Upon uttering the name, a hiss of breath issued forth in a rattling sigh.
“I was to train my son in the old ways.” The switch to a singular pronoun made Briar shudder. He’d spoken to ghosts before, but this was different. Not wholly the spirit of the man whose name it bore. “Witches came to tithe what didn’t belong to them. We fought back, but they had protection and numbers, so I did the only thing I could to protect my people and the forest. I offered myself as a willing sacrifice and cursed my son to take my place if the wards were to fail and the forest was invaded again.”
“It wasn’t your life to give!” Briar’s fury flared. Not for the forest, which seemed a mindless collective will of survival, but for Rowan’s father. “He loved you, and you marked him for slaughter.”
A twitch of wood and bone. “Youexist in minutes, hours, years, and decades. We are centuries, millennia. We have learned what it is to survive that long.”
“At the price of his life.”
“One life for many. It is an acceptable exchange.”
“And my mother? Me? Every person cursed by the siphons made from your magic?”
“Casualties of greed, from which we slowly sustained ourselves after the damage suffered in the siphons’ making. Éibhear’s sacrifice was enough to create the wards, but not to heal. That is what those witches failed to comprehend. They thought what they stole came free, but in the short term or the long, a price will be paid.”
“It doesn’t make sense. You’ve attacked countless people. Surely what they’ve given you is enough. How did Éibhear’s sacrifice sustain the wards for a decade, but the rest isn’t enough to heal?”
“Because,” said the woods, “there is more power in a gift than something stolen. His sacrifice was worth more than any tithe, any exchange. It is more than the commerce you call magic.”
“And now?” Briar gestured at the forest, which grew and withered. At the sky, where the wards were evanescent.
“Now, we are under attack again. We use what remains of Éibhear to sustain both ourself and the wards, but it is not enough. Another sacrifice must be made.”
Briar’s voice broke. “But he didn’t agree to this! Rowan isn’t like Éibhear, he isn’t giving himself to you, not willingly. You said that’s not as powerful.”
“This is true, but he is a Keeper. There is magic in his blood, in the fulfillment of responsibility, in a promise kept, even if that promise was not made by him.”
Upon saying this, it stopped and swept aside a bush, revealing a low hill on the other side, a tree atop it. Bound to the tree was Rowan.
Briar sprinted up the hill, relief chased away by worry. Rowan was unconscious, eyes closed, head drooping. Roots entombed his feet, and vines held his arms outspread so he hung like an insect caught in a web. Thorny branches had once again shredded his shirt, and upon his chesta snaking tendril of thorns cut into his skin, drawing the beginnings of a sigil. Briar seized it and tore it away, but more snaked up his calves and pulled his legs out from under him. He hit the ground, wind knocked from his lungs, and scrambled to pull the knife from his tithe belt before remembering he hadn’t worn it. He’d taken only the bare minimum to the runway.
Desperate, he turned to Éibhear’s construct. “Stop! Didn’t you bring me here to rescue him?”
“Idid.Wedidn’t. My influence is limited.”
Briar tore at a vine and kicked the remains from his ankles. He got to his feet and held Rowan by the face, begging him to wake. More vines seized him.
“You have to dosomething,” he pleaded. “He’s your son!”
“That’s why I brought you.”
Still fighting. “But I can’tdothis alone! Rowan can’t either. He deserves to know you tried.”
The construct shook. “I… I—”
“You cursed him with this fate! You can undo it. You’re the only one who can.”
Éibhear’s grinning skull took in the spectacle of his son’s prone body and the plaintive words of the dying witch, and it froze. It looked inanimate, a motionless tree like any other. Then the skull blackened and crumbled. It raised a hand of branch-like claws. It slashed.
Briar thought it would strike him down. But the air whistled at either side of his head, and the vines holding Rowan came apart, wind shrieking through the trees like a wail. The last scrap of Éibhear, the tithed skin by which Briar had identified him at all, burned up in the last efforts of his will. The rest, sticks and claws and bark, all crumbled like a skeleton no longer wired together.
The last twinkles of purple winked out of the sky, the wards gone with their maker.
On the wind, a voice said, “Tell Rowan I…” The rest faded.
The buzzing, malignant energy of Rowan’s scar slowly, slowly dwindled. But did not vanish entirely.
The creeping ivy of the forest gave a sudden surge of motion. It wound up as far as Rowan’s waist in defiance of Éibhear’s last efforts. Briar yanked them away, but it was not like the time before. The forest, ferally desperate, wouldn’t release him. Éibhear might have promised his son to them,but his withdrawal of that vow was not enough, for in the moments before death, he had been as much the forest as the forest was him. Both would have to surrender Rowan.
