As they left the church and walked together through the streets, people who hadn’t been at the church joined their throng. The charcoal was in pieces to share between them. People brought more from their homes. Some cast guilty looks at the pastor for missing Sunday Mass, and he said, “Oh, you’re forgiven, just come along.” They all helped draw the tithes.
By the time they reached the edge of town, their company numbered in the hundreds. It was most of Coill Darragh. Briar thought the air should have carried heavy solemnity or fear. The forest garnered respect, but also suspicion. Instead, everyone seemed electric, all of them filaments in something grand, and Briar was overwhelmed with gratitude to play a part in it.
They’d nearly reached the forest’s edge. A portal opened, so close Briar nearly fell into it. He stumbled back, his way barred by Rowan’s formidable arm, flung across his chest like armor.
Linden stepped out of the portal.
He looked as pristine as he had on the runway—nothing of the experience besmirched his silky clothes—but his blue eyes were wild, the pupils distant black holes. Atticus stepped out too, back arched, hackles raised along his spine. Before the portal closed, Briar glimpsed the Fairchild manor, the bedroom where he’d lain awake in fear. It was torn asunder, clothes and smashed perfume bottles strewn over the floor. Something he glimpsed lodged a stake in Briar’s heart. It could have been a spilled potion, but it could have been blood.
The portal closed. With the wards down, Linden didn’t need a bracelet or a marriage to ensure his safety while he pillaged Coill Darragh for all it was worth.
Somehow, the thing that Briar’s mind caught on, of all the jagged glass in his relationship with Linden, was only this. “Your parents?”
“They could not bear to see what you’d done to me. They went willingly.” From his belt, he pulled a dagger. In the other hand, he held his broomstick of white poplar.
Rowan started to put himself between Briar and Linden, despite Briar’s resistance. He was large, had greater reach. Rowan could disarm him. Linden was also outnumbered. His sharp gaze ricocheted between Rowan’s and Briar’s throats, to the townsfolk, all bearing the same mark. Carefully, he sheathed the dagger in his tithe belt, but his hand lingered there.
“I’m going to finish what I started,” he said.
“The hell you are—” Rowan began, but Briar cut him off.
“What for, Linden? It’s over. The whole world knows what you did.”
“I can fix it!” Linden’s words came through bared teeth.
“You don’t want to fix it, you want to cover it up and pretend it never happened.”
Linden’s shoulders rose, stiffening, holding himself back. “You don’t understand, it was never meant to go so far. None of my research said anything about curses resulting from wild magic! I know it can be tamed. I have the power now, my parents died to—”
“You killed them! You killed them, and my mother, and Rowan’s father, and who knows how many other people while you scrambled to fix it, but you only made it worse!” Briar’s chest heaved. At his words, the people of Coill Darragh formed a wall of bodies at Briar’s and Rowan’s backs.
Linden snarled. “You think I don’t understand that? I led my entire family to their deaths. I thought we would find a wealth of magic thatcould heal. I thought I would change theworld, but this forest is malignant. It must be destroyed, and with it, all will be rectified, resurrected!”
Linden spoke with the conviction of a lie told so many times it had become ideology, a belief held to so firmly because to accept the reality would be to see himself for the first time, and to loathe what he saw. Briar could imagine a young, idealistic Linden finding rare texts about the power of wild magic. He could see the family, who’d funneled so much of their adulation and energy into this talented witch, rallying behind him in his quest to make their fortune. Charismatic, beautiful, a prodigy. He’d only been a boy, and Briar didn’t know if he could blame that boy for his terrible mistakes over the adults who enabled him, but he absolutely faulted the man before him now.
“The forest can’t be killed,” he said, “not without more suffering, maybe lost lives. Just leave.”
The mad look in Linden’s eyes subsided. That was somehow worse. He straightened, fixing Briar with the imperious expression he so often wore. “I should have known you were just like the others. Fine. I’ll prove it to you.”
Before Briar could stop him, Linden took to his broom, Atticus leaping astride it. They sped into the skies above the forest.
Briar took Rowan’s hand. “Make a line, everyone! If I can cast the spell all at once…”
People crowded nearer, everyone holding a hand or touching a shoulder, everyone connected. Briar looked to his left and right at the lines of people fanning out around him.
A crack of thunder erupted in the twilight. Briar jumped, his hand clenching around Rowan’s. The noise had not been another falling tree, and there were no thunderheads in the sky, just a small speck as something—someone—flew above the canopy.
Briar swore under his breath.
Vatii said, “He’s using the siphons.”
Linden, astride his broomstick, tossed another siphon into the forest below. Another slap of thunder like an explosion. A shower of timber and foliage spat into the air then disintegrated, a chthonic spray of snaking tendrils surging above the canopy before they, too, crumbled to ash. The forest, weakened, couldn’t reach Linden. The wards, destroyed, couldn’t expel him. He chucked siphons into the densest parts of the forest, destroying its centers of power, leeching magic out of the very ground and using the surplus to continue his path of destruction.
The forest only had one source of power to draw from. Down the line of Coill Darraghns, several voices screamed.
If Briar’s plan worked, the wards would be renewed, and Linden would perish in them just like his family had. There weren’t any tourists in Coil Darragh now; most had left after the forest’s attacks, and those remaining had wardstone bracelets.
As the forest let out another snarl of anguish, and someone cried out as a part of their body was consumed by tree roots, Briar decided he didn’t have time to consider the consequences of murder on his mortal soul.
