“Not a bother,” said Rowan.
“I didn’t mean to make you feel like you had to get them all for me in case I didn’t like your recommendation—”
“You’re grand.”
Briar watched him go, the buns warming his hand through the paper bag, and a not dissimilar feeling welling in his chest. It was the sort of kindness he itched to repay, and the kind of generosity he struggled to mirror. Not for lack of wanting.
Pastries aside, his trip into town had borne nothing. He asked the baker and a few people waiting outside about work, and they looked at him as if he’d asked where he could buy poison for humans. It was not that they were unfriendly—they engaged him in conversation with eager curiosity—but at the mention of working with him, grew leery. He didn’t understand how he was meant to make a livelihood in Coill Darragh when the townsfolk mistrusted outsiders, and with so little to his name that he couldbarely afford a pastry. A snarl of varied emotions tangled in his head. He’d worked hard through his apprenticeship, but even now that felt like only a tiny step on a ladder upon which others who had been born to higher rungs already stood.
Everything always cost more when you had less.
The injustice of it stung in older, more grievous wounds. If his mother had been alive… She’d been the sort to send care packages, to make him a cup of tea when he was disheartened. Vatii could advise him, but she couldn’t pick him up when he fell.
He had to help himself.
He’d wandered far without taking note of where. The houses weren’t packed so closely together, giving way to farmers’ fields and dirt lanes. Preferring the fresh air over returning to his empty flat with nothing, Briar walked and looked out at the green fields, dotted white with sheep and glazed with fog. Beyond that, the canopy of the Coill Darragh woods seeped into overcast skies. Though nowhere near the forest’s edge, its aura throbbed like a heartbeat in the soil beneath his feet.
Vatii said, “Maybe we should go home. Have some tea. See if we can come up with something.”
Reluctantly, he agreed. Back toward town, he spotted a figure bent near a fence. An elderly man, wearing a tweed cap and grass-stained dungarees, stooped to examine a broken gate. His legs quaked, and he only bent halfway before having to stand again, rubbing his lower back.
The farmer’s stilted movement reminded Briar of his mother precariously climbing stools to fetch things from the top cupboards.
Quickening his pace, he called out to the farmer, who surveyed his approach with a crinkled expression. “Need a hand?”
“Might just be a lost cause,” said the old man. “I’ll be hiring a carpenter by day’s end, make no mistake.”
Ivy covered the gate like a spider’s web. The weight of it, or perhaps the wind, had torn the gate down and rent a great hole in the sod where the support posts once stood.
Briar tried hefting it upright. It was a lot heavier than it appeared, but the difficulty lay in the vines. They bound the gate to the soil. As Briar’s fingers brushed a leaf, magic tickled like pins and needles up his arm. He couldn’t free the gate.
“It’s banjaxed, I’d say. Don’t bother yourself, boy.” The man said this last word in an intonation that had none of the chastising implications ofBriar’s teachers saying it. Instead, it sounded familiar, friendly. And more like “bye.”
Vatii whistled and flitted from Briar’s shoulder to the stone wall bordering the collapsed gate. “A flesh tithe would do it, I think,” she said.
Maebhhadtold Briar to help people around the village. Determined, he said, “Give me a second.”
He turned his back and pulled charcoal from his pocket. Rolling up a sleeve, he drew a quick rune on his wrist. The powdery scrape of charcoal was comforting, familiar, but he didn’t want this stranger to see. Perhaps he imagined it, but he felt as though the woods watched him work.
He let his sleeve down to obscure the rune and bent to draw a second symbol on the stone wall. An anchor. That done, he straightened and put his hands on the beam of the gate. The magic coursed through him, a pulse beating its way to the surface. He recalled how it had once been like water barely restrained beyond a dam. Now, it trickled out of him and into the wood, securing loose nails, mending torn earth. The ivy crept back, loosening its hold, until he could raise the gate into place. His magic packed the soil around the post. When Briar lifted his hands, they shook, but the gate stood as sturdy as the dry stone flanking it.
“Ah sure, that’ll do it!” The farmer gave the gate an experimental wiggle. “You must be that new witch in town. What’s your name, boy?”
Extending his hand, Briar introduced himself, the farmer’s grip stronger than his own after the spell. The man gave Briar’s elbow a slap, his aura overwhelming with a smell like ripened figs.
“Briar? I’m Diarmuid. And what’s your particular talent?”
“Ehm,” Briar hedged. “A jack-of-all-trades? I specialize in enchanted clothing, but—”
“We had a witch here several years past,” Diarmuid interrupted. “She made the best potions. My joints haven’t known peace since she passed, they haven’t.”
Though the rune tithe had sapped Briar’s strength and left his mind foggy, he knew an opportunity when he saw one. “I could try my hand at an elixir, if you like.”
Diarmuid fixed him with an assessing look. Briar wondered if he’d toed some invisible line, asking for paid work from a stranger. He needed this opportunity badly. Something, anything to make some money.
“Ah, sure!” said Diarmuid. “If you can make my bones sturdy as this here gate, that’d be grand.”
CHAPTER 5
