“It’s just—they’re not—” She growled in frustration. “Look, I can’t remember why, but no one goes into the woods. You heard those girls, yeah? It just isn’t done. You respect the woods. You look at them from afar like, oh, how pretty. In the abstractI would never set foot in theresense. Not without its Keeper.” She stopped. Frowned. Shaking her head, she added, “But you don’t go in.”
“What do you mean, its Keeper?”
“Nothing. I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
“I don’t like nature either, but it’s just a forest,” Briar said with a tone of sarcasm that riled her further.
“It’snotjust a forest,” Gretchen said. “It’s old. It’s alive. Not in the normal sense, either. Those trees are all part of each other—pretty sure they’ve all got the same underground root system or something. Whatever, they cancommunicate.”
“So?”
“So it’s powerful. Can’t you feel it?”
Briar looked at the dark depths of the forest, listened to the way the wind whistled past like a rattling voice. He understood what she meant, and it made him shiver, but he didn’t have any other options. “How do you know all this anyway?” he asked.
Gretchen folded her arms. “I do remembersomethings.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t go,” Vatii put in. “That place could be full of wild magic—untamed and unpredictable. We should be cautious.”
“It’s the best shot I have of finding lichen. Witches used to forage for tithes from their back gardens all the time.”
Gretchen’s face contorted. “Fine! Go if you like, but take my curtain off. I’m not going in there with you.”
“I won’t make you. Either of you.” Briar fished in his pocket for the scrap of fabric he’d cut from the curtain cloak that morning. He found a soft place to dig a hole in the soil. The forest’s magic had sunk into the dirt and stung like nettles under his nails. Despite his bravado, the sensation and Gretchen’s warnings unnerved him. He wanted to get this over with.
He buried the fabric scrap and stood. “There. We’ll see if the piece in the ground is enough to let you roam freely once I get home.”
“You’re making a mistake,” Gretchen said.
“Vatii?”
“I think you’re a fool, but I’m coming with you.”
They parted ways, Briar heading up the dirt path as Gretchen faded away behind him until she wasn’t there at all.
From a distance, the forest was an abstract concept, but close up, Briar understood Gretchen’s aversion to it. All living things carried auras. Every plant, animal, and person. Each tree had a signature, and yet the forest as a whole exuded something utterly its own. Coill Darragh was a curious invitation in an unmarked envelope. It was the sting of a papercut as you slit the letter open.
The path ended. It didn’t snake between the trees—the grass swallowed it. No sign proclaimed this a dead end or warned him not to go in.
He exchanged a look with Vatii. With breath held, they entered.
Passing under the sprawling canopy, an immutable quiet enveloped them. Sunlight dappled the ground and danced over shrubs and fallen logs in defiance of physics. One step, dead leaves crunched underfoot. The next, moss squelched and sank. Leaves hissed, trees groaned, the earth rose and fell like something huge breathed beneath it. On some level, Briar understood these were natural phenomena. Moss and earth stretched tight over tree roots could rise and fall as the trunks leaned in the wind. The forest was alive, as all plant things were, and it changed and transformed with the world around it.
But on an instinctual level that went beyond Gretchen’s warnings, he sensed the forest wasn’t alive the way plants were. The forest watched. The forest knew things. And it yearned.
The thought crawled like spider legs across skin. Briar pushed farther in. He made note of landmarks to find his way back. Two cracked trees thatformed the letter “M” with the peaks of their broken trunks. An irregular red-leafed bush amongst the green. A moss-covered stone speckled with flowers. The density of growth and lack of footpath made the search slow, but Briar eventually came to a landmark that stopped him dead.
An enormous tree riddled with bumpy sores rose up, tall and twisting. Around it, the forest shrank away. No toadstools or shrubs grew. No ivy climbed its boughs. He noticed even the surrounding canopy refused to touch it, creating a halo of sky around this tree’s leaves.
A scar—like the ones on the buildings in town, like Rowan’s—marred the trunk, but here it seemed fresh. Veins of magic twisted through the injury like barbed wire. They smelled of rotten meat.
“This is cursed magic,” Vatii said. “Wild magic. We should leave.”
Briar agreed, but he was incomprehensibly drawn to this tree. This fetid, stinking thing that was neither alive nor dead.
Briar wondered, If the forest could look back at him, perhaps it could talk to him too. “You wouldn’t happen to know where I can find some lichen?”
The wind picked up, and the trees around them moaned, braced against the gale. All but the twisted tree, which remained steadfast. Briar watched in silent terror as a fingering branch sprouted from the trunk. It grew in a zigzagging coil, coming close enough to touch. At its tip, a tangerine-colored lichen grew with spidery gold-green lashes framing each polyp. It grew prolifically, covering the bough, until the branch snapped and fell to the ground.
