Acommotion of voices babbled outside Briar’s window.
Coill Darragh wasn’t usually bustling early in the morning. In the street, a thick knot of people crowded in front of the shop. Some held cameras aloft, flashing with the same frenetic energy as the people. All faces pointed at the front of the shop neighboring Briar’s.
Some buoyant combination of hope and intuition coalesced in Briar’s heart, sending him careering around his room in search of clothes. He recalled a teasing Alakagram video.
The other witch coming to Coill Darragh couldn’t possibly be…
Dressed so quickly that both socks were inside out, Briar flung himself down the stairs and out the door. The street heaved. No sooner had he joined the throng than he had an elbow in his ribs, the press of auras smothering him like overbearing cologne. Though the crowd was filled with all sorts, one thing every person had in common was the wardstone bracelet fastened about their wrists. Tourists, all. Briar squeezed between two men with cameras to peer on tiptoes over the heads of a number of teens. Through the vibrating crowd, he glimpsed a head of sable hair, flicked over a shoulder adorned with a feathered epaulette.
It was only a passing glance, but Briar would know the face anywhere.
Disbelief, feverish excitement, and a little trepidation all warred within him, but the excitement reigned triumphant.
It was unmistakably Linden Fairchild.
Briar had seen him once before, though in a crowd several fathoms larger.
The Fairchilds were famous for their healing potions. After a bout of illness had killed most of their family, they’d dedicated themselves to medicine. Yet, even compared to his parents, who were world-renowned for their elixirs, Linden was the jewel in the family crown.
Like Briar with aura reading, Linden had a unique talent for healing. The Fairchilds had once run a traveling miracle tour. Briar had been fifteen on the sunny day he and his mother went into Port Haven to watch Linden cure a young girl of cancer and a man of multiple sclerosis. Briar had insisted on bringing his mum. Though she’d protested she wasn’t ill, he knew different, or thought he did. Linden had asked what ailed her, and she’d looked to Briar. He’d said, “Please just check.” Linden had laid his hands on her shoulders. Briar remembered how they had looked. Long fingered and gentle. He’d admired Linden distantly before, through the barrier of a screen, but this encounter, up close, had birthed a different sort of fascination. A yearning to be as bright and world-changing.
Linden had closed his eyes. His magic quested like a tuning fork searching for discordant notes. But he’d opened his eyes and proclaimed there were none.
She wasn’t sick. Not yet. The Seer’s fortune hadn’t come to pass. Briar hoped she’d been wrong. A quack. But a year later, his mum was tired all the time. A couple years later, she had a diagnosis of Bowen’s Wane. By then, Linden’s Miracle Tour ended with a public announcement. Years of being on the road and overusing his magic without breaks had taken its toll. He’d exhausted his abilities.
Try as he might, he could never heal anyone again.
It struck Briar as criminally unfair that the one person who might have saved her had been robbed of his talent to do so.
It wasn’t unheard of. Witches could burn out their abilities, sometimes permanently, and Linden had been young—a teenager—during that tour. Linden took up fashion design afterward. For Briar, it had been a lifeline. Much of what he’d learned to sew, he’d done through Linden’s online tutorials. It allowed Briar to dress himself for success even when he couldn’t afford the flashy brands his peers wore.
Now, Linden was everything Briar remembered. He didn’t strut or gleam or preen in front of the cameras but carried himself with a quiet charisma. Effortlessly beautiful, from every angle a composition made for painting. He stopped at the stoop to the shop, emerald half cape swirling around him, the cupid’s bow of his mouth quirked in a smile. A white catprowled at Linden’s heels—his familiar, Atticus—while an assistant tailed them, filming their arrival for Alakagram.
Briar couldn’t get a sense of Linden’s aura. It looked like he’d cast a spell to keep the crowd at a distance, but he hadn’t needed to. Rowan cut a path through the crowd, which shied from him like a murmuration of starlings around a bird of prey. He carried a single suitcase, white with gold fastenings. Too tall and blocking the view of many cameras, Rowan set the suitcase at Linden’s feet. It hit the cobblestones like a dropped anvil, spelled to contain multitudes. Rowan departed quickly.
Linden waited as the crowd held an anticipatory breath. When he spoke, it was in the crisp, clean vowels Briar had often fallen asleep to while watching live videos from his phone.
“Hello, everyone. I know you must be excited to hear what I have planned for my modest shop in Coill Darragh. Though I’m equally excited to share, I regret that now’s not the time.”
He allowed a moment for the mutters of disappointment. Many of the crowd were reporters and paparazzi raring to tell the story first.
“I won’t leave you without even a clue, of course,” Linden continued. “There’s been a lot of speculation that I might make this my first brick-and-mortar store outside Pentawynn, or that I’m about to announce a new fashion line for winter, but I can let you in on a secret. None of those rumors are true. This store will be a return to something I’ve always held a deep passion for.”
A second pause, this one peppered with feverish whispers. Briar’s stomach flipped.A return to something I’ve always held a deep passion for.Linden was prodigal, talented beyond the norm for witches. Perhaps his powers had returned. Perhaps…
Briar didn’t want to give in to the hope Linden could cure him of his curse, but seeing him here, it felt like—
Fate.
“Which brings me to the next important detail: a date,” Linden continued. “Coill Darragh holds an annual festival on the twenty-first of October. At six that evening, I’ll hold a grand opening to my shop, here on this doorstep.”
To the cheers and claps of the crowd, he said, “I’ll be getting started now. I hope to see you all very soon.”
He opened the door and swept inside. Bright banners unfurled in the interior windows, flashing the opening date and Linden’s logo of a cat ina witch’s hat in enchanted lights. The crowd’s checked enthusiasm during Linden’s speech crashed through the streets of Coill Darragh. People took photos outside the shop in front of the new banners. Many more dragged their luggage to check in to their lodgings.
The magnitude of Linden’s fame only sank in for Briar as he watched the town transform. A fanatical pulse replaced the quiet thrum of locals going about their daily lives.
Briar found it infectious. He returned to his shop. Very little daylight penetrated the pack of bodies outside his window, so he had to put lights on, but he didn’t mind. The knowledge of who lived and breathed just on the other side of his wall left him effervescent.
