“Do you think roots destroying bits of fabric and eating hares is normal?”
He didn’t. Vatii looked uncomfortable but didn’t comment. Though he didn’t understand much from that glimpse, Briar felt the draw of it, too. Something stirred in Coill Darragh that went deeper than a few strange phenomena. They had to investigate, even if the notion made him long to curl up at home with a cup of tea instead. It could lead him to answers about why the forest had cursed him. He could help Gretchen.
“There’s another scar here,” he said.
Between the gaps in the cobbles, a slash of magic fizzled, fainter than on the church. He pointed to it, and Gretchen hovered near. She asked if he was ready before kneeling to touch the violet aurora.
The vision didn’t last long. In Gretchen’s place, a witch took to his broom. A siren scream of magic roared through the square, and the same pulse that had taken the first victim snatched this one from the air, dashing him apart like dandelion seeds.
The vision left him clammy and corpse-cold. It seemed to drain Gretchen too, her apparition flickering. This vision was no less unnerving than the last, for all its brevity, but it offered nothing new, except—
“His shoes,” Briar said. “The witch had beetle-wing embellishments on his shoes. Those were in fashion ten years ago, before people boycotted them because the beetles were endangered. It gives us a time frame.”
“Of course the thing you notice is hisshoes,” Gretchen said. “We should try another location.”
They traveled through town and paused at intervals to survey scars marking a street sign and a garden wall. Both played out the same. Witches running. A wave of malignant magic. A death, and the vision ended.
There was one anomaly—a vision wherein a civilian’s arm erupted with roots—but Briar couldn’t tell whether this was a misfired spell or a result of the magic wave.
One thing became clear. The wave discriminated in who it killed. Some perished in its grasp, others remained unscathed.
Beyond this, they learned little. The noise of the cataclysm set Briar’s teeth on edge. He despaired at the devastation. With no sign of its cause or new information, he wondered if they’d wasted their evening. And he was keenly aware he had less time to waste than most.
On a stone footbridge, leading over a brook and out of town, there was a smear of magical scarring along the left parapet. It looked no different from theothers. When Gretchen touched it, though, the ringing noise Briar expected didn’t come. Instead, footsteps of an encroaching figure pounded closer. A witch blocked the bridge, casting a web of magic that walled off passage, spreading over into the brook, stretching several meters in either direction. Her fingers flexed as if drawing upon a well of magic from deep within, except that couldn’t be possible. To create such a barrier, she would require a tithe of enormous power, yet her arms were unmarked, her hands empty.
Beyond the barrier, a running figure got close enough to see. A man with a jutting chin, his hair flying away from its leather twine, and his eyes alight with desperate rage.
He was unmistakably the man in whose likeness the statue in the square had been built.
Gretchen said, “Éibhear.”
Briar didn’t have the breath to ask how she knew him. All the air was stolen from his lungs as he watched the two witches on their collision course. If Éibhear ran into that barrier, it would eviscerate him, much like the wards should have done to Briar when the woods broke his bracelet.
Éibhear did not slow. He drew one arm back like a lance. As he did, thorny vines rose from the bedrock of the brook. They reared back and punched through the other witch’s ribs like a serpent’s strike.
Her barrier dissolved. She hit the parapet. The vision ended.
They’d just seen Éibhear, the man commemorated with a statue, murder another witch.
Hot bile rose in Briar’s throat. He didn’t know how the vision was significant, only that it made his skin crawl to see two witches wield magic like that.
Vatii whispered, “I don’t like any of this.”
“Me neither,” Briar agreed. “How did they do all that without a tithe?”
“I don’t know.” Gretchen’s hands clenched in fists. “I don’t know how, but I don’t knowwhyeither. IrememberÉibhear.” Her voice came out gritty and frustrated. “Or at least, I think I do. He was my mentor. He could be a strict teacher, but he was kind to me.”
Briar struggled to reconcile that description with what they’d just witnessed. “What else do you remember about this battle? That magic wave thing?”
Gretchen scowled, clenching her jaw. “I…” She hesitated, squinting into the middle distance, a look of growing consternation in her dark eyes. “I don’t know. It’s like the memories are all locked up. I remembersomething Éibhear told me about the forest? He said it was special, that there were other ancient sources of wild magic a long time ago, but ravaged for tithes, those places weakened in power. But here, in Coill Darragh, it’s different. Protected and protector.” She squinted, searching for the memories, the details. “I… That’s all I’ve got.”
She sounded scared, and that scared Briar too. Not even death frightened her, butthisdid.
He searched the fields beyond the bridge, the woods within sight. The vines that killed the hare and destroyed the curtain scrap looked ominously like the vines Éibhear used to murder his foe. This forest claimed it had cursed Briar’s mother. Now they’d discovered some terrible event had transpired ten years prior, around the time his mother was cursed.
Briar wanted to help Gretchen, but deep down, he understood this involved him, too. He feared the woods and what secrets they contained, but curiosity pulled him toward those woods anyway.
They crossed the bridge and followed the dirt lanes into the fields, following the direction Éibhear had run from in the vision, misty rain pestering their progress. The path split left and right ahead. Beyond that, grassy knolls bowed before the towering trees of Coill Darragh. At the edge of the wood, a line glowed in the reeds. The closer they got, the greater a sense of malaise settled over Briar. The scar blazed a swath in front of the woods, six meters across, grass growing over the crater.
