Briar paused, the forest’s voice echoing in his ear.You, soon. Your mother.
He bristled. He didn’t want to get any closer, so he skirted around it, but Gretchen had to touch it to weave her strange brand of magic. With hand extended, she hesitated. Though blood no longer pumped through her veins, and no pulse could make her hand quiver, it shook visibly. She steeled her resolve, clenched her fist, and plunged it into the grass.
Éibhear appeared. Unlike the other vision, he stood alone. His shoulders rose and fell with harsh breaths, gaze cast up into the looming canopy. A moment of paralyzing indecision wrote itself in the sweat of his brow. After a beat, he shucked his cloak into the grass. Then his shirt.
Briar gasped. Even Vatii ruffled in surprise.
Across Éibhear’s arms were rune tithes.
Countless, more than triple the number Briar had accumulated. They coiled up both arms, several more along his lower torso. Briar jolted with a nauseating thrill. He wanted no comparison to this man who killed witches with impunity, couldn’t ever imagine using his magic the way Éibhear had.
Yet a powerful and celebrated man bore the same sordid tithes Briar did.
Éibhear took something out of his robes. Charcoal. With it, he drew upon his chest. He had no mirror, so the marks sometimes went awry. He smeared these away by licking his fingers and rubbing. It took some time. A sigil over his chest, runes around its circumference, circles interwoven at its center, more lines and symbols arrayed down his stomach, over his ribs.
Finished, he dropped the charcoal and stared into the trees. He tilted his head back and closed his eyes, lips parted. Stood frozen like that.
Nothing happened. Nothing that they couldsee, butsomethingtranspired. A silent communion of man and nature. The forest’s heartbeat throbbed underfoot.
Then Éibhear bent backward, chest surging toward the sky as if drawn there by a needle and thread. He floated upward. The new runes on his skin glowed, and the agony of so many rent a bloodcurdling scream from him. Gooseflesh broke out over Briar’s arms. The earth below Éibhear moved, bubbled, lumps of earth roiling. Roots burst forth in a shower of soil. They spiraled and coiled around Éibhear, thorns biting into skin, his blood hissing where it streamed into the open earth. The roots and vines enveloped him until only his face was visible. For a moment, he was more a tree than a man.
Then the roots pulled Éibhear under. Like a meteor hitting, he and the vines plunged beneath the loam. Dirt sprayed. The earth rumbled like a hungry stomach.
It went quiet. So quiet. Briar clenched his throat to keep from being sick.
Gretchen’s voice quivered. “It’s not over.”
From the tree line, a sound rose. For all its familiarity, it still made Briar shudder. A high whine, like ringing in his ears. Then a rumble. The two frequencies wove together in a sickening, undulating tune that got louder and vibrated in Briar’s core.
The trees bled. Not red, but a thick, semitransparent ooze that spread into a viscous pool. The dark purple of a bruise, it turned up bits of dead leaf and detritus from the forest floor, moved like a living deep-sea thing. Slow but picking up speed, it advanced toward the town.
The magic cataclysm swept past. Briar closed his eyes. He could feel it coursing over him, even if it was only an echo. He could envision it hemorrhaging through the town like poison through an anthill, killing with its peculiar discrimination. The purple ectoplasm covered everything as far asthe eye could see and reached upward. Briar turned in a circle to behold it. A wall rose, stretching like fingers into the sky, until the wards of Coill Darragh painted the entire horizon in an amaranthine sunrise.
When the vision ended, it left them standing in the cold and the dark and the rain—in a funereal miasma. Briar clutched Vatii to his chest, where she was tucked into his robes, though they were soaking cold. He unstuck his tongue from where it was glued to the roof of his mouth.
“Gretchen, what was that?”
Her specter shivered like she felt the rain too. “We just saw the creation of the wards.”
“It killed people,” Briar said, and she nodded. “Why?”
She rubbed her eyes beneath her glasses. “I don’t rememberanyof this, I can’t—but I know who you can ask.”
“Who?”
Gretchen gave him a queer look. “Rowan.”
It made sense. He’d lived through it. He even had a scar reminiscent of the ones left by the wards. But something in the tone of Gretchen’s voice made Briar think that wasn’t all.
So he asked, “Why Rowan?”
“You really don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?”
“Éibhear,” she said. “He was Rowan’s father.”
CHAPTER 10
