“She disappeared, didn’t she?” Maebh said. “I remember her. Dark hair, glasses. Didn’t leave the house much. I contacted her relatives back then, to see if she’d gone home. Terrible thing. Seemed she was quite estranged from most. Very work focused.”
Briar didn’t want to accuse her late husband of murder, but he had to point it out. “You don’t think she might have died when the wards went up?” Maebh raised her eyebrows. “I see you’ve been learning our local history.
No, Éibhear could be an eejit. God knows I had words with him countless times about how he treated our own. Rowan in particular. But he’d never let that girl come to harm. Matter of fact, I remember him making her a wardstone bracelet like the ones Niamh makes for tourist folk. Made it the day before he died, after effing and blinding that he’d misplaced his journal and accusing me of rearranging his office, as if I’d touch it!”
Briar grasped at the threads of information. “Do you remember anything else? Who were the invaders?”
Maebh frowned. Usually unflappable, she looked quite flapped. “Never found out, did we? Died when the wards went up, thanks be to God. Nothing left of them after.”
“Nothing? No idea even where they came from?”
“I’m sorry, Briar. The woods, the wards, and my husband all took those secrets and buried ’em.” Seeing his disappointment, she said, “I’ll get you another mince pie.”
“Let me at least pay for this one.”
“You’re grand.” She fixed him with a serious look. “I owe you the kindness, anyhow.”
He snorted. “How do you figure?”
“My Rowan,” she said. “He hides it well, sure, but what my fool husband did to him… left him scarred more ways than one, it did. A good husband, Éibhear was, but a dreadful father. So obsessed with work and magic. Not a word I said mattered. I says to him, I says, it’s not that you love that girl, Gretchen, but that you show no love to your own children.”
A hollow spot in Briar’s heart hurt. Her words mirrored a grief he knew well, though it took a different form. His mother’s passing had left a void in his life, but for Rowan that void had simply sat empty. Waiting. Even when his father was alive.
“I don’t regret marrying him, you understand,” Maebh said. “Wouldn’t have my Sorcha and Rowan otherwise. But I regret that I left it so long thinking he’d turn a new leaf, only for what happened to happen and, well…” She glanced up at the potion bottles behind the bar, a terrible, weighty melancholy in the taut pull of her mouth.
When she turned back to Briar, her eyes shone with something like relief.
“You see the heart of him, and I’m grateful he has a friend in you. That’s all.”
CHAPTER 13
Briar left the Swan and Cygnet with a belly full of warm pies and a heart sick with the things Maebh had told him.
He didn’t know what to make of the story about invaders, wards, and emotionally unavailable fathers. Instead, he fixated on her last words.I’m glad he has a friend in you.That wordfriendstruck him through with guilt and longing for something different as he steeped in the memory of Rowan’s lips on his.
Then, as he passed a gap in the houses looking out toward the woods, he saw something strange, and all those thoughts perished.
Coill Darragh’s trees waved in the night, blacker than the sky above. Briar could see the bridge where Éibhear had cut down that witch. Farther still, the purple hue of the scar left by his sacrifice glowed like a ghastly sunset.
A shadow in the shape of a man bisected the glow.
From size and shape, even at this distance, he knew it was Rowan. He walked in a slow, stumbling trance, and he was heading toward the forest.
Heart in his throat, Briar ran. Down the street, over the bridge, up the hillock smothered in cold fog. Getting closer, he could see Rowan walked at a slow pace. One step at a time, and something moved by his feet. Briar’s vision adjusted to the dark, and the shapes resolved—they were vines. Twisting tree roots grew up from the ground and curved around Rowan’s boots and calves. When he took a step, they wilted and shrank back, shooting up wherever he placed his foot next.
He was only a few paces from the tree line. Briar put on a burst of speed, nearly tripping on the lumpy grass.
He stopped in front of Rowan, hands on his chest. The aura of Rowan’s scar flared and fizzled like television static, so strong it nearly drowned out his true aura. The roots were cobras swaying around their legs. One hissed against Briar’s ankle.
His breath was ragged as he said, “Rowan?”
Rowan stopped. His dark eyes had a milky film over them. He looked, unseeing. Briar clapped a hand to his chest.
“Rowan, wake up!”
Rowan blinked, and when he opened his eyes, the film was gone. The roots dissolved into ash at their feet. Whatever trance had come over him lifted.
“Briar?” His chest rose sharply as he sucked in a panicked breath. A grunt of pain, and one hand rose to clutch his heart, only to encounter Briar’s hand. He held it there. “Was I—”
