“You don’t owe me anything.”
Just like that. No jealous outburst, no demands to know more. Briar would never have been so gracious in Rowan’s place. His breakup with Celyn came to mind. He wished Rowan would get angry, dare Briar to deny that whatever they’d shared could be so easily abandoned.
Rowan told him he should come in to warm up, but Briar insisted on heading home.
He trudged into his flat and went upstairs to continue embroideringwith a healthy dose of sulking. When he reached the landing, he found his flat wasn’t empty.
Gretchen sat just as she had before, cross-legged on the kitchen table. Her apparition wore the same clothes as the day she died, her hair still tangled in its messy bun. Even the streaks of dirt on her knees were the same. She couldn’t wear the exhaustion of her time spent banished the way Briar wore the effects of his curse—in clothes hanging off his thin frame and dark circles under his eyes. Yet she looked… harrowed.
After lingering in the doorway, Briar pulled out a chair to sit facing the table. He was so tired. Slept-for-weeks-and-still-needed-more tired. Neither of them spoke. It was a question of who would be magnanimous enough to apologize first.
“You didn’t have to throw salt at me,” Gretchen said.
“You didn’t have to wish me dead,” Briar shot back.
The stalemate persisted.
Gretchen broke it. “It took me a long time to figure it out, you know. When I died. I didn’t look down at my corpse like they do in dumb movies. I woke up in bed like I’d been sleeping and went straight back to working on a potion recipe. I could stir a cauldron, drop ingredients in. I went a long time without feeling hungry when I was alive, so it wasn’t much different when I was dead. I only realized when people came and started taking away my things, and they couldn’t hear me screaming at them to stop, but they sure felt it when I threw a ladle at their head. They ran away screaming, ‘Ghost!’ and that’s when I knew.”
Briar listened with a feeling like a clenched fist.
“Ever since, I’ve been trapped here. A new witch would move in, and every year they’d make sure I stayed trapped. No one bothered with the expense of an exorcism. Why bother, when salt’s good enough, right?”
She looked around at the bed, at the various symbols of Linden’s presence there. “It doesn’t look like you’d struggle to afford an exorcism now.”
“Linden offered,” Briar said. “I’d never do that to you.”
She looked sad, picking at a laddered tear in her leggings. “I’m not very good at admitting when I’m wrong. Wasn’t when I was alive either.” A shaky sigh. “I wasn’t mad at you about the tether. I was mad because I thought we were friends, and you didn’t even tell me you were cursed.”
Briar said, “We are friends.”
“Then why didn’t you say anything?”
Because people looked at him differently when they knew, but that wasn’t the whole truth. Where had he got this stubborn impulse to do everything by himself? At the heart of it, maybe he still felt he had something to prove. That wasn’t the whole of it either, though.
He said, “Ever since my mum died, I’ve been on my own.”
“Ever since I died, I’ve been on my own, too, until you showed up.”
The last part she said with such dripping sarcasm that Briar chuckled. “Sorry?”
“Is that an apology?”
“I’m sorry for throwing salt at you.”
“Well, I’m sorry for telling you to just die.”
The pressure of the stalemate dissolved. Briar eased back in his chair. Spoken like this, the argument sounded ridiculous, for all it had wounded him deeply at the time.
Gretchen said, “I really am sorry. Are you… feeling better?”
It mattered most that she asked. “A bit.”
Awkwardly, Gretchen said, “So, what have I missed? What year is it?”
They fell into companionable conversation, mostly about the bizarre occurrences lately, the increase in attacks from the forest, the acceleration of his curse. He skimmed over the events of his love life, though he doubted she’d ridicule him for it. He enjoyed the return of his friend so much, he almost forgot to tell her what he meant to.
“The siphon!”
