“Anything that could harm the forest,” Briar supplied. “Right?”
Rowan nodded.
They reached a fallen log blocking the path at hip height. Linden took Briar’s hand to help him over it and didn’t let go afterward. Rowan staredinto the trees ahead while Briar’s stomach churned—he was here to help, not remind Rowan of what they’d lost.
They continued searching for anything amiss. Besides the wind and their footsteps, the forest was eerily quiet. No birds sang, no small animals scuffled in the bushes, no insects hummed. Only the trees spoke.
Ours, they said.
The Keeper.
Briar longed to wrench Rowan away from this place.
They discovered why it was so quiet with a dry crunch underfoot. Not of twigs—the tiny skeleton of an animal, perhaps a squirrel. Not so strange a thing, until they found more. A tiny tibia, the scattered remains of rodents and birds. Some were shriveled, still wrapped in tight skin, fur or feathers, others nothing more than yellow bones. What killed them wasn’t evident until they came across a mouse, freshly dead and caught in the ivy of a tree. The star-shaped leaves made a red halo around its body. Before their eyes, the mouse shriveled as the forest sucked the vitality from it.
So the wood not only attacked the people of Coill Darragh, but the animals, too. The remains, Briar sensed, were devoid of tithe magic, sapped dry.
“This place is cursed,” said Linden. “I don’t know why you don’t just burn it to the ground.”
“If you’d seen Sorcha today, you wouldn’t ask,” Rowan growled.
“Will she be all right?” Briar still couldn’t speak to Sorcha—she was frosty with him, but he couldn’t blame her for that.
“She will be, yeah. Scared Ciara something fierce, though.”
That made Briar shiver. What if the forest came for Ciara?
“What’s that?” Linden pointed ahead, where a mound of earth and twigs rose from the earth. It looked like a sleeping goliath, a bear, from afar. They picked their way toward it and found—
A hut.
It was stranger than the dead animals. A man-made construction in this forest defied logic; no one went into the woods, let alone lived here. Red ribbons hung like gore from the twigs, fluttering in the breeze, markings written along their length. Runes. The ribbons were wards like the one he and Linden used to banish Gretchen. Many no longer shone with the light of active magic, weathered and frayed. Others were naught more than scraps of fabric. The forest menaced the hut from all sides, shrubs and trees leaning in, reaching, held back from destroying the thing by the wards. But only just.
A ragged blanket hung in the doorway, obscuring the interior. Rowan’s hands shook visibly as he pushed it aside. Briar wished he could reach out to steady Rowan, but Linden still held his hand tightly.
Inside, it was too dark to see until Linden tithed a strand of hair to cast a floating orb of light. The ceiling was low. Rowan couldn’t stand straight, and things hung from the ceiling, tickling the back of Briar’s neck. More ribbons. Countless. Baskets containing tithes littered the floor. The ground was uneven beneath Briar’s foot. He scuffed dead leaves out of the way to find a sigil dug into the dirt. Wards and tithes for protection were everywhere. Whoever had occupied the hut, they’d known the danger.
“Look at this,” Rowan said.
On a table at the back were several leather tomes scrawled with runes, recipes, and treatises on old magic. Next to them, in a bowl of inky water, floated several spherical objects. Hesitantly, Rowan lifted one from the water. It was empty. No smoke swirled within, but it was clearly a siphon.
Linden said, “Use of those would be a swift way to invoke the forest’s ire, I wager.”
“You don’t think—?” Briar asked.
“Yeah,” Rowan said gruffly. “Whoever was behind it ten years ago, seems they’ve returned.”
He dropped the empty siphon back in the brew. Briar hated to think what that water might contain to empower the glass spheres to capture swathes of life from the woods.
“This is only a hypothesis,” Linden said, “but, if this exact thing happened before, then perhaps the use of these siphons is what prompted the woods to curse your mother.”
“Butwhy? She’d never been here, far as I know,” Briar said.
A thunderous rumble interrupted them. The forest moaned as if every tree was the mast of a great ship whose stays had snapped. Abruptly, all the silvery rune marks on the ribbons dissolved. The hut shook.
Linden said, “I think that’s our cue to leave.”
The trees said,This way.
