“No!” Rowan swayed. For a frightening moment, Briar watched his eyes glaze over, the milky cataract covering them. Then he snapped from it and said, “There’s something else.”
He left the hut. Briar marched after him and was nearly yanked from his feet when Linden did not follow. At the same moment, the hut rent apart. The wards dispelled, their magic no longer powerful enough tocontend with the forest, which took back its components greedily. Light spilled in through the cracks as vines crept in and tore apart the log supports. Wattle and daub fell in crumbling chunks. Linden didn’t resist this time as Briar ran. Ahead, Rowan’s back receded into the trees, following a call neither of them could hear.
Linden’s face was wan. “Where is he off to?”
Briar didn’t stop to speculate. Vatii flapped after him as he skipped over the heaving ground. Linden swore and stuck close. His amulet helped—the skittering movement of plants and wild magic shied away from him as they went.
Ahead, Rowan came to a halt in a clearing. It wasn’t a normal glade—it was a crop circle of blackened ash, as though a fire had burned within the confines of a ring. Rowan stood before the only remaining tree in the glade, a crooked thing. He stared at something caught up in a cage of branches.
It was once a man.
Like the birds and animals, his skin had pruned, sucked tight over his bones. Bright teeth bared wide. The tattered remains of clothing draped in lank folds. Though it appeared old, there was something fresh about the corpse. It dripped.
Rowan stared down at its hand. It held something tight in a skeletal grasp, something with a glassy sheen. A siphon, only this one was full. It contained all the life, all the tithes of that barren circle, and it had cost the caster dearly.
“Who is it?” Briar asked.
Rowan shook his head. No distinguishing features remained.
Linden said, “Look.” With thumb and forefinger, he picked up the arm of the corpse by its loose sleeve as if picking up a rat by its tail. The hand gripping the siphon fell open, the orb bouncing in clouds of ash. Something shiny fell from its finger. Linden bent to pick it up and dust it off. A ring. Custom made to match another one, which Aisling had happily worn on the night of Saor ó Eagla.
It was the ring Briar had sold to Kenneth.
It was difficult to extract the remains without breaking them, but Rowan managed to use his oversized jacket to bundle up the body.
Though Kenneth had been behind the chaos in Coill Darragh, it still seemed cruel to leave him there. They had to tell Aisling, but how to explain her lover had been tithing the forest, inciting its wrath against herfellows? She’d thought he’d gotten cold feet, skipped town to avoid breaking off their engagement.
At the news, she railed against her ex-fiancé as though he were alive to hear her. According to her, Kenneth’s parents were dead. It not only explained why no one had come looking for him, but aligned with the events of ten years prior. If his parents started this war on the woods, they’d probably died when the wards went up.
Perhaps he’d believed Aisling’s love would protect him from the forest. Perhaps he’d wanted vengeance for the deaths of his family. They’d never know. Nothing left in the disaster zone of his hut alluded to his motives.
It should have been a relief. The source of the forest’s ire dealt with by the forest itself.
Instead, Briar returned to find his flat in havoc. A hurricane sent the contents of his desk and kitchen cabinets streaming across the flat, a dervish of fabric and sewing materials. He had to hold his cloak up to protect himself from flying utensils. A barely human howl screeched through it all.
“Is that Gretchen?” Vatii shrieked.
Sure enough, a spectral image of Gretchen flickered like television static near the high beams of the ceiling.
Horror gripped him. “Gretchen?”
“Briar?” Her voice sounded distant and too close at once, breaking up and distorted. Her image winked out and appeared closer, her face drawn in agony. “Briar, help, I think I’m—”
She couldn’t get the rest out. Briar reached for her, grasped for her wrists and phased through them. The chill on his fingers was no longer like snow on skin; it was the sensation of coming into a warm house after you’d gone numb, the scalding pain of every nerve reawakening.
Vatii shied away, taking shelter under an upturned chair. “This isn’t right, Briar. No poltergeist has this sort of energy.”
Briar called out, “Gretchen, what’s wrong? What’s happening?”
“Feels like— Torn apart— I think someone’s trying to—” Her voice sputtered in and out.
“Trying to what?!”
The tornado of furniture and objects in Briar’s home halted, everything floating in suspended animation. Briar stood rooted to the spot. Gretchen’s screech came through slowly, like metal rent apart. Just one word.
“Exorcism!”
Her cries died. Everything in the flat crashed to the ground in a catastrophic rain. Briar dodged out of the doorway to avoid a bludgeoning. It took time for the debris to settle, the tinkle of sewing needles rolling away like delicate shrapnel.
