Where Briars Burn: The Briar Grove

The marsh opened its mouth and swallowed Sergeant Dorian Voss between one breath and the next.

Kael Ashworth heard the scream first, raw and brief, then the wet, sucking collapse that followed. He spun from the broken path, boots sinking into peat that trembled beneath his weight like the flank of some vast, slumbering thing. Voss had been three paces behind him, stepping exactly where Kael stepped, following the trail marked by bent reeds and faint sigils scratched into bark. Now Voss was gone, dragged beneath a crust of grey-green moss that had looked solid enough to bear a horse.

The remaining men stopped. Four of them, counting Kael. Their cloaks hung heavy with mist, and their faces held the particular grey pallor that came from two days without proper sleep and three meals of stale bread. Sergeant Harren, the oldest among them, pulled his horse backward from the sucking edge. The animal's eyes rolled white, nostrils flaring at the bog water that now bubbled where Voss had stood, releasing a sour reek of rot and iron.

No one spoke. The marsh had a way of swallowing sound along with men.

Kael knelt at the edge, gripping his sword hilt with one hand and reaching for his belt knife with the other. He hacked a reed shaft, thrust it down into the mire where Voss had vanished, and felt nothing. No resistance. No body. The bog had taken his sergeant to a depth beyond easy reach.

"Form the line," Kael said. His voice came out steadier than he felt, the southern consonants he had never quite lost from his years in the Crown's service lending an odd formality to the words. "Single file. Test every step. Harren, take the rear."

Harren did not move. His gaze stayed fixed on the bubbling patch, on the slow spiral of grey water that marked the place a man had been.

"Sergeant."

"Aye, m'lord." Harren's voice was a croak. "Just counting how many we came in with, and how many we'll walk out."

Kael did not ask the number. He already knew. Twelve men had ridden out from Millhaven's southern gate two days ago, when the magistrate's commission had been pressed into his hand by a clerk who would not meet his eye. Now four remained standing on a strip of solid ground no wider than a wagon bed, and somewhere ahead of them, the girl they hunted moved like a ghost through water.

She had warned them. He had to admit that much, privately, to the part of himself that catalogued guilt like coins in a locked purse. The night before they had entered the marsh, a bundle of dried yarrow and hemlock had been left on the road. A small fire had been laid but not lit. A knot of red thread had been tied around the nearest sapling, three loops, the old sign for a warning to those who followed. Kael had seen these things and chosen to ride forward anyway, because his commission was a weight in his coat and because Elara Veylan's name had been spoken in the petitions of three widowed mothers, and because his debt to the Veylan name was older and heavier than he wished to remember.

Now Voss was in the bog, and the path forward smelled faintly of feverfew and chamomile, herbs that did not grow wild in this part of the marsh.

Elara was laying more warnings. She was laying them like a woman scattering grain to keep birds from the ripening wheat, gentle and deliberate, and she was not slowing down.

They moved for another hour. The sky hung low and pewter, neither dawn nor dusk but something between, the light that came to the marsh as if filtered through old glass. Kael led from the front now, refusing the position to any of the men, because a magistrate who sent others into danger he would not face was a magistrate who had already failed his office. Each step he tested with the butt of his spear before committing his weight. The mud sucked at his boots. Once, his leg sank to the knee, and he felt the cold pressure of the bog water climb his thigh like a living grip before he hauled himself free, gasping, the smell of peat filling his mouth.

Harren came up beside him. The sergeant's hand found Kael's elbow and steadied him without comment. They exchanged a look that held no comfort.

"She knows the ground," Harren said quietly.

"She grew up in it," Kael replied.

"Then we're fools."

Kael did not deny it.

By the second hour's end, another man had fallen. This time it was not the bog but the fever. The youngest of them, a cavalry rider named Pell whose surname Kael had never learned, began to shiver as they crossed a shallow ridge of firmer ground. His teeth chattered. His eyes took on a glassy sheen, and the skin of his hands went the color of tallow. Pell sat where he had stopped, unable or unwilling to rise, and when Kael crouched beside him he could smell the sickness coming off him in waves, a sweet, cloying scent that did not belong to any illness he had known in field hospitals or garrison towns.

It smelled of meadows. It smelled of crushed herbs pressed into hot water, the smell of a poultice or a sleeping draught.

"Her work?" Harren asked.

Kael looked at the ground around Pell's feet. A few sprigs of something pale and dried had been crushed into the mud. Feverfew. The same feverfew he had scented on the wind all morning.

"Leave him water," Kael said. "Mark the spot. We will send a cart from Millhaven when we return."

"And if we don't return?"

Kael met the sergeant's eyes. "Then someone else will."

Harren held the look for a long moment, then nodded once and unhooked his canteen. Pell's shaking hands took it, and Kael rose and walked on, because walking on was the only direction that remained.

He thought of Elara Veylan as he walked. He had seen her only once, years ago, at a funeral in Hollowmere. She had stood at the back of the gathered mourners, a girl of perhaps thirteen, wearing a dress too large for her frame and a wreath of dried angelica in her hair. Her grandmother had been the one in the coffin, and Elara had not wept. She had watched the proceedings with a stillness that Kael had recognized, even then, as the stillness of someone who had decided long ago what grief would be permitted to do to her and what it would not.

He had not spoken to her that day. He had spoken to her father, briefly, about old favors owed and old wounds carried, and then he had ridden south to take up his commission in the capital. The next he had heard, Hollowmere had emptied itself of its young, and Elara had gone into the marsh alone.

Now she was three days ahead of him, perhaps four, and every step he took on her ground cost him another man.

The third day broke with rain. It came in a fine, persistent mist that settled on cloaks and hair and made every surface gleam. The path, such as it was, wound between twisted alders whose roots rose from the water like the knuckles of buried hands. Mistletoe grew thick in the higher branches, and Kael caught the distant croak of something amphibious, a sound that came from no particular direction and seemed to surround them.

Harren's horse went lame at midday, the animal's foreleg sinking into a patch of soft ground that had looked like firm path. Kael put the horse down with a single thrust of his knife, a mercy he had learned to deliver without hesitation and without thinking. The animal's shuddering stilled. Harren stood apart, his face working, and then the sergeant simply walked on, because the walking was all there was left to do.

By the afternoon, only Kael and Harren remained.

The last of the other two, a scout named Brennick and a pikeman whose name had been Tomas, had parted ways from them at a fork in the path. One had wandered into a stretch of mist that closed behind him like a door, and when the mist cleared, he had gone with it. The other had simply stopped walking, sat down among the reeds, and refused to rise. Kael had knelt beside the man and begged him, in the careful southern phrases he had been taught to use with peasants and witnesses, to stand and continue. The man had looked at him with the same glassy eyes Pell had worn, and said only, "She told me to wait." Then he had smiled, and the smile had been worse than the sickness, because it had been the smile of someone being given a gift.

Kael left him sitting upright in the reeds, propped against a stone, his canteen in his lap, his face turned toward the path that led deeper into the marsh.

Now Kael walked alone with Harren, and the silence between them was a living thing.

"You should go back," Kael said. Not a question. An offer.

Harren's jaw tightened. "I'm paid through the season, m'lord. Whatever that season turns out to be."

"It's not your debt."

"No." Harren's voice dropped. "But it's my oath. I signed on with you. I'll walk till the bog takes me, or till we find her, whichever comes first."

Kael did not argue. He had learned, in years of tribunals and inquiries, that a man who had decided to stay was a man beyond the reach of persuasion.

They walked until the light began to fail, and then Kael saw the next warning.

A sapling had been bent and tied with red thread, three loops again, but this time the loops held a small bundle of dried stalks wedged into the crook. He stopped. He unwrapped the bundle carefully, feeling Harren's breath on the back of his neck, and found within it a folded scrap of bark-paper, soft and damp at the edges.

He read it by the failing light. The handwriting was small and careful, the letters formed with the patience of someone who had learned to write by candlelight on a grandmother's knee.

Two lines, no greeting, no signature.

The marsh will take what it is owed. Turn back, magistrate. The next warning will not be kind.

Kael read it twice. The southern courtesy in him wanted to fold it and pocket it, to consider it later, to weigh the words in some quiet chamber with tea cooling on a desk. The soldier in him wanted to crumple it and press on. The man who had stood at the back of a funeral in Hollowmere and not spoken to a girl in an ill-fitting dress wanted to kneel in the mud and weep, because he understood, suddenly and completely, what Elara Veylan was doing.

She was not fleeing. She was not hiding.

She was walking a path that would kill anyone who followed, and she was leaving the bodies of his men along it like markers, so that when he reached her, he would know exactly what his pursuit had cost.

Harren's hand settled on his shoulder.

"M'lord."

Kael folded the note. He did not put it in his coat. He held it in his fist, the bark-paper softening against his palm, the ink bleeding faintly against his skin.

"We make camp," he said. "Here. On this ground. We do not advance another step tonight."

Harren exhaled but said nothing, and began, with the slow efficiency of long practice, to clear a space among the roots.

Kael sat with his back to the sapling and watched the last of the light drain from the marsh. Somewhere ahead, beyond the mist and the alders and the sucking ground, a fire that had been laid but not lit was waiting to be seen by someone. He closed his eyes. He did not sleep.

He listened, instead, to the marsh breathing around him, and to the small, persistent rain, and to the soft tread of a woman walking away from him through the water, leaving warnings in her wake like bread crumbs for a wolf she hoped would learn to turn around.

Kael rose before the marsh woke.

He had not slept. His back ached where it had pressed against the sapling all night, and his eyes burned with the particular grit of a man who had watched darkness turn slowly to grey. The rain had not stopped, but it had thinned to a mist that clung to his coat and beard in fine beads.

He ate nothing. He drank from his flask. He looked once at the note in his fist, now soft as cloth, and tucked it into his coat against his chest.

"Harren."

The sergeant appeared from the grey, already wearing the expression of a man who knew what was coming.

"Stay here with the men."

"M'lord, the ground ahead is worse than what we've crossed. If she has laid more..."

"Then you will have ground to hold. If I do not return by nightfall, take the column back to the village and send word to the Crown."

Harren's jaw worked. He did not argue. He had served Kael long enough to know when argument was useless.

Kael buckled his sword belt, checked the edge of his blade with his thumb, and walked into the mist.

The path Elara had left was easy to follow, once a man knew how to read it. Broken stems, always broken toward the next high ground. A heron's feather, placed upright in the mud. A scrap of wool caught on a thorn, the colour of the dress she had been wearing at her grandmother's funeral. She was not trying to hide. She was laying a trail for him to follow, and he understood, with the soldier's clarity that had once made him useful and now made him wretched, that she wanted him to find her.

She wanted him to see what he had come to see.

He walked for two hours. The marsh gave way, by degrees, to higher ground. The alders thinned. The ground firmed. The mist thinned with it, and through it he began to see, ahead and slightly to the east, a darkness in the trees that was not the darkness of the wood.

It was the darkness of thorns.

The Briar Grove had a name once, before the marsh had crept this far north and the old villages had emptied. The villagers had called it the Witches' Knot, or the Thorn Circle, or, in the oldest songs, simply the Place of Binding. Elara's grandmother had brought her here as a girl, Kael knew, because Harren had told him, and Harren had heard it from a woman in Hollowmere who had seen them go. The grove was where the old craft was taught. The briars that grew there were not like other briars. They remembered.

He felt them before he saw them.

A prickling along his forearms, as though the air itself had grown teeth. The smell of iron, though there was no blood yet. A pressure in his ears, like the moment before a storm breaks.

Then the trees parted, and the grove opened before him.

It was a small place, no more than thirty paces across, and it was ringed by a wall of blackthorn so thick and so old that the stems had fused into a single braided mass, higher than a man's head, shot through with pale blossoms that should not have been blooming in this season and that gave off a faint, sweet rot, like fruit left too long in a cellar. Inside the ring, the ground was bare earth, dark and soft, and in the centre stood a single stone, waist-high, covered in moss, and before the stone stood Elara Veylan.

She was wearing the dress from the funeral. It was mud to the knees now, and torn at the hem, and there was a new stain at the shoulder, dark against the grey wool. She had braided her hair back from her face, and her hands were bare, and her hands were raised, palms out, fingers spread, and from her fingers the briars were growing.

Not fast. Not with the explosive violence he had been told to expect. Slowly, deliberately, like vines in a time-lapse, they unspooled from her knuckles and her wrists, looping outward, finding the air, finding him. They were the colour of old blood. They smelled of the marsh.

"You came alone," she said.

Her voice was steady. It was the steadiness of a woman who had walked all night through a place that wanted to kill her, and who had decided, somewhere in the walking, that she was finished running.

"I did."

"Why?"

"Because I owed a debt to your grandmother, and because I owe one to you, and because if I sent more men into that marsh they would die as the others died, and I could not, in good conscience, ask that of any man who had not chosen it for himself."

Her fingers twitched. A briar shot sideways, struck a branch, wrapped it once, and went still.

"You chose it."

"Yes."

"And if I kill you here, Kael Ashworth, what then? Will your Crown send another? And another? Until they find one who does not flinch when a hedge-witch looks at him?"

He drew his blade.

The steel was not silver, but it had been folded with silver wire by a smith in the southern capital who had died twenty years ago, and the wire showed along the fuller in pale threads. The flame came when he willed it. He willed it now. The edge of the sword burned, low and blue, and the smoke that rose from it smelled of nothing at all, which was worse, in its way, than any smell.

"Then they will send another," he said. "And another. And you will be alone in this grove until you die of it, or until one of them is clever enough to catch you off your ground. I am not here to catch you. I am here to ask you to come with me, and to answer you with steel if you will not."

"I will not."

"Then we will see."

She moved first.

She moved first.

Elara did not hurl a briar at him. That would have been the obvious thing, the blunt thing, and she was done being obvious. Instead she dropped low into the moss and the mud and the slick rot of fallen leaves, and her hand swept through the water that pooled between the roots, and the water rose with her will into a curtain of black mirrored glass that caught the blue flame of his sword and threw it back at him in a hundred blinding shards.

Kael threw his arm across his face. The heat licked at his sleeve, singed the wool, did not touch skin. He lunged forward through the curtain and the water broke around him like a fist, soaking him to the thigh, and he felt the cold of it reach into his boot and curl around his ankle and try to hold him where he stood.

He slashed downward. The silver-wire edge parted the grasping water. The blade met a root and sheared it, and the root bled sap that steamed when the flame touched it. He stepped free of the pool and found her.

She had moved. Of course she had moved. She was fifteen paces to his left now, crouched behind the ruined shrine, and her fingers were weaving something in the air that he could not see but could feel, a pressure in his ears like the moment before a thunderclap. The briars along the shrine were stirring. The ones he had cut were trying to regrow. The ones he had not cut were leaning toward her like dogs called to heel.

"Elara."

She did not answer. Her mouth was a thin line. Her eyes were the grey of the bog water and just as still.

He came at her along the side of the shrine, keeping his weight on the balls of his feet, keeping the blade low. He had been taught to fight men, not witches, and the lesson was twenty years old and half-forgotten, but the body remembered what the mind let slip. He feinted left and went right. The shrine's wall was waist-high and crumbled where he put his boot against it. He came over the top in a single motion, blade up to guard his face.

A briar caught his wrist.

It came from the thatch of the shrine roof. He had not seen it. He had not thought to look at the thatch. The thorns punched through the leather of his gauntlet and bit the flesh beneath, and the pain was bright and specific, a row of small iron teeth closing on the tendons of his forearm. He felt his grip on the sword loosen. He set his teeth and held.

The briar hauled him forward. He planted his back foot and the mud gave, and he stumbled, and her hand was in his face, fingers splayed, and the air between her palm and his eyes went cold and sharp as a blade.

She could have killed him. He saw it in the stillness of her face, the absolute deliberation of her. She could have stopped his heart with a word, could have drawn the breath out of his lungs, could have turned the blood in his veins to winter. He saw her choose not to.

Instead she said, very quietly, "Yield."

"I cannot."

"Then stop."

"I cannot do that either."

The briar tightened. He felt the bones of his wrist grind against each other, a sound like a small stone cracking inside his arm. The sword drooped. The blue flame guttered.

Then the bog screamed.

It was not a sound that should have come from a bog. Bogs do not scream. They sigh, they bubble, they give up their gases in slow burps that smell of rot and copper. This was something else. This was a sound like a thousand green things being broken at once, like a forest being felled in a single second, and it came from everywhere and nowhere, from the ground beneath their feet and the water behind them and the trees above them and the air itself.

The shrine shook. The briars along its walls went rigid, every thorn pointing outward, every leaf flat and hard as a knife. The water in the pool rose up in a single sheet and then fell away. The mud beneath Kael's back foot began to bubble.

Elara's head snapped toward the sound. Her hand dropped from his face. The briar on his wrist went slack, and he pulled free of it with a grunt and a wet tearing of leather, blood running down into his glove.

"What did you do?" she said.

"Nothing."

"What did your Crown send behind you?"

"Nothing. I came alone."

"Then what is that."

The ground split open.

It split along a seam that had not been there a moment before, a jagged line that ran from the base of the shrine out into the pool and on into the deeper bog beyond. The edges of the seam curled back like the lips of a wound, and what came up out of it was black and tall and wrong.

It was the size of a draft horse. It had the shape of a man the way a rotten tree has the shape of a man, all bulk and suggestion and no grace. Its skin, if it could be called skin, was the blackened wood of drowned trees, bark peeling back in long strips that wept a thick ichor the colour of bile. Its eyes were knots in the wood, dark and wet, and they did not blink. Its mouth was a vertical slit that opened and closed and opened again, and the sound it made was the bog's scream translated into breath.

It reeked. The smell hit Kael like a blow, sweet and foul, the smell of something that had been dead in the water for a hundred years and had forgotten how to finish dying. He tasted it at the back of his throat, copper and pond-scum and rot.

The curse-spawn took one step toward the shrine. The ground under its foot sank a foot deep. It did not seem to notice.

"Elara," Kael said, and his voice was steady, which surprised him. "I think we have a problem."

She was already moving. She came around the ruined wall of the shrine and her hands were in the briars and the briars were in her, and she pulled, and they came with her, a dozen long whips of thorn and green wood that she held in both fists like reins. Her face was white. Her hands were bleeding from a dozen small cuts where the thorns had bitten her on the way out. She did not seem to notice that either.

The curse-spawn swung one massive arm. The blow meant for the shrine. The blow meant for her. Kael saw it coming and did not think, and what he did was run forward and put his shoulder into her and they both went sprawling into the mud behind the shrine's back wall as the arm came down where they had been standing and tore the front of the shrine into a spray of stone and rotten thatch.

They lay in the mud for one breath, two. The curse-spawn hauled its arm free of the rubble and turned, slowly, the knots of its eyes scanning. Kael was on his back with Elara half across his chest and his sword somewhere under him and his wrist screaming where the briar had been. She was looking up at him from very close range, and her expression was not gratitude.

"Get off me," she said.

"You are on me."

"I am aware. Get off."

"You first."

She pushed herself up on her palms. He rolled to the side. The curse-spawn's foot came down where his head had been and the mud exploded upward in a black sheet that spattered them both.

They got up. They stood back to back without deciding to, because there was nowhere else to stand. The curse-spawn loomed above them, ten feet tall, twelve, blocking out what little light the overcast sky had been offering. The ichor that wept from its bark hissed where it touched the ground. The briars along the grove had gone wild. They were growing toward the thing in long groping tendrils, trying to pin its legs, and the thing was stepping through them like a man through tall grass.

"It came for me," Elara said. Her voice was flat, certain. "It came for what I am."

"It came for this place."

"Same thing."

"Perhaps. Do we fight it or do we run?"

She looked at him. The mud was on her face and her hair was coming loose from its braid and her eyes were very bright.

"Run where?" she said.

The curse-spawn swung again. This time they were ready. Elara dropped flat and her briars snapped upward in a wall of thorns that caught the creature's arm and held it, and Kael came in low from the side with his blade burning and put the edge into the joint where the arm met the shoulder, where the bark was thinnest, where the ichor ran thickest.

The edge bit. The silver wire sang. The curse-spawn made a sound that was worse than its scream, a low grinding keen like a millstone turning over a bone, and the arm tore free of its socket in a shower of black splinters and ichor that spattered Kael from chest to knee. The ichor burned where it touched him. He did not let himself think about that.

The creature staggered. It turned toward him, and the stump of its arm was already sprouting something, a black bulbous knob that pulsed and split and began to reach for the shape of a hand. It would grow back. He had perhaps a minute before it had a new fist to swing.

"NOW," Elara said.

She was standing in the pool. The water was around her knees and her hands were plunged into it to the wrists and her eyes were closed, and every briar in the grove was leaning toward her, toward the curse-spawn, a hundred green arms drawn back like bows. She opened her eyes.

The briars struck.

They struck the curse-spawn from every side at once, thorns the length of a man's forearm punching into the black wood, into the knots of its eyes, into the slit of its mouth. They wrapped its legs and hauled. They wrapped its one remaining arm and hauled. They pulled it downward, inch by inch, toward the bog, toward the mud, toward the water that had been its cradle and would be its grave.

It fought. It pulled against the briars and the briars creaked and some of them snapped, and where they snapped Elara made a small sound in her throat that was not quite a word. Blood ran from her nose. The water in the pool was boiling around her knees.

Kael ran. He did not think. He ran at the curse-spawn's back, the one place the briars had not reached, and he jumped, and his boots found a ridge of bark, and he hauled himself up the thing's spine like a man climbing a wall, and his burning blade found the notch at the base of its skull where the wood was darkest and wettest and the ichor ran like a spring.

He drove the sword in to the hilt.

The curse-spawn screamed. The briars hauled. The sword burned in its brain. The thing shuddered once, twice, three times, and then it began to come apart, the bark peeling away in great sheets, the ichor pouring out in a flood that swept Kael off its back and slammed him into the mud ten feet away. He hit the ground and the air went out of him in a single white-hot pulse, and he lay there, and the sky above him was grey and he could not breathe and he could not move.

The curse-spawn collapsed. It fell in on itself like a tower of wet sand, and the briars rushed in to fill the space where it had been, and for a long moment there was nothing but the sound of wood settling and water running and a woman breathing very hard somewhere close by.

Then quiet.

Kael lay in the mud. His sword was gone. His wrist was on fire. His chest felt as though someone had taken a hammer to every rib. The ichor on his clothes was still warm, and where it touched his skin it burned in slow patches that he did not want to look at.

Elara was three feet from him. She was on her back in the mud, her arms spread, her braid half-unraveled, her face turned toward the sky. The blood from her nose had run down across her lip and into the mud at the corner of her mouth. She was breathing in short shallow gasps that sounded like a small animal caught in a trap.

Neither of them moved for a long time.

The bog settled around them. The water in the pool went still. The briars along the grove relaxed, their thorns softening, their leaves unfurling. Somewhere in the distance a heron called, a single hoarse note, and was answered by silence.

"I cannot," Kael said, after a while, "fight you any longer today."

A sound came from her that might have been a laugh. It was thin and wet and it turned into a cough.

"Nor I you."

"My sword is in the mud somewhere."

"Mine is in my hand."

He turned his head to look at her. Her right hand was closed around a length of briar she had not let go of, and the thorns were buried in her palm and her fingers were white around the green wood and she did not seem to have the strength to open them.

"Will you kill me?" he said.

"No."

"Will you come with me?"

"No."

"Will you let me rest here until morning?"

She was quiet for a moment. The heron called again. The mud was cold beneath his back and the ichor on his chest was beginning to set like tar and the pain in his wrist had settled into a steady throb that matched his heartbeat.

"Yes," she said. "You may rest here until morning. And then you will go."

He closed his eyes.

"And Kael Ashworth."

"Yes."

"If you are still here when the sun touches the trees, I will not ask again."

He did not answer. He was already asleep, or something close to it, the kind of half-sleep that comes over a body that has been given permission to stop. He lay in the mud in the ruined grove with a witch three feet away and a curse-spawn dissolving into the bog beneath his shoulder blade, and he did not dream, and the briars grew slowly around them both in the dark.