Page 14

Story: The Hazelwood Pact

Rowan Blackthorn was a coward.

That much was obvious even to Mottle, who didn’t exactly rank high on the spectrum of emotional subtlety. He took one long look at her, cocooned in yesterday’s dressing gown, hair a tangled bird’s nest of remorse and residual lust, and sniffed.

“Shall I knit you a blanket for the pity party, or will you be sobbing directly into your knickers today?”

Rowan hurled a pillow at him. It exploded midair in a delicate detonation of lavender buds, crushed stuffing, and something that might’ve once been a button shaped like a frog.

She didn’t dignify him with an answer.

She had bigger problems than a sass-mouthed familiar and a thoroughly cursed pillow.

Her apothecary, once the chaotic, fragrant heart of her work and her life, lay in a state of undignified disarray.

The air inside hung limp and listless, like a spell gone stale.

No flicker of candlelight danced in the potion flasks.

No impatient burble from the singing salves.

Even her enchanted scales, which usually clicked with the fussy precision of a judgmental grandmother, had fallen uncharacteristically silent, though Rowan swore they glared at her whenever she passed by.

Sticky tinctures clung to the counters like old guilt.

A bowl of goat’s rue sat abandoned and moldering, half-ground and forgotten, the scent of rot curling faintly through the air like the ghost of her good intentions.

The mortar and pestle, enchanted for convenience, now refused to budge unless she apologized. Profusely. With flowers.

And her magic — oh, her magic was being petulant. Hurt. Unmoored.

It no longer flowed but prickled angrily at the tips of her fingers like nettle rash.

Behind her eyes, it pulsed like a migraine on the cusp, too faint to wield, too loud to ignore.

She tried to draw it into shape and it spat sparks at her, fizzled like a damp firework, then slunk away, wounded and sullen.

Even the ley lines beneath Briar’s Hollow had turned volatile in her hands. They beat against her senses with a low, rhythmic throb, not unlike a toothache. She could feel them in her bones, in her jaw, in the hinge of every word she refused to say.

But still, she did not go next door.

Instead, she lingered by the windowsill in the attic room, wrapped in her shame and linen and the too-thin gauze of denial.

Her fingers curled in the lace curtain like roots searching for softer soil.

She told herself she was just looking at the garden.

Not at him . Just at the lavender, which was flowering late.

At the tomatoes, which had taken on a smug, bulbous shine. Just the garden.

But every morning, like clockwork and heartbreak, he was there.

Linden Thorn. Barefoot in the dew-damp grass, his sleeves rolled to the elbow, hair curling from sleep and summer.

He hummed to the seedlings, whispered to the foxglove, stroked the leaves of a particularly needy zucchini plant like a lover’s cheek.

And gods. Gods. He was still being himself.

He didn’t come banging at her door. Didn’t demand answers or apologies. He just left things . Bundles of herbs, folded gently into linen like offerings. Bound in twine like promises. Tucked just so on her doorstep, where even her most cowardly self couldn’t help but notice.

There was always a note. Always. Scrawled in that gently slanted hand that made her chest ache.

For strength when you're bone-tired.

For peace when your thoughts race like hares.

For whatever hurts and won't say so.

And Rowan… Rowan didn’t respond.

She couldn’t. Her hands itched to reach for him, her mouth longed to say his name, to taste the vowels and consonants again like sweet fruit. But if she reached, if she so much as stepped , she knew what would happen.

She would fall.

Hopelessly. Hungrily. Completely.

And gods help her, she wasn’t sure if she could survive the landing this time.

Not when he’d already made a home inside her without asking, just by being kind.

Not when her body still remembered how he touched her like she was a sacred thing and a storm all at once.

Not when her magic still sparked to life at the memory of his hands, of his voice, of the soft, unbearable way he’d said her name when he came undone.

Rowan Blackthorn was a coward. But cowards knew a terrible truth that heroes often forgot.

Falling was easy.

What came after… that was the danger. That was the ruin.

And she was already so, so tired of bleeding for what she loved.

***

By the fourth day, the ley lines cracked.

The air in Briar’s Hollow turned thick and strange, too sweet and too sharp all at once, as if the land had forgotten the proper rhythm of breath.

Bees lost their sense of direction and began circling the wrong blossoms in confused, furious loops.

The rain, when it came, fell upward in a fine mist, pooling against the clouds with the slow horror of a child’s first reversed heartbeat.

Elder Thistle’s orchard birthed peaches the size of cauldrons, flushed pink and obscene on their bowed branches. The fruit dropped with the thwump of cannonballs and shattered at the roots, releasing perfume so potent it knocked out three squirrels and gave a pair of hedgehogs temporary visions.

And one of the Wren twins, no one ever remembered which, slipped on a rogue blossom and swore with such vehemence that the milk in every pantry curdled in unified protest. Several chickens fainted. A weather vane attempted to file for early retirement.

It was chaos.

Beautiful, whimsical, completely untethered chaos. The sort of magic-born strangeness that made the Hollow what it was, but wrong , this time. Tilted. Strained at the seams.

Rowan tried to fix it.

She really did.

She stood at her worktable in the hollow hush of her apothecary, sleeves rolled, jaw clenched, fingers trembling above the carved rim of her ritual bowl.

The runes etched into the wood blinked weakly — flickered once, like the dying pulse of a candle — and went dark.

Her magic, already temperamental to begin with, slipped from her grasp like a frightened animal.

It hissed from her skin in fine trails of steam, not wild enough to wield, not still enough to gather.

A half-spoken incantation fell from her lips, and the words dissolved like ash before they hit the air.

She redrew her sigils with chalk. Then with blood. Then with tears, though she would never admit it.

None of them held.

The heat in her chest flickered. Guttered. Went cold and still, she refused to speak the truth aloud.

That she couldn’t do this alone anymore. That maybe she never could.

Not without him.

Not without the strange, impossible resonance that sparked between them like flint and dry kindling. Not without his hands grounding her, his voice harmonizing with hers, his presence coaxing the chaos back into rhythm like they were instruments in the same broken song.

From the windowsill, Mottle gave a long, theatrical sigh.

The kind that suggested he’d had just about enough of her tragic heroine routine.

“You gonna cry into the daisies,” he said, dry as bone and twice as brittle, “or actually tell your leaf-touched ex-boyfriend you miss his stupid face?”

Rowan didn’t look at him.

Didn’t speak.

She just moved .

Fast. Breathless.

A sound burst in her ears like thunder underwater, and then she was gone, down the stairs, out the crooked front door, across the riotous threshold of her failing wards.

Her bare feet kissed the overgrown path, her skirts tangled around her thighs, and the wind surged behind her like it knew where she was going. Like it had waited for her to run.

***

Linden was in his garden. Of course he was.

Bare feet buried in the soil like roots. He was humming, some old lullaby from the Hollow, the kind woven from moss and cradlewood and soft, long-forgotten spells. His fingers brushed over a tomato vine like it was something sacred, like coaxing fruit from stubborn stems was an act of reverence.

It made her want to cry. It made her want to scream. It made her want to run straight into his arms and sob until her bones turned to honey.

She stopped at the garden gate.

The wood was warm beneath her palm, the metal latch rusted from years of Briar Hollow’s damp summers, and her breath wouldn’t come properly.

Her lungs were full of bees, buzzing and frantic, stinging from the inside out.

Her magic pressed against her skin in great aching waves, pulled like a tide toward him.

“Linden,” she managed to finally call out to him.

He turned. And smiled .

“Rowan,” he said, and her name in his voice was everything. A knife to the ribs and a kiss to the soul.

She pushed open the gate, heart hammering so loud it hurt. Stepped onto the sun-warmed path and let it shut behind her with a snick of finality that echoed like a vow.

“I can’t keep doing this,” she said. Her voice cracked. Shattered on the air like glass.

Linden set down his trowel with careful grace, wiped his hands on the thighs of his trousers. He didn’t speak. Didn’t move. Just waited . Like she was a storm cloud ready to burst, and he’d chosen to stand still and let it wash over him.

“That morning, I… I left,” Rowan said, and the words came suddenly, jagged and hot and real .

“After everything. I left... Because it felt too good. Because it worked . Because I knew it wouldn’t last, and I couldn’t…

” She swallowed hard. “I… I know I couldn’t survive breaking again. Gods… I barely survived the last time.”

Linden tilted his head. Still silent. Still listening . Gods, he always listened .

“You weren’t there… Ten years ago.” The memory rose like bile, uninvited and choking.

“When everything fell apart. When the ley lines cracked and the wilds bled and the covens splintered… When my magic went wild. I looked for you. After the Shattering. I was broken and when I woke up, I looked … I needed you… And you were gone .”

The wind caught her hair, tangled it around her face like ivy. She pressed her fingers to her sternum, as if she could keep the rest of the confession caged inside.

But it spilled out anyway.

“I needed you, Thornling.” Her voice shook. “And I hated needing anyone. I wanted to be strong enough. Whole enough. To fix it myself. To be enough . And… And for ten years… ten years, I tried so hard… I struggled to live with myself… And then you just come back and I…”

Her throat closed. She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t look away.

“You came back,” she whispered, “and you were still kind . Still you . Like no time had passed. Like I hadn’t broken into pieces and stitched myself up all wrong.”

The admission stripped her bare. Her heart beat like wings in a cage.

“And I… I can’t touch you,” she said, voice barely audible, “without my magic singing . Like it remembers something I’ve spent ten years trying to forget.”

Shame rose up inside her, thick and cloying, metallic on her tongue.

“I hate that I want that,” she choked. “I hate that part of me still lives in you.”

And there it was. All of it. Her hands shook. Her knees wanted to give out. The hollow behind her ribs echoed with everything she’d carved away just to survive.

Please say something , she didn’t say. Please see me. Please don’t leave me again.

The silence that followed was unbearable.

And then Linden moved.

Three long strides across the garden. A sense of urgency finally seeping out from his patient and calm demeanor. Like she was the center of his orbit and he was finally coming home.

He reached for her with a gentleness that undid her completely.

No dramatic speeches. No demands. No sudden kisses or declarations of fate-bound longing.

He just… held her .

Gathered her into his arms like she belonged there. Like he remembered the shape of her grief and carried no fear of it. His skin smelled of sun-warmed soil, his tunic rough beneath her cheek, still damp from the garden. She could feel the steady beat of his heart.

Rowan collapsed into him.

She didn’t mean to. It just happened . Her knees buckled, and her fingers curled in the fabric at his back, and her tears soaked the soft patch of his collarbone.