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Story: The Hazelwood Pact

Rowan Blackthorn had exactly three rules before noon: no customers, no spellwork, and no forced interactions with people she might be tempted to hex into oblivion. Especially not before tea. And especially not in a blouse that still smelled vaguely of exploded mugwort and despair.

So naturally, that was when Elder Thistle herself knocked on her front door like a tax collector bearing bad news and rhubarb.

"Town Hall," the Elder said with the grim finality of a thunderclap. She stood prim as a periwinkle in full bloom, the gold threads of her Council robes slightly frayed and entirely unimpressed by Rowan’s protest of, "I have a rash. A magical rash. Contagious. Possibly fatal."

"You’ll live," Thistle said briskly, and then proceeded to escort Rowan down the cobbled lane like a maiden being marched to the gallows.

Town Hall was exactly as Rowan remembered it: drafty, full of creaky floorboards and even creakier politics, and smelling faintly of beeswax, herbal tension, and one too many mildewed spellbooks.

The building had once been a chapel, then a grain store, then a goat shelter during the Flooding, and it still bore the architectural confusion of all three.

The room was packed. Villagers filled the old pews, voices pitched in anxious chatter.

Someone had brought knitting. Someone else had brought scones.

The Witch Council sat at the head table beneath the faded banner of the Hollow: a circle of hawthorn and hazel surrounding a leaping hare.

Rowan recognized them all. Elder Thistle.

Elder Gorse. Elder Juniper, who appeared to be meditating or asleep, possibly both.

And beside them, as if he belonged there, sat Linden.

Rowan stopped walking. Her spine became a lightning rod of pure, incandescent irritation.

He wore a mossy green tunic, sleeves rolled to the elbow, exposing forearms dusted with golden hair and a lattice of old scars like ivy grown under his skin.

There were flowers in his braid again, daisies and something star-shaped she refused to name.

The sight of him made her stomach lurch in a way she chose to interpret as indigestion.

He saw her, of course. His eyes lit with something maddeningly gentle, and his lips twitched like he wanted to smile but thought better of it. She immediately wished for the floor to become quicksand.

Elder Thistle took her seat with the weary air of someone who had seen three plagues, two uprisings, and at least one enchanted goose scandal.

“This emergency Council session will now come to order.”

The room quieted at once.

Knitting needles paused mid-click. Scone crumbs froze mid-hover, caught in the air by a jittery telekinesis spell that didn’t know whether to scatter or settle. Someone’s enchanted thermos gave an anxious burp and hissed lavender steam into the rafters.

Thistle stood with the slow, deliberate drama of a woman who'd made entire generations tremble with a single arch of her eyebrow. She tapped the scroll in her hand against the table, the parchment crackling with old magic and newer irritation.

“As you are all aware, the ley lines under Briar’s Hollow have begun to fray.”

A ripple of murmurs passed through the gathered crowd consisting of villagers, witches, herbalists, and two goats that no one had managed to banish from the meeting room.

“More like throwing full-on tantrums,” someone muttered from the back. Rowan recognized the butcher’s voice — Milo, eternally meat-scented and permanently unimpressed.

“Magic surges are increasing,” Thistle continued, her voice clipped and cool. “Storms are rising without warning. Crops are failing. The barley grew teeth.”

That one got them. The room sucked in a collective breath. Even the goats looked alarmed.

Rowan slouched in her folding chair, arms crossed, expression set to apathetic local menace . She hadn’t wanted to come.

“We have consulted with seers, historians, and a very expensive coven of academic witches in Morbraith,” Gorse intoned. “All agree: the Hollow’s anchor must be stabilized before the ley lines collapse completely.”

The council table turned as one, slowly, ominously, like sunflowers following the sun, o look at Rowan.

Specifically, to glare.

Thistle’s voice dropped a register. “That means you.”

Rowan raised her brows and gave a brittle, theatrical smile. “Delighted. Can’t wait to singlehandedly untangle a magically ruptured landscape with the same fingers I once lit on fire trying to charm a teaspoon.”

There was a pause. A moment in which hope, for a brief and fragile heartbeat, dared to flicker that maybe, maybe , this would end there.

It did not.

“Not singlehandedly,” Elder Gorse said, and Rowan’s stomach plunged like a poorly cast broomstick.

Her gaze slid, slow as molasses and twice as sticky, to Linden.

Linden was smiling that soft, tragic smile. Looking like the goddamn Spirit of Spring Equinox.

He offered a helpless shrug, as if to say don’t blame me, I only agreed to help stabilize reality itself, not emotionally devastate you again in public.

The traitor.

“The Council has invoked the Hazelwood Pact,” Thistle said.

It hit like a silence spell dropped from ten feet up.

Rowan blinked. The room around her seemed to ripple, warping at the edges. Somewhere, someone actually dropped a biscuit.

“You what now ?” Rowan said, sitting up straight as if yanked by her own incredulity.

Juniper stirred, her voice papery and precise. “The Hazelwood Pact is a rarely used provision for magical emergencies of regional significance. It permits the Council to mandate a pairing of bonded casters to perform harmonic rites for land healing.”

“Bonded casters?” Rowan echoed, her throat inexplicably dry. “You mean like…”

“A magical pair with historic emotional resonance,” Thistle said briskly.

Rowan laughed.

It was not a sane laugh.

It was the sound of someone two syllables away from hurling a scone at a government official. Or possibly herself. Preferably into the sun.

“You want me,” she said, voice rising like steam off a bubbling cauldron, “to perform harmonic rites with him ?”

A beat of silence.

Elder Gorse nodded gravely. “The land remembers you together.”

Rowan made a sharp, strangled noise, something between a scoff and a snarl. “The land also remembers the night I cracked the ley lines like a cheap teacup at a hexed estate sale.”

“Which,” Thistle said, folding her hands with the exact smugness of someone who always planned the last move on the chessboard, “is why it must be you to help mend them.”

Rowan whirled toward Linden, who was — and this was deeply, obscenely offensive — blushing . Just the faintest pink dusting his cheeks, like he'd just remembered something filthy during a sermon.

“ You’re okay with this? ” she hissed at him, every syllable a little poisoned dart.

He looked at her with that maddening, unflinching honesty. That open, earthy steadiness that once made her want to kiss him and throttle him in the same breath. “If it helps the Hollow. If it helps you . Yes.”

Rowan blinked. Once. Twice. She was not going to burst into flames. She was not going to burst into tears . She was going to burst into something , though, and it would be dramatic and possibly legally actionable.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake ,” she muttered.

Thistle cleared her throat with all the delicacy of a guillotine being wheeled into place. “The rites will require shared spells. Prolonged proximity. And emotionally charged intent.”

Rowan could feel the villagers leaning forward. The sheer, unbearable lean of a small-town full of romantically under-stimulated people witnessing a live slow-burn enemies-to-lovers reunion like it was serialized theatre. You could’ve bottled the atmosphere and sold it as Aphrodisiac No. 9.

Mottle, from the depths of her coat pocket, let out a long-suffering croak that echoed through the rafters.

“ Sounds horny, ” he muttered, without shame.

Rowan slapped a hand over him with the desperate force of a woman trying to both save and end her own life.

“You expect us to what … live in each other’s pockets?” she demanded, gesturing wildly, her braid swinging like a dangerous tail. “To share rituals? Possibly beds? And feel things together ?”

“The magic,” Elder Juniper said in a tone usually reserved for tragic operas and aggressively floral teas, “must resonate through a full chord. Mind, body, and heart. ”

Rowan’s expression went through seven stages of grief in two seconds. She considered combusting on the spot. She considered begging for exile. She considered kissing Linden just to get it over with and then punching him out of principle.

Across the room, Linden had the audacity to look calm.

His hands were folded neatly in front of him, his expression soft but unreadable, as though he were already halfway into some meditative grounding spell.

His flaxen hair glowed like sun-warmed straw.

His entire posture said: I am emotionally healthy and willing to grow.

Which, frankly, felt like a personal attack.

“We can start with the easier rites,” he said, gently. “Grounding spells. Shared circles. I won’t push.”

Of course he wouldn’t.

He never pushed. That was the problem. He’d let her run off the edge of a cliff with her magic unraveling like ribbons, and still he’d stood there, arms open, waiting for her to come back when she was ready.

Which she never had been. Until now, apparently, when the ley lines had finally decided to blackmail her with her own unfinished business.

Rowan stood, all angles and brittle tension, stiff as a broom cursed into stubborn animation. Her hands trembled. She clenched them into fists and met Thistle’s eyes.

Her voice was very precise. Very sharp.

“Fine. But if this ends in me murdering him with a binding charm, I’m putting it on your tab.”

Thistle inclined her head like a pleased executioner. “Duly noted.”

Beside her, Juniper sipped her tea and murmured, “We’ll send you the rite scrolls this evening. And perhaps a soothing oil blend.”