Sid said nothing after that, and Reeve wondered if he might never hear the blade speak again.
With vexation muddying his ability to search, he went to Celeste and assisted her instead. Together, they thoroughly went over every inch of both greenhouses, but came upon no suspicious cracks or hidden glows.
“I suppose we can dig up her plants,” Celeste said hesitantly, pressing a hand to the soil and calling back the shadows she had sent out, “but I’m not feeling anything beneath the ground.”
“Neither am I.” Reeve doused his spell, much weaker under the moonlight but similarly telling him there was nothing arcane to feel.
They stepped out into the space between the two greenhouses under the light of the moons. It was quiet, the faint sound of music droning from the southern distance, and the air was warm. Ima’riel had explained that the day and night were equal in length when the sweetbriars were slated to bloom. Reeve was familiar with when the sun would rise dependent on the rhythm of the seasons, winter saw shorter days and summer long ones, but he never thought the day and night were truly anything but equal. They had always seemed like two halves of a necessary whole to him, one needing the other.
Celeste stood at his side, staring up at the sky, brow and lips pinched in thought. He brushed his hand along his pocket to feel the key he’d taken from the cottage. He carried it on him still without thought or reason—known thought or reason, at least—only that Valcord had urged him to that place twice and had not punished him with guilt for taking the key. In fact, Reeve hadn’t felt guilt at all, not for poking around the greenhouse, not for missing morning reverence, not for indulging in every obscene—
A scream pierced the air. It was carried to them on a whipping breeze, and they quickly looked at one another.
“What was that?”
“Not a fox.”
Both ran, bursting through the greenhouse and around the cottage to find Earlylyte already pawing at the ground and snorting as more horrified sounds rose from the village proper. Reeve tossed Celeste up onto the horse’s back, climbed up before her, and at a gallop they raced down North Road.
Mud splattered as they went, but quickly the cries died off. They should have seen villagers scattering if they’d fled some disaster, but the road was eerily calm, the sounds of the panting horse and galloping hooves all that filled the night air. The arcane lights that had been so beautiful as they sparkled over Briarwyke had dimmed, swirling instead with a murky color and throwing twisted shadows along the road.
Celeste gripped onto Reeve’s waist, and she gasped when they saw the vines. They hadn’t bloomed, no greenery or lushness to them, but they had somehow come alive. Thicker and darker than they’d been, the thorny briars sprawled all over town and pulsed with unlife as if a viscous liquid pumped beneath their husks. Where before the briar bushes had been dry and resigned to being buried in shadowed corners and clinging to the edges of the buildings, they were now massive, climbing up walls and onto roofs, twisting around lampposts and enveloping the lights, and, worst of all, entangled about the paralyzed bodies of the villagers.
Still as death, it was apparent they had tried to flee. Earlylyte galloped past bodies sprawled out on the North Road, wrapped in trailing tendril after tendril and fixed to the earth, eyes closed. The vines continued to crawl slowly over them, working away from the center, spreading, then the horse reared back and whinnied. Reeve pulled him to a stop, and Celeste jumped down, Reeve following.
“You have to send him back.” Celeste grabbed onto Reeve’s arm as Earlylyte reared again, a vine crawling toward the horse as if it sensed his presence and meant to ensnare him just like the others.
“Go to the temple,” Reeve called, and the creature darted back the way they’d come.
In the muck and mud, Celeste slid as she sprinted away from the crawling vines. Reeve wrapped a hand around his sword and cast with the other, calling up light. As it shone on the pulsing, blackened tendrils, the plant let out a hiss and recoiled, but it let no one go.
He raised his sword and cut down through the closest vines, severing them plainly as a spray of slimy blackness splattered out all over. The fallen coils twitched where they landed, and then began to move toward the two, the severed ends healing and continuing their assault.
“It’s like the hydra,” Reeve said and began to conjure divine fire along his blade.
“No!” Celeste took his arm and doused his flame with a flick over her locket. “You’ll burn them too.”
Reeve swore under his breath as she pointed at the trapped villagers, all out of options and far too soon, but Celeste was already pulling him toward the circle, deeper into the fray with a bravery he hoped he could manage in himself.
They came upon the circle, unrecognizable from how it had been only hours earlier. The tables were flipped and crushed beneath the vines that entangled the bodies of those who’d been slowest. The very center of Briarwyke pulsed with that murkiness Reeve felt simmering beneath the village when he first arrived. His hand found Celeste’s waist, pulling her close. The briars had taken everything, but they would not take her.
There was a single figure that still moved, standing atop one of the tables that remained upright. The elderly stranger Reeve had identified before was small, but she held her staff overhead like a beacon, a green glow against the murkiness closing in. Vines had captured her ankles but went no higher.
“You?” Reeve called, leveling his sword at the woman.
Celeste stilled his hand, pointing.
Across the circle came another figure, stepping out from the Fitzroy Manor garden. He had never taken the same shape, but there was no mistaking that this was Syphon. As tall as a man and a half, the lanky limbs had filled out, and the horns too had grown. He casually strode with legs no longer just a smoky mass, and in his chest the final sieve was nestled, green, just between the red and blue.
“The manor’s garden,” hissed Celeste, her grip on Reeve tighter. “Oh, I should have known! How else was it blooming so early in the season? And Fhiz’rys? The Fitzroys have elven blood! Of course the last sieve was there all along.”
Reeve’s gaze darted around at the bodies ensnared in the vines—so many of them, Edwin Fitzroy included. At the entrance to the Fitzroy garden, one of the brick columns was utterly destroyed. Beside it, Geezer’s form looked older than it had ever been, hunched and entrapped as well, a smear of blood across his outstretched hands, the dagger he always wore fallen bloody at his feet. For all the magic that the mage had, he had been bested by Syphon too, a terrifying thought.
“They’re alive,” called the elderly woman atop the table, “but I’m not sure for how long I can hold this back.”
“You needn’t fret, witch,” answered Syphon, his inhuman-human form striding around the well at the cobblestone’s edge, running a hand over twisted vines. “They are simply asleep now, but I’ve no intention of killing them, they’re much more valuable alive. However, taking a few lives is a sacrifice I’m willing to make until I’m given what I want.”
“You’re not touching her,” Reeve growled. He would find a way to protect them all, no life would be lost, but Celeste’s wellbeing beyond survival mattered to him the most. Her grip on him shifted, though, and she loosened herself of his grasp.
