“Shut up!” I hissed.
“Did you say something?” Rogan asked me.
“No,” I replied, hauling myself to my feet. “The water’s safe to drink.”
He bent and sipped some of the water. He didn’t—couldn’t—see the crystalline otter doing somersaults around his hands. When he looked back up at me, his blue-green eyes were intent.
“You used to talk about growing things when we were younger,” he said. “You planned to ask the queen for a plot in the kitchen gardens, I remember. Did you ever?”
“No.” Cathair’s vile tinctures and rude poisons had dissuaded me from that notion. “That was a long time ago. It was a child’s dream.”
Rogan looked at the derelict greenhouse, the overgrown beds, the broken stone walls. A spark of inspiration danced across his face. “Maybe, while we’re here—”
Moments ago, I’d been guilty of the same thought. But creeping beneath that thought were terrible memories of what my growing magic had done. Pinecone, crumbling to dust. Eimar, trotting into the dusk. Caitríona—
No. My magic was dangerous—I couldn’t allow myself to love anything else, not even a garden.
“We have other things to focus on. Starting with finding the Thirteenth Gate. The full moon is only a few days from now. We need to be ready.”
“Right.” Rogan shed his morning’s softness, turning hard as battle metal. From his mantle, he unfolded the map Mother had given him. “It’s supposed to be somewhere in those woods—the map here calls it Roslea.”
A chill stroked my spine, and I glanced over my shoulder into the forest. Blank eyes stared from beneath bushes. Faces frowned from tree trunks. Grasping arms—
I blinked. Nothing more than the undersides of pale leaves, the gnarled bolls of ancient oaks, the branches of tall trees. I squared my shoulders, rubbed my thumbs over the twin hilts belted at my hip.
“I don’t think I need a map,” I said. “But we should go now, before the morning passes. We don’t want to be caught in the forest after dark.”
Rogan gave me a questioning look. But I didn’t know how to explain to him that the forest was watching.
And I wasn’t sure it liked what it saw.
The forest was somber this time of year. Last week, these trees would have worn gowns of russet and gold. Now their bare branches grasped at leaden skies, and brown leaves crunched beneath our feet. We walked until we could no longer feel the weight of Dún Darragh at our backs. The trees grew huge and widely spaced, their thick ancient branches sifting gray light.
A crash in the underbrush broke the silence. The weight of watching eyes pricked the hairs at the nape of my neck. I spun on my heel, scanning the forest.
“What do you see?” asked Rogan softly.
I squinted into the twilight hush. I glimpsed the outline of astag—noble head, muscular legs poised for flight, great arching antlers scraping the sky. But no—the light shifted, and it was brush and branches.
“Nothing,” I said.
I turned and nearly walked into an ash sapling in the middle of the path. I sidestepped the tree, but something about its shape made me hesitate. Four slender roots pushed into the ground, almost like legs. Something pale was caught in the tree bark—I brushed my fingers across it. Animal hide. Dappled gray, like—
Realization punched me in the chest. A half second later, I saw the horse’s skull embedded between the sapling’s branches, twined with vines and staring with unnatural blossoms.
“Eimar,” I gasped. From the moment I accidentally Greenmarked the mare, I knew this would happen. But it was another thing toseeit—to see something so alive becomedeathand, in that death, become a different kind of life.
I stumbled back. My heel smacked against something hard lodged in the earth. I fell onto my arse, graceless. Rogan reached down to help me up, but I batted his hands away, reaching instead to brush layers of old leaves off whatever tripped me. It was quarried stone—odd for the middle of the forest. I stood, eyes scanning the ground.
Another stone humped a few paces away. Rogan intuited my intention and bent, clearing moss and dirt from its base. Time-smoothed contours gave it a familiar shape. Aface.
Rogan’s river-stone eyes were unnerved. “What is this place?”
I shook my head.
Together, we moved deeper into the forest. We threaded between battered rocks and listing statues bent in shapes and angles nature didn’t make, beginning to see this ancient place for what it was.
A graveyard for monsters.
