Elizabeth convulsed in his arms.
The thorn answered.
The slender stems that had coiled about her skirts climbed with dreadful deliberation. One circled her waist. Another slipped higher, gliding over the line of her stays as though seeking a truer purchase. A darker, thicker vine rose from the churned mud at her feet and passed, slow as a hand fastening a ribbon, across the hollow of her throat.
Her breath broke.
Darcy felt it. The instant of interruption. The small, helpless struggle of her lungs against a narrowing hold.
“Elizabeth!”
He dropped fully to his knees and seized the vine at her throat. The stem… yielded. It bent as living muscle bends, curling around his fingers. He yelped in surprise, and it slid from his grasp and wound higher, barbs catching in the curl of her hair, pressing against the pale column of her neck.
Around them, the murmur changed.
No longer accusation. No longer command. Someone muttered a prayer. Someone else fell silent halfway through one.
Harrowe caught a thicker strand about her ankle and braced his boot in the mud, hauling with both hands. The vine stretched. It did not break. Blood sprang along his palm where thorns bit through skin. He swore and pulled harder, broad shoulders straining, but the growth held as though anchored in stone.
A villager—young, white-faced, shamed by the pistol—darted forward and slashed at a coil with his knife. The blade skidded uselessly along the green surface, scraping barkthat seemed too supple to be cut and too firm to be pierced. He stumbled back, crossing himself.
Elizabeth’s fingers, still clenched in Darcy’s coat, slackened. Her eyes met his.
Not in panic.
In apology.
The vine at her throat drew tighter. Closing out the world, taking her to itself.
He felt the constriction as if it were upon his own neck. The depletion that had plagued him flared sharper now, not merely draining but answering something in the earth beneath them.
He changed his grip.
No longer tearing. No longer fighting.
He slid his hand lower, to where one of the stems wound about her wrist, and pressed his palm fully against it.
The response was immediate.
The vine shifted beneath his touch. Not recoiling.Turning.
Elizabeth drew a shallow breath—no more than a thread of air—but it was breath.
Darcy stilled.
He did not look at Harrowe. He did not look at the crowd. He did not look at his aunt, though he felt her stare burn like frost upon his back.
He pressed harder.
The thorn rose along his wrist as though following a path it had long marked but not yet claimed. It climbed the span of his forearm, barbs pricking through cloth and skin alike. Pain shot through him—bright, precise—but beneath it ran something else. Recognition. The same answering he had felt in the hollow. The same terrible attention that had darkened the fields.
The vine at Elizabeth’s throat loosened another fraction. She sagged forward, coughing against his shoulder.
Behind them, Lady Catherine made a sound that was neither outrage nor triumph but something nearer to disbelief.
“No,” she said, and this time the word faltered. “No—this is not—”
Darcy gathered Elizabeth closer with one arm while the other remained fixed against the living coil. He could feel the root of it beneath the soil, a pull downward and inward, as though the land itself had fastened its grasp and waited.
