Sliding through them.
Steering them.
But they weren’t the roots.
They were just… riding them.
“Alright,” I muttered.
The mark flared again.
But I didn’t fight it.
I grabbed it.
The sensation nearly knocked me sideways.
Cold power surged through my chest like river water breaking through a dam. My fingers clenched automatically as the Hedge magic roared awake inside me.
The vines around the clearing exploded outward.
Not lashing.
Growing.
Branches thickened, twisting together as thorned walls surged upward. The shadows tangled in them shrieked as the brambles tightened around their shapes.
They fought back briefly.
Then the vines dragged them down and became what I imagined of them.
Twobble stared.
“Oh,” he whispered. “That seems… new.”
Skonk blinked rapidly.
“Did she just… grow the forest?”
“I heard that,” I snapped.
I kept my attention on the hedge.
The shadows were still moving through it, slipping along the vines and tugging at the edges of the spell as they had before. But now I could feel where they were—every place they brushed the magic, every gap they tried to slide through, and I turned them around.
Another wave dropped out of the trees, but the hedge answered before I even thought about it. Vines shot upward, thick and fast. Three of the shadows hit the thorns and burst apart in ragged streaks of dark.
Three tried to twist past the branches, and I turned two of the shadows against the others.
The hedge closed around it, tight and sudden, and crushed it into nothing.
For a split second, the clearing went quiet.
But the shadows reacted with a rush of something cold and furious that rolled through the trees and rattled every leaf around us.
The fog at the far end of the clearing stirred.
The Priestess stepped out of it like she’d been there all along.
