Chapter 13

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

After the copper glow disappeared from the courtyard keyhole and I no longer heard retreating footsteps, I yanked open my foraging bag and demanded, "How screwed are we?" There would be time to celebrate my little discoveries later.

Sawyer wiggled free and seized the remains of the game hen from my hand, pinning it down on the stone bench with his front paws and tearing off a huge mouthful. It was only with his back arched in the full light of the autumn morning that I realized how skinny he was. He hadn't mentioned the trials he and Ame had faced getting to the castle, much less infiltrating it, but clearly he'd endured one or more empty-belly nights.

After a few bites so large they could've choked out a ravenous wolverine, let alone a scrawny young tomcat, I yanked away the game hen.

The tomcat turned momentarily feral, swiping with his claws after the food. "Hey!"

"You'll get it back it a second," I told him, dangling it high in the air and out of reach. "I don't want your belly to pop! Now, how screwed are we?"

Sawyer busied himself licking the grease from his whiskers as he though. "He said ‘the southern fields.' What did that look like on the map? South is relative, you know. I'll take that hen back while you draw."

My eyes narrowed at his cheekiness, but I gave him the hen so I could dig around in my foraging bag. Sawyer pinned it once more to the bench like it could still fly off and made happy little rawr-rawr-rawr sounds as he gnawed away.

Sitting down beside him, I pulled the paper-birch-bound notebook from my bag and settled it on my knees. While instinct had told me never to let this bag out of my sight, I'd never been overly curious as to what was inside it, unless in times of great need. I realized now that that was odd and wondered if Grandmother's curse persuaded me never to delve deeper, or maybe she had hexed my bag? I'd just have to make it a point to root around in it more often and hope that would wear down whatever jinx plagued it.

The maelstrom locking away my memories from before Ossian darkened as I opened the notebook with new curiosity. This was my handwriting inside—not surprising—but I didn't remember making these observations.

Apparently I'd started a turf war with Midwestern pixies?

And healed my core with a hallucinogenic moonflower-milk bath?

There were dozens of more entries, each more fascinating or startling than the last.

My fingers shook as I rapidly flipped page after page, my eyes no longer distinguishing letter from sketch. Grandmother's curse had taken so much from me. She had taken so much. First she'd suppressed my growth as a green witch, then she'd cursed me to never do magic ever again. But I'd changed in Redbud, become my own person, and while the curse might've worked on the old Meadow Hawthorne, it hadn't worked on me. Not completely. I was unlocking more of my restraints every day, remembering. Becoming. Especially now that Sawyer was here.

Let your success be the laughter in the faces of those who thought you'd fail , I told myself, snatching up a charcoal willow wand from the bag and smoothing down a fresh page in the notebook. I quickly sketched a less-detailed version of Ossian's map and showed it to Sawyer, who had finally come up for air.

"These are the southern fields," I said, pointing.

The tomcat gave a sharp nod. "We should be clear. We're going right here." He touched a spot on the map about four or five miles east of the castle and left behind a greasy smudge. "Oops. Sorry."

"Are you sure? Ossian's map didn't show anything out there except a strip of forest and an old cornfield."

"I'm sure."

I bit down on my lower lip as I thought. "That's a long way. And Wystan's attacks have all been reported in this area." I traced a crescent of land between the castle and where Sawyer claimed the farmhouse was.

Sawyer blinked large amber eyes up at me. "I can only show you the way, Meadow. You have to choose whether or not to follow it. To trust me. And I trust Ame. She says you need to get the ember to the farmhouse, that time is running out."

"What does she know about that?" I asked sharply. It was one thing to hear Ossian say it, another from a cat who had no place in his court.

He shrugged. "She's a cat," he replied, as if that explained literally everything.

Huffing an exhale, I snapped the notebook shut and returned it to my foraging bag. "We go today," I announced, seating myself amongst the cluster of potted plants. "Come here, kitty. I need you."

"For what?" He tore off one last gigantic mouthful before crawling into my lap.

"When I touch you while using my magic, I don't get tired. You give me a boost or you take the weariness away. I don't know exactly."

"Ohhh," he mused. "So that's what I felt under the table." His ears perked. "Cool!"

I smiled at his youthful exuberance then placed a hand along his striped side. The other hand flattened against the soil beside the stalk of the first potted plant, a purple aster.

My eyes fluttered shut as I grounded myself through my palm. The aster's aura answered my call, and I took its green life energy until the plant withered. I didn't kill it—Ossian had told me to drain them, and I had only agreed that I'd heard his command. I left enough life in its roots that it entered its natural winter dormancy a few months ahead of schedule. Inside, its energy combined with my own power and dissolved another small section of leaf-like links in the chain mail curse covering the oak tree of my magic.

I opened my eyes long enough to find my next donor, a cluster of red-streaked black-eyed Susans. As I grounded through my hand once again, my fatigue was siphoned away into the little purring cat. I didn't know what he did with it, but he didn't seem bothered in the slightest. And so it went, pot after pot, flower after shrub after ornamental cabbage, absorbing green life energy and freeing more of my core. When the potted plants were all dormant, I went after the rambler roses once more, siphoning them down to the root stocks.

Finished, I sagged against the stone bench. I wasn't panting from exertion, but from relief. A quarter, maybe more, of my core was free. The lowest part of the oak tree's trunk gleamed with uninhibited light, and the roots stretched further through me, seeking more of that fertile green life energy.

Around me, the courtyard was less vibrant. Except for the willow tree, everything was shades of brown and ochre. The gray stone of the walls, previous hidden by the foliage, stood out in stark relief on all sides. A prison.

"Eat," Sawyer said, the first word he'd spoken since I'd started. He nudged the picnic basket with his nose. "But not so much that you're fat and slow."

"Thanks," I said dryly. More seriously, I said, "And thank you for all your help."

"That's what I do," he said with a grin.

I pulled out a covered dish of wild rice salad and another of roasted chicken breasts. Sawyer helped himself to more of the chicken as I mixed some into the rice salad. It was chock-full of toasted pine nuts, diced celery, tart cranberries, and covered in a garlicky-Parmesan dressing. It was strangely addicting, what with all the different textures and flavors, and I'd eaten more than half of the crock before Sawyer cleared his throat. To spite him, just a little, I stuffed not one, but two of Mrs. Bilberry's chocolate-pecan cookies into my mouth before nestling all the leftovers back into the picnic basket. Except the jug of milk and the apples—those went into my bag. I might want a snack on our little trip. Sawyer rolled his amber eyes and put himself back into the foraging bag, kicking the jug and apples out of his way.

While he fussed, I stacked a few of the bigger terra-cotta pots on top of the stone bench and wrapped the white fox-fur coat around it. It would serve as a poor decoy, but it might fool someone chancing a glance through the keyhole.

With the foraging bag slung over my shoulder, I climbed the willow tree and crouched on top of the courtyard wall. A gentle sweep of my hand parted the whip-like branches and the screen of yellow-green leaves, and my breath stilled in my throat at the sight of all that wall-less land that stretched out before me.

Sawyer wiggled his head and one paw free of the bag and pointed a claw to a colonnade of red cedar trees. A small English garden of hydrangeas and a stone fountain separated the cedars from the courtyard. Bordering the garden were giant yews and burning bushes in the height of their color. "If we can make it there without getting caught, the land dips low and out of sight. Ame and I came through the gardens—we'll go back that way and use the hedges to keep out of sight of the guards."

"Those hydrangeas might have hidden you, but they're only hip-high on me. And Ossian doesn't use guards," I whispered, calling on the willow branches to weave themselves into a rope to lower us down to the ground. I snorted at the high fae's arrogance. "Only wards."

"That would've been nice to know a week ago," Sawyer grumbled.

"That being said, how did you get past them?"

"Oh, that was the easy part! We're cats."

I rolled my eyes.

It wasn't because of the cold that I shivered when the frost-coated lawn crunched underfoot. It was the sheer power I felt from the earth. For a moment, I forgot the danger of discovery and seriously considered shucking my boots and socks and wiggling my toes into wet grass. To truly ground myself and return to the self I had forgotten.

But it was not to be. I couldn't free myself from the curse with just grass. I needed the power of the Hawthorne ember. But how was a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere supposed to do that?

"I can only show you the way, Meadow. You have to choose whether or not to follow it. To trust me." That's what the little cat had said. And I did trust him. Wiggling my hand under the cat's belly, I found and pulled free the masking sand from the foraging bag.

Then, keeping my back hunched, I scuttled through the hydrangea hedges like I could be spotted any moment. There might not be guards, but there were windows. With every step, I flung masking sand over my shoulder like it was spilled salt. Maybe Mrs. Bilberry was making a trip to the flour mill. Maybe Ricky and Joe were sneaking off to wherever they went to ferment the hard apple cider that no one was supposed to know about. Charlie could be coming back from his brewhouse in the village. There were dozens of beasts coming and going from the castle for any particular reason, remaining close due to the hobgoblin's raids, and all of them would find it suspicious to see me beyond the walls.

Alec and the rest of the Brotherhood could return at any moment too, not to mention Ossian himself!

"You made it," Sawyer congratulated me as I doubled over on my knees behind a lush yew bush. The robin nesting inside gave me an unappreciative chirrup that I'd brought a cat so close and flew off with a flutter of brown wings.

"I need… a second…" I wheezed. Thistle thorns, I was so out of shape. I hadn't kept up with the morning physical training Dad had always insisted upon, though… at once point I had supplemented it by chopping wood? I clutched my head as the maelstrom swirled, trying to suppress that strange memory.

"If you're this winded now, we won't make there and back to the farmhouse before nightfall," Sawyer said doubtfully.

"I… will… make it," I forced out, sucking in another breath of crisp air.

"Your spirit says one thing, but your body is saying another. Maybe this is just your warm-up day? Like, preparing to travel five miles?"

"I can walk it in like two hours."

"Yeah, maybe if it was entirely flat terrain, which is isn't. This is Southern Indiana, remember? Hills galore. Two hours there, two hours back, however long it takes you at the farmhouse to do your thing… that doesn't leave a lot of time. The sun sets early nowadays."

I snatched the bag and hauled it around to my front so I could glare down at the tabby head poking out of its top. "If you are my friend as you say you are, then you're doing a poor job of reassuring me."

Instead of looking chastised, Sawyer swiveled around in the bag then, whiskers twitching and ears pricking.

"We are going ," I insisted.

"Shh! Someone's—" He wrenched his head back into the bag.

If he thought he could just suck his head down like a gopher into its hole, he had another thing coming. I wrenched open the zipper to regard the cowering cat fully. "I might not get another chance!"

"Meadow, who are you talking to?" a voice exclaimed.