She struggles and breaks free, “No, I won’t. I don’t know how, but I know what I’m doing.” She crouches at the sigil again, holding her hand over it. I try to watch her as my chanting continues, but I only catch flashes of it. One moment, her hand is over the sigil; the next, it’s beside it on the ground.
When she breaches the circle surrounding the sigil and places her hand in the middle, I feel a rush through my body that is unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. Magic explodes from me, throwing me back on the ground as a mountain of dirt encircles the home, burying the fairy circle under six feet of solid soil.
Panting, I sit up, weaving my fingers into Flint’s fur so he knows to speak just to me.“Flint, what was that?”
“Unsure, Master. She appeared to alter your sigil to receive her magic.”
“Are you saying what I felt was… her? That was Briar’s magic?”
“Yes, Master. I believe you just experienced a fraction of what she is capable of.”
I look to Briar, my sweet butterfly, sitting on the ground by the sigil and smiling at me with pride.
And yet, I cannot stop the fear surrounding me when I look at her.
Someone locked her up, but the question remains: Why? Or rather, what will they do to get her back?
She is powerful. More powerful than any magic user I’ve ever met before.
What will this Banisher do to get her back?
I stagger to my feet, and Briar is there, hands on my elbow, tears in her eyes that I didn’t notice before. “I’m so sorry, Hans. Did I hurt you? I didn’t mean to. You told me to help, and I thought I was helping. I am so, so sorry.” Her rambling makes my heart ache, and I grasp her hands and pull them to my chest.
“You did not hurt me, Briar. I am just not used to channeling that level of magic.” She wraps her arms around my middle, resting her head under my chin.
I can hear her sniffles and feel her body move with quiet tears against me. “When you were talking to Flint, the way you looked at me… I thought you were upset with me.”
Sometimes, I forget that while the words said between Flint and me can be private, that doesn’t mean my facial expressions are. “I was not upset with you. I was upset, though.”
Gerrit, who, until this point, was sitting silently on the porch, stomped over. “How could you be upset? She helped, like you asked!”
“I said I’m not upset with her! I’m upset because the power she channeled through me is unlike any I’ve felt before. If she was locked up because of it, whoever did that is going to fight like hell to get her back. I’m scared for her, not upset at her!”
Briar stumbles back at my words, her eyes wide with shock and her body crumpling to the ground. Both of us are on our knees next to her in a second, but she has her knees pulled to her chest as she sobs heavily, blocking her face from view.
“Witchy, what’s wrong?” Gerrit asks, snaking his hands around her shoulders.
“I’m sorry, Briar. I didn’t mean to upset you.” I kneel in front of her as she raises her head to look at me, tears tracking down her cheeks and converging in the hollow at the base of her neck.
Her hand, nails dirty from the spell, reaches out to me, and I grasp it within both of mine. “You care.” Her voice is small, a quiet squeak that I have to strain to hear. “You care about me,” she says again, her voice stronger.
I look at Gerrit, and his face is scrunched with confusion. I meet Briar’s eyes again, watery with tears. “Of course, I care. We both care.” She shakes her head, and the tears fall again, hitting the dirt beneath her. Flint comes up and rubs his head against her arm, and she moves it around him, touching his head with hers.
“She is not upset with you, Master.”
His words echo in my head, and I know Briar can hear them, too. She shakes her head as Flint speaks again.
“Her emotions are too strong, so she cannot speak. But she has permitted me to share.”
I wave Gerrit over to whisper the words to him, removing the embarrassment Briar may have by hearing me shout them.
“Miss Briar has never had anyone care about her before. She has been alone her entire life, with her only contact being with someone who sought to break her. When she did find a human, years of starvation caused her to kill that companion, which broke her even more. The cycle was long and brutal, leaving a lasting effect on her.”
Her sobs are loud now, shaking her whole body, but she holds onto Flint, and he lets her, soaking up her tears with his dappled fur.
“She thought you were just kind because you needed her magic. She didn’t imagine you would care about her. She never imagined anyone would.”
The words get caught in my throat as I relay them to Gerrit, whose fists clench in anger at a world that allowed someone as special as Briar to be so broken.
