The Druid's Bargain

The oak at the heart of the grove was weeping sap the colour of old blood, and Sorcha Ni Brennan knelt among its roots with her hands pressed to the bark and felt the slow, terrible pulse of a tree that was trying to die and could not. The blight had come with the autumn rains, creeping up from the lowlands where the new lord had drained the marshes and turned the peat to farmland, and it had taken the hazel first, then the rowan, then the ash, working its way through the sacred woods with the patience of a thing that understood the old order of trees and meant to dismantle it precisely.

She was the last druid of Cnoc na Darach, which was a title that sounded grander than it was — it meant she was twenty-three years old and alone in a grove where her grandmother had once led ceremonies attended by hundreds. The village below depended on the grove's magic for clean water, for fertile soil, for the mild winters that kept the cattle alive when every other settlement in the province buried their dead in frozen ground. If the grove died, the village would follow within a season, and Sorcha would be the one who had failed to prevent it.

The spirits spoke to her at dusk, when the light filtered through the dying canopy in shafts of amber and grey and the air took on the mineral tang of rain on ancient stone. They did not use words — they never had — but she felt their offer settleinto her bones like cold water: they could heal the grove, reverse the blight, restore the old magic that had protected this place since before the monks came with their bells and their books. The price, they whispered in a language older than speech, was hers to discover. It always was.