Warden of the Wild

The first ward failed on Samhain, which was either a coincidence or the forest's idea of poetry. Cara Donnelly felt it go — a snap at the base of her skull, like a branch breaking under snow — and she was out of her chair and through the door of the warden's lodge before the teacup she had been holding finished its arc to the floor. The ward-stone stood at the northern boundary of the Greenmantle, a pillar of grey granite carved with ogham that her predecessor's predecessor had maintained, and it was dark. Not broken — dark, the way a fire is dark when the last coal has cooled, the runes still legible but holding no light, no heat, no power.

She knelt in the dead leaves and placed her hands on the stone and felt nothing. That was the worst part — not the failure but the emptiness, as though the stone had been hollowed out from the inside. She had maintained twenty-three wards for four years, walking the circuit every fortnight, feeding the stones with the small magics her grandmother had taught her — blood from a pricked finger, breath at dawn, the whispered names of trees in a language that predated Irish. She had never lost one. Her grandmother had never lost one. The records in the lodge, kept in cramped handwriting across seventeen volumes spanning three centuries, recorded only two prior failures, both during periods of war.

The forest noticed immediately. The trees atthe northern edge, which had always grown in the disciplined rows that the old magic imposed — oak, then ash, then hawthorn, repeating — began to shift. Not quickly enough to see, but by morning the pattern had broken, and the trees had rearranged themselves into something older and wilder, a configuration that belonged not to the Greenmantle as it was but to the Greenmantle as it had been before the wardens came, before the wards were raised, before whatever lived at its heart had been given a cage of carved stone and spoken boundaries.