Poppy paused to listen. In the distance she caught the Mogwen song—two birds, or maybe four—singing in two-part harmony. Mogwen weren’t rare, but they were rarely caught. She moved quickly, holding tight to the loops of rope she’d slung over her shoulder and backpack. She stopped counting her steps. She had tested the ward with painstaking thoroughness, so she knew what would happen. First her skin would tingle, and then it would itch—and then, when she got close to her hundredth step, it would burn, and not in a pleasant way.
Poppy’s breath rasped against her teeth as she hurried toward the birdsong. She hoped Mack would join her. He’d be angry at her if she “made bad choices” without him. Half a smile edged its way across her face at the thought of his stern expression. It was Mack who had told her about the Mogwen. He’d been her best and only friend ever since an afternoon two years ago when she found him picking mushrooms at the edge of the forest.
The song grew louder, and now the birds sang in three-part harmony. That meant there had to be at least six of them. Any more, and she’d have to come back another time; it would be too dangerous. Three more steps and her skin tingled everywhere with full-body pins and needles. Twenty steps left.
A flash of red feathers high above gave the Mogwen away. Poppy pressed herself against the sticky bark of a pine tree and looked up. The birds were in the highest branches of a white-barked birch—and beside it stood the first thorn tree she had ever seen.
Poppy’s heart jumped. She knew what it was right away. Nothing else could have that shiny, smooth black bark. The tree almost glittered, as though it was draped in a fine sunlit layer of frost. The whip-like branches shifted, dancing in the nonexistent breeze, and she caught glimpses of the long thorns underneath. She hadn’t expected them to be so … pretty. It was like a willow tree gone wrong.
Thorn trees grew from heavy black soil, watered in the blood of their prey, and littered with the skeletons of animals once wrapped in their thorny whips. In the Grimwood deep, whole groves of them grew. Her parents had stumbled on more than one that had caught a human. They spoke about the thorn trees in hushed voices, after they stumbled in from their death-defying missions. Young Poppy had loved the tiny shivers that ran down her spine when her parents told her about their work.
Seeing her first for-real thorn tree made Poppy’s mouth go dry, but she resisted the urge to move closer for a better look. The trick with thorn trees was to see them before you got too close—before they sensed you were there. This one hadn’t been there a few days ago. She’d heard they sprang out of the ground like springs, but did they always grow so fast, she wondered … and what was it doing here, so close to the edge?
The thorn trees defend the forest and feed its magic. Attack the forest, and a thorn tree would grow. Any creature that dared to cut down a tree in the Grimwood would soon find themselves looking at the world from high up, wrapped in the whips of a thorn tree. Had someone—besides her—gone into the forest and tried to, what? Cut down a tree?
The dark circle of soil around the thorn tree still held remnants of the shrubs and plants that had died when it rose. Poppy shivered. She didn’t even want to imagine what had caused the huge groves in the deep wood to grow. Perhaps they had been there as long as the forest.
She peeled her gaze away from the tree, turning back toward the Mogwen. The birds were clever. They had perched just far enough away that the thorn-covered-whips couldn’t reach to strike them down or wind them in a deadly embrace.
Poppy ignored the sparking sensations that fluttered over her skin and carefully reached back over her shoulder. Her fingers wrapped around the smooth cold barrel of the net gun as she lifted it free. She peered up at the nearest bird through the crosshairs and pressed her lips together. She’d forgotten how big they were. Easily two feet tall, with a pointed red crest and sharp black beak they used to pierce their prey.
Poppy paused and studied the trees. She’d have to choose one and climb to get close enough to nab the bird with her net gun. Her best option would be the pine just outside the circle of black soil that marked the thorn tree’s territory. It was farther from the Mogwen than she liked, but she had the ward to consider—not to mention the thorn tree. The pine was just out of its range.
She wrapped the rope around the pine with a sharp exhale, coiling each end around one of her wrists. She gripped tight, leaned back, and gritting her teeth, began to climb.
Beams of sunlight pierced through the trees like arrows. The pine sap made the rope stick, and sweat burst out over Poppy’s forehead as she quietly made her way up the tree. She tried not to step on the small purple and black tentaculars that scattered over the surface of the bark, each one waving its sticky arms in the air to gather pollen before bending them, one at a time, to the hole of its mouth.
Poppy’s hands slicked, and she sent Jute silent thanks for the gloves.
The Mogwen song drifted over the forest, the three distinct patterns rising and falling together like a spell. Poppy pulled herself up to sit on a branch and caught
