The two faced off for what felt like several minutes, Lark clutching a long wooden spoon, her arms folded across her chest.

“Fine,” Baines said at last. “We’ll finish this later. The rest of you, out.”

*   *   *

It was nasty weather and Isaac pulled the collar of his coat tight around his neck. A dense fog hung over the landscape and the ground was squishy wet. Isaac was especially grateful for the uniform’s trousers woven of thick, warm Scottish wool. Kat led the way to a garden shed that sat next to an old barn. Plenty of tools—pruners, saws, and axes—hung on the walls in neat order.

“I miss Hugo.” Amelie sighed. She glanced at Isaac. “He took care of everything here at Rookskill, for Lord Craig, but now he’s joined the local regiment. Look how nicely the tools have been left.”

“Let’s get to work,” Baines said, leaving the shed and heading for a place where the trees pushed right up to the edge of the castle. Isaac thought that the trees had again crossed Kat’s warding boundary, and he exchanged a glance with her that confirmed he must be right. She had wide, worried eyes. The thorns on the vines were huge and sharp, and the vines themselves were fat and knotty as if hundreds of years old.

Baines raised pruners and began to clip ferociously at the thorny branches.

The five children watched, mesmerized, as the branches fought back.

“What the devil?” Baines exclaimed, backing away as thorns reached for his arms and head, and vines grabbed at hunks of his hair and mustache. “Give me a hand!”

Leo was frozen with horror. Colin laughed so hard he was doubled over. Kat and Amelie bent together and whispered, so Isaac moved to extract Baines.

That was when it happened.

CHAPTER 30

Isaac

1942

The instant Isaac reached for a branch, trying to dislodge a thorn from Baines’s coat, he heard that hum—so loud his head ached and he had to take a step back.

As he did, the trees followed him. The vines, the thorns, let off attacking Baines and went for Isaac.

But they didn’t attack Isaac—they reached for him. Tried to enfold him. Cradle him. Absorb him. He couldn’t get away. He was a fly in a spider’s web, a fish in a net. When he moved, the trees moved with him, grasping as if they might tear him apart out of need and want. The entire forest hummed, singing in a low vibration so intense that Isaac clapped his hands over his ears and shut his eyes.

From a distance Kat was chanting. “‘Who can impress the forest, bid the tree unfix his earthbound root?’”

The next thing Isaac knew he was lying on his back on the soggy ground, the other children peering down at him. Baines exclaimed from behind them about “those dratted thorns.”

“What happened?” Isaac began.