Arthur wakes up with the sun, on his pallet in the loft of the Sayer barn. It’s a small half room partitioned by old trunks and pieces of Rhun’s grandfather’s unfinished furniture. A square window faces northeast, though the tall pine trees on this side of the mountain block all but the most determined dawn rays. Other than weapons, Arthur has very little in the way of personal belongings.
Groggy from staying up most of the night with the other potential runners, he yawns and rubs his eyes. Their mood was too soft for his taste, all of them accepting their fate—or rather their lack of one. Rhun will be the saint.
Is it always so obvious? Arthur wonders. Did everyone know three years ago that John Upjohn would be the runner? Did they know it of Baeddan Sayer ten years ago? He casts his thoughts forward to the boys that will be teenagers in seven more years. Can he guess?
No. Arthur has no idea.
Hungry, he shoves off the quilt and pulls on a fresh shirt and boots and a thin knitted sweater handed down from Rhun Senior. He quietly climbs down the ladder to his long leather hunting coat, then picks his way over Sayer cousins and one of the Argall brothers—Per, he thinks it was, who followed him here last night. Outside, he grabs the well bucket and hooks it onto its rope before plunging it down. The water is cold but not yet freezing, and refreshing on his face. He runs wet fingers through his hair, shakes his head, and sends the bucket down again for water to take inside to Nona Sayer.
The front door is ajar and he knocks it open further with his foot. Saint Branwen sniffs at his hip while Llew stretches his long legs exactly in the most way of Arthur’s path.
Nona says, “Thanks for that; here’s bread,” and trades him the bucket for a hot crust. “Butter’s out too, today, and ham.”
He thanks her and spreads plentiful butter, sitting on one of the precarious three-legged stools while she pours the new water into her cauldron over the fire. “Rhun up?” he asks quietly.
“No.” The tightening of her mouth in disapproval suggests to Arthur she’s less happy with her son’s fate than she ever let on before.
“I . . . ,” he starts, but doesn’t know how to show her any of his heart. It’s never been necessary before: Nona took him in when his mother left and his father couldn’t bear looking at him. She treated him hard but kindly, and doesn’t expect any thanks, she’s said often enough he believes her.
Nona faces her adopted son, studying him carefully enough as Arthur eats his entire breakfast under her stare. She’s handsome and tall, with the same warm brown skin and same eyes as Rhun, but hers are tinged with displeasure, as if the world will always disappoint her. Probably that’s why Arthur usually relaxes around her, feeling the same.
She says, “I’m glad to have to worry about only one of my sons tonight.”
Rather angry than touched, Arthur rises to his full height. “You’re so sure which one?”
Gesturing for him to lower his voice, Nona says, “No.”
It stuns Arthur. He crosses his arms over his chest. “You think it might be me?”
“I doubt it, here in a place like Three Graces. Out in the rest of the world, though, you would be the one.”
“Why?”
“The rest of the world appreciates ambition and fire.”
“Not you, though. You chose this place, knowing both worlds.”
Nona smiles her flat, no-nonsense smile. “It is a very good place, Arthur.”
“No it’s not. What kind of good place takes its best and throws it away?”
“We don’t throw it away. It’s a sacrifice. A hard one, and don’t you think otherwise. There’s no power in throwing something away, only in giving something up.”
Arthur clutches himself. “How can you do it? How can you just let this happen to Rhun?”
The older woman stares down her nose at him. “This is a better way than the way of the outside world.”
“How?” Arthur hears the ache in his own voice, the pitch of pleading.
Nona sighs hard enough to blow down a straw house. “In the rest of the world, Arthur, bad things take you by surprise. They knock down your door when you’re cooking dinner, they knock down your door when you’re sleeping, or sometimes they don’t even knock at all. You’re worried about it all the time. If I raised my sons out there, this danger might have found Rhun years ago, or if he survived this long, it might find him any day in his future. But here in Three Graces, we throw the door open wide and say, ‘Today is the day, trouble. Your only chance.’ ” She takes Arthur’s wan face in her warm hands. “The dread today is hard, but the relief will be so much finer. I prefer to keep the devil on a schedule.”
Arthur feels his fire calming—no, not calming, but settling in deep, like the hottest embers in the heart of a log. It makes sense to him, on a profound level, to choose such a thing. To invite trouble when you’re ready for it. He is ready for it.
But nobody else can see.
Nona strokes her thumbs along her prickly almost-son’s temples, then lets her hands slide away from his face. “Go outside, boy, and I’ll send Rhun along in a moment.”
He obeys.
• • •
DAWN PASSES, AND NEITHER MAIRWEN nor Rhun wake, having finally fallen hard and heavy into the first real sleep either have experienced in days. Mair wakes first, and suddenly. Something in the kitchen snapped her out of dull dreaming. The mattress crunches as she shifts and blinks against bright sunlight. She slowly stretches her arm around Rhun’s chest, flexes her toes, rolls her neck, and snuggles deeper against him. His breath puffs the hair at the top of her head, and one of his arms curls around her waist, pinned beneath her.
She lays a hand over his heart. A few curled black hairs accent the shape of his muscles, and she traces their path below his collarbone and down his stomach. Rhun’s hand around her tightens, and she stops moving, lifting her gaze to his still sleeping face. The sunlight gilds his short eyelashes, and an ache of fear clenches in her belly.
Swallowing it away as best she can, Mairwen glances around. Wool blankets hang on the walls to lessen the drafts from the old stone. The cream and gray brighten the entire room. He’s tied blessings and bone amulets to one of them, on the eastern wall. A trunk set in the corner holds his few clothes beside the leather jerkin and hunting hood spread over a stool. His axes lean against the trunk, his bow and quiver, as well as pieces of unmade arrows on the floor, including three white feathers she brought him, salvaged from the body of a swan in the shambles.
The sunlight brings it all clear. Sunlight from those narrow south-facing windows. Mairwen jerks, clutching at Rhun, who wakes instantly.
“Mair?” he says thickly.
“It is late,” she whispers.
Just then, the heavy blanket tied across Rhun’s bedroom door snaps aside. His mother stands with her arms out majestically, a fierce glare shaping her entire face. “Idiot children! You’re late, Rhun. Get up. Arthur’s waiting outside to go with you. And you”—Nona sweeps her eyes down Mairwen’s thinly covered body—“you’re due at your mother’s house to sew the saint shirt with the rest of us.”
And Nona Sayer is gone again. The blanket falls hard behind her.
Rhun rolls out of bed swiftly. Mair grips the corner of the blanket, sticking it and her hands under her chin. As he strips off his braies, she stares, lips parted, at all his long lines. Rhun, naked as a babe, throws open the trunk and digs in. He holds up a wad of cloth. “I know I’ll receive the saint’s shirt this afternoon, but I should wear fresh underthings to run in, don’t you think?”
Mairwen attempts a smile, though teasing is the last thing she wishes for today. “That’s what you call fresh? Balled up in your trunk?”
Rhun laughs, lighthearted as the sun. Mair longs to lose the weight on her chest too. When he stands, facing her and entirely naked crown to toes, it’s her voice she loses instead. He steps into the woolen braies a leg at a time, smiling a promise at her, and straightens, tying them fast at his waist.
She slips out of the bed and kneels before him. She ties the soft braies at his knees, skimming her fingers against his calves. When she finishes she peers up, leaning back on her heels. She smiles bright and clean and with everything of bounty she can make it. None of her shadows, none of her bristling. “I’ll help you with your stockings and the rest, too.”
Together they dress him, in dark wool and leather, tying and buckling until he’s fit to go into the forest. Mairwen slips the lacing of her bodice free and uses it to help him tie back his curls.
He kisses her mouth, and her heartbeat slows, regulating itself to the central rhythm of Three Graces: the Slaughter Moon, the bargain, the Bone Tree, and Rhun Sayer.
Rhun picks up her skirt and holds it open for her to get into, then buttons it for her. She pulls her bodice over her arms, but leaves it open on the front for lack of laces. Rhun wraps her square shawl over her shoulders, then finds her boots and helps her on with them.
From the kitchen, Nona Sayer roars, “Out, both of you, now!”
But Rhun takes Mairwen’s hand. “When the saint comes for you tonight, will you dance with him?”
“You know I will,” she says. With that, she gathers her shawl across her undressed chest and ducks out of his room, wishing she could make herself the saint.
Nona leans against her uneven kitchen table, brow lifted expectantly. Mairwen thinks she should tell Nona that her son was good and broke no rules, even at the urging of the saint’s own daughter, but all she does is hold herself tall. “Good morning,” she says tightly as she leaves.
Nona Sayer snorts. “I’ll catch up to you, girl.”
Mairwen winces at the bright sunlight as she pushes out of the house and stands there, gazing down the slope of yard that ends in thick mountain woods. She can’t see any of the valley from here—for that, one must be up on that coveted second story—but the mountain trees are colorful enough, full of jewel-toned leaves and rustling shadows. Overhead the sky is perfect blue with sheer clouds. The air’s near balmy for so late in the season.
Several paces away Arthur Couch sits up from the grass. Leaves cling to his spiky blond hair. His look of surprise pinches as he sees her and stands slowly. “What are you doing here?”
Tightening her shawl around her, Mairwen clenches her jaw. “What do you think?”
“Dressed like that.” Arthur bites out every word.
“Jealous?” she asks.
Arthur’s lips part and he stares at her as if she’s both completely right and completely wrong. Mair pushes past him and starts down the path.
“How could you?” Arthur calls, as if he has some claim to her.
She spins back around. “I was reminding him who he has to fight for, Arthur Couch!”
Instead of yelling back, or even sneering as she expected when she threw his own words in his face, the young man nods slowly, bobbing his head like a bird.
Her irritation melts, and Mairwen chews her bottom lip. But she has nothing else to say to Arthur. So she turns again, stomping through fallen leaves.
A hand grabs her elbow and swings her around. Arthur’s flickering eyes gouge into hers. “He didn’t let you, though, did he? I would have.”
She shrugs. “That’s only proof of what we both already know about the difference between you and Rhun Sayer.”
“And you and Rhun Sayer,” Arthur shoots back.
Mair’s blood boils, and her cheeks flush hot, like Arthur infected her with his burning ulcer. “Fine, yes,” she hisses. “We’re neither of us as good as him, neither of us noble and bound to the promise of Three Graces. Is that what you want to hear? It doesn’t matter. It’s him who’s going into the forest, him who’ll face the devil. The men will choose him because he’s everything a saint of this town is supposed to be: brave, strong, kind, generous, friendly! Noble and innocent, and not always angry and doubting like us. That’s how it should be. If we didn’t love him, it wouldn’t be a sacrifice.” She jerks free of Arthur’s touch. “You paint a smile on that sour face, and you don’t let him see anything else. He doesn’t need your frustration and doubts and denials. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” Arthur murmurs. He holds his hands away from her. “I understand you perfectly.”
“Good. Because he loves you, and if he doubts he has reason to survive this night, it will be your fault.”
This time, when Mairwen leaves, Arthur doesn’t stop her.
Her wild heartbeat presses her home fast, and Nona doesn’t manage to catch up with her after all.
• • •
RHUN’S MOTHER HANDS HIM A thick slice of bread slathered in butter, with strips of fried ham on top. “Here. Eat up. You’ll need it.”
He takes his first huge bite while Nona watches. “I’ve got to get to the Grace house,” she says when he swallows. “I love you. I’ll see you . . . tomorrow morning.”
Before eating more, Rhun balances the bread precariously on the edge of the table and grabs Nona in a hug. It might be his last chance.
She returns it ferociously, but neither says more before she frees herself and leaves him.
Chewing slowly to savor the breakfast, Rhun shrugs his quiver on his shoulder and double-checks he’s got his bow on his back and his long knife strapped to his thigh. The hilt of the knife is made of yellowish bone, smooth and warm under his thumb.
Outside, Rhun breathes deeply as he joins Arthur standing in the center of the yard. The sky is bright, the air warmer than he expected, and all the trees flicker their leaves at him. It’s a beautiful last day.
Of course he shouldn’t think that way, but he doesn’t try hard to stop it. If he’s learned nothing about himself, it’s that he needs to be in the moment to truly appreciate it. Why pretend he might have more beautiful autumn days when he can embrace the promise of his fate and better love this now?
Arthur says, “Do you think this place would be prettier if it rained more often? So we had bad weather to compare with our good?”
Rhun laughs. “No. It rains exactly the right amount.”
Giving him an angry look, Arthur starts toward the path up the mountain. But then, Arthur’s looks are nearly always angry, so it can’t touch Rhun’s broad, winning mood. He hums as he goes after, striding longer than necessary, until he’s far enough ahead of Arthur to turn backward and grin. “Keep up, man!”
Arthur says, “What’s the point?”
“I want to be—I . . .” Rhun waits for his friend. “I’m glad to spend this day with you,” he says.
“Oh.” Arthur turns his head away as he catches up. His eyes widen in shock and panic as he takes in the trees around them, the golden-brown leaves and narrow deer path.
It dawns on Rhun this is very near the place he kissed Arthur three years ago. Fear tenses up his stomach and he swallows. He opens his mouth, but nothing pops in fast enough to fix it.
“I’m all right,” Arthur says roughly. He won’t meet Rhun’s gaze, but then suddenly he does: Arthur’s blue eyes intense enough to curl Rhun’s toes. “I’d run for you. Let me do it for you.”
Rhun thinks, This could be the last time we’re alone. The last time I have a chance to say anything. But then it sinks in what Arthur said. Let me do it for you.
“You can’t do it for me,” Rhun says. “It’s mine to do.”
Arthur’s lips begin to curl, and Rhun leaps forward. “I don’t mean you couldn’t. I mean I won’t let you. I won’t let you die for me.”
“Instead you die for me?” Arthur whispers. There’s a thing so helpless in his face it takes all Rhun’s willpower to keep himself from touching his friend. His crackling, frantic, beautiful friend. All the desire Mair teased out in him last night and this morning nearly bowls him over; he wants to just reach out and take something of Arthur for himself.
“I’m running, not dying,” Rhun says.
Arthur winces rather elegantly. His choppy hair catches all the morning light, bursting like the sun itself. He reaches out in a jerking motion, and before Rhun can brace himself, puts his hand on Rhun’s shoulder. It’s always the other way around: Rhun touching Arthur, not this way, not from Arthur’s choosing. “I don’t want you to die,” Arthur says. “I—I don’t know what I would do.”
“I don’t want to either.” He puts his hand over Arthur’s, hoping for more and happy with this.
“Good. Then.” Arthur withdraws his hand but doesn’t back away. His jaw clenches and he holds Rhun’s gaze. “We should go up.”
“Yes,” Rhun says. He smiles, no longer trying to secret his heart away. This is perfect. This was perfect. He grins and hums to himself, ignoring Arthur’s standard scornfully friendly laugh. He feels so light, so open, all the weight of worry and his lost four years gone, all the anxiety that something changed melted away. Rhun Sayer hikes up the mountain with his best friend at his side, knowing he kept the vow he made to himself and his cousin-saint Baeddan: to love everything he has.
• • •
MAIR ARRIVES HOME IN A fit. Every few feet she pauses to crouch and rip grass from the earth and throw it into the wind with all the force she can muster. When her house is in sight, she takes great seething breaths and tries to calm herself down. Smoke floats up from the front yard, and all the house windows are thrown open. As she approaches, she grips the shawl more tightly over her breasts. A surge of womanly laughter reminds her she’ll have an audience, for the women already gather here to bless the saint shirt.
She sweeps around the northeast corner, walking proudly along the short wall toward the gooseberry bushes. More than a dozen women sit circled around her mother’s fire, on chairs and stools dragged here from their own homes and from inside Mairwen’s. They pass three bottles of wine among them, braiding ribbon charms and chattering enthusiastically. It’s Martha Parry with the saint shirt in her lap: Woven of the finest gray wool, with perfect seams, already it bears the marks of several women in the form of embroidered flowers, tiny circles, spirals, and lightning shapes in every color of thread owned in Three Graces. Most of them collect on the chest, where they’ll settle over Rhun’s heart, but some arc like rainbows down one arm.
The conversation falls away as Mairwen stands there beside the tangled mass of gooseberries. Her mother rises from her place between Beth Pugh and her sister Hetty, whose mouth opens in a lazy grin when she meets Mairwen’s gaze. Hetty pats back dark hair, and Mairwen inadvertently touches her own, which is more brambled than usual. Haf stares at her, eyes wide.
Aderyn beckons her daughter forward, and Mair hurries around the bushes to the front gate with as much dignity as a half-naked sixteen-year-old girl can when caught before her mother and aunts and cousins.
Hetty Pugh snorts loud. “Lazy girl, you’ve entirely missed breakfast.”
Mairwen’s tongue betrays her as she stops beside the fire, nearly in the exact center of the circle of women. She drops her shawl and cries, “It’s the only thing I’m allowed to do! For him. Not go into the forest myself!”
Gasps come from where the youngest girls sit, gape-mouthed on blankets spread over the grass. Each of them here for the first time to bless a saint shirt. Older women are shocked, amused, and some even approving—it was the saint’s last chance, some must be thinking. Her mother’s sharp eyes are full of worry. Hetty Pugh laughs bright and loud, and Haf giggles through her hands and murmurs Mairwen’s name.
“This shirt is doing something,” Aderyn says.
“It’s not enough,” Mairwen replies.
“Come inside and get yourself presentable,” Aderyn says, more testy than most are used to hearing from her. She sweeps up and into the cottage. Mairwen follows—she needs new lacing for her bodice, after all—but glances back surprised when Hetty follows as well. Mairwen nearly crashes into her mother, stopped in the center of the cottage’s ground floor.
“Hetty, close that behind you, please,” Aderyn says, and Hetty shuts the house up. The women both study Mair. She feels their cool gazes like the pressure of fingers on her neck and arms and chest.
Hetty speaks first. “You’re scaring the girl, Addie.”
Aderyn presses her lips in a line. “Takes more to scare my daughter.”
Mairwen says, “I wanted him to know he’s loved. I wanted him to see my heart. Bind his here, so he’d come back to it.”
The two older women share a glance, and Hetty says, “So his can’t be bound to the forest.”
Aderyn says, “That’s dangerous magic.”
Mair barely stops herself from flinging out her arms. “Why? To love a boy? To bind our hearts together? Sex isn’t dangerous.”
Her mother makes a disgruntled noise.
Hetty says, “I don’t think your mama is ready to be a grandmama.”
“I don’t want him to die,” Mairwen whispers. “He’s so good and we need him here. I want him to grow old while I’m old.”
Aderyn says, “What did you imagine before now? We’ve known, most of us, for years that Rhun would be the saint when it was his turn. He knows his heart so well, and he’s never hidden from anyone that he believes he’ll follow his cousin. Did you not think you would face this moment?”
“Eventually, I . . .” Mairwen shakes her head. “I had four more years. I didn’t have to be afraid yet. It’s too soon! The bargain is broken, or cheating us, and it’s not worth Rhun’s life.”
“You never questioned whether the bargain is worth it before,” Hetty says. “When it didn’t threaten a boy you love.”
Mair bites her bottom lip, gouging the skin hard enough to hurt. She sinks into a chair. “You’re right, I feel it sharper now, but shouldn’t I?”
Aderyn sighs and kneels at her daughter’s chair. “It’s true, when Carey Morgan died the valley’s beauty lost some brightness to me. And when Rhun dies, you’ll carry it with you. Every spring you’ll feel it, an ache when the flowers bloom rainbows across our hills. When you taste our year’s meat or sip the brews. You’ll feel the pain, and that pain makes everything around it brighter. That is what the bargain is: death for life, a sacrifice that makes it all sweeter and sharper. Without it, how could we appreciate what we have? We love our saint, and he runs for us, and everyone here knows exactly how precious life is, and love itself. Everybody dies, Mairwen, but the saints of Three Graces die for a reason.”
Mair grips her knees, bunching the fabric of her skirts too tight; she won’t let herself be dissuaded. “Then what is the reason it came early this year? What did we do wrong with John Upjohn? He was the saint, and he ran. He survived. We met the terms of the bargain, didn’t we?”
“As far as I know,” Aderyn says, pushing to her feet again. “Have you eaten breakfast? There are leftover pastries.”
“How can you not be curious? The devil owes us an explanation.”
Hetty snorts, but Aderyn frowns hard. “First we must crown a saint and do our part, or Rhos’s baby will die. After that we can try to understand.”
Mairwen presses her knuckles into her eyes. She doesn’t want Rhos’s baby to die, but nor can she stand Rhun throwing his life away if there’s something wrong. How can they not see it? “I have to do something. Can’t you feel it? Something changed, and we shouldn’t ignore it.”
The Grace witch pinches her mouth in a thing nearing despair.
Leaping up, Mairwen makes to grab her mother’s hands, but stops and draws a deep breath to show she can be calm. It evens out the pain in Aderyn’s expression. Her mother says, “You know how to make charms.”
“Yes.” Mair tries not to sound too eager.
“Life, death, and blessing in between? That’s the recipe.”
“Always a balance of three pieces.”
Hetty joins them, so they stand in an intimate triangle. But she says nothing, knowing already, Mairwen suspects.
“The bargain is a charm, but a very powerful one. Life, death, and blessing in between.”
Mairwen sees it. “Life in the valley, death in the forest, and . . . we’re the blessing in between. The Grace witches.”
Aderyn touches Mair’s cheek, sorrow in her eyes. “Our bloodline, our hearts, set originally by the youngest Grace, whose love and sacrifice started it all. We bind the saint. We anoint him with blood. A Grace witch.”
Mair has always felt in between, been drawn to that edge of shadows, because her blood is already bound up in the charm. It’s so simple. Except . . . “The saint doesn’t always die. There’s not always death in the forest, yet those four times before now, the bargain has held just the same for the seven expected years.”
“What was the last charm you made, little bird?”
“A healing blessing for the sick horse.”
“And how did you make it?”
“His living mane, a fox rib, and my song and breath.”
“Nothing died for that death; it was only a piece of death, the promise of it.” Aderyn smiles grimly.
“I see,” Mairwen says, mostly meaning it.
“The saint must choose to die, but he does not need to truly die. But you cannot say those words to Rhun Sayer.”
Hetty pushes her hair out of her eyes once again, lifting one brow. “If a saint knows he doesn’t have to die, how can he choose to die? The one thing is paradoxical to the other.”
Mairwen has nothing to say, only a smog of thoughts.
“You need food,” her mother says, going for the bread basket hanging from a hook by the hearth. She digs in and pulls out a pastry so perfectly pinched it must be one of Bree Lewis’s.
“Let me do it,” Mairwen says. “I want to anoint the saint shirt with my blood and go up the mountain to crown the saint. It’s the ritual. It’s what the witches do, so let it be me!”
Aderyn pauses, pastry in hand. It has been her duty since her own mother passed it on. She looks to Hetty, and Hetty shrugs.
“Wait,” Aderyn says, and vanishes into her bedroom.
Hetty Pugh wanders to Aderyn’s kitchen table and begins picking at a spread of bowls filled with water to steep herbs. She dips a finger into one floating with wrinkled rose petals and tastes it. Unease ticks at Mairwen.
Her mother shoves aside the curtain separating her bedroom from the main cottage and emerges with a voluminous layer of blue and cream cloth folded over her arm.
A dress.
Mairwen touches her mouth to keep quiet her surge of hope.
Aderyn holds up the dress, handing one part to Hetty. It’s a long bodice and overskirt, dyed indigo. Hetty spreads her arms to display the soft linen shift, embroidered at the cuffs and hem with delicate green vines Mair recognizes as her mother’s own hand. The bodice has oversleeves that tie on and are slashed to display bursts of undyed silk.
It’s too rich, too beautiful. “Mother,” she breathes.
“I’ve been putting it together since last spring,” Aderyn says briskly, brushing invisible dirt off the fine wool skirt. “There’s stockings and ribbons, too, and a cream belt. A new shawl Hetty and Beth have woven for you. I was waiting for some fine boots Lord Vaughn helped me arrange to have made in the city, but you’ve grown so much these past months, and hardly fit yourself anymore.” Aderyn purses her lips for a moment, eyeing her daughter’s undone bodice. “It is a proper dress for a witch.”
Mairwen throws her arms around her mother, crushing the dress between them.
The women help her out of her older clothes. Hetty brings the bowl of rosewater and tosses it across Mair’s bare back, while Aderyn grabs a chunk of blessed thistle soap and scrubs. Mair only stands, arms up to hold her heavy hair off her neck, and takes it all, cold and hot in waves, embarrassed and thrilled to have her mother and Hetty washing her as if she’s their peer. She closes her eyes and whispers Haf’s name. Hetty goes to the door and snaps for the Lewis girl, returning with Haf hurrying at her heels. The girl asks no questions, but squeezes Mairwen’s fingers as she holds bowls of water and oil.
The women braid and pin Mairwen’s hair up. They clean her fingernails and the backs of her knees, her elbows and hips and ears, and even wash her feet, then rub an oil Mair has never before smelled into her skin. The women’s firm fingers work Mair’s muscles and soothe her, until her head nods despite the cool air and her stiff pose standing with her arms up in the middle of her mother’s house.
When they finish, they dress her in her long new shift, stockings, bodice, and overskirt. They tie on her sleeves, and the new shawl at her waist is of the softest cream wool she’s ever known. Hetty puts a bracelet woven of her own and Aderyn’s hair around Mairwen’s wrist, whispering a blessing. Aderyn kisses her daughter and whispers, “All my strength is your strength. You are everything I am.”
Then Aderyn Grace and Hetty Pugh leave the two girls alone in the sunny kitchen. Aderyn pauses before closing the cottage door. “Come out to bless this shirt when you’re ready, Daughter.”
Mairwen breathes with care. She smells thistle and rose and evergreen and pungent sage. Her skin tingles. She longs to find Rhun and show him how Hetty and Aderyn have made her into the Grace witch for his Slaughter Moon. It almost feels powerful enough to matter.
Haf takes both of Mairwen’s hands and shakes her head wonderingly. “Mairwen, you look amazing, and seem so . . . ready.”
“I hope this is how Rhun feels when the men are finished with him,” she murmurs, drawing her friend nearer. She embraces Haf, touching her cheek to Haf’s soft black hair. This way, Haf can’t see her face, or the tension pinching at her eyes. “When I put the shirt on him and lay the horse saint’s head upon his like a crown, I pray he feels all their strength behind him.”
Haf hugs tighter. “I hope it’s enough.”
“Rhun says he’s ready, Haf. With me binding the charm . . . he can do it. Give himself up and also survive.” And then, if he has to leave the valley, I’ll leave with him. So will Arthur, she thinks.
But Haf says, “I meant enough for you.”
“I love you, Haf Lewis.” Mair wants to say it to everyone she loves today.
Haf kisses the corner of her mouth. “I love you too, Mairwen Grace.”
When the girls emerge into the front yard, where the town’s women remain circled about the fire, drinking and talking and sewing, there’s a collective exclamation at Mairwen’s new attire. She imagines it as armor. She lifts the shawl to show off the overskirt and holds out her arms and spins lightly until every woman is satisfied.
Mairwen’s appearance relaxes Devyn Argall’s shoulders and allows smiles to slide across the Perry sisters’ mouths. They read the dress and Mair’s face as proof: It will be Rhun Sayer, not their sons, sent into the forest.
It rankles her insides, and she holds their relief against them, thinking of Arthur’s bitterness when he said, I’d survive it.
Joining the circle of women upon a stool so as not to muss her dress, Mairwen nibbles at leftover cake from the bonfire as Haf kneels beside her. Bree and her friend Emma kneel with them, and as she waits her turn with the blessing shirt, Mair leans over to whisper to the three that yes, she spent the night with Rhun Sayer. Heat snakes up her neck and throat as she relates finding him half naked, kissing him, and her near begging, but then only sleeping at his side, nothing else. Emma sighs romantically, insisting Rhun must be the noblest man in all Three Graces, while Bree claims Per Argall would’ve acted the same. Haf says she knows her own Ifan Pugh would most certainly not.
Mairwen laughs as she’s expected to, and presses her cheek to Haf’s fine hair, remembering Arthur Couch say the same to her, as if he wanted her to hear it. She wishes Arthur were here with them, with the girls, to put his fire into the saint shirt where it could protect Rhun. Competing with the boys is a waste of his time. His power is more suited here, because he knows a thing about transformation. Or he should, if he’d admit it to himself.
When the blessing shirt comes to the girls, they let Mair take the lead. She touches the fine gray wool, imagining a ferocious lion or a quick rabbit to lend him strength or speed. But thinking of the Bone Tree, of the monster she and Arthur killed, thinking of the youngest, first Grace witch who fell in love with a beautiful devil, instead she chooses a deer, for the old god of the forest. Needles quick and sure, the four girls embroider it there at the shoulder. Em and Bree create tawny legs, Haf a sleek body, and Mairwen the crowning antlers. When they finish, Mair takes bright red thread and stitches a bloody heart to the stag’s chest. She pricks her finger and anoints the heart with three drops of her blood.
Haf and her sister try not to frown at the dangerous addition, and Emma whispers, “It looks a bit like fire, doesn’t it?” The girls each take a drink of wine, then pour the final sip into the earth.
• • •
IF THERE IS A PIECE of the Slaughter Moon ritual Arthur Couch dreads deepest, it’s the long afternoon fast and vigil each prospective boy is expected to keep in the rough terrain near Sy Vaughn’s manor, alone—except for the company of his father.
Gethin Couch is as long and lanky as his son, with similar blond hair, but the rest of Arthur came from his mother. Gethin’s got a hard jaw and a wide suntanned face, with soft green eyes, and his hands are stubby but talented with leather. He makes the best gloves in town, and any leather piece that requires detail work and dedication. Last year, the decade anniversary of his wife leaving Three Graces, he went through a carefully constructed un-marriage ritual with Aderyn Grace. It was the least they could do to help him move on, with no proof that Arthur’s mother was alive or dead. Arthur had been invited, but he hadn’t attended.
The two men sit three feet away from each other on a narrow outcropping of white chalk high on the mountain, entirely bared to the elements, for no trees grow so high and the scrubby heather and grasses offer no shelter even from the wind. Arthur stares out at the wide-open valley, eyes burning from the cold. He’s supposed to be receiving advice and support from his father, but there are too many expectations wasted between them for Arthur to want such from Gethin.
He imagines the conversation Rhun and Rhun the Elder are sharing at the moment, and it relaxes him just enough to lean back against the rough mountain.
“Well, boy,” Gethin Couch says, “your mother sure would be furious if she could see you now. Wish she could.”
Arthur says nothing.
“I wager,” Gethin continues, “she’s counting the years, and expects you to be up in four more. If she’s alive, she’s still afraid and worrying about it somewhere. I hope it chokes her. Makes her look old and ugly before her time.”
“I don’t,” Arthur says, remembering his mother’s soft smile, and remembering too how terrible her mouth turned when she screamed at him, You may as well already be dead.
“Bah,” his father says.
“We don’t have to speak.” Arthur has yet to truly look at his father; he’s avoided the man for years, not finding any good reason to give thought or energy to somebody who turned him over to the Sayers without complaint. Better he be raised around so many men and boys now, was Gethin’s excuse, said knowing Arthur listened.
“But you should know, son, I see what you’ve become. You may not be the best, but there’s no doubting you’re as close as anyone with your temperament could get. Nothing she did hurt you.”
Arthur closes his eyes. Every word pains him, infuriates him. Maybe this is why the potential runners are forced to fast alone with their fathers: It’s no comfort, but a final test to discover what boy can withstand parental torture. “I don’t need your approval,” he says through his teeth.
“You have it anyway.”
“Approve of this, then.” Arthur stands up. “You’re no father to me, and haven’t been at least since my mother left, if you ever were before. You either were so blind and disinterested in a daughter you did not see what she did, or you agreed with her to do it, but blame her alone for all. So this is outside the spirit of the ritual. I’ll see myself away.”
He steps off the stone outcropping and skids down toward the path that leads back to Vaughn’s manor. What a furious lie this valley is, he thinks. Perhaps the devil’s bargain keeps sickness and death at bay, but it certainly doesn’t make people good or keep families together.
Or perhaps it’s only Arthur who thinks so. Everyone else is content and happy. Everyone else accepts the bargain and its restrictions. He’s the one who doesn’t belong, because his mother did ruin him. Who would he be now if he’d always been a boy? Would he be as good as Rhun?
Who would he be if he’d remained a girl?
A great wind blows at him, shifting him backward on the path: away from Vaughn, away from the valley. Arthur pauses and glances over his shoulder. The path pierces down that way, along a chalk ridge and toward the pass through the mountain, out to the rest of the world.
He could leave.
The thought sucks his breath away.
The rest of the world appreciates ambition and fire.
But Arthur knows too well what would be said of him here were he to leave. Coward. Better off without him. Too hot for his own good. Like they’d said of his mother. Never belonged here.
And if he goes now, he’ll never know if Rhun survives. It would prey on him. So, he thinks bitterly, perhaps I’ll go the day after tomorrow. When it’s clear he’s not needed, when Rhun can’t give up the fight for not having him to come home to and Mairwen can’t accuse him of being at fault for it. He could survive without them both. He could.
Arthur walks the path toward Sy Vaughn’s manor, slow but sure, and when he arrives the lord is there alone, standing before a small fire built up in the center of the stone yard between the manor’s gate and the tree line.
The late-afternoon sun is brutal, cutting every inch of Vaughn’s attire bold and blacker than black should be in the daylight. It’s a black that comes from outside the valley, where merchants have access to better dyes and more expensive techniques. Supple as a mountain cat’s fur coat and glistening sleek, too. The lord’s hair is loose, falling in russet curls around his cheeks and neck. His hands clasp behind his back. When the lord hears Arthur’s bootstep, he turns. His eyes are black and gray—the left black, the right gray, or maybe that is only the way the sun hits half his face. He smiles with thin lips, and it occurs to Arthur that Lord Sy Vaughn is lovely. Striking and strong, sure, but also beautiful. Arthur wonders what it would have been like to have someone like this as a father, to protect and defend him when he was a child.
“Arthur Couch,” Vaughn says calmly, gesturing for Arthur to join him. “Back so soon.”
“That man has never been much of a father to me.”
Vaughn nods, and something untwists inside Arthur just to be agreed with so simply and readily.
“I have a question for you,” Vaughn says. He looks out over the valley, not at Arthur, and Arthur follows the young lord’s gaze. From here they can see down the tops of the trees, across Three Graces and all the barley fields, tiny white spots of sheep, the rolling hills of the pastures, all the way to the dark Devil’s Forest and there—there in the center, the pale Bone Tree with its scarlet crown.
“I’m listening,” Arthur says when it becomes clear Vaughn is waiting for a response.
“Why didn’t your mother take you with her?”
Arthur bares his teeth. “How should I know?”
Vaughn hums a single, low note of acknowledgment.
“She didn’t want me. She wanted a daughter.”
“It seemed to me that she wanted a child guaranteed to live.”
“Then of course she didn’t take me with her: I might’ve died a dozen ways outside the valley.”
“Yes. I’ve seen many terrible ways for a child to die out in the world. But if I had a daughter, I think I would do anything to keep her safe, and if that failed, anything to remain with her.”
“And if you’d had a son?” Arthur challenges.
Vaughn smiles again. “It would be an honor for him to be a saint.”
“Someday maybe you’ll find out if you’re right. You’ll have to marry and have an heir to take over this place.”
“I suppose so. Any suggestions for a willing lady?”
Arthur waves his hands, aggravated with the turn of conversation. “I want to run, sir. I need to. Give this to me. Let it be me, not Rhun.”
Vaughn’s gray and brown eyes flick up and down Arthur’s face. “You’ll have your turn to plead your case shortly.”
“Let me plead it now. I’m worthy—let me prove it. Show you. I can win this.”
“Win?” Vaughn’s eyebrows fly up, and he laughs softly. “Oh, Arthur Couch. There is no way to win. It is a sacrifice, not a game. It must be done for love.”
“I can do it,” he grinds out.
But the lord says, “No.”
Arthur strides away with a frustrated cry. He crouches and his hunting coat flares around him exactly the way he remembers skirts billowing out. Putting his fists to his forehead, he seethes, trying to breathe evenly, trying to find an argument that will earn him the right to run tonight. To prove he’s not more flawed than any other potential saint, including Rhun Sayer.
It occurs to him in a terrible flash that he could tell Sy Vaughn right now what he’s kept secret for three years: Rhun Sayer is in love with a boy.
And in the next instant, a worse truth reveals itself to Arthur: He will never be the best, because he’s not even good. No one good would ever, even momentarily, consider what he just considered.
He promised himself, ten years ago, to someday run into the forest and offer the devil his heart, but Arthur understands now that the devil ate his heart a long time ago.
• • •
AN HOUR BEFORE THE SUN sets, all the potential runners, their fathers, and every man or boy in Three Graces older than thirteen gathers around the fire at Sy Vaughn’s manor. Rhun’s eyes are wide as he stares at the heavy blue sky overhead, taking in all he can. His father’s eyes shine with unshed tears, but he smiles proudly, his arm around his son.
“You don’t have to do this, son. Not for me, not for your mother. We’re proud of you already,” Rhun the Elder said, just before they returned to the manor.
But Rhun made this decision years ago.
“Where’s Arthur?” he asks Lord Vaughn when he and the others step forward for the final choosing.
Vaughn says, “He returned to the valley, I suppose to lick his wounds.”
Rhun glances toward Gethin Couch, who appears as surprised as everyone. He’s never liked Arthur’s father, which is as near to despising a person as Rhun can get. Rhun the Elder frowns apologetically at his son, for Rhun had asked if they might take Arthur with them on their afternoon fast and Rhun the Elder suggested it would be important for Arthur and Gethin to come to terms if Arthur was to have a chance at being the saint.
“I should get him,” Rhun says, starting for the path, but a grumble from the collected men halts him.
“Stay,” Lord Vaughn says. “Or forfeit your chance as Arthur Couch has.”
Blowing air through his teeth, Rhun stays. He takes his place in the line of boys, sending them all a supportive smile. Per, and Darrick Argall, the Parry cousins, and Bevan Heir.
Vaughn removes a glass vial from his coat pocket and with great ceremony dumps it into the fire.
A gout of flame screams up, and the smoke turns as white as the moon, as white as the Bone Tree.
The signal to the women: We have begun.
Rhun breathes the smoke, finding it softer than he expected, comforting. His lighthearted mood remains, tinged only by wishing Arthur hadn’t gone. But they had their moment in the woods this morning, and that is all Rhun needed. This is his time, his own moment to be what he’s always been meant for.
Lord Vaughn calls, “Tell me, Per Argall, what makes you the best?”
Per clears his throat and says hesitantly, “I’m young and fast—the fastest. I . . . yes.”
“Tell me, Bevan Heir, what makes you the best?” Vaughn asks.
Bevan, nineteen and thick in shoulder and head, says, “I have a plan, to alternate running with hiding. I can play this game with our devil, and make the night of the Slaughter Moon worthwhile.”
And so Sy Vaughn calls on every potential runner to have their say. Darrick Argall claims to be the bravest and kindest. Ian Parry says he’s practiced every day of his life. Marc Parry tells the men his mother has always known it, and dreamed he would be the saint, and he would like to be everything his mother dreams he can be.
When it is Rhun’s turn to say what makes him the best, he shrugs and only offers, “Nothing but my heart, sir.”
It is so earnestly done, the gathered men and boys nod along, and because Arthur is not present to sneer, nobody does.
• • •
THE GRACE WITCH ARRIVES IN a beautiful blue and cream dress, with a wreath of bones and yellow flowers around her neck, and a heavy horse skull cradled in her arms. Her cheeks are bright from the exertion of hiking here with the heavy thing, and bright from hope and fury and love. She smells like a bitter salve she stirred under her mother’s instruction, bled into, and with which she anointed herself.
Rhun waits at the fore with Sy Vaughn.
When she sees him, her lips part and she murmurs the litany of saints. “Bran Argall. Alun Crewe. Powell Ellis. John Heir. Col Sayer. Ian Pugh. Marc Argall. Mac Priddy. Stefan Argall. Marc Howell. John Couch. Tom Ellis. Trevor Pugh. Yale Sayer. Arthur Bowen. Owen Heir. Bran Upjohn. Evan Priddy. Griffin Sayer. Powell Parry. Taffy Sayer. Rhun Ellis. Ny Howell. Rhys Jones. Carey Morgan. Baeddan Sayer. John Upjohn.”
Together, everyone says, “Rhun Sayer.”
She sets the horse skull on the ground and unwraps the blessed and embroidered shirt. She glances up at Rhun, who, with the help of his father, removes jacket and shirt. The Grace witch steps forward and lifts the new shirt over his head. As he fills it out, she whispers his name again and again. The men join her, his name becoming an invocation, a hiss, a wind all its own.
The witch unties the wreath from her neck and wraps it around Rhun, then leans up onto her toes to kiss his mouth as she laces it at the back of his neck. Hidden in the flowers is the disarticulated jaw of the sacrificed horse. If the witch kisses the saint with a little more passion than usual, none make comment.
She unstoppers a metal box tied to her belt and smears her thumb in the dark ointment, then touches it to Rhun’s lips and forehead. A bitter smell rises fresh.
Mairwen stands back, arms spread, full of nerves and fire. Rhun’s father helps him back on with his coat and hunter’s hood, but then Vaughn lifts the horse skull and sets it over the hood, hiding the last dark flash of Rhun’s eyes from her. She pants in shallow gasps as the Parry cousins put a cape of horsehair over Rhun’s shoulders, and Bevan Heir ties the tail so it spills like a crest down his back. Here Rhun is fierce and frightening, half man, half beast, and evening has arrived.
The horse skull grins down at her, one half of it caught in the burning light of the dying sun. Orange and pink bleed down that west-facing side, catching on the blocky teeth in the back of the skull. The light sharpens the long nasal bone into a dagger and blackens the eye cavities. The bottom jawbone hangs down from rope against Rhun’s chest like a plate of armor, crushing some flowers in the wreath. He is hardly knowable, but she does know that leather jerkin, the deep oxblood of his hunting hood, his plain brown leather bracers. She knows those hands, and the thighs, too, wrapped in trousers, hiding the skin she touched and dressed herself only hours ago.
Mair’s breath catches.
The saint steps to her and holds out his hand. The pale edge of the saint shirt peeks out from his jerkin. Her charm. The entire valley’s charm. Mair finds his eyes, only a glint in the shifting shadows beneath the skull, and gives him the most meaningful glare she can. Survive, she mouths. No matter what.
Taking her by the waist, he tilts back his head so some rays of light can cut beneath the long skull and across his mouth. I love you, he mouths back.
Then Rhun tosses his head like a horse, prancing and spreading his arms. Inviting the Grace witch to join him.
He holds out his hand again and Mairwen takes it. Their fingers weave together, and Rhun leads her away.
• • •
TOGETHER, THE SAINT AND THE witch dance and skip down the mountain, breathless. The men follow, murmuring his name, clapping their hands, Lord Vaughn joining at the end.
Together, the saint and the witch knock on every door in Three Graces, calling the town to join them too, to dance in a long, twisting line toward the Devil’s Forest for the Slaughter Moon. Through houses and gardens, along cobbled alleys, through the square they weave, trailing a snake of people behind.
Around Three Graces in a sunwise circle they dance as the sun falls farther and farther, then to the pasture hill. Behind them everyone else yells and cheers, sings and weeps and prays as Rhun the saint leads them around and around the fire made by Aderyn Grace and the women, through bloody smoke where this stallion’s organs burn. Mair and Rhun do not laugh or shriek with the rest.
The entire moon crawls free of the dark mountain horizon, and the saint stops.
The town pours around them into a massive crescent, a shield between them and Three Graces.
Together, Rhun and Mairwen face the forest.
It’s a black wall, silent and forbidding, edged in pale moonlight.
The Bone Tree thrusts up from the center like a silver salmon leaping into the air. The ghostly crown is stark and compelling, missing every single scarlet leaf. They’ve all fallen during the day.
Rhun tightens his grip on Mair’s hand, then releases it. With both strong hands, he lifts the skull crown off his head and sets it upon a staff rammed deep into the hill beside the bonfire. The skull settles there with a slow nod, one empty eye toward the forest, one toward the town.
Rhun Sayer the Elder walks to his son with a quiver and strung bow. He helps Rhun into them both, and his cousin Brac Sayer offers Rhun his axes, which he puts to his belt. Braith Bowen gives him a dagger for his boot.
That’s all. Mair expected Arthur to give Rhun something, but she sees him nowhere.
A worm of disappointment eases through her guts. Where is he? He belongs here. With them.
Rhun glances at Mair, smiles bravely, and nods like the horse skull nodded. She readies herself to step forward just as a murmur ripples through the arc of townsfolk.
A dark figure dashes below them, from the direction of town, around the curve of the pasture hill.
Arthur Couch stands halfway between the Devil’s Forest and the crest of the hill where the bonfire blazes, where the horse saint’s skull nods, where the people of Three Graces wait to offer their son to the sacrifice.
His spiky pale hair catches the last warm traces of daylight.
Mairwen’s heart beats hard enough to thrust out of her chest and her toes tingle in her boots. Somebody whispers, “What is he doing?”
Arthur turns to face up the hill. His bow and quiver poke over his shoulder, and the glint of long knives mark his hips. He wears a black hunting hood, an old leather coat, trousers, and boots. Arthur puts both his hands out and waves madly at them all.
A strangled cry breaks from Aderyn Grace and Rhun grunts wordlessly.
Mairwen thinks Arthur looks coiled and sharp, dangerous and ready to face down the devil. She flexes her hands into fists and steps forward. Though she can’t see his eyes clearly, she knows the moment Arthur fixes his attention on her. Her palms ache, and she feels hot, then cold, then terrified, because Arthur doesn’t have the shirt. He can’t go in. He’s not anointed.
“But I’m the blessing in between,” she whispers. Her blood. Her heart.
Behind Mairwen, a knowing, panicked look flashes in her mother’s eyes. But Aderyn has never called her daughter’s name where the devil might hear it.
Haf Lewis is not yet so wise, and when Mairwen leaps forward, grabs one of Rhun’s axes, and takes off down the hill, Haf screams her best friend’s name.
Mairwen runs, thrusting hard against the skirt of her dress, gasping against the tightness of her bodice.
She pushes harder, boots thudding her heartbeat into the earth.
Her name becomes a cry behind her, a swarming prayer, as she careens downhill toward Arthur.
Their eyes meet for a flash, and she holds out her empty hand.
Arthur slaps his palm to hers, and together they run for the trees.