Strange Grace by Tessa Gratton (6)

Arthur has never been so exhausted in his entire life, but the light of dawn piercing his eyes like nails is a welcome pain. Sometime during the night, he stopped expecting to survive. That he has, that Rhun’s weight pulls down at his aching shoulders as the two of them limp out of the Devil’s Forest together, is a surprise.

He’ll never admit that, though, not now that he’s managed it, now that he spent the night running from the devil and emerged victorious. And his friends are alive too.

Never mind there are already pieces he can’t recall, as if every dragging step out of the forest pulls him away from what happened. From what he did.

But the sun is a star rising in Arthur’s chest: bright, pure, full of clarity. Arthur Couch knows who he is after last night.

Even if he doesn’t quite remember why.

He winces as he steps fully into the sun, grips tighter around Rhun’s waist as they pause in the warmth. Behind him the forest looms, and he hears Mairwen’s shallow breathing, and the deeper, rattling breath of that thing Rhun would not leave without. It will cost them, Arthur knows somehow, but everything came with a price last night, and everything that comes next will have one too.

The bracelet on his wrist twists tighter, tiny thorns cutting his skin. It’s magic, but he can’t remember putting it on. Soon he’s going to be extremely worried at his fading memory, but right now he’s just bone-tired.

Clear morning sky stretches over the pasture, and there stand the villagers in clusters and lines, faces drawn, hopeful eyes wide on Arthur. He sees Haf Lewis first, ahead of the others, braid loose and mouth open in the start of a brilliant smile. He hears his name, and Rhun’s and Mair’s names, gasped and called in relief.

“Mom,” Rhun whispers, leaning heavily against Arthur. He can’t finish. Nona Sayer doesn’t hear her son anyway.

She, and all the others, have turned in shock to the thing—man, monster, devil, Arthur doesn’t know what to call it—they brought out with them.

Alis Sayer cries out, “Baeddan!” and lifts her skirt to run down the pasture slope toward the emerging saints.

Arthur has a nearly impossible time calling him that.

Baeddan Sayer, twenty-sixth saint of Three Graces.

Why can’t Arthur remember anymore how Baeddan is still alive? After ten years.

The Bone Tree—it’s something about the Bone Tree, and the bargain.

All Arthur remembers is that the story isn’t true. The Grace witches made it all up.

Alis begins a stampede, and soon the four are surrounded by what seems like all of town, asking questions and pushing to be nearer, joyous and afraid, startled and loud. Arthur mutters into Rhun’s ear, “The closest to these black trees most of these cowards have ever been.”

Rhun shakes his head, weary, avoiding Arthur’s gaze.

Arthur hisses out through clenched teeth. It hurts that Rhun refuses him. What happened?

Vines tighten around his arms, bending him back onto the altar. Arthur closes his eyes and knows this is worth it if Rhun lives. The devil presses down on his chest. Two of his ribs crack in a flash of pain and

When Arthur swallows, a bruise presses his throat. His side aches.

“Be careful,” Mairwen says, loud and commanding, even from her bloody mouth, split at the lip from a terrible kiss. Arthur remembers that, too, just as suddenly: Mairwen kissing the devil. But not why her hair is no longer than her chin, cut off in chunks, worse and messier than his own. She steps around the creature Baeddan, protecting him though he’s a head taller than she and nearly as broad as Rhun.

With his arm about Rhun’s waist, Arthur can feel Rhun trembling; his knees are going to give out and Arthur very likely cannot hold him upright. What does Rhun remember?

Alis Sayer stares at what’s become of her son.

Baeddan ran into the forest ten years ago—they all remember it. They remember a brilliant, strong young man more charming even than Rhun, and proud and handsome. This is a shadow of what he once was, but recognizable to those who knew him best: It’s in the shape of Sayer eyes and crooked nose and jaw; it’s in the bearing and way Baeddan raises his eyebrows in hope.

His mother hesitates. Her hands are out, reaching, but she doesn’t touch him, even when Mairwen shifts to the side so she can.

Because Baeddan Sayer is as young as the night he ran in, but his skin is sallow, greenish and violet like bruises and death and the first signs of rot. Dark purple blood stripes his bare chest in many parallel furrows, like he put his own hands to his skin and clawed again and again. He wears the tattered remains of a leather coat and trousers, but is barefoot. His once-Sayer eyes are black through and through. Thorns grow out of his collarbones, hooked in two rows from his heart toward his shoulders. His knuckles are gnarled like tree bark. Antlers hide in his black hair, tangled and sharp, wrapping his skull in a crown.

Staring at Baeddan, Arthur knows, though he can’t remember why, that Baeddan’s skin is cold, that the lost twenty-sixth saint murmurs old lullabies like threats and sometimes screams and the entire Devil’s Forest answers.

“What happened last night?” Hetty Pugh demands, looking furiously back and forth between the survivors. Aderyn Grace is beside her, and there at the back of the crowd Lord Sy Vaughn waits, surprised.

Arthur barks a single laugh, but it hurts his throat and jars his cracked ribs. Rhun shakes his head, lowering it as if he is too tired to hold it upright any longer.

Mairwen puts her hand on Baeddan’s chest, stroking the skin between ragged wounds, and says gently, “We ran, we faced the devil, and we rescued him who has been trapped in the forest for a decade.”

Questions from everyone compete for their attention and the world tilts under Arthur’s feet. He wonders if Mairwen remembers it, or is covering. Lying as a Grace witch is apparently born to do. He glances at Rhun to check the grayness of his cheeks and faint flutter of his lashes. Rhun releases him and steps forward.

Mairwen tries to speak again, asking for calm, attempting to take control of the situation, and beside her Baeddan lifts a hand to shade his eyes from the sun. He opens his mouth and says to his mother, “I’m so hungry,” like a child’s sad plea.

“Oh, baby,” Alis Sayer says, falling forward against her transformed son. Tears stain her face, and soon Baeddan’s blood, too, and the village presses closer. Some are laughing now, and calling up praise to God, pushing between Arthur and Rhun and Mairwen and Baeddan.

“Stop.”

The order thrills through the villagers, from the certain voice of Sy Vaughn.

Quiet falls.

“This began,” Vaughn says, arms still and outspread so his black cloak falls smooth as glass, “with illness and an unconventional Slaughter Moon. Before we celebrate, before we press too hard on these young people, we must assess the bargain.”

Rhun slides a dark look at Arthur, then immediately walks up the pasture hill. His stride is less sure than usual, but he doesn’t appear to be near fainting. Arthur looks to Mair, who meets his gaze with a stare of her own, and the two of them nod slowly together. Mairwen curls her fingers around Baeddan’s wrist, and though he clearly wishes to stay with his mother, he does not venture a protest before going at Mair’s side to join Arthur in following Rhun.

Three Graces follows behind.

As he climbs the hill, thighs straining, injured ribs aflame, Arthur begins to feel better. The pain diffuses like an old, angry bruise. It’s working. The magic of the bargain. Whatever they did is working.

black, empty eye sockets stare out from the skulls, bound with snaking vines to the massive trunk, and shoulder blades, rib cages, all the bones forming the armor of the Bone Tree and

The sun is a burning disk in the east, warming the breeze; the smell of autumn ashes and bonfire and horse dung is as familiar as his own voice. Rhun is alive ahead of him, and the knowledge of it pulses in the binding on Arthur’s wrist: alive, alive, alive like a heartbeat. He senses Mairwen just behind and beside him, too, just as alive, just as connected. Their feet find a natural rhythm, and all three who ran into the forest walk across the hills of Three Graces at the same pace, tuned for the same song.

Baeddan Sayer clicks his sharp teeth in time with their stride.

Arthur is not afraid of anything, not even whatever it is he’s forgotten. He survived. He’s strong, and this morning he’ll be whatever he makes himself.

Rhun leads them in a straightways path, not like the snaking dance twelve hours ago, but direct to the barley field, half razed and harvested. He arrows through the tall bearded grasses, ignoring how seeds shake loose. The sound is a rushing roar as Arthur and Mair go after, as all the town comes behind, boots and skirts transforming the barley into an angry sea.

Reaching the place where he stopped his work three days ago, Rhun bends with a muffled groan of pain. Arthur startles forward but stops himself, knowing better than to help Rhun right now. But he stands behind Rhun with his knee near his shoulder, so if Rhun chooses, he can lean in. He doesn’t.

“Check on Rhos and her baby too, and that sick horse,” Rhun says, rough and tired. “But the blight is gone.” He stands with a handful of healthy barley, casting eyes out over the gathered crowd. “The blight is gone,” he says again.

Sy Vaughn peers curiously at Rhun, and Arthur barely holds back a defensive sneer. Aderyn Grace says the ritual words: “So the Slaughter Moon has set, and seven more years are ours.”

“Amen,” Mairwen tells her mother, and the villagers repeat it fervently. Baeddan Sayer tries the word too, dragging it out into an awkward curse instead. Mair puts her fingers over his lips.

Rhun says, “It’s not right.”

“What do you mean, Rhun Sayer?” asks Vaughn. The people of Three Graces press close.

Mairwen answers, “It might not last, again. Because there’s no . . .” She winces and shakes her head as if she can’t remember. “Baeddan is here, and that means he didn’t die, but nor did he, exactly, survive. But his bargain held seven full years. He was this, and trapped in the forest, but we still don’t know why the Slaughter Moon happened fast now, after John Upjohn and—and—”

“We need rest,” Arthur says. He meets Lord Vaughn’s mismatched eyes and then looks around at everybody.

“Let’s get these young men food and rest, and our young witch, too,” Vaughn says, spreading a smile.

It’s the usual way for the day after the run to go: The saint, if he survives, is taken home for rest and food, and when he’s recovered the town will welcome him with a less desperate feast in the square. A thing to quietly honor him, an opportunity to give him gifts or ask for additional blessings. Last time, with John Upjohn, it had been more than a week before the saint agreed to do it, and then he only sat on a stool, rigid and silent, while the people ate around him and gave their gifts to his mother or Mairwen for safekeeping.

Arthur wonders what John Upjohn remembers about the devil.

“What happened inside the forest?” asks Per Argall.

“Tonight,” Arthur says, wanting time first with only Mairwen and Rhun. He wants to know if they remember more than he does, or less.

Mair glances his way as the morning sun glints off the hair and thorns circling her wrist, and the small bone woven against the soft underside, right above her pulse. A similar delicate bone touches Arthur’s own fluttering pulse, and one tied desperately to Rhun’s as well. Where did these bones come from? He frowns.

“Yes,” she agrees. “Tonight we’ll be well enough, and tell our story.”

All around their friends, neighbors, cousins, families smile with relief, clasping hands, congratulating them and declaring wondrous predictions for the years to come. Nona Sayer touches her boy’s bloody brow, pats her hands against his curls, half tied back, half loose and flared in messy coils. She doesn’t smile, but her relief is palpable. She reaches for Arthur then, and more firmly than ever wraps an arm around his neck.

Arthur grins and catches Rhun’s hollow gaze, then Mairwen’s wild one.

The bargain is bound, for now.

•  •  •

MAIRWEN REFUSES TO ALLOW HERSELF to be separated from any of the boys. No one argues with her, except her mother hugs her tight. “You should have me with you too, while you rest.”

“No, Mother,” Mair whispers. Aderyn smells like bonfire smoke and bitter flowers. Mairwen feels tears in her closed eyes. Her head throbs and her wrist, too, where the thorny binding pulls taught. After last night, she wants to sink into her mother’s lap and confess all her fading memories before they’re gone. But Baeddan is proof that the story the Grace witches tell is a lie, and Mair can’t be sure her mother didn’t know. Aderyn said the saint did not have to die, only choose to die, so perhaps this living monster Baeddan is exactly what her mother meant, and this was Rhun’s true fate.

And what does Aderyn know about memory charms?

With a small sigh, Aderyn touches the ragged ends of Mairwen’s chopped hair. “Will you tell me the story of this at least, daughter?”

“I did it myself,” she says, anger dragging at her mouth because she can’t quite remember why. A gift? A spell? There is hair in the bracelet on her wrist. “I’m sorry about the dress,” she adds, glancing down at the stained, torn blue skirt of her gown. The bodice is streaked with drying blood—scarlet and violet both, splatter from all four of them.

blood sprays her chest and neck, and she screams, “Stop!” Arthur falls to his knees, the devil—no, Baeddan—behind him

Mair shudders, then turns it into a shake of her head. She winds her fingers through Baeddan’s cold ones. He jerks his hand closed, too tight.

Nona Sayer leaves her hand on Rhun’s shoulder. “I’d have my boys in my home.”

“Mom,” Rhun whispers. He takes her hand and kisses her palm, leaning his cheek against it. “I’m just going to rest, and I’d rather with people who . . .”

“Who know,” Arthur finishes, when it’s clear Rhun won’t or can’t.

It makes Mairwen search the crowd for John Upjohn. Does he know? Does he remember? Her heart grows thorns of anger sharp enough to make her gasp. Baeddan says, “No one knows,” and bares his fangs for the first time.

The crowd gasps, even steady Nona Sayer.

Sy Vaughn says, “What a pitiful creature,” with what sounds like true pity.

Then Baeddan moans and covers his eyes with his hands, digs his fingernails into the skin of his forehead and drags down, cutting.

“No,” Mairwen says. “Stop.”

He stops.

Mair turns her commanding gaze out across the people, using only her eyes to part the crowd until there’s a path for her to take with the others. “We have earned our rest,” she says to all. “Go hold your most beloved and give thanks the bargain is sealed. Tonight I will tell you our tale.”

She holds her chin up as she leaves, Baeddan’s hand in hers, sticky with blood. She does not look for any other individuals, not even Haf, whom she longs to see. That will be for later, when her vision does not waver, when her mouth does not ache even as it heals. Baeddan is her priority, Baeddan and the devil.

What happened to the old god of the forest?

It’s her own voice in her mind, an echoing memory. She doesn’t know what it means. All she knows is: She trusts Baeddan, and this bracelet she wears—she made—is somehow binding the bargain. For now.

The way home from the barley field is a narrow dirt path stepped through the sheep pasture by two hundred years of witches’ feet, and Mairwen keeps her heritage at the fore of her thoughts as she leads Baeddan and Arthur and Rhun across it. She feels strings of blood drawing thickly through her veins, curling and spinning like tendrils of vines inside her. She trips. Baeddan catches her elbow in his cold hand and presses her against his scoured chest.

“Mair?” Arthur says with quiet urgency.

She waves him away, giving herself a moment to lean on Baeddan. Her temple feels aflame against his neck, the entire side of her that touches him cooling as if she stands in shade. That brings a smile to the corner of her mouth, for how she used to stand half in and half out of the forest, warm in the sun and cool in the shade. She brought the forest out with her, the heart of it, the forest devil, and so wherever she goes now with him, she’ll have the shadows of the forest to block the sun.

The vines coiling through her blood slide smoother, calmer.

His breath rattles under her ear, and he touches his mouth to the crown of her head. Not like a kiss, more like a taste. Mair shivers and holds tighter to him. He is alive after ten years, and the heart of the bargain is a lie.

“Come on,” Arthur mutters, pushing past the two of them. “I’m starving and Rhun is going to fall over.”

Instead of arguing, Rhun only continues to walk, sliding Mairwen a worried glance. He includes his once-cousin too, and briefly his expression grows darker before he forcibly shutters it and passes.

The Grace house sits empty, thatching gilded by the morning sun, walls smooth and white and the windowsills and door recently painted a cheerful red. Rhun had helped with the painting. They’d worked beside each other to the smell of baking pie. Elderberry and apple, Rhun’s favorite, and the only thanks he’d accept.

There are no baking smells now, but only the sharp scent of drying herbs as Rhun pushes through the door and holds it open for the others. Mair goes straight to the fire to wake it up, but the embers have died over the long night and she crouches to shove in more kindling. “Arthur?” she says, and he appears with his fire steel in hand.

Arthur obliges Mairwen to set a spark in the hearth. She busies herself gathering the kettle and tea leaves while he gets the flames going. Rhun drops an armful of logs from the stack across the kitchen at Arthur’s feet, then goes to the loft ladder and climbs.

“Rhun, wait,” Mairwen says.

“I’m tired.”

“We have a few things to discuss before we sleep, and before we face town again.”

“I can hear you.” Rhun pulls himself up onto the loft and disappears against the sloping roof where Mairwen’s bedding tucks.

Arthur’s jaw clenches as he grinds his teeth, and Mairwen is moved to touch his cheek.

“Why did you do it? Why did you run in?” Mair asks, looking at Arthur over her shoulder. She is a piece of the wild forest: tangled vines of hair; beautiful dress torn and heavy at the hem with mud and water; insistent, dangerous eyes; lips parted; cheeks flushed. An ax loose in one hand like she’s the vengeful spirit in a terrible story.

“Saving him is the only way to be better,” he says.

“Better than him?” she whispers, shaking her head.

“Better than myself.”

He wants to ask why she followed him, but Arthur knows. Mairwen Grace belongs here.

Mair and Arthur jerk apart. It had been his memory, but she remembers it now. Until she touched him, she’d forgotten the moment herself.

“Is this the same as the altar in the forest?” Baeddan asks before she can say anything to Arthur. The devil drops to his knees at the fire, hands spread wide against the massive hearthstone.

“Yes,” Mairwen says, though she’d forgotten that, too.

Baeddan lays himself against the stone, his lips moving in a quiet song she can’t quite hear. It’s awkward to reach over him and hang the kettle, but she manages. “Will you get water, Arthur?” she asks. “We need to wash.”

He goes outside, and Mair continues preparing a meal. She finds cheese and dry mutton, ignoring the strange ache in her bones and the dragging weight of blood in her veins. Her collarbone, too, blooms with bruising that seems to grow larger instead of healing. She needs to remain focused, to get through eating and cleaning, and they need to speak together, compare memories. However meager they might be.

Food spread on the table, she calls Rhun. He doesn’t answer. She’s about to climb up to fetch him when Arthur shoves the front door open and says angrily, “She won’t go.”

Startled, Mairwen meets Haf Lewis’s wide eyes. She’s carrying a bundle of clothes. Haf shakes her head helplessly, and her gaze sinks to Baeddan splayed like the sacrifice he was against the wide hearth. “Mairwen,” she says, strained.

And Mairwen is before her in an instant. She throws her arms around Haf and Haf hugs back so very tightly. Arthur makes a disgusted sound and stomps past, sloshing the water in his bucket. But Mairwen doesn’t care at all. Like this house, Haf is familiar.

•  •  •

RHUN STARES UP AT THE thatch from the floor of the loft instead of the bedding. He’s too filthy to touch quilts and the soft straw mattress. This slatted wooden floor is good enough.

Branches as thick as his wrist frame the roof into place, stripped of bark and polished a lovely rich brown. Layers of wheat-straw spread in bundles muffle sounds from outside, holding warmth in. Though most of the ceiling has been sealed with limewash, this section of the loft is uncovered thatch. It seems older for it, darker, full of tiny hidden secrets.

Below, Arthur argues with Mairwen over how long to steep tea and how thick she’s spreading butter on bread and even over Haf Lewis being allowed to stay.

It should amuse Rhun and aggravate him, but he feels everything from a dull distance. Even Arthur’s spikes.

Rhun closes his eyes and glimpses the dark forest: leaves flashing past, the splash of marshy water, flickering orange light. A white veil. Arthur’s mouth open, gasping. Mairwen with—Mairwen with the . . . no, with Baeddan.

He opens his eyes to the thatching. He should still be in there. Cut to pieces and bound down by the devil, to fulfill the bargain.

Flinging an arm over his eyes, Rhun grimaces, wishing he could smile. His lips have forgotten the shape of happiness.

Even that melodramatic thought carves deeper into the empty cavern of his chest.

Everything Rhun believed in was a lie. Baeddan is alive, and Rhun feels betrayed. That wasn’t the bargain. That wasn’t what he was promised. Baeddan was supposed to be at peace, Rhun’s fate should have been to die or live—that is what the saints agree to. That is the price. But he will not forget there are twenty-five skulls on the Bone Tree, and twenty-five saints before Baeddan.

Rhun closes his eyes.

Twenty-five pairs of black, empty eye sockets—

Arthur’s fist out of nowhere, slams into Rhun’s cheek—

Rhun can’t remember, but—

He’s crumbling.

Twenty-five. Nobody survived. There was never hope—Rhun doesn’t understand how it’s possible, when four saints ran back out of the forest, but he counted. Again and again. Twenty-five.

Mair backs away from the youngest skull, shaking her head. Her hair is short and ragged, her eyes wide and black. She’s holding the devil’s hand! “My father,” she says, and—

Exhaustion and disappointment drag Rhun down, and this thing on his wrist stings and pulls. He’d rip it off if he weren’t afraid of the consequences. To the valley, to Baeddan Sayer.

“Saint, saint! There you are!” the devil hisses. “I know that shirt and those bones and the glow of your skin and smile.”

Rhun presses his arm into his eyes and allows himself a grimace. Tears smear on his cheeks, draining down his temples. He’s not worried about his lack of memories, because all anyone needs to know about the Devil’s Forest and the bargain is there’s no surviving. There’s no choice. There’s no hope.

Baeddan was always doomed; so was Rhun.

It’s gone silent below. Rhun rolls toward the ladder, startled to find Arthur perched there, watching him with a pitcher in one hand and a scrap of cloth tossed over his shoulder. Blood smears his chin. Blue hollows under his eyes turn them bright indigo. His mouth is half curved up, half bitter, and bloodless.

“Here’s water,” Arthur says, clunking the pitcher against the slatted floor. “To wash off the worst of the blood.” He climbs the rest of the way up while Rhun scoots over, crouching so as not to knock his head or shoulders on the low ceiling.

But for the blood on his chin, Arthur seems clean already. He wears a too-large, fresh shirt that falls nearly to his knees, over fawn trousers, and is barefoot. He kneels and dips the cloth he brought into the pitcher. “Come on, Rhun. That back of yours is thrashed.”

Rhun says, “You missed some on your chin.”

Arthur swipes the cloth over his chin, pulling it away pink with blood. He lifts his eyebrows aggressively. “All right?”

“No,” Rhun says, but they both know he doesn’t mean the blood. He means, Nothing will ever be all right again.

A moment of silence squats between them.

Arthur touches Rhun’s knee and they both feel the heat of it in the stinging bracelets tied around their wrists with hair and needle-thorns.

“I was afraid you wouldn’t forgive me for running in here before you. For taking it away,” Arthur whispers.

Deep in the forest, he huddles with Rhun beneath the roots of a tree tipped over a creek bed, and Rhun relishes the weight of Arthur’s head on his shoulder, how Arthur doesn’t pull away when Rhun touches his cheek to Arthur’s hair. They’re blinded by darkness, anxious to find Mairwen again, aching from bloody and bruised bodies. Rhun says, “I’ll always forgive you. Haven’t you figured that out?”

Rhun knocks Arthur’s hand away.

A familiar sneer parts Arthur’s mouth, the defensive one, the furious one, but he makes no comment.

“It’s healed. Not thrashed,” Rhun says. “My back.”

“Are you really not going to let me do this?” Arthur is incredulous.

Rhun glowers.

“Fine, you jackass.” Tossing the cloth on the floor with a snap, Arthur clamors back down the ladder. “Finish yourself and I’ll throw up a shirt for you. Then you come down to eat so we can talk.” His choppy blond hair vanishes below the loft ledge, and Rhun folds himself over his own lap. He laces his fingers behind his head. He has got to get it together.

A shirt flops up over the ledge, sleeve catching on the ladder. It’s a pale-green shirt, thin and worn, but clean. Rhun strips his jerkin off—he lost his hunter’s hood and doesn’t remember when—and slowly peels his saint shirt away. It sticks to him, glued by blood, and tugs at his healing skin. Rhun angrily rips it free.

The tattered saint shirt lands in his lap in pieces.

Colorful embroidery decorates the sleeves, just along the top and near the shoulders. Flowers and lightning bolts, stars and an orange sun. And there is a stag sliced in three pieces by the devil’s claws. It had a heart once, Rhun realizes. Just like he did.

•  •  •

MAIRWEN SMILES—A SMALL, GENUINE smile—as Baeddan inspects a piece of cheese, then touches it delicately to his mouth. He nibbles, uncertain, before shoving it all in like a child. The fire flickers warmly behind him, and hot tea diffuses heat in her belly. Haf sits quietly beside her. Baeddan lifts his eyes, which have slowly taken a more human coloring, the black irises streaked and flecked with green. Green of spring and emerald green, the dark green of shadows and the green muck of a stagnant pond. His lashes are short and as black as his hair, vivid against the pale-purple skin fading to deathly bone-ivory and yellowish stains. Crescent wounds from his fingernails frame his brow, glinting with the rich purple of his blood. He smiles at her, a soft, hungry smile, and she can see the curve of his cat teeth. Her body thrills, and the thick blood in her veins pumps faster, smoother. Whatever else, Mairwen remembers that he belongs here. With her. Or she with him? Both of them in the forest? The details are sketchy, but the feeling is real: belonging, and the forest.

She wants to go back.

Beside the hearth, Baeddan touches his hand to his chest, curling his fingers to tear, but with their eyes locked, he doesn’t do it. He only taps his forefinger at the hollow of his throat, tap-tap, tap-tap, with the beat of her heart. Mairwen leans nearer, drawn to the rhythm. She feels it dancing across her skin, pulsing in points of pain along her collarbone.

Sliding his hand lower, he cups his palm just over his heart, where on his chest are twenty-four small bones sewn into his flesh, and three seeping wounds.

Arthur thumps down the ladder and sweeps up the trousers and shirt and vest Haf brought from Braith Bowen for Rhun to change into. He throws it up in a messy ball, then turns to Mairwen and says rather viciously, “He has got to get on board.”

Mair scrambles to her feet. She was supposed to be using this time to clean herself up too, not commune with the twenty-sixth saint. But Rhun is sliding down the ladder. “On board with what, Arthur?”

“With us! With what happened and with figuring out what to do about it.”

“It was all a lie. That’s what I remember.” Rhun shoulders past him to the worn table and takes a hunk of bread. Before eating, he glances at Baeddan. “How is he—are you?” he corrects himself. His face is drawn, splotchy with uneven stubble.

“Warm, cousin,” Baeddan says. Then he laughs gently. The laugh nudges itself into a wilder grin that suddenly cuts off. Baeddan scowls. “Baeddan Sayer is my name.”

Rhun stares at him, looking exhausted.

Baeddan hums a broken melody and takes Mairwen’s wrist, drawing her down to sit beside him on the hearth. She’s glad to, and presses near enough her hip touches his, and when he lifts his arm it’s natural to tuck under it despite glowering disapproval from Arthur and uncertainty from Haf. She can’t help it: Being near Baeddan is like being with the whole of herself. The call inside her quiets. The tension and longing she’s lived with all her life has an answer. Because he is the forest now, somehow, the heart of it, and she is a Grace witch. Her heart always belonged to the forest.

Rhun sinks onto a bench, puts his elbows on the table, and begins picking apart his bread.

Arthur draws a breath to steady himself. “Tell me what you remember, Rhun, even if it doesn’t matter.”

“I remember running, fighting wolves—black and gray, bleeding purple. They were nearly dead, or like corpses risen to fight. And . . . I remember a stinking marsh with strange orange lights. You punched me, Arthur.”

“What! I don’t—”

“And I remember flashes of teeth and roaring, and it wasn’t the devil stalking me; it was Baeddan. Laughing behind me, singing an old song about a bird?”

“I know that lullaby,” Mairwen says. “I was singing it, not Baeddan.”

Baeddan says, “I am the devil.”

Mair curves her arm up to his face and strokes his jaw. “You’re the saint. One of the saints of Three Graces. The bargain made you into this, tied your heart to the forest like . . .” She shakes her head. “Maybe. I’m not sure what happened. What the magic is.” She lets her eyes drift toward the north window, as if she could see all the way to the forest.

“There were twenty-five skulls on the Bone Tree.” It’s Rhun, voice dark and dull.

Silence falls.

“My father,” Mairwen says, reaching toward a skull. The youngest, white and yellowing, the bridge of its nose sharp as a dagger.

“We should burn it down,” Arthur says. “The Bone Tree.”

“Then anyone might die!” cried Haf, standing suddenly. “Babies!”

“Where did the four skulls come from, to make twenty-five,” Mairwen asks, “if any saints survived and left our valley?”

Rhun says, “It’s all a lie. The Grace witches tell a story to make us agree to run.”

Mairwen meets his angry brown eyes, and a tremor of matching anger raises bumps along her forearms. Her mother, her mother, her mother. Except— “Maybe they’ve forgotten too. The Grace witches. My mother. We’re forgetting. Maybe . . .” She only wants her mother not to be a villain.

“Tell us your memories now, Arthur,” Rhun says.

“Baeddan choking me. Ghosts like my family, taunting me. I remember a marsh, too, and—drowning. Running, but it’s a blur, like a dream. And an altar, I think at the base of the Bone Tree.”

“Yes!” cries Baeddan, “like this one.” He smooths a hand along the hearthstone where he’s sitting.

As if he’d not been interrupted, Arthur says, “And I remember Mairwen asking me why I ran into the forest at all, but I didn’t until she touched me this morning. I remember hiding with you in that dry creek bed, since I grabbed your knee in the loft. We might remember more if we . . . do it again.”

The look on Rhun’s face is too easy to read. Now you want to touch me, he says without saying anything at all. Even Mairwen knows.

She says, “I remember Baeddan. And running—Arthur, you climbed a tree. Not the Bone Tree. I remember . . . birds. Tiny little bites. ‘What happened to the old god of the forest?’ I said that. I also said, ‘We are the saints of Three Graces.’ ”

“I remember saying that, too!” Arthur stands suddenly, too excited to be calm. “We are the saints. We said it when we made the charm, I think.”

Baeddan whispers, “It tasted so good.”

They all stare at him for a moment of stunned silence.

“What did?” Mairwen asks carefully.

He touches his chest, and the three wounds beneath those other tiny bones sewn into his flesh.

the tip of the tiny blade pressed at the edge of the bone. “Are you ready?” she asked Baeddan, and the devil bared his teeth. She took a deep breath, and cut

Mairwen turns over her arm and stares at the knobby white bone tied to the bracelet. “It’s a bone from John Upjohn’s hand. And the rest are there . . .” She looks at Baeddan’s mottled, scarred chest.

“Holy Mary,” Arthur says, and Mairwen thinks she’s never heard such reverence in his voice.

Rhun shoves the heels of his hands into his eyes.

Haf gasps. “Why did you do that?”

“I don’t know,” Mairwen says with a frown. Her breathing shifts as something near panic takes hold of her. She stares at the bracelet, narrowing her eyes. Remember, she orders herself. She is a Grace witch! She should remember.

“Why did we forget?” Rhun demands. “Why is that part of the bargain? Nobody ever told us that, did they! John should have. If he forgot too. Or is it—is it different for us?”

Mair thinks of John Upjohn and his haunted eyes, his nightmares. He remembers something, but maybe not all.

“We forget to keep the ones who run back out from telling us the truth,” Arthur says as if it is obvious. “The four who survived, and John, if they’d told us they saw the previous saint, the story would have fallen apart.”

“That’s giving Three Graces plenty of credit. Assuming anyone would care,” Rhun says. The bitterness turns Mair’s stomach. It falls too hard and ugly from Rhun Sayer’s lips.

Arthur glances at her, clearly just as worried about Rhun.

“It’s also assuming,” Mair says, “this is always what happens: A saint goes in, is bound to the forest, and becomes like Baeddan. Then they stalk the next saint, and that saint replaces the old as the devil? Unless they run out again.”

Baeddan moans softly.

“The magic . . . works,” Mair says, thinking, Life, death, and blessing in between.

“What do you remember, Baeddan?” Haf asks, then bites her lips as she watches him.

He touches a line of scarring that slides down his chest, ropy and purple. His head shakes in tiny fast motions. “The devil who chased me was the last saint, horned and vicious,” he whispers. “I ran and ran, and then I was—chasing. I chased John Upjohn because he smelled right. His breath tasted like sacrifice. So did yours, Rhun Sayer.” His claws cut into his flesh, and new violet blood blossoms. With the dull white of the bones sewn over his heart, his chest is like a meadow scattered with spring flowers.

Mairwen puts her hand on his.

Baeddan bares his sharp teeth and rolls up onto his feet quick enough Mairwen barely scrambles out of the way. He says, “The forest sang to me, lullabies and soothing hymns, and we made things together, creatures and—and new flowers. I tried. I tried to be what the forest needed, but I’m not good enough. I’m not—I don’t remember, except! If I bound Rhun Sayer onto the altar slab, I would be free! My head on the Bone Tree with the rest of them, to make Rhun Sayer the devil in my place.”

He pants, sweat glistening across his mottled forehead. “It’s calling me,” he moans.

“Baeddan,” Mair soothes. “Baeddan Sayer.”

Slowly, slowly Baeddan’s lips lower over his teeth, and his brow smooths. He blinks again and again, shoulders drooping. “Baeddan Sayer,” he whispers.

Mairwen holds on to his clammy shoulder and checks on Haf.

Her friend’s cheeks are deep pink, but she’s holding herself still. Sorry, she mouths.

“I feel it too,” Rhun says. “Calling me. It wants me back.”

It’s on Mair’s tongue to say she wants to go back inside the forest; maybe they’ll remember if they go back inside.

Mairwen Grace.

Forest daughter.

She grips Baeddan’s hand and sees a vision of Rhun, her Rhun, sliced open and bound to the Bone Tree’s altar, vines piercing his wrists and thighs, twining through his rib cage, transforming him into a devil. It isn’t a memory, but Baeddan moans again, and his hand under hers trembles.

Warmth hugs her wrist, and she sees Rhun’s mouth twitch. Arthur clenches his jaw. They both feel it too, because of the charm binding them together.

She doesn’t know how she made these or how much time they have until the bargain breaks again, and she’s dizzy suddenly. Her collarbone aches, her skull throbs, and blood drags through her veins slow and thick.

If she goes into the forest, all will be well.

Mairwen Grace.

She stands, distancing herself from Baeddan’s touch, from all of them.

“It calls the survivors back,” she whispers. “They leave the valley, maybe, but they come back. And they die. That must be what we realized in the forest. There is no surviving.”

“No hope,” Rhun adds. “I was a saint only to be slaughtered.”

“I will make this right,” Mairwen whispers. “I have to—lie down.” She rushes into her mother’s back bedroom.

Closing the door, she presses her back hard against it and digs her fingers into her chest exactly as Baeddan does. Her breath comes quickly and her collar aches and itches.

Her eyes fly open as her fingers push at the skin over her collarbone. Beneath the skin she feels small bumps, like her collarbone is growing hard boils. She walks her fingers along them, staring straight ahead at the fan of beautiful goose feathers hanging on the wall.

Baeddan has a row of thorns growing in short hooks from his collarbone.

Mairwen holds her hands before her, inspecting them.

The bracelet of hair and bone and thorns twists tightly around her wrist, stinging in a dozen places. But there’s nothing obviously changed about her hands. Her fingernails are ragged and bluer than usual from being cold so many hours. She touches her face and hair, exploring with her fingers everything she can touch. She strips out of the bodice and overskirt, removes her shift and leggings, socks and boots until she’s naked in her mother’s room, shivering and running her hands everywhere, hunting for irregularities. All she finds are scabs and shallow scrapes from the night, mostly on her arms and neck and scalp, tiny bites, and the closing wounds created by invasive trees lifting her off her feet.

At her mother’s trunk, she pulls out a long wool shirt and drags it on. She climbs into her mother’s bed and huddles under the quilt, breathing deep of Aderyn’s flower smell that’s sunk into the pillow and mattress.

•  •  •

MAIRWEN LEAVES A VOID WHEN she departs.

They stare at each other until Haf, very practically, sets more tea to cook and Rhun attacks some mutton, frowning.

Baeddan crouches at the hearthstone, hands dug through his hair and sharp thorns, humming to himself.

Arthur burns to say something to Rhun, to break him out of this dark mood, but Arthur’s never been one for speeches or comfort. Especially not with Haf Lewis and the devil for witnesses. He focuses on not squirming, on staying where he is, when much of him would like to walk out that front door and burn it all down. Make the choice for all of them. Rhun’s right: The bargain is a lie, and it shouldn’t be remade. It should be ended. Three Graces should be forced to wake up.

Rhun says, “I’m going to sleep,” and stands. Before climbing to the loft again, he crouches in front of the devil. “Baeddan, stay here. I don’t know if you’re tired too, but we have to rest. If you sleep, the bargain might—it might heal you too, if you can be healed.”

“Yes, cousin,” Baeddan says, putting a discolored hand on Rhun’s knee.

Arthur thinks Rhun seems the elder of the two, the more weary. It breaks his heart and he hates it. He’s filled with a longing to find some comfort for Rhun, sharper than it’s ever been. For a breath, nothing matters except making Rhun Sayer smile. It’s the bracelet—it has to be—binding them together, but when Rhun climbs the ladder, Arthur forces himself to ask Haf if she’ll be all right, and at her affirmation, he follows Rhun.

His friend curls on the bedding with his back to the edge, dark hair a messy cloud of curls.

Arthur says, “We should go down and join Mair. I think we should all be together now. It’ll make us stronger, heal faster. Remember more.”

Rhun shakes his head.

Grumbling a sigh, Arthur sits next to the pile of mattress and quilts. He sniffs angrily. This is not a position he ever wanted to be in. He draws up his knees and props his arms over them, using his forearms as a place to lay his head. He waits, falling into a drowsy peace, until Rhun hasn’t shifted or changed his breathing in several minutes.

Then Arthur carefully stretches out beside Rhun, back to back. He barely breathes, too aware of Rhun’s body, angry about it, angry at himself for being angry, and finally falls asleep holding himself tense and straight.

•  •  •

ARTHUR RUNS HARD, LEAPING FALLEN logs and shoving through snapping branches, while the creatures dog his heels. He hunts for open ground to turn and fight, but there’s no time, no place. A skeletal rat-boy jumps onto his back, ripping at his hood, and shrieks with laughter as he uses Arthur’s hair like reins. Arthur flips one knife and slashes up at the tiny monster. His knife cuts, but the creature holds on. It slows Arthur, and other bone monsters claw at him.

Grunting, he spins and slams backward into a tree, crushing the monster on his back. He’s free for only a moment before another grabs his thigh. Arthur kicks, stabs downward with his long knife. The blade slides in too smoothly, and Arthur pops the rat-skull head off.

Laughter all around.

He runs again.

His pursuers are tiny and white, all knobby knees and elbows, some on two legs, others on four, with bloated stomachs, concave chests where the ribs press out like ladders. Their heads are the skulls of what they once were: rats and squirrels, owls, dogs, all with teeth and black hollow eyes. Some wear ragged capes of fur or feathers. They’re all half rotted.

The darkness hides leaves and slippery deadfall, and it’s all Arthur can do to stay on his feet and ahead of them. He’s no thought to direction, just getting away and leading them away from Mairwen.

His heel catches and he stumbles, drops a knife before impaling himself, and hits the ground hard. Rolling fast, he swipes with his remaining knife, bares his teeth, and growls. The bone creatures cackle like tiny ringing bells, clapping and dancing around him. One, fish-belly pale with a young deer skull, holds up the fallen knife, and then they swarm.

Arthur yells, tries to leap up, but they’ve got his legs, and two jump down from a tree onto his chest. It blows his breath away, and he struggles to suck more in again. He can’t roll. He can’t move. Then there’s a cold blade at his neck, and the black, empty eye sockets of a raven skull.

This cannot be the end. He will not die here, so shortly into his run. He will not die by these damned tiny monsters.

But his head rings and his chest burns. They’re tearing at his coat, tugging open ties to push it open and reveal his wool shirt. One whines something, like words.

Another answers, then another.

Arthur’s breath is evening, though his heart pounds and his head aches. He still holds one knife in his left hand as he watches the bone creatures. They surround him, at least twenty, hissing and whispering to themselves. He has to risk it, or they’ll bury him here.

In a single motion, he flings his knife up and slides to the side. Their knife at his throat cuts, but he barely feels it yet. His knife slashes the bone boy at his head and Arthur is free, grunting under the onslaught of grasping claws reaching for his arms and legs and chest. One has his hair. Arthur kicks with all his strength, sending more of them flying back.

Then he’s up and about to run again, except the bone creatures scatter.

A part of him knows the most likely reason they fled is because something worse is coming, but he leans into a tree anyway, puts his arm against it and his forehead against his arm, and breathes deeply. Pain spreads in a perfect line across his neck, but the wound barely bleeds, he can breathe, and he can turn his head, so it’s shallow.

Carefully, Arthur puts his back to the tree and looks around. He’s alone, surrounded by gnarled black trees dripping sap that glints reddish in the moonlight. Like blood. But the smell in the air is floral and sweet. Arthur steps toward his dropped knife. It’s caught between roots. His back aches from blossoming bruises, and he’s amazed he hardly noticed the pitching, tangled ground while he was down on it. Jerking his knife free, he sheathes it, and the other. His quiver is cracked and useless, from slamming into that tree to remove the bone creature, or from his fall, he doesn’t know. Taking out the handful of arrows, he tucks them into the back of his belt as best he can. It’ll lose him time when he needs to draw them, but at least he’ll have them. He backtracks slowly for a few minutes to find his bow if he can.

Too soon, he realizes it’s impossible. This is only the way he believes he ran, and he’s not sure when he lost the bow. It might be all the way back at that tree Mairwen climbed to orient them.

He doesn’t say her name out loud, though he wants to, just to remind himself how it feels.

At a quiet noise to his left, Arthur spins, knife raised. He stares through the shadows, unblinking, as if the longer he stares the more likely he’ll be able to see through the darkness to whatever shifted leaves.

A light flickers.

It moves like a living thing, like someone coming toward him through all the tangled forest with a small white candle.

Ducking behind a tree, Arthur keeps his gaze on the light.

Could it be Mairwen? Would she have been able to find fire? But she’d be louder, surely.

It grows nearer, growing in length: It’s a figure in white, walking slowly, its entire body covered in a sheer white veil.

Around it the air is hazy, thickening into a lovely mist that reminds him of sunrise, when the low fields gather fog and dew spreads like diamonds across the valley.

It approaches him, and Arthur steps out from behind the tree.

The veiled figure pauses. Beneath the veil he can make out a lovely face, a woman’s face. Or a girl. She’s smiling. The veil falls to the tops of her white feet.

Arthur Couch, she whispers.

Her mouth does not move.

The whisper comes again, behind him. He whirls around: nothing.

When Arthur looks back, the veiled girl is gone.

•  •  •

THE FOREST IS NOT WHAT Rhun expected. He tracks Mairwen and Arthur on and on through the darkness, ignoring the whisper of movement all around him, the occasional growl. And then—then come the footsteps.

Hard, even thudding footsteps like heavy boots or massive paws.

It might be the devil.

Rhun moves faster. He keeps his breath even. He has to find Arthur and Mairwen before the devil does.

Unless this is the devil behind him, and Rhun can lead it away from his friends.

But how to know for certain?

He pauses when he realizes the path he was following diverges at the base of this wide yew tree: Arthur’s long-stride prints smeared against undergrowth leading northwest; the broken twigs off a bush leading northeast where Mair and her skirts passed so destructively.

Shadows crawl toward him.

He follows Arthur, telling himself it’s because he believes Mair is safer. The daughter of a witch and a saint, she can rely on her own power, but Arthur is vulnerable. Losing Arthur is a risk he doesn’t know how to take.

The path leads far; Arthur was running, and there are tinier prints around his, some like tiny dogs, others cloven-hoofed but in a two-legged pattern, some clawed like birds. He finds a bow and lifts it off the muddy ground. It’s Arthur’s, and Rhun holds it tightly, teeth clenched. “Arthur?” he calls, unconcerned with attracting attention. Better the forest notice him than attack Arthur.

There is only silence in response. He tracks on, making little enough noise himself, eyes wide for flashes of color or movement, ears open, senses alert for shifting light or cold.

The trail ends in a small clearing, signs of scuffle apparent in gouged bark and crushed leaf litter. A smear of mud. A broken arrow. The trees are narrow and black here, dripping sap a thick reddish-brown color. It’s more honey-like than the blood it resembles, and Rhun rubs his finger through it, pulling it away tacky and smelling like copper.

Scarlet catches his eye, on the forest floor.

Blood.

But not enough to stop Rhun’s heart. Only a few speckles across a spill of oak leaves.

Rhun stalks the perimeter, noting where the tiny footprints gathered and scattered, where they head off without Arthur, directly toward where Rhun is fairly sure the Bone Tree waits. It’s as if he can sense it, beating at the center of the forest. Part of him wants to follow that call, but Rhun rolls his shoulders, breaking the pull. He heads the other way through the dense undergrowth, hoping it’s the right choice to continue finding signs of Arthur.

Soon moonlight wavers ahead of him, in a pattern he recognizes as water. He hears no trickle or stream, and assumes he’s located a pond or such, wondering if he can drink it. Probably not, but he has a water skin strapped to his back.

It’s not too long before the trees shrink and thin, growing like elegant needles out of long grass. Orange light flickers from the earth. He smells dankness and rot, and a low wind groans, bringing a tang of burning iron with it. Not a pond, but a marsh.

Rhun’s boots sink into mud, and bright green grass clings to his calves with sticky fingers.

“Arthur!” he yells.

His voice rings out, then fades, leaving silence heavier than before.

A splash draws his attention, something large falling, and he dashes toward it, lifting his legs high to get through the muck.

It’s Arthur, facedown, limp. Rhun grunts his panic and grabs his friend’s shoulder, turning him over. Arthur’s hair sticks across his face, his mouth open and full of water. His skin is clammy, waterlogged. He’s not breathing.

“Arthur,” Rhun says, slapping his cheek, digging a finger into his mouth to clear it, shaking him. There’s nothing. No response. “Arthur!” he yells.

Water and mud suck at him, lapping as he splashes frantically.

He hears the echo of his own name, cried back at him from a long way.

It is Arthur’s voice.

Rhun leaps up, the body rolling away from him, sinking, disappearing. He darts forward, searching the muck with his boots, crouching to dip his hands again and again in the water. The body is gone. It wasn’t Arthur.

Relief and terror leave him a special kind of breathless.

“Arthur!” he cries again.

“Rhun!”

He moves toward the voice. At least he thinks he does. Sound echoes strangely in this marsh. The orange light disorients him and the shadows are not attached to what they should be. He stumbles into another body. His mother, Nona Sayer, drowned, too, her hand gray and open-palmed, eyes glazed and white as the moon. Rhun bares his teeth at it, steps over her, his heartbeat hurling through him, painful and hard. Here is Mairwen, and there his cousin Brac, and there—oh God—the little hands of Genny Bowen. His youngest brother, Elis. His town, his family and friends, dead and drowned. Rhun knows it’s not real, but he can touch them, lift them, smell the dank death, even as the marsh glows, tuning their bodies into monstrous form.

“Arthur!” he yells.

“Rhun!”

He’s nearer, and Rhun runs, kicking his heavy boots through the shallow water.

He sees Arthur across a stagnant stretch of marsh, spinning as though blind, attacking nothing, mouth bent in a ferocious grimace.

“Arthur,” he says firmly, dashing for his friend. “Arthur, there’s nothing here but me. It’s Rhun.”

Arthur lashes out, but Rhun blocks the strike, twisting around to catch Arthur’s arms. They grapple, and Arthur shakes his head. “You’re not real,” he says desperately.

“I am. Arthur. I followed you in, tracked you. It’s all right. You’re all right.”

“No. NO.” Arthur shoves free. His cheeks are alive and pink with exhilaration, his blue eyes wild, blood streaked across his forehead and staining his wet hair. “I cannot afford to believe you. It’s not worth my life to believe you.”

Rhun reaches out again, helpless. “Arthur, please.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t.” Arthur backs away, shaking, wincing. And staring Rhun up and down with such longing it breaks Rhun’s heart.

He knows how to prove it, but also fears it, worried the answer will make everything worse. Fiery light surrounds them, as if they exist in the center of a bonfire. The dark water ruffles at their ankles. White faces of the drowned and deceased stare with hollow black eyes at Rhun. Everything he knows and loves dead, destroyed. His worst nightmare. He steps forward. Arthur waits. What does Arthur see? What fear?

And Rhun plunges in. He takes Arthur’s face and kisses him.

He expects Arthur to jerk away, cry out and hit him, but believe him.

Instead Arthur melts nearer with a small cry of relief, kisses Rhun’s jaw as he wraps his arms around him and hugs tightly enough to make them both shake. “Rhun,” he says. “It’s you.”

•  •  •

THE FOREST CLINGS TO MAIRWEN. Roots unfurl from the mud to lap at her boots, and night-black flowers reach for her ankles. Invisible fingers press her cheeks and tug at her hair. Her sleeves tear and her dress, too, and she leaves a wake of blue wool, trailing behind her in fits and thready tangles.

“There, there,” she murmurs to the forest, and hums a fragile melody. A lullaby about courting birds, a lark and a jay, who don’t belong together but recognize each other’s songs. Fewer roots curl up in her way and the trees drift and sway out of her path. Mair sings it softly, then louder, though she never thought much of her own singing. She repeats the refrain again and again as she slowly walks through the Devil’s Forest, voice trembling. Not from fear, but from a growing pleasure. Everything she sees makes her think how right she was to come in here. She fits. Light and dark together, all angles and promises.

She finds herself in a copse of young dogwood trees, blooming their snowy flowers even now at harvest time. The petals draw moonlight like mirrors, and Mair breathes in the clean, bright perfume. These dogwood flowers would make a lovely crown, braided into her hair. With their cross-shaped blossoms, their pale-pink tones and bright-green centers, the tiny oval leaves. Blessing trees, these are called sometimes.

She makes certain her shawl is knotted tightly and shoves the handle of Rhun’s ax into it for safekeeping. The head presses up against her back ribs. Humming her song under her breath, Mairwen walks over soft, long grass into the center of this dogwood copse. A warm breeze blows, shaking loose some white petals that float around her. Mair sits down.

Her skirt balloons around her, settling as gently as the blossoms. Here she belongs.

Plopping her hands into her lap, she allows herself a moment to mourn the beautiful indigo wool and skims a finger against the slits of silk in the sleeves. Arthur snapped at her, when they first ran inside, that her skirts would hold them back.

The warm breeze skimming through her tumbling braids reminds her of the sun, and she hopes Arthur is alive. Her jaw clenches. She makes fists in her lap.

“Why have you stopped singing?” a tiny voice asks.

Mairwen leaps up, trips on her skirt, and lands in an awkward crouch.

It’s a woman the size of a sparrow, naked but for dowdy brown bird wings folded loose against her back. Her eyes are black as a sparrow’s too, her chin pointy, and her body slim, frail, with only a hint of breasts and hips. She stands an arm’s length from Mairwen.

“I didn’t realize anyone but the trees were listening,” Mairwen replies, thinking to herself that honesty is the only path to take.

The bird woman smiles, her teeth like needles.

Mairwen gasps, suddenly imagining her own teeth growing long and sharp and special.

“We liked your singing,” a different tiny voice calls, drawing Mair’s attention up into the dogwood branches, where another bird woman perches, spreading her speckled wings.

“Yes, we did,” several of them chorus at once.

From behind the petals, more emerge. They push aside the flowers, rubbing their cheeks to the soft petals, embracing them like friends. One bird woman jumps down, spreads her russet wings, and soars in a modest spiral around Mairwen’s head.

The first bird woman ruffles her own wings and walks a few steps nearer Mairwen. “Yes, sing again. Sing about your birds.”

“I should go,” Mairwen says instead, standing slowly. “I have business to attend.”

All the bird women frown. There must be nearly fifty of them, and though they’re tiny, Mairwen doesn’t relish the thought of a swarm of their needle teeth chewing at her.

“I need to find a friend of mine,” she says.

“Don’t go,” says the first woman.

“Sing,” says another.

“Sing!” repeat a dozen others, in a discordant harmony.

Mair opens her mouth to say no, but thinks there’s no good reason not to give them another round. “The jaybird crowed his lonesome song,” she sings, under her breath, backing away from the first bird woman. The flutter of wings behind her reminds Mairwen she’s entirely surrounded. She can’t remember the next line, though she sang it again and again just now.

A bird woman lands on her shoulder, wings brushing Mair’s cheek. The woman grasps at her hair and the collar of her bodice. “Sing!” she shrieks into Mairwen’s ear. The tiny teeth snap. “Daughter of the forest!”

“I—I cannot,” Mair says firmly, “I need to find my friend. I must go.”

The woman pulls hard at her hair, and three more dive at Mairwen’s skirts and face.

She bats at them, tries to knock the woman off her shoulder, but the creatures cling to her hair.

“Then we shall have your fingers!”

“We shall have your toes!”

“We shall have your pretty eyes!”

“Or we shall have your song!”

Mairwen covers her face with her hands, jaw clenched at the ripping pain in her scalp. She hums the tune frantically, and the bird women cheer tiny cheers. At least four tangle in her hair, flying around, pulling at the curls, and one grips her ankle, no more than the weight of an apple against her foot. She feels one at her ear, tiny fingers tugging the lobe. Another—or two—take her left hand and grasp around her thumb and small finger. One settles against her breast, wings fluttering as fast as Mairwen’s heart.

She hums, holds herself still, though her body trembles to run.

When the song comes around again and Mairwen falls silent, there’s a second of peace and a soft sigh from the bird women.

“Sing!” one cries.

“Sing,” begs another.

“No,” Mairwen says. “I must find my friend.”

Pain flares at her ear from a sharp bite, and then the bird women pull at her hair. They bite her fingers and Mairwen flings them away with a scream. She knocks at the woman on her shoulder as blood slips down her neck. “No!” she yells.

“Sing! Sing!”

“She tastes like a saint!”

“She tastes like the forest!”

“Sing for us, forest-girl saint!”

The demand echoes and swirls around her as the flock flies circles, darting in to scratch at Mair’s skin, to grab curls and tear. She tries to run, but they dive at her face, swiping at her eyes and snapping at her lips. They drag back her hair, tearing her scalp. They giggle and shriek, tangling her hair in the dogwood branches. “Sing! Sing! Sing! Give us your voice, or give us your fingers and toes! Give us your eyes and give us your nose!”

“I am the daughter of a saint,” she cries, holding herself still again, hands out and trembling, breathing too hard as the burn in her scalp and ache in her fingers and her ear gentles. “I am a Grace witch, and I already gave you a song!”

“WE WANT MORE!” they scream. “Stay with us all night! We will not let you go! You are ours, Grace witch!”

Mairwen opens her eyes. She has power here. They can taste it. Bird women perch on her outstretched hands, showing her those needle teeth. Bird women crouch at her eye level on the dogwood branches, tearing at the blossoms as they long to tear at her skin. Bird women stand on the ground, surrounding her in circles and circles.

“I will give you something better than a song,” she says. “Something that will last.”

“Forever?”

“Songs last forever!”

“We love your song!”

Mairwen shakes her head, pulling painfully at the curls tangled all around her face and neck, stretched out to the dogwood branches like snarling vines. “I will give you all a piece of my hair.”

The bird women stare with their blank, black eyes. They blink together.

“A strand of hair!” one of them sings: Mair has lost track of which was the first. “Yes!” sings another. “Hair! Braided and curled for us!”

“What lovely hair she has!”

Mairwen says, “Let me go, and I will sit. I will take my hair and give it to you until each of you has your own. But free me, and let me sit.”

Several dive at her, fast enough she startles back, pulling hard at the tangles. They grab the ends of hair stuck in the trees, unwind it all with skill, unknotting and unbraiding, until Mairwen feels the last of it fall free.

She kneels with relief, surrounded by bird women darting nearer, fluffing their wings and clicking their teeth.

Tears build in her eyes as she reaches for the ax tucked into her shawl. She places it on her lap and then braids all her thick, brambled hair. Grabbing it in one hand, she lifts the blade and before she can think, saws through with five rough, hard, slices.

Twice as many tears fall onto her skirt.

The bird women laugh and cheer. One flies up into Mairwen’s face. Mair cries sadly, but the woman only licks up one fat, salty tear. “Oh!” the bird woman sings blissfully.

Another takes her place, and licks, then a third and a fourth. The fifth bird woman bites Mairwen’s cheek, and Mairwen gasps, pushing them all away.

Her hair spills across her lap, dark as cherrywood, tangled and dirty with bits of bark and even a few snow-white dogwood blossoms. “Come,” she murmurs over her sorrow-thick tongue. “For your nests or belts or charms.”

The bird women dance to her, skipping or flying, some grasping small handfuls of curls, others holding out their arms for Mairwen to tie her hair around them like bracelets. They bat her gently with their wings, laughing and picking at one another, braiding the hair or flitting away with it.

Finally every last strand is gone. Seven of the bird women remain crouched with their wings flared like mantles around their bodies. Mairwen smooths her remaining hair off her face. It’s too short to tie back, too short to be in her way. She chews her lip to keep back more tears, sad but annoyed with herself for such vain mourning. It’s done, and the hair will grow back. She presses her hands to her knees. “I will go now,” she says.

The bird women nod, and one, perhaps the very first one, says, “We will find your friend.”

Mairwen says, “He is a terrible singer,” though she can’t remember if she’d ever heard Arthur sing. She realizes her hair is as choppy and short as his now.

The bird women titter, and all but the first fling themselves up into the air, flapping hard and vanishing into the night. The first says, “Follow me, Grace witch!” before darting off. Mairwen dashes after.

•  •  •

MAIRWEN WAKES FROM THE DREAM with her hands fisted beneath her chin, stiff and cold.

The memory of the little bird women remains clear.

As does—

The bird woman flutters her wings and darts left, but before Mairwen can follow, a devil slides out of the shadows and in one swipe grabs the bird woman midair, shoving her into his mouth.

Mair reels back.

The devil grins, teeth bright and sharp; feathers spill past his lips, and she hears the crunch of bones.

“Pretty witch, you’re no ghost or green girl,” the devil says, spitting feathers from his mottled chin. He leaps forward and grabs Mairwen’s head as fast as he snatched the bird woman. Mair’s feet slip and

Baeddan.

Yawning, she slowly stretches beneath her mother’s quilt, feeling physically strong. She rolls out of bed. Her toes touch the wooden floor and she rolls on the balls of her feet.

The long shirt she slept in pulls strangely across her breasts and Mairwen touches her collar. Those small nubs press up against her skin now without her needing to explore. Mair’s breath rushes out of her. She hopes there are no more obvious signs of change. She runs her tongue over her teeth; they feel normal. She inspects her hands again. Are her nails darker? Turning to talons or thorns?

Sliding her fingers through her hair, she searches for antlers and finds nothing but knots and tangles. From her mother’s small table she retrieves a bone comb and quickly picks the tangles free. Blood and dirt remain crusted in her hair; she never did wash herself this morning.

An urge to rush out and wake Baeddan or Haf and confirm there’s no change in the color of her eyes or the shape of her mouth grips her, but Mairwen remains calm, dressing in an old gray skirt of her mother’s and a bodice missing several grommets that was waiting to be picked apart for reusing the stays. She looks like a beggar, she imagines, though she’s never seen a beggar. She wraps a scarf around her neck, crosses it over her chest to tuck at her waist and conceal her collarbone as best she can. Then she carefully slips into the front of the cottage.

Baeddan curls by the fire, as much of his body as possible touching the hearthstone, huddled in his ragged leather coat and trousers. He is so still for a moment Mair fears he died—that bringing him out of the forest killed him. But his chest suddenly rises and holds, then slowly falls again. The same slow rhythm as her own breath. Relieved, she glances at Haf, dozing upright in a chair with her head lolled onto her chest. Her hands are loose in her lap, all of her limp and relaxed.

Letting go a long, slow sigh, Mairwen thinks about the dream, about the bird women and the snap of their teeth. Daughter of the forest. Was there something else? Yes, the feeling in that copse, as though she belonged there.

She does not belong here.

The bracelet on her wrist pinches. She needs to examine it more closely. And get out under the sky. Closer to the forest.

She considers waking Arthur and Rhun to bring them with her, but no. Let them sleep. Let them remember everything they can. They would only keep her away from the forest. After putting on her boots, she opens the front door and steps into the sunlight.

Mairwen sets her path toward her boneyard.

Beyond the horse pasture and directly east from her house, the shambles is a hollow between two hills where a young oak grows alone and sheltered from the wind. Mairwen hangs cages full of rotting skeletons in the oak so nature might help with the job of baring bones but no predators can make off with useful pieces. She has barrels of water for loosening the most stubborn flesh and tendons without the fire or heat that would soften bones and render them useless. It’s filthy and reeking much of the time, but her grandmother dug drainage to send the refuse water spilling toward the Devil’s Forest and Mair had always assumed the hungry spirits enjoyed the snacks she sent them.

Mairwen keeps a stool and flagon of wine there, as well as tools for working bone into needles or knives, combs or fishhooks or charms, or even bowls if somebody brings her the right kind of intact skull.

No one sees Mairwen on her way, and it was unlikely they would, for the people of Three Graces have always avoided the shambles, viewing it as a witch’s territory except for some of the braver children or hunters delivering bones.

She’s going to have to confront her mother.

The afternoon breeze gently rocks the cages hanging from the oak limbs. Mair glances over the fenced pen she built herself three years ago to protect the slope where she sun-bleaches bones. Ribs and femurs from two deer are spread on an undyed piece of wool, nearly finished. They’ve been out all year, and are hardly discolored at all. The wool has been a partial success. Her grandmother used to lay bones out on rooftops for this, but the thatching or slate tiles always stained the bones on the underside.

Beside the fence is the burying ground, where she puts some carcasses deep in the soil with horse manure, to decompose slowly and safely, also in cages so the smallest bones aren’t lost. It’s safer than hanging if she wants to keep all the teeth.

Mairwen takes a deep breath.

It’s been only three days since she was here last, but everything feels different.

Hunkering down on her stool, she puts her hand in her lap and examines the bracelet. She obviously built it in a hurry. Was she trying to bind the bargain? Or save Baeddan? All of it?

The bracelet is such a scraggly, ugly thing in the light of day. She flips open the tin box in which she keeps her tools and draws out a pair of tweezers. The delicate metal prongs allow her to pull on individual strands of hair, exploring the design while paying close attention to how she feels. How the magic trips and tingles against her skin and beneath it, tugging at the thick blood in her veins.

It appears to be her hair, and Rhun’s and Arthur’s, twined together into a dark muddle, black and gold and cherry-bark, wound with a needle-thorn vine. And knotted around the single knuckle bone from John Upjohn’s hand.

Baeddan went into the forest ten years ago and was bound to the forest. Transformed. Seven years later the Slaughter Moon rose and John went in, but came back out. Only his hand remained, and Baeddan bound it to his own chest. Then the Slaughter Moon came only three years later.

If Mairwen thinks like a witch, thinks of what she’s always known and what she’s learned, leaving room for things she doesn’t know or has forgotten, it makes sense to her that Baeddan’s entire body would fuel the sacrifice seven years, and John’s hand last only three.

Col Sayer, Marc Argall, Tom Ellis, and Griffin Sayer all lived through their Slaughter Moon, but there are twenty-five skulls on the Bone Tree. Someone died every seven years.

She can feel the call of the forest, a mingling of curiosity, longing, and desperation. Is that the reason for the memory charm? To draw the survivors back in? Will the mystery of it drive them inside, never to emerge again?

But Aderyn told her the saint does not have to die. Only choose to die.

Either Mairwen’s mother lied, or was lied to in turn.

In the story—both the Grace witches’ private story and the one they tell the town—the devil and the first Grace loved each other, and Grace gave her heart to the forest in order that the valley might thrive. The devil, in both, said only the run mattered.

Who lied first? The devil or the witches?

There’s a gaping nothing in her mind’s eye when she tries to make an answer: too specific a lack to be natural. She knew the answer, but she forgot it.

Frustration has her grinding her teeth. She should march back into the forest now. Straight to the Bone Tree. She’s rested and ready.

A step on the grassy path hisses for her attention, and Mair glances up to discover John Upjohn standing at the shambles’ threshold. She stares at him, feeling unwelcoming toward him for the first time.

John holds himself rigid, expressionless. A wool travel pack is slung over one shoulder and he’s in a coat and sturdy new boots.

Mairwen stands. The tweezers fall to the ground.

“How could you?” he asks. His mouth barely moves.

“What?” She steps nearer him.

He flinches. “Bring that devil out of the forest. He tormented me. Chased behind me for hours, and . . .” John pinches his eyes shut and jerks his wrist free of the extra pocket in his coat.

Understanding brings fury to pinken her cheeks. “You remember him!”

John is barely breathing. Mair recognizes the tension boiling inside him from his midnight explosions at the Grace house door—John pounding, begging to be allowed inside to sleep on the hearthstone or with his head on Mairwen’s lap. His nightmares compelled him to claw at his chest and shake and tremble, and while sleeping he reached with both hands, distressed not to be able to grasp anything in his left. He says, “Sometimes in my nightmares it was Baeddan, but I did not—I didn’t think it was real. I thought it was an illusion to terrify me! Everything in my memories is mixed up.” His mouth pulls into a grimace deep enough she can see his long dimples.

Mair takes John’s elbows, pulling them closer. Sorrow and pity twist into something like love again, or the echo of it. “I’m sorry, John. My memories are all a scramble too.”

The muscles of his jaw shift. “You always calmed me. You and that hearth in your house. When my nightmares were too much, when I was remembering too much, all I wanted was to go back into the forest. My dreams told me only the Bone Tree could soothe me, make all this end. It was so terrible that first night after I ran, Mairwen. Only you calmed me. Anytime I decided the only thing to do was walk back inside, I could think of you, or hold your hand and . . . I could stay.”

“John,” she whispers. “I hear it. The forest. It’s always called me.”

“I want to leave the valley,” John says.

“What!”

“I think Vaughn will give me the means, as his family has for all the—all the survivors. Maybe if I get far enough away the call will lose strength. Maybe I can sleep again.”

“I don’t think it will, John. But maybe I can help you. I—”

“You are not enough for me to stay. And I cannot—cannot!—remain while the devil that haunts my every moment lives and walks in this valley.”

“Tell me what else you remember, John, and maybe I can put all the pieces together.”

“Mairwen,” he says. That’s all.

She holds his gaze, memorizing the feathered lines at the corners of his eyes, the wisps of pale-blond hair falling out of the tail to frame his temples and tickle his jaw.

“I don’t want to always be alone,” he finally adds. “I have to go.”

Lifting her wrist, she puts the bracelet between them, the delicate underside of her arm lifted to the sky. “John,” she whispers. “Do you see this strange bone?”

It is shaped like a pebble, with five rounded corners, and white as the moon.

“I see it,” he breathes.

“It is a bone from your hand.”

John reels back, stumbling.

She reaches out, grabs at him, but he shies away.

“John, listen!” Mairwen speaks fast. “Baeddan has all of them, all the bones from your hand, sewn into the flesh of his chest, over his heart, binding you to him and to the forest—it was the most power from you he could take without keeping you, and why the bargain only lasted this long! Because your hand was powerful, but not powerful enough a sacrifice to burn for the whole seven years. Now the bargain is only held by my willpower, my little charm! It won’t last even a season. Tell me what you remember, so we can understand what the bargain needs. So we can keep everyone safe. Even you.”

He shakes his head, backing away, heels knocking pebbles and tufts of grass so he seems to trip and move like a gangly scarecrow brought to life. “I thought my hand would be on the tree.”

“The Bone Tree?”

“Yes. It was covered in bones. Don’t you remember that at least? It was the center of all my dreams, that wretched tree. Strung with skulls, rib cages, femurs, and vertebrae knotted together like a baby’s mobile. And the altar among the huge white roots, embedded there snug and sound.”

Mairwen nods slowly, remembering the skulls.

“The devil laughed as he tried to drag me to it, Mairwen. Baeddan Sayer laughing and singing a song I knew. My mother used to . . . and I—I thought to sing with him. He was so delighted I knew his song that he dropped me and I ran for the light.”

“I won’t let him near you,” Mairwen says. She must convince him to stay. Whatever John thinks, Mairwen is the only thing keeping him out of the forest now. “I swear, John Upjohn, Baeddan Sayer will not bother you. I’m going to drag his memories out of him, too, and figure this out. Please stay. At least for a few days.”

John is terrified; it’s obvious in his tight eyes, the pull of his mouth. The tension in the leather pocket where he’s shoved his stumped arm too hard. “A few days,” he whispers.

“I swear I will find you answers,” she says, leaning near enough to touch her forehead to his shoulder, and her mouth is near his collar, where on her own chest the thorns press up, hooking through her skin like sickles.

•  •  •

THE CREATURE WHO WAS AND occasionally still is Baeddan Sayer hears the Grace witch leave her cottage. Like a puppy after a favorite ball, he pushes up and follows her outside, but instead of heading behind her to the shambles, his gaze turns southwest, toward Three Graces.

The whisper of the forest is a chittering in his ears, or in his mind, or both. He crushes his eyes closed, thumps his fists against his temples. “Baeddan Sayer,” he says to himself, as clearly as she would. The name fills his chest, makes his tongue more human, and he takes a few halting steps toward town. “Baeddan Sayer,” he says again, straightening his spine.

Along the sloping, grassy path he goes, called by the glinting white of cottages and smoke rising, rising, rising, against the too-bright sky. He can’t remember his mother’s face, though he knows he saw her, only a few hours ago. What was her name? Baeddan claws his chest, the pain sharpening his mind: Alis Sayer. Will she be in town, or up the mountain at the Sayer homestead? She spent most days with her sisters in town. Ha! Yes, he remembers that!

Also, Baeddan is hungry. His teeth cut against his lips, and he tastes his own blood, just a trickle. The sun is so warm across his back, through the ripped leather of his jacket.

And the Grace witch brought him out into it. Into the sun.

He smiles, oh, he smiles, broad and terrifying, thinking of her wildness, the taste of her mouth and her blood, the hot press of her fingers on his face, on his wrists, her warmth in the circle of his arms as they danced among the bobbing lights of merry ignis fatuus.

“You are no ghost or green girl,” he says wonderingly, leaping forward to grasp her face. To peer at her crackling brown eyes, the shattered curls about her ears, the bloody scratches crusting along her jaw. At her lips, narrow and pink, wanting to eat her, to bury his face in her neck and discover her tenderest flesh. She looks as delicious as Grace.

“Release me!” she commands, and he does.

Just like that, no struggle, no anger. He obeys her as the forest obeys him.

“What are you?” Grace asks.

“The devil,” he says.

Her eyes narrow. She reaches haltingly for his chest, to touch the furrows of blood there, the ropes of scabbing, the hard root-scars grown over his wounds. He reaches to touch her, too, and she snatches her hand away. “No you’re not,” she says, firm and certain.

Laughter drops from his mouth. “No I’m not!” he cries, gleeful.

“What are you? You look like my friend.”

“Is your friend the Three Graces saint? I saw the moon rise. I know the saint is here, running, running, running. I’ll find him, you know. Smell him out. They always smell like that. Like you, hmm.”

Goose bumps lift along the girl’s arms. She says, “I came in here alone.”

The devil leans nearer, nose to her temple. He draws a long breath, sliding down her neck. He’s so close his sharp antlers gently scrape her cheek. Did Grace come here alone? He doesn’t remember. Should he?

“No,” she says, though not to any real question.

“You’re Grace,” he replies, rumbling her name like a purr deep in his chest. She gasps. He can hear her heart beating off-kilter, and all around them the forest is a stage, full of eyes and hopes, making this moment into a dark spectacle.

“I’m a witch,” she whispers. “What are you?”

He touches the skin at her neck, just over her bodice sleeves. She stares with wide eyes, as if he’s as amazing a thing to her as she is to him. He skims fingers up her throat and to her jaw, and a hundred tiny shivers race down his spine and arms, tingling his palms. Her breath is cool as it breaks over him, musty and sweet, and he tilts her chin up.

“A saint,” he says, and kisses her.

It’s only a moment, lips on lips, but the devil tastes her heart.

She wrenches away. “Baeddan Sayer!” she cries.

The creature pauses. He blinks. He puts the butts of his hands to his eyes and backs away. “My name,” he whispers.

Wind hisses through the trees.

“You’re Baeddan,” she says. “You’ve been here ten years. You were the saint then.”

“No, the saint is mine,” he says, suddenly vicious, teeth bared. “I must find him and drag him to the Bone Tree! That is what I must do. Get my fingers around his bones. Not like his finger bones around my heart! Ha! Ha!”

“Baeddan Sayer, no. Listen to me.”

He digs his fingers into his chest, under the tiny bones. “Say my name again,” he pleads.

“Baeddan.”

Clawing his skin, he drags his hands down. “Baeddan,” he whispers.

Baeddan lifts his head and stares up at the sun until tears burn in his eyes. He can still cry.

He tries to recall the cadence of her heart, the rhythm of its song that was not the forest’s song. He should have followed the witch. Not Grace, but Mairwen. Another Grace. But here he is, creeping toward town carefully enough to be aware he’s trying not to be seen.

His bare feet crunch through the dry grass, unattached to the pull of the forest, the magic that used to flow through him strongly enough to plant flowers in his wake, to curl vines up around his ankles if he stood still for too long, that drew the eyes of the trees, the roots, all of it stretching toward him. His forest. His heart and his forest.

This land does not yearn for him. It is quiet, peaceful. He could stretch out and slumber as still as stone for years perhaps.

Baeddan takes a very deep breath and sighs it out.

The buildings of town are like boulders, he decides, slipping quietly around from the southeast to come upon them where there is no path. He easily climbs a yard wall, onto a side building, onto a thickly thatched roof, for he has not lost any of his unnatural strength.

People move below him, though not too many, for it is early afternoon and many still recuperate from the long vigil. He hears them stirring in their beds, murmuring quietly to one another, some walking about from home to pub or the chapel. The sounds comfort him, like long-lost lullabies. He hums along.

What did he used to be, he wonders, that this was all he needed?

The Devil’s Forest is a shadow in the north, embracing the valley, calling him.

Baeddan stands tall at the crest of this house he’s chosen, so the wind hits his sore chest and flaps the ends of his coat. The sun slithers through his hair, finding the antlers that circle his head, picking at the thorns grown from his collar, and transforming his mottled skin into something like a pearl, or unpolished amethyst, rough and beautiful.

Here in the sun, between the village at his feet and in view of the wicked Bone Tree, so far away and yet threaded through his heart, Baeddan feels wild and raw. Why did he not bring Mairwen Grace with him here, to hold his hand, to promise him this home again?

Spreading his arms, as if he is the embracing dark forest, as if he will hold Three Graces to his chest, protect it as he died to do, Baeddan whispers his name to himself.

In the center of the village, young Bree Lewis stares up at the devil from the spiral of cobblestones, thinking he’s come on black wings, come to destroy them all now that he’s free. She screams.

•  •  •

RHUN WAKES WITHOUT FUSS. ONLY an opening of eyes.

Arthur kissed him. In the forest. He remembers perfectly now.

Something opens inside his chest, and Rhun thinks, I would have died for only that.

There’s heat and comfort at his back.

Slowly, it occurs to him that Arthur is stretched there, spine to spine; they lean together where the straw mattress sinks in the middle.

He sits carefully, sliding off the foot of the low mattress, and kneels there looking down at loose, sleeping Arthur Couch. How he used to long for such ease between them.

Arthur frowns, turning toward the warmth where Rhun’s body used to be.

Rhun touches Arthur’s ankle and feels the strength seep through his fingers again. No doubt this magic has connected their health and power not only to the bargain, but to each other. And somehow, Arthur doesn’t seem to mind.

The Grace cottage is quiet, sunlight pressing through the tiny loft window, diffused all throughout the room below him. He picks up his boots and creeps down the ladder. Haf Lewis dozes in a chair; Baeddan Sayer is vanished from the hearth. Rhun drinks down the dregs of a cup of cold tea before ducking into the rear bedroom. Mairwen’s ruined blue dress is in pieces on the floor, but Mair herself is gone.

Rhun goes outside to put on his boots. The borrowed trousers are slightly too long, so he tucks them in and swings his tattered hunting jacket over the new shirt. He scrubs at his face and pulls all his huge hair back, irritated to not have anything with which to tie it. It’s a wild cloud against his shoulders. He pulls apart handfuls and braids them loosely. The texture and sweat and dried blood keep the strands stiffly woven when he lets go.

Stomping out of the yard and up the first hill, Rhun takes stock of the valley: It all seems lovely and well. He should be filled with satisfaction, should be glad and awed because no matter what else, he ran into the Devil’s Forest four years before his time and survived.

But there’s a secret at the heart of the bargain. A lie.

Rhun hates both secrets and lies.

“I should’ve set fire to the Bone Tree when I had the chance,” Arthur says quietly behind him.

Rhun winces in the bright afternoon. “Maybe you tried and I didn’t let you.”

“That sounds about right.” Arthur laughs.

Sighing hard enough to shrug his shoulders, Rhun turns to his friend, who stands several steps away, slouched on one hip, scowling and chewing his bottom lip. Arthur looks ridiculous in the too-large shirt. But good.

“We should go home and get our own clothes,” Rhun says.

“I look so bad to you now?” Arthur spreads his arms out.

Rhun stares at him, at the sharp lines of his cheeks, his neck, the way the shirt presses to his ribs on the windy side and flutters on the other, at his spiky hair and bright blue eyes, at his mouth. He feels it still, but from that long distance where all his desires and needs and hopes live. He remembers the fork in the forest path and choosing to go after Arthur. “I think I died after all,” he says, rough and simple.

“My God, Rhun,” Arthur breathes. He closes the space between them and grasps Rhun’s shoulders, then his neck, thumbs pressed to Rhun’s jaw.

“Get off him!” Rhun cries, tearing at Baeddan’s hair and coat, ripping him off the fallen Arthur. Baeddan growls, and Arthur goes wild, knife up, sneering, and lurches forward again—

Rhun closes his eyes tightly, bowing his head, and Arthur puts his face nearer. “Rhun,” he says. “You didn’t die. You’re here, with us. With me. Stop being dramatic.”

It makes Rhun snort helpless laughter. Arthur lets go.

But there’s a shimmer of tears in Rhun’s eyes when he opens them. “I feel like it, though, Arthur. I feel lost. I should be telling Mairwen this. It’s the sort of thing I would confess to her, not you. I always wanted you to think I was impervious to—to hurt. To damage. I wanted you to think you couldn’t hurt me, no matter what, so you’d stay by my side.”

Arthur hisses. “I’m such an ass. And a terrible friend.”

He shakes his head. “I asked too much from you.”

“No, never. You never did. It was just . . . love you wanted, Rhun. I thought giving it to you was weak, or made me weak at least. I’m the ass for holding it against you.”

Rhun eyes Arthur, frowning. Why can’t he remember what happened to change Arthur? It couldn’t have merely been death. He’d give anything to remember. Rather remember Arthur than everything else that happened in the Devil’s Forest.

The two young men—so much older today than yesterday—don’t realize for a long moment that their breathing has aligned. Rhun lifts his right wrist, and Arthur mirrors him, until they hold the binding bracelets together, not quite touching but existing in the same tingling air, pressing warmth against each other. Wind shifts the golden grass around their ankles, murmuring along the rolling hills of the valley with the smell of smoke and clear winter ice. Arthur opens his hand and Rhun follows this time, and they put their palms together, sucking in air at the same time at the strange sensation dancing down their wrists along the lines of their veins.

“It’s like a handfasting,” Arthur says, but the scorn does not reach his eyes. His gaze hooks into Rhun’s, and Rhun almost feels something. His breath hitches.

“You kissed me in the forest,” Rhun whispers before he can stop himself.

Arthur startles, frowning. “I don’t remember.”

Despair is a thing Rhun never thought he’d become used to.

“But I believe you,” Arthur continues ferociously. “I walked out of that forest alive, Rhun, and I feel that way. Alive. On fire. I’m not afraid of you anymore. I’m not afraid of anything.”

“You weren’t afraid of me.”

Arthur eyes him, incredulous. “I was afraid of what you were, and what I thought I was.”

Rhun shrugs one shoulder, feeling dull. “You’ve always been on fire.”

And then here comes Mairwen, hurrying toward them in an ugly gray and brown outfit. Rhun thinks there must be something symbolic about none of them in their own clothes, like everything they were before is so changed nothing fits. It’s Arthur who reaches his other hand to Mair, holding it out as she marches down the hill from the pasture, speeds up to skip and stumble, her own hand reaching until their fingers skim together. Rhun takes her other hand and reels back at the great clap of energy uniting them suddenly.

Their hands grip tighter, and Mairwen gasps, grimacing as if in pain. Between their feet the grass sprouts green, feathering with new spring seeds.

“Mair?” Rhun asks.

Arthur pulls her nearer, so the young men hold her between them, all three pairs of hands still clasped. She shakes her head hard, eyes shut, mouth tightly drawn. Rhun and Arthur share a fearful glance over her hair. Rhun shrugs. Arthur shakes his head slightly.

They wait, watching each other and watching her, watching the thin tracks of clouds stretching in from the west. Rhun is grounded, heels and toes firm to the earth, and it’s good and right here with the two of them, hands held, even if everything outside their circle is broken and pockmarked with secrets.

—they climb together onto the crumbling altar, hands held, all of them trembling as the branches of the Bone Tree tremble overhead, and the skulls rattle, teeth clattering in nasty laughter—

Rhun grunts at the memory.

Mairwen’s head falls back. Color returns to her lips. His own skin is over-warm, but pleasantly so. Like sunshine and laughter. There are three tiny purple flowers flaring teardrop petals at Mair’s feet.

“Violas,” Mairwen says, blinking, her eyes unfocused, then, “I have to ask Baeddan about the Bone Tree.”

“Where is Baeddan?” Rhun asks, eyeing the pasture hill behind Mair, from which she came.

She frowns. “Inside?”

“No,” Rhun says, and Arthur says, “He wasn’t with you?”

“Oh no.” Mairwen releases both of their hands and turns in a rather frantic circle. “Where would he go?”

Arthur snorts. “On a murderous rampage? Or skipping though the fields of sheep, singing old shepherd songs? Who can tell with that one?”

Rhun says, “Home.”

•  •  •

THEY SPLIT UP.

It’s not the best idea, but worse to let Baeddan Sayer wander. Mair heads toward the forest, to loop around the northern edge of the valley in case Baeddan is being drawn to his more recent home; Rhun goes to the Sayer homestead; Arthur gets the rather short straw of searching Three Graces itself.

God, Arthur feels fiery, awake, fulfilled, even after only a few hours of sleep. The sunlight is clear, his eyes see far, and he’s ready to act. Arthur came out of the Devil’s Forest fearless. And that makes him powerful.

What I am is not for you to decide!

It’s a revelation he wishes he’d had years ago.

As Arthur tromps through the grass, down around the barley fields, and skirts the edge of the sheep pastures, he smiles. There always was something wrong with this valley, and he knew it, even if he was wrong about the source. Three Graces is ruled by fear. Fear of death, illness, bad crops, too much rain! Fear of little girls, even, and saints. He remembers thinking only the Slaughter Moon reminds everyone of their place, two nights ago at the sacrifice feast. But it isn’t the bargain. It’s fear. Not of the devil, but fear of change. Fear of doing anything different that might cause a ripple and bring it all down. Fear of a little boy in a dress, because he didn’t fit into the structure of town, the rules.

There was never anything wrong with Arthur.

Except his damn memory. He’s angry he can’t remember kissing Rhun in the forest. A wild thought crosses his mind—You’ll have to kiss him again, then—and it terrifies Arthur, so he laughs.

A small group of girls—a couple of Howells and Bethy Ellis—head toward him from the edge of town. They pause to watch him, whispering behind their hands, and Bethy is sure to touch her lips flirtatiously. Arthur’s smile turns a little too self-satisfied.

And then, around the corner from the last row of cottages comes Alun Prichard, calling out something to Taffy Howell. He stops short at the sight of Arthur, though, gaping slightly before he sets his features in a knowing drawl. “Couch,” he says, “borrowing a man’s clothes from your daddy—or Rhun Sayer’s daddy?”

It’s Alun’s usual sort of jibe, more ignorable than hurtful, but that never stopped Arthur from rising to meet the stupidity before.

Today something amazing happens: Arthur laughs. It fades into a rather condescending smile. “You, Alun, are the last thing that scares me anymore.”

Confusion spreads on Alun’s face, and one of the boys with him claps a hand on his shoulder, laughing with Arthur. Alun shrugs it off, and Bethy Ellis says, “Arthur’s a saint now.”

Because he can afford to, Arthur shakes his head. “No, that’s only Rhun Sayer. I’m still just my mother’s son.” Nobody can change who he is except for himself, not any saint ritual, not an ignorant, terrified town, not a night spent in the forest, not a dress or a kiss. He steps nearer Alun. “My mother’s son who can still beat you to bloody bruises if I want to, and who will say otherwise?”

A scream rips over the rooftops.

All the young people startle, turning toward it and the center of town.

Arthur is the fastest to react, still tuned in to danger, and he runs for the sound.

Shouldering through a crowd at the edge of the town square, he grits his teeth and hopes it’s not Baeddan, though he knows better. More villagers push out of their houses around him, most not noticing who he is, which aggravates him. He elbows past two broad men blocking his way, ignoring the curse from the older one, and finds himself at the fore, surrounded by the worried, frightened, and drawn faces of his neighbors.

Baeddan crouches over streaks of ash and charcoal left from the bonfire celebration two nights ago. His bruised hands cover his face and his back is bowed as he bends over, making himself as small as possible. The tattered hem of his old cracking leather coat flares around him like a skirt. His shoulders are tense as he slowly rocks on the balls of his bare feet.

Arthur’s seen this pose before, and if everyone shut up, he’s certain they’d all hear Baeddan singing to himself, nonsense phrases and rhymes without finesse.

The devil crouches, muttering, and Arthur says, “It’s not as frightening as I—”

The creature thrusts up, hissing through bared teeth at Arthur, who leaps back, long knife out. But Arthur’s hand shakes—he’s too tired, too sore, too furious! “Back off,” he snarls, and the devil snaps his teeth at him, laughing.

“You’ll run and run, but you can’t outrun me, no-saint, never-saint, saintless, saint-free, saint saint saint—”

“Baeddan,” Mair soothes. “Come away with me. Leave them. You don’t need to chase them.”

“He can chase me,” Arthur snaps. “Welcome to try, devil.”

“Ha!” The devil lashes out, ignoring the knife that slices his side, and catches his claws across Arthur’s face.

Arthur strides forward and bends to one knee so he’s at Baeddan’s level. He was right; the devil is muttering softly to himself. “Baeddan Sayer,” Arthur says softly but firmly, as Mair would. “Get up and come away with me.”

“Not-saint, never-saint, is it you?” comes the singsong voice, muffled by his hands.

“It’s Arthur Couch. Use my name as I have the courtesy to use yours.”

“Courtesy!” The devil’s broad shoulders shake with laughing.

It makes Arthur’s mouth twitch with matching humor. He puts a hand on the devil’s shoulder, unprepared for the spark that passes between them. The binding on his wrist tightens, stinging his raw skin. Arthur doesn’t let go. The devil looks up with coal-black eyes, monstrous and lost.

“Why did you come here?” Arthur asks. “Let’s go, to Mairwen.”

“Yes, yes, Mairwen Grace, the Grace witch, where is she?” Baeddan whispers.

“Is it really Baeddan Sayer?” calls a woman.

Half the valley at least is here, and more arriving as word passes. There are the Lewises except for Haf—who might still be asleep at the Grace house—their youngest girl hiding her face in her mother’s shoulder; Cat Dee propped on her grandson Pad’s arm, too wrinkled to see straight; Sayer cousins and both Parry brothers, hungry as they stare at Arthur. The smith, the cooper, and all the butcher’s family, and men spilling out of the pub. Including his father, Gethin Couch.

“Yes, it’s Baeddan,” Arthur says.

“Baeddan?” A different woman haltingly approaches. Effa Crewe, pretty and lithe, a decade or so older than Arthur. Under his hand, the devil growls low and longing.

Per Argall, who Arthur would not have credited with such pluck, calls out, “Tell us what happens in the forest, Arthur. How did you do this?”

Arthur stands, using the devil’s shoulder for support. “I’d love to tell you, Per. But we’ll wait for the others.”

Lord Vaughn steps out of the crowd. He’s with the men who came out of the pub. The lord is dressed simply in brown velvet that blends well with the garb of the men around him, and his brown hair curls reddish in the afternoon sun. He seems younger than before to Arthur. Or maybe Arthur feels older. “How is Rhun, and Mairwen, too?” the lord asks.

Arthur shrugs. “They’ll be along. Tell you themselves.”

Vaughn puts on a sympathetic face as his half-gray, half-brown gaze falls to Baeddan. “Poor creature, poor saint. We would like to hear your story.”

Baeddan stands suddenly, staring at Vaughn, and Arthur almost thinks he’ll attack, but then Baeddan only huffs and laughs gently to himself, then covers the tiny bones sewn into his flesh with his hand. Spinning, Baeddan dashes away, leaving Arthur stunned. It’s not the exit he prefers, but Arthur takes off after the devil.

•  •  •

RHUN IS TOO FAR AWAY to hear the scream, more than halfway up the wooded path to the Sayer homestead. His legs feel strong and steady, his heartbeat firm, though he’d almost rather still be thrashed, too tired to face the day, face his family or any truth.

Leaves fall gently, yellow and orange, pieces of sunlight chipped out of the sky. He walks with his habitual stealth, though he experiences a sudden wild desire to crash off the path, make all the noise he can manage to ruin the peaceful beauty of his home forest. Stopping, he forces himself to take several long, slow breaths. Autumn tastes sharp on his tongue, and the first freeze of winter tightens the back of his throat. This place is worth fighting for, he reminds himself. He has to believe that. The people are as earnest and honest as they were yesterday. As he was before he knew there was a lie at the heart of the forest. He had faith in the rituals, in the sainthood, in himself. He owes them that faith.

A sour smile turns his mouth. Arthur would say Rhun is the one owed, and Mairwen that he’s given enough. But he was made the saint, given the burden of seeing the bargain completed, no matter how much of it was a lie. It was intended as an honor, and he embraced it as one. He can’t let his little brothers down, at least, or his parents.

So Rhun Sayer tries to appreciate the golden atmosphere and merry birdsong, the tiny hints of life that were so absent in the Devil’s Forest. He hums, but only the first several notes of different songs. He can’t quite fall fully into one.

The front door of the Sayer house is open, smoke streaming gracefully from the chimney. If it were all shut up, he’d be able to slip in and grab clothes, assuming Baeddan is nowhere to be found.

“—won’t be long,” his mother is saying when he steps up onto the wooden floor of the house, narrowing his eyes as they adjust to the combination of sparse sunlight and hot firelight.

Silence falls, and a woman gasps. There are four of them sitting around Nona Sayer’s gouged kitchen table: Nona, his aunt Alis, Hetty Pugh, and Aderyn Grace. He has no idea what to say, and so remains quiet.

“Rhun, my God.” Nona stands up from her mismatched chair, but comes no nearer to him; it isn’t her way. Hetty smiles through the weariness scoured under her bright eyes, and Aderyn stares at him as if he’s a ghost, though she is not the one most gutted by their return this morning. That is Alis Sayer, Baeddan’s mother, who walks to Rhun and carefully puts her arms around his neck, hugging him so tightly she goes up onto her tiptoes. He hugs her back, lifting her slowly off her feet, giving what he can. “I’m sorry for the shock of it,” he whispers to her.

“I’m sorry for nothing today,” Alis whispers back, dropping away from the embrace with shining eyes and a damp, pretty smile. She puts her hands to either side of his face and shakes her head happily. “My son is alive. How could I be anything but grateful?”

Rhun isn’t certain how to answer without revealing too much of the tortured existence he suspects Baeddan has suffered these ten long years. He nods.

Nona wipes her hands on her apron. “Tell us now, Rhun. Your mothers have been desperate for too long, and you shouldn’t force us longer.”

“Isn’t it better,” Aderyn Grace says carefully, “to tell us now, before the feast, when there are no children to be frightened?”

It’s the only thing she could have said, perhaps, to solidify Rhun’s determination not to share anything he knows, especially with her, before Mairwen has a chance. His jaw clenches, his fists, too. He says, “Children are the ones expected to give all to the bargain, expected to sacrifice their lives. I think the children deserve this story more than any of you ever could.”

Aderyn pulls back, hands folding at her waist, and Hetty clicks her tongue. Alis Sayer touches her mouth, and her eyes drift shut to let a tear fall from each. Rhun’s mother plants fists on her hips and says, “You’ve changed, son.”

He rubs the binding on his wrist, relishing the sting. “I’m not a boy anymore, that’s all. I understand some things I didn’t before. About . . . people.”

Nona turns an angry glance at the other women, then says to Rhun, “I hoped a valley like this would never teach you such a lesson.”

“It was either this lesson, or death.”

His mother’s face slackens in shock, and Rhun feels only a small moment of shame.

“We’re never promised innocence in this valley,” Hetty Pugh says.

“Such a bargain would require an even steeper price,” Aderyn agrees quietly, studying Rhun with a level, heavy regard. “Where is my daughter?”

“With Haf Lewis,” he says, uninterested in revealing they lost Baeddan and split up to find him.

“Is she so changed as you?”

Rhun stares; he’s not sure. The forest was always in Mairwen, he knows, but the night intensified her, purified her somehow. She is more herself than he thought was possible.

He says, “Mairwen is her truest self now. Maybe we all are.”

•  •  •

THE EDGE OF THE DEVIL’S Forest swells with shadows, and Mairwen holds tighter to Haf Lewis’s hand, stepping fully inside. Haf gasps but joins her, squeezing so tight their bones crunch together.

It feels right to enter the forest again. The air cools and ahead all is quiet. She remembers something warm and peaceful in the center. The altar.

rough gray stone is warm under her fingers. She avoids the dark streaks staining it, maybe from rain or old dead vines, maybe blood. Mairwen imagines laying herself down upon it and falling into a long, relaxing sleep. She’s so tired, and this bed would welcome her bones. Her heart. It doesn’t frighten her, though perhaps it should. A breeze rattles the thorns and dry leaves tossed over the surface of the altar. Dawn arrives soon. An hour or less. Beyond the altar, the Bone Tree is beautiful: white as the moon, layered with armor of bones. Half alive. She could make it fully alive.

“Mairwen Grace.”

She lifts her head.

“I never thought to stand here,” Haf whispers.

Mair transfers her grip to Haf’s shoulder, hugging her friend. “There is an altar at the base of the Bone Tree just like the hearth at my mother’s house, and if you touch it, it’s warm, despite being hard granite. The warmth is the heart of the forest, and magic pulses out through the root system and canopy, the way our blood is in our fingers and toes.”

“You make it sound like it’s magic from a fairy tale.”

“Oh, Haf.” Mair looks into the forest, at the tall black trees and popping green undergrowth, the scatter of tiny white flowers, and every layer of shadows back and back and back. “This is all a fairy tale.”

Haf wraps her arm around Mairwen’s waist. “It’s too real for that.”

“We tell it as a story, the three Grace sisters and the devil. It’s about falling in love with monsters and giving your heart up for your home. We tell it to the boys so they’ll have it like a shield. We tell it to the entire town so none of us question the details of the bargain.”

Wind blows the canopy overhead, littering them with tiny oval leaves, dry and brown and pale yellow, and Haf shudders, making an involuntary move to run back out into the sun.

Just then, the bruising ache along Mairwen’s collarbones pulses, and she thinks she hears the creaking sound of branches growing and leaning in a harsh wind. Mair closes her eyes, focuses on the pain until it dissipates. What is she becoming?

beneath her sheer veil, the girl puts a finger to her lips for quiet

Mairwen closes her eyes, reaching out with her hand as if she can grasp the memory.

A tiny voice calls out “Mairwen Grace!” from deeper in the forest.

Haf startles, tugging away. “What was that? Who is in there?”

Mair walks forward, crunching over a bed of fallen leaves. It was not Baeddan, but a high, lovely voice, like a bird. She smiles. “Some bird women, I think, tiny creatures with sharp teeth. Be careful.”

“Oh,” murmurs Haf in awe.

“Mairwen Grace!”

Darting toward them from branch to branch is a drab sparrow woman. She flits and leaps in a stunted arc of flight. “Is that you, Mairwen Grace?”

“Hello, lovely,” Mair calls, holding out a hand palm-up. The bird alights upon it, hands grasping at Mairwen’s wrist.

Haf covers her mouth with her hands. “How wonderful and terrifying,” she says through pressed fingers.

“This is my friend Haf Lewis,” Mairwen says.

The bird woman grins, displaying all her needle teeth. “Though she broke our forest, any friend of the Grace witch is a friend of mine.” Then she stands, her bare feet tickling Mair’s palm, and puts her hands to her waist, where a braid of red-brown hair circles her like a belt.

“It is an honor to meet you, Lady Sparrow.” Haf even goes so far as to curtsy neatly.

The bird woman adores it. She whistles happily. “I like you. Do you sing?”

“Later,” Mairwen says. “What do you mean, I broke your forest?”

“You stole our god and gave us none new!” the bird woman accuses.

“Your god?”

“The witches call him a devil!” She stretches her wings to their full expanse: near a foot, perhaps, if one is measuring generously.

“What happened to the old god of the forest?” Mairwen cries out.

The memory remains an echo of her voice, just the question, again and again.

Mairwen strokes the bird woman’s long feathers, puzzling through what she knows. “Baeddan. The twenty-sixth saint, he stayed in the forest and . . . became the god. That’s what we call the devil.”

“It is uncomfortable in the forest today. Our heart needs a heart.”

“My mother always said he was a god, not a devil,” Mair says, glancing to Haf.

“Yes, yes, you understand, pretty girl, Grace witch. Oh, you are wise as you are beautiful.” The bird woman offers a flirtatious, sneaky smile.

Mair draws the bird woman nearer to her breast. “How long has there been a devil in your forest, do you know?”

“The devil changes, again and again, new boys, new hearts, new songs.”

“And before the devil, what then?”

The bird woman cocks her head, very like a bird. “There has always been a devil.”

“Did . . . did the devil always change?” she asks carefully. “The first one, the old god?”

“No,” the bird woman trills. “The old god left the heart tree, the tree at the heart of our forest, and everything was different.”

Breathless, Mairwen holds the bird woman close, recalling Baeddan’s taste for them, and strokes her long primary feathers. The rhythm of her petting meets the rhythm of her heartbeat, the rhythm of her breath and the itch across her chest. She feels it, too, in her fingers, and along her spine, and flushing over every inch of her skin. Changing her. Mair tosses the bird woman lightly up, and as the creature takes to flight, she crouches. Though Haf hums in confusion, Mairwen unlaces and knocks off her boots, then places her bare feet against the earth of the forest. It’s so cool and comforting her shoulders relax and she lets her head fall back.

The old god of the forest broke free of the Bone Tree. Mairwen would risk all their lives to wager that moment was the start of this bargain. The old god and the youngest Grace witch. The story says they loved each other, but can the story be trusted at all?

Mairwen Grace stands there, toes dug into the Devil’s Forest, eyes shut, and the wind shakes her hair even as it shakes the canopy of autumn leaves. She is terrified, suddenly, and trying to bury the fear.

“Mairwen, I don’t know what’s happening,” Haf murmurs.

Mair snaps her head up, looks down at her feet. Spring-green tendrils curl out of the dirt to tease at her toes and ankles, blooming even smaller star-shaped purple flowers.

•  •  •

SUNSET IS AN ELABORATE TRICK tonight. Wispy clouds tumble along a horizon scratched with vibrant pink, and the sky is the rich purple that used to put Baeddan Sayer in mind of violas but now only reminds him of his blood.

He leans in the lee of the church, disappeared in shadows, awaiting the Grace witch.

Arthur Couch, tall and mean and bright as the morning star, runs interference for him, standing between Baeddan and the rest of the village, on one cocked hip and drinking from a mug of wine. He offers some to Baeddan, who drinks it fast as water. The tartness lingers on his tongue as if the wine has a life of its own.

Baeddan cannot close his eyes, or all of this will vanish. He’ll be back in the burning heart of the forest. The Bone Tree twisting all around him, tiny threads of roots piercing his ankles and wrists, penetrating the skin over his ribs, looping and winding through his bones in a ferocious agony. The forest ate his flesh and bones, spat him out as this thing, this devil with nonsense songs and lullabies looping in his imagination, faces and names confused together, and that great need pushing him on and on. The words find themselves, and he understands them, when he listens: Find the saint, the saint, the saint. Find him.

It’s difficult, nearly impossible, for Baeddan to look at even Arthur Couch, who was not the saint, never the saint, and do anything besides strike. When Rhun Sayer arrives in the village square, dark and handsome in fresh, fitting clothes, the anointed saint, Baeddan cannot breathe for the compulsion racking his heart. He thrusts his fists into his eyes, grinding painfully until starbursts explode in the darkness, until he sees streaks and spots of white and blurred red.

The hiss and grind of the crowd talking, shifting, waiting, drinking, setting out food and dragging long tables into place, children yelling, running feet, all of it swarms together in a rush like the rush of blood in his ears, like a roaring wind blowing through the corrupted branches of the Bone Tree. It overwhelms him. He chews his own teeth, grinding, clicking, clicking, oh yes—the click of teeth and tiny branches, the click of delicate hooves, click, click, click—

“Baeddan Sayer.”

He shudders. Tendrils of forest magic tickle at his face.

“Baeddan,” she says again. Mairwen Grace. He looks wildly at her, then snatches the scarf tied across her chest, dragging her nearer, and kisses her.

There come gasps and protestations from all around, but not from Mairwen, who allows it, who holds his face, thumbs stroking his temples. She is a piece of him, his heart, and Baeddan can breathe again, can think about things other than dragging the saint to the altar so his bones can be tied down, so his bones can be made the flesh of the forest. The Bone Tree rises in his mind, growing between them, lashing their hearts together.

The voice of the forest quiets.

She jerks back. Her eyes—oh, they are so many delicate brown shades, darkening together, blackening, he is sure.

His heart pounds. Mairwen Grace tightens the scarf crossed over her chest, tucking it more firmly around her waist.

She faces the village. “I am Mairwen Grace,” she calls. “You all know my name, but so did the Devil’s Forest. It knew me. It recognized me, for I have the blood of Grace witches and the blood of Carey Morgan, the twenty-fifth saint, running through my veins.” Mairwen touches her mouth, bringing her fingers away with blood.

“Because of my blood, I was safe in the forest, and I found its secret.”

Baeddan stands abruptly, knowing she means him. He bares his teeth, hungry.

Arthur Couch appears at his right, Rhun Sayer at his left. Each young man puts a hand on his shoulder, and Baeddan shivers at the flow of binding power between them all. It itches under his skin.

Mairwen continues. “We three found the Bone Tree, where Baeddan Sayer has survived these ten years, bound to the forest, the sacrifice we sanctified and sent inside to run and die. For that is the true destiny of the Three Graces saint: to become the forest devil until his seven years are up.”

The crowd mutters and grumbles, staring at him, at Baeddan. They don’t want to believe. Some point. Some make signs against evil.

“This is Baeddan Sayer, or what’s left of him.” Mairwen’s voice is hot in his ears, and he sees flashes of who he was before: laughing, merry, dancing, a boy ready to face his destiny.

“What makes you the best, Baeddan Sayer?” the lord asks. Baeddan is the third boy to answer, and he has no idea what to say.

He shrugs and smiles his best charming smile. “I don’t know if I am, my lord, but I know I’m willing to try, and die, for Three Graces. If that’s what it takes.”

“What’s left of all of us,” Baeddan sings quietly.

The Grace witch—his witch—glances back at him, then goes to the nearest bench and lifts one side, dragging it loudly across the cobblestones. She drops it and climbs onto it. Rhun moves immediately to her so she can balance with a hand on his shoulder. Around them, the faces of villagers stare wide-eyed as skulls, blanched and eager, frightened, excited, and hungry, hungry, hungry.

“Here is what I know,” Mairwen says, putting her hands out. “We went into the forest, found Baeddan, and at the altar in the roots of the Bone Tree we made a charm to bind our bargain. I know the saints don’t die immediately: They are bound to the tree, their hearts sacrificed to the heart of the forest. I know once there was a god of the forest, but that god is gone. Dead, or vanished, or fled, I cannot say. The story isn’t the whole story.”

“How long will your charm last?” says a bearded man wearing a dull yellow jacket.

Baeddan digs his strong fingers between two stones of the square.

“I don’t know, but not long,” Mairwen answers. “The forest has no heart.”

Mairwen is a pillar of light standing over them all, the setting sun making a torch of her brambled hair. Her bare feet are streaked with dirt, and Baeddan understands why the two of them are the only people in Three Graces without footwear of any kind: the forest, the forest, the forest.

“We should let it end,” Arthur Couch says. Baeddan agrees.

“We can’t,” calls a gangly woman with sprouting black hair.

“We shouldn’t,” responds the woman beside her—her sister, Baeddan knows, but he cannot remember their names.

Arthur joins Mairwen on the bench. “Look at us. Three Graces never changes. We never change. So we don’t live. This place might as well be dead! Nobody risks anything, but without risk, there’s no life. If nothing burns, then nothing burns.”

“Burning hurts,” calls Beth Pugh. Others nod around her, but plenty frown, plenty grip each other’s hands and hold tight to their families.

“So does love,” Arthur calls out in irritation.

“Since when do we listen to this boy?”

Baeddan doesn’t see who calls it, but Arthur makes a dismissive hand gesture. “Since I ran into the Devil’s Forest and survived, Dar.”

“We live. We love,” says the lord with the curling brown hair. “We know the risk of death, Arthur. It is possible to understand risk and danger without flinging oneself into it.”

Arthur shakes his head. “It’s a vicarious understanding. You understand through the saint, only that one night. Don’t you all remember the tension, the anticipation last night? When else do you feel so deeply?”

Mairwen touches his arm. “There’s more. The whole story should be told before we make choices.”

“Do you remember the whole story?” Arthur asks. His irritability makes Baeddan laugh.

Aderyn Grace asks, “How did you bind the bargain, Mairwen?”

“Yes!”

“Tell us!”

Mairwen puts her right arm in the air. “This charm. Binding myself, Arthur, Rhun, to the Bone Tree.”

“Does it mean the bargain can be met without losing one of our boys?” Alis Sayer asks, glancing at Baeddan.

“No.” The tired voice is Rhun’s. He doesn’t join his friends on the bench, but merely shakes his head. “There are twenty-five skulls on the Bone Tree.”

Gasps sound everywhere, and cries of shock.

Baeddan closes his eyes. His ribs ache, his fingers dig at the cobblestones. He grinds his jaw. “They’re all dead!”

Those near enough to hear him fall silent.

“Baeddan?” It’s Mairwen, leaning around him. She touches his temple.

“Don’t you see? Don’t you remember?” He clutches his head, backing away from them all. Baeddan shakes his head and bares his teeth again, eyes tightly shut. Their skulls laugh at him, twisted to the Bone Tree. He snarls, and shouting breaks out: questions and accusations, both hard and tremulous.

“Stop. Baeddan.”

Mairwen catches his face again. Behind her is her mother.

Baeddan remembers Addie Grace, and as he stares at her bright brown eyes, her dark hair, her still hands and round hips, at the certainty in the shape of her mouth, he thinks of her when he was a boy. When she was sweeter and sadder, heavy with Carey Morgan’s child.

Carey Morgan, the saint before him.

“Do you know, Addie?” Baeddan says in a growling voice he likes but hardly recognizes—it is the voice of the forest devil, the voice of the stalker, the killer, the monster bound to the Bone Tree. “I saw Carey Morgan last, when I ran, when I was your saint. He hunted me, green and sick yellow, horns on his head and claws and sharp teeth! He stalked behind me, one step at a time, teased me and scared me, and when it was nearly dawn he dragged me to the Bone Tree and . . .” Baeddan raises his arm, hand out like claws, as if he holds some large man by the neck. “Ah! He cut my chest open! And the forest grew out of me. Oh, it hurt, it hurt, and . . . he was . . .”

Mairwen puts her hands on his bare chest, smoothing down along the furrows of scabbing and old scars. “My father was alive until you took his place. You became the devil after him.”

Sucking a ragged breath, Baeddan nods, and says it louder for all those listening. “He was alive until ten years ago. Carey Morgan lived as the forest devil until I took his place, and his bones were strapped to the Bone Tree, his skull hung with all the others!” Baeddan laughs, desperate, delighted. “All the others!”

“Is that how the bargain is kept?” Mairwen asks, as if she does not already know.

“Yes, yes. A sacrifice every seven years, a life to bind it to the Bone Tree, so the power roots into the land, spreading like a disease throughout the valley.”

“How do you know?” asks Aderyn Grace.

“It’s the only way. There must be a heart!”

Murmurs of uncertainty and disbelief scatter throughout the villagers. They’ve all turned to shadow as the sun vanishes, leaving only the pale glow of the creamy horizon.

“Aren’t you the devil? Tricking us?” asks a young girl. Brave, though her chin lifts defiantly and her hands are clenched against fearful trembling. The small tawny girl who screamed at him from the square.

Baeddan shudders and crouches, hunkering down like the monster he looks. He gouges his chest with sharp nails and nods. “I am the devil, pretty girl, yes. Yes.”

The girl keeps her brave face, and a boy as tan as she but taller and older, asks, “But sometimes the runner lives.”

Other voices take up the protest.

“Some live!”

“John!”

“Col Sayer! Griffin!”

“Tom Ellis!”

“Marc Argall!”

“I don’t know! I don’t know!” Baeddan cries. “But someone dies. The saint dies, because the saint runs in anointed for the tree! It is how I knew John Upjohn and—and Rhun Sayer. They were already bound to the Bone Tree when they ran into the forest.” Baeddan covers his eyes, then his ears, as the villagers ask a dozen questions. Rhun Sayer joins him, kneeling at his side. Rhun’s shoulder touches his, and Baeddan grinds his fists into his ears.

•  •  •

MAIRWEN IS ENERGIZED AND WILD, eyes too wide, unable to breathe through her nose, but only suck in air like she’s tasting it all, needing the flavor of everything. The forest whispers her name again and again. She feels it like a thread of lightning from the thorns growing over her heart, down into her viscera.

She asks her mother to explain the charm to everyone: death, life, Grace witches in between; explain the blessing shirt and anointing. Aderyn does so, and it is little surprise to most folks, who’ve seen the Grace witches charm the square and sing blessings for their entire lives. The anointing oil is made from herbs collected from the edge of the forest, the fat and bones of the previous Slaughter Moon’s horse sacrifice, and a drop of Grace witch blood. That is how she was taught by her mother, who was taught by her own mother, and back and back until the bloodline sprang from the elder two Grace witches.

“What else did your mother teach you, that isn’t in the story?” Mair asks.

Her mother studies her, a familiar impatience on her face. “That the devil is a god, the old god of the forest, as you said, and that the saint goes in to keep the heart of the bargain strong. That all of us, our bloodline, are called into the forest finally, when it is our time to stay there. And . . . that a Grace witch can undo it all.”

“I’ve always heard the call,” Mairwen tells everyone. “Since I was a child. Because my father was already part of the forest. His heart.”

“You risked undoing it all by going in,” Aderyn says.

“If I hadn’t, Rhun would be dead.”

Nobody is willing to argue with that. Not yet.

But the town does argue over Baeddan’s insistence that all the saints have died, even those who ran back out. They left the valley because their memories were too terrible, because they longed for further adventure, and would never, ever return without telling their families! Some say perhaps others died, strangers. Or it’s the hearts of the Grace witches from the past two hundred years binding the charm in between saints. Or Baeddan is simply wrong—look at him, how broken he is. None agree. Lord Vaughn says he’ll look through his family’s books for information, but he doesn’t know if it will help.

Without the old god to ask, Mairwen wonders if there’s any way to know. Except to walk back inside. To remember. Her stomach churns as she listens to the voice of the forest in her mind and heart.

Mairwen Grace. Mairwen. Daughter of the forest.

The townsfolk ask her the same questions again and again, and she answers, again and again, though the answers never change. She doesn’t remember enough for more.

She’s starving, and as bread and meat are brought out, as rosemary potatoes fill the air with savory smells, Mair stands apart, breathing hard, not quite able to be a piece of the whole. Of all people, it’s Arthur who takes Baeddan to the trough of meat and aids him in selecting a piece to devour. Arthur remains all sharp edges but seems less interested in stabbing people indiscriminately. Mairwen can’t help but like it. Rhun stays beside her, solid and silent, unsmiling. She touches her shoulder to his. She shivers, but isn’t cold.

“Hungry?” Rhun asks. Mair nods. He goes and brings back food and two knives with which they stab and eat potatoes and roast from the same bowl, shoulders together. Hot food in her belly, Mair feels less ephemeral.

Arthur and Baeddan sit together, devouring twice as much as Mairwen and Rhun, and Mair notices children are creeping nearer and nearer, especially the Sayer cousins. Baeddan eats with his hands, but carefully, eyeing the small boys and girls, occasionally showing them his teeth, even with meat in them. Arthur winces once or twice, and snaps something at the children. Baeddan snatches a hunk of bread from a little Crewe girl, who stares wide-eyed, then frowns at him and demands it be returned with a tiny, insistent white hand.

More Sayers cluster around as Baeddan and the girl negotiate, including his mother, Alis, who slides a hand through his dark hair. She jerks back, cupping her hand protectively, and Baeddan’s father, Evan, inspects it. Baeddan himself hunches over, covers his ears, and again it’s Arthur soothing him.

Rhun notices Mair stop eating, and takes the rest for himself. He eventually joins the Sayers around Baeddan, and Mairwen slips away, glad Rhun chose to seek out the comfort of his large family. She searches for Haf Lewis and finds her with her husband-to-be, Ifan Pugh, sharing a bowl of food too.

Ifan swallows awkwardly when Mair arrives, and balances his knife across the lip of the bowl in order to touch the back of Haf’s neck.

Haf leans toward him, probably without realizing it, and Mairwen smiles very slightly. She says, “What do you think, Ifan? What happened to the surviving saints?”

“If you hadn’t gone into the forest, I’d say your family drags them back in to that altar,” he answers, and Haf gasps in the closest to fury she’s capable of.

“Ifan Pugh!” she hisses.

He stands his ground silently.

“He’s right,” Mairwen says. “If it were me, at least I’d have all the answers.”

She is the one receiving the most suspicious glances, the one apart tonight. If they only knew she was transforming, they wouldn’t even listen. They’d assume she was corrupted by the forest at the very least.

Maybe she is.

Mairwen Grace has never felt more like a witch. But what to do about it? How to behave? What does she even want to do? Save the bargain, but also save the saints. It doesn’t seem possible.

How does Aderyn fit in so smoothly? she wonders, looking for her mother. Aderyn the witch, husbandless mother, has never stood so apart as Mairwen has always done.

The best way to look for Aderyn has always been to look for Hetty Pugh’s tall frame, and sure enough, the two women and Bethy, too, and Nona Sayer and Cat Dee stand together. Aderyn is staring back at Mairwen.

She starts for her mother without parting words with Haf and Ifan, but three steps on, she hears her name.

Rhos Priddy waits there in the torchlight, a bundle of baby quilt in her arms. Tiredness is plain in her eyes and poorly braided hair, but Rhos smiles prettily. “Thank you, Mairwen,” she says, dropping one shoulder so Mair can see into the shadows of the bundle where Rhos’s baby sleeps. “She’s alive because of you. I know you’re upset—everyone is upset—but I can’t help not being so.”

It warms tiny pockets of Mairwen’s heart she hadn’t realized had gone cold. Lips parting in awe, she touches a finger to the baby’s nose, then one hairless eyebrow. The baby is so small, so soft. Mairwen thinks of those terrible hours rubbing her warm, touching thin cheeks and ignoring the sunken little eyes as best she could, and the gasping, choking breath.

“We did the right thing,” she says quietly, and Rhos Priddy squeezes her elbow.

“Mairwen, may I have a moment?”

To her surprise, it’s Lord Vaughn. He offers a soft, comforting glance for Rhos, who curtsies and goes. Vaughn gestures toward the cemetery wall, and Mairwen attends, studying the flash of torchlight in his paler eye. At the edge of the square, Vaughn says, “I hope you’ll come help me look through my family books. You might see something I don’t. Since you’ve been in the forest.”

“I don’t remember very much.”

“Really?”

“Part of the charm, I think, is to make us all forget.”

“But why?”

“If the saint survives, and remembers, he’ll remember the face of his devil is the same as the last saint?”

Vaughn purses his lips. “Would that make a difference? Are you sure there isn’t something else to forget?”

Mairwen closes her eyes and sees the girl in the white veil again. “Maybe. Ghosts or old spirits. The first Grace? There was a girl in a veil, and I don’t know who else she might be. My imagination. Or myself, even.”

The lord touches her shoulder. She remembers him suddenly, when she was a very small girl, picking yarrow at the base of the mountain. He helped her for a moment, crouched there, smiling at her as if she were the sun. Curling hair, young brown eyes.

It couldn’t be him, twelve years ago: It was his father, the last Vaughn. Both eyes in her memory were brown. “What was your father like?” she asks.

Surprised, Vaughn hesitates. “My father?”

“He looked like you. Do I look like my father?”

The lord pinches the end of a curl at Mairwen’s jaw. “His hair curled, too. He liked the forest. He wanted to go in. I remember that much.”

“Were you at his ceremony?” Mair thinks Vaughn would have been thirteen or so then. Maybe old enough.

“Yes. I’m sorry you couldn’t grow up with a father.”

She closes her eyes. Tears are pricking at her lashes. “He was alive until I was seven years old. Until Baeddan went in. My father. I didn’t know.” What if she’d ignored everything and run inside as a child? Could she have saved her father as she saved Baeddan?

Baeddan is not yet saved, reminds a voice inside her head, snarling rather like Arthur.

“I must go,” she says, and dashes off, out of the center of town and into the dark side streets heading north. A cold wind blows, chapping Mair’s lips, and she sucks on them, tightening the scarf over her burning collarbone.

Mairwen Grace. Come home.

Daughter of the forest.

Mairwen slows down when she hears her name in a real voice behind her. Aderyn’s voice. The moon is not yet risen, but the arc of the sky already fills with stars. Mair stops at the smaller pasture gate. Dozens of sheep huddle together.

She props herself against the fence as her mother catches up. Aderyn carries a long tallow candle, the flame protected by her cupped hand, and sticks the base of it to the gate post. She studies her daughter, frowning.

Finally, Aderyn says, “You’re changed, Daughter.”

“Rather a lot,” Mair admits in a whisper.

Aderyn cups Mairwen’s face, smoothing her thumbs along Mair’s cheek. Her head tilts to the side, making Mairwen think of the bird women, but it’s sorrow and loss adding weight to Aderyn’s frown, not curiosity.

Her mother pulls Mair into a hug, and Mairwen returns it, careful to hold her mother just away from her breast, where the thorns are ready to pierce her skin.

“May I examine that bracelet you showed everyone?” Aderyn asks as she draws away.

Mair puts her hand in her mother’s, who angles it toward the candlelight. Aderyn leans over it, skims a finger against the tiny, sharp thorns.

The angry skin below heats up at the touch.

“This is well made,” her mother says. “You must have been in a rush. What excellent balance, though. What is the death of the blessing? Your pain?” Aderyn’s eyes lift to Mairwen’s, curious and proud.

Mairwen nods. She wonders what color Carey Morgan’s eyes were. When did her mother fall in love with him?

“You’re sure you won’t be trapped the way poor Baeddan Sayer is? Change like him? If he was the sacrifice, and now you three are, mightn’t you turn into a creature like him?”

“Not yet,” Mairwen says slowly.

“And John Upjohn’s hand bones. My, what a gruesomely effective charm you’ve made, Daughter. I suppose I should not be surprised, given your love of the shambles.”

Gently tugging her hand away, Mairwen frowns at her mother. The firelight pulls red from Aderyn’s hair, just as it does her own, and flickers in the mirrors of their black pupils. “Mother, did you know Rhun would die?”

Aderyn frowns.

“Did you know, when you comforted me and said if love could save anyone it would be Rhun? When you gave me the dress and let me be the one to anoint him? Did you know you were making me into the instrument of certain death?”

“Mairwen—”

Mair backs up, out of the glow of candlelight. “Did you lie to me? You’ve always known the saints die, haven’t you? I’ve tried to work out any other way, and can’t. They always die, and always have. Do we kill them? The Grace witches? Don’t lie to me now, not about this. Not when my own father—” She turns her head away, grief cracking across her mouth and wrinkling her nose.

Silence beats between them, and several sheep wander over, nuzzling at the fence. Mairwen scrunches her eyes so tightly shut she sees pinprick stars. “You’re the Grace witch. You know how it all works,” she whispers. “You didn’t tell me everything. You knew it’s real death. You knew there was no hope for Rhun.”

Aderyn grabs her shoulders. “Be calm.” She takes Mairwen’s chin and forces her daughter to look at her. “We are the Grace witches, and we protect this valley and this bargain. It’s what we do and always have done. We made the bargain with the devil, and now we uphold it. The anointing oil contains our blood. It ties them to the Bone Tree, because a Grace witch’s heart is buried there too. We do not kill them or drag them back inside. They return to the tree because they are anointed. It’s fixed by the time the saint accepts his crown. I would have told you everything afterward, passed this full burden on to you. Shared it between us. You could’ve understood then, calm in your grief and understanding of true sacrifice, what it means to maintain the bargain. It is the only way to be a Grace witch.”

“Oh God, Mother!” Fury coats her whisper now. She tears free, knocking into the fence, startling a few sheep. The stars overhead waver exactly like the candle at her elbow.

Her mother tries to touch her again, but Mairwen says, “No,” deeply and furiously.

“You’ll understand when you think on it long enough. Listen. You’ll see you’ve always known in your heart, because of who you are. You’ve always understood the forest. It is life and death! Both. You love it, long for it. And I’ve always allowed you that, never tried to take it away, because you were preparing yourself. The only lie we perpetuate is hope, because hope is the thing that lets the saints do what they must. By destroying the hope, you’ve destroyed the entire bargain. Everyone will suffer for it.”

“But Rhun is alive,” Mair says.

Aderyn sighs. “If only I believed you love him so much and everything else so little that you would sacrifice everything else for him.”

“Have you ever loved anything at all?”

“How can you ask me that?”

“Do you know what my father’s bones feel like?” She says it through clenched teeth, growling, desperate as a monster.

Her mother folds her hands before her. “I love you. I have only ever allowed you to be free, to do what you must for yourself and the town.”

“I don’t believe you. How could you let him be the saint if you loved him and knew? If I’d known I’d never have let Rhun run.”

“You’d have let some other boy do it?”

“I . . .” Mairwen shakes her head, stunned, furious, and even afraid. “I don’t know. No! It’s wrong to trick them. It’s always been wrong! Everyone should know the full truth and then if they still would be a saint, or still be willing to live the way we do, they should know the real price. What our bargain is truly built on. How dare you keep this secret!”

Whirling, Mairwen makes to go, but her mother grabs her arm.

“You’ve broken it now, yourself, and you will not be thanked for revealing the truth, Mairwen. People don’t want the truth.”

Mair jerks free and stares, horrified, at Aderyn. Her mother stares back, just as angry.

The moonlight shines all around, and Mairwen feels the forest tugging at her.

She says, “Mother, do you know what happened to the old god of the forest when the first Grace died?”

Aderyn plucks the candle off the fence, leaving behind a cooling ring of wax. “You already know everything I know about the bargain, Mairwen. I’m going to stay with Hetty again tonight, but tomorrow I will take back my house.”

When Mairwen is alone in the darkness, pressed near the dozing sheep, she sinks to her knees and hugs her stomach, mouth open in a silent scream.

It hurts too much: her burning eyes, the sting of the charm at her wrist, the sharp pulse of her collarbone, and oh, her heart, her heart! Her toes press into the cold earth and she bows her head. All those ragged, short brambles of hair tickle her neck and ears, a reminder of how she’s changed, and she huddles there in the dark and silence. She snaps her jaw closed, grinding her teeth, lips back, shoulders hunched. There is such a blaze across her chest, stabbing with persistence.

Her skin splits, and she feels the birth of hooked thorns, flaring up from her bones.

Trickles of hot blood slip down her skin, running below the scarf and under the collar of her wool shirt to pool in a thin line along her breasts where her bodice presses tight.

•  •  •

RHUN IS SURROUNDED BY SAYERS. They’ve overtaken an entire long table, with Baeddan in the middle, Arthur at his side, and Rhun at Arthur’s. Then the rest: cousins and uncles and aunts, gathered around and pressing near, sharing bowls and drinks. Brac, his most recently married cousin, shares a mug of beer with him. So encircled, Rhun almost manages to feel normal. The lying is over, and it’s peeled a few of the hardened layers away from his heart. Three Graces knows what he knows, and even though nothing’s been decided, the folk need time to accustom themselves to the revelations.

But he can’t quite relax into his great clan. He’s unsettled and keeps catching himself looking north, toward the forest. Like that’s where he belongs, not here with his family. The Bone Tree waits for him, reaching cold and white against the darkness. Saint, it whispers.

“I’m proud of you.” Rhun the Elder places a hand on his shoulder, as if sensing it’s better not to hug his son.

Rhun the Younger can’t respond. If he opens his mouth, the voice of the forest might spill out.

Elis, his little brother, carefully creeps up behind Baeddan, leaning on Arthur’s back so his short, tight curls flatten against Arthur’s borrowed shirt. Arthur shifts to make better room for Elis, but the boy won’t get closer to Baeddan.

“Elis,” Rhun says softly, and holds out a hand. His brother leaps at the chance, and climbs up onto the bench with Rhun. Half of Elis’s gangly nine-year-old body sprawls on Rhun’s lap. Grounding him here. So long as somebody sits on him, Rhun can’t get up and run back in.

It didn’t feel like this when the sun was up.

He looks to the moon in the east. It rose late, no longer quite full.

“Do you remember what you told me before the Slaughter Moon?” Elis whispers.

He does, and nods. I love you, and I love all of this, and that’s what you should remember, Rhun said, before going home to collapse in bed, at peace with his own death. It’s close to what Baeddan told him ten years ago.

Elis puts his head back against Rhun’s shoulder and says, “I probably will remember this more, dinner with the forest devil.”

“Me too,” Rhun confesses, managing a smile. Out of nowhere, he thinks he’d like to see what Elis is like in seven years, or ten, or go to Elis’s wedding.

Brac is telling a story about missing boots, and Uncle Finn interrupts constantly to correct him, in a familiar pattern. They’ve told this story a hundred times before. Baeddan suddenly slams his hand down on the table and says, “But the dog was under the bed!”

Silence crushes down the Sayer table in a long wave. It was the final revelation of the story, told a minute too soon.

Baeddan breathes hard, the tips of his sharp teeth showing.

Then Brac laughs, and so does Arthur, and along down the lines of benches the rest of the family joins in.

“That’s right,” Finn drawls. “The dog was under the damn bed.”

Sayers move on to a new memory, and Rhun closes his eyes and tries to ignore the forest moaning in his head. He’ll never sleep tonight. Is this what it’s like for John Upjohn, always? Not fitting, afraid of what he’ll face in his dreams? If Rhun goes to Mairwen and the Grace house, will the hearthstone and Mair’s embrace quiet the Bone Tree?

When he opens his eyes, Gethin Couch is there, slinking out of the shadows toward his son. He says, “Arthur.”

Arthur turns, eyeing his father. Rhun braces himself.

Crossing his arms over his chest, Gethin says, “What a man you are, my boy.”

Arthur laughs meanly. It’s Rhun’s favorite laugh, though it shouldn’t be. Arthur says, “How can you tell? You’ve never been a man, Gethin. I know the difference now, between the look of a man and the truth of one.”

Shock and anger pull his father’s mouth open. “Oh, do you?”

“Someone pretending to be a man clings to the trappings. But if you are one, you don’t have to cling. You just are yourself.”

His father frowns. “If you say so.”

“I do, and that’s what matters.” He shrugs, casually turning back to the Sayers.

For a moment, Gethin remains, but nobody is paying him much heed. Rhun murmurs to Elis to reach for his beer, watching Arthur’s father with the corner of his eye. Finally, Gethin scoffs under his breath and leaves.

Rhun nudges Elis out of the way and says, “Arthur?”

He shoots Rhun a skinning look. Then grimaces. “Sorry. It’s him, not you.”

“I know.”

“Elis, you’re in my way,” Arthur says, grabbing Elis by the waist and dragging him across his chest to set him down beside Baeddan. Elis’s face tightens and his brown eyes go all wide.

Baeddan peers through the dim torchlight. “I don’t remember you.”

“I wasn’t born when you ran,” Elis whines.

The smile of delight on Baeddan’s face makes Elis—and Rhun—smile a little in return. Baeddan says, “Something new!” reaching to poke at Elis’s cheek. Arthur scoots nearer to Rhun, so their arms brush when either moves.

“Do you hear the forest?” Rhun murmurs, head tilted toward Arthur.

“No. You do?” Arthur spits a curse. He grabs Rhun’s knee, fingers biting through the wool trousers. “I won’t let you go back in.”

He studies Arthur’s face, his pressed lips and furrowed brow, the certainty in his blue eyes, and remembers—

“Stop it! I’m not letting you die here!”

“I don’t want to die, but if it’s that or you do, I’d rather die a thousand times.”

“So would I, you idiot. Why should you get the satisfaction?”

The devil laughs his high, looping laugh and cries, “Oh, you will both die, for trying to die for each other! The forest is whispering so many things, and your battle tastes so good.”

Arthur raises his eyebrows in surprise. Rhun grabs his hand.

The sun is minutes from rising, but the devil blocks their path.

Rhun’s throat aches and his chest heaves; beside him Arthur bends, spitting blood onto the dead ground. The Bone Tree rules over this grove, and over the entire forest, like a king crowned with moonlight and robed in the bones of twenty-five dead boys.

Rhun closes his eyes.

Arthur says, “It’s the devil’s turn to die.”

Mairwen bares her teeth. “You aren’t helping, Arthur Couch!”

“Baeddan Sayer is already dead,” Arthur says. “I’m sorry, devil, but you are.”

“Dead, dead, dead and breathing,” the devil hisses.

“Stop remembering,” Arthur says, shuddering.

Rhun puts his hands on the altar, sweeping dry vines off its surface and flaking blood and ancient black rot. “The forest needs your heart,” moans the devil beside him.

“I can’t stop,” Rhun answers. “It’s pressing against me, but if I go inside the forest, it will end.”

“Listen to me instead of the forest. Listen to Baeddan with your little brother, and all the family.”

“I’ll try.”

“I’m not leaving your side.”

“I’m not leaving your side, now or ever, Rhun Sayer. Do you hear me?”

“I’ll hold you to it, Arthur.”

Arthur lifts his chin, glaring through a smear of blood staining his eyebrow and dripping into his left eye.

In front of the whole Sayer clan, Arthur puts his pale, strong hand on Rhun’s cheek, and Rhun breathes carefully, thinking of nothing but the touch, nothing but the sounds of conversation, someone laughing. It’s good, and he’s here, alive.

“Let’s go find Mair,” Arthur says.

•  •  •

THE NIGHT IS COLD, AND Mair huddles against the sheep fence. Her face is sticky from tears, her eyes swollen, but she breathes calmly now. With her eyes closed, she can hear the forest whispering at her, calling her.

Mairwen Grace. Daughter of the forest.

All she smells is her own blood, and sweet manure and dry grass. There is rain on the wind too.

She reaches out, shivering, and grabs the grass. She pulls herself forward, crawling, toward the forest. It’s where she belongs. And unlike John Upjohn, it’s where she wants to be. The heart of the forest, curled against the Bone Tree’s roots; they will be her cradle against the wind. There she can sleep, finally relax. She is so very weary.

“Mairwen!”

She stops.

It was not the voice of the forest.

“Mairwen!”

Rhun.

She shudders hard; yes, yes, the saint can go with her into the forest. Together they will put a heart in the—in the—

she lifts the veil and says

“Mair, is that you?”

Arthur’s voice, joining Rhun.

Their boots hit the earth hard, as if they’re running for her, and she feels the vibration through the valley.

Mairwen climbs to her feet. The forest needs her.

“I’m coming,” she whispers.

“Mair,” gasps Arthur, and then Rhun touches her hand.

An ache cracks her bones. The thorns on her chest seem to tighten and grow at the same time. The forest whispers such a demanding song that her knees falter and she slips to the ground again, crouching there. She shakes, head lowered, teeth clenched, fighting the forest, bleeding, until arms come around her. She lets herself be lifted off the earth and cradled against Rhun’s chest. He walks away from the village, and Arthur is with them the whole way home.

•  •  •

ALL THREE TUCK THEMSELVES UP into the dark, secluded loft in the Grace house. Mairwen farthest in, against the wall, where the thatched roof meets the limewash. Rhun holds her freezing hands while Arthur piles blankets on her, hovering like a worried old man.

“Do you hear it?” she whispers, eyes closed, for there is little to see but the glint of their eyes and shadowy outlines.

“I do,” Rhun says, and Arthur at the same time says, “No.”

She clutches Rhun’s hands, then frees one to reach for Arthur. “Baeddan?”

Rhun says, “With my mom. She, and the whole Sayer clan, can handle him. He seems calmer, after eating, and after being around them all.”

“He told a story he remembers from before the forest,” Arthur says as he plays with Mair’s fingers, spreading them out, tracing the length of each.

“Good.” Mairwen pulls both young men toward her. “I am so tired,” she murmurs.

“What happened?” Rhun does not give ground, remaining in his awkward crouch, half on the mattress, half off. “I hear the forest, but it did not do this to me.”

Irritated he won’t just cuddle against her, let her sleep, she says, “I spoke to my mother, and she knew they all died. She knew you had to die, Rhun! She says Grace witches have always known the saint dies! It’s our duty to make sure they’re anointed, to hold up the bargain. We lie.”

Arthur snorts. “I knew it would be like this.”

Rhun slides him a glare, but the darkness swallows it.

“I did,” Arthur continues. “We should’ve set fire to the Bone Tree and then we’d be forced to make a new bargain. One we know all the rules to. We have to break it, even if it can’t be remade. Nothing else will stop this hold it has on you. I’ll go back in and do it now,” he boasts. But he, too, is tired. Drained the way Mairwen is drained. He leans closer to Mair in order to press the back of her hand to his heart.

“We might have to,” Rhun says.

“Not tonight,” Mairwen murmurs, tugging at them again.

This time Rhun takes a moment to remove his boots and climbs in beside her, opening his arm for her to curl against his side. Arthur hesitates. “Do you think I can stop both of you, if you decide to listen to the forest?”

“I won’t leave you,” Rhun says, mirroring Arthur’s earlier promise.

Mairwen nuzzles her blankets. “It’s quieter behind your buzzing. Come closer.”

Underneath his spikes, Arthur wants nothing more than to be loved by these two people. Something tells him, though, that a future is as impossible now as it was before.

“C’mon, Arthur,” Mairwen murmurs.

He stretches next to Rhun, between both of them and the rest of the world.

•  •  •

MOONLIGHT CRAWLS ALONG THE TWISTED black branches overhead, glowing along shelves of fungus and patches of scarlet lichen. They’re all headed toward each other: Arthur and Rhun, muddy and damp, follow a bird woman who shrieked at them, singing songs created of Mairwen’s name, until they agreed to follow; Mairwen pants with a heady combination of exhilaration and fear on the heels of a devil who grins at her with sharp teeth, touches her with tenderness, and laughs and laughs and laughs.

“There, there!” crows the devil, throwing his arms out. “I told you, Mairwen Grace, that I could find your saint.”

The bird woman flares her wings to turn, fleeing for her life, and Arthur skids to a halt. Rhun puts a hand on a nearby tree, shoulders heaving because of the wound on his thigh slowing him down. “Mair,” Arthur says, but all Rhun sees is the devil. He notches his ready arrow.

Even as Arthur and Mairwen slam together in a relieved embrace, the devil lashes out, and Rhun shoots.

His aim is true as always, and the arrow hits the devil’s shoulder, piercing his black leather coat.

“Rhun!” cries Mairwen.

The devil roars, tearing the arrow free, only to be hit with another.

Arthur hears the note of distress in Mairwen’s voice—he hears her fear not only for Rhun, but for the devil, and anger makes him shove her away to grab his last long knife. He joins Rhun in the attack.

Everywhere the devil’s skin breaks, purple blood bursts forth, and green vines, tendrils curling and trailing tiny leaves and tinier petals.

The devil is unhurt by the wounds, though he screams and roars, though he bleeds. The devil stabs Rhun with his own arrow and knocks Arthur back with a hard punch. Rhun brings out his ax, and the devil catches his wrist, squeezing almost hard enough to break bone. The devil grins, dancing in place. “You will taste good, saint. You will fill this forest with life again.”

Arthur leaps onto the devil’s back, arms around his neck. The devil swings, throwing himself around and against Rhun.

“Stop it, now,” orders Mairwen, dragging at the devil’s arm.

The devil steps toward her. “Go, get out of here,” she says to the boys. “Keep running.”

“No,” the devil growls, pushing her away to face Rhun again.

“Go!” Mairwen screams.

Rhun barely hears through his focus. The devil is unaffected by blood loss and injury, looming over him and Arthur with smears of blood over his face. There are antlers in his hair and thorns growing from his chest, and his black eyes are impossibly dark, reflecting nothing of life or light back.

“We aren’t leaving you,” Arthur says.

But Mairwen reaches around the devil and slaps her hand flat against his chest. “Baeddan Sayer. Stop.”

Something shifts in the devil, and the devil blinks. Awareness, like a man might have, not a monster, is the thing Rhun sees, and it terrifies him more than anything else, though he does not know why.

The devil shakes like a wet dog. “Mairwen, Mairwen, I cannot stop I will eat them I want their bones I want to be free!”

Mair slips around to the devil’s front, nudging Rhun away with her boot. “I know. I know. Take me away from here. Let me help you, Baeddan.”

And Rhun hears it, suddenly: The name penetrates his battle rush. His cousin, the saint, his beautiful cousin who taught him to love everything. He sees it in the line of the devil’s crooked Sayer nose, the shape of his shoulders. “Oh my God,” Rhun breathes.

“God!” echoes the devil in despair.

Rhun twists his wrist out of Arthur’s hand. “It’s not possible.”

Arthur says, “It’s a trick. It must be.”

“Saint!” cries the devil, and Rhun leaps away. The devil claws at the saint, tearing at Rhun’s back.

Rhun’s knees give out and he falls through a fire of pain. Arthur barely catches him, and Mairwen slaps the devil’s chest again, demanding his attention.

“Go! I’ll be fine—I have been these last hours. Trust me,” she says to Arthur.

“Damn it,” Arthur says, and helps Rhun up, running with him, away from Mairwen.

They crash off, limping and tripping, and Mairwen says, “Baeddan, show me the most beautiful place in your forest.”

“You imagine beauty in a place like this?” His voice is grating and low.

“You’re beautiful.”

Baeddan’s eyes catch moonlight, revealing stars in them: endless light, cold and distant. But like the stars, they make her long to be nearer.

He growls, and she feels it under her palms.

The devil moves so quickly she gasps. He’s a dozen paces away, crouched, glaring at her. “You’re tearing me apart. The forest whispers one thing, you whisper another, and I want—I want to listen to you. But the forest is my devil. The forest is all I am. It is my bones and heart and . . . How can I listen to you?”

“I love the Devil’s Forest,” Mairwen confesses. “If it is your bones, I love your bones. If it is your heart, I—I love your heart.”

“Witch!” he cries, and runs back to her, takes her hand, and pulls her with him. They dash through the forest, and the forest bends out of their way. Trees lean aside, branches curl into an arched corridor, roots withdraw and sink into the earth to clear the path. Mairwen’s boots fly over the ground, her heart beats fast as sparrow wings, and the devil holding her hand laughs brightly.

He takes her to a grove of silver trees, naked to the sky, reaching slender branches up and up. There is no scatter of leaves on the forest floor, no ungainly roots, no underbrush. It is empty except for slender white vines, looping lazily among the trees, spiraling up trunks and dripping from the low branches, covering the earth in curls and knots.

“This?” Mairwen says. It is not what she imagined when she asked for beauty, but the starkness is inspiring.

“There is room for me here,” the devil says, “and the trees are quiet.”

She cannot tell if it is pity or love she feels.

Then the devil—Baeddan Sayer—smiles wickedly. “And also this.” He spreads his hands, standing in a cross, and his coat opens over his bloody, strong chest. He leans his head back, and at the tips of his clawed fingers tiny flowers of light bloom.

Mair gasps.

The lights bob in the air, blinking in a heartbeat rhythm. More appear, all around them. Mairwen turns slowly, amazed. When she’s made a full revolution, Baeddan is right before her, and he takes her hands. Lifting one eyebrow in charming invitation, he sweeps back and pulls her into a dance.

No music plays; there is only moonlight and vines and a gentle wind shaking the bare trees. There is only their footsteps and the brush of her heavy blue dress against his legs.

It is as beautiful as she’d hoped.

Baeddan’s hand is cold around hers, and those wicked thorns hooking out of his collarbones are very near her face as they dance. She smells blood, earthy and thick, like the ground after an autumn rain; cold granite in his breath; a shadowy sweetness she wants to taste again. Her front is colder than her back, just as it was when she stood half in the forest and half out the other day. She leans nearer to him, dancing carefully, but with a lightness she’s unused to, as if in this moment nothing else matters.