Rhun wakes first, as the sun rises. Mairwen sleeps with her head on Rhun’s shoulder, an arm stretched over him to rest on Arthur’s sternum. Rhun opens his eyes, warm and comfortable with his two most beloved friends on either side of him. Sunlight creeps in through the small square window, and Arthur’s hand is under his own; they curled together in the night. He turns his head. Arthur’s face is right there, lashes pale gold and fine on his cheeks. His nostrils flare slightly as he breathes sharp and wakes up, eyes flashing open onto Rhun’s.
The spark in them is anger, as always, but Arthur does not look away this time, or pretend he doesn’t realize how intimate this situation is. He holds still.
“You grounded me here,” Rhun whispers. His mouth is tacky from sleep.
Arthur lifts his eyebrows and turns his hand under Rhun’s, clasping it. The thorns of Rhun’s bracelet prick Arthur’s bare wrist. “I won’t let you fade away, Rhun Sayer. Or transform into a monster. Or turn bitter. You are the best, and—no, listen. You’re the best to me. I only care for what I care for—you know that—and I care for you. And Mairwen. I know what this valley is now, and who I am, and I know who you are and what matters. I know. I won’t let go of that, and I won’t let go of you.”
Rhun nods. He grips Arthur’s hand and tries not to show too much of his heart. His life was over, and then he learned everything was a lie, except this is true and always has been true: He loves Arthur Couch.
From his shoulder Mairwen sighs in her sleep. Both he and Arthur glance at her. Her skin is splotched and pale, and the hollows around her eyes are too purple. Her lips bloodless. Her hair lank and messy. He remembers his dream, even the part that wasn’t his own memory: She danced with the forest devil as if she belonged there.
“We have to keep her safe too,” he says to Arthur. He hugs her tight to his side and grunts at a strange poke where her chest presses to him.
“What?” Arthur asks, leaning up.
Rhun shifts, and though Mairwen clings to him, he gently rolls her over, and as she wakes groggily and with an uncomfortable sneer, he peels off her scarf. It’s wound behind her neck, crossed over her chest, and tied around her waist again. Blood smears her skin below it, and is crusted to the scarf.
A row of delicate thorns cut up out of her skin, along the sweep of her collarbones.
Arthur hisses over Rhun’s shoulder. Rhun is stunned, frozen, and Mairwen finally wakes fully, stretching. She winces as her skin pulls tight, and one hand flies to the thorns. They’re tiny, deep brown but fading to a reddish tip like rose thorns.
“Your eyes,” Arthur says.
Rhun looks up and he sees it too: Mairwen’s eyes are blacker throughout. As if while she slept pieces of brown were plucked out and replaced with shards of darkness.
“What about my eyes?” she asks with measured calm, too calm, the calm of a person who is anything but.
“They’re darker,” Rhun says.
Mairwen sits, head barely clearing the low thatched ceiling. She fists her hands in her lap. “I want to see. Your mother has a mirror, doesn’t she, Rhun?”
“Are we different?” Arthur asks before Rhun can do more than nod.
Fear twists Rhun up, and he turns to Arthur, despite having just spent several moments gazing into Arthur’s eyes. But Arthur looks as fine as always. Except for his wrist.
All three of them lift their wrists with the charm: The bracelets seem to have grown into their flesh. For Rhun and Arthur it’s a gentle melding, skin grown up against the braided hair and thorns and bone.
Mairwen’s wrist is a gauntlet of hardened skin, several inches wide, reddish and brown like healthy bark. Her fingernails are tinged blue, but she says she’s not cold.
“Why is this only happening to you?” Arthur asks, sounding as if he’s offended.
“I’m the witch,” she whispers. “Our hearts already half belong to the Bone Tree. I was supposed to let Rhun die after I anointed him, but instead I gave the rest of my heart to the forest.”
Rhun frowns and holds on to her shoulders, studying her face for more differences. He touches her hair, digging his fingers gently against her scalp. No crown of thorns or antlers that he can find, and he strokes down her neck. Her wide new eyes project uncertainty, which he has never seen in Mairwen Grace before. Rhun kisses her.
Her hands flutter against his chest for a moment, then she settles them on his shirt. He looks, and her eyes have drifted closed.
“Your heart wasn’t yours alone to give, Mairwen Grace,” Arthur says.
• • •
CLOUDS PULL HIGH ACROSS THE valley, peaceful and calm. The gray backdrop brings out gold in the fields. Mairwen puts herself between Rhun and Arthur as they leave the Grace house for the Sayer homestead, her hands in theirs.
She is not afraid, though she senses she should be. She is excited, thrilled even, for the bargain she made must be working better than she thought. Maybe she can hold it, inside of her, the way Baeddan Sayer did, and perhaps it will last seven years without a death. Because Arthur is right: She couldn’t give all her heart to the forest. Too much is here, with Rhun and Arthur and Haf and her mother, and even Baeddan. All the people in Mairwen’s heart lending it greater strength, grounding it in the valley. Perhaps there will be a way to make this the permanent solution: Every time more than one person could be bound to the Bone Tree, and so no single person must die. Together, their hearts, their love, might be strong enough to overcome the need for sacrifice.
Certainly Mairwen seems to be holding the heaviest portion, but she can take it. She was born for this, born to hold the blessing between life and death. Saints and witches.
She laughs to herself, earning a frown from Arthur and an anxious glance from Rhun.
“You sound like Baeddan,” Rhun says.
That makes her stop so fast she swallows air, stumbling.
The young men catch her by her elbows, leaning in protectively. She says, “I feel good, not mad, not confused like him.”
It’s even true.
Mair closes her eyes, shielded by her friends in a pocket of shade and solidarity. She listens. Her toes brush the grass, and the pulse of her heart thumps gently down into the earth. A cool breeze tickles the fringes of her hair, the tip of her nose, and her lips, her ears. She slides her hands into Rhun’s and Arthur’s again, and feels the heartbeat spread among them.
From the earth rises a whisper, unlike a sound, more of a sensation thrilling through her blood. It does not whisper in words. It warms her belly and tightens her skin, especially along her spine and breasts. She desires this thing from the bowl of her hips.
“Are you all right?” Rhun asks.
She tilts her face toward his. Yes, Rhun Sayer would do. She would devour him and leave his bones at the altar.
Mairwen gasps, wrenching away from both of them. They start toward her, but she shakes her head. “Stop, please,” she says, holding her hands to the sky. Oh, what she would give for a pure, hot beam of sunlight.
“It is like Baeddan,” Arthur says. “Isn’t it? This binding is turning you more like him. Part of the forest.”
“Something like that,” Mair admits, unmoving. But still it could work. She can take it. She can survive this.
“Damn it.” Arthur strides to her and grips her shoulders, forcefully pulling her toward him. “This can’t happen. I’m not going to let it.”
“You can’t stop it,” she whispers.
He glares at Rhun, and Rhun says, “We’ll find a way. Mairwen, he’s right. We won’t let you die in my place.”
Arthur’s mouth compresses. “Neither of you is dying. What do you eat and drink, what do you dream of, that makes you so willing to give everything for this bargain? Do you think I don’t understand how much it matters, that I want to let it take anything from this valley? Do you think I don’t care about babies dying or famine or bloody, pus-filled boils? I understand, but I won’t let it win. None of us is dying. Do you understand me? Or do I have to put it in your own language?”
He kisses Mairwen, and she gasps at the abruptness and heat of it. Arthur’s kiss is different from before, not angry, despite his anger, but demanding something from her. Demanding she rise to meet him. If Arthur is fire, his kiss should burn and consume her, but instead it makes her want to live, too. Like he’s the powerful sunlight she wished for moments ago, and when his kiss ends, she’s standing again in the shade.
Her mouth stays open, but she has no idea what to say. His kisses have always been a challenge or a dare, never their own conclusion.
Arthur turns his eyes to Rhun, who steps back under the force in them. “You did this,” Arthur says. “You both made this thing happen, between the three of us. I thought it was only the forest, whatever exactly happened at the Bone Tree, but it was more inevitable than that, wasn’t it?” And Arthur grabs the front of Rhun’s jerkin and kisses him, too.
Mairwen laughs, delighted. Her hands come together in one ferocious clap, and she folds them under her chin, watching. Arthur has no idea what he’s doing, clearly, and knocks his mouth against Rhun’s instead of using what he knows from kissing Mairwen. She swells with affection for both of them. Her blood flows smoother, losing a measure of thickness, and the throb in her collarbone feels more like bruises and grinding teeth than pain.
Rhun tentatively puts his hands in Arthur’s hair, and Arthur leans away, jaw muscles shifting, pink flaring at the points of his cheekbones. He chews his bottom lip once, and Rhun smiles.
With a huff, Arthur stomps away from them. He waves and snarls, “Just think about that, you suicidal idiots.”
“Arthur.” Rhun starts after him, but Mairwen grabs his arm and turns them in a skipping, happy circle.
“Stay with me, Rhun,” she murmurs, singsong. “He’ll be back. You know he will. He only has to find a way to gnaw up whatever he’s feeling and grow spikes over the top of it again.”
“I don’t want him to grow spikes over it.” Rhun looks after Arthur, whose loping progress is fast taking him over the pasture hills toward Three Graces. His golden hair and skin and dark-brown jacket blend in with the autumn fields, and Mairwen likes thinking he fits in for once, finally.
She says, “You like his spikes—I know you do—or you wouldn’t be so in love with him.”
And the slow smile Rhun gives her is so full of blossoming joy and acknowledgment, for a moment Mairwen forgets everything else.
• • •
THE SAYER HOMESTEAD IS HOPPING with Sayers, like fleas in warm weather, especially when Rhun and Mairwen step off the path and into their goat yard. Rhun is still thinking obsessively about Arthur.
Saint Branwen and Llew bound up, barking, and Mairwen laughs a little. Rhun feels their barking in his chest and goes onto one knee to embrace the dogs. They hit him hard, strong in their welcome, but Rhun holds himself upright, scratching their shaggy necks as their long legs scramble at his thighs. He feels an echo of pain slashing down his thigh, the memory of red-eyed monster dogs, and killing them with bare hands and arrows. Rhun shudders, missing Arthur, who stabbed the dog tearing at Rhun’s spine. Arthur, who kissed him, not only inside the forest, but out here in the valley, where it means something different. Who is on fire to save everybody, but especially Rhun. It’s a good thing, and Rhun won’t let go.
His father, Rhun the Elder, whistles for order, and the hounds obey immediately.
He and Mairwen are surrounded by Sayers, mostly men and boys, for that’s some odd trick of the bloodline. “Hello, son,” the Elder says, smiling the same easy smile Rhun himself used to so frequently sport. “Mairwen Grace,” continues Rhun’s father, tentative but warm. For years he kept distant from her, not because she’s a witch, but worried it would be too hard to lose her when they lost Rhun at his Slaughter Moon. Now that it’s over, he’s unsure how to be.
Mairwen puts a hand to her breast, over the hidden thorns. “Mister Sayer,” she says.
“Where’s Baeddan?” Rhun asks.
“Slept up in the loft with us!” Elis Sayer chirps, tugging Rhun’s sleeve.
Rhun the Elder nods his chin up at their outbuilding. “Was still sleeping at dawn. He looked more like himself, you know. Like being at home is healing him.”
“I want to see him,” Mairwen says.
“Maybe we should let him sleep,” Rhun murmurs, glancing toward Mairwen’s collar.
“Come eat. Non’s got food out still, since this whole lot can’t settle,” Rhun the Elder says.
“All right,” Mair agrees. She firms up her expression and heads for the house.
“Sure, Dad. I’m hungry. I could eat a bear,” Rhun says, directing the last toward his little brother. Elis wrinkles his face at such a ridiculous idea.
Rhun the Elder smiles tightly and leads the way.
A wake of Sayer cousins streams after them, pressing behind Rhun and Mairwen, none of whom quite cross the threshold, afraid of Nona Sayer’s ire. She’s clanging around at the hearth while Delia Sayer, Rhun’s aunt, prepares a chicken carcass for the pot. Brac’s wife, Sal, is stirring a large bowl of cream, seated on one of the odd Sayer stools.
“Ah, you’re here!” Sal says, pushing bright curls off her face with the back of her hand. “We were just talking about who we think killed the surviving saints.”
Nona hisses with frustration, slamming a lid onto the savory-smelling pot simmering over her fire.
Mairwen says, “Grace witches.”
“You must be joking,” Nona says, fists on her hips, though the rest of those present are slower to react, shocked.
“Do you have a mirror Mair can use?” Rhun asks, diverting conflict. Since Arthur kissed him, he’s been walking a razor’s edge of hope.
“I do,” his mother says. “Think of another culprit, Mairwen Grace. Your mother is a witch, not a devil.”
Mair shifts into a stance Rhun knows well: stubborn and challenging. She says, “My mother knew our blessing ointment for the saint would tie Rhun to the Bone Tree, dooming him. It creates a binding charm that draws the saint back to the tree even if he survives his night, even if he leaves the valley. That’s as good as killing them, to do it knowingly. Rhun’s blood would have been on my hands, because I made the charm. That is the Grace legacy.”
Nona stares at Mairwen with hard eyes. “My boy isn’t dead. That’s your legacy.”
Mairwen opens her mouth but says nothing. She stares at Nona.
“The mirror’s upstairs in my trunk, girl. And pick out a nicer shawl if you would like.”
With a twirl, Mair heads up.
Rhun’s mother sends everyone else away too, so it’s only herself and her son. Then Nona turns to the fire like she’s nothing to say after all, and Rhun stares at her shoulders. At the strength of them, their broadness, the length of her neck and the curls of black hair sticking to it. “Are you still bound to the tree, son? Is what she said true?”
“Yes,” he answers. “Though it’s different, because of Mairwen, and everything.”
Suddenly, Nona spins faster than Rhun has ever seen her move, and her clenched jaw is so like his own, the carmine in her eyes sparking like his. “I am so very proud of you for ending it, Rhun Sayer. You ran and you fought and you changed everything. No matter what happens now, whatever the bargain becomes. I couldn’t bear to change my life outside the valley, for the risk it would be, so I only ran away. But you do what you know is right, for everyone, every moment. I am so proud of you.”
Rhun’s knees loosen and he sits. He draws a ragged breath. “It was Mairwen and Arthur who made me, who changed it. Not me.”
“I don’t believe you. They went into that forest for you: They might have begun the change, but they never would have without you.”
“I lived my life expecting to be a saint. It isn’t such a great sacrifice, if you never expected to have a future.” Rhun shrugs one shoulder. “That’s why I’m not better. The best. I didn’t really give anything up at all.”
“Rhun, you gave yourself up every day, again and again. I watched it constantly. Always choosing other than yourself. My selfless boy. I wish you’d been more selfish. I hope you’re learning it now.”
“Maybe. I—I love Arthur.”
And? her eyebrows ask.
“Mom, I mean . . . I love him like you love Dad, like I love Mairwen, like . . . I kissed him. He kissed me.”
Nona presses her mouth into a line and stares at him.
Rhun’s stomach finally catches up with his confession, twisting hard.
“Well.” Sighing, she slumps down onto the bench beside her son. “Well.”
“It’s just love, Mom,” Rhun whispers. His hands clench because he wants to touch her hand, pat her shoulder, or give her a hug.
“Nothing is just love,” Nona says almost as softly.
• • •
THE SECOND STORY OF THE Sayer house is one long room divided by wood panels into two. The front is Nona and Rhun the Elder’s bedroom. Gray sunlight stretches through the large windows, casting the room in cool pastels. Mairwen crouches at the top of the ladder, listening to the painful conversation between Rhun and his mother. Her old, easy love for Rhun grows up again as she listens to Nona reveal how proud of him she is, and it flares hot as the sun when Rhun tells his mother about Arthur. She’s ready to fall back down the ladder and get in Nona’s face if the woman makes even the slightest move to chastise him.
But Nona doesn’t, and Rhun falls quiet, and Mairwen touches the thorns on her chest, pressing hard enough to make them ache. She loves him so very much, and Arthur, too, and she isn’t going to let anything happen to either of them, or Haf or her family or the Priddys or Pughs, or to a woman like Nona Sayer, who never will talk about her past but was brave enough to leave it and find a future.
That’s what Mairwen has to do: carve a future for everybody in Three Graces.
Standing, Mair goes to the small trunk beside the bed, opening it. The mirror rests on a narrow shelf carved into the left side of the trunk. Its handle is made of bone, yellowed with age, and the mirror itself is backed with silver and mother-of-pearl.
Taking a fortifying breath, Mairwen flips the mirror around.
The first thing she notices are the stark lines of her cheeks that never were so blatant before. Her eyes are only slightly sunken with weariness, and the eyes themselves large as ever. Bowed lips plenty pink, and when she bares her teeth, she likes the shine of them. Her chin seems daintier now, because of the raw mess of her hair. It falls in jagged curls and weird layers, a true bramble.
And that blackness in her eyes. It’s a spiral pattern in one and random starbursts of black in the other. Mairwen shudders, loving it, even as it scares her.
She holds the mirror closer, at an odd angle, to inspect her hairline, to dig in with fingers to find any hint of more antlers or thorns ready to sprout from her skull. Nothing. Lowering the mirror, she unties her shirt and reveals the collarbone. The base of the small thorns are crusted with blood, for she hasn’t washed them well, and her skin tinges bluish.
She traces the path they create across her chest. The skin is so sensitive, like her lips. She wants to know what it feels like to have someone else touch her there, with gentle hands or mouth.
For a moment, Mairwen is lost in a forest growing up through the walls of the Sayer house, vines of thick green, bending branches full of emerald and dark purple leaves. The forest whispers in her ears, tickling her skin from the inside out. Her chest expands, her hips roll, and her head falls back as the forest promises to bring her to its heart, again and again.
The veil slips against her braids, against her shoulders and arms as he gently pulls it away. Through the white lace she sees the black flicker of his eyes, the shimmer of his form, always changing—antlers, fangs, fur, soft skin, four delicate legs, bare feet, hands that grip her waist, tendrils of thin green vines circling his arm, his neck, long hair dripping tiny flowers, feathers spilling along his spine, and wings, even, stretching like the night sky—and she longs to be brought inside all of that, a piece of him, when the veil is gone.
She gasps as it falls finally away, and smiles at the creature. Then a whisper in the wind makes her blood cold. He is gone. She’s alone, except no—
Who?
What is this. When is this?
Mairwen faces the girl in the long white veil, and the girl lifts her hand, points at Mair, and says—
A footstep on the stairs startles Mairwen awake, and she is only a young woman holding a mirror, kneeling in someone else’s bedroom, staring at herself. Her eyes are blacker now, and her gums ache as if her teeth are loose. She pulls back her lips to see her eyeteeth grown just slightly longer and sharper.
“Haf is here,” Rhun says. “She needs to show you something.”
• • •
ADERYN GRACE STANDS IN THE center of her cottage, hands raised to bring down a dried bundle of yarrow. A persistent memory has caught her midaction, an image from her dream—a dream she’s experienced the past three nights.
In the dream, she’s pressed flush to the wall, laughing, as a man kisses along the curve of her neck. He smells like rain and summer flowers, and Aderyn opens herself up to him as if nothing in the world belongs inside her as well as he does. When he pulls back, taking both her hands, she sees his face and it is beautiful.
But when she wakes, his features fade to a blur of affection and distant memory. The Grace witch does not enjoy uncertainty, nor muddled memories. She’s never been inside the forest—why should her mind be affected as her daughter’s is?
“Aderyn?”
Hetty ducks around the kitchen table and pokes the witch in the shoulder. It startles Aderyn from her contemplation. “I’m all right. Only . . .”
“The dream. It’s your daughter, stirring up memories of Carey, and the early sacrifice, and all the questions. You know.”
Aderyn turns to Hetty and takes the other woman’s freckled face in both hands. “I hope it does not hurt you.”
“How could it? I’ll never resent any part of your life, especially a part that gave you Mairwen.”
The Grace witch smiles sadly, but with all her heart, and gently tugs Hetty nearer, turning her own head to allow Hetty’s lips access to her neck. She will replace the memory with hotter love.
“Ladies.”
The voice thunders through Aderyn’s ribs and she stumbles away from Hetty. Her eyes squeeze tightly closed as memories rattle her bones, jerking her heart into stillness. Memories of sex and purple flowers and her thrill at getting away with something terrible.
“Addie, I need something of yours,” the voice says, rich and crawling up her spine like a lover’s scratch.
Hetty screams.
Framed in the cottage doorway is Mairwen’s father.
• • •
ARTHUR COUCH STANDS AT THE edge of the Devil’s Forest.
Daylight streams through the canopy, despite the thinly overcast sky, reflecting motes of dust and forest rot hanging in the air. A few remaining brown and gold leaves shiver in the tiny breeze, like the trees are waving to him.
“Arthur Couch!” sings a bird woman, swooping toward him. “Did you miss us?”
“Hello, little thing; no, I did not.”
She snaps at him and darts away—past him, out into the gray sunlight.
Arthur spins to watch her. In her wake, two more bird women fly out. They giggle and spin, one lifting high to soar like a hawk. Right out in the open, far beyond where he stands at the forest boundary.
Fear makes his heartbeat flicker.
If they’re able to fly free, what else? Next could be a thing like that deer that stumbled out when the bargain was weak before. There are so many worse things hiding deep in the forest, and worser still that he might not even remember.
This must be done, and now, before their binding breaks. Before Rhun or Mairwen answers the Bone Tree’s call.
Arthur hefts the ax in his left hand, and fingers the fire steel in the pocket of his coat.
When he was a child, he swore he’d run in and offer his heart to the devil, to prove he was the best. It turns out the devil never wanted him, but not because there’s anything wrong with Arthur. All the wrongness in their valley was born in the original bargain itself. Those rules for the sacrifice somebody decided mattered—only a boy and only the best—passed down as traditions, creating a tight web of what it means to be the best boy, and barriers dividing people. That way of life, that system, nearly strangled Arthur and would have murdered Rhun Sayer, the only person in Three Graces who definitely didn’t deserve it. Born from the lie that you can be both a saint and a survivor.
If the only way to keep it from happening again, to unravel the story back to the beginning, is to burn it all down, then that’s what Arthur will do.
He walks back into the Devil’s Forest.
• • •
BAEDDAN CROUCHES BETWEEN TWO TALL, happy trees just beyond the Sayer homestead, and listens to the call of songbirds. There are no words in their singing, no longing, no danger. Just two birds. He glances up at the canopy, trying to spy them. Leaves fall gently, drifting in the windless forest air, and beyond them the branches splay against a gray sky, with only hints of the sun. It’s quiet, peaceful. Baeddan can hear his own calm breathing, and none of his heartbeat.
He covers his ears to make certain, eyes locked above, slowly crossing the sky for the birds.
There! A flit of a wing, too purposeful to be a fluttering leaf. A flash of rusty brown.
Humming, Baeddan walks on, following the bird. He feels free. Someone or something else has drawn away his burden.
Perhaps he is finally dead, he thinks, except the birdsong is too lovely, too much like home.
He woke this morning in a pile of boys and dogs, surrounded by hay and discarded furniture, wrapped in musty wool and his face pressed to a fur blanket. Little boys and cousins younger than him but seeming older all snored together, mouths open, some sprawled, others curled, and it reminded Baeddan of the roots of the Bone Tree, and all their teeth were flowers and their skulls would soon show through withered, dead skin, their hair twisted into vines.
He pushed free and stumbled down the ladder from the barn loft, out the back, where he knew without thinking a rear door opened to a path leading higher up the mountain before it curved around southwest to join with the Upjohn homestead.
It seemed a good path.
His humming mars the birdsong, but a crow joins in, and Baeddan laughs as loud as it calls. He smells smoke and he’s hungry for it, for something—anything. Reaching for a nearby tree, he slips his fingers under a fan of pale-orange lichen. He stops. No. He does not eat such things, not out here. Not . . .
Baeddan squeezes his eyes shut. His hunger fades, replaced by discomfort where his bare feet are growing cold. “Baeddan,” he says aloud. Will the name ever stick?
Where is the Grace witch? he wonders, glancing around for a flash of white—no. She has brambled brown hair and dark eyes and—
The heart of the forest suddenly beats in his chest.
Thunderous and abrupt.
Saint.
Saint.
He steps in time with it, turning down the mountain. The voice of the Devil’s Forest is hissing and chaotic, pulling at him and others. . . . Baeddan feels it expand suddenly, its need pushing outward and larger than before. Toward him.
He can’t understand, but the shadow inside him grows.
What is his name?
Sighing through his teeth, he thinks he should go back to—to the Sayers. Baeddan Sayer. Yes, he should find . . .
Birds dart overhead; they giggle and laugh. Not birds, or not only birds, but—
No, he should go this way.
He does, following his instinct down a slope of conifers. His feet slide through the deadfall and he slows, quieting his progress. This requires silence, the stalking, the slipping behind, coming around, listening, listening for—
Saint, the forest says, in a heavy, demanding dark voice this young devil has never heard before.
• • •
HAF WAITS IN THE SAYER kitchen, hands wrung together. For a second, Mair sees the veiled girl standing in Haf’s place, but she blinks and her friend is there again. Mairwen lists toward Rhun, who holds her elbow.
She feels so strange, and the memory of the veiled girl hangs in her thoughts. It was not her memory, nor Rhun’s, nor Arthur’s, but a forest memory. Was it the first Grace and the old god?
“What happened to the old god of the forest?” she asks.
“Mairwen?”
Startling out of her thoughts, Mair focuses on Haf as Rhun sits her down at the table and puts a plate of hot bread in front of her. “Yes,” she says, lifting the bread.
Rhun sits beside her, and Haf on her other side. They lean together around Mairwen, conspiratorial. Haf murmurs, “Look,” and puts out her light-gold hand, palm-up. A smear of blood mars the delicate skin between her thumb and forefinger, around a puncture wound. “I caught it on a splinter last night, stumbling in the dark, and washed it, bound it, went to sleep. It was like this when I woke.”
“The bargain should heal this sort of thing overnight,” Rhun says.
Mairwen stares. At the fire, Nona stirs up the coals beneath her cauldron and nestles potatoes along the edges. Sal has returned to stirring her bowl of cream, and Delia is stuffing the chicken she cleaned at the far end of the table. All quiet, all listening.
“I said it was temporary binding,” Mairwen says in her normal voice, if a bit tighter for worry.
Sal’s eyes flash to Mairwen, then Delia, then Mairwen again. “But so soon?”
“Do you feel all right?” Rhun asks Mair, nudging her plate closer to her hand. “Eat.”
Nona stands. “It’ll last as long as it lasts. Then we’re on our own.”
“Unless we make a new bargain,” Rhun says. He’s looking at Mairwen, not his mother.
“If my binding won’t hold it, if my heart won’t, like this, then death is the only way,” Mair says. “We can’t just shove someone into the forest to die.”
Rhun puts his hand over hers. “It isn’t that simple. If I’d known the truth, I might have volunteered anyway. If I’d been raised that way, knowing what it would mean for everybody else. Without the lie.”
“Rhun,” whispers Haf.
He glances at her. “Bree wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for the bargain. And when I was small there was a pox that rolled through overnight, and vanished. How many might it have killed otherwise? And Rhos’s baby is alive right now, and I touched her little nose. It’s the same bargain it always was: one life for all this. Isn’t that worth it?”
“Some folk are saying so,” Haf says. “That the saint is the saint, and you have to . . . that we should . . . put you back in.”
“That is what makes it wrong,” Nona says, slamming her hand flat to her hearth. “Any folk who’d try that don’t deserve my son’s life.”
Mairwen nods, and Haf, too. Sal leans on the end of the table. “That’s right, Rhun.”
Aunt Delia has tears in her eyes, but nods.
“You should stay here a while,” Haf says to Rhun. “Keep out of sight. And where’s Arthur? He’s not the saint, not really, but the way his father talks and some others . . . they might . . .”
“I can’t hide,” Rhun says. “I’ll go find Arthur. The bargain will last a little while longer, and then we’ll—”
Mair stands. “I’m going to the manor, to look through Sy Vaughn’s books. There might be answers there. I want to know what his ancestors think happened to the old god.”
“I’m going with you,” Haf says, and Mair nods.
“Rhun, find Arthur, and Baeddan if you can. Hunt, encourage everyone you meet to live as if it’s any day, and all is well. Three Graces is the life part of the bargain, so people need to live.”
Rhun puts his hands on Mair’s waist and kisses her.
The veil slips against her braids, against her shoulders and arms as he
Mair presses her mouth harder to Rhun’s, feels the burn of the thorns at her collarbone and the impression of her own sharpening teeth against her upper lip. “Be careful,” she whispers.
Just as she lets go, she gasps: Her blood pulls taught suddenly, thick and cold. She shivers and lets Rhun wrap his arms around her. She can feel the forest reaching toward her, all the way here on the mountain. It is desperate, and strong! The shadows pierce past the line of trees, up the pasture toward her mother’s house. Eyes shut, face pressed to Rhun’s shoulder, she sees a flock of birds dart over the valley, and a wind drags out of the Devil’s Forest, rolling toward her.
• • •
THE DEVIL STUMBLES ACROSS THE yard and against the door, hard enough it shakes and his shoulder grows a new bruise. His sight is fading, blurred. He hurts everywhere, and the command is all, all, all he hears: hungry, so hungry bring the saint find the saint the saint saint
Every step withers the grass at his feet. Every tree he touches shivers and turns black in a mark the shape of his hand.
The devil is dying, and taking it all with him.
Throwing himself against the door again, the devil roars. He pounds and claws at it, and the door gives way.
Inside is warm, a fire in the hearth. He growls at a woman and young girl, blurs of skirts and wide eyes, and they grab on to each other, calling “John! John!”
The forest calls, too, John! John!
“John!” the devil bellows, and for a moment his sight clears, his mind clears. Baeddan knows why he’s here.
Running, he pushes aside the women and tears into the second large room of this homestead: A man waits for him, half dressed, light hair loose, one-handed. The other arm ends at a pinkish, shining scar of a wrist.
John Upjohn can hardly breathe.
The devil’s skin is yellowish and cream; the antlers have fallen from hair and head, and even his thorns are dying, two missing, with wounds left behind, and the hint of black bone beneath. He trembles. He’s weak. His eyes are sunken into his face and his lips are dry and cracked as he pulls them open over his sharp teeth.
John steps closer, eyes locked to the devil’s chest, where the remaining twenty-odd bones of his hand are sewn with vine and sinew into the devil’s flesh. Finger bones and hand bones, strange knuckles and pebble-like wrist bones.
The devil jumps forward to claim his prize.
• • •
THE FOREST IS QUIET, BUT not silent.
Light diffuses through the barren canopy, bright enough, but unnerving, as Arthur picks his way as directly north as he can, toward the Bone Tree. He imagines taking axes and shovels and with a line of men cutting a path through it all. Marking it with red paint as a warning not to stray.
Unlike two nights ago, Arthur cuts a strong, confident figure as he strides between the trees. No ducking aside, no peering uncertainly through the shadows. When he comes across a stream, he recognizes it from a flickering memory and leaps over it, glad to know he’s still going the right way. When a dozen bird women shriek and dive at him, he only shoves them away, batting gently with his hands. “I am Arthur Couch, and you know me,” he says through his teeth. “Let me be. You may not have my blood.” When his path is blocked by three undead bone creatures, one with a raven skull, another a goat, and the final a fox, he smiles his most ferocious smile and brandishes his knife.
They laugh and skip around to join the bird women following him.
It isn’t more than a quarter hour before Arthur has an entourage of ghouls and bone boys, all clicking their teeth and giggling. A fanged and claw-footed deer picks behind, and a handful of black wolves with red eyes and razor teeth. Shadows flitter, more shape than form, and nearly invisible in this scattered light.
His stomach growls. Arthur wishes he’d eaten something. Though he passes bright apples and vibrant black berries, he won’t risk it.
The song of the wind takes up a more skeletal chime, and Arthur knows he’s near the Bone Tree. It creaks and groans even without wind, stretching itself wider and digging deep into the earth below the forest.
He steps into the grove, leaving his creepy entourage huddled at the edges.
All is gray, as if it is the surface of the moon, but for the cage of black trees encircling them. The Bone Tree stands tall, looming over everything with cragged white branches and dark gray scars. Strewn across the bare earth are a hundred dead scarlet leaves. And a few sprinkles of blood, darkened to brown or a deep purple.
Arthur bends over, spits blood onto the ground, then does his best to growl. It’s a losing fight. He’s weak, but he will not let—
Blinking away the memory—for what good will it do him now? He has a mission—Arthur walks carefully toward the Bone Tree.
The altar waits, cold and pale and empty, stripped of its black vines and gruesome remains. Roots thick and grossly pale, like massive worms rising from the earth, embrace the altar and prop up the Bone Tree itself.
And of course, there are the bones. Arthur clenches his fists, seething at the plain evidence of centuries of deadly sacrifice. Twenty-five skulls, staring and smiling, tied in a spiral pattern to the rough white face of the tree. A flare of scapula and ribs, like wings stretching up and back, and rows of long bones, femurs and arm bones lined into a terrible coat of mail.
Glancing up, Arthur winces at the glare of light; everything is too bright, too silvery-white. At least the conflagration he has planned will warm it all.
Arthur heads for the altar. He grabs old vines and scraps of cloth that remain from the jerkins and trousers and shirts of saints before Baeddan. It is gruesome to think on, but he takes satisfaction that he’ll be giving them a massive funeral pyre.
He’s got a good pile of leaves, twigs, dried-out strips of bark stacked against, around, and atop the altar, ready to light, when a sound catches his attention.
Turning, he looks at the edges of the Bone Tree’s grove, hunting for whatever made it.
Nothing.
Silence surrounds him; even the ghouls and monsters ducked between shadows have gone silent. That stillness puts Arthur’s teeth on edge. He pulls out his knife. It cannot be Baeddan. That devil was never silent. But who else? What else?
He slows his breathing with great effort and pulls out his fire steel.
A branch cracks.
Arthur nearly drops the loop of metal.
Something groans; it’s the Bone Tree.
Mouth hanging in shock, he glances up at the skeletons and staring skulls, at the higher white branches, laced with deep fissures of age. Is that a splash of color? Violet.
A flower. It floats down and lands at the tip of his pyre. The petals look velvety, teardrop shaped, and one by one they wither into blackness.
More fall. Three there, and then a handful, trembling as they flutter down and down around him.
The Bone Tree shudders, and pale-green tendrils push out from the cracks in its bark.
“What is going on?” Arthur asks aloud.
“I’ve come home,” says a creature behind him, voice low and full of satisfaction.
• • •
THE LAST TIME MAIRWEN CLIMBED this difficult mountain path, she was eager and desperate, running on fumes of hope because one of the horses in the pasture was sick and Rhos Priddy went into early labor. She scales it again now, with Haf just behind her, conquering the overgrown trail, grasping boulders and tangled roots to drag up and up. But she is stronger than before, filled with a power that tells her where to grasp, how to step. She can reach back and pull Haf up, assisting where it’s needed.
“Mairwen, you’re not afraid.”
Surprised, she stops. Haf pants lightly. Exertion puts a pretty flush in her lips and brightens her eyes. Long wisps of sleek black hair stick to her tan neck.
Mairwen holds out her arm, showing Haf the gauntlet of forest growing from wrist toward her elbow and the way her ruddy pink skin is tinging violet. “It’s power. A manifestation of what I’m becoming.”
“Which is?”
“Part of the forest, I think. Like Baeddan was, before we pulled him out.”
“Is it because you’re a witch?”
“And daughter of a saint. And I anointed myself,” Mair confesses with a brief downward flick of her eyes.
Laughing breathlessly, Haf takes Mair’s hand. “I always wanted to be a witch, too. Because you are, and you’re so . . .”
“Weird?”
“But you don’t care.”
“I think you’d be a marvelous witch. If you weren’t so happy with Ifan, and it wouldn’t make Arthur cry, I’d convince you to be my witch partner, like Hetty and my mother.”
“Do they . . . ?”
“They do.”
Haf squirms. “Well.” She grips Mairwen’s hand tightly.
“Here,” Mair says, grinning with her sharp teeth, “is the first lesson: listen.”
Silence stretches. Mairwen nods and continues climbing, Haf’s hand still in hers. Mair listens to the slip of pebbles tumbling under their feet, the wind through the trees and tall grass ahead, where the mountain juts up past the tree line. She listens to Haf’s breath pick up with effort and expectation, to her own slight grunt of effort, and the throb of blood in her ears. She listens to the voice of the forest, calling, calling, and it’s not in her ears. It’s in her heart. Since it pushed out, it’s gone quieter again, as if it caught something and reeled it back in.
“Listen to what?” Haf finally says, exasperated.
“Just listen!” Mair tugs them a little faster. “To everything. Listen. Mom used to set me somewhere and leave me for an hour, and when she returned asked me to tell her everything I heard, and what I thought of it.” The reminder is bitter in the aftermath of Aderyn’s confession; Mair thinks if she’d learned the lesson better, she’d have known the truth long ago.
“What is the second lesson?” Haf asks.
“My mother would say learning to steep herbs and make an ointment, or patience. But I think it’s seeing between day and night. Learning to find a place between everything. That’s the charm. Life, dead, and grace in between. The witch in between.”
“Being comfortable there,” Haf says thoughtfully. She slips her arms around Mairwen’s waist.
Mair nods, hugging back. “I think being a witch means making choices, too. If you can see between day and night, if you see shades between good and evil, then you can act on what others can’t, or refuse to, see. Change things.”
“I’ve always admired that you didn’t fit anywhere, so you made your own place.”
“You do too, Haf. Nobody says who you are but you. It doesn’t matter who anybody wants us to be. We choose. We decide.”
Haf stops moving. She watches Mairwen carefully for a moment, then nods. “Maybe. I think I’m lucky because I want to be what others also want me to be. It’s harder for you.”
“I make it hard.”
“Is Arthur a witch?”
Mair huffs.
“He’s lived between,” Haf suggests. “I thought he was lucky at first, to get to be both, but he hated it.”
“He fights so hard against being undefinable! I love it. He’d rather nobody saw his betweenness. How can he see between light and dark if he’s determined to only ever stand in the dark?”
“Maybe he couldn’t tell who he wanted to be, when people forced it on him so early.”
“No more than the rest of us are dressed as we’re born and trained as we’re supposed to behave,” Mairwen says.
Haf sighs.
“Arthur’s problem,” Mairwen says, “is he puts more value on being a boy than on being a girl. As if the fact that the best boy is sacrificed means boys are better than girls. That’s not why.”
“Why?”
“It’s just how the bargain was formed. I think any heart would bind it, but that wasn’t a good enough story. To make people believe something deeply enough to hurt other people, the bargain had to be specific, had to create rules the town could ascribe meaning to. Could imbue with value. Trust me; people don’t like magic that doesn’t make sense, that isn’t easy to believe. It was easy to believe a strong, skilled, noble boy could be worthy of sacrifice, especially if he had a chance to survive.”
“You want to change the story.”
“We have to.”
“That will hurt too,” Haf murmurs, but not to argue against it.
For a moment, Mairwen listens again to the wind, the distant voice of the forest, and her gently beating heart. She knows Haf is right, or mostly right. It wasn’t the girl’s name or dresses that hurt Arthur. No, he was happy when they were all children. She remembers how hard Lyn Couch laughed. What hurt him was the rule change. Being forced out of girlhood into boyhood, as if it were only an either/or, as if to make any other choice was unnatural. He was so little when his world was dragged out from under him, it was no wonder he clung to the rules forever after. His world changed and he wouldn’t change with it, until he broke another rule, until he ran into the forest and witnessed for himself the lies. Arthur had to change to survive. Just like Three Graces. The rules of the bargain have changed, and they all have to find a way together to change again. For the better. Mair smiles. “We should all learn to be witches in Three Graces.”
“I’ll start,” Haf says.
Mairwen kisses her cheek, breathing in the wonderful smell of the sweet oil Haf rubs in the ends of her hair to keep it from drying out in the winter. “Let’s go.”
They finally reach the flat yard of stone and gravel, where no trees grow. There are the remains of the bonfire from the night of the Slaughter Moon, when she was the Grace witch and she anointed the saint and kissed him, not knowing what it was she sentenced him to.
Heading quietly past it, Mairwen pushes through the iron gate. At the heavy front door, she lifts a hand to knock, but discovers the door open a handspan.
“Oh,” Haf says, worried.
Mair uses her shoulder to shove the door open. “Hello? Lord Vaughn?” Her voice echoes slightly down the dim corridor. She follows it. “Vaughn?”
There’s no reply, and hardly a thing to hear. No crackling fire. No noise besides the shuffle of Haf’s feet at the threshold. Mairwen’s bare toes make no sound.
The girls wend their way through the manor, past pristine limewash and dark wooden panels, through the library and kitchen, sitting room and a narrow music room full of dusty instruments. They search every room they can find, even shoving aside the tapestries for signs of hidden rooms. Vaughn is nowhere to be found.
• • •
AS HE MAKES HIS WAY down into Three Graces, Rhun’s thoughts flit between a pleased anticipation for seeing Arthur again and worry that he won’t live up to his mother’s expectations. You do what you know is right. She’s proud of him, and he wants to keep it so, but he’s not sure what is right anymore. Haf Lewis says folks are upset—and rightly so—that instead of doing his duty he let Mairwen and Arthur change the bargain, rebinding it in a way that can’t last. They’re right, too. He did choose to live, to give Mairwen’s binding a chance.
There’s a moment he remembers now from the forest, when Arthur tried to give himself to the devil and save Rhun, and all Rhun could feel was a desperate need to survive. For both of them to walk out of the forest. Together. He forgot it, just as he forgot what is worth saving.
Rhun wants to live, but he doesn’t want Three Graces to suffer for it.
Moving as quietly as he does, Rhun startles Judith and Ben Heir, who are taking a turn with the sheep, nudging the herd toward longer grass. They’re holding hands, and Judith stretches up to whisper something, tickling behind Ben’s ear until he smiles. Last night at the Sayer table, Rhun heard from his cousin Delia, who heard from her sister-in-law, that Judith’s pregnant. The next generation of children to be sacrificed for the forest.
He stops. “Congratulations, you two.” It’s difficult to tell if he means it.
Judith leans back against her husband, whose hands grip her shoulders. “Thank you, Rhun,” she says with a smile.
“I want my child to be safe,” Ben says, less happy, but with a look that Rhun knows exactly how to interpret.
“I want that too, Ben. Have you seen Arthur?”
“No,” Judith answers. She hesitates before saying more.
Ben says, “How can we just let this all fall apart?”
“We’re trying not to. Arthur, Mairwen, and me, and Haf Lewis, and anybody else who wants to can try with us. Mair and Haf are up at Vaughn’s manor now, looking for answers. I need Arthur. For . . .” He shrugs.
“Strange birds flew out of the forest this morning,” Ben says. “And it’s been overcast for hours.”
“We need rain,” Judith reminds her husband.
“We usually get a perfect amount of it. Now, I don’t know. What if it floods?”
“What do you think we should do?” Rhun asks him.
The slighter man runs a hand over his short brown hair. He winces. He shakes his head. “I’m not sure.”
“It’s hard. I know what some are saying.” Rhun starts to walk past, thinking of his mother’s words. Any folk who’d try that don’t deserve my son’s life.
“I just want my son to live, or my daughter,” Ben presses.
Rhun turns back. “You want me, or some other boy, to die so yours will live, Ben. I understand that. Until he’s fifteen or so, and then maybe it’s his turn. Only, you’ll know there’s no chance that he’ll run back out of the forest. If your son is the saint.” Rhun steps closer, holding Ben’s gaze. “I’m sorry.”
“Without it, he might die before he’s even born,” Judith whispers, holding her small belly.
“I know.”
“What are we going to do about it, then?” Ben holds his wife tight.
The bracelet on Rhun’s wrist tightens suddenly. He freezes and pushes back his sleeve. The braided hair and vines constrict and crumble, turning to ash.
It’s gone. Rhun splays out his hand, then makes a fist, concentrating on the strength in his arm. There’s no magic.
Eyes widening, he looks north to the forest. It hasn’t even occurred to him the voice has been silent for a long while, asleep or dull or just uninterested in seducing him back to the Bone Tree.
But that’s not the problem. Their binding isn’t slowly weakening, falling apart.
Something just broke it.
• • •
IN VAUGHN’S BEDCHAMBER, MAIRWEN AND Haf discover a bed the size of Mair’s entire loft. Its posts are built of the solid trunks of trees, dark wood and polished to a shine. The mattress is thick and moves with feathers, not straw, and smells of pine and an earthy fragrance Mair can’t quite put a name to besides “autumn.” Haf runs her fingers along the edge of a narrow silk pillow and reaches up to touch the fringe decorating the dark-blue curtain.
Though she intended to explore the small pile of letters atop the table in the corner, and the lacquered box beside them, Mairwen stops as she crosses the floor at the foot of the bed. A long gray stone is embedded among the smaller stone tiles, and when she crouches, it’s slightly warm to the touch.
Just like the hearthstone in her house, and just like the Bone Tree’s altar.
“Mairwen,” Haf whispers, though there’s nobody around to hide from.
A chill creeping up her spine, Mairwen glances at her friend. She’s pointing to the cold hearth, and a small oval painting set against it. It’s a painted portrait of a little girl.
Mairwen rushes to it, lifting it carefully. The paint is old, cracking along the border where it meets the thin gold frame. But the gaze of the girl is as intense as looking in a mirror. Round brown eyes, a thin pink smile, blotchy pink skin, and dark hair with hints of sunlight red.
It’s her. When she was five or six years old.
Before Mairwen can say anything, her wrist pinches.
Then, with a cry, Mair falls to her knees as fire and night-black coldness both flare in her body: the heat in her blood, the cold in her bones.
She drops the portrait, and Haf crashes down beside her, grabbing her shoulders, calling her name.
Mairwen’s tongue is so dry, her throat closed; she coughs, wretchedly, feeling something choking her, tearing up from her stomach. She shudders and tastes it, bitter and sweet both, blood and sugar. She spits out a flower. A tiny purple viola.
From Baeddan’s bleeding wounds purple flowers grow, wither, and die, falling in black ashes to surround his bare feet. “I let the last one go, and look what’s become of me.”
“Oh, Mairwen, is it getting worse?” Haf asks.
“No,” Mairwen says from a raw throat, then spits out another tiny purple flower. Her hands are splayed before her on the stone floor: one plain and ruddy, knuckles whitening with tension, the other bluish and splotched, but the gauntlet is flaking off, chipping away in tiny brown scraps. The braided hair shrivels, pinching at her.
Suddenly Mair’s chest is on fire. She struggles to kneel back and tears down the shirt, ripping the linen on the edge of a thorn. The thorn falls off with a slick sound, and Mair bites her lip.
The forest is withdrawing from her! Fast and desperate, ignoring her body’s need for slower change.
“It hurts,” she whimpers. “Help me to my feet.”
“Get in the bed, Mair. I’ll—”
“No! I have to go to the Bone Tree. I have to—something is very wrong!”
Mairwen uses Haf to climb to her feet, stepping on the portrait. Her heel snaps it in two and she stumbles, but Haf is there to catch her, and together they run out of the manor.
• • •
ARTHUR TURNS SO FAST HE knocks back against the altar.
Emerging from the forest is a man, simply dressed in a fine tunic and trousers, his shirt collar untied around his throat and the cuffs loose at his wrists. He wears no boots or stockings, and his bare feet are strangely pale, mottled like moonlight, as is his face. His smile is wide and curved like a scythe, his hair wild and all the colors of tree bark and earth: browns and grays and blacks and reds, twisted into a riot of curls. His eyes seem to widen and narrow separately from each other, one dark and one light, and it is only that which allows Arthur to put a name to the man.
“Lord Vaughn?” he says, squinting.
The man raises his arms, and several bird women land upon his open palms. “Lord, at least,” he says warmly.
Flowers continue to rain gently down upon them, and Vaughn tilts his chin to look up at the Bone Tree.
“Ah, my heart,” he says.
Arthur’s mind is spinning. He sits on the edge of the altar.
Vaughn enters the grove, moving directly toward Arthur but staring at the Bone Tree. Two bird women clutch his arm, and another settles in his hair. In his wake, a handful of bone creatures crawl after, the raven and two foxes, wide eyes stuck on Vaughn in a way Arthur can only read as awe. All around the grove the trees shift and shiver, with no breeze to cause it, and the shadows reach inward. Arthur hears clicking teeth and the rustle of feathers, footsteps, and the creak of cold branches.
And he sees these same little purple flowers that fall from the tree growing anew where Vaughn steps. They push stems out from the cracked earth, from between the massive roots, from under flat stones; they reach up, curling, and the violet buds burst open.
Arthur presses his bottom to the altar’s edge, gripping it too, his body rigid with slow understanding and panic.
“You’re the devil,” he says as Vaughn passes close by. The lord is taller, and his gait inhuman, as if his—yes, his legs have bent wrong, with an extra joint it seems, the strong rear legs of a horse beneath his trousers, but his feet spread and grow tufts of fur, clawed almost like a wildcat.
Vaughn laughs. His voice is hollow, echoing on itself, and deep within the laugh Arthur swears he hears the ringing of bells.
Thorns push out from the lord’s forehead and temples, growing up and hooking in, until he wears a crown of them. They divide and spread like antlers, but flowers bloom, wither, and die, then bloom again, spilling down into his hair and over his cheeks.
The old god of the forest, Arthur thinks, and it’s Mairwen’s voice whispering the words to him. Then Arthur thinks, I am doomed.
If he can find a chance to light his fire, maybe he’ll get out. Vaughn seems so enchanted by the Bone Tree, by his own movements and laughter, it might be possible. Arthur slowly reaches in his pocket again for the fire steel. He’ll have one chance to catch the sparks. Thank God he’s already got the rags and dry grass. A spark and a breath and maybe—
He spins and cracks the ring of steel against the altar. Sparks fly. He bends, cupping his hands around the fodder, and gently blows.
A wide, gnarled hand presses down over the sparks. Smoke coils around the devil’s fingers. Arthur grabs his knife and spins, cutting simultaneously.
The blade slashes across Vaughn’s chest, through tunic and into flesh. Blood splashes on Arthur’s face, and Vaughn grabs him by the throat.
Vaughn lifts Arthur off the ground, holding him high by only the neck. Arthur claws at the devil’s wrist, kicks out; his boot connects hard, but it’s like kicking a giant oak. He grinds his jaw, seething breaths as best he can, holding himself up with the strength in his arms.
Vaughn contemplates Arthur’s struggle. Blood, thick and reddish and brown, drizzles slow and sticky down his chest. Like sap. His eyes are black through and through, with flecks of brown and white, and his mouth bright red, devastatingly red, his teeth sharp. As Arthur stares, eyes bulging, Vaughn’s skin continues to transform. It darkens in streaks, down from his eyes, gray and purple as if his veins have all burst and spread under his skin, or like death. He’s dying and decomposing before Arthur.
“Why,” the creature Vaughn asks, words thick, “did your mother not take you with her?”
Arthur hisses, spit flecking his lips, and stars sprinkle through his vision. Black spots pop in his eyes. Blood roars in his ears. He kicks again and again, twisting, but he can’t breathe enough to—to—
He’s flying backward, tossed easily back, over the altar. He lands in the mess of Bone Tree roots, hard. His body constricts, and he can’t catch a breath.
Then he’s sucking in air, gasping, coughing, hands on the roots, turning over to crawl up.
The Bone Tree shakes, and beneath him the earth trembles. Or Arthur is the one shaking, breathing hard.
A ringing in his ears fades to a lower pitch, and he hears giggling all around him.
Glancing up through reddened vision, Arthur sees Vaughn at the trunk of the Bone Tree, leaning in to put his cheek against its rough bark. One of his bony hands grips the lowest skull, fingers curled around the bottom jaw like he’s holding on to a skeletal scream.
His back has broadened, tearing the tunic, and he’s taller, and bright white again. His hair is more like fur, sleek and black, and he glances over his shoulder at Arthur.
“Alive, still. Well.”
“I don’t—” It hurts Arthur to speak, but he forces words through his bruised throat. “Why do you . . . care . . . about my . . . mother?”
“I don’t understand how she could leave her child. I nearly destroyed myself for mine, and your mother just . . . left.”
“I’d never have left!” Arthur yells.
The devil, whatever he is, crouches, balanced easily on his wildcat legs, and watches Arthur. “Yes. You’re too like me. I’ve always believed that, too.”
Arthur shakes his head. “No, no, I’m not.”
“Too powerful for the place you’re rooted. Wanting more but unable to let go.”
“No.” Pushing to his knees, Arthur shakes his head again. “I’m not.”
A moth bats wings against his cheek, and a centipede the size of a snake slips across the back of Arthur’s hand, scurrying toward the tree.
Flowers continue to fall.
What did the devil say? Arthur squeezes his eyes tightly shut. I nearly destroyed myself for mine. “What child?” Arthur demands. He coughs, racked with the ache of it from his throat.
“It doesn’t matter to you, Arthur Couch. I’ll be right there, to snap your neck properly.”
Arthur begins to crawl away, carefully getting to his feet, though he sways and stumbles back. “So you, what? You wanted more and so you made a bargain with the Grace witches, to leave your forest?”
“Yes, exactly! A taste of freedom, able to leave these roots, but the roots had to change, they had to have a replacement god.”
“The devils you gave it hardly replaced you.”
“Not the devils, not the saints themselves, but the life and death of them. The cycle, you see? Life and death. That is what I am, what has always been the heart of my forest. I tore free by giving the heart a different channel.”
Arthur can see now what the devil is doing: He’s caressing the Bone Tree, slowly coaxing it to open, so that the heavy white bark draws back from a crevasse. “Are you going back in?”
“Planting a new seed, Arthur Couch.”
“With what?”
Then Vaughn smiles again. “Here it comes.”
Screams of laughter erupt behind Arthur, and he turns. Something is coming, dragging something else behind it.
Arthur stands, holding on to the altar for strength.
The devil—Baeddan.
Arthur steps closer, but Baeddan doesn’t see him. His tattered black coat catches and tears on a scraggly bush, but Baeddan continues on, tugging violently at his prize.
The devil looks up and grins. “I’ve got the saint, and I’ve got the saint! He’ll be woven into the Bone Tree, Arthur Couch, for now and for ever, and I will be free! Oh, I am hungry.”
Panic slices through Arthur, and he runs toward Baeddan. “Rhun?” he gasps, skidding to a stop at the edge of the grove.
“Ha, ha, ha!” says Baeddan, then deteriorates into rasping, devilish laughter.
It is a body Baeddan was dragging behind him. There’s a roaring in Arthur’s ears as he closes in. Baeddan grabs the saint’s hair, jerking his head up.
John Upjohn.
The energy of Baeddan’s gesture pulls the man’s eyes half open, and his jaw is slack. His arms dangle so that his single hand has scraped bloody and raw against the earth. Dirt and leaves cover his chest, and the front of his jerkin is torn.
“He’s dead already,” Arthur says softly.
Baeddan snorts and drags Upjohn by the hair. Chunks of blond rip free, and Arthur leaps forward, shoving his shoulder into Baeddan. “Let go. Get off him!” Arthur yells. But Baeddan growls, swings his arm, and backhands Arthur.
Pain blackens his vision and blood bursts in Arthur’s mouth as his teeth cut into his cheek. He blinks away dark stars, scrambling for Baeddan again. “Stop, Baeddan.” He grabs at Baeddan’s bare, scarred chest, hitting hard.
Baeddan grunts.
Arthur crouches over John Upjohn, wincing so the surge of sorrow he feels doesn’t appear on his face, but only flows through him, spilling out in ragged, heaving breaths. He spits blood onto the leaves. The old saint is limp. Dead. A great scratch claws across his left eye and down his nose.
“Dead?” whispers Baeddan.
“Dead,” says Arthur as if it’s a curse.
“Well, then,” Vaughn drawls behind them, having watched their drama from the heart of the grove. “I suppose, Arthur Couch, you’ll be useful after all.”
• • •
“THE BARGAIN IS BROKEN,” RHUN says to Judith and Ben, both of whom stare at the smoldering remains of his bracelet. He won’t hide it. He wonders if Arthur has realized it, if Mairwen feels it, and if they’ll all three find each other again.
“What are we going to do?” Ben asks again.
And suddenly, seeing the couple there in the powerful sunlight, silver with clouds, Rhun understands: We is right.
Everyone was complicit in the secret, even if they didn’t know. So everyone has to be just as complicit in the solution. Not a handful of people making choices for all, not the Grace witches or even just him and Arthur. Everybody who benefits or suffers must decide together. Heat flushes his face, like triumph, and he says, “We’re going to fix it together. All of Three Graces.”
“How?” asks Judith.
Rhun Sayer smiles. “We’re all going to become saints, Judith! Come with me into town.”
With that, he moves on, revelation unfurling like wings on his back.
When he reaches the first houses, he slows. He calls out, “People of Three Graces, this is Rhun Sayer! You named me your saint, and by that honor I ask you to listen! Come to the center now, the bonfire. Bring coats and boots. Bring a weapon if you must! But come. This is Rhun Sayer, your twenty-eighth saint, and I’m asking this of you!”
Rhun walks on, curving through three of the side streets, crying out his message again and again. He says the names of the people he sees, calling them with the power of their families and histories.
“This is Rhun Sayer!” he yells from the spiral town square. He plants his feet and cups hands around his mouth. “Listen to me!”
More and more gather, slowly some, but others arriving as if they’ve waited all their lives to be called. It does not escape his notice that the first to come are children and young people, the runners and their cousins and friends. Rhun nods at them. His chest heaves with effort and sparks of excitement. He’s neither afraid nor happy, not delighted nor spinning into panic. He is truly, finally ready, like he’s never been, because there is nothing to hide now.
Rhun Sayer wants to live, but more than that, he wants everyone to see him. Not his destiny, not what he’s promised, not some fabled quality of goodness that makes him the best. No, he wants them to see the answers to all the secrets in his heart: He loves them so much, and he loves this valley so much, he has to make them all saints. Every last one of them. He’s changed, and they all need to change with him. To choose it. Nobody will be lied to, nobody will be innocent. Everyone will choose together.
He sees his mother arrive, and his father. He sees Arthur’s father, and Cat Dee, Beth Pugh and her brother Ifan. Sayers pour in. All the young men who wanted to be the saint instead of him.
And then, only then, Rhun smiles.
A few townsfolk smile back, because they always smile at Rhun Sayer. It’s instinctive.
“Thank you,” he says. “Thank you for putting down your work, or your fear, to listen. You know what the bargain we’ve lived under for two hundred years truly is. Every saint died, none survived until John Upjohn, and me. We tried to bind the bargain, Mairwen, Arthur, and I. We managed it, but it didn’t last.” He holds up his bare arm. “The charm is broken. The bargain is gone. Because we didn’t bind it with death. There’s no balance to the life we’re given. How can we expect to live as we do without sacrifice?” Rhun laughs softly and with despair at his former ignorance. Shaking his head, he scans the shifting group of friends and neighbors, his family. They’re eyeing each other and eyeing him. Silent. As if they’re unwilling to argue but cannot quite step into sync with him.
“We’ll die!” someone from the back calls.
“We always die,” snaps Beth Pugh.
Gethin Couch shoves to the fore. “Are you going to die, then, Rhun Sayer? Or my son? How will we remake this bargain?”
“I don’t know,” Rhun says. “But we have to do it, all of us. Everyone who will benefit must agree to the price. Everyone hold the weight together.” He holds out his hands. “Come with me into the forest, all of you.”
Cries of protest and hushed fear burst out, with a few promising yays peppered through.
Rhun nods again, meeting the eyes of all he can reach. “Be brave,” he says. “Be your best! Mom, Dad, all you Sayers I know have this running in your blood. And you, Braith Bowen, you’re strong and you want to keep your family safe. You, Beth, and all of you women who know what fire feels like. Brothers and sisters who can’t imagine any other way, let me show it to you.”
“You’re not our leader, Rhun Sayer,” calls Evan Prichard. “You’re young. A saint, to be sure, but you’re reckless. You and your friends are the ones who changed it all. It was working! Why should we want anything different?”
“It was working at the price of my life,” Rhun says.
“You knew that—you competed for the honor!”
Some are agreeing, but Rhun sees in others how much they want Rhun to dissuade Evan Prichard, how much they’d like him to be wrong. They sense it, they just can’t convince themselves.
Rhun says, “I was lied to. I thought I had a chance. Baeddan Sayer didn’t walk in to his certain death. And John Upjohn wanted desperately to live! Carey Morgan had a daughter on the way! Who’s to say they’d have won the sainthood if they’d known? Would you, Per Argall, have stood at my side and answered the question what makes you best if you’d known?”
The young man’s eyes pinch, his hands fist, but he doesn’t look away. “I don’t know, Rhun,” he admits, quiet and sorrowful.
“None of us can know,” Rhun says. “But it was our right to make a real choice. To be truly brave, to know! Without that truth, every joy we all have in this valley is built on a broken foundation! A secret that kills us.”
Nobody else is leaving; they stare at Rhun, awaiting his next breath like he is a piece of God.
Rhun feels the weight of it. He always has. So he breathes hard and says, “We all have a best self. We only have to choose to let it rule us. Your best selves know what I know: We must to do this together. Let me show you the Devil’s Forest.”
Just then a woman screams, “The devil took John!”
It’s Lace Upjohn, weeping and dragging her daughter behind her.
“What?” Rhun dives toward her, and the crowd parts.
“That devil, who was Baeddan Sayer, who you brought out of the forest, broke into my house and dragged my son away! What will you do about that, Rhun?” Her voice is tight and accusing.
Rhun accepts the blame. He clenches his jaw. “I’ll go into the forest and stop it. I’ll fight for John’s life and the lives of everybody here.”
“Maybe you should let the devil take him,” says Gethin Couch, and judging by the scatter of nods, he isn’t the only one to think it.
“You said goodbye to him,” Gethin snaps, leaning into her face.
“I’m not willing to let that happen, Gethin,” Rhun says.
“Some of us are. That’s the bargain, like you say, and we need it.”
Braith Bowen calls, “Could you sleep tonight, you heartless bastard?”
Evan Prichard calls back, “I sleep every night, except the Slaughter Moon, always knowing we threw a boy to die in the forest. It’s the same.”
Too many reply at once. It’s a cacophony, and Lace Upjohn wipes tears off her face, snatches a knife from Gethin Couch’s belt, and marches away, northward.
“I’m going to the Bone Tree!” Rhun yells as loudly as he can. “Go with me if you want to be the best! If you want to deserve this life we have.”
Little Bree Lewis says, “My sister would go with you. I’ll go too.”
Per and Dar Argall step out, axes in hand. “Lead on, Rhun.”
From the side, Rhun the Elder brings a bow and arrow.
When Rhun accepts the weapon, it triggers a landslide of volunteers. Not everybody, not nearly, but Rhun has no time to rally the resistant. He’ll accept these, mostly young men and women, who have not lived so long with nothing to fight for they don’t know how to risk it all. Some of their parents, some cousins, most of the Sayer clan. Ben Heir, though he makes Judith swear to remain and stay safe.
With him, when he strides toward the Devil’s Forest, are all the folk of Three Graces who ever had it in them to be brave.
• • •
BRANCHES AND LEAVES SLAP MAIRWEN in the face as she careens down the mountain, barely staying on her feet. Haf is far behind, though following. Mair can’t quite bring herself to slow down for her friend, not when the forest is almost gone from her blood, when she’s dizzy with the lack of it, when her heart aches like it’s broken in half.
She flies into the sheep fields, cutting north and east, toward the forest. Her lungs burn, but her legs are strong and her arms pump, grasping at the air before her as if to drag her faster. Wind tears at her head, and tiny flower petals flutter behind her, shredded and falling from her hair.
As she runs around the rear of the Grace cottage, she glances at the chimney: no smoke. She comes around, ready to press on to the horse pasture, but someone huddles inside the yard, just next to the front door, which hangs half open.
Though she needs to continue into the Devil’s Forest, Mairwen slows, drawn back with an inexorable sense of dread.
The decision is made before she realizes it, and Mair runs urgently to her home and shoves through the gate, cutting her palm on stray gooseberry bramble. It’s Hetty kneeling beside the front door, arms over her head, bent in half. Her long fingers are dug into her glossy hair, fisting and relaxing again and again.
“Hetty?” Mairwen says through heavy panting.
The older woman lifts her head: Tears streak the freckled cheeks, and blood has crusted at the corner of her mouth. “Mair, I’m so, so sorry. I couldn’t stop him. Your mother . . .”
Sucking air through her teeth, Mairwen darts inside the cottage. The door swings hard against the wall, then shuts behind her.
In the dim light, at first everything appears normal. The kitchen table, the benches, all the bundles of dried herbs hanging from the rafters. Her boots where she left them yesterday—yesterday?—before going into town for the celebration, slouched beside the ladder to her loft.
Except the fire is dead, and ashes and black chunks of charcoal fan out from the hearth as if the fire exploded in a great gust.
And across the hearthstone lies her mother.
Or what is left of the last Grace witch.
Aderyn’s eyes are closed, her lips gently parted as if in pleased dreaming. Hands relaxed at her sides, palms up, and her skirts folded at her calves. Like Aderyn simply stretched herself out to sleep.
But her chest is a mass of dark blood and blossoming violas, or something like violas, if those tiny purple flowers ever grew in thick braided vines. The flowers pierce straight out of her heart, erupting through her ribs to knot about her sternum and between her breasts.
Mair falls to her knees beside her mother, breathing hard. She hovers her hands over Aderyn’s cheeks, then over the flowers, one finger brushing the tip of a petal. Then she covers her own mouth against a wail.
Aderyn’s lips twitch and she draws a breath.
“Mother!” Mairwen shrieks, grasping one cold hand.
“Mairwen,” her mother whispers.
“Who did this to you? What happened? How can I help?”
The words are so soft, Mairwen must lean forward. “No. There must be some charm, something for me to say, to banish these flowers. The forest is—it is leaving me. It must leave you, too.”
Aderyn’s brow creases and she whispers, “This is the death for all Grace witches. The flowers in our heart burst, and we become flowers.”
Mairwen frowns. “But you weren’t called to the forest. Not yet! You didn’t . . .”
trees shake, and moonlight coalesces into figures and faces, pushing free of the trees, gathering light to them as sheer veils. Nine women, with flowers growing out of their chests. They remain before their trees, all but one, who
Shaking the memory away, Mairwen tells herself, Not yet!
“The forest came to me. It did not have to call,” Aderyn says simply. Her voice is too low, too weak.
“No!” Tears fall from Mairwen’s eyes and plop onto her mother’s collarbone, and another hits a dark heart-shaped leaf. The vine trembles, tightens, and her mother cries out.
Mairwen grabs one of the vines and says, “Wither,” with all the insistence in her heart. The vine twists and withdraws, but Aderyn whimpers.
“Stop, stop, little bird, and listen: He is back at the heart of the forest.”
“What? Who?” She wipes her tears and clenches her jaw. In her veins, her blood throbs. She needs to do something, to rage or run or find the Bone Tree and demand it obey her.
“Vaughn. Your . . .” Her mother’s voice fades; she winces as if confused.
“What? Lord Vaughn? He wasn’t at his manor. He was gone? Did he do this to you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” she shrieks.
“I remember him. I remember him when you were small, and before you were born. I’ve been dreaming of him the past three nights, strange dreams . . . like memories, and I—I remember him.”
“So do I. Everyone does,” Mairwen whispers. “I remember his—his father, too, because he liked me.”
“Not his father. Vaughn has no father. He is no man, little—little bird. He is forest and flowers . . . stones and clay . . . all beasts.”
The roaring in Mairwen’s ears is suspicion, is a wild guess, a terrible thrill of truth that she does not want. “The old god,” she whispers.
“Your father.”
“No.” Mairwen scuttles away from her mother. “No, no. My father was a saint! Carey Morgan, and his bones are on the—on the Bone Tree. I touched my finger to his moon-white cheekbone and looked into his empty eyes!”
She remembers it with perfect clarity.
“I am the daughter of a witch and a saint!”
Mairwen faces the girl in the long white veil, and the girl lifts her hand, points at Mair, and says—
“No,” Mairwen whispers.
the girl lifts her hand, points at Mair, and says, “You are not one of us.”
• • •
EVERYTHING IS SILENT.
Silver trees surround her, laced with white vines and moonlight. Her feet brush rocky earth, with no sign of grass or deadfall, and through the branches stars twinkle against the impossible blackness of the night sky. She cannot see the moon. It must be low. Only two hours until dawn.
She leans into Baeddan’s shoulder as they shift and slowly spin, dancing beneath bobbing little lights.
“They’re waking,” Baeddan whispers. He lets go of her hand, and lets go of her waist.
“Who?” Mairwen glances all around. She is so weary, and so at peace, she could close her eyes and sleep against that nearest tree, with Baeddan’s arms around her, and listen to his erratic heartbeat and strange songs. Maybe in her dreams the words would make sense.
He backs away awkwardly, as if he does not know where to look. “Watch, Mairwen Grace. They are so beautiful.”
Standing in the center of the grove, Mairwen waits alone.
Filaments of light drip down from the stars, setting aglow the cracks in the tree bark, and all the vines shiver, bursting with violet flowers that turn silver and white and then gray as ash before falling quietly to the earth.
The trees shake, and all the light coalesces into figures and faces, pushing free of the trees, gathering light into sheer veils. Nine women, with flowers growing out of their chests. They remain before their trees, all but one, who walks toward Mairwen.
She holds her breath but does not flee.
The girl drifts nearer, and through the long, white veil Mairwen sees dark eyes, white-violet skin, parted lips, and dark hair falling in fat curls around her face and shoulders.
“Hello,” Mairwen says, heart and stomach aflutter because she knows who these women are. Grace witches. Her grandmother, and her grandmother’s mother, on and on back to the original Grace witches, and this, here, the youngest, first Grace.
The girl, Grace, lifts her hand beneath the veil to point at Mairwen. Her lips move, and from all around the wind carries her voice, a whisper of wind. “You’re not one of us.”
Mairwen shakes her head in denial. “I’m a Grace witch. My mother is Aderyn Grace, daughter of Cloua.”
“Grace witches do not come into the forest until they are here to remain.”
“I came in because my father was Carey Morgan, a saint, and his bones are here.”
The other veiled women murmur, asking each other: A saint?
Is that all?
Could that be the answer?
Why her breath bends the trees and her blood gathers wind?
But the first Grace shakes her head; her veil trembles with the movement. “No. The saints are all on the Bone Tree, but your heart is not here for sacrifice. Daughter of the forest.”
“My—my blood does not gather the wind,” Mairwen says.
“The devil obeys you,” says the first Grace, glancing outside their grove to where Baeddan Sayer crouches, clutching his head, rocking himself like a baby.
“But . . .” Mairwen’s mouth is dry. “My mother is a witch and my father a saint.”
The first Grace presses her lips together. She appears no older than Mairwen, sixteen if not younger. Mair wants to ask about the devil, the old god of the forest. Did she love him? Why did she find him beautiful? Mairwen has always thought the worst things were full of beauty, and perhaps this first Grace knows why. But when she opens her mouth, the first Grace says, “Stop.”
Mairwen listens, because she chooses to, not because she is compelled.
Wind gusts, and the trees shiver, and the long veils of light flutter. Baeddan groans.
Before Mairwen realizes what’s happening, Baeddan is behind her, holding her shoulders. He bends over and shoves her head to the side with his face, then bites into the flesh at the base of her neck.
She cries out in surprise, then at the flash of pain. “Baeddan!”
“I’m sorry, so, so sorry,” he whispers, touching his sharp teeth to her skin again. “Oh, Mairwen Grace, look!”
The first Grace’s eyes are locked to the wound and Mairwen tries to see, craning her neck. Warm blood leaks down her collarbone.
“Grow for me,” the first Grace whispers.
The little star lights floating in the air begin to drop like rain.
Discomfort blooms in Mairwen’s chest, slithering like a worm toward the wound on her shoulder. She struggles again, gasping. Her eyes are so wide, but all she can see is dark blood, nearly black in the moonlight.
The worm reaches the bite, and it grabs the edges of broken skin. Mairwen closes her eyes and feels a surge of energy, a spark.
Baeddan laughs. “Look!”
She does, in time to watch the little purple flower lifting itself out of her flesh, twining up her neck to her cheek. Her eye aches from the effort of focusing on it, and then the flower seems to kiss her cheek and break away, drifting and tumbling down to the ground, where it blackens and dies.
“Look!” Baeddan cries again, releasing her to dance around. He gouges his chest, and with the spurt of purple blood flowers bloom, curling around themselves and winking bright violet. Then they too break off, die, and land like ashes on the ground.
“The forest is inside you,” says the first Grace.
Mairwen touches the smear of blood and looks at it. Red, as blood should be, but so dark.
“You can break it all, or remake it.”
“What?” breathes Mairwen, still staring at the glint of blood on her fingers.
“You are a witch and a god, Mairwen Grace. Both a girl and a forest. Or you could be, if you let yourself.”
Arms circle her from behind; Baeddan, leaning around her as if he needs comfort. He nuzzles the bite mark, kisses it gently, and licks away some of the blood. Mairwen shudders, but feels stronger with his arms around her than alone with the first Grace.
“Tell me what happened,” Mairwen says. “Tell me the truth.”
The first Grace smiles grimly. “I fell in love with the forest. And the forest loved me back. And so we traded hearts. Mine is here, larger and stronger than it could have been in the small cavern of my body, and I am only death. His heart is outside, free. And he is only life. The saints bind us together, keeping the charm alive, keeping the forest itself half alive without its god. Because the saint lives and also dies, the saints are always alive and always dead.”
Baeddan laughs.
“What happened to the old god of the forest?” Mairwen asks.
“He lives. He walks among you. He ventures far from his tree. But he always returns for the slaughter.”
Mairwen clutches at Baeddan’s wrists, digging her nails in. He hisses his pleasure and tightens his embrace. But Mairwen looks for the moon, then remembers it’s so low, so very, very low. “The old god of the forest left the forest.”
“I think, pretty Mairwen,” the first Grace says, “he must also be your father.”
She’s panicking, breath too thin and fast, scratching at Baeddan the way he scratches at himself. It’s impossible. Her mother would have told her, or at least would not have lied. “My mother . . .”
“Forgot.” Grace shrugs. Her veil hardly trembles. “Or forgot some. Our charm makes sure of it, that the old god is forgotten.”
“And I can change it? I can change the bargain? Break it or unmake it, because of who . . . what . . . I am?”
“If you let it change you first. But you won’t remember I told you so. We’ve spoken too much of him.”
Mairwen backs away from the first Grace, pushing at Baeddan so he steps back too. Eyes bright and on Grace, Mairwen says, “Baeddan, take me to the Bone Tree.”
• • •
WHEN SHE OPENS HER EYES, Mairwen remembers.
Every step inside the Devil’s Forest, every cut and every tree she climbed. She remembers the bird women and bargaining with them to be led to Arthur. She remembers Baeddan finding her instead and kissing her and the moment she recognized him. She remembers the rowan doll, and she remembers fighting with him, screaming at him; she remembers his eagerness, his wild singing, his willingness to take her through the marsh. She remembers the brilliant red apples he fed her and trees grown faces and claws, the ferocious half-dead wolves and rotting bone creatures and tracks in the mud, and when she saw Rhun was in the forest too, and Baeddan was desperate to eat him. She remembers Arthur and Rhun fighting over who would die, who should run. Their misery at how much they wanted the other to live.
She remembers dancing with Baeddan in the perfect grove, his sorrow, his distress, and when the Grace witches woke from their graves.
She remembers what the first Grace said, and leaving the grove to find the Bone Tree, where she was confident she could change the bargain and hold it inside her. She remembers counting the skulls on the tree, and finding Carey Morgan’s. When she touched his cheekbone, she was saying goodbye, because she did not share his blood after all.
Mairwen remembers climbing onto the altar with Rhun and Arthur, swearing it would free Baeddan, too, and all of them would go home. I can change it! she said. They clasped hands, tied woven charms to their wrists, and cried, “We are the saints of Three Graces,” just as the sun rose.
She remembers Sy Vaughn laughing and helping her gather yarrow when she was a little girl. Two dark-brown eyes.
And one is different now, but only since John Upjohn’s Slaughter Moon. It went gray as the bargain broke. As he lost hold of himself.
All the memories huddle in her mind, dull and dreadful.
Her mother is barely breathing, and so Mairwen leans over to breathe for her, then kisses her lips and stands.
Her knees shake and Mairwen catches herself against the kitchen table. Her insides squeeze and twist. She coughs; it becomes a gag, and she’s retching, her body bent and shaking. Mairwen spits another flower out of her mouth, and pieces of tree bark, chunky and wet. Another spasm catches her and she can’t breathe through the strength of the retching this time.
She spits out the small, pebble-like wrist bone that had been part of her binding charm.
Her head spins and sweat breaks out all over her body. She is flushed in the face and cold in the hands.
Mairwen sits.
It’s over. Her magic is gone. The charm, the pieces of the forest she bound to her: gone.
• • •
ARTHUR RUNS.
He’s surrounded not only by bone creatures and bird women, wolves and trees, but two devils. Baeddan leaps gleefully toward him, punching Arthur in the chest. Something cracks as he falls back and into the massive arms of the old god.
Arthur struggles, but his legs and arms are held in grips stronger than steel, and he’s carried to the altar. He gasps, and he cannot believe this is the end—bound to the forest, changed like Baeddan, his heart broken and his mind in tatters, without Mairwen and Rhun. My God, he thinks, what will Rhun do when he finds out? “No, please,” he whispers, then lashes with his entire body; his spine bends, he flails, but he cannot get even an inch of freedom.
The devil and the old god of the forest press him onto the altar, scattering the remains of his fire. Vaughn flattens his wide hand over Arthur’s chest and vines explode from the earth, crawling up the altar stone like snakes, winding around and around Arthur’s arms, around his bruised throat, too. They pierce his skin, sewing his wrists down.
Arthur screams. Flowers and vines make a web, and the old god leans down to put his bright red lips against Arthur’s forehead.
“Will they come for you, Arthur Couch?” the old god whispers.
• • •
THE FOREST REFUSES TO ALLOW Rhun and his company easily inside.
He and his father lead the way at the head of an arrow of folk. They shove aside angry branches, sometimes chopping through vines that snake across their feet, and everyone winces against a constant, freezing wind. They progress, but slowly. Some give up, their courage spent out over the flash of teeth from the hollow of a tree, or a scream that nobody else seems to hear.
Bird women dart about, slashing at eyes, giggling and chanting Rhun’s name, and “Too late! Too late!” and “The god is home!” and “There is a saint on the altar already, Rhun Sayer, Rhun-Rhun-Rhun! What will you do?”
“Cut him free!” Rhun growls at them, imagining John Upjohn tied down, his blood staining the altar. “You’ll not have his heart!”
And the bird women laugh, flitting at Bree Lewis and Per Argall, who swipe with a knife and ax respectively.
High in the trees, rodents chitter and sneer, winking red eyes at them, dripping putrescence, and Rhun hears the scurry of spiders, the flap of rotting wings. His heart pounds and he prays there will be no wolves.
There are, of course.
One leaps at Braith Bowen, who grunts in pain, and his cousin Dirk hacks at it with his ax. Three more attack, and Rhun does his best to direct the defense, but it is a melee of blades and screams, until finally all four wolves lie wholly dead. Bevan Heir has his thigh sliced up and can’t go on. Many are bleeding from less desperate wounds. They lose three to helping Bevan limp home.
Rhun is tired, more so than he was after only an hour in the forest before. He can’t imagine why this resistance is so terrible, when the Bone Tree has Upjohn, when Baeddan must be lost there too, trapped by the heart of the forest.
A woman in a veil appears, flanked by two more, and they shake their heads, holding out hands to stop Rhun’s progress.
“We’re going to the Bone Tree,” Rhun says. “To end this.”
The women let him pass, but they reach out to slide chilling touches to the cheeks and hands of every single person who follows him.
• • •
WHEN MAIRWEN GRACE WAS TEN years old, she created a charm to wake up her father’s ghost. Made of a tin whistle his sister lent her and braids of her own hair and grass she plucked from the shadows of the Devil’s Forest, knotted together with the slender red ribbon Rhun Sayer meant for the Witch’s Hand tree, but tied into Mairwen’s hair instead.
She chewed her bottom lip as she dragged Haf Lewis with her down the pasture hill toward the Devil’s Forest, wondering if the charm was hearty enough, or if she should put a few drops of her blood onto the blessing ribbon. It was already life, death, and blessing in between, but this was big magic she wanted, perhaps too much for a little witch’s charm.
“This is so near,” Haf breathed, fingers cold with terror and clutched tightly around Mair’s.
“Of course it is.” Mairwen wrinkled her tiny nose at her friend. “He died inside, so I have to be as close as I can get.”
Haf stopped and dug her feet into the dirt and green grass at the base of the pasture hill. “Maybe this is near enough.”
“It isn’t. But stay here if you must. I’m only going a bit farther.”
The tall black trees of the Devil’s Forest swayed gently in the pleasant summer wind. Mairwen knelt along the line between sunlight and shadow, placing the charm in her lap.
Haf dashed the rest of the way and knelt behind Mair, so that her knobby brown knees fit onto the soles of Mair’s tucked-under feet and pressed against her bottom. Twisting, Mair smiled her thanks. It felt better and right to have her friend’s connection to the valley and the sun—Haf was always bright, after all, and full of life. Mairwen decided maybe she herself could be the charm: the Devil’s Forest was death, Haf was life, and Mair the thread between them.
But she didn’t say so out loud to Haf.
Lifting the charm in her cupped hands, Mair put her lips to the mouth of the whistle and blew gently.
It sang a sweet song, only one note.
Mairwen blew harder, all her breath, and again and again, in an even rhythm. Between the notes she whispered her father’s name: “Carey Morgan. Carey Morgan. Carey Morgan.”
There was no sensation of warmth or change, nothing to signify the charm worked, but that was the way of magic, her mother always said. It either succeeded or it did not. A witch needed to trust her power and her charm.
Haf touched her forehead against Mairwen’s back and slid her hands around Mairwen’s waist, huddling nearer. When Mairwen whispered her father’s name, Haf whispered it too.
The Devil’s Forest swayed. Fallen black leaves fluttered on the ground several feet inside it.
Spare thoughts invaded her concentration: Perhaps she should’ve used the charm at night, for ghosts prefer night, don’t they? She should step inside the forest, kneel in the shadows instead. Or maybe the blessing ribbon was too bound up in her feelings for Rhun Sayer to be the right thread here? Oh, but she wanted to see her father so badly, to ask him where his bones were laid, so she could find a way to gather them up.
A snap of wood deep in the forest startled Mairwen out of focus. The whistle faded. She stared wide-eyed into the layering shadows, at shifting light deep in the farthest reaches she could see.
Haf trembled, fingers digging into Mairwen’s sides.
Mairwen breathed carefully, but her hands were shaking too.
A figure appeared far away, only a shadow with bright eyes. Strong, like a saint. Mair leaped to her feet. “Dad!” she cried.
Haf scrambled away, gripping Mair’s skirt. “Mairwen,” she whispered.
The dark figure crouched. She saw the glint of teeth as it smiled or grimaced or growled. One clawed hand touched the tree beside it.
Mairwen’s small heart beat faster and faster, and she bared her teeth too. She was afraid and also refused to be afraid. This was not like the red-eyed squirrels and misshapen rabbits. It was not like the tiny birds flitting between the black branches, whispering songs with human words instead of trilling and chirps.
She knew it was not her father’s ghost.
Her charm had brought the devil.
Mairwen stepped back, and back again. “Come on, Haf,” she whispered, walking backward, never looking away from the devil’s eyes until she was far enough from the edge of the forest he blurred into the trees.
• • •
SIX YEARS LATER, MAIRWEN DOESN’T hesitate to cross the threshold again, though this time she is alone, with no charms to protect her or even offer comfort.
The forest is quiet, refusing her its whisper, ignoring her as if she were so insignificant there’s no need to bother.
Mairwen clenches her teeth.
She is not nothing. She is a witch and the daughter of a—of a—
Between. She isn’t a god or a girl. She isn’t a saint or a witch, not only.
Mairwen runs. Her bare feet find easy footing, and she slips between the trees, just a girl in a tattered gray dress.
Her breathing is strong, her gaze focused ahead. Her heartbeat does not waver.
In no time at all she leaps over the creek, pushes through the hedges of red berries, vaults across flint, and into a marsh. She knows the way, because she remembers all of it. Directly to the heart of the forest.
On and on she runs, swift and sure as a deer.
The Bone Tree towers over its grove, and she steps quietly in, heart pounding, ears ringing. Exactly as she remembers.
And the ground is littered with tiny purple flowers. Viola blossoms.
Baeddan huddles against the altar, and atop it a person is stretched out, tangled in vines and flowers, dripping blood from wrist and ankle. She steps nearer the altar, fear tightening her throat. Strands of angry blond hair escape the vines, and she knows.
Before she can dash to him, she sees John Upjohn sprawled just in front of her, obviously dead. Tears burn, but she refuses to allow them to spill. No.
“Arthur,” she says, stepping over John. “Arthur, can you hear me?”
Baeddan’s head jerks up. “Go back, go back, Grace witch!” he hisses.
Too late.
“Mairwen!” calls a warm, delighted voice. “You came!”
He is there: walking around the base of the Bone Tree. Sy Vaughn, his russet hair curled around his face, bright and summery. He smiles, and his skin glows as if suntanned, his eyes bright. His coat is brown and green, leather and rich velvet, and fur at the collar. His black boots are polished. He is the picture of a man in perfect health and prosperity.
But as he walks down a long, curved root toward her, he changes. His eyes blacken and thorns sprout from his cheeks. His teeth lengthen and his lips turn bloodred. His shoulders widen, his legs grow longer and his clothes hug him, transforming into leathery wings, strips of fur, and thick green moss trailing down his hip and thigh. Antlers rise from his head, forking again and again, then cracking and falling away into scarlet autumn leaves. His hair flowers and his hands turn to claws. Feathers appear down his hard stomach, soft and downy as a young owl’s.
Mairwen stares, amazed.
He clomps around the altar on heavy hooves, rounded like a horse’s, and he stretches his arms out; feathers sprout and fall away. His nose lengthens to a snout, tusks press out of his mouth, curling and curling before turning into vines that snake back over his shoulders. Lichen grows down his forehead, dark orange.
Then he’s bloating and turning ugly purple. Pale blood falls from his nose, and his eyes turn white. His skin shucks away, but instead of meat and bone, there he is perfect again: Sy Vaughn with russet hair and butter-pale skin.
“See, my love?” he says.
It begins again, but this time his skin hardens into gray granite exactly like the altar stone, paling to the white, fissured bark of the Bone Tree. His eyes are perfect purple like the violas.
“You’re the god of the forest,” she whispers.
She ignores it, pushing it away, under the throbbing of her frightened heart. “Why did you come back into the forest now? Why did you hurt my mother?”
“The magic has been tugging at me for years. It was time to come home and reset the bargain myself. Aderyn . . .” He sighs, making a grating sound like stone on stone. “My darling Aderyn was remembering me finally, because all the charms were fading, and I wish I could let her—I miss her, my witch—but I needed her blood.”
“For what?”
Vaughn sweeps his arm toward the altar, and Arthur. “To anoint a new saint.”
Mairwen shifts nearer to Arthur, clutching her hands together against her sternum. “Is it too late?”
“For him? He’ll take Baeddan’s place, and you’ll speak with him again.”
“That isn’t . . . Don’t do that.” She looks at Vaughn’s eyes, black and brown now, and intentionally holds his gaze while she says, “Please.”
He laughs: a dark, pleasant rumble that vibrates the ground beneath her bare feet. From all around the laughter echoes in giggles and shrieks. Mairwen’s spine stiffens, for she’d not realized they were surrounded by denizens of the forest. “That worked once, to save the life of a saint, but I cannot let it work again.”
She frowns, suddenly realizes something that tumbles out of her mouth. “You knew leaving John alive would break the bargain. That it would weaken the magic, and—and yourself.”
“It was the only thing you ever asked of me.” His voice is tender, awkward around the fangs pressing against pink lips. He never stops shifting, transforming, dying, living again.
Mairwen only stares, stunned.
The old god of the forest adds, “It was worth it, for you.”
She blinks, and tears fall down her cheeks in straight lines.
“I didn’t know I wanted you until you were here,” he says. “I never had a child before you. Yet when you were born, I went to Addie and I held you. It was the first time since I left the forest that I had made life, that I had sown life again. I used to. Here in the forest, I was part of it all. Life and death, stars and rot—”
“Heartbeat and roots,” Mairwen whispers with him, shivering.
Her father smiles. “I looked at you and longed for the day you’d be old enough to understand, to see me.”
Mairwen has no word for the feeling swelling inside her; it is light and gentle, but promising more, like dawn or rising bread. She wants it, to live in its spaces, despite knowing it’s not real, or not enough to last. But Arthur is dying. Her mother is dying. This creature—god, father, everything he is—cannot have them.
“You took my magic away,” she finally says. “It was changing me, but you sucked it all back in when you came here.”
“I’d have died if I did not come and see the heart of the forest reborn. The bargain keeps me free, and it is entirely broken. You broke it.”
“I would have seen you better if you’d shown yourself when I had thorns in my bones and flowers in my blood.”
Vaughn smiles. “You can have it again. Eat a flower from his heart and take the power back, Daughter.”
She looks at Arthur, at the tiny purple flowers blooming from his chest, the lines of blood dripping down the sides of the altar stone. At Baeddan, who trembles, whose skin is sinking against his skull. He is dying too.
“I know you, Mairwen. I know you want this,” the god says eagerly, holding out a hand to her. “You are everything I hoped. Brave and bold and powerful, my daughter.”
She glances down at the flowers curling around his toes. A thin path of them trails behind him, climbing the roots of the Bone Tree, painting its white bark green and violet.
Vaughn says, “You are bound to this place because my blood makes you part of it, Mairwen. Grace blood and the blood of the forest itself! Ah.” He laughs. “We can have all of this, all the power. You and me, a family.”
The hand he holds to her urges her to clasp it, with gnarled wood fingers, and a spark of wild joy. “Daughter,” he says. She wants him to be earnest. To want her for herself and the possibility in his words, not for power.
Mairwen slides her fingers along his, her thumbs spreading across his palm. She stares at the lines forming in this bark-skin and brings his hand to her face. She presses her cheek into it, turns and kisses the ball of his thumb. It smells like musty roots.
“You and me, Mairwen,” the god tempts. “No one in Three Graces will stand against us if we are united.”
“No,” she murmurs quietly. Her family is Rhun and Arthur and Haf, her mother, yes, and even this devil tempting her. Her toes are cool against the forest floor; she feels vital energy strung through the earth of roots.
“No!” Vaughn is genuinely surprised.
“Mairwen already has a family,” Rhun Sayer calls from the edge of the grove.
• • •
RHUN’S SHOULDERS RISE AND FALL hard as he pauses at the edge of the Bone Tree’s grove to collect himself. He heard enough of Mair’s and the devil’s conversation to know this is the old god, and the old god is both Vaughn and Mair’s real father. Her father who is offering her all the power of the forest she’s ever longed for.
Somehow, Rhun is not surprised. No, he thinks as he watches Mairwen touch her father’s hand and consider, he is surprised; it’s just that he isn’t worried. He’ll deal with these revelations, but there’s no sliver of doubt in his heart what Mairwen will do. He’s very likely more sure of her than she is of herself in this moment.
“Mairwen already has a family,” he says confidently, emerging fully into the grove.
Mairwen spins to him, and Baeddan growls, stumbling to his feet.
The devil—the god—grins. “Rhun, welcome, and welcome all who’ve come in your wake. Bree, Per, Rhun the Elder! Nona, I’m not surprised. Braith and even you, Cat Dee! You must be determined, to have made it here on those tired old legs. Welcome to the heart of my forest. Ah, is that you, Lace?”
Sy Vaughn is recognizable by everyone, despite the thorns and flowers twisting into a crown among his curls, despite the sharp teeth and black eyes. His bearing is as noble as they’ve always been used to, and his voice only slightly more gravelly.
They all remember him now: There was no previous Lord Vaughn, but only this one, young and handsome, for two hundred years.
“Rhun,” Mairwen says, but Lace Upjohn pushes into the grove and limps to the body of her son.
“Oh, John, no,” she whispers, hands shaking. “You did this, Mairwen Grace.”
Mair steps away from her, stricken.
Cat Dee says, “No. It was him. That creature.”
The townsfolk who followed Rhun hesitantly join them under the spreading white branches of the Bone Tree.
It’s Vaughn who goes to Lace and crouches. “I am so very sorry, Lace. We’ll celebrate that he had three extra years to live, to be with you.”
She looks up at him with teary eyes, her son’s cold hand in both of hers. “What are you?”
“The forest, dear lady. I’m the forest god, and also your lord, whom you’ve known all your life.”
“I remember,” Lace murmurs. She blinks at him, seeming unafraid.
Rhun says, “We’re here to make a new bargain, or end it forever, Vaughn. All of us.”
The devil glances at him, standing up on tall legs. Bree Lewis and Ginny Argall crouch with Lace, helping her hold on to John.
“Well, Rhun Sayer, what makes you think you’re in any position to bargain?”
“We won’t give you more saints. We’re all here to decide what to do together.”
The devil smiles, and laughs, a sound like thunder and bells, both. Rhun clenches his jaw.
“Arthur is already on the altar,” Mairwen says quietly; the words travel, though, and Rhun jerks his head up.
There is a body on the altar, wound in vines and bleeding, too. “No,” he says, and runs.
But Baeddan knocks him back with a hard arm. Rhun hits the ground, breath whooshing out of him, and gets up as quickly as he can. His cousin steps near, gripping Rhun’s upper arms. He sings, “You can’t pass me, saint-saint-saint. This is the only way I’ll be free-free-free.”
“Baeddan, let me go. You know it’s wrong. Arthur isn’t a saint. He isn’t one of us.” Rhun doesn’t believe it. He believes Arthur’s heart is so very worthy, but he pleads anyway, whatever he needs to say to move to the altar.
His cousin’s eyes are blacker than river muck again, dull and quiet. Baeddan’s skin is sunken to his skull; his breath comes fast, dry, and smelling of mold.
Distantly, he hears Mairwen say something, and the devil reply, but Rhun puts his hands on Baeddan’s chest. He shoves, leaning all his weight against Baeddan. “Let me by.”
“I cannot, cousin. Brother.” Baeddan shakes his head and begins pushing Rhun back and back, with the strength of a mountain. He bares teeth of hard, pointed granite. Black thorns break through the thin, cracking skin along his jawbone, as if the effort is changing him again.
“I love him,” Rhun says.
“I know. It doesn’t—I can’t fight—the forest. It is inside me. I’m inside it. I am a flame in a lantern and the glass trapping my own heat, saint. I am—I am roots and earthworms. They crawl inside my stomach and it tickles, Rhun Sayer. It tickles.” Baeddan giggles, fingers tightening on Rhun’s arms, bruising. “My lungs are dry leaves. My heart—my heart is flower petals.”
At the edges of the grove appear spirits—white-veiled ghosts. Screams erupt as a hundred bird women dart about the grove, flapping and chattering curses, followed by running bone creatures who cut at the villagers with hard fingers and yelling maniacally. Decaying wolves howl, teeth falling from their mouths, and everyone from Three Graces crowds together, kicking and reaching out with axes and brooms, defending themselves.
“Stop!” roars Sy Vaughn, arms out, flowers catching fire in his hair.
The tiny monsters and little devils flee, and Rhun ignores it all, breathing hard and evenly, staring at his cousin.
Rhun stops struggling. He relaxes. “All right, Baeddan. I understand.” And he does. He knows what he must do to save Arthur.
Baeddan’s shoulders slump. “Good, good. I’m sorry about Arthur. His heart will last. It will last, and he’ll remember you for—for a while. I’ll be in the Bone Tree, watching with empty eyes and smiling a bare-boned smile.” Baeddan laughs sharply at his own terrible joke. Then he lets go of Rhun.
Rhun grabs the handle of the knife in his boot. Nothing else matters around him except holding his cousin’s churning black gaze as he snaps up again and slides the blade deep and fast across Baeddan’s neck.
• • •
“SEE,” THE OLD GOD SAYS after Mairwen tells everyone Arthur is on the altar and Rhun is stopped by Baeddan. “See, everyone, there already is a saint sacrificed, and I will tend the transformation. You have seven more years, and all you need do is return to your lives.”
“I won’t leave without Arthur,” Mairwen says to Vaughn, then turns her gaze onto all the people of Three Graces brave enough to come with Rhun. She is proud of them. “We can’t leave him to die, to become what Baeddan became.”
“It is the only way to put life back into the forest, Mairwen. See all these poor creatures, neither alive nor dead, like Baeddan. Would you have the forest fester and perish?”
Haf bursts out of the trees. “Mair! There . . .” She bends over, panting, and leans her hands on her knees. “I saw your mother! I saw Hetty.”
Mairwen clenches her jaw.
“You cannot stop the sacrifice, Mairwen,” Vaughn says. Somehow he’s slowed his constant cycle of changing, fixed himself as the summery Vaughn, with only hints of wildness: thorns, antlers, flowers. Mairwen understands he doesn’t wish to frighten the people. He looks like a god from a story: beautiful and strange, but not monstrous.
“I’ll stop you.”
“Not like this,” he says with a smile. “Not unless you eat a flower from his heart and take up your power again.”
She shakes her head.
Braith Bowen says, hands in fists at his sides, “Lord Vaughn, I . . . We came with Rhun because we want to know the truth. We want to be part of the decisions.”
“Yes, we must!” says Bree Lewis from beside John Upjohn’s body; she’s holding on to Lace’s arm.
“Let us all bargain with you,” Nona Sayer demands. She’s flanked by Alis Sayer, Delia Sayer, her husband and a dozen Sayer men and boys.
The devil rolls his shoulders and feathers burst from them, trailing down into massive wings. “Yes,” he says through a mouth of curved fangs, “bargain with me. What would you offer for peace and prosperity in the valley? If not one of your hearts?”
Mairwen crouches, puts her hands to the earth. “Forest,” she whispers. “I need you to wake again in my blood.”
Daughter of the forest. Mairwen Grace.
The ghosts of all the Grace witches appear around the boundary of the grove. Mairwen sucks in a quiet breath just as bird women shriek and the forest denizens leap in to fling rocks at the ghosts, to tear at the skirts and boots of the men and women who do not belong here in the Devil’s Forest.
“Stop!” commands Vaughn, and the goblins, bone monsters, and bird women dart away, dashing and slipping into the shadows again. “Hello, Grace,” he says, turning to the youngest girl, who smiles beneath her veil.
“My heart,” the first Grace says. “It is too long since you visited me here.”
“I could not come back inside once the charm was done, my love.”
“How can you love her?” Mairwen says. “You used her for your freedom.”
“I love her and I used her, little bird. Most things in this world are more than one thing.”
Gasping with understanding, Mairwen stands and goes to the first Grace. “Give me my power back.”
“Take it,” Grace murmurs, lips hardly moving.
A guttural sound distracts her, and Mairwen spins to Rhun just in time to see him cut Baeddan’s throat.
Dust and motes of light splatter from the wound. No blood.
The wound burns in Mair’s gut, as if she had been stabbed. “No,” she says, rushing to the dying devil.
Vines crawl out of Baeddan Sayer’s flesh, pulling him apart, and smoke puffs out of his lips, rises from the corners of his eyes like upside-down tears. He bares his sharp teeth and they’re falling out, spinning as they tumble to the ground. Baeddan continues to laugh, throws back his head and grasps Rhun’s shoulders again. Rhun throws his arms around his cousin, loving him, and afraid.
They collapse together. It smells like fire and sharp metal, and Baeddan crumbles in Rhun’s hands, turning to embers and ash, dirt and cutting brambles, hooked thorns and even flowers, desiccated and colorless.
The vines on the altar twist and tighten, and three more flowers burst open.
Tears fall from Rhun’s eyes.
Mairwen, crying too, kneels beside Rhun and digs into the flowers, into the brittle bones, to find the chunk of thorns that was Baeddan’s heart. She pries the knife from Rhun’s hand. She slices it across her chest and throws it down, then presses the heart to the long, fiery line of blood. It crumbles, and Mairwen licks the ashes from her palm.
Thorns and brambles explode up from the earth, surrounding her in a violent nest.
Rhun stumbles away from the thorns, gasping her name, then runs for the altar.
While most are fumbling back, a few follow Rhun, and the Sayer women surround Vaughn, arrows out like swords, an ax in each of Nona’s hands. The spirit women drift nearer; the first Grace smiles at Vaughn, widening to a grin as the feathers of his wings shrivel to ashes. His life and death cycle begins again.
Inside her cocoon of thorns, Mairwen shivers and cries at the slick, heavy dragging of her blood, as vines and flowers push free, as they knot in her stomach and crack her bones. Her collar burns as thorns grow again, all at once, and her nails darken.
At the altar, Rhun begins sawing at the vines, ripping as best he can. Haf helps, as do his father and Braith. There is Arthur’s throat, and there his mouth, open, flowers spilling out.
“It can’t be too late,” he whispers, touching Arthur’s cheeks, his lips. “Arthur, wake up! Baeddan is dead. You cannot be too.” He kisses Arthur’s eyebrow, as the others continue dragging the vines free. Blood splashes when they cut free the thorny vines about his wrists, tearing them from his flesh.
Arthur jerks, back bowed. He opens his mouth and screams silently.
Mairwen, still inside the nest of brambles, grasps a vine, cutting open her palms. Where her blood falls, flowers blossom in tiny white clusters like yarrow. She tears open a way through the briars and emerges.
“Arthur, I’m here. It’s all right,” Rhun is saying. “I won’t let the forest have your heart. It’s mine.”
“Let that saint on the altar go,” Mairwen commands the Bone Tree.
Vaughn says, “You cannot defeat me, Daughter. Your power is only life, not death. You have to be both. You have to let it change you completely. That is real power: change.”
“Stopping you is enough,” she says. The forest pours out of her mouth, burning her eyes until they are black coal, and her lips crack. Yarrow blooms and falls, and her hair is a briar, too, curling over itself as tender green shoots emerge and twine into the thorns.
Arthur Couch sits up, coughing blood and petals. He spits and falls off the altar, against Rhun’s chest. He cannot focus his eyes, but hears roaring and bells all around him. His body is weak; Rhun holds him up. Every beat of his heart thumps through his bones.
The Bone Tree creaks and shudders, bursting with scarlet leaves: the signal for a Slaughter Moon.
“There,” Mairwen says through the flowers on her tongue. “The bargain is broken again. The tree needs a heart, and you will not have any of ours.”
“Your crops will fail, the rain will not come, then, and your babies will die,” the old god says. Fur grows down his cheeks, antlers from his head. His back bends and he sinks to the four delicate legs of a stag, transforming completely.
This is my heart tree. You will all suffer without me! Locking me here again, he says as the fur falls away in chunks and the stag’s antlers become naked branches, as he rots and is only bones, then covered in new flowers again and rises onto two legs: a bear, a man, a creature of lichen and mud and clay, a beautiful man again, with leathery bat wings and a mouth of heavy molars. “Make me a bargain,” he says through the rocks. “Daughter. They’ll hate you if you do not, if their children die. If you all starve. You won’t be welcome in your valley, and you will not be welcome here, where your heart is.”
Mairwen stares, exhausted already, aching and barely holding tight to the flaring edges of the magic that courses through her veins, bulging them, overwhelming her heart.
“You’re a witch, Mairwen!” screams Haf Lewis. “Be a witch!”
She looks at Haf, whose cheeks are marred by tears, and she looks at the first Grace, who is smiling. Then she looks at Rhun Sayer and Arthur Couch, holding on to each other against the altar. Arthur catches her eye, and she sees that circling the first three fingers of his right hand is his fire steel.
She told Haf being a witch was being in between: seeing both sides, all sides, seeing what others cannot and using that power to choose. To change the world.
Your power is only life, not death. You have to be both. You have to let it change you completely. That is real power: change.
“Arthur,” she says. “Do what you came here to do.”
The old god cries out, half in fury, half laughter. The forest leans in, grabbing at the people. Bone creatures attack, and the bird women shriek.
Mairwen does not wait. She runs for the Bone Tree, scrambling up its roots to the black hollow her father coaxed open. Diving in to the sticky, cold womb, she turns and looks down at Arthur.
Steadying himself against Rhun, who fights at his back, keeping the monsters away, Arthur lifts the fire steel. His lips make the shape of her name.
“I love you,” she says, though nobody can hear it. “Both of you, and all of you. Hold on to my heart and I’ll be fine. Now do it.”
His nostrils flare as he takes a furious breath, and Arthur Couch strikes a spark.
• • •
THE ALTAR IGNITES. THE DRY and cracked vines, fueled by blood and crisp flower petals, light, and the old god laughs.
He laughs because a fire is not enough to hurt him. The Bone Tree will be born again after it dies.
But the first Grace, his Grace, appears before him and smiles. “Your daughter is in the heart of the tree.”
The old god looks and there Mairwen is, pressed to the dank inner wood, digging her claws into its heart, letting the flowers from her mouth twine against the flaking white bark of the tree.
Arthur picks up a burning branch, nudges Rhun, and takes the fire with him as he climbs nearer to Mairwen, then plunges the flames into the roots. Rhun says, “No!” but Arthur answers, “Trust me. Trust her,” so Rhun lifts a thick vine snaking with fire and drapes it at the foot of the Bone Tree. Haf Lewis helps, and her little sister. The rest battle the desperate creatures of the forest, the half-living, half-dead bone creatures, the monstrous birds and rodents, the bending, shifting trees.
The old god warns, “This will ruin you all,” still thinking he can stop them and also never afraid of death and inevitable rebirth. “Mairwen, I’ll go with you. We’ll be reborn together.”
“No,” she whispers, thinking of her mother. Mairwen Grace pulls on her heart, and the old god falters. He falls to his knees.
“Mairwen.”
“Father,” she whispers, but he hears it. Deep in his flesh and beyond his bones, he hears her voice.
As the Bone Tree burns, Mairwen closes her eyes and presses her palms to the angry wound on her breast, to the ruins of Baeddan’s thorny heart, the dying heart of the forest, the key to the bargain. She makes it grow.
Flowers burst from the old god’s mouth. His hands grow into the roots and earth, trapping him.
Fire flickers around the god and his daughter, licking at both, casting a web of shadows across Mairwen’s face.
The old god coughs, dying again, and Mairwen says, “It will be mine now. My heart, my forest.”
She weaves briars across the hollow mouth of the Bone Tree, and she is alone in the darkness.
Except, she will never be truly alone, because her heart belongs to more than one.
• • •
WHEN MAIRWEN, ARTHUR, AND RHUN climbed onto the altar together, in the final moments of their Slaughter Moon, they put still-bleeding bone bracelets around each other’s wrists and held hands. They cried out the words of their charm, holding tight, eyes closed, heads thrown back. We are the saints of Three Graces!
It felt like drowning, painful and desperate. It felt like waking from the worst nightmare. It felt like fire, and it felt like their hearts beat so fast they hummed.
When the Bone Tree is consumed by flame, it feels the same.
• • •
THERE IS ONLY FIRE. NO balance, no peace, only the burning destruction, reaching in every direction out and down and even up, up, up toward the sky.
Wind swirls, dragging sparks from the Bone Tree, and flash fires break out, lighting up a tree here and there. Bird women fly too near and go up in a burst of lightning flame.
Rhun and Arthur hold on to each other, and Haf Lewis puts her hand on Arthur’s back. Her little sister holds her hand, and Per Argall holds Bree’s, and on and on until every person from Three Graces still in the grove links themselves together.
“We are the saints of Three Graces,” Rhun says too soft for anyone to hear over the fire. But it’s his prayer and the forest knows.
Mairwen opens her eyes in the center of the firestorm. It hurts. She pushes out with her magic and wonders if she can die faster, but no—she has to be with the tree if she wants to transform. If she wants to take all her power.
That is what she clings to: transformation.
In the forest, life to death to life is the spark, the seed of magic.
Life and death, and Grace in between.
Mairwen, in between. Both. She will survive.
She grinds her teeth as the heat overwhelms her and she cannot breathe at all. She gasps, coughs, cannot stop coughing. Her muscles spasm and she bends in half, falling, cracking her shape and losing all sight and hearing, all feeling but for the fire.
• • •
THE BONE TREE EXPLODES, FIRE and ashes, flaming branches and billowing streaks of smoke.
It flings the people back and away, out in an arc.
Smoke and wind swirl, and nine columns of silvery moonlight stretch up and up, dissipating against the dark twilight sky.
The moon has yet to rise.
The altar itself is cracked in two: atop it a pile of bones and fur and sinew slowly falling to pieces. All that’s left of Sy Vaughn, an ashy mirror of the ruined Bone Tree.
Between the altar and the tree, Rhun and Arthur prop each other up.
Behind them, the grove is empty of everything but human beings. Haf Lewis and her sister clutch tight to each other. Nona Sayer and her husband embrace. Lace huddles over her son’s body. Braith and Cat Dee and Ifan Pugh and Beth Pugh stare at one another, holding hands. They are covered in ashes and flower petals stick in their hair.
Except for the small grunts and muttering of people slowly picking themselves up, and the creak of the forest stretching itself up again, there’s little sound. The Bone Tree smolders, split in three.
“Mairwen!” Rhun cries, and it comes out hoarse and empty. Arthur turns, lungs raw as if he sucked down all the fire.
Neither cares for anything in that moment but her, and they shove around, pulling apart the ashes and hot chunks of roots, hunting. Haf joins them, tears tracking through the spray of ashes on her cheeks. Then others, too.
A few moments of fruitless hunting bring Rhun and Arthur together again. Rhun looks thrashed, near tears, and Arthur wants to pull out a knife and gouge his skin off as if it would be a welcome distraction. Instead, he just puts his arms around Rhun, holding him close and tight. Rhun’s head falls against Arthur’s, and his shoulders tremble.
Nobody knows what Mairwen did. Nobody knows if the charm is back in place, if there’s a new bargain, or if their valley is like any other valley now.
“What story will we tell?” murmurs Haf.
Arthur brushes his fingertips on Rhun’s sleeve. “Look.”
Spring-green vines are curling up the remains of the Bone Tree, winding and spiraled. They shoot up, growing unnaturally fast, covering the blackened bark, chipping it away. Soon the entire three splayed pieces of the tree are more emerald than black, more living than charcoal. Tiny white yarrow blossoms.
Rhun takes Arthur’s hand. Arthur grabs Haf’s, and they pick their way over crumbling roots and new tangles of vines.
They help each other up the massive base of the tree, to where the three broken pieces of the trunk converge. It’s empty of all but ash, yarrow flowers, and thin, moon-bright bones.