Every morning as the sun rises, Rhun Sayer and Arthur Couch wait at the edge of the Devil’s Forest. Sometimes Haf Lewis joins them with a basket of bread.
It’s been twelve days since the Bone Tree burned. No other tree caught fire. John Upjohn is buried in the cemetery under the saints’ memorial. Too little was left of Baeddan, though Rhun picked up a few teeth and a curving rib bone. Haf and Hetty led them to the Grace cottage, where Aderyn Grace’s body was grown straight into the hearthstone, and from her chest a small gray sapling reached up toward the ceiling. Rhun and Arthur climbed onto the roof and pulled apart enough thatching to shed light on the little tree.
Rain came, just enough, and Rhos Priddy’s baby isn’t doing well, but lives. They’ve finished the harvest, and a dozen people left the valley, including Arthur’s father. Without a bargain, they said, why remain where they cannot achieve greater things? Arthur shrugged and moved his meager belongings from the Sayer barn up into Sy Vaughn’s manor and pointedly took a pair of Rhun’s boots with him. Rhun hasn’t been ready to move out of his family home yet. Not while he doesn’t know. When the sun shines on a patch of fallen red leaves he thinks of Mairwen.
Twice he and Haf climbed up to the manor house at night and sat around the fire pit where the saints were named, three fat candles burning, just to watch the moonlight against the pale green, flowering branches of the Bone Tree. Arthur always makes them come inside and tell stories to the few other kids who live with him already. Per Argall, for one, and seven-year-old Emma Howell, who says she wants to be a saint. Arthur tells her she can’t, but only because there are no more saints. He’ll still teach her to skin a rabbit and make a fire and whatever else would help her survive alone in the wilderness.
It takes three days for the burns on Rhun’s and Arthur’s and Haf’s hands to heal completely. Slower than with the bargain, but they wonder if it’s still magic-fast. None in the valley know or remember how long it should take.
Arthur stares at Rhun one afternoon, when they’re setting a series of rabbit traps. Rhun starts to sweat under the intensity of the look, and backs up against a tree. Arthur pushes off his hunter’s hood and kisses Rhun.
Closing his eyes, Rhun accepts the kiss, letting Arthur work through it. After an uncooperative moment, Arthur’s mouth softens and he brushes his lips against Rhun’s cheek, too. His eyelashes flutter, teasing Rhun’s skin.
It breaks some barrier that had been keeping Rhun from demanding what Arthur had been doing at the Bone Tree alone.
“I went to burn it down,” Arthur says, not moving away. There’s only a handspan of air between them.
“You shouldn’t have.”
Arthur shrugs and touches his own lips.
Rhun can’t let it go, despite his gaze locked on Arthur’s fingers and Arthur’s lips. “We all had to decide together! It doesn’t matter what you learned or how you changed. If you were just going to make a choice alone, make the decision alone, it’s as bad as all the secrets and lies that came before. You don’t get to choose for other people.”
“There wasn’t really a choice to make. The bargain was wrong. You know it.”
Reluctantly, Rhun nods. Regret and sorrow drag down at him. He frowns. He misses Mairwen so much. She’d know what to snap at Arthur to make him understand he can’t change people by taking everything over, even if he’s right.
Arthur sucks in a sharp breath. “I want her back.”
“Even though she was the devil’s daughter?”
“We always knew that,” Arthur says with a wry smile.
Most of Three Graces doesn’t hold anything against Rhun or Arthur, though some continue to give Arthur sideways glances, but likely because Arthur is as quick to sneer as ever. Arthur thinks the first time someone dies of illness there’ll be a hard few weeks for the former saints. Rhun promises they’ll get through it. Rhun the Elder and Braith Bowen and Cat Dee create a few plans for storing more food over the winter and ask for better records of the animals and crops in the valley, just in case they need, in the spring, to send someone into a city for supplies or more chickens or something. They’ll figure it out.
This morning it’s two weeks since the Slaughter Moon, and as the sun rises, so does an impossibly tiny sliver of a smiling moon.
Rhun crouches at the edge of the Devil’s Forest, hands covering his bowed head. Light spreads over Arthur beside him, stretched out in uncertain sleep.
A bird trills at the dawn, hesitant in the frosty breeze. Not a cloud mars the sky, so dawn rings the valley: pink and gold in the east, gentle cream in the west. Stars cling to their last in the dark apex. Rhun presses his fingers into his scalp, releasing fractions of the gentle ache that’s haunted him the past hour or so.
Arthur is not asleep, but unready to open his eyes. His back is cold where he’s lain for hours, flattening the yellow grass, and the tip of his nose, too. Only his hands are warm, folded under the front of his jacket. He’s tired of this dawn vigil, impatient for Mairwen to either prove herself alive or be dead. If she’s dead he’ll want to die too, but Rhun will need him. The not knowing is making his stomach crawl constantly.
Then he can taste the light on his lips.
Rhun puts his hand on Arthur’s waist, and the heat of the touch through his shirt opens Arthur’s eyes. He squints and sits smoothly, taking Rhun’s hand and holding on to it by the wrist. He stares at the smear of bright pink burn scar, shining perfectly parallel to one of the lines across Rhun’s palm.
“It’s been too long,” Arthur murmurs.
Rhun’s fingers curl protectively around his palm. “She told me she would marry you.”
Arthur laughs merrily. “She doesn’t even like me.”
Rhun only watches, quietly amazed at how beautiful Arthur is when he forgets to be cranky. Dawn brightens the sharp line of Arthur’s jaw, and the ragged layers of his hair, and flares along his eyelashes.
The hungry look on Rhun’s face reminds Arthur their hands are folded together and his easy laugher fades into a suspicion. “You mean she said she’d marry me if you died.”
“No. She promised either way. And if I survived, I could live with you both.”
“Oh God.” Arthur is laughing again, thinking what a disaster it would be, but liking it.
Rhun shrugs, over-aware that Arthur is holding his hand, thumb stroking the delicate skin of his palm. He shivers. There’s still some magic here, and perhaps throughout the valley.
Suddenly Arthur goes rigid. “Rhun,” he whispers. “Flowers are blooming in the forest.”
• • •
There is a smile in her heart that has yet to translate onto her mouth, for her body is new, transformed, less a girl than yesterday. Or the day before. She isn’t sure. Where she steps, the forest roots rise to poke and caress, and branches reach out for her where she passes. Her touch encourages brightening leaves, despite the approach of winter. The beat of her heart is strong, pumping cool blood, like forest streams that never see sunlight, through her veins.
If she pauses to close her eyes, she can feel all of it: the entire valley. Her feet connect through the earth, her hands through the trees she strokes. She tastes it on her tongue and hears the quiet song of it. Her heart throbs and the valley echoes it back. A hundred, no a thousand and more lives flicker with her. People. Little creatures, clicking their teeth. Birds, hounds, rabbits and foxes and a few white deer. Some are hungry, some asleep. Some hunting and others stretching wings against the cold breeze. Alive. They’re all alive.
She’s not stuck between light and dark, or valley and forest. She isn’t a thread of magic or a piece of a charm. She’s not one of three. She’s the center of it all.
The sun rises and she approaches the edge. A forest devil, a witch, a young woman, with eyes like a starry night and teeth like cats, and thorny, flowering brambles tangled in her hair, littering white petals behind her.
They’re waiting for her. Two of the hearts: one burning, one perfectly in tune.
She smiles, lips parted over sharp but not too-sharp teeth.
Instead of slowing, she leaps forward. She dives at them, throwing arms around both together. One hisses as some sharp piece of her body slices at his skin, and the other grunts because he catches most of her weight. Neither of them lets go.