Strange Grace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The bird woman smiles, her teeth like needles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Don’t go,” says the first woman.

  “Sing,” says another.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Then we shall have your fingers!”

  “We shall have your toes!”

  “We shall have your pretty eyes!”

  “Or we shall have your song!”

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

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

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

  “Sing!” one cries.

  “Sing,” begs another.

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

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

  “Sing! Sing!”

  “She tastes like a saint!”

  “She tastes like the forest!”

  “Sing for us, forest-girl saint!”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Forever?”

  “Songs last forever!”

  “We love your song!”

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

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

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

  “What lovely hair she has!”

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

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

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

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

  Twice as many tears fall onto her skirt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • • •

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

  The memory of the little bird women remains clear.

  As does—

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

  Mair reels back.

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

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

  Baeddan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  She does not belong here.

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

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

  Mairwen sets her path toward her boneyard.

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

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

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

  She’s going to have to confront her mother.

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

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

  Mairwen takes a deep breath.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Who lied first? The devil or the witches?

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

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

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

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

  Mairwen stands. The tweezers fall to the ground.

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

  “What?” She steps nearer him.

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

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

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