Strange Grace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Ifan Pugh!” she hisses.

  He stands his ground silently.

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

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

  Maybe she is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Mairwen, may I have a moment?”

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

  “I don’t remember very much.”

  “Really?”

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

  “But why?”

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

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

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

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

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

  Surprised, Vaughn hesitates. “My father?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Mairwen Grace. Come home.

  Daughter of the forest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The angry skin below heats up at the touch.

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

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

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

  “Not yet,” Mairwen says slowly.

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

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

  Aderyn frowns.

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

  “Mairwen—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “But Rhun is alive,” Mair says.

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

  “Have you ever loved anything at all?”

  “How can you ask me that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Arthur turns, eyeing his father. Rhun braces himself.

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

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

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

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

  His father frowns. “If you say so.”

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

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

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

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

  “I know.”

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