She can’t seem to help herself: She glances straight at Rhun Sayer. But Rhun’s eyes watch the crowd, earnest and willing them to listen.
It’s Arthur who meets her gaze.
Arthur thought he was a little girl when he heard this story first, and with the other little girls played out the tale again and again. He’d liked being the middle sister, the one with the ax. Mairwen, when she played at all, insisted on playing the devil. They’d used the story to scare themselves: Haf as the youngest Grace would lean toward the edge of the forest, so that Mair the devil could pretend to appear out of it. Haf always screamed, and Mair insisted they hold hands, and kiss, and that was the part Haf didn’t mind, swooning over herself as if wildly in love with Mair the devil.
He can’t hear the story now without remembering the exact moment he’d been forced to realize he wasn’t a sister; he wasn’t one of the girls. He’dlikedwho he was. He’d fit in and had friends, worn skirts and been happy. Then all of that was taken away.
It makes him feel like a monster, like the devil, to miss being a girl.
The witch tears her gaze off Arthur and finishes. “The sisters hesitated, but the youngest smiled so brightly they finally agreed, for it was a miraculous promise. The youngest Grace and the devil married, striking the bargain together. The youngest Grace went inside the forest and never returned, her heart affixed to the center, bleeding so the Bone Tree bled, binding every generation of folk in Three Graces to note the rising of the Slaughter Moon and send the best of our sons to face the Devil’s Forest.”
Though the story is fraught and bloody, as it ends, the entire town seems to sigh in relief. This they know. This they understand. The rules and origin.
At least, Arthur thinks as he holds out his hand to help Mairwen down, they believe they understand. Not many in Three Graces have ever had their world shifted under their feet like this. But Arthur has. Twice.
To his surprise, Mair touches his hand briefly to hop down from the bench. Arthur says for her alone, “You won’t sleep tonight. Neither will I. I’ll be stalking that moon, and the blood on the Bone Tree.”
It’s an invitation, but Mairwen purses her lips. “I’ll be doing everything I can tonight to keep Rhos Priddy and her baby alive, Arthur Couch.”
With that, she swirls away and dashes off, leaving Arthur with a feeling of censure, as if she meant to put him in his place.
The problem is Arthur has neverhada place in Three Graces. Not since he was seven years old.
Just like sickness and blight, like torrential rain and sudden death, Arthur does not belong.
He shudders like a flickering candle flame, wishing he knew where to stand, or how to make himself into an inferno.
For most of his seventeen years, Rhun Sayer has slept soundly, waking with the sun or just before it along with his brother and cousins and parents, joined them all in a raucous breakfast before they parted ways to hunt or plant or harvest, to chop wood or run with the dogs. As the oldest of his brothers and with his closest cousin Brac married now, and Arthur in the barn loft, Rhun sleeps alone in a narrow room just off the kitchen. It’s always warm from the rear wall of the hearth, and only a trunk of cast-off clothes and a small bed fits, though he’s hammered nails into the wall from which to hang scarves and boots laced together and a small basket for his few prized possessions. But after standing restless in Three Graces last night with the villagers after Mairwen left, wishing he could lean on Arthur, and waiting to hear that Rhos’s babe was finally born, a little girl, but weak and refusing to cry... after such tidings, Rhun did not sleep well at all.
He wakes before dawn, before his mother or father stirs up the fire, and can’t relax. So he pulls on boots and trousers and jerkin, only half tucks in his shirt, grabs his bow and quiver, and slips quietly out of the house. Instead of darting up the mountain to hunt, he turns on the path toward town. A starry sky bathes Three Graces in calm silver light, and the wind is still.
Rhun doesn’t allow himself to glance toward the Devil’s Forest. Even in this light, if there’s blood on the Bone Tree he’ll see it. And if there’s blood, there will be a sacrifice. Rhun will run; he’ll do it. He’s always known his sainthood would come.
But he expected more time.
He walks slowly toward the whitewashed cottages and thatched roofs gray in the predawn, letting his chest tighten as it’s wished to ever since he discovered the blighted barley. Something like pain wraps his ribs, and he feels light-headed as he goes quietly past the sleeping bakery and the pub into the center of town. He walks along the spiral of chalked blessings.
Aderyn Grace herself—and more often lately her daughter—does the chalking on Sundays as part of what’s become the weekly ritual for town since the last circuit priest abandoned them when they refused to abandon their devil, during Rhun’s grandfather’s boyhood. Now every Sunday the women bake bread to be shared in the church, and the men bring a special brew of wine from casks hidden from the sun in the dugout of the Royal Barrel. Together they sing old prayer songs while the witches do the chalking, while children play and weave charms from grass and flowers. It’s an informal spirituality the townsfolk have built together, managing to perform their own marriages and baptisms and final rites with an eye and prayer toward God, hoping he hasn’t renounced them for the pagan practice of the Slaughter Moon.
Rhun never worries, because his grandmother told him God loves and is love, and had been willing to sacrifice a son to the world because of love. Was that not the very same heart of the bargain? She said,God is with us every time we send a boy into that forest, because we do it for love. And that boy, our saint, becomes a piece of God.
It makes him smile as he crosses the town center, thinking of her. She died a few years ago, and the funeral had been here, and it had been merry. Gatherings in Three Graces tended toward merry, even wakes and funerals, for nobody is taken before their time. Until now. It is not Rhun’s time, and yet...
The weight of it hangs on his shoulders.
His sigh puffs in the air, though it shouldn’t be cold enough. Rhun turns a slow circle, looking at the buildings, and remembers dancing at his cousin Brac’s wedding last spring, everyone laughing and happy. Remembers the last night ten years ago, before his cousin Baeddan went into the forest, and Baeddan was glorious.It is so good here!
The pain in Rhun’s chest, he tells himself, is love.
He loves Three Graces, the people and the land, and he’ll run early to keep them safe.
A few dim stars wink directly above him as those in the east are defeated by the dawn, and Rhun knows he can’t put it off: He turns his face toward the Devil’s Forest and takes the first step just as a singsong wail slithers out of the Bowen house. Rhun immediately alters course.
The chimney of the smithy smokes thinly, and he hears no rush of bellows or hammering yet. But through the open shutters of the house trails little Genny’s cry, and he goes through the rear gate and into the house without knocking. Braith stands over his two-year-old daughter with his mouth open, eyes pinched, and his large sooty hands out like tree branches.
“All right, Braith?” Rhun asks.
“My wife is... sick.” The mid-aged smith drops his hands to his sides. “Head just aching, she says, and I’d just fired up the...”
