“Oh no,” Rhun says, but puts on a smile as he bends to Genny. The little girl is half out of her smock, with the armhole knotted about her braid. Tears stick to her lashes and pink cheeks, and dark purple jam paints her mouth in wide strokes. “Come on, sunlight,” Rhun murmurs. “Let’s get ready for the day.”
Genny clings with sticky hands to Rhun’s trousers.
“You take care of Liza,” Rhun says. “I’ll keep Genny with me for the morning.”
Braith Bowen stares a moment at Rhun and his only daughter, lines cutting at his mouth. He unties his heavy smith’s apron and keeps on watching as Rhun calmly plucks Genny off the dusty floor and puts her on the table, as he washes the child and sings a song about noses and eyes and mouths and keeping them clean for the saints to kiss. He kisses Genny’s nose and eyes and mouth after each rhyme, with a delicate smack. Then he tickles her knees and ribs, wiggling the smock into its proper place.
Rhun glances at the tired face of the smith. “We’ll be all right, Braith. It’ll be good for me, too, to have Genny to look after until...”
“Until we know,” Braith says.
Rhun nods, eyes darting toward the north window and the lightening sky.
Braith touches his daughter’s hair, then Rhun’s shoulder, and disappears through the door toward the back bedroom of his cottage.
Rhun picks up his song again, changing it to one of the harvest tunes. He teases the child that he’ll slice off her hair with a scythe if it doesn’t get combed once a week,slicelike the barley,slicelike the wheat,slicelike the butcher cutting his meat. And Rhun chops his teeth lightly at Genny’s chubby fingers. He gets her hair unknotted and braided in a rope, then hefts the babe onto his hip and takes her outside, where the square remains empty, but he can see more smoke lifting out of the chimneys as the folk get up and started for the day. Are others sick? Have the goats dried up or milk gone sour? What new pieces of the bargain have fallen apart today?
The two-year-old kicks, knocking her heels on Rhun’s thigh. “Let’s walk out to the pasture, shall we?” he says, snuggling her close. “See the horses?”
“Horses!” she repeats.
As he carries her out of town, he sings again, about walking and trotting and galloping a pony, varying his own gait according to the song, until Genny laughs so bright the pain around Rhun’s chest lifts away just enough.
•••
DAWN IS NOT YET MOREthan a line of silver in the eastern sky when Mairwen arrives again at the pasture hill nearest the Devil’s Forest. As expected, she hardly slept the night before, taking turns with Nona Sayer to care for Rhos and the tiny babe. They swaddled the girl and warmed her, massaged her and kept constant eye that she breathed, using what little knowledge Nona remembered from keeping puppy runts alive as a girl. Water boiled over the fire all night while Aderyn worked with Rhos to get her milk flowing, though by the time Rhos finally wept herself to sleep there’d been no success. Finally, Aderyn sent Mair up to her loft, but she’d only dozed, too focused on the tiny gasping breath of the baby to sleep, wishing she’d defied Lord Vaughn and her mother to go into the forest. Nona Sayer confided that without the bargain, Rhos’s baby would certainly die.
Finally Mairwen got up, got dressed, and creaked down the ladder to the kitchen. She stirred up the fire so it would warm the room before the other women woke, then took a boiled egg from the basket, and her mother’s old leather coat from the peg beside the door.
She crunches through the dying grass to the horse pasture, peeling her egg as she goes and scattering the shell behind, whispering tiny blessings to the grass. Stars sparkle crisply in the chilled air, and no clouds mar the diamond sky. To her right, the far horizon bends silver where in less than an hour the sun will rise. By the time she reaches the stone wall around the pasture, she’s finished her egg, and pauses to swipe a handful of wild dill to chew.
The horses huddle in the valley, opposite the forest slope. Two mares pop their long faces up to snicker at Mairwen. She shushes them, searching for the gray who was sick yesterday; he kneels alone, head low.
As she reaches the crest of the hill to gaze down at the woods, it surprises her to realize she’s not the earliest riser. Someone stands below her, at the very edge of the Devil’s Forest, near the ugly tree the children call the Witch’s Hand. Its lightning-scarred branches crawl up against the midnight green of the forest itself, streaked with white ash and decorated with a number of red blessings tied there by brave—or foolish—children. They dare each other to do it: to ready a charm against the devil and walk up to the wrecked tree and stand there long enough to tie up their blessing. No matter what they spy creeping in the deep shadows of the forest, no matter what shrieks they hear or the chill of demon breath trickling down their spines.
They’d all been eight when Dar Priddy challenged Rhun to hang a blessing, and Mair heard from Haf that the boys were sending someone out. Haf had tittered how brave it was to make such a gift, and the Parry sisters giggled nervously that it was always boys doing it; wouldn’t it be grand for one of their own to be so brave? Mairwen, just to be contrary, said it was meaningless courage because nothing came of those blessings, so why not save bravery for an act that mattered? Bryn Parry sniffed and told her sister obviously Mair was just afraid and using her awful logic to make her fear sound sensible.
Of course, Mairwen was not afraid of the forest, and so it was easy to walk up to the Witch’s Hand at the same time as Rhun Sayer and convince him there was no good cause to leave a blessing.
When she came up behind him that dawn, Rhun had been trembling and tense. At her footsteps he whirled around, ax in one hand and limp red ribbon in the other. “Mairwen Grace!” he squeaked, backing up to knock into the trunk of the tree. Its branches rattled overhead, and Mair pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth, looking wide-eyed at Rhun, who was no taller than her then, but only a boy with big hair and a crooked nose too large for his face. She put her fists on her hips and said, “Better to give that blessing to me than to a cursed tree like this, Rhun Sayer!”
His mouth fell open and he laughed.
Mairwen laughed, too.
She’d never paid him much attention before, though she supposed she’d known him all her life. The cadence of his laughter had warmed her from the inside out.
But the noise of it carried well into the Devil’s Forest, and a laugh echoed back at them, high and wicked enough to prick.
They leaped together, grasping hands, and ran up the long hill to the grazing horses, where their peers waited, jeering and wide-eyed, but shaking too, for they’d heard Rhun’s laugh and the mirror of it from the forest.
The girls held out their arms to welcome Mairwen back, but skinny Arthur Couch had insisted, “It doesn’t count if you don’t tie the blessing on,” holding his hand out for the ribbon. “I’ll do it. Give it to me.”
But Rhun tied his ribbon into the thicket of Mairwen’s hair instead.
Now the young man standing before the Witch’s Hand takes a low-hanging blessing in his fingers, gently tugging. But he doesn’t untie it, only strokes it, and then lets his hand drop.
Arthur.
