•••
RHUN WINCES AWAY FROM THEfirst slice of sunlight. He realizes, though, what it means, and drops open his mouth. Others have noticed, too: his father and mother, and Aderyn Grace the witch, the sisters Pugh and the lord Vaughn. The name passes from mouth to mouth:Baeddan Sayer. Baeddan Sayer.
The people of Three Graces wait, though it is surely too late now. The Grace witch murmurs,So the Slaughter Moon has set, and seven more years are ours. They no longer feed the bonfire; it will burn itself out, and the ashes will go in winter gardens and soap.
As the sun lifts entirely over the mountains, transforming the sky in a bloody wash, Mairwen Grace walks slowly to the edge of the forest. Her mother reaches out but knows better than to say her daughter’s name where the devil might hear.
Mairwen stops alone just where the light of dawn teases the first trees.
She stares into the dim and whispers the saint’s name.
Nothing happens, and Mairwen throws the rowan doll as far as she can into the Devil’s Forest.
•••
LATER, WHEN THE SUN FILLSthe valley, a shadow stirs. It is a slinking thing, powerful and hungry. It lifts fingers of bone and root from the forest floor, cradling the tiny doll.
It’s a quiet, lovely day, like every day in Three Graces, except one of the horses is sick.
Mairwen Grace puts her hand to the beast’s velvety lips and scrapes her fingers under his chin. She was coming from the boneyard, looping wide over the pasture hill to tease herself with the shadows reaching out from the Devil’s Forest, when she saw the gray stallion shudder and lower his head to the stiff autumn grass. He did not tear a bite, nor nuzzle it, nor raise his head again. He only let his head hang and gave a great, racking cough.
She’s never heard a horse cough, or even thought it possible. His flanks darken with sweat and the spirit has drained from his brown eyes. Worry sinks through her gut: Mairwen has known this herd all her sixteen years, and never have any of the sturdy, small horses been anything but the perfect image of health.
No one falls ill in Three Graces, because of the bargain.
Frowning, Mair leans her shoulder against the horse’s neck, cooing softly to calm the horse and herself. She gazes out at the forest. This near to winter, the leaves curl yellow and orange as far as her eyes can see, to the distant shoulders of mountains and hazy blue sky. Pockets of green remain, of fir and a few mighty oaks whose roots dig deep. Not a sound creeps out from the forest, not of bird nor beast.
It is a silent, strange wood, a crescent of dark shadows and ancient trees embracing the town of Three Graces like the pearl in the mouth of an oyster.
And in its deepest center, the Bone Tree rises higher than the rest, with barren branches, gray as a ghost. Every seven years a handful of leaves bloom just at the top, turning red as if some sky-giant has shed drops of blood. A warning that the next full moon will be the Slaughter Moon and one of the boys will become a saint. If they do not send a saint in for sacrifice, the bountiful magic that holds their valley healthy and strong will fade.Thensickness will come, harvests will fail, and babies will die.
But it has been only three years since the last Slaughter Moon.
Unease wraps fingers around Mairwen’s spine. It draws her like a fish on a hook toward the forest. Her arm slips away from the horse and she sets down her basket of sun-bleached bones.
Her boots brush loudly against the grass as she picks down the long pasture slope toward the forest, eyes on the dark spaces beyond the first line of trees. Her breath thins and her heart beats faster.
Mairwen herself has never been sick, though she’s felt the flush of nausea before. She thinks of the carcasses hanging in cages in the boneyard, of the buckets of macerating skeletons, all part of cleaning the bones to make magic charms and buttons and combs. She thinks of the tendons, blood, and offal, the vile residues and grease of her work. Sometimes the stench of rot gags her, sometimes it slips past the scarf tied about her face and curdles her stomach, but that sort of illness always passes when she finishes changing out the bucket water.
This is different.
The daughter of the Grace witch and the twenty-fifth saint of Three Graces, Mair has been raised to believe she’s invincible, or at least special. A blessing and good luck charm. But a town like hers hardly needs additional blessings or luck, not when the bargain keeps everything in the valley healthy and good. So Mairwen pushes at everything. She skims her hands into the forest, and surrounds herself with bones. Although her mother, Aderyn, spends time teaching her the healing ways of the Grace witches, Mairwen is more interested in strangeness. In bone charms and dark edges, in crows and night-mice. In all the things the first Grace witch knew and loved.The first learned the language of bats and beetles, sang with the midnight frogs,Mairwen’s mother used to whisper late at night, when Mair climbed onto her bed for stories about the long line of Grace witches.
At the final brink of sunshine, Mairwen stops.
Fingers of darkness slither over the trees, shadows where none should be, moving in ways no shadows should move. She licks her lips to better taste the hollow breeze and touches her longest finger to the cool trunk of a tall oak tree. Her toes wiggle in her boots, and she steps forward, half in shadow, half in light. Her apron turns gray in the shade while the sun continues to warm her tangled cherry-bark hair.
“Hello,” she says softly, but her voice carries through the dull first few feet of the forest. Wind blows, whispering back at her from the canopy above. From here she can see uneven rows of trees, some oak, some pole pines, chestnut, she thinks, and other grand, proud trees, their leaves curling orange and gold as fire. The ground is covered in leaves and pine needles, all grayish brown from decay. No undergrowth for a long stretch that ends in a snarl of rowan and hawthorn and weedy hedges.
She wishes to step inside. Longs to explore, to discover the forest’s secrets. But her mother has said, again and again,Grace witches do not return from the forest. We all hear the call, eventually, and walk inside forever. My mother did, and hers before that. You were born with the call, baby bird, because of your daddy, and must resist.
Mairwen clenches her hands together. It does not seem right to ignore this yearning, but her mother has promised:Someday, someday, baby bird.
She listens carefully—a witch’s first lesson, her mother has also said. A leaf falls, brown and torn. A cluster of white flowers shivers against a root, tiny as a handful of baby teeth.
She taps her own teeth gently together. Some evenings and other dawns she hears the creatures of the forest gnashing theirs. She’s seen them: tiny black squirrels with hollow eyes; birds with hands and bloody beaks; larger shadows formed like people or mountain cats; shifting, see-through shadows. Monstrous because the magic of the bargain has made them so, Aderyn says. When the setting or rising sun paints the sky the pale colors, this threshold becomes impossible to see, and Mairwen likes to come here to find it with her touch, with her skin and mouth and the nervous flutter of eyelashes. Then she can hear them, the clicks and hisses, the rattling laughter that even in summertime sounds like empty winter branches and bones.
But not now, not when the sun is high behind her.
