“You never questioned whether the bargain is worth it before,” Hetty says. “When it didn’t threaten a boy you love.”
Mair bites her bottom lip, gouging the skin hard enough to hurt. She sinks into a chair. “You’re right, I feel it sharper now, but shouldn’t I?”
Aderyn sighs and kneels at her daughter’s chair. “It’s true, when Carey Morgan died the valley’s beauty lost some brightness to me. And when Rhun dies, you’ll carry it with you. Every spring you’ll feel it, an ache when the flowers bloom rainbows across our hills. When you taste our year’s meat or sip the brews. You’ll feel the pain, and that pain makes everything around it brighter. That is what the bargain is: death for life, a sacrifice that makes it all sweeter and sharper. Without it, how could we appreciate what we have? We love our saint, and he runs for us, and everyone here knows exactly how precious life is, and love itself. Everybody dies, Mairwen, but the saints of Three Graces die for a reason.”
Mair grips her knees, bunching the fabric of her skirts too tight; she won’t let herself be dissuaded. “Then what is the reason it came early this year? What did we do wrong with John Upjohn? He was the saint, and he ran. He survived. We met the terms of the bargain, didn’t we?”
“As far as I know,” Aderyn says, pushing to her feet again. “Have you eaten breakfast? There are leftover pastries.”
“How can you not be curious? The devil owes us an explanation.”
Hetty snorts, but Aderyn frowns hard. “First we must crown a saint and do our part, or Rhos’s babywilldie. After that we can try to understand.”
Mairwen presses her knuckles into her eyes. She doesn’t want Rhos’s baby to die, but nor can she stand Rhun throwing his life away if there’s something wrong. How can they not see it? “I have to do something. Can’t you feel it? Something changed, and we shouldn’t ignore it.”
The Grace witch pinches her mouth in a thing nearing despair.
Leaping up, Mairwen makes to grab her mother’s hands, but stops and draws a deep breath to show she can be calm. It evens out the pain in Aderyn’s expression. Her mother says, “You know how to make charms.”
“Yes.” Mair tries not to sound too eager.
“Life, death, and blessing in between? That’s the recipe.”
“Always a balance of three pieces.”
Hetty joins them, so they stand in an intimate triangle. But she says nothing, knowing already, Mairwen suspects.
“The bargain is a charm, but a very powerful one. Life, death, and blessing in between.”
Mairwen sees it. “Life in the valley, death in the forest, and... we’re the blessing in between. The Grace witches.”
Aderyn touches Mair’s cheek, sorrow in her eyes. “Our bloodline, our hearts, set originally by the youngest Grace, whose love and sacrifice started it all. We bind the saint. We anoint him with blood. A Grace witch.”
Mair has always felt in between, been drawn to that edge of shadows, because her blood is already bound up in the charm. It’s so simple. Except... “The saint doesn’t always die. There’s not always death in the forest, yet those four times before now, the bargain has held just the same for the seven expected years.”
“What was the last charm you made, little bird?”
“A healing blessing for the sick horse.”
“And how did you make it?”
“His living mane, a fox rib, and my song and breath.”
“Nothing died for that death; it was only a piece of death, the promise of it.” Aderyn smiles grimly.
“I see,” Mairwen says, mostly meaning it.
“The saint must choose to die, but he does not need to truly die. But you cannot say those words to Rhun Sayer.”
“Why?”
Hetty pushes her hair out of her eyes once again, lifting one brow. “If a saint knows he doesn’t have to die, how can he choose to die? The one thing is paradoxical to the other.”
Mairwen has nothing to say, only a smog of thoughts.
“You need food,” her mother says, going for the bread basket hanging from a hook by the hearth. She digs in and pulls out a pastry so perfectly pinched it must be one of Bree Lewis’s.
“Let me do it,” Mairwen says. “I want to anoint the saint shirt with my blood and go up the mountain to crown the saint. It’s the ritual. It’s what the witches do, so let it be me!”
