Now it is a tense, quiet forest. A promise.
Mairwen thought she knew exactly what that promise was. But one of the horses is sick. Something is wrong. Something haschanged.
A laugh tumbles out of her, jagged and surprising. Nothing changes in Three Graces, not like this.
Whirling, she dashes up the hill to the poor horse. From her basket she draws a thin, curved bone, yellow and hard. A rib from a fox, as long as her forefinger. She braids it into the horse’s mane, whispering a song for happiness and health. Hair, bone, and breath: life and death tied together and blessed, a perfect little charm. Then she takes off for her mother’s house.
The golden grass of the pasture is nothing beneath her sturdy boots, though bits of it cling to the short hem of her skirts. She’s grown a handspan in the last year and her summer clothes make it plain. Her wrists stick out of her sleeves, too, and what used to be a bright blue bodice is faded and worn. At least her mother’s handed-down square shawl fits: It’s hard to outgrow a shawl. Mairwen is molded exactly after her mother, Aderyn Grace, in most ways: strong shoulders and round hips and capable hands; a ruddy face more interesting than pretty, but with a round little nose and bowed lips; eyes as plain brown as sparrow feathers under straight brows; cherry-bark hair that twists and annoys like brambles.
At the pasture wall, Mairwen climbs up to walk a measure along the top and delay the moment she arrives home. She’ll tell her mother what she’s found. This won’t be her secret anymore. It will spiral out to the entire valley. Rhun will hear it.
If something is wrong with the bargain, what will happen to Rhun?
The wall stones are locked together by puzzling only, and so Mairwen treads lightly lest she set it all crumbling. She’s been forbidden this game too many times, especially after her friend Haf fell off and broke her wrist when they were six. The bones healed in less than a week, of course. Now the rough stones wobble and tremble beneath her, but Mair can’t bring herself to hop down. She’s too exhilarated, too terrified and confused. Is this what the first Grace witch felt, Mair wonders, when she met the devil himself, when she gave him her heart?
Cool wind rushes across the fields, ruffling the grasses. As she grows more still, Mair can hear the tang of Braith Bowen’s smith hammer, but no other sound from Three Graces finds her ears. Her back still turned against the northern Devil’s Forest, she looks south down the gentle slope toward town with its gray and white cottages, thatched roofs, and muddy lanes. The central square is gilded with strewn hay, but the outer common gardens and smaller goat pastures hold green. Long tracts of land swarm with tiny figures that are her friends and cousins, their skirts tied up or shirts stripped away while they cut the last harvest. There the creek pours out of the foothills with the mill at its strongest straight. Beyond it all the herds of sheep spread up their mountain, guarded by children and rangy dogs. Smoke snakes up from chimneys in town, and from all the scattered farmhouses too. Long curls of it even mark the Sayer and Upjohn homesteads hidden beneath the gentler, kinder forest of their mountain.
And higher up still, Sy Vaughn’s stone manor grips the mountainside like a hunting kite.
This is why she climbed the wall as a child: to see Three Graces mapped before her, to feel the warmth of recognition fill her lungs. To see her home, and its unchanging beauty, and imagine herself an intrinsic part, instead of somehow outside of it all for being a witch and a saint’s daughter. Between the town and the forest, pulled in both directions so that she can never settle down.
She has climbed the wall with Rhun and Haf and Arthur so many times. Rhun crows and spreads his arms as if to embrace the whole of it; Haf balances too carefully, compensating for her fear of falling again; Arthur walks easily, nose up, pretending not to check his steps, as if it all comes naturally to him, as if he were the best.
Where are the three of them? she wonders. Haf with her sisters, washing diapers and braiding baskets or hair or both, charging after chickens. Rhun in a field for the harvest, no doubt, in the center of all the people he can manage, laughing his hearty loud laugh that makes others mirror it. Arthur—alone, she assumes, with a cute sneer—hunting up the mountains to the south, determined to bring back a buck all on his own, or more in his brace of rabbits than any other hunter.
Or, because there’s a sick horse, everything has changed, and she knows nothing of where her friends might be.
If something is wrong with the bargain, did her father die in vain? And Baeddan Sayer, and—
Mairwen jumps to the ground, catching herself with a hand on the earth.
Her mother’s house is the farthest out of town in the north. Surrounded by a fence of logs and stone, the Grace house is two odd-shaped stories with a long wing for herbal work and a separate one-room workshop. One of the oldest local homes, its hearth is made of a single gray stone as long as a man, set down two hundred years ago by the first Graces to find themselves near the Devil’s Forest. The upper level has been added twice, once for grandchildren and again after it burned down in Mairwen’s great-grandmother’s time. In the yard they keep chickens and three milk goats, and her mother’s herb garden overgrows the rear field. A cluster of gooseberry bushes snarl over the wall near the front door.
Mair expects Aderyn to be in the yard where the herb-fire burns, stirring her iron pot for soap or charms or maybe just laundry, but instead angry steam hisses in waves where the abandoned pot has boiled over.
Just then a scream cuts through the pleasant groaning wind. It comes from inside the house.
She runs.
Her bones jar with every hard step as she careens down the slope, skirts tangled around her shins until she wrenches them up and sprints through the gate into the yard. The front door gapes open and Mair flies through, stopping abruptly in the dim entrance.
A single large room of pale daub and dark wood, dominated by the hearth and kitchen space, the bottom floor is usually full of neighbors at any time of day. But now every chair and bench has been haphazardly shoved to the sides of the room and piled atop the heavy dining table, leaving a wide space of only braided rugs. In the center, Aderyn Grace and her best friend, Hetty Pugh, support the pregnant Rhos Priddy between them as the younger mother-to-be grits her teeth and moans. The three women take slow steps around the rug. Rhos pants, then strains against the grip of the older women. Aderyn says, “You’ve got to keep moving, if you can, and we’ll get you through this one and put some tea in you.”
Hetty Pugh shoves black hair out of her face. “One foot, then the other, rosebud.”
Rhos, four years older than Mairwen and only seven months into her first pregnancy, nods frantically, cheeks red, sweat darkening the sunshine curls around her face. Like the sweat turning that gray stallion black.
Mairwen hesitates, one hand on the doorframe, and reminds herself birth is difficult work even in Three Graces. She’s heard the cries, boiled water, mopped up blood. It happens here often, for the Grace heritage makes their house with its ancient hearthstone a lucky place to be born. But this is too soon.
“Mother?” Mairwen finally says, as Rhos’s breath evens out and the girl sags. Both Aderyn and Hetty turn sharply.
“Mair!” Hetty says. “Go to Nona Sayer and send her here. She might know something from outside the valley to help.”
“What’s happening?” Mairwen asks, still hovering.
Her mother slips an arm around Rhos’s wide middle and leads the girl to one of the low rocking chairs. “Rhos is having some pains, is all,” Aderyn says gently. Her dark eyes meet Mair’s, and Mair feels the lie settle in her guts. But it’s a lie for Rhos, not her. Aderyn soothes Rhos with tender fingers patting the girl’s hair. Again Mairwen is reminded of the gray horse and her own ministrations.
Unlike Aderyn’s unruffled surety, Hetty is furious. Her freckles stand out more than usual against bloodless white skin, taking years off the woman’s thirty-odd.
