Beside her Rhun Sayer murmurs something she can’t quite hear. Eyes on the forest, he walks slowly but with absolute purpose down the pasture hill.
“Rhun,” says Nona Sayer.
He acknowledges nothing, but continues on at the same pace until he’s at the edge of the trees. He pauses, but doesn’t look back over his shoulder, as if he knows looking back would hold him in place.
Rhun follows his friends into the Devil’s Forest.
Haf understands, but it turns her heart even colder.
Conversation flares at her back, louder than the bonfire. Haf watches her shadow; flames cast it long and flickering and strange toward the forest. She swears she will not close her eyes until the sun appears. Lowering to kneel on the crisp grass, Haf arranges her skirt carefully around herself as a distraction. She’ll need more than that, though, to make it the nine hours until dawn.
“Be calm,” Lord Vaughn commands, and the fearful talk quiets.
“Our part of the bargain is intact,” Aderyn Grace says, almost too softly. But they all hear.
Vaughn adds, “Hold vigil, as you—as we—always hold vigil. There is no more any of us can do. When the sun rises, we will see.”
After a moment’s pause, someone begins to recite the litany of saints.
One by one, the townspeople join in, until the prayer is a billowing cloud of hope lifting off the hill. Haf moves her lips along with the prayer, hands folded in her lap, eyes on the forest.
Her sister Bree brings her a mug of beer, but Haf waves it away. The beer would only make her tired. Hot tea would be better, or plain water, she thinks, though truly she hardly knows; Haf has never kept vigil before. Seventeen years ago she’d been a babe in arms. Ten years ago she left with her parents after the snake dance, after Baeddan Sayer ran in. She’d only been eight, and her mother easily convinced they should spend the night by their own hearth with little four-year-old Bree. Three years ago she tried to stand with Mairwen, but halfway through the night her eyes drooped heavy. She paced to stay awake, and pinched her cheeks, but several hours before dawn she fell asleep leaning against the pasture wall only to wake in sudden terror at the sight of John Upjohn’s bloody wrist.
Haf pictures Mairwen covered in blood.
•••
THE WIND INSIDE THE FORESTwhispers,Grace, Grace, Grace.
Mairwen, running, hears her name, and Arthur flings himself before her as if to protect her from ghosts. But the forest is everywhere around them: listening, stalking, laughing.
Grace, Grace, Grace,it says, and the tiny monsters chatter it, goblins and bobbing spirits, sharp-toothed birds and bone boys all revel in the sound of the name.
The devil bides his time, stretching his jaw in a massive, lazy yawn, crouched at the base of the Bone Tree. He will go after them soon.
Them.It is an odd thing, but he smells more than a saint, and the forest is alive with that old name.
•••
HAF SITS SO STILL ONLYwisps of her hair move in the breeze and the heat from the fire. Her braids are expertly crafted, and only a few long tendrils have fallen, exactly where Haf meant them to when she wove it up this afternoon. She wanted to look as pretty as Mairwen in the beautiful blue dress. Haf even daydreamed about her own wedding dress, nearly finished and folded in the trunk at the foot of her mother’s bed. It’s a warm summery green and embroidered, too, like Mair’s, but without the rich silk sleeves. Haf had insisted on sewing loops and ribbons into the skirt so she could raise it to her calves after the ceremony, in order to dance all day and night with her family and friends and new husband. This spring, after the first bloom. Mairwen has to be there. In her heart, Haf feels absolutely certain she cannot ever marry without Mairwen to chalk blessings and kiss her cheek and find perfect delicate sparrow bones to weigh down the ends of her wedding veil.
A man’s boot appears near her hip, worn and dark brown in the firelight. He kneels and touches her shoulder gently. Haf’s eyes flicker to his—though the fire at his back turns him into a dark silhouette and fine features are impossible to determine, she knows it’s Ifan. As if summoned by her slowly spiraling dread.
Not even this rare touch from her soon-to-be-husband comforts her.
She covers his hand with hers, though, curling her small fingers around his, and he accepts the invitation to sit with her.
“Are you warm enough?” he asks in his plain way. She nods quickly, shallow little nods highlighting her fear. She can’t stop thinking about Mairwen hurt, bleeding—things she’d never imagined before. Mairwen in the devil’s clutches, or forced to watch Rhun or Arthur or both of them die. She imagines the devil himself, like in the story: monstrous and strange, part forest creature, part man, with handsome eyes and face, but fangs and cloven hooves and horns.
How does anyone who loves the saint survive the vigil hours? she wonders. It would’ve been bad enough to hold Mair’s hand all night long, both of them hoping after Rhun Sayer. Haf prepared for the past two days to be a solid force of friendship and love for Mair, prepared little stories she recalled of their childhood to distract her. She never thought to prepareherself.
•••
AT FIRST RHUN MOVES FAST,tracking his friends easily, for Mair’s skirt tears and drags, leaving a path he could’ve followed as a child. Moonlight snakes through the lattice of branches overhead, casting shadows in odd places. He tracks them to a deer path cutting through a scarlet hedge with thin leaves as red as blood and twice as tall as him. It emerges at a wide, shallow creek with an opposite bank of flat stones. The moon’s reflection is a bright oval, a shivering fungus on the water.
It’s too quiet. Besides the slow murmur of water and whispering breeze, Rhun hears nothing.
Fear seeps down his spine.
