The forest is black and silent.
Haf hears her heartbeat thrumming in her ears.
The moon sinks.
•••
THE DEVIL HOLDS OUT Abroken rowan doll. “You gave this to me.”
Mairwen gasps, blood on her mouth and under her nails: She sees through the devil, past mottled skin and terrible scowl, past thorns and scars and teeth, past years of torment and hunger, to what remains of his heart.
•••
“IHOPE,” IFAN SAYS SOFTLY, MOUTHagainst Haf’s tumbling crown of braids, “Rhos and her baby are well in the morning. I hope, because the Moon was early, that it does not matter three went into the forest.”
She nods, crossing her arms over her chest in order to hold his hands.
The bonfire settles, and Haf settles too, into a daze of blurred memories and hopes as raw as starlight.
Wind blows out of the northern mountains. It raises a hiss from the forest, tossing leaves together, and the long white claws of the Bone Tree creak.
•••
RHUN BURSTS INTO THE GROVEof the Bone Tree, falls to his knees.
The tree is a mammoth creature of striped bark, elegant, arcing branches, naked of leaves. The moonlight turns it silver, and it throbs and shifts like it’s breathing. But that is not why he cannot look away.
Melded to the trunk are human bones. Femurs and vertebrae, narrow fingers reaching for him, delicate forearms, hips and sharp shoulder blades jutting out like butterfly wings. And black-eyed skulls, mouths gaping, woven to the tree by wormlike vines. One hangs at exactly Rhun’s height, and he stares at its empty dead gaze.
Horror unlike any he’s imagined sinks through the saint, and he trembles.
There are twenty-five skulls on the Bone Tree.
•••
IN THE FINAL HOUR—SHEhopes it is the final hour—Haf pinches her wrists to stay alert, to keep her attention bright as the lightening sky.
Her legs are stiff, her neck aches, and her eyes are burning and dry. Ifan cradles her hips, breathing evenly against her hair, relaxed as if he dozes even as he stands at her back. It brings to life a well of tenderness in her, though her brow is bent with anxiety, her heart hurts. She longs to walk nearer, to be right at the edge when the sun breaks in the east. Nearby, Aderyn Grace has put her knees and hands to the earth, fingers dug into the grass. The witch’s back bends, her head lolls forward, and all her brambling dark hair—so like Mairwen’s—falls as a veil. She’s singing a soft song, a hymn it sounds like, with words like “God” and “mother” and “everlasting.”
•••
THE DEVIL DANCES AS HEbinds the boy to the altar. So it goes, so it always, always goes: The devil has won and this heart belongs to the forest.
•••
THE MOON TOUCHES THE WESTERNhorizon.
Haf looks right, where half the sky has painted itself pastel, where the stars are vanishing, and with them her fear. A solid, weighty thing grows in her chest, like hope but colder. The time comes, the moment, the answer to nearly ten hours of prayer.
The townsfolk keeping vigil stir and shift.
The sun reaches its fingers to the edge of the trees, casting pink light along the roots and trunks, destroying that liminal plane where Mair liked to tease and play. Every single person strains forward, stepping nearer, and every single person in the valley is surprised.
Arthur Couch emerges first: fitting as he was the first to vanish. He drags with him Rhun Sayer, limping and near-broken and barely able to stand. Rhun leans on Arthur as if Arthur is the only thing in the world keeping him alive.
A whimper of relief ricochets through the crowd, but they hesitate; they hardly move, waiting still, until there—just there, behind the boys, walking in as painful and slow a manner, comes Mairwen Grace in a ruined blue dress.
But she is not alone.
