Mair says as calmly as she can, “Mother, I need to speak with you,” and Aderyn immediately gives Rhos over to Hetty and ushers Mairwen back into the yard.
“One of the horses is sick,” Mair says in a gasp. “And this! What does it mean?”
“I can’t know yet. Maybe nothing too much,” Aderyn answers, wiping her brow. “Go for Nona, and then up the mountain to find out if Lord Sy is home from his summer travels yet, and tell him, and bring him down.”
Mairwen goes in a swirl of skirts and tangle of fear.
•••
RHUN SAYER PUTS DOWN HISscythe and crouches amid the cut barley. Sun beats down on his bare, broad shoulders, and sweat mixes with field dust and bits of seed to itch along his spine and behind his ears and where the buttons of his trousers rub his stomach. All around him men and women grunt and sing “swing, child, swing” to hold on to an even rhythm. This glinting haze only happens late in the afternoons on harvest days, when the lowering sun angles exactly to light up the dust tossed high from their work.
Everyone expects Rhun to stand wide, sigh happily, and grin, to declare this day has been a good day and maybe start a new song, something rapid and merry. A tongue twister or ask-and-answer. It’s what he usually does, full of hard work and the promise of relief and hot meat and beer for dinner with his cousins and neighbors alive in the glare of low sunlight.
But Rhun isn’t paying much heed to the haze or the chanting. He narrows his gaze onto the patch of dark, bent barley that he half sliced through. The stalks are spotted with pale freckles, ringed with blackening brown. He’s never seen anything like it, but he knows in his gut this is blight. Not a thing to be blamed on beetles or grasshoppers, but disease. Like the pox that sometimes crawls through the valley, marking temporary scars on the young and old, and leaving relief behind in its wake, for here nobody dies of such things.
But some of this barley, Rhun thinks, is dead.
An unfamiliar frown pulls at his lips. Unease flickers behind it, and Rhun huffs out a breath. He needs to tell somebody, even if it’s nothing but a strange outlier patch.
“Rhun? Y’all right?” It’s Judith Heir, a woman five years older than him, as unused as the rest of them to a frown on the mouth of Rhun Sayer the Younger.
Rhun knows it, and smiles. He’s a handsome boy, seventeen, with broad shoulders and the crooked nose that runs in his father’s family, and the brown skin and odd carmine flecks in his eyes he got from his practical, cranky mother, Nona. Otherwise, he’s symmetrical and large all around, wears whatever fits him and suits his day’s task, and ties his black spiral curls into tails and clubs, never hiding his face. “Yeah, just got a crick in my shoulder,” he says. For emphasis, he rolls his right shoulder dramatically, wincing. “I think I’ll run and go get a salve from Aderyn Grace.”
“Surely,” Judith says, then mops her brow with her sleeve before hefting her scythe again.
Quickly, Rhun puts his fist around the base of some of the patchy barley and tugs it out of the earth. Hooking his scythe over a post, he strides for the witch’s house, tapping dirt off the barley roots against his thigh as he goes.
Secrets are Rhun’s least favorite thing in the world, for how they taint everything with a prickly combination of hope and fear, but he is certain that at least immediately, it’s better to keep this discovery quiet. He’ll find Mair and show her, get her take. Let her be fascinated as she always is with the rare and different, and pull him along with her enthusiasm.
Just the thought of her calms him: Mairwen Grace, the person he loves whom he is allowed to love.
Wind from the north blows in over the Devil’s Forest. Rhun glances at the darkness cradled there, a horizon of black trees undulating under the wind like an angry ocean, with distant mountains behind. He pauses. The barley in his hand tingles, or perhaps that is a tickling unease in his palms, the urge to run, run, run.
Someday.
Rhun Sayer smiles a gentle, private smile, not performing anything but only for himself at the rightness of his future: Someday he’ll stand at the top of the pasture hill with the entire town, beside a bonfire, wearing the saint’s crown. And as the sun sets and the Slaughter Moon rises, he’ll be the one to dive into the forest like his cousin, and run—and likely die—for the valley. For all this goodness.
The certainty of it comforts him as much as the thought of Mairwen did.
But the wind reaches him, chilling the sweat on Rhun’s chest, and he realizes he left his shirt folded over the cart at the corner of the barley field. Awkward to knock on Aderyn Grace’s door without it, so he shifts his path toward home instead.
•••
IN A CLEARING OF AUTUMNtrees that glow under the late sun like a soothing family fire, Arthur Couch pinches the edges of fur in his fingers, right at the cuts he made at the rear ankles, and with a firm jerk, strips the entire skin off the rabbit he snared and hung.
The tearing noise satisfies him, and the skin remains whole enough for several different uses. This rabbit died fast by his knife, not breaking its neck in the trap like many do, so the tiny neck bones should be intact enough for Mairwen.
A hot flush creeps up Arthur’s pale ears at the thought of the last time he brought her bones. She tossed them into a large stinking barrel full of water and other small animal skeletons as if they weren’t a gift, as if it didn’t matter to her at all that it was him who brought them. He supposes it isn’t terribly special to bring dead things to a witch.
Wind gusts high above him, bending the trees to loom over him like interested friends, but he hardly notices.
The problem is that he wants it to matter, wants to be special still, to her. He used to be. She used to laugh at his jibes and wicked jokes; her eyes used to sparkle when his burned; she used to race with him and care as much as he did which of them won. Rhun never cared—Rhun neverhadto care. He’s so certainly the best boy, whatever he does is just what the best boy does, even if that’s lose a footrace to Arthur Couch. But Mairwen cared passionately. She hissed when she lost. She dared Arthur to put his hand in the forest. She smirked when he wouldn’t, yet.
It has been nearly three years since they’ve been comfortable enough together to be mean, and he misses it. He misses her with a simple ache that wakes him up at night. He doesn’t know if he’s in love with her or if he wants to set her on fire.
All he knows iswhyshe stopped giving him her attention three years ago. Why things are tense with Rhun. Why he’s even more of an outsider than he was before.
The answer is Rhun’s secret, though, and Arthur tries to bury it deep.
