Flinging an arm over his eyes, Rhun grimaces, wishing he could smile. His lips have forgotten the shape of happiness.
Even that melodramatic thought carves deeper into the empty cavern of his chest.
Everything Rhun believed in was a lie. Baeddan is alive, and Rhun feels betrayed. That wasn’t the bargain. That wasn’t what he was promised. Baeddan was supposed to be at peace, Rhun’s fate should have been to die or live—that is what the saints agree to. That is the price. But he will not forget there are twenty-five skulls on the Bone Tree, and twenty-five saints before Baeddan.
Rhun closes his eyes.
Twenty-five pairs of black, empty eye sockets—
Arthur’s fist out of nowhere, slams into Rhun’s cheek—
Rhun can’t remember, but—
He’s crumbling.
Twenty-five. Nobody survived. There was never hope—Rhun doesn’t understand how it’s possible, when four saints ran back out of the forest, but he counted. Again and again. Twenty-five.
Mair backs away from the youngest skull, shaking her head. Her hair is short and ragged, her eyes wide and black. She’s holding the devil’s hand! “My father,” she says, and—
Exhaustion and disappointment drag Rhun down, and this thing on his wrist stings and pulls. He’d rip it off if he weren’t afraid of the consequences. To the valley, to Baeddan Sayer.
“Saint, saint! There you are!” the devil hisses. “I know that shirt and those bones and the glow of your skin and smile.”
Rhun presses his arm into his eyes and allows himself a grimace. Tears smear on his cheeks, draining down his temples. He’s not worried about his lack of memories, because all anyone needs to know about the Devil’s Forest and the bargain is there’s no surviving. There’s no choice. There’s no hope.
Baeddan was always doomed; so was Rhun.
It’s gone silent below. Rhun rolls toward the ladder, startled to find Arthur perched there, watching him with a pitcher in one hand and a scrap of cloth tossed over his shoulder. Blood smears his chin. Blue hollows under his eyes turn them bright indigo. His mouth is half curved up, half bitter, and bloodless.
“Here’s water,” Arthur says, clunking the pitcher against the slatted floor. “To wash off the worst of the blood.” He climbs the rest of the way up while Rhun scoots over, crouching so as not to knock his head or shoulders on the low ceiling.
But for the blood on his chin, Arthur seems clean already. He wears a too-large, fresh shirt that falls nearly to his knees, over fawn trousers, and is barefoot. He kneels and dips the cloth he brought into the pitcher. “Come on, Rhun. That back of yours is thrashed.”
Rhun says, “You missed some on your chin.”
Arthur swipes the cloth over his chin, pulling it away pink with blood. He lifts his eyebrows aggressively. “All right?”
“No,” Rhun says, but they both know he doesn’t mean the blood. He means,Nothing will ever be all right again.
A moment of silence squats between them.
Arthur touches Rhun’s knee and they both feel the heat of it in the stinging bracelets tied around their wrists with hair and needle-thorns.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t forgive me for running in here before you. For taking it away,” Arthur whispers.
Deep in the forest, he huddles with Rhun beneath the roots of a tree tipped over a creek bed, and Rhun relishes the weight of Arthur’s head on his shoulder, how Arthur doesn’t pull away when Rhun touches his cheek to Arthur’s hair. They’re blinded by darkness, anxious to find Mairwen again, aching from bloody and bruised bodies. Rhun says, “I’ll always forgive you. Haven’t you figured that out?”
Rhun knocks Arthur’s hand away.
A familiar sneer parts Arthur’s mouth, the defensive one, the furious one, but he makes no comment.
“It’s healed. Not thrashed,” Rhun says. “My back.”
“Are you really not going to let me do this?” Arthur is incredulous.
Rhun glowers.
“Fine, you jackass.” Tossing the cloth on the floor with a snap, Arthur clamors back down the ladder. “Finish yourself and I’ll throw up a shirt for you. Then you come down to eat so we can talk.” His choppy blond hair vanishes below the loft ledge, and Rhun folds himself over his own lap. He laces his fingers behind his head. He has got to get it together.
