A shirt flops up over the ledge, sleeve catching on the ladder. It’s a pale-green shirt, thin and worn, but clean. Rhun strips his jerkin off—he lost his hunter’s hood and doesn’t remember when—and slowly peels his saint shirt away. It sticks to him, glued by blood, and tugs at his healing skin. Rhun angrily rips it free.
The tattered saint shirt lands in his lap in pieces.
Colorful embroidery decorates the sleeves, just along the top and near the shoulders. Flowers and lightning bolts, stars and an orange sun. And there is a stag sliced in three pieces by the devil’s claws. It had a heart once, Rhun realizes. Just like he did.
•••
MAIRWEN SMILES—A SMALL, GENUINEsmile—as Baeddan inspects a piece of cheese, then touches it delicately to his mouth. He nibbles, uncertain, before shoving it all in like a child. The fire flickers warmly behind him, and hot tea diffuses heat in her belly. Haf sits quietly beside her. Baeddan lifts his eyes, which have slowly taken a more human coloring, the black irises streaked and flecked with green. Green of spring and emerald green, the dark green of shadows and the green muck of a stagnant pond. His lashes are short and as black as his hair, vivid against the pale-purple skin fading to deathly bone-ivory and yellowish stains. Crescent wounds from his fingernails frame his brow, glinting with the rich purple of his blood. He smiles at her, a soft, hungry smile, and she can see the curve of his cat teeth. Her body thrills, and the thick blood in her veins pumps faster, smoother. Whatever else, Mairwen remembers that he belongs here. With her. Or she with him? Both of them in the forest? The details are sketchy, but the feeling is real: belonging, and the forest.
She wants to go back.
Beside the hearth, Baeddan touches his hand to his chest, curling his fingers to tear, but with their eyes locked, he doesn’t do it. He only taps his forefinger at the hollow of his throat,tap-tap,tap-tap, with the beat ofherheart. Mairwen leans nearer, drawn to the rhythm. She feels it dancing across her skin, pulsing in points of pain along her collarbone.
Sliding his hand lower, he cups his palm just over his heart, where on his chest are twenty-four small bones sewn into his flesh, and three seeping wounds.
Arthur thumps down the ladder and sweeps up the trousers and shirt and vest Haf brought from Braith Bowen for Rhun to change into. He throws it up in a messy ball, then turns to Mairwen and says rather viciously, “He has got to get on board.”
Mair scrambles to her feet. She was supposed to be using this time to clean herself up too, not commune with the twenty-sixth saint. But Rhun is sliding down the ladder. “On board with what, Arthur?”
“With us! With what happened and with figuring out what to do about it.”
“It was all a lie. That’s what I remember.” Rhun shoulders past him to the worn table and takes a hunk of bread. Before eating, he glances at Baeddan. “How is he—are you?” he corrects himself. His face is drawn, splotchy with uneven stubble.
“Warm, cousin,” Baeddan says. Then he laughs gently. The laugh nudges itself into a wilder grin that suddenly cuts off. Baeddan scowls. “Baeddan Sayer is my name.”
Rhun stares at him, looking exhausted.
Baeddan hums a broken melody and takes Mairwen’s wrist, drawing her down to sit beside him on the hearth. She’s glad to, and presses near enough her hip touches his, and when he lifts his arm it’s natural to tuck under it despite glowering disapproval from Arthur and uncertainty from Haf. She can’t help it: Being near Baeddan is like being with the whole of herself. The call inside her quiets. The tension and longing she’s lived with all her life has an answer. Because he is the forest now, somehow, the heart of it, and she is a Grace witch. Her heart always belonged to the forest.
Rhun sinks onto a bench, puts his elbows on the table, and begins picking apart his bread.
Arthur draws a breath to steady himself. “Tell me what you remember, Rhun, even if it doesn’t matter.”
“I remember running, fighting wolves—black and gray, bleeding purple. They were nearly dead, or like corpses risen to fight. And... I remember a stinking marsh with strange orange lights. You punched me, Arthur.”
“What! I don’t—”
“And I remember flashes of teeth and roaring, and it wasn’t the devil stalking me; it was Baeddan. Laughing behind me, singing an old song about a bird?”
“I know that lullaby,” Mairwen says. “I was singing it, not Baeddan.”
Baeddan says, “Iamthe devil.”
Mair curves her arm up to his face and strokes his jaw. “You’re the saint. One of the saints of Three Graces. The bargain made you into this, tied your heart to the forest like...” She shakes her head. “Maybe. I’m not sure what happened. What the magic is.” She lets her eyes drift toward the north window, as if she could see all the way to the forest.
“There were twenty-five skulls on the Bone Tree.” It’s Rhun, voice dark and dull.
Silence falls.
“My father,” Mairwen says, reaching toward a skull. The youngest, white and yellowing, the bridge of its nose sharp as a dagger.
“We should burn it down,” Arthur says. “The Bone Tree.”
“Then anyone might die!” cried Haf, standing suddenly. “Babies!”
“Where did the four skulls come from, to make twenty-five,” Mairwen asks, “if any saints survived and left our valley?”
Rhun says, “It’s all a lie. The Grace witches tell a story to make us agree to run.”
