“Were you at his ceremony?” Mair thinks Vaughn would have been thirteen or so then. Maybe old enough.
“Yes. I’m sorry you couldn’t grow up with a father.”
She closes her eyes. Tears are pricking at her lashes. “He was alive until I was seven years old. Until Baeddan went in. My father. I didn’t know.” What if she’d ignored everything and run inside as a child? Could she have saved her father as she saved Baeddan?
Baeddan is not yet saved, reminds a voice inside her head, snarling rather like Arthur.
“I must go,” she says, and dashes off, out of the center of town and into the dark side streets heading north. A cold wind blows, chapping Mair’s lips, and she sucks on them, tightening the scarf over her burning collarbone.
Mairwen Grace. Come home.
Daughter of the forest.
Mairwen slows down when she hears her name in a real voice behind her. Aderyn’s voice. The moon is not yet risen, but the arc of the sky already fills with stars. Mair stops at the smaller pasture gate. Dozens of sheep huddle together.
She props herself against the fence as her mother catches up. Aderyn carries a long tallow candle, the flame protected by her cupped hand, and sticks the base of it to the gate post. She studies her daughter, frowning.
Finally, Aderyn says, “You’re changed, Daughter.”
“Rather a lot,” Mair admits in a whisper.
Aderyn cups Mairwen’s face, smoothing her thumbs along Mair’s cheek. Her head tilts to the side, making Mairwen think of the bird women, but it’s sorrow and loss adding weight to Aderyn’s frown, not curiosity.
Her mother pulls Mair into a hug, and Mairwen returns it, careful to hold her mother just away from her breast, where the thorns are ready to pierce her skin.
“May I examine that bracelet you showed everyone?” Aderyn asks as she draws away.
Mair puts her hand in her mother’s, who angles it toward the candlelight. Aderyn leans over it, skims a finger against the tiny, sharp thorns.
The angry skin below heats up at the touch.
“This is well made,” her mother says. “You must have been in a rush. What excellent balance, though. What is the death of the blessing? Your pain?” Aderyn’s eyes lift to Mairwen’s, curious and proud.
Mairwen nods. She wonders what color Carey Morgan’s eyes were. When did her mother fall in love with him?
“You’re sure you won’t be trapped the way poor Baeddan Sayer is? Change like him? If he was the sacrifice, and now you three are, mightn’t you turn into a creature like him?”
“Not yet,” Mairwen says slowly.
“And John Upjohn’s hand bones. My, what a gruesomely effective charm you’ve made, Daughter. I suppose I should not be surprised, given your love of the shambles.”
Gently tugging her hand away, Mairwen frowns at her mother. The firelight pulls red from Aderyn’s hair, just as it does her own, and flickers in the mirrors of their black pupils. “Mother, did you know Rhun would die?”
Aderyn frowns.
“Did you know, when you comforted me and said if love could save anyone it would be Rhun? When you gave me the dress and let me be the one to anoint him? Did you know you were making me into the instrument of certain death?”
“Mairwen—”
Mair backs up, out of the glow of candlelight. “Did you lie to me? You’ve always known the saints die, haven’t you? I’ve tried to work out any other way, and can’t. They always die, and always have. Do we kill them? The Grace witches? Don’t lie to me now, not about this. Not when my own father—” She turns her head away, grief cracking across her mouth and wrinkling her nose.
Silence beats between them, and several sheep wander over, nuzzling at the fence. Mairwen scrunches her eyes so tightly shut she sees pinprick stars. “You’re the Grace witch. You know how it all works,” she whispers. “You didn’t tell me everything. You knew it’s real death. You knew there was no hope for Rhun.”
Aderyn grabs her shoulders. “Be calm.” She takes Mairwen’s chin and forces her daughter to look at her. “We are the Grace witches, and we protect this valley and this bargain. It’s what we do and always have done. Wemadethe bargain with the devil, and now we uphold it. The anointing oil contains our blood. It ties them to the Bone Tree, because a Grace witch’s heart is buried there too. We do not kill them or drag them back inside. They return to the tree because they are anointed. It’s fixed by the time the saint accepts his crown. I would have told you everything afterward, passed this full burden on to you. Shared it between us. You could’ve understood then, calm in your grief and understanding of true sacrifice, what it means to maintain the bargain. It is the only way to be a Grace witch.”
“Oh God, Mother!” Fury coats her whisper now. She tears free, knocking into the fence, startling a few sheep. The stars overhead waver exactly like the candle at her elbow.
Her mother tries to touch her again, but Mairwen says, “No,” deeply and furiously.
