“Your eyes,” Arthur says.
Rhun looks up and he sees it too: Mairwen’s eyes are blacker throughout. As if while she slept pieces of brown were plucked out and replaced with shards of darkness.
“What about my eyes?” she asks with measured calm, too calm, the calm of a person who is anything but.
“They’re darker,” Rhun says.
Mairwen sits, head barely clearing the low thatched ceiling. She fists her hands in her lap. “I want to see. Your mother has a mirror, doesn’t she, Rhun?”
“Are we different?” Arthur asks before Rhun can do more than nod.
Fear twists Rhun up, and he turns to Arthur, despite having just spent several moments gazing into Arthur’s eyes. But Arthur looks as fine as always. Except for his wrist.
All three of them lift their wrists with the charm: The bracelets seem to have grown into their flesh. For Rhun and Arthur it’s a gentle melding, skin grown up against the braided hair and thorns and bone.
Mairwen’s wrist is a gauntlet of hardened skin, several inches wide, reddish and brown like healthy bark. Her fingernails are tinged blue, but she says she’s not cold.
“Why is this only happening to you?” Arthur asks, sounding as if he’s offended.
“I’m the witch,” she whispers. “Our hearts already half belong to the Bone Tree. I was supposed to let Rhun die after I anointed him, but instead I gave the rest of my heart to the forest.”
Rhun frowns and holds on to her shoulders, studying her face for more differences. He touches her hair, digging his fingers gently against her scalp. No crown of thorns or antlers that he can find, and he strokes down her neck. Her wide new eyes project uncertainty, which he has never seen in Mairwen Grace before. Rhun kisses her.
Her hands flutter against his chest for a moment, then she settles them on his shirt. He looks, and her eyes have drifted closed.
“Your heart wasn’t yours alone to give, Mairwen Grace,” Arthur says.
•••
CLOUDS PULL HIGH ACROSS THEvalley, peaceful and calm. The gray backdrop brings out gold in the fields. Mairwen puts herself between Rhun and Arthur as they leave the Grace house for the Sayer homestead, her hands in theirs.
She is not afraid, though she senses she should be. She is excited, thrilled even, for the bargain she made must be working better than she thought. Maybe she can hold it, inside of her, the way Baeddan Sayer did, and perhaps it will last seven years without a death. Because Arthur is right: She couldn’t give all her heart to the forest. Too much is here, with Rhun and Arthur and Haf and her mother, and even Baeddan. All the people in Mairwen’s heart lending it greater strength, grounding it in the valley. Perhaps there will be a way to make this the permanent solution: Every time more than one person could be bound to the Bone Tree, and so no single person must die. Together, their hearts, their love, might be strong enough to overcome the need for sacrifice.
Certainly Mairwen seems to be holding the heaviest portion, but she can take it. She was born for this, born to hold the blessing between life and death. Saints and witches.
She laughs to herself, earning a frown from Arthur and an anxious glance from Rhun.
“You sound like Baeddan,” Rhun says.
That makes her stop so fast she swallows air, stumbling.
The young men catch her by her elbows, leaning in protectively. She says, “I feel good, not mad, not confused like him.”
It’s even true.
Mair closes her eyes, shielded by her friends in a pocket of shade and solidarity. She listens. Her toes brush the grass, and the pulse of her heart thumps gently down into the earth. A cool breeze tickles the fringes of her hair, the tip of her nose, and her lips, her ears. She slides her hands into Rhun’s and Arthur’s again, and feels the heartbeat spread among them.
From the earth rises a whisper, unlike a sound, more of a sensation thrilling through her blood. It does not whisper in words. It warms her belly and tightens her skin, especially along her spine and breasts. She desires this thing from the bowl of her hips.
“Are you all right?” Rhun asks.
She tilts her face toward his. Yes, Rhun Sayer would do. She would devour him and leave his bones at the altar.
Mairwen gasps, wrenching away from both of them. They start toward her, but she shakes her head. “Stop, please,” she says, holding her hands to the sky. Oh, what she would give for a pure, hot beam of sunlight.
“It is like Baeddan,” Arthur says. “Isn’t it? This binding is turning you more like him. Part of the forest.”
“Something like that,” Mair admits, unmoving. But still it could work. She can take it. She can survive this.
