When Rhun accepts the weapon, it triggers a landslide of volunteers. Not everybody, not nearly, but Rhun has no time to rally the resistant. He’ll accept these, mostly young men and women, who have not lived so long with nothing to fight for they don’t know how to risk it all. Some of their parents, some cousins, most of the Sayer clan. Ben Heir, though he makes Judith swear to remain and stay safe.
With him, when he strides toward the Devil’s Forest, are all the folk of Three Graces who ever had it in them to be brave.
•••
BRANCHES AND LEAVES SLAP MAIRWENin the face as she careens down the mountain, barely staying on her feet. Haf is far behind, though following. Mair can’t quite bring herself to slow down for her friend, not when the forest is almost gone from her blood, when she’s dizzy with the lack of it, when her heart aches like it’s broken in half.
She flies into the sheep fields, cutting north and east, toward the forest. Her lungs burn, but her legs are strong and her arms pump, grasping at the air before her as if to drag her faster. Wind tears at her head, and tiny flower petals flutter behind her, shredded and falling from her hair.
As she runs around the rear of the Grace cottage, she glances at the chimney: no smoke. She comes around, ready to press on to the horse pasture, but someone huddles inside the yard, just next to the front door, which hangs half open.
Though she needs to continue into the Devil’s Forest, Mairwen slows, drawn back with an inexorable sense of dread.
The decision is made before she realizes it, and Mair runs urgently to her home and shoves through the gate, cutting her palm on stray gooseberry bramble. It’s Hetty kneeling beside the front door, arms over her head, bent in half. Her long fingers are dug into her glossy hair, fisting and relaxing again and again.
“Hetty?” Mairwen says through heavy panting.
The older woman lifts her head: Tears streak the freckled cheeks, and blood has crusted at the corner of her mouth. “Mair, I’m so, so sorry. I couldn’t stop him. Your mother...”
Sucking air through her teeth, Mairwen darts inside the cottage. The door swings hard against the wall, then shuts behind her.
In the dim light, at first everything appears normal. The kitchen table, the benches, all the bundles of dried herbs hanging from the rafters. Her boots where she left them yesterday—yesterday?—before going into town for the celebration, slouched beside the ladder to her loft.
Except the fire is dead, and ashes and black chunks of charcoal fan out from the hearth as if the fire exploded in a great gust.
And across the hearthstone lies her mother.
Or what is left of the last Grace witch.
Aderyn’s eyes are closed, her lips gently parted as if in pleased dreaming. Hands relaxed at her sides, palms up, and her skirts folded at her calves. Like Aderyn simply stretched herself out to sleep.
But her chest is a mass of dark blood and blossoming violas, or something like violas, if those tiny purple flowers ever grew in thick braided vines. The flowers pierce straight out of her heart, erupting through her ribs to knot about her sternum and between her breasts.
Mair falls to her knees beside her mother, breathing hard. She hovers her hands over Aderyn’s cheeks, then over the flowers, one finger brushing the tip of a petal. Then she covers her own mouth against a wail.
Aderyn’s lips twitch and she draws a breath.
“Mother!” Mairwen shrieks, grasping one cold hand.
“Mairwen,” her mother whispers.
“Who did this to you? What happened? How can I help?”
“I’m dying, little bird.”
The words are so soft, Mairwen must lean forward. “No. There must be some charm, something for me to say, to banish these flowers. The forest is—it is leaving me. It must leave you, too.”
Aderyn’s brow creases and she whispers, “This is the death for all Grace witches. The flowers in our heart burst, and we become flowers.”
Mairwen frowns. “But you weren’t called to the forest. Not yet! You didn’t...”
trees shake, and moonlight coalesces into figures and faces, pushing free of the trees, gathering light to them as sheer veils. Nine women, with flowers growing out of their chests. They remain before their trees, all but one, who
Shaking the memory away, Mairwen tells herself,Not yet!
“The forest came to me. It did not have to call,” Aderyn says simply. Her voice is too low, too weak.
“No!” Tears fall from Mairwen’s eyes and plop onto her mother’s collarbone, and another hits a dark heart-shaped leaf. The vine trembles, tightens, and her mother cries out.
