“Mairwen.”
“Father,” she whispers, but he hears it. Deep in his flesh and beyond his bones, he hears her voice.
As the Bone Tree burns, Mairwen closes her eyes and presses her palms to the angry wound on her breast, to the ruins of Baeddan’s thorny heart, the dying heart of the forest, the key to the bargain. She makes it grow.
Flowers burst from the old god’s mouth. His hands grow into the roots and earth, trapping him.
Fire flickers around the god and his daughter, licking at both, casting a web of shadows across Mairwen’s face.
The old god coughs, dying again, and Mairwen says, “It will be mine now. My heart, my forest.”
She weaves briars across the hollow mouth of the Bone Tree, and she is alone in the darkness.
Except, she will never be truly alone, because her heart belongs to more than one.
•••
WHEN MAIRWEN, ARTHUR, AND RHUNclimbed onto the altar together, in the final moments of their Slaughter Moon, they put still-bleeding bone bracelets around each other’s wrists and held hands. They cried out the words of their charm, holding tight, eyes closed, heads thrown back.We are the saints of Three Graces!
It felt like drowning, painful and desperate. It felt like waking from the worst nightmare. It felt like fire, and it felt like their hearts beat so fast they hummed.
When the Bone Tree is consumed by flame, it feels the same.
•••
THERE IS ONLY FIRE. NObalance, no peace, only the burning destruction, reaching in every direction out and down and even up, up, up toward the sky.
Wind swirls, dragging sparks from the Bone Tree, and flash fires break out, lighting up a tree here and there. Bird women fly too near and go up in a burst of lightning flame.
Rhun and Arthur hold on to each other, and Haf Lewis puts her hand on Arthur’s back. Her little sister holds her hand, and Per Argall holds Bree’s, and on and on until every person from Three Graces still in the grove links themselves together.
“We are the saints of Three Graces,” Rhun says too soft for anyone to hear over the fire. But it’s his prayer and the forest knows.
Mairwen opens her eyes in the center of the firestorm. It hurts. She pushes out with her magic and wonders if she can die faster, but no—she has to be with the tree if she wants to transform. If she wants to take all her power.
That is what she clings to: transformation.
In the forest, life to death to life is the spark, the seed of magic.
Life and death, and Grace in between.
Mairwen, in between. Both. Shewillsurvive.
She grinds her teeth as the heat overwhelms her and she cannot breathe at all. She gasps, coughs, cannot stop coughing. Her muscles spasm and she bends in half, falling, cracking her shape and losing all sight and hearing, all feeling but for the fire.
•••
THE BONE TREE EXPLODES, FIREand ashes, flaming branches and billowing streaks of smoke.
It flings the people back and away, out in an arc.
Smoke and wind swirl, and nine columns of silvery moonlight stretch up and up, dissipating against the dark twilight sky.
The moon has yet to rise.
The altar itself is cracked in two: atop it a pile of bones and fur and sinew slowly falling to pieces. All that’s left of Sy Vaughn, an ashy mirror of the ruined Bone Tree.
Between the altar and the tree, Rhun and Arthur prop each other up.
