Behind them, the grove is empty of everything but human beings. Haf Lewis and her sister clutch tight to each other. Nona Sayer and her husband embrace. Lace huddles over her son’s body. Braith and Cat Dee and Ifan Pugh and Beth Pugh stare at one another, holding hands. They are covered in ashes and flower petals stick in their hair.
Except for the small grunts and muttering of people slowly picking themselves up, and the creak of the forest stretching itself up again, there’s little sound. The Bone Tree smolders, split in three.
“Mairwen!” Rhun cries, and it comes out hoarse and empty. Arthur turns, lungs raw as if he sucked down all the fire.
Neither cares for anything in that moment but her, and they shove around, pulling apart the ashes and hot chunks of roots, hunting. Haf joins them, tears tracking through the spray of ashes on her cheeks. Then others, too.
A few moments of fruitless hunting bring Rhun and Arthur together again. Rhun looks thrashed, near tears, and Arthur wants to pull out a knife and gouge his skin off as if it would be a welcome distraction. Instead, he just puts his arms around Rhun, holding him close and tight. Rhun’s head falls against Arthur’s, and his shoulders tremble.
Nobody knows what Mairwen did. Nobody knows if the charm is back in place, if there’s a new bargain, or if their valley is like any other valley now.
“What story will we tell?” murmurs Haf.
Arthur brushes his fingertips on Rhun’s sleeve. “Look.”
Spring-green vines are curling up the remains of the Bone Tree, winding and spiraled. They shoot up, growing unnaturally fast, covering the blackened bark, chipping it away. Soon the entire three splayed pieces of the tree are more emerald than black, more living than charcoal. Tiny white yarrow blossoms.
Rhun takes Arthur’s hand. Arthur grabs Haf’s, and they pick their way over crumbling roots and new tangles of vines.
They help each other up the massive base of the tree, to where the three broken pieces of the trunk converge. It’s empty of all but ash, yarrow flowers, and thin, moon-bright bones.
Every morning as the sun rises, Rhun Sayer and Arthur Couch wait at the edge of the Devil’s Forest. Sometimes Haf Lewis joins them with a basket of bread.
It’s been twelve days since the Bone Tree burned. No other tree caught fire. John Upjohn is buried in the cemetery under the saints’ memorial. Too little was left of Baeddan, though Rhun picked up a few teeth and a curving rib bone. Haf and Hetty led them to the Grace cottage, where Aderyn Grace’s body was grown straight into the hearthstone, and from her chest a small gray sapling reached up toward the ceiling. Rhun and Arthur climbed onto the roof and pulled apart enough thatching to shed light on the little tree.
Rain came, just enough, and Rhos Priddy’s baby isn’t doing well, but lives. They’ve finished the harvest, and a dozen people left the valley, including Arthur’s father. Without a bargain, they said, why remain where they cannot achieve greater things? Arthur shrugged and moved his meager belongings from the Sayer barn up into Sy Vaughn’s manor and pointedly took a pair of Rhun’s boots with him. Rhun hasn’t been ready to move out of his family home yet. Not while he doesn’t know. When the sun shines on a patch of fallen red leaves he thinks of Mairwen.
Twice he and Haf climbed up to the manor house at night and sat around the fire pit where the saints were named, three fat candles burning, just to watch the moonlight against the pale green, flowering branches of the Bone Tree. Arthur always makes them come inside and tell stories to the few other kids who live with him already. Per Argall, for one, and seven-year-old Emma Howell, who says she wants to be a saint. Arthur tells her she can’t, but only because there are no more saints. He’ll still teach her to skin a rabbit and make a fire and whatever else would help her survive alone in the wilderness.
It takes three days for the burns on Rhun’s and Arthur’s and Haf’s hands to heal completely. Slower than with the bargain, but they wonder if it’s still magic-fast. None in the valley know or remember how long it should take.
Arthur stares at Rhun one afternoon, when they’re setting a series of rabbit traps. Rhun starts to sweat under the intensity of the look, and backs up against a tree. Arthur pushes off his hunter’s hood and kisses Rhun.
Closing his eyes, Rhun accepts the kiss, letting Arthur work through it. After an uncooperative moment, Arthur’s mouth softens and he brushes his lips against Rhun’s cheek, too. His eyelashes flutter, teasing Rhun’s skin.
It breaks some barrier that had been keeping Rhun from demanding what Arthur had been doing at the Bone Tree alone.
“I went to burn it down,” Arthur says, not moving away. There’s only a handspan of air between them.
“You shouldn’t have.”
Arthur shrugs and touches his own lips.
Rhun can’t let it go, despite his gaze locked on Arthur’s fingers and Arthur’s lips. “We all had to decide together! It doesn’t matter what you learned or how you changed. If you were just going to make a choice alone, make the decision alone, it’s as bad as all the secrets and lies that came before. You don’t get to choose for other people.”
“There wasn’t really a choice tomake. The bargain was wrong. You know it.”
Reluctantly, Rhun nods. Regret and sorrow drag down at him. He frowns. He misses Mairwen so much. She’d know what to snap at Arthur to make him understand he can’t change people by taking everything over, even if he’s right.
Arthur sucks in a sharp breath. “I want her back.”
“Even though she was the devil’s daughter?”
“We always knew that,” Arthur says with a wry smile.
Most of Three Graces doesn’t hold anything against Rhun or Arthur, though some continue to give Arthur sideways glances, but likely because Arthur is as quick to sneer as ever. Arthur thinks the first time someone dies of illness there’ll be a hard few weeks for the former saints. Rhun promises they’ll get through it. Rhun the Elder and Braith Bowen and Cat Dee create a few plans for storing more food over the winter and ask for better records of the animals and crops in the valley, just in case they need, in the spring, to send someone into a city for supplies or more chickens or something. They’ll figure it out.
This morning it’s two weeks since the Slaughter Moon, and as the sun rises, so does an impossibly tiny sliver of a smiling moon.
