Page 27 of Strange Grace
Arthur’s lips begin to curl, and Rhun leaps forward. “I don’t mean you couldn’t. I mean I won’t let you. I won’t let you die for me.”
“Instead you die for me?” Arthur whispers. There’s a thing so helpless in his face it takes all Rhun’s willpower to keep himself from touching his friend. His crackling, frantic, beautiful friend. All the desire Mair teased out in him last night and this morning nearly bowls him over; he wants to just reach out and take something of Arthur for himself.
“I’m running, not dying,” Rhun says.
Arthur winces rather elegantly. His choppy hair catches all the morning light, bursting like the sun itself. He reaches out in a jerking motion, and before Rhun can brace himself, puts his hand on Rhun’s shoulder. It’s always the other way around: Rhun touching Arthur, not this way, not from Arthur’s choosing. “I don’t want you to die,” Arthur says. “I—I don’t know what I would do.”
“I don’t want to either.” He puts his hand over Arthur’s, hoping for more and happy with this.
“Good. Then.” Arthur withdraws his hand but doesn’t back away. His jaw clenches and he holds Rhun’s gaze. “We should go up.”
“Yes,” Rhun says. He smiles, no longer trying to secret his heart away. This is perfect. This was perfect. He grins and hums to himself, ignoring Arthur’s standard scornfully friendly laugh. He feels so light, so open, all the weight of worry and his lost four years gone, all the anxiety that something changed melted away. Rhun Sayer hikes up the mountain with his best friend at his side, knowing he kept the vow he made to himself and his cousin-saint Baeddan: to love everything he has.
•••
MAIR ARRIVES HOME IN Afit. Every few feet she pauses to crouch and rip grass from the earth and throw it into the wind with all the force she can muster. When her house is in sight, she takes great seething breaths and tries to calm herself down. Smoke floats up from the front yard, and all the house windows are thrown open. As she approaches, she grips the shawl more tightly over her breasts. A surge of womanly laughter reminds her she’ll have an audience, for the women already gather here to bless the saint shirt.
She sweeps around the northeast corner, walking proudly along the short wall toward the gooseberry bushes. More than a dozen women sit circled around her mother’s fire, on chairs and stools dragged here from their own homes and from inside Mairwen’s. They pass three bottles of wine among them, braiding ribbon charms and chattering enthusiastically. It’s Martha Parry with the saint shirt in her lap: Woven of the finest gray wool, with perfect seams, already it bears the marks of several women in the form of embroidered flowers, tiny circles, spirals, and lightning shapes in every color of thread owned in Three Graces. Most of them collect on the chest, where they’ll settle over Rhun’s heart, but some arc like rainbows down one arm.
The conversation falls away as Mairwen stands there beside the tangled mass of gooseberries. Her mother rises from her place between Beth Pugh and her sister Hetty, whose mouth opens in a lazy grin when she meets Mairwen’s gaze. Hetty pats back dark hair, and Mairwen inadvertently touches her own, which is more brambled than usual. Haf stares at her, eyes wide.
Aderyn beckons her daughter forward, and Mair hurries around the bushes to the front gate with as much dignity as a half-naked sixteen-year-old girl can when caught before her mother and aunts and cousins.
Hetty Pugh snorts loud. “Lazy girl, you’ve entirely missed breakfast.”
Mairwen’s tongue betrays her as she stops beside the fire, nearly in the exact center of the circle of women. She drops her shawl and cries, “It’s the only thing I’m allowed to do! For him. Not go into the forest myself!”
Gasps come from where the youngest girls sit, gape-mouthed on blankets spread over the grass. Each of them here for the first time to bless a saint shirt. Older women are shocked, amused, and some even approving—itwasthe saint’s last chance, some must be thinking. Her mother’s sharp eyes are full of worry. Hetty Pugh laughs bright and loud, and Haf giggles through her hands and murmurs Mairwen’s name.
“This shirt is doing something,” Aderyn says.
“It’s not enough,” Mairwen replies.
“Come inside and get yourself presentable,” Aderyn says, more testy than most are used to hearing from her. She sweeps up and into the cottage. Mairwen follows—she needs new lacing for her bodice, after all—but glances back surprised when Hetty follows as well. Mairwen nearly crashes into her mother, stopped in the center of the cottage’s ground floor.
“Hetty, close that behind you, please,” Aderyn says, and Hetty shuts the house up. The women both study Mair. She feels their cool gazes like the pressure of fingers on her neck and arms and chest.
Hetty speaks first. “You’re scaring the girl, Addie.”
Aderyn presses her lips in a line. “Takes more to scare my daughter.”
Mairwen says, “I wanted him to know he’s loved. I wanted him to see my heart. Bind his here, so he’d come back to it.”
The two older women share a glance, and Hetty says, “So his can’t be bound to the forest.”
Aderyn says, “That’s dangerous magic.”
Mair barely stops herself from flinging out her arms. “Why? To love a boy? To bind our hearts together? Sex isn’t dangerous.”
Her mother makes a disgruntled noise.
Hetty says, “I don’t think your mama is ready to be a grandmama.”
“I don’t want him to die,” Mairwen whispers. “He’s so good and we need him here. I want him to grow old while I’m old.”
Aderyn says, “What did you imagine before now? We’ve known, most of us, for years that Rhun would be the saint when it was his turn. He knows his heart so well, and he’s never hidden from anyone that he believes he’ll follow his cousin. Did you not think you would face this moment?”
“Eventually, I...” Mairwen shakes her head. “I had four more years. I didn’t have to be afraid yet. It’s too soon! The bargain is broken, or cheating us, and it’s not worth Rhun’s life.”
