Page 30 of Strange Grace
IF THERE IS A PIECEof the Slaughter Moon ritual Arthur Couch dreads deepest, it’s the long afternoon fast and vigil each prospective boy is expected to keep in the rough terrain near Sy Vaughn’s manor, alone—except for the company of his father.
Gethin Couch is as long and lanky as his son, with similar blond hair, but the rest of Arthur came from his mother. Gethin’s got a hard jaw and a wide suntanned face, with soft green eyes, and his hands are stubby but talented with leather. He makes the best gloves in town, and any leather piece that requires detail work and dedication. Last year, the decade anniversary of his wife leaving Three Graces, he went through a carefully constructed un-marriage ritual with Aderyn Grace. It was the least they could do to help him move on, with no proof that Arthur’s mother was alive or dead. Arthur had been invited, but he hadn’t attended.
The two men sit three feet away from each other on a narrow outcropping of white chalk high on the mountain, entirely bared to the elements, for no trees grow so high and the scrubby heather and grasses offer no shelter even from the wind. Arthur stares out at the wide-open valley, eyes burning from the cold. He’s supposed to be receiving advice and support from his father, but there are too many expectations wasted between them for Arthur to want such from Gethin.
He imagines the conversation Rhun and Rhun the Elder are sharing at the moment, and it relaxes him just enough to lean back against the rough mountain.
“Well, boy,” Gethin Couch says, “your mother sure would be furious if she could see you now. Wish she could.”
Arthur says nothing.
“I wager,” Gethin continues, “she’s counting the years, and expects you to be up in four more. If she’s alive, she’s still afraid and worrying about it somewhere. I hope it chokes her. Makes her look old and ugly before her time.”
“I don’t,” Arthur says, remembering his mother’s soft smile, and remembering too how terrible her mouth turned when she screamed at him,You may as well already be dead.
“Bah,” his father says.
“We don’t have to speak.” Arthur has yet to truly look at his father; he’s avoided the man for years, not finding any good reason to give thought or energy to somebody who turned him over to the Sayers without complaint.Better he be raised around so many men and boys now, was Gethin’s excuse, said knowing Arthur listened.
“But you should know, son, I see what you’ve become. You may not be the best, but there’s no doubting you’re as close as anyone with your temperament could get. Nothing she did hurt you.”
Arthur closes his eyes. Every word pains him, infuriates him. Maybe this is why the potential runners are forced to fast alone with their fathers: It’s no comfort, but a final test to discover what boy can withstand parental torture. “I don’t need your approval,” he says through his teeth.
“You have it anyway.”
“Approve of this, then.” Arthur stands up. “You’re no father to me, and haven’t been at least since my mother left, if you ever were before. You either were so blind and disinterested in a daughter you did not see what she did, or you agreed with her to do it, but blame her alone for all. So this is outside the spirit of the ritual. I’ll see myself away.”
He steps off the stone outcropping and skids down toward the path that leads back to Vaughn’s manor. What a furious lie this valley is, he thinks. Perhaps the devil’s bargain keeps sickness and death at bay, but it certainly doesn’t make people good or keep families together.
Or perhaps it’s only Arthur who thinks so. Everyone else is content and happy. Everyone else accepts the bargain and its restrictions. He’s the one who doesn’t belong, because his motherdidruin him. Who would he be now if he’d always been a boy? Would he be as good as Rhun?
Who would he be if he’d remained a girl?
A great wind blows at him, shifting him backward on the path: away from Vaughn, away from the valley. Arthur pauses and glances over his shoulder. The path pierces down that way, along a chalk ridge and toward the pass through the mountain, out to the rest of the world.
He could leave.
The thought sucks his breath away.
The rest of the world appreciates ambition and fire.
But Arthur knows too well what would be said of him here were he to leave.Coward. Better off without him. Too hot for his own good. Like they’d said of his mother.Never belonged here.
And if he goes now, he’ll never know if Rhun survives. It would prey on him.So, he thinks bitterly,perhaps I’ll go the day after tomorrow.When it’s clear he’s not needed, when Rhun can’t give up the fight for not having him to come home to and Mairwen can’t accuse him of being at fault for it. He could survive without them both. He could.
Arthur walks the path toward Sy Vaughn’s manor, slow but sure, and when he arrives the lord is there alone, standing before a small fire built up in the center of the stone yard between the manor’s gate and the tree line.
The late-afternoon sun is brutal, cutting every inch of Vaughn’s attire bold and blacker than black should be in the daylight. It’s a black that comes from outside the valley, where merchants have access to better dyes and more expensive techniques. Supple as a mountain cat’s fur coat and glistening sleek, too. The lord’s hair is loose, falling in russet curls around his cheeks and neck. His hands clasp behind his back. When the lord hears Arthur’s bootstep, he turns. His eyes are black and gray—the left black, the right gray, or maybe that is only the way the sun hits half his face. He smiles with thin lips, and it occurs to Arthur that Lord Sy Vaughn is lovely. Striking and strong, sure, but also beautiful. Arthur wonders what it would have been like to have someone like this as a father, to protect and defend him when he was a child.
“Arthur Couch,” Vaughn says calmly, gesturing for Arthur to join him. “Back so soon.”
“That man has never been much of a father to me.”
Vaughn nods, and something untwists inside Arthur just to be agreed with so simply and readily.
“I have a question for you,” Vaughn says. He looks out over the valley, not at Arthur, and Arthur follows the young lord’s gaze. From here they can see down the tops of the trees, across Three Graces and all the barley fields, tiny white spots of sheep, the rolling hills of the pastures, all the way to the dark Devil’s Forest and there—there in the center, the pale Bone Tree with its scarlet crown.
“I’m listening,” Arthur says when it becomes clear Vaughn is waiting for a response.
