Page 48 of Strange Grace
His voice rings out, then fades, leaving silence heavier than before.
A splash draws his attention, something large falling, and he dashes toward it, lifting his legs high to get through the muck.
It’s Arthur, facedown, limp. Rhun grunts his panic and grabs his friend’s shoulder, turning him over. Arthur’s hair sticks across his face, his mouth open and full of water. His skin is clammy, waterlogged. He’s not breathing.
“Arthur,” Rhun says, slapping his cheek, digging a finger into his mouth to clear it, shaking him. There’s nothing. No response. “Arthur!” he yells.
Water and mud suck at him, lapping as he splashes frantically.
He hears the echo of his own name, cried back at him from a long way.
It is Arthur’s voice.
Rhun leaps up, the body rolling away from him, sinking, disappearing. He darts forward, searching the muck with his boots, crouching to dip his hands again and again in the water. The body is gone. It wasn’t Arthur.
Relief and terror leave him a special kind of breathless.
“Arthur!” he cries again.
“Rhun!”
He moves toward the voice. At least he thinks he does. Sound echoes strangely in this marsh. The orange light disorients him and the shadows are not attached to what they should be. He stumbles into another body. His mother, Nona Sayer, drowned, too, her hand gray and open-palmed, eyes glazed and white as the moon. Rhun bares his teeth at it, steps over her, his heartbeat hurling through him, painful and hard. Here is Mairwen, and there his cousin Brac, and there—oh God—the little hands of Genny Bowen. His youngest brother, Elis. His town, his family and friends, dead and drowned. Rhun knows it’s not real, but he can touch them, lift them, smell the dank death, even as the marsh glows, tuning their bodies into monstrous form.
“Arthur!” he yells.
“Rhun!”
He’s nearer, and Rhun runs, kicking his heavy boots through the shallow water.
He sees Arthur across a stagnant stretch of marsh, spinning as though blind, attacking nothing, mouth bent in a ferocious grimace.
“Arthur,” he says firmly, dashing for his friend. “Arthur, there’s nothing here but me. It’s Rhun.”
Arthur lashes out, but Rhun blocks the strike, twisting around to catch Arthur’s arms. They grapple, and Arthur shakes his head. “You’re not real,” he says desperately.
“I am. Arthur. I followed you in, tracked you. It’s all right. You’re all right.”
“No. NO.” Arthur shoves free. His cheeks are alive and pink with exhilaration, his blue eyes wild, blood streaked across his forehead and staining his wet hair. “I cannot afford to believe you. It’s not worth my life to believe you.”
Rhun reaches out again, helpless. “Arthur, please.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t.” Arthur backs away, shaking, wincing. And staring Rhun up and down with such longing it breaks Rhun’s heart.
He knows how to prove it, but also fears it, worried the answer will make everything worse. Fiery light surrounds them, as if they exist in the center of a bonfire. The dark water ruffles at their ankles. White faces of the drowned and deceased stare with hollow black eyes at Rhun. Everything he knows and loves dead, destroyed. His worst nightmare. He steps forward. Arthur waits. What does Arthur see? What fear?
And Rhun plunges in. He takes Arthur’s face and kisses him.
He expects Arthur to jerk away, cry out and hit him, but believe him.
Instead Arthur melts nearer with a small cry of relief, kisses Rhun’s jaw as he wraps his arms around him and hugs tightly enough to make them both shake. “Rhun,” he says. “It’s you.”
•••
THE FOREST CLINGS TO MAIRWEN.Roots unfurl from the mud to lap at her boots, and night-black flowers reach for her ankles. Invisible fingers press her cheeks and tug at her hair. Her sleeves tear and her dress, too, and she leaves a wake of blue wool, trailing behind her in fits and thready tangles.
“There, there,” she murmurs to the forest, and hums a fragile melody. A lullaby about courting birds, a lark and a jay, who don’t belong together but recognize each other’s songs. Fewer roots curl up in her way and the trees drift and sway out of her path. Mair sings it softly, then louder, though she never thought much of her own singing. She repeats the refrain again and again as she slowly walks through the Devil’s Forest, voice trembling. Not from fear, but from a growing pleasure. Everything she sees makes her think how right she was to come in here. She fits. Light and dark together, all angles and promises.
She finds herself in a copse of young dogwood trees, blooming their snowy flowers even now at harvest time. The petals draw moonlight like mirrors, and Mair breathes in the clean, bright perfume. These dogwood flowers would make a lovely crown, braided into her hair. With their cross-shaped blossoms, their pale-pink tones and bright-green centers, the tiny oval leaves. Blessing trees, these are called sometimes.
