Page 52 of Strange Grace
Mairwen takes a deep breath.
It’s been only three days since she was here last, but everything feels different.
Hunkering down on her stool, she puts her hand in her lap and examines the bracelet. She obviously built it in a hurry. Was she trying to bind the bargain? Or save Baeddan? All of it?
The bracelet is such a scraggly, ugly thing in the light of day. She flips open the tin box in which she keeps her tools and draws out a pair of tweezers. The delicate metal prongs allow her to pull on individual strands of hair, exploring the design while paying close attention to how she feels. How the magic trips and tingles against her skin and beneath it, tugging at the thick blood in her veins.
It appears to be her hair, and Rhun’s and Arthur’s, twined together into a dark muddle, black and gold and cherry-bark, wound with a needle-thorn vine. And knotted around the single knuckle bone from John Upjohn’s hand.
Baeddan went into the forest ten years ago and was bound to the forest. Transformed. Seven years later the Slaughter Moon rose and John went in, but came back out. Only his hand remained, and Baeddan bound it to his own chest. Then the Slaughter Moon came only three years later.
If Mairwen thinks like a witch, thinks of what she’s always known and what she’s learned, leaving room for things she doesn’t know or has forgotten, it makes sense to her that Baeddan’s entire body would fuel the sacrifice seven years, and John’s hand last only three.
Col Sayer, Marc Argall, Tom Ellis, and Griffin Sayer all lived through their Slaughter Moon, but there are twenty-five skulls on the Bone Tree. Someone died every seven years.
She can feel the call of the forest, a mingling of curiosity, longing, and desperation. Is that the reason for the memory charm? To draw the survivors back in? Will the mystery of it drive them inside, never to emerge again?
But Aderyn told her the saint does not have to die. Only choose to die.
Either Mairwen’s mother lied, or was lied to in turn.
In the story—both the Grace witches’ private story and the one they tell the town—the devil and the first Grace loved each other, and Grace gave her heart to the forest in order that the valley might thrive. The devil, in both, said only the run mattered.
Who lied first? The devil or the witches?
There’s a gaping nothing in her mind’s eye when she tries to make an answer: too specific a lack to be natural. She knew the answer, but she forgot it.
Frustration has her grinding her teeth. She should march back into the forest now. Straight to the Bone Tree. She’s rested and ready.
A step on the grassy path hisses for her attention, and Mair glances up to discover John Upjohn standing at the shambles’ threshold. She stares at him, feeling unwelcoming toward him for the first time.
John holds himself rigid, expressionless. A wool travel pack is slung over one shoulder and he’s in a coat and sturdy new boots.
Mairwen stands. The tweezers fall to the ground.
“How could you?” he asks. His mouth barely moves.
“What?” She steps nearer him.
He flinches. “Bring that devil out of the forest. Hetormentedme. Chased behind me for hours, and...” John pinches his eyes shut and jerks his wrist free of the extra pocket in his coat.
Understanding brings fury to pinken her cheeks. “You remember him!”
John is barely breathing. Mair recognizes the tension boiling inside him from his midnight explosions at the Grace house door—John pounding, begging to be allowed inside to sleep on the hearthstone or with his head on Mairwen’s lap. His nightmares compelled him to claw at his chest and shake and tremble, and while sleeping he reached with both hands, distressed not to be able to grasp anything in his left. He says, “Sometimes in my nightmares it was Baeddan, but I did not—I didn’t think it was real. I thought it was an illusion to terrify me! Everything in my memories is mixed up.” His mouth pulls into a grimace deep enough she can see his long dimples.
Mair takes John’s elbows, pulling them closer. Sorrow and pity twist into something like love again, or the echo of it. “I’m sorry, John. My memories are all a scramble too.”
The muscles of his jaw shift. “You always calmed me. You and that hearth in your house. When my nightmares were too much, when I was remembering too much, all I wanted was to go back into the forest. My dreams told me only the Bone Tree could soothe me, make all this end. It was so terrible that first night after I ran, Mairwen. Only you calmed me. Anytime I decided the only thing to do was walk back inside, I could think of you, or hold your hand and... I could stay.”
“John,” she whispers. “I hear it. The forest. It’s always called me.”
“I want to leave the valley,” John says.
“What!”
“I think Vaughn will give me the means, as his family has for all the—all the survivors. Maybe if I get far enough away the call will lose strength. Maybe I can sleep again.”
“I don’t think it will, John. But maybe I can help you. I—”
