Page 62 of Strange Grace
“We shouldn’t,” responds the woman beside her—her sister, Baeddan knows, but he cannot remember their names.
Arthur joins Mairwen on the bench. “Look at us. Three Graces never changes. We never change. So we don’t live. This place might as well be dead! Nobody risks anything, but without risk, there’s no life. If nothing burns, thennothing burns.”
“Burning hurts,” calls Beth Pugh. Others nod around her, but plenty frown, plenty grip each other’s hands and hold tight to their families.
“So does love,” Arthur calls out in irritation.
“Since when do we listen to this boy?”
Baeddan doesn’t see who calls it, but Arthur makes a dismissive hand gesture. “Since I ran into the Devil’s Forest and survived, Dar.”
“We live. We love,” says the lord with the curling brown hair. “We know the risk of death, Arthur. It is possible to understand risk and danger without flinging oneself into it.”
Arthur shakes his head. “It’s a vicarious understanding. You understand through the saint, only that one night. Don’t you all remember the tension, the anticipation last night? When else do you feel so deeply?”
Mairwen touches his arm. “There’s more. The whole story should be told before we make choices.”
“Do you remember the whole story?” Arthur asks. His irritability makes Baeddan laugh.
Aderyn Grace asks, “How did you bind the bargain, Mairwen?”
“Yes!”
“Tell us!”
Mairwen puts her right arm in the air. “This charm. Binding myself, Arthur, Rhun, to the Bone Tree.”
“Does it mean the bargain can be met without losing one of our boys?” Alis Sayer asks, glancing at Baeddan.
“No.” The tired voice is Rhun’s. He doesn’t join his friends on the bench, but merely shakes his head. “There are twenty-five skulls on the Bone Tree.”
Gasps sound everywhere, and cries of shock.
Baeddan closes his eyes. His ribs ache, his fingers dig at the cobblestones. He grinds his jaw. “They’re all dead!”
Those near enough to hear him fall silent.
“Baeddan?” It’s Mairwen, leaning around him. She touches his temple.
“Don’t you see? Don’t you remember?” He clutches his head, backing away from them all. Baeddan shakes his head and bares his teeth again, eyes tightly shut. Their skulls laugh at him, twisted to the Bone Tree. He snarls, and shouting breaks out: questions and accusations, both hard and tremulous.
“Stop. Baeddan.”
Mairwen catches his face again. Behind her is her mother.
Baeddan remembers Addie Grace, and as he stares at her bright brown eyes, her dark hair, her still hands and round hips, at the certainty in the shape of her mouth, he thinks of her when he was a boy. When she was sweeter and sadder, heavy with Carey Morgan’s child.
Carey Morgan, the saint before him.
“Do you know, Addie?” Baeddan says in a growling voice he likes but hardly recognizes—it is the voice of the forest devil, the voice of the stalker, the killer, the monster bound to the Bone Tree. “I saw Carey Morgan last, when I ran, when I was your saint. He hunted me, green and sick yellow, horns on his head and claws and sharp teeth! He stalked behind me, one step at a time, teased me and scared me, and when it was nearly dawn he dragged me to the Bone Tree and...” Baeddan raises his arm, hand out like claws, as if he holds some large man by the neck. “Ah! He cut my chest open! And the forest grew out of me. Oh, it hurt, it hurt, and... he was...”
Mairwen puts her hands on his bare chest, smoothing down along the furrows of scabbing and old scars. “My father was alive until you took his place. You became the devil after him.”
Sucking a ragged breath, Baeddan nods, and says it louder for all those listening. “He was alive until ten years ago. Carey Morgan lived as the forest devil until I took his place, and his bones were strapped to the Bone Tree, his skull hung with all the others!” Baeddan laughs, desperate, delighted. “All the others!”
“Is that how the bargain is kept?” Mairwen asks, as if she does not already know.
“Yes, yes. A sacrifice every seven years, a life to bind it to the Bone Tree, so the power roots into the land, spreading like a disease throughout the valley.”
