Page 77 of Strange Grace
Saint.
He steps in time with it, turning down the mountain. The voice of the Devil’s Forest is hissing and chaotic, pulling at him and others.... Baeddan feels it expand suddenly, its need pushing outward and larger than before. Toward him.
He can’t understand, but the shadow inside him grows.
What is his name?
Sighing through his teeth, he thinks he should go back to—to the Sayers. Baeddan Sayer. Yes, he should find...
Birds dart overhead; they giggle and laugh. Not birds, or not only birds, but—
No, he should gothisway.
He does, following his instinct down a slope of conifers. His feet slide through the deadfall and he slows, quieting his progress. This requires silence, the stalking, the slipping behind, coming around, listening, listening for—
Saint, the forest says, in a heavy, demanding dark voice this young devil has never heard before.
Bring me the saint.
•••
HAF WAITS IN THE SAYERkitchen, hands wrung together. For a second, Mair sees the veiled girl standing in Haf’s place, but she blinks and her friend is there again. Mairwen lists toward Rhun, who holds her elbow.
She feels so strange, and the memory of the veiled girl hangs in her thoughts. It was not her memory, nor Rhun’s, nor Arthur’s, but a forest memory. Was it the first Grace and the old god?
“What happened to the old god of the forest?” she asks.
“Mairwen?”
Startling out of her thoughts, Mair focuses on Haf as Rhun sits her down at the table and puts a plate of hot bread in front of her. “Yes,” she says, lifting the bread.
Rhun sits beside her, and Haf on her other side. They lean together around Mairwen, conspiratorial. Haf murmurs, “Look,” and puts out her light-gold hand, palm-up. A smear of blood mars the delicate skin between her thumb and forefinger, around a puncture wound. “I caught it on a splinter last night, stumbling in the dark, and washed it, bound it, went to sleep. It was like this when I woke.”
“The bargain should heal this sort of thing overnight,” Rhun says.
Mairwen stares. At the fire, Nona stirs up the coals beneath her cauldron and nestles potatoes along the edges. Sal has returned to stirring her bowl of cream, and Delia is stuffing the chicken she cleaned at the far end of the table. All quiet, all listening.
“I said it was temporary binding,” Mairwen says in her normal voice, if a bit tighter for worry.
Sal’s eyes flash to Mairwen, then Delia, then Mairwen again. “But so soon?”
“Do you feel all right?” Rhun asks Mair, nudging her plate closer to her hand. “Eat.”
Nona stands. “It’ll last as long as it lasts. Then we’re on our own.”
“Unless we make a new bargain,” Rhun says. He’s looking at Mairwen, not his mother.
“If my binding won’t hold it, if my heart won’t, like this, then death is the only way,” Mair says. “We can’t just shove someone into the forest to die.”
Rhun puts his hand over hers. “It isn’t that simple. If I’d known the truth, I might have volunteered anyway. If I’d been raised that way, knowing what it would mean for everybody else. Without the lie.”
“Rhun,” whispers Haf.
He glances at her. “Bree wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for the bargain. And when I was small there was a pox that rolled through overnight, and vanished. How many might it have killed otherwise? And Rhos’s baby is alive right now, and I touched her little nose. It’s the same bargain it always was: one life for all this. Isn’t that worth it?”
“Some folk are saying so,” Haf says. “That the saint is the saint, and you have to... that we should... put you back in.”
“That is what makes it wrong,” Nona says, slamming her hand flat to her hearth. “Any folk who’d try that don’t deserve my son’s life.”
