Page 79 of Strange Grace
His stomach growls. Arthur wishes he’d eaten something. Though he passes bright apples and vibrant black berries, he won’t risk it.
The song of the wind takes up a more skeletal chime, and Arthur knows he’s near the Bone Tree. It creaks and groans even without wind, stretching itself wider and digging deep into the earth below the forest.
He steps into the grove, leaving his creepy entourage huddled at the edges.
All is gray, as if it is the surface of the moon, but for the cage of black trees encircling them. The Bone Tree stands tall, looming over everything with cragged white branches and dark gray scars. Strewn across the bare earth are a hundred dead scarlet leaves. And a few sprinkles of blood, darkened to brown or a deep purple.
Arthur bends over, spits blood onto the ground, then does his best to growl. It’s a losing fight. He’s weak, but he will not let—
Blinking away the memory—for what good will it do him now? He has a mission—Arthur walks carefully toward the Bone Tree.
The altar waits, cold and pale and empty, stripped of its black vines and gruesome remains. Roots thick and grossly pale, like massive worms rising from the earth, embrace the altar and prop up the Bone Tree itself.
And of course, there are the bones. Arthur clenches his fists, seething at the plain evidence of centuries of deadly sacrifice. Twenty-five skulls, staring and smiling, tied in a spiral pattern to the rough white face of the tree. A flare of scapula and ribs, like wings stretching up and back, and rows of long bones, femurs and arm bones lined into a terrible coat of mail.
Glancing up, Arthur winces at the glare of light; everything is too bright, too silvery-white. At least the conflagration he has planned will warm it all.
Arthur heads for the altar. He grabs old vines and scraps of cloth that remain from the jerkins and trousers and shirts of saints before Baeddan. It is gruesome to think on, but he takes satisfaction that he’ll be giving them a massive funeral pyre.
He’s got a good pile of leaves, twigs, dried-out strips of bark stacked against, around, and atop the altar, ready to light, when a sound catches his attention.
Turning, he looks at the edges of the Bone Tree’s grove, hunting for whatever made it.
Nothing.
Silence surrounds him; even the ghouls and monsters ducked between shadows have gone silent. That stillness puts Arthur’s teeth on edge. He pulls out his knife. It cannot be Baeddan. That devil was never silent. But who else? What else?
He slows his breathing with great effort and pulls out his fire steel.
A branch cracks.
Arthur nearly drops the loop of metal.
Something groans; it’s the Bone Tree.
Mouth hanging in shock, he glances up at the skeletons and staring skulls, at the higher white branches, laced with deep fissures of age. Is that a splash of color? Violet.
A flower. It floats down and lands at the tip of his pyre. The petals look velvety, teardrop shaped, and one by one they wither into blackness.
More fall. Three there, and then a handful, trembling as they flutter down and down around him.
The Bone Tree shudders, and pale-green tendrils push out from the cracks in its bark.
“What is going on?” Arthur asks aloud.
“I’ve come home,” says a creature behind him, voice low and full of satisfaction.
•••
THE LAST TIME MAIRWEN CLIMBEDthis difficult mountain path, she was eager and desperate, running on fumes of hope because one of the horses in the pasture was sick and Rhos Priddy went into early labor. She scales it again now, with Haf just behind her, conquering the overgrown trail, grasping boulders and tangled roots to drag up and up. But she is stronger than before, filled with a power that tells her where to grasp, how to step. She can reach back and pull Haf up, assisting where it’s needed.
“Mairwen, you’re not afraid.”
Surprised, she stops. Haf pants lightly. Exertion puts a pretty flush in her lips and brightens her eyes. Long wisps of sleek black hair stick to her tan neck.
Mairwen holds out her arm, showing Haf the gauntlet of forest growing from wrist toward her elbow and the way her ruddy pink skin is tinging violet. “It’s power. A manifestation of what I’m becoming.”
“Which is?”
