Page 97 of Strange Grace
Arthur jerks, back bowed. He opens his mouth and screams silently.
Mairwen, still inside the nest of brambles, grasps a vine, cutting open her palms. Where her blood falls, flowers blossom in tiny white clusters like yarrow. She tears open a way through the briars and emerges.
“Arthur, I’m here. It’s all right,” Rhun is saying. “I won’t let the forest have your heart. It’smine.”
“Let that saint on the altar go,” Mairwen commands the Bone Tree.
Vaughn says, “You cannot defeat me, Daughter. Your power is only life, not death. You have to be both. You have to let it change you completely. That is real power: change.”
“Stopping you is enough,” she says. The forest pours out of her mouth, burning her eyes until they are black coal, and her lips crack. Yarrow blooms and falls, and her hair is a briar, too, curling over itself as tender green shoots emerge and twine into the thorns.
Arthur Couch sits up, coughing blood and petals. He spits and falls off the altar, against Rhun’s chest. He cannot focus his eyes, but hears roaring and bells all around him. His body is weak; Rhun holds him up. Every beat of his heart thumps through his bones.
The Bone Tree creaks and shudders, bursting with scarlet leaves: the signal for a Slaughter Moon.
“There,” Mairwen says through the flowers on her tongue. “The bargain is broken again. The tree needs a heart, and you will not have any of ours.”
“Your crops will fail, the rain will not come, then, and your babies will die,” the old god says. Fur grows down his cheeks, antlers from his head. His back bends and he sinks to the four delicate legs of a stag, transforming completely.
This is my heart tree. You will all suffer without me! Locking me here again, he says as the fur falls away in chunks and the stag’s antlers become naked branches, as he rots and is only bones, then covered in new flowers again and rises onto two legs: a bear, a man, a creature of lichen and mud and clay, a beautiful man again, with leathery bat wings and a mouth of heavy molars. “Make me a bargain,” he says through the rocks. “Daughter. They’ll hate you if you do not, if their children die. If you all starve. You won’t be welcome in your valley, and you will not be welcome here, where your heart is.”
Mairwen stares, exhausted already, aching and barely holding tight to the flaring edges of the magic that courses through her veins, bulging them, overwhelming her heart.
“You’re a witch, Mairwen!” screams Haf Lewis. “Be a witch!”
She looks at Haf, whose cheeks are marred by tears, and she looks at the first Grace, who is smiling. Then she looks at Rhun Sayer and Arthur Couch, holding on to each other against the altar. Arthur catches her eye, and she sees that circling the first three fingers of his right hand is his fire steel.
She told Haf being a witch was being in between: seeing both sides, all sides, seeing what others cannot and using that power to choose. To change the world.
Your power is only life, not death. You have to be both. You have to let it change you completely. That is real power: change.
“Arthur,” she says. “Do what you came here to do.”
The old god cries out, half in fury, half laughter. The forest leans in, grabbing at the people. Bone creatures attack, and the bird women shriek.
Mairwen does not wait. She runs for the Bone Tree, scrambling up its roots to the black hollow her father coaxed open. Diving in to the sticky, cold womb, she turns and looks down at Arthur.
Steadying himself against Rhun, who fights at his back, keeping the monsters away, Arthur lifts the fire steel. His lips make the shape of her name.
“I love you,” she says, though nobody can hear it. “Both of you, and all of you. Hold on to my heart and I’ll be fine. Now do it.”
His nostrils flare as he takes a furious breath, and Arthur Couch strikes a spark.
•••
THE ALTAR IGNITES. THE DRYand cracked vines, fueled by blood and crisp flower petals, light, and the old god laughs.
He laughs because a fire is not enough to hurt him. The Bone Tree will be born again after it dies.
But the first Grace, his Grace, appears before him and smiles.“Your daughter is in the heart of the tree.”
The old god looks and there Mairwen is, pressed to the dank inner wood, digging her claws into its heart, letting the flowers from her mouth twine against the flaking white bark of the tree.
Arthur picks up a burning branch, nudges Rhun, and takes the fire with him as he climbs nearer to Mairwen, then plunges the flames into the roots. Rhun says, “No!” but Arthur answers, “Trust me. Trusther,” so Rhun lifts a thick vine snaking with fire and drapes it at the foot of the Bone Tree. Haf Lewis helps, and her little sister. The rest battle the desperate creatures of the forest, the half-living, half-dead bone creatures, the monstrous birds and rodents, the bending, shifting trees.
The old god warns, “This will ruin you all,” still thinking he can stop them and also never afraid of death and inevitable rebirth. “Mairwen, I’ll go with you. We’ll be reborn together.”
“No,” she whispers, thinking of her mother. Mairwen Gracepullson her heart, and the old god falters. He falls to his knees.
