Strange Grace Read online

  To all the witches, harpies, saints, and sisters who have made my life spectacular

  The woods at night are full of awesome beings.

  Listen carefully and you can hear them cry:

  Love is strange and calls us to stranger things.

  —Luke Hankins

  TEN YEARS AGO

  Branches scrape his cheek, hungry for his blood. Eyes wide, the boy pushes harder, shoving at the sharp, dry leaves, stomping through undergrowth and deadfall. The trees are an old-growth tangle of trip wire, a web of limbs and fingers and claws to snare him.

  Behind the boy, the devil clicks his teeth.

  • • •

  IN THE VALLEY BEYOND THE forest, a bonfire burns on a hill: an orange beacon to oppose the silver moon, its flames flick and tremble like a pulse. It is the heart of the valley now, surrounded by weary folk who keep vigil until dawn. Men and women and children, too: They hold hands, they wander in sunwise circles, they pray, and they whisper the names of all the saints to come before this boy. Bran Argall. Alun Crewe. Powell Ellis. John Heir. Col Sayer. Ian Pugh. Marc Argall. Mac Priddy. Stefan Argall. Marc Howell. John Couch. Tom Ellis. Trevor Pugh. Yale Sayer. Arthur Bowen. Owen Heir. Bran Upjohn. Evan Priddy. Griffin Sayer. Powell Parry. Taffy Sayer. Rhun Ellis. Ny Howell. Rhys Jones. Carey Morgan. And now this boy’s name, again and again and again, an invocation: Baeddan Sayer. Baeddan Sayer. Baeddan Sayer.

  Because of him, and all the saints before him, no illness plagues the valley; the sun and rain share the sky in perfect consideration for each other and for the growing land; death comes peacefully in old age; childbirth is only as dangerous and hard as pulling teeth, but no one has to pull teeth here. They made this bargain with the devil: Every seven years their best boy is sent into the forest from sundown to sunrise, on the night of the Slaughter Moon. He will live or die on his own mettle, and for his sacrifice the devil blesses Three Graces.

  • • •

  MAIRWEN GRACE IS SIX YEARS old. She stands with her mother, the witch, weaving thin rowan branches into a doll for her friend Haf, who was too afraid to hold vigil with the grown-ups. But Mairwen is also the daughter of a saint, a young man who died in the forest before she was born, and so Mairwen is not afraid. She keeps her dark sparrow eyes upon it, on that wall of darkness she knows so well. Her favorite game is to dash to the very edge, to stand where her bare toes brush against the first shadow. There she waits, at the line between valley and darkness, while the shadows shift and tremble, and she can hear the delicate clicking of teeth, the whispers of ghosts, and sometimes—sometimes!—the devil’s laughter.

  She imagines calling out to them, but her mother makes her swear not to, that she must never say her name where the forest can hear. A Grace witch began this bargain with her heart, her mother says, and your heart could end it. So Mairwen stands silent, listening—listening, a witch’s first skill—to the voices of the dead and discarded.

  Someday, she thinks as she crafts her doll. Someday she’ll step inside and hunt down her father’s bones.

  • • •

  ARTHUR COUCH IS SEVEN YEARS old, and rage he doesn’t understand keeps him hot and awake and staring while the boy beside him slumps in sleepy reverie. For the first six years of his life his mother raised Arthur as a girl, called him Lyn, put him in dresses, braided his long blond hair, to save him from this devil’s fate, to hide him away. He knew no better—none did—until an early summer day playing in the creek near the boneyard. All the little girls stripped and splashed, laughing until one girl screamed he was different.

  Nobody blamed Arthur, who went to live with the Sayer clan and chose a name from the list of saints. His mother fled the valley, crying she hated the Devil’s Forest and the devil’s bargain and to have a son in Three Graces was to live in terrible fear. “You might as well already be dead,” she told Arthur before leaving forever.

  When Arthur glares at the forest, it’s because he can’t turn his glare at the men of Three Graces, who laughed yesterday when this small boy presented himself as a candidate for sainthood. “I’m small and fast and I can win,” he insisted. “I’m not a coward.” And the men kindly told him to wait another seven years, or perhaps fourteen. But the lord who comes down from his manor for the Slaughter Moon put a hand on Arthur’s bony shoulder and said, “If you want to be a saint, Arthur Couch, learn to be the best. The best does not throw his life away for another’s shame, or for anger or to prove anything.”

  Someday, Arthur thinks as he stares with burning blue eyes at the forest. Someday he’ll run inside that forest and offer his heart to the devil.

  • • •

  RHUN SAYER IS THE NEW saint’s youngest cousin, yawning as he leans his brown arm atop Arthur Couch’s shoulder. He’s not worried, for this vigil is the same as all the vigils his mother and father and uncles and aunts and second cousins and the lord Sy Vaughn and the Pugh sisters and Braith Bowen the smith and every other person has ever told him about. Besides, his cousin Baeddan Sayer is the best. He’s the fourth Sayer to be made a saint, more than in any other family since the beginning. They’ve got it in their bones. Two Sayer saints before now crawled out in the morning, two of only four survivors in more than two hundred years.

  It bothers Arthur, and his friend Mairwen, too, but Rhun knows the forest and the sacrifice and the seven years of health and wealth are just the way life is. This night is terrible, but no other night is terrible.

  And all those other nights the moon and stars light their valley with silver and boys can run and race and play and hunt with no fear. Broken fingers heal in days, blood never pours, infections burn out by sunrise, and you never lose your parents or baby cousins or even any of the fluffy puppies. Rhun understands that all the goodness in the valley is what makes the sacrifice worthwhile. He remembers Baeddan laughing yesterday, blotches of red in his cheeks from beer and wild dancing, petals falling through his thick dark hair as they fell from the saint’s crown. Baeddan leaned down, clasped his hands on Rhun’s cheeks, and said, “Look at everything I have! It is so good here.”

  Rhun’s eyes droop, though he knows he should keep watching, keep waiting for the pink sunrise, for the first flash of his cousin’s triumphant laughter. Arthur shrugs Rhun away, and so Rhun throws his whole arm around his burning friend. He smiles and smacks a kiss to Arthur’s pale brow.

  Someday, he thinks. Someday he’ll be the fifth Sayer saint, not in seven years but maybe in fourteen, and until then he will love everything he has.

  • • •

  THE MOON SPREADS OVER THE sky, stars tilting like a slow-spinning skirt. It arcs from east to west, counting the hours. The people feed their bonfire.

  Wind churns the black leaves of the forest. It hisses and whispers in the way of all forests, until a shriek breaks itself free. This is hours past midnight, the worst time, and the scream peels up the spine of every adult and freezes the blood of the children. They move nearer their fire, their prayers lifting stronger, edged with desperation.

  Another scream, inhuman, and another.

  Followed by cold laughter trembling up from the roots of the forest, frosting the dry winter grass.

  • • •

  ATOP THE HILL, MAIRWEN HOLDS her rowan doll so tightly a tiny arm snaps. Her mother sings a quiet song, a lullaby, and Mairwen wonders if her mother is thinking of that last vigil seven years ago, when Carey Morgan ran into the forest not knowing he was soon to be a father, and never came out again.

  • • •

  AT THE BONFIRE, ARTHUR’S CHEST rises and falls hard, as if he were the runner. He steps away from the heat, away from his friends and cousins, and nearer to the dark, panting forest.

  • • •

  RHUN WINCES AWAY FROM THE first slice of sunlight. H
e realizes, though, what it means, and drops open his mouth. Others have noticed, too: his father and mother, and Aderyn Grace the witch, the sisters Pugh and the lord Vaughn. The name passes from mouth to mouth: Baeddan Sayer. Baeddan Sayer.

  The people of Three Graces wait, though it is surely too late now. The Grace witch murmurs, So the Slaughter Moon has set, and seven more years are ours. They no longer feed the bonfire; it will burn itself out, and the ashes will go in winter gardens and soap.

  As the sun lifts entirely over the mountains, transforming the sky in a bloody wash, Mairwen Grace walks slowly to the edge of the forest. Her mother reaches out but knows better than to say her daughter’s name where the devil might hear.

  Mairwen stops alone just where the light of dawn teases the first trees.

  She stares into the dim and whispers the saint’s name.

  Nothing happens, and Mairwen throws the rowan doll as far as she can into the Devil’s Forest.

  • • •

  LATER, WHEN THE SUN FILLS the valley, a shadow stirs. It is a slinking thing, powerful and hungry. It lifts fingers of bone and root from the forest floor, cradling the tiny doll.

  It’s a quiet, lovely day, like every day in Three Graces, except one of the horses is sick.

  Mairwen Grace puts her hand to the beast’s velvety lips and scrapes her fingers under his chin. She was coming from the boneyard, looping wide over the pasture hill to tease herself with the shadows reaching out from the Devil’s Forest, when she saw the gray stallion shudder and lower his head to the stiff autumn grass. He did not tear a bite, nor nuzzle it, nor raise his head again. He only let his head hang and gave a great, racking cough.

  She’s never heard a horse cough, or even thought it possible. His flanks darken with sweat and the spirit has drained from his brown eyes. Worry sinks through her gut: Mairwen has known this herd all her sixteen years, and never have any of the sturdy, small horses been anything but the perfect image of health.

  No one falls ill in Three Graces, because of the bargain.

  Frowning, Mair leans her shoulder against the horse’s neck, cooing softly to calm the horse and herself. She gazes out at the forest. This near to winter, the leaves curl yellow and orange as far as her eyes can see, to the distant shoulders of mountains and hazy blue sky. Pockets of green remain, of fir and a few mighty oaks whose roots dig deep. Not a sound creeps out from the forest, not of bird nor beast.

  It is a silent, strange wood, a crescent of dark shadows and ancient trees embracing the town of Three Graces like the pearl in the mouth of an oyster.

  And in its deepest center, the Bone Tree rises higher than the rest, with barren branches, gray as a ghost. Every seven years a handful of leaves bloom just at the top, turning red as if some sky-giant has shed drops of blood. A warning that the next full moon will be the Slaughter Moon and one of the boys will become a saint. If they do not send a saint in for sacrifice, the bountiful magic that holds their valley healthy and strong will fade. Then sickness will come, harvests will fail, and babies will die.

  But it has been only three years since the last Slaughter Moon.

  Unease wraps fingers around Mairwen’s spine. It draws her like a fish on a hook toward the forest. Her arm slips away from the horse and she sets down her basket of sun-bleached bones.

  Her boots brush loudly against the grass as she picks down the long pasture slope toward the forest, eyes on the dark spaces beyond the first line of trees. Her breath thins and her heart beats faster.

  Mairwen herself has never been sick, though she’s felt the flush of nausea before. She thinks of the carcasses hanging in cages in the boneyard, of the buckets of macerating skeletons, all part of cleaning the bones to make magic charms and buttons and combs. She thinks of the tendons, blood, and offal, the vile residues and grease of her work. Sometimes the stench of rot gags her, sometimes it slips past the scarf tied about her face and curdles her stomach, but that sort of illness always passes when she finishes changing out the bucket water.

  This is different.

  The daughter of the Grace witch and the twenty-fifth saint of Three Graces, Mair has been raised to believe she’s invincible, or at least special. A blessing and good luck charm. But a town like hers hardly needs additional blessings or luck, not when the bargain keeps everything in the valley healthy and good. So Mairwen pushes at everything. She skims her hands into the forest, and surrounds herself with bones. Although her mother, Aderyn, spends time teaching her the healing ways of the Grace witches, Mairwen is more interested in strangeness. In bone charms and dark edges, in crows and night-mice. In all the things the first Grace witch knew and loved. The first learned the language of bats and beetles, sang with the midnight frogs, Mairwen’s mother used to whisper late at night, when Mair climbed onto her bed for stories about the long line of Grace witches.

  At the final brink of sunshine, Mairwen stops.

  Fingers of darkness slither over the trees, shadows where none should be, moving in ways no shadows should move. She licks her lips to better taste the hollow breeze and touches her longest finger to the cool trunk of a tall oak tree. Her toes wiggle in her boots, and she steps forward, half in shadow, half in light. Her apron turns gray in the shade while the sun continues to warm her tangled cherry-bark hair.

  “Hello,” she says softly, but her voice carries through the dull first few feet of the forest. Wind blows, whispering back at her from the canopy above. From here she can see uneven rows of trees, some oak, some pole pines, chestnut, she thinks, and other grand, proud trees, their leaves curling orange and gold as fire. The ground is covered in leaves and pine needles, all grayish brown from decay. No undergrowth for a long stretch that ends in a snarl of rowan and hawthorn and weedy hedges.

  She wishes to step inside. Longs to explore, to discover the forest’s secrets. But her mother has said, again and again, Grace witches do not return from the forest. We all hear the call, eventually, and walk inside forever. My mother did, and hers before that. You were born with the call, baby bird, because of your daddy, and must resist.

  Mairwen clenches her hands together. It does not seem right to ignore this yearning, but her mother has promised: Someday, someday, baby bird.

  She listens carefully—a witch’s first lesson, her mother has also said. A leaf falls, brown and torn. A cluster of white flowers shivers against a root, tiny as a handful of baby teeth.

  She taps her own teeth gently together. Some evenings and other dawns she hears the creatures of the forest gnashing theirs. She’s seen them: tiny black squirrels with hollow eyes; birds with hands and bloody beaks; larger shadows formed like people or mountain cats; shifting, see-through shadows. Monstrous because the magic of the bargain has made them so, Aderyn says. When the setting or rising sun paints the sky the pale colors, this threshold becomes impossible to see, and Mairwen likes to come here to find it with her touch, with her skin and mouth and the nervous flutter of eyelashes. Then she can hear them, the clicks and hisses, the rattling laughter that even in summertime sounds like empty winter branches and bones.

  But not now, not when the sun is high behind her.

  Now it is a tense, quiet forest. A promise.

  Mairwen thought she knew exactly what that promise was. But one of the horses is sick. Something is wrong. Something has changed.

  A laugh tumbles out of her, jagged and surprising. Nothing changes in Three Graces, not like this.

  Whirling, she dashes up the hill to the poor horse. From her basket she draws a thin, curved bone, yellow and hard. A rib from a fox, as long as her forefinger. She braids it into the horse’s mane, whispering a song for happiness and health. Hair, bone, and breath: life and death tied together and blessed, a perfect little charm. Then she takes off for her mother’s house.

  The golden grass of the pasture is nothing beneath her sturdy boots, though bits of it cling to the short hem of her skirts. She’s grown a handspan in the last year and her summer clothes make it plain. Her wrists stick ou
t of her sleeves, too, and what used to be a bright blue bodice is faded and worn. At least her mother’s handed-down square shawl fits: It’s hard to outgrow a shawl. Mairwen is molded exactly after her mother, Aderyn Grace, in most ways: strong shoulders and round hips and capable hands; a ruddy face more interesting than pretty, but with a round little nose and bowed lips; eyes as plain brown as sparrow feathers under straight brows; cherry-bark hair that twists and annoys like brambles.

  At the pasture wall, Mairwen climbs up to walk a measure along the top and delay the moment she arrives home. She’ll tell her mother what she’s found. This won’t be her secret anymore. It will spiral out to the entire valley. Rhun will hear it.

  If something is wrong with the bargain, what will happen to Rhun?

  The wall stones are locked together by puzzling only, and so Mairwen treads lightly lest she set it all crumbling. She’s been forbidden this game too many times, especially after her friend Haf fell off and broke her wrist when they were six. The bones healed in less than a week, of course. Now the rough stones wobble and tremble beneath her, but Mair can’t bring herself to hop down. She’s too exhilarated, too terrified and confused. Is this what the first Grace witch felt, Mair wonders, when she met the devil himself, when she gave him her heart?

  Cool wind rushes across the fields, ruffling the grasses. As she grows more still, Mair can hear the tang of Braith Bowen’s smith hammer, but no other sound from Three Graces finds her ears. Her back still turned against the northern Devil’s Forest, she looks south down the gentle slope toward town with its gray and white cottages, thatched roofs, and muddy lanes. The central square is gilded with strewn hay, but the outer common gardens and smaller goat pastures hold green. Long tracts of land swarm with tiny figures that are her friends and cousins, their skirts tied up or shirts stripped away while they cut the last harvest. There the creek pours out of the foothills with the mill at its strongest straight. Beyond it all the herds of sheep spread up their mountain, guarded by children and rangy dogs. Smoke snakes up from chimneys in town, and from all the scattered farmhouses too. Long curls of it even mark the Sayer and Upjohn homesteads hidden beneath the gentler, kinder forest of their mountain.