Tessa Gratton

“This Whole Angry Ocean”

a Strange Grace short story

I.

It rains the morning Arthur Couch leaves Three Graces forever. But it’s sunny the afternoon he comes stomping back. 

Being honest with himself, he knows he always intended to return, it was just that in order to go at all he had to pretend it would be forever. It would be real change. It would be setting fire to the valley and village and forest and leaving it all behind to forge himself anew. 

It isn’t like he hasn’t set fire to everything several times in the past.

When he does return, Arthur goes straight up the mountain to Lord Vaughn’s manor, where he lived last winter. It’s a large house built of stones carved from the deep gray granite of the mountains, with real glass windows and a slate roof. The previous owner is dead, killed on an afternoon in the Devil’s Forest that seems mostly like a fever-dream to Arthur now. He knows everything that happened was real, he was there, but like most magic, it’s easier to live next-door when the shape of it is more of a peripheral shadow. Or a just a story. 

Once upon a time a village was cursed to sacrifice their best boy to the devil every seven years. The saint ran into the forest, the devil slaughtered him, and in return the village never suffered drought or famine or pestilence, nobody died before their time, and injuries faded in hours. For two centuries the curse survived, until Three Graces made a saint called Rhun Sayer, who was so beloved by his friends that they ran into the forest before he could. But Rhun went after them, and together the three broke the curse. The devil died, replaced by his wild daughter: a girl and a forest and a witch and a devil all her own.  

It’s easy to label Rhun and Mairwen in the story: the saint and the witch. The saint and the forest. The saint and the new god. She’s made of so many thorns and brambles now, her hair rough and her teeth a little too sharp. Her blood is thin and purple and tiny white yarrow flowers spill out of her skin when she’s cut, or her nose when she sneezes. She rarely leaves the trees. Arthur kisses her and sometimes it hurts, which is terrible. He is supposed to be the sharp one. 

Rhun will always be the saint, even though he’s not everyone’s favorite anymore. That’s what he gets for building a little house inside the forest and moving in with Mairwen, but kissing Arthur in front of literally half the town this spring at Haf Lewis and Ifan Pugh’s wedding party. It had been awful.

Unlike the other two, Arthur never had a fairy tale title, no easy epithet. He’s still just Arthur. The saint and the witch and…Arthur. If anybody does give him a title it’s usually something like the outcast.

Maybe that's why he goes to the manor house first, instead of looking for the two people he loves most in the world. It’s been nine weeks since he left, and he knows he needs to just put his hands on Mair and his mouth on Rhun and he’ll feel home. But as usual, Arthur won’t set foot on the easy road. 

So he goes to the manor and drops his bag full of spices and steel tools and spools of silk thread and other things they can’t make in Three Graces. He left with gold in his pockets from Vaughn’s stash to get whatever he could find, and the two most expensive things he bought are for Rhun and Mairwen. One is a wool coat the most spectacular shade of indigo Arthur has ever seen, apparently dyed with the shells of sea creatures. Wrapped carefully inside it is a small stag made of glass—perfectly smooth, crystal-like glass sculpted with fire. He also found a filigree silver comb for Nona Sayer, who was a better mother to Arthur than his own. 

Nobody else is in the manor, which surprises Arthur, since a handful of children had moved up here with him for the winter, but he supposes they trickled back into town after he left instead of keeping up the big house by themselves. He makes a fire and sets in the bath rocks, then heads out to the well with buckets to slowly fill the tub next to the hearth. Impatient, he doesn’t wait for it to be very warm before stripping down and scouring himself with a slice of the soft olive oil soap he bought in a two-story shop one could smell from two blocks away. 

He falls asleep in the water. 

Like always when he’s home, Arthur dreams about being devoured by the forest. Vines pierce his arms and legs, and his blood seeps out, soaking into the granite of the cold altar beneath his back. He struggles, but the vines tighten around his neck, slithering up his stomach. Sometimes the vines become hands, and the dream takes a brighter turn, with kisses and aching and different mouths whispering different things in his ears. Other times he dies in his dream, screaming and angry. 

This is one of the bad times. He can’t move against the altar, but he can hear the devil pacing around him on cloven hooves, laughing and promising what it will be like to have his heart planted in the roots, for his bones to become stone and his muscles dry out like winter detritus. The pain is so deep and constant it feels almost natural, like he’s made of pain, it’s what flows through his veins. 

“Arthur?” 

Water sloshes as Arthur thrusts up, scrabbling at the sides of the tub. He pants, vision blurry, and then he rubs his face. The water is tepid, the fire is low but still lending a warm glow to the shadowy room. He never opened any of the windows. 

Rhun steps in. His shoulders fill the doorway and his spiral curls are falling out of the tie at his nape, flaring around his head like a black halo. Arthur stares at the shape of his lips, the carmine flecks in his brown eyes, his crooked nose, the rich gleam of his brown cheeks—and shoulders and arms, bare to the world thanks to the loose vest Rhun is wearing. 

“It is you,” Rhun says in a low, rumbling voice, as he stops halfway across the polished wooden floor. 

“Rhun,” Arthur answers. His voice is scratchy from disuse and sleep. He starts to stand, but he’s naked. Rhun has seen him naked, but it’s been a long time.

Then a grin splits Rhun’s face, and he laughs lightly, pushing his hair off his face—it only bounces back again—“You’re back.”

“Briefly,” Arthur says and then with a harsh sigh he just stands up, clenches his jaw, and gets out of the tub. He gets a thin towel and aggressively swipes at the water streaming off him. Then he strides into the bedroom with its huge bed with velvet drapes and carved posts and grabs a pair of trousers from the shelf in the wardrobe and pulls them on over his skin. 

Rhun follows him and when Arthur turns, lacing the pants, the other young man doesn’t bother pretending not to have been looking at whatever he can. Arthur’s fingers slow and he can’t stop his lips from parting because Rhun is always beautiful, but when he’s being salacious it’s even worse. “Did you see the fire?” Arthur says. 

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t think it was Emma Howell?” 

“No.”

“I would have come to see you.”

Rhun gently rolls his eyes. “After you’d done everything you could think of to delay.”

Arthur scowls. 

“I knew you’d rather see me sooner.” 

“Oh?” Arthur makes the word mean. 

“If you didn’t want to, you’d have come straight away.” 

Knowing he’s caught, Arthur twists his mouth. But he stares into Rhun’s stare, and then steps forward slowly and deliberately. Rhun lets Arthur come to him. 

“You’re still so skinny,” Rhun murmurs, gaze sinking from Arthur’s face down past his delicate collarbones and chest to the ripples of muscles on his belly and sharp hip bones jutting just over his trousers. Arthur doesn’t have anything to spare, lean as a starving wolf. Rhun is big and has a layer of fat over all his work muscles, good to sink fingers into. And teeth. Rhun really likes being chewed on. 

Arthur kisses him. Just lips on lips, sweet and plain. His eyes close and he leans in, sliding his face along Rhun’s, appreciating the scruff of hair barely covering Rhun’s jaw. Then Arthur wraps his arms around Rhun’s neck and Rhun hugs him with a little grunt. Arthur’s spine pops under the sudden grip and he sighs because it feels good. He’s been tense for nine weeks and this is what he needed. 

II.

Rhun takes Arthur to the Devil’s Forest, bypassing Three Graces and the ruins of the Grace cottage with that tree growing up through the roof where Mairwen’s mother died. The sun sets as they pass through the horse pasture and Arthur thinks about buying a couple of new horses when he leaves next time, but doesn’t say it to Rhun yet so they don’t argue. 

Mairwen waits at the edge of the forest shadows, bouncing on her bare toes. When she sees the two young men, she reaches her hands out and flicks her fingers eagerly. 

Arthur drops the bag, vaguely aware of Rhun grabbing it, and dashes the rest of the way with a grin. He catches her up in both arms, swinging around so he’s in the forest and she’s just barely—barely!—in the final rays of liquid sunlight. It instantly finds the gleaming thorns tangled in her auburn curls and the sleek, winding antlers circling her skull tight like a crown. She sneers but Arthur kisses it off her. He holds her against him, rediscovering how light she’s become, like she’s a doll of grass and magic staves, and how she smells like dirt and leaves now, like rain on the wind and sticky pine sap and blood. 

Instead of lowering her down, Arthur drops her and laughs when she reaches out to steady herself on his chest. He takes that hand, then reaches for Rhun’s and he was right: this is what he needed. Both of them together.

Arthur refuses to speak of the outside world while they wander deeper into the forest toward the cottage, so Rhun and Mairwen fill the air with Three Graces gossip and the issues they’re having with the tiny, blood-thirsty bird women venturing out into the fields and hunting honey bees of all things. They like the sting and sweetness, they say, but it’s bad for crops and flowers alike. “Tell them you’ll eat them if they keep disobeying,” Arthur suggests. 

“Then I’d have to be willing to do it,” Mairwen hisses. 

“I will,” he promises, then yells, “Roasted with honey,” to make sure any bird women hiding behind leaves right now hear him plain enough. 

“We’ll eat you with honey, Arthur Couch!” one shrieks back. 

Arthur laughs. 

Rhun, smiling broadly, says, “I think they’d been stringy.”

“But you could hang the wings from colored string and it would be pretty fluttering in the wind.”

“Oh,” Mair says, black-black eyes widening, “but no—the tiny wing bones might be excellent needles. We always need more needles.”

They push through a hedge of blood-red briars, hop a moonlight-silver stream, and crunch over flat layers of crumbling slate to reach the cottage in its small clearing. Tiny lights glow blue and purple and white, eerie and pretty, along the eaves. They look like miniature candle flames but are pure magic. A couple of bone boys lounge near the door, playing a game of dice. One has the skull of a fox for a head, the other a raven, and Arthur isn’t surprised they’re the two sticking closest to Mairwen. 

Inside Mair tosses Arthur a fire steel which is his signal to kneel at the hearth and build a fire while they get out food for dinner. They’re quiet unless somebody has a question, moving easily in the small one-room cottage with its hearth and long table and shelves of jars with food (and worse) in them, bundles of hanging herbs and skeletons. There are no chairs, just a bench beneath the table and pillows and smoothed fallen logs for sitting. A ladder leads to a loft that’s mostly just a huge mattress. 

The place smells like fire and forest and slowly cooking rabbit meat. Rhun lights a few candles and sets them haphazardly around. Arthur steals a chunk of cheese while Mair slices sweet brown bread. Every moment nobody says much Arthur relaxes more. 

When the soup is ready, they nest in the pillows beside the fire, cradling hot bowls and dipping more bread. Finally, Arthur relents, and tells them what the city he visited was like. He describes five-story houses and buildings stacked against each other, courtyards and gardens and people in ridiculous clothes. He liked the carriages the best, with teams of matching horses, he liked the clamor of voices in a market and buying hot food anytime he liked. There were neighborhoods larger than all of Three Graces, a tanners’ corner, a row of specialized smiths, tailors and leatherworkers and butchers and a bakery that only made pies. There was a fort with soldiers, and they had guns, which Arthur had only heard of, never seen. He wants one, of course. Mairwen grimaces, but Rhun is intrigued and agrees they should get one just to figure it out. Mair says the more they bring in to Three Graces that can’t be born here the more the outside world will trickle in, and someday her magic won’t be strong enough. 

“Someday we’ll all be dead,” Arthur says. 

“Sooner if my magic fades,” she answers. 

“We won’t let that happen,” Rhun promises. 

Arthur puts a long finger under her chin and makes her look at him. “We won’t,” he admits. Then he gives them their gifts and his heart is light as a cloud when Mairwen gasps at the glass stag, holding it as if to breathe too hard upon its glinting flesh would shatter it. She smiles and strokes it, and it’s still weird to see the sharpness of her teeth but he likes it. Rhun strips off his vest and tosses it aside, pulling on the indigo coat. It’s bold and rich, catching the firelight in deep ripples. The shoulders are slightly too tight, but Rhun doesn’t seem to care. He smoothes his hands down his chest and smiles a soft, pleased smile. 

Mairwen ties a tiny noose around her stag’s neck and hangs it from a nail over the hearth so the glass glimmers and spreads the firelight like a tiny star. It’s perfectly gruesome and perfectly beautiful, exactly what Arthur expects from her. 

He doesn’t know which one of them to kiss first. So he gets out the last gift, for all of them: a flask of a bright, clear liquor that brings tears to all their eyes as they pass it around, and Mair sprinkles some on her fingers and goes outside into the dark Devil’s Forest where she invites ghosts and bone boys to lick it off. Arthur walks up behind her and holds her, pressing against her back. He cuts his jaw on one of her thorns as he kisses her neck. Rhun wipes the blood off Arthur’s skin with his big thumb. They go inside and climb up into the loft, all three of them, and Arthur and Mairwen take off most of their clothes but Rhun leaves the indigo coat on no matter how Arthur gripes. Arthur gets folded between the two of them, right where he belongs. 

Six days later, Arthur leaves Three Graces again. 

III.

The ocean is the most incredible thing Arthur has ever seen. It’s just so huge, so powerful, so loud and spitting. How did he never know for eighteen years there was something even better than fire? 

He came to the port city this time because he was told in the last town that the port is bigger and more fantastic—and more dangerous. Exactly what he needs. He’s got a list of items people want him to buy and trade for, plus his own list. Though since this is a seaside port, he decides to leave horses for next time. He rents a room in the attic of a pub by the docks and throws the tiny window open so he can always hear the waves. Then Arthur does what he does best: he goes out and gets into trouble. He flirts, he fights, he argues about things he knows nothing of, he makes friends with sailors and merchants, and learns the streets and alleys of the city so well he can get anywhere fast, even in the dark. Then he moves his attentions uptown to the nicer streets and gardens. He’s got enough money to look at least as nice as an upper-class servant and gets a job in a fancy stable on account of being pretty and excellent with the animals. When the women come to ride in their velvet and silk habits, the tails of their coats long and voluptuous, Arthur can barely breathe. But despite having a tiny room behind the stable where he’s close to the luxury and gorgeous women, he keeps his little attic room and visits on his only day off to stare at the sea and give his meager earnings to the beggar kids. He likes them. A sailor told him that the kids aren’t as poor as they pretend, and certainly aren’t actually as sick or broken, but put on the pretense to dig up more sympathy. Arthur likes that about them and takes them most of his breakfast some days. He crouches beside one, a skinny whip of a child in too long shirt with raggedy hair and a sore made of what smells more like flour paste than pus. He stares, and the child stares back. 

Arthur asks, “Are you a little boy or a little girl?” And the child remains silent, eyes boring into him as if it’s the most confusing or most useless question the child has ever heard. “Me too, kid,” Arthur admits reluctantly. “But regardless, if you put on a skirt or a tattered bow in your hair you might make more.” 

Taking his own advice, he visits a tailor to commission a dove gray dress made with full skirts, a bodice, and deep red silk chemise. When it’s done, he folds it up at the bottom of his trunk and leaves it there. 

When the ocean wind starts cutting like winter and the trees inland are going brown, Arthur keeps looking up at the night sky, waiting for the full moon. It’s a year since he ran into the Devil’s Forest, since a centuries-old curse broke against him and his two best friends. He has to hurry back if he wants to be there for the winter or settle in here, without them until spring. 

He waits. And waits. The full moon comes, and he spends it outside on a pier where it reflects like a wavering ghost on the dark ocean. What if he joined a crew and sailed off on one of those ships moving down the coast to winter in more protected ports? Arthur thinks he’d like sailing. The hard work, the camaraderie, the knots and harsh wind. The sunburns. The tattoos. He wants a tattoo. A stag over his heart. A line of thorns across his collarbones. Nobody in Three Graces has a tattoo. 

But he’s got all this stuff people asked him to bring back, so he figures he’d better. He uses the last of his Vaughn gold to buy a sturdy mare and a little wagon and sets off for home. 

IV. 

Arthur has never seen real snow covering every inch of Three Graces. It snowed before, but only enough to coat everything with a perfect layer of ice that melted gently in the afternoon sun. The tips of the mountains cupping their valley stay pure white all season, but otherwise he’s used to a cold winter landscape of evergreen and dark grays, the wet gold of the fallow fields, and thin mud. This is a fairy realm: the trees are lined completely with snow, the rolling hills and fields covered, the houses, too, like tiny iced cakes. Arthur stops his horse and wagon high on the road despite the horse’s eagerness—whatever boundary the Devil’s Forest holds switches from keep-away to welcoming in the space of a few feet and when they crossed it the tired horse got a bounce back in her step. He gazes down at the too-bright white valley, wincing as the sun pops out from behind floating clouds then hides again. 

Looking at the vast spread of snow is a little bit like looking at the ocean on a still, overcast day, glinting shades of gray and white. It hurts how beautiful it is, and Arthur is struck as he often is these days by how terrible it is to be more than one thing at a time. 

He belongs here he belongs by the sea, he is fire he is a storm, he is a boy he is a girl, he is Mairwen’s and he is Rhun’s. He wonders if they’re equally his.

People trudge slowly through town, little dark shapes moving with purpose. Smoke slithers up from all the chimneys. Arthur looks toward the dark forest and sees nothing, and up to Vaughn’s manor. The white light gleams off the glass windows, but nobody has made a fire. 

This time Arthur goes first to the Sayer homestead, half up the mountain from Three Graces. They’ll keep his horse and wagon. He can eat with them and let Nona fuss about how long his hair is before he makes his way to the forest. 

The homestead is three buildings of dark wood tucked off the road among tall red pines and naked oak and hazel. The snow is packed down in the yard from dozens of human and canine feet, with paths cleared from house to well and house to barn. A fire burns outside, too, as well as from all the chimneys, and random furniture built from reclaimed wood are scattered around, some occupied by boys repairing tools and darning socks, yelling and laughing at each other. It looks like the Sayers barely notice the difference between inside and outside. 

They hear him approach with the creaking wagon, and Arthur realizes he’s extremely lucky the road was clear enough to drive. Or it wasn’t luck, it was Three Graces magic. Mairwen’s magic. 

“Arthur!” Somebody yells first, and the call is taken up. Soon he’s surrounded, glaring them back so his horse isn’t spooked. In the chaos he manages to get her unhitched and stowed with two others in the barn, while the deer hounds wander long-legged and sniffing at him like they’ve never smelled him before. He puts off questions easily, then makes the boys help him unload and carry things into the house. They’re an eager wave tugging him along to where Nona Sayer waits in the open door, bulky with shawls and a coat, her spiral black curls just like her son’s braided into a crown and her brown forehead chapped like he’s never seen. Arthur’s skin is chapped too, he knows, he can feel the dryness, but his stark white cheeks are blotched red from the scouring ocean, not snow and cold. 

“Your hair is a tangled mess, Arthur Couch,” Nona says with a glower, but pulls him inside, shows him where to stomp his boots, and then she’s hugging him under one arm, putting him by the fire, and Delia Sayer, one of her sisters, is shoving a mug of hot tea in Arthur’s hands and Sal Sayer, married to Rhun’s brother, gives him bread with thick butter and dried onions, and everything is too loud, too hot, it’s a crush, but Arthur relaxes. Maybe he belongs here, too. 

He tells them about the city by the sea, about the sailing ships and the neighborhoods, about the mayor’s castle and how he worked with the finest horses he’s ever seen. He asks them about the snow! It’s been on the ground for three days, and they’re getting used to it—Ellis, who’s nine, promises to take Arthur out and show him the fort they built and where they play war. 

Arthur says, “Tomorrow, maybe, I need to…”

“It’s not snowy under the branches of the Devil’s Forest,” Nona says, where she’s folding dough methodically against a flat tray in her lap. 

Standing, he puts the little baby Catrin into her uncle’s arms and bends over Nona to kiss her forehead. 

He walks until he’s out of sight of the homestead, and then he’s running as hard as he can across heavy snowfall and rolling hills, toward the Devil’s Forest. 

By the time he arrives he’s gasping and hot, and in the shade of the forest he strips off his coat, flinging it away like shed skin. His shoulders heave and his breath streams through his teeth like dragon fire. It’s quiet here, but for the fall of water droplets farther in, and the creak of cold wood. He can see through the layers of shade and ice, deep into the wild. Arthur is the loudest thing here and he’s only panting. Then he steps forward, and again, until he’s running once more. Running like the devil is behind him, running like his life depends on it. 

He snaps and cracks through the trees, shoving aside branches and thorns. Weak afternoon sunlight filters through, drawing him forward. A sharp cry jerks his head to the side, but he keeps on. It was a jay. Or a monster. 

When Arthur bursts through the blood-red hedge and leaps the creek, he lands on his feet but then kneels on the cold dead pine straw. He goes still, staring at the cottage. Warm light fills the windows, and bones dangle from the eaves in pretty, grave mobiles. Shattered glass glued to the door makes a bright, sharp spiral. 

There are yarrow flowers growing out of the thatched roof, even here at the start of winter. 

“Mairwen!” he yells. “Rhun!”

Rhun comes from around the outside, blood on his hands and a skinning knife gripped loosely. 

Mair throws open the cottage door. They’re both staring at him. She has all her hair pulled back in a scarf. 

Arthur laughs. “I’m back.” 

They run, too: they didn’t think they’d see him until spring. 

V.

Arthur confesses, squished between them in a nest of pillows and quilts at the hearth, that he wishes they could all three be sailors, because Mairwen would love to conquer the sea and Arthur wants to kiss a crust of salt off Rhun’s mouth. 

But Mair can’t leave the valley. Not ever. And Rhun won’t leave her. Not ever. 

Mairwen pinches his bottom lip and says, “When you’re on the ocean, we’re all on the ocean.” 

Rhun closes his eyes. “I wish you would stay with us.”

“I always knew he’d go,” Mair says. At Arthur’s offended glare, she continues, “My mom knew, too. Arthur Couch burns too hot for Three Graces she said. I told her you burn too hot for all the world. But I could always imagine you out there. Past the mountains. With that whole world to fight.”

Her voice softens at the last, and her big magic-black eyes flick from his down to his mouth and then to Rhun. Arthur reaches to brush his fingers along her cheek. The tenderness he feels for her is too quiet, filling him up to all his edges with mercy. He needs to do something to make it hurt again. But he isn’t sure what. 

The way Rhun stares at him from Mairwen’s other side reminds him of the little beggar child. Like Arthur is being confusing or obtuse on purpose. Arthur leans up and over Mair to kiss Rhun. He twists his fingers in Rhun’s hair, pulling at him, desperate to make Rhun understand he is Arthur’s home, like a—like an anchor. 

They kiss over Mairwen, hard and awkward and meaningful, and the muscles of Rhun’s skull and jaw slide under Arthur’s palms, his teeth click on Arthur’s. When Rhun pulls on Arthur’s hair Arthur jerks away and there—that’s the hurt he needed. He’s panting again, like he was when he ran here. He says, glaring at Rhun, “I love you.”

Rhun’s big stupid grin shows up. He nods again and again. Then the smile falls off and he’s only looking longingly at Arthur. “I wish you wanted to stay with me. With us.”

“I do,” Arthur says, sitting up to cross his arms over his bare chest. “It just isn’t the only thing I want.”

“Alright,” Rhun says. 

“I think you should both be touching me now,” Mairwen sings softly. 

Because Rhun and Arthur are looking at each other when she says it, they see exactly what the other feels in reaction.  

VI. 

That winter is good. Arthur relishes chopping trees from the Devil’s Forest to light their hearth. He goes hunting with bone boys, but always has to head out to the valley for real food. There’s nothing good to eat in this forest. Can’t tell what’s really alive in order to kill and cook it. He whistles for the bird women, those little sparrows with human faces and breasts and arms. And a lot of teeth. They eat whatever he brings them, so long as it’s bloody. He helps Haf Pugh build a cradle for the baby she’s expecting, and politely leaves when Mairwen has her strip so she can paint blessings onto Haf’s belly. People come to the edge of the forest and leave notes tied with red ribbon or string, if they need healing or luck, and Mairwen makes the magic for Rhun or Arthur—but mostly Rhun—to deliver. The whole valley does well, but not as well as before they broke the curse and so Mairwen has to be more proactive about keeping the harvest good and the people healthy. The three of them spend hours under the bright sun and dark moon weaving triskelions to bury in the fields for plenty. 

A handful of Lewises get sick, and Mairwen leaves the forest with Rhun and Arthur at her side, bolstering her magic, to tend them. They all survive. Nobody says anything, but nobody likes sickness in Three Graces. Someday Arthur thinks the town will try to make a new sacrifice.

Arthur asks Nona Sayer to teach him how to braid his hair. It’s a handspan past his shoulders now, and she plaits it in a crown like her own. Then she gets her hand mirror and shows him. Arthur clenches his jaw because he likes how the shape of it around his neck and ears softens his features just a little. Makes him prettier. His heart beats too fast and he pushes the mirror away, trying to control his horror—his pleasure. He rips the braids out, and Nona gives him a cup of warmed wine, asking if they have enough quilts in the forest cottage. 

But he comes back in a few days. And again and again, until he understands the pattern and can do it messily himself. Nona only offers the mirror once more, and Arthur shakes his head. He knows what it looks like, and he can feel it with his hands, with the shifting balance of weight when his hair is like this instead of down and tangled, or in a single braid. 

It’s to Rhun he shows the dove gray and scarlet dress. 

One afternoon at midwinter, when they’re out hunting, and catch nothing. Arthur says they should stop at the manor, so they do. And Arthur digs the dress from the bottom of the trunk. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t know what to say. Maybe Rhun will assume it’s a gift for Mairwen. 

Rhun doesn’t. He takes the surprisingly heavy folds and carefully slides his hand over the velvet. He looks at Arthur, then at the dress. He opens it, holding it up in two pieces: scarlet chemise, gray overdress. He bites his bottom lip and looks a little mournfully at Arthur. “This is beautiful,” he says, and Arthur hears, you are beautiful. 

Arthur nods sharply, and then puts the dress away. 

Just before winter breaks into mud and rain for the springtime, Mairwen has Arthur alone in the weird, wild garden behind their cottage, which grows mostly dead plants in silver and blue and brown. She pushes him down, sits across his hips, and while the cold seeps up through his trousers and thick wool jerkin, she says, “Folk keep asking Rhun when he’s marrying me.”

Arthur is angry and afraid in alternating spikes of adrenaline. “What does he say?” He asks carefully, mouth dry. 

“He says ‘She’s marrying Arthur.’”

Sitting up, he has to catch Mairwen as she tumbles back. “That idiot. He should just marry you.”

Mairwen purses her lips in a tiny sneer. 

Arthur meets her sneer for sneer. Locked together, they don’t speak or move. It’s a game of glaring, his hot blue eyes and her rich bird-black eyes. 

“I’ll talk to him,” Arthur finally says, taking her hands. 

“That’s not what I need from you.” 

“Then what?”

“I want you to figure out what you want, so you can tell him.”

His head falls. “That’s what I want, too,” he says to their joined hands. 

So Arthur of course finds Rhun and shoves him and says, “You should marry her.”

“We’re young,” Rhun says casually. “We don’t need to think about that for a while.”

“Even if I married her tomorrow I’d still leave the valley when the winter breaks.”

Rhun huffs. “Why aren’t you happy here?”

Stepping close, Arthur puts his hand on Rhun’s chest. “I’m happy here. As happy as I’m capable of being.” 

Rhun covers Arthur’s hand with his. “I wish I could marry both of you. I wish I could hold your hand in town without people going all bug-eyed. I don’t understand why anybody cares.”

“Maybe they’re just jealous,” Arthur teases, to lighten the moment. 

Rhun snorts softly, almost a laugh. “They should be.”

The next time they’re in town, Arthur pauses in the street next to Braith Bowen’s smithy and kisses Rhun. There’s not many people around, but a few, and Arthur uses his scathing will to block them out, to press his mouth to Rhun’s and then his forehead to Rhun’s forehead, so they breathe together. Arthur is just a little taller, Rhun rather broader. “Maybe someday,” Arthur murmurs. 

VII. 

Nona Sayer gifts Arthur a set of skirts and some underthings, a bodice and shawl. She’s tall enough for her castoffs to be the right length. He tries to pay for them, but she just levels her warm gaze on him until he gives up. When Arthur arrives in the port city in the wagon behind his mare, with more for trade and just enough money, he’s trying to be a woman. The stays are tight, he doesn’t think he looks like a woman, he sits wrong he isn’t sure how to walk, and yes, his hair looks very nice and soft, but that’s not all that matters, he’s sure, when it comes to being a woman. On the other hand, nobody will expect he’s not when he arrives like this. In a dress, soft, smooth face, luxuriously braided hair, flowers. Maybe he’s a lanky, flat-chested girl. Maybe he’s from a farm and it’s not his fault he has too-broad shoulders. He tries to rent a room in a neighborhood where they shouldn’t recognize him, prepared to say he’s Arthur Couch’s sister, but they don’t rent to single women! When they ask his name, he can’t bring himself to use the one his mother gave him for the first seven years of his life, when she told him he was a girl to avoid the curse of the Devil’s Forest. Instead he says it’s Mary, because that’s close to Mairwen. Arthur hopes he dies before she finds out her name gave him that kind of courage. 

For a few days he continues playing Mary, but not only does it make his work of arranging trade and buying items harder, because if he talks to somebody too long they always start looking at him more closely, wondering what exactly is going on. He hates it. And being a woman like this isn't right, either. He feels sick, either too hot or twisting in the stomach, and returns early every day to the little camp outside the city ready to give up. He wishes people would just look at him and know his turmoil, know he’s not what they expect, know that it’s not fair to make him be one thing only. But even people in Three Graces who’ve known him all his life don’t do that. 

Because Arthur is stubborn he goes out one more day as Mary, and that’s when it happens: he’s in a bakery purchasing a leek pie for breakfast and hears a voice he knows. 

The woman is behind him, talking to another woman, and her voice crawls up his spine and all Arthur’s skin pebbles. Unable to stop himself, he turns, and his mother is right in front of him. His mother.

Sarah Couch. Old. Not too old, Arthur thinks, but she looks older than she would if she’d stayed in Three Graces. Her brown hair’s gone silver in thin streaks, and her eyes are just as pale a blue as his. He sees his nose and mouth on her, and wonders if he’d been born a girl he’d…but Arthur stops thinking it. His lips have parted, and she’s staring at him, too. 

Arthur leaves as fast as he can, runs back through the edge of the city and to his camp in the forest. He strips away Nona Sayer’s skirt and the bodice, then he uncovers his wagon—the horse is stabled in town—and pulls out his usual clothes. Puts himself back together with the women’s dress balled up deep in the bag. Then he heads back into town and rents his attic room easily. They remember Arthur from last autumn. 

It takes him five days to return to that bakery. When he does, she’s there. She’s sitting at one of the benches outside the storefront, holding a cake in her lap but not eating it. Arthur sees her first and hesitates. But then he strides forward until his shadow just about touches her skirts and she looks up at him. 

“….Arthur?” She breathes. 

His nod is jerky. His jaw hard. He doesn’t know what to say. 

Sarah Couch stands. She’s nearly as tall as him. The wrinkles around her eyes deep as her face shifts. He wishes he could read it, but it’s been eleven years since he saw her. He was a child. The last thing she said to him was you might as well already be dead. 

“What are you doing here? Away from…” she trails off as if she can’t speak the name. 

“I went into the forest,” he says. 

Crushing the cake to her stomach, his mother lets her breath out in a long, slow stream. 

“I wasn’t the saint,” Arthur adds before she can be proud or relieved or angry. “I broke the rules and I ran in and ruined everything.” He lifts his chin and feels his nostrils flare, his cheeks pink. 

Her hand comes up and Arthur freezes. Sarah just pinches a strand of his golden hair and lets go. He stares at her eyes, at the smeared freckles on her cream cheeks. She’s pretty, but only just. 

“Five mornings ago,” she begins in a hushed tone. “You were…it was you?”

Arthur’s throat closes thickly. It’s filled with mud and brambles, like when he’d been bound with vines to the altar stone. He steps back. 

“Wait,” she says. “Please talk to me. Tell me what’s happened to you. To your father. To…everyone.”

“You could have come back.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Why didn’t you take me with you when you left?” He demands. If she lies, if she says anything he hates he’ll leave and never return. 

Sarah lowers her eyes and a thoughtful crease appears between her arching brows. She presses her mouth into a line and Arthur knows he does that too. “You were happy.”

Arthur’s jaw drops. “I was not! You broke everything, I lived—” he wants to say a lie, but knows now, thanks to the Devil’s Forest, that being a girl first hadn’t been wrong, it just hadn’t been right either. So Arthur chokes off, and his mother meets his eyes again. 

“Before everyone found out what I’d done, you were very happy, Lyn.” Her voice is certain. Her look a mother’s knowing, hard look. 

“Don’t call me that.” 

“It was your name. I’m sorry. Arthur.”

“Me too.” He leaves. 

VIII. 

But he goes back. He sees his mother again and they go to the docks where he can stand on a pier and look at the churning, deep waves and tell her slowly and with as few words as possible what has happened. 

Sarah listens. She asks a few questions after the Lewises and Hetty Pugh and is shocked when Arthur explains what the curse truly was, and how Mairwen Grace helped him and Rhun Sayer kill the last old god of the forest so she could be reborn as a new god. She’s angry when he tells her her husband Gethin left Three Graces, too, and Arthur thinks it’s because now she has to worry about someday seeing his father’s face out here in the real world. She tells him it took her years to settle outside the valley, working as she could, unused to aches and illness, until she found solid work in a tailor’s shop, and has been considering marrying the tailor. 

“You don’t have to. I’m going back soon,” he tells her. “You can come with me.”

He doesn’t feel very much when he offers it. Maybe he’s not letting himself feel very much. 

“Oh, I have a life out here.”

“You had a life in the valley and left that. Left me,” he adds, never one to pull a punch. 

His mother grimaces. But she nods. “You could stay.”

“If I ever don’t go back, I’ll buy a commission on a ship, and sail the ocean until I drown,” he says. “Not stay here with you.”

“You couldn’t put on a dress if you were a sailor.” It’s the first time she’s mentioned how she saw him the first day. 

Arthur sneers. “I can’t put on a dress anywhere and be myself.”

“Are you yourself like this?” She gestures at his half cape and tunic and trousers and boots. At the knives at his hip. 

“I don’t know. The knives help.”

His mother laughs once, both sad and bitter. He always assumed he got that from his dad.

The truth is Arthur might to never know how to be himself. There might not be a place where he can, where himself fits or makes sense. Not in this world. Maybe not in any world. 

He can’t say that. Even thinking it makes his stomach into thorny brambles and his insides turn to water. 

IX. 

Arthur leaves the ocean the next day. He doesn’t say goodbye to his mother. Just packs up and goes home. 

This time, he heads directly for the Devil’s Forest. 

He walks slowly, dropping the reins and letting the horse free of the wagon; he leaves it just sitting there in the valley and vanishes into the forest. Somebody will find it. Take care of it. Three Graces is so small. Through the tall trees he goes, through the blood-red hedge, over the moon-silver stream—moon-silver even in the light of day—to the cottage where he slumps down onto his knees and just waits. Head bowed, back bent. The weight of the world is dragging him down. 

Then he’s shaking. Crying. The tears taste like salt and when he laughs angrily at himself, for being pathetic and melodramatic, the tears make his breath taste like ocean wind. Why is he like this? It’s not fair. He doesn’t even know what to aim for, what to burn down. At least before the Devil’s Forest he knew what he was trying to be. Even if that wasn’t exactly a good thing. How dare magic and curses ruin that. Ruin him. He was fine. That’s a lie. He was never fine, but at least he knew something. Until he saw power that wasn’t either/or. Until he crashed through those lines that defined boys and girls and he was bound to a real altar and sacrificed and became stone and blood and vines and flowers. 

And damn Mairwen and Rhun for loving him even though he doesn’t deserve it, and Haf too, and Nona. Why can they love him and he doesn’t know how to love himself? 

Arthur hugs his stomach, aching at how much his entire body hurts. His ribs are like ropes tightening around him, and there’s this whole angry ocean pushing up and up from inside, burning his throat. He clenches his jaw but still coughs on it, and some water slips out of his mouth, and his nose is just melting, and tears trail down his cheeks like huge slimy slugs. He’s coming apart and he wishes it would be enough. 

Finally, Arthur stretches onto his back, arms flung out, staring up at the stripes of darkening blue that glimmer between the lush green leaves of the canopy. Light fades, and he’s not much of anything. Decomposing in the front yard of Mair and Rhun’s happy home. 

A tiny bird shape flits over him, then another. Then two bird women drop out of the sky to land hard on his stomach. “Oof,” he gasps, and they laugh, crawling up him with their naked little hands and feet, wings cupped out so their arcs are perfectly shaped and the tips of their mousy brown feathers flutter. Their little grins show razor teeth. 

He hears Rhun laugh. It’s far enough away to echo creepily through the twilit grove, and then Mair’s voice saying something he can’t understand. They sound happy. They don’t know he’s here. They’re happy without him. Good. That’s good. 

Arthur is crying again. He’s too exhausted to move so the tears just fall down his temples to water the detritus on the floor of the Devil’s Forest. 

Even when Mair gasps and their footsteps quicken, when the bird women leap up shrieking, and when Mair skids to a stop and collapses beside him, burrowing against his side, nose in his neck, arm and leg thrown across him. “What happened?” she hisses, hugging him tight to her. Thorns on her collarbone and elbow and side of her knee, on her jaw in her hair, stab at him and Arthur hugs her closer, glad for it, glad Mairwen got to transform into something and wishes just for a second that they’d let the forest take him eighteen months ago, and he’d have been the one to transform, all thorns and stone, wild purple blood and tangled-root heart. For seven whole years he could have been neither a boy nor a girl but a forest monster. That’s better than this. Whatever this is. He squeezes his eyes shut.

Rhun kneels at his head and combs Arthur’s hair back from his face. Doesn’t say anything. 

For a while the three of them remain just like that, quiet and still. 

Until Rhun says, “I’m glad you’re here.”

“Why?” Arthur asks, too weary to snarl. 

“I don’t feel like myself when you’re not.”

“How do you know?” Arthur sits up, dislodging Mair and turns to glare at Rhun. 

“That.” Rhun jerks his chin at Arthur. 

“What?”

“You—snarling at me. It just…I like it. It feels right.”

“That’s terrible!” 

Mairwen laughs. “You like terrible things.”

Arthur opens his mouth to argue, but can’t. He takes a deep breath. Wilts a little. Draws his knees up to his chest. Looks between the two of them. “What if I’m never happy?”

“But you are.” Rhun frowns. “I’ve seen you happy.”

“If you were happy for longer than a flash-fire,” Mair says, “I’d know you were dying.”

He huffs in pretend annoyance. It does feel good—right—to let them tell him about himself. Maybe it’s safe for him to be uncertain if they are sure.

X.

Late that night, Arthur stares at the dull red embers in the hearth, on his stomach in a nest of blankets, Mairwen flopped against him and Rhun against her. He’s trying to just be, to appreciate the warmth and glow of sex and terrible elderberry wine they’re making themselves. It tasted like drinking rancid sugar, but he appreciated the terribleness because that gave him a way to love it. 

Rhun says, voice thick, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I love that you leave.”

Arthur goes absolutely rigid, he can’t breathe, he can’t move, he is going to shatter into knives of petrified fucking wood. 

“I miss you,” Rhun says, and a weight of fingers flutters at Arthur’s temple. “Like part of myself is gone. But when you come back…oh. Oh, Arthur…” Rhun’s voice thins into a whisper. “Nothing feels as good as when you come back again.”

Arthur crushes his eyes closed. His heart is beating so very loudly. 

“That first moment I see you, or hear your name, or when you make that face with your mouth twisted and your teeth…” 

“A snarl,” Arthur breathes. 

“Ha, yes. When that happens, I light up! I just…it’s worth it, missing you, because you come back. And you always will?”

Still with his back to Rhun, Arthur nods. And again. “Yes.”

XI. 

Arthur wakes up warm and languid. He thinks about the sea, and joining a crew, sailing to the horizon to face monsters and storms and pirates and everything the world has to offer. It would be great, but he knows, like a tiny diamond in his stomach, that he’d still feel this way. Being a sailor, or the captain of a ship, wouldn’t fix him. He could go to every horizon and he still wouldn’t be what anybody expected. He just has to get used to it. Or at least stop hating it. 

And maybe be a sailor one day. Maybe not. 

Mairwen stretches and gets up, pinching his thigh as she stands. Arthur listens to her make tea while Rhun snores softly. 

“Sometimes I die in the night,” Mair says suddenly. 

“Fuck,” Arthur turns, sitting up. He tries to be gentle to allow Rhun to sleep, but stares up at Mairwen mincing around her kitchen. 

“I come back to life,” she says with a shrug. “It’s just that, I’m part of the forest, like the old god, and so I’m…everything. Life and death. Girl and monster. Plant, person, bird, tree… you know. A lot at once.” 

“Alright.” 

“So you can be a fire and the ocean.”

“Rhun’s encouraging speech was better.”

Mair glares over her shoulder. “Bastard.”

“I like you better when you’re less…nurturing.”

“I like you better when you’re…”

Laughing, Arthur climbs to his feet. “What?”

She lowers her eyes. “Here. I’m jealous.” 

In three strides he’s with her, hugging her up off her feet. “I’ll tell you anything. Everything. I saw my mother.”

“Oh my god!” She smacks his shoulder. “Rhun! Wake up. Arthur saw his mother.”

They gather at the table to eat and talk, and even though it only lasts for the morning, it’s good.