The Grace Year

One night, Tierney watches Ryker as he sleeps. He wakes up from a nightmare, and he is overwhelmed by feelings of despair and loneliness. Although Tierney wants to comfort him, she knows that this life they are living together must eventually come to an end.

Ryker boils enough water to let Tierney take a hot bath. Ryker asks about Tierney’s husband-to-be, and she explains how Michael is her childhood friend, but she doesn’t love him romantically. Ryker has “no one special waiting for [him] back home” (260), and Tierney is relieved and intrigued. The tension builds between them, and Ryker admits that he isn’t afraid of Tierney’s magic: He is afraid of his feelings for her. They draw closer together, but as they share a kiss, Ryker is suddenly “ripped from [Tierney’s] limbs” (262).

Anders thinks that Tierney used her magic to seduce Ryker. Ryker tries to calm Anders, and he explains that Tierney is the daughter of the doctor who saved Anders’s life. Ryker admits that he doesn’t want to kill Tierney: He “want[s] to be with her” (263). Ryker implies that he’s thinking about deserting the poachers and leaving to go west, and Tierney can “almost feel [Anders’s] heart breaking” at the thought of losing his best friend (265). Ryker says that anyone who hurts Tierney has to answer to him. Reluctantly, Anders agrees to keep Ryker’s secret, and they plan to meet up in the morning to harvest hemlock silt to sell.

When Anders leaves, Ryker reminds Tierney that Anders thinks the grace year girls killed his entire family. Ryker proposes that he and Tierney get married so they can be together, but she is distracted by the discovery of a jar of Anders’s hemlock silt. Ryker says that hemlock silt is used to bring on visions, and it can allegedly “[connect] you to the spirit world, above and below” (267). However, he warns that regular use of it would drive a person insane. Tierney recognizes the algae, and she realizes that the girls are suffering from hallucinations, illness, and insanity because of contaminated well water. Tierney wants to inform everyone about their discovery, but Ryker says it would be pointless. Ryker asks Tierney to run away with him and trust that Michael will protect her sisters from being punished for her disappearance. Tierney is torn, but Ryker asks her to trust him.

The next morning, Ryker leaves to help Anders. Tierney thinks about her possible future with Ryker. After a while, she thinks she hears Ryker return, but Anders appears and threatens her. He orders her to leave that night, and he promises to leave a shroud and a candle for her so she can sneak back to the fence and “slither back into [her] hole, where [she] belong[s]” (272). He threatens to kill her if she doesn’t do what he says or if she tells Ryker, and he says he will bring every single poacher to the blind in the morning. He doesn’t want Ryker to get hurt, but he would “rather watch [Ryker] die a thousand deaths than watch him betray his family” by running off with her (272).

When Ryker returns to the blind, he assures Tierney that he talked to Anders. He shows Tierney a flower that Anders picked out for her: a blue pansy, the symbol of farewell. Tierney realizes that her feelings for Ryker are real and that “[she’s] in love with him” (275). She lets Ryker take out her braid, and as they undress and come together, Tierney knows that their time together is coming to a close.

Tierney is heartbroken as Ryker sleeps beside her, but she musters the strength to leave. She sneaks out of the blind and sees the wind chimes made of bones, wondering if Anders made them from a dead grace year girl. She walks the path back to the barrier, and she slips through the hole in the fence, which is still unrepaired. As she pushes herself under the fence, she hears “a strange brushing sound” like “silk against rough fingers” (278), but no one is there.

Tierney returns to the girls’ encampment, and she is shocked by what she sees. The girls are filthy and disoriented, the food is rotting and full of pests, and the punishment tree is “bloated with new trinkets, the soil beneath, caked in fresh blood” (280). She finds Gertie in the larder with a serious infection on the back of her head. Kiersten appears and balks when she sees that Tierney has removed her braid. Tierney plays along and says that Kiersten “helped” her embrace her magic. She tells the girls that the ghosts in the woods helped her find food and water, and Kiersten orders her to bring a pail of “ghost water” to prove it.

Tierney goes looking for the spring, and she hears the “soft scratching noise” once again (287). She comes across the bones of the dead grace year girl again, and she wonders what happened to the girl and why her body was never collected. She realizes that the girl’s killer “must’ve hated [the girl] so much that they were willing to condemn her entire family” (287). Suddenly, Tierney discovers a garden: Her seeds grew at the bottom of the ridge after the earth gave way. She collects a few vegetables and the spring water. As she turns to leave, she hears the same scratching sound again. Tierney feels “[e]yes on [her] skin,” as if “the woods are staring back at [her]” (290).

Tierney tells the girls that the water is a gift from the ghosts, and she realizes that she has “found the one thing that still scares them: the ghosts of the fallen grace year girls” (290). She cleans Gertie’s wounds, and although Tierney’s mind drifts back to Ryker, she knows she has to focus on “getting the camp clear of this poison” (292). Tierney makes dinner for the starving girls, and she hears the same scratching noise on the perimeter of the fence. She tells the girls that these are the grace year girl ghosts, telling the stories of what happened to them. She wonders how the girls will ever be able to recover from the trauma of the grace year.

That night, Tierney cleans out the larder, and she and Gertie sleep in it. Gertie explains everything that happened with Kiersten and the lithograph. Kiersten found the lithograph and showed it to Gertie, and Gertie thought Kiersten was “trying to tell [her] something” (297). She kissed Kiersten and was caught, but Gertie explains that she was only trying to tell Kiersten that she loved her. Tierney tells Gertie what she learned about the contaminated well water. She also admits that the ghosts aren’t real.

Tierney dreams of the girl for the first time in months. The girl warns her that “[h]e said he’d come back for [her]” (299). Tierney awakens and finds the door of the larder opened. Someone has braided Tierney’s hair, and she suspects it was Kiersten. Kiersten forces Tierney to drink from the well, and as Tierney “[chokes] on hemlock silt, blood, and malice” (302), the girls laugh. She remembers that she left Anders’s shroud at the fence, and when she goes to find it, the shroud is gone and the hole in the fence has been repaired. Tierney worries that the girl in her dream was trying to warn her that Anders would come back and kill her.

Tierney starts working on an irrigation system that can carry the spring water down to the camp, and as she works, she hears the mysterious scratching noise yet again. She comes across the dead grace year girl again, and to her shock, someone has placed a red chrysanthemum in the dead girl’s ribcage: “[t]he flower of rebirth” (305). Tierney tries to tell herself that she’s being paranoid, but she can’t help but wonder if she somehow raised the ghost of the dead girl.