The Grace Year

Tierney runs away from the dead girl and stumbles through the woods until she arrives back at the girls’ camp. She keeps her distance and hides in the trees, watching the girls and listening as they discuss her. Kiersten says that there’s “a lot more [she] can cut off of Gertie” if Tierney tries to come back (178). Tierney heads back into the woods, feeling lonelier than ever before.

For days, Tierney hides out in the woods, and she starts to regain her sanity. She wonders if “just being around [the other girls] is what’s making the sickness spread” (179). She becomes desperate for food, and she wonders if the skeleton in the woods belongs to the girl from her dreams. One day, she discovers a hole in the fence. She makes the hole bigger, hoping that Hans will come to fix it and help her survive. One night as she sleeps, a bear enters her campsite and rips her cloak, but someone distracts the animal and lures it away. Tierney finds “the fatty remains of a mangled piece of fresh meat” that someone threw over the fence (187).

The next morning, Tierney discovers that the bear’s claws ripped a hole in the lining of her cloak, which is full of seeds and beans. She realizes that this was June’s doing: “an intricate maze of seeds” to help her sister survive the grace year (188). She decides to plant all of them because she might not make it to the next season. Snow begins to fall, and Tierney is met with frozen earth. She tries to plant the seeds, but a winter storm starts to move in.

Tierney tries to protect her garden, but as the winter storm moves in, “the earth lets out a terrifying groan” and “the ground begins to shift” (191). The ridge breaks away, and all of her seeds land in the bottom of a ravine below. Tierney watches the seeds “wash away, slip[ping] right through [her] fingers” (192). Suddenly, she hears another scream coming from the camp.

Tierney returns to the camp and finds the girls screaming, dancing, and “covering themselves in mud and snow” (193). Chaos has taken over the camp, and lightning strikes one of the girls, Tamara. Kiersten drags Tamara to the gate and orders the other girls to open it. Tierney tries to stop them, but they throw Tamara outside the fence. Moments later, the poachers arrive, and the girls hear “blades ripping into flesh” (194). Kiersten attacks Tierney with an axe, leaving a gaping wound in Tierney’s shoulder. Tierney takes off running with the axe.

The girls chase after Tierney, and she tries to hide from them long enough to bandage her wound. Out of desperation, Tierney crawls through the hole in the barrier. One of the girls follows her and is immediately killed by a poacher. Tierney sees a vision of the girl from her dream beckoning her to the icy shore of the lake, warning her that “[t]ime is running out” (201). Tierney walks out onto the ice, and she finds the same poacher that spared her life watching her. She uses the axe to break the ice, plunging herself into the icy water so the poacher cannot take her. However, he pulls her out of the frozen lake, and “the world goes black” (205).

Tierney regains consciousness and finds herself in incredible agony. She sees a “stark naked” man walking across the room, “pure muscle roiling beneath flesh” (205), and she is filled with terror. The man dons his shroud once more, hiding his face and body, and he pours “rancid liquid” down her throat (206). He digs a knife into the flesh of her arm, and as pain overwhelms her, Tierney believes that he is skinning her and beginning the process of harvesting her magic.

Tierney takes in the sight of the room and sees “a series of small glass bottles” that will hold her body parts (207). The poacher forces her to drink more of the rancid liquid, and he cauterizes her wounded shoulder. Another poacher comes knocking, and Tierney’s captor—Ryker—orders Tierney to be silent or he will kill her. Ryker talks to his friend, who urges him to come join the others, but Ryker says that he’s sick. The other poacher laughs with glee at the number of girls they’ve managed to catch and kill. Ryker’s friend found Tierney’s cloak, and Ryker trades a pelt for it before the poachers say their goodbyes.

Tierney decides to “play the broken bird” (212). She accepts the rancid liquid the poacher gives her but spits it out as soon as his back is turned. When he leaves the room for water and firewood, she practices moving her feet, but she is restrained by ropes. Finally, one day, the poacher is “careless enough to leave his blade belt on the bench next to [her]” (214), and Tierney steals a knife and cuts her ropes. She attacks the poacher and stabs him, but when she tries to run out the door, she steps on “nothing but air” (216).

Ryker grabs Tierney before she can fall out of his treehouse. Ryker insists that he isn’t trying to hurt her, and reluctantly, Tierney allows him to help her back inside. When she looks into his eyes beneath the shroud, she senses kindness. Ryker explains that everything he did was meant to help Tierney, and she is surprised that Ryker knows her name. As he checks her shoulder wound, they find that her flesh is infested with maggots and a “smell of death” is coming from her (218).

Ryker continues to nurse Tierney back to health. He admits that he knew who Tierney was when he saw her on the trail because she looks like her father. Tierney’s father goes to the outskirts to treat the women and children there, and he saved Ryker’s friend, Anders, who found Tierney’s cloak. The year before, “the prey tried to take [Anders] over the barrier, bit him,” and “cursed his entire family” (223) with an illness. Tierney’s father was able to save Anders, and in exchange, Ryker agreed to let Tierney go. Tierney realizes that if she is going to survive the winter with Ryker, she has to make him “see [her] not as an it, not as prey, but as a human being” (225).

Tierney awakes to the sound of Ryker cutting up a rabbit. Tierney asks why he’s keeping her alive, and he admits that he doesn’t know. However, he says that when he saw her hit the ice with the axe, it was “one of the bravest things [he’d] ever seen” (228).

As the days drag on, Tierney’s body fights an infection. Ryker asks how she got the wound, and Tierney tells him about Kiersten and the axe. She mentions the dreams she has: dreams of a girl who inspired her to work for a better world where things could be different, “not just for the grace year girls” but for “the women of the outskirts, too” (230). She tells Ryker that she suspects the magic isn’t real and that something else is happening to the girls.

Tierney asks Ryker how he can kill “innocent girls” (233), but Ryker reminds Tierney that those “innocent” girls hurt her. He tells Tierney about his family: He has a mother and six sisters, all girls that were taken in by his mother when they were exiled from the county. He explains that the poachers have been “sanctioned to cull the herd” by the county (235), and they are paid generously for bringing back dead girls. When Tierney asks him how the poachers manage to lure the girls out, he explains that they “do it to themselves” (235). He admits that he has never killed a grace year girl, and he’s glad he didn’t kill Tierney.

Tierney runs a fever, and she hears a strange noise outside. Ryker explains that Anders made wind chimes out of bones and that Anders “likes to make things with bones” (236). Tierney asks Ryker to show her his face so she can see the person who tried to save her, and although he hesitates, he finally removes his shroud. Tierney isn’t sure if Ryker would be considered handsome in the county, but she “can’t stop staring at him” nonetheless (237).

Tierney’s fever breaks and she feels a flush of gratitude toward Ryker for saving her life, but she remembers that “he’s still a poacher and [she’s] still a grace year girl” (239). Ryker reveals that he was the one who threw meat over the barrier to her when she was starving. Ryker’s father was a poacher who got a kill and then used his winnings to leave the outskirts and disappear over the mountains. Anders’s mother was a grace year girl who was banished, and she taught her sons to hate the county. Ryker dreams of taking his mother and sisters away from the outskirts, but he can only do that if he gets a kill.