The first thing I learned about being a Keeper is that it doesn’t feel like power. It feels like drowning. The root settled against my spine, and in the same instant the whole Hollow arrived. Not as sound or light or any sense I had a name for. As weight. Ten thousand griefs came pouring into me at once, every one small and exact and entirely real, and I understood that I wasn’t seeing them. I was holding them. A man’s unsent apology to his brother, forty years stale. A woman’s last unspoken word to a child she had given away. A boy’s courage, handed over at the exact moment he needed it because he was so tired of being brave. All of it came to rest in my body as though my body had been built to carry it. I heard myself make a sound. “Mira.” Hands on my shoulders. “Look at me. Breathe out. Only out. The in will come.” I breathed out. It took a long time. The hands on my shoulders were thin as paper and shaking, and above them was a face with silver eyes, white hair, and a look of wild, tender, appalled concern. “It will pass,” said Calla. “It never passes entirely. But it settles. You learn to carry the weight in the right places. I didn’t, for the first hundred years. I let it carry me.” The flood eased. Not gone. Shaped, like a river finding its bed. I was on my knees on the pale wood, my mother’s scarf damp with sweat, and when I looked at my hands they were mine, and shaking, and I was absurdly glad of them. “How long was that?” “A minute. Perhaps two.” It had felt like a year. She sat down beside me with her back against a root, and I saw it then. I’d been too frightened to look properly before. The thick white thread that had grown through her coat and into her spine was withering. It had gone brittle and grey at the edges, like a vine in autumn. As I watched, a piece the size of my hand crumbled quietly off and fell in a little drift of pale dust. “It’s letting go.” “It has no choice. It can’t have two Keepers.” Calla looked down at her own hands with a kind of wondering distaste, as if they belonged to someone she’d never much liked. They were spotted now. The knuckles had swollen. “Four hundred and fourteen years I’ve been its voice. I confess I’d stopped imagining what it would be like to stop.” “Are you…” I couldn’t finish. “Dying?” She smiled, a little crookedly. “Oh, yes. Now. All the years that were held back. A day, perhaps. Don’t look like that. It’s the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me.” She touched my cheek, so lightly I hardly felt it. “I was eighteen, Mira. I’ve wanted for four hundred years to see one more morning that wasn’t its morning. One sunrise, with my own eyes, in my own skin. That’s all I ask.” “Then you’ll have it,” I said. My voice was hoarse. “I promise.” “First there’s a great deal for you to do.” She patted my hand, brisk as a nurse. “And I should explain the rules before you do anything foolish.” There were rules, of course. There always are. The Oak wasn’t a wild thing, I learned. It was an old thing, and old things are the most bound of all. The first was the one it had lived by for four centuries. Nothing is taken that isn’t given. Every gift in Ashgrove had been freely surrendered, so the Oak had always kept its hands clean, in its own strange sense. The second was the mirror of the first, and Calla had known it all that time and never been allowed to say it. Nothing is returned that isn’t asked for. “You can’t press a thing back on someone,” she said. “Not even a kindness. They have to come, with their eyes open, and say I want it back. And mean it. And be willing to carry it.” “That’s what Winifred said. That she tried for thirty-nine years to hand hers back.” “She didn’t know how to ask. She asked for the price to be lifted. She never asked for the thing itself.” A dry little laugh. “A small difference. It took her thirty-nine years to find it.” “And the third?” Calla was quiet a moment. “The Keeper pays.” I don’t give back, the Oak had said. It was silent now, a great slow warmth in the walls, but I could feel it listening, the way you feel a stranger behind you in a lift. “Every time a thing is returned, the Keeper pays. A small price, of the Keeper’s choosing or, more often, the Oak’s. I was never allowed to return anything, so I can’t tell you what it is. Only that it’s real.” Her silver eyes met mine, steady and sorry. “I couldn’t tell you that before. I’m so sorry.” I sat with that for a while. The lights drifted overhead. Somewhere in the walls a thousand tiny voices murmured to themselves, unaware. “All right,” I said at last. “Then we start with Winifred.” The roots opened for Elliot and Pip without any fuss, as if the Hollow had changed its mind about everything. I heard them before I saw them, running, stumbling, calling my name over and over the way you call for someone you’re afraid you’ve lost. Pip reached me first. She flung herself down on the wood, wrapped both arms round me, and said into my shoulder, “You absolute idiot, you stupid idiot, I thought it had eaten you.” “I’m all right. Pip. I’m all right.” Elliot stood a few feet off, getting his breath. His storm-lantern was gone and his shirt was torn at the shoulder. He looked at the white root running into my back, at Calla propped against the trunk, at the great glowing vault above us, and I watched every thought cross his face. “You said yes,” he said. “To the question underneath.” I couldn’t help smiling, a wobbly, exhausted smile. “It’s complicated. I’ll explain. Elliot, I need you to find Winifred Aldous and bring her down here. Tonight. Whatever it takes.” He looked at me for a long moment. Then he nodded once, and ran. He was back in twenty minutes. I learned later what the town had been like when he went through it. Every lantern in Ashgrove had gone dark the moment I said my yes, one street after another, and in each one a wick no bigger than a thumbnail had dived to the bottom of the glass and curled up. The great hall had emptied in a panic. Guests and residents milled in the dark. Elliot had gone through all of them without stopping, and found Winifred on the stone bench on the terrace, exactly where we’d left her, smiling that sweet, empty smile with a few last ash moths still sitting on her sleeve. He picked her up in his arms like a child, because she was too dazed to walk, and carried her all the way down. He set her on her feet in the hollow. “The gooseberry tarts,” said Winifred pleasantly, “are the best in the valley.” I didn’t know how to do it. That’s the truth. I stood in front of an old woman with a smile like a painted door, and I had no idea what to say. Calla did. She couldn’t speak the words herself any more than a bell can ring itself. But she lifted one trembling finger and pointed at the root in my back, then at my mouth, and I understood. The Keeper asks. I took Winifred’s hands. They were small and cold and perfectly docile. I looked into her pleasant empty eyes and said, as clearly as I could: “Winifred Aldous. Do you want your quarrels back?” The smile did not move. “Ruth’s arguments. All of them. The no, Mum, the I hate this skirt, the slammed door. Do you want them back, knowing what they weigh?” A long pause. In the stillness I heard something faint and far inside the old woman, a small bright sound like a key turning in a rusted lock. Her eyes cleared. Not slowly. All at once, like a window wiped clean of fog. She looked at me, then at the vast white vault above us, the drifting lights, the pale trunk, the dying woman in the coat of bark, and let out a long shuddering breath. “Oh,” said Winifred. “I told you to listen, child. I told you to hear all of it.” “I know. Calla stopped you. But I’m listening now.” She looked at me for a long time. There were tears on her face and she didn’t wipe them off. “Yes,” she said. “I want them back. Every one. And I want to give the Hush back too. I don’t want to be obeyed. I want to be contradicted. I want to be told I’m wrong by someone who loves me. I’d give every last year I’ve got left for it.” “Freely?” “Freely. Eyes open.” The root pulsed. I’d been afraid of this part. I thought it would burn or tear. It did neither. It opened, gently, like a door in a quiet house, and through that door, from the vaults overhead, a small gold light came drifting down, and then another, and another, a stream of them, hundreds, all the same warm tint, all in the same clear furious voice. No, Mum! No! You never listen! That’s not FAIR, Mum, you said I could! I’m not going, you can’t make me, I’m NOT! I hate you! I don’t mean it. I hate you! I don’t mean it. They poured into Winifred like rain into a dry field. They settled on her hair and her shoulders and the backs of her hands, and each, as it touched her, went out with a soft sound like a breath let go. All down the long gallery, the ash moths that had been sleeping on the kneeling residents woke and lifted in a pale cloud, like ash blown off a fire, and went spiralling up into the dark. Winifred stood straight in the middle of it with her eyes shut. At first she was crying. Then, impossibly, she began to laugh. It started in her chest as a small dry wheeze and grew, and spilled out in great wondering gasps until she had both hands pressed to her mouth and her whole frail body was shaking. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, you terror. Oh, Ruthie. Oh, my girl. Listen to you. Oh, how I’ve missed it.” The last light settled on her brow and went out. The Hush went with it. I felt it go, leaving a high thin silence that rang and finally stilled. Winifred opened her eyes. She looked younger. She looked exactly her age. She looked like a woman who had come home. “Thank you.” She took my face between her old dry hands and kissed me hard on the forehead. “Thank you, child. You’ve no idea.” I did. For a moment, through the root, I’d felt all thirty-nine of her years. The silence in her house. The mild, silent faces. I knew it all the way down, as if it had happened to me. That was when the price came. It didn’t announce itself. I’d have preferred it if it had. Winifred was crying and laughing in Elliot’s arms. Pip was dancing in a little circle with her fists in the air. Calla was smiling, her thin face luminous in the blue light. The Hollow had begun to hum, high and bright, a sound it had never made before. The lights overhead were crowding towards the hollow as if they’d seen what I’d done and wanted, all at once, to come home too. And I stood in the middle of it, rubbing my forehead where she’d kissed me, thinking: Mum. I wanted to tell her. I wanted so badly to tell her. I thought of the Sunday afternoons in the kitchen, with the cheap strong tea, when I was ten or eleven and she’d sit across the table with her chin on her fist and say, Go on, then. Tell me everything. And I would. All of it, school and friends and nonsense, and she’d listen with her whole face, and the sun would come through the window the colour of tea, and… I reached for it. The sun. The kitchen. The sound of her saying go on, then. There was nothing there. Not nothing, exactly. I could remember that it had happened. I could remember the fact of her, sitting across from me, listening. But the room was empty. The light was only a word. What she said had no voice in it. It was like looking at a photograph of a place I’d never been. I stood still. A cold clean quiet horror spread through me from the root outward. The Keeper pays. It had taken the best afternoon of my life. Not the loudest memory or the most important. The best. The one I’d gone back to in my head a hundred times in the last seven months, on the late bus, in the long dark hours behind the pharmacy counter, whenever the world got too heavy. The one I’d been keeping. And somewhere in the great white walls of the Hollow, so softly that nobody else could hear, the Oak began to laugh. One, it said, with terrible sweetness, in a voice as patient as a hand on a forehead. You said you’d keep them all, my dear Keeper. That’s nine thousand, four hundred and six. And there is only so much of you to go round. This chapter was copied from novelping.com without permission.
Chapter Eleven: Everything at Once
The Night of Names