I didn’t tell anyone about the Sunday afternoon. I don’t entirely know why. Shame, perhaps, or the stubborn habit of someone who has spent her life being useful and quiet and easy to overlook. When Pip asked if I was all right I said I was tired, which was true, and when Elliot looked at me for a long moment with his perfect, merciless memory and said nothing, I was grateful. What I did instead was kneel in front of Calla Rue and say, “Can you walk?” “Not far,” said Calla. “But I’d like to try.” The root in my spine had changed. I noticed it when I stood. It had lengthened, somehow, and loosened, so that it trailed behind me over the pale wood like the train of a dress. When I took a step, it ran out gently after me. When I took ten, it ran out with me. It didn’t tug. It didn’t hold me back. It only went where I went, a long white thread of warmth running all the way down into the trunk. “The Keeper may walk the town,” said Calla, watching me. “The tether is very long. Longer than you’ll need. But I shouldn’t try the hills, my dear. Not yet.” I didn’t ask what would happen if I did. I’d had enough rules for one night. Elliot took her arm on one side and I on the other, and Pip walked ahead with a lantern the Hollow had given her, a small soft globe of blue-white light that had come off a root as easily as a fruit from a branch. We went up through the vaulted passages. Behind us the great voice of the Oak said nothing at all. But I could feel it, the whole way, turning its attention over and over like a thing in the dark that has been handed a new toy and doesn’t yet understand it. Tomas was waiting where we’d left him. He was sitting on the cellar floor with his back to the iron cabinets, exactly as I’d last seen him, his mended spectacles in his lap. But he was no longer alone. Standing in the half-light of Pip’s globe were a dozen strangers. Residents. I knew them by their clothes, the waistcoats and shawls and boots of no particular century. Odalys the baker was among them, flour still on her apron. Fenwick from the tavern. The tiny clockmaker with her lens. They stood absolutely still, with their eyes open and their faces slack and their hands hanging, as if someone had cut the strings. “They came down the stairs about an hour ago,” said Tomas hoarsely. “All at once. Didn’t speak. Walked in and stood where you see them. I think they’ve nowhere else to be.” I understood at once. The puppets. The reflections the Oak had worn up above in the lantern light, smiling and handing out tarts. When I said my yes, the strings had come loose. The real people were down in the roots, kneeling, with a thread in their spines. And these shapes had nobody left to be. Odalys’s face was turned towards me, perfectly blank. It was the face of a lovely dress hung on a hook. “Can you help them?” Pip asked quietly. “Not yet.” I made myself say it. “They have to ask. Whoever they really are, wherever they are, they have to ask for it back. I can’t do it for them.” “Then how…” “I don’t know,” I said. “I will.” I believed it, standing there. It surprised me how much. Tomas got up slowly. He put his spectacles back on and looked at me for a long moment, and I saw a slow astonished loosening come over his weathered face, as if something he’d held in his mouth for twenty-eight years had dissolved. “Mira,” he said. “I think I can say it now.” “Say what?” He took a breath. “The tarts aren’t good. They never were. Odalys burns half of them and nobody’s had the heart to tell her. And your mother, Mira, your mother was the bravest, funniest, most frightened woman I ever met, and she died owing me a game of chess, and I have missed her every single day.” He put both hands over his face and wept. Nobody said anything. After a moment Pip went and put an arm round his waist. It was the first honest sentence he’d spoken in my whole lifetime. I hadn’t known until then how much I’d wanted to hear it. Ashgrove was dark. I’d never seen it dark. Every lantern in the town had gone out, every strand of lights, every glowing sign. The streets lay under a huge unfamiliar sky, black and thick with stars. A thin cold wind stirred the dead strings overhead. The square was empty, and the fountain stood silent with its stone bird, wings half open, as if it had only just remembered it was meant to fly. On the rim of the fountain, alone in the starlight, sat Jonah. He lifted his head as we came out of the library. His face was white and his eyes were enormous. “Mira. I didn’t see this.” I went to him at once. He caught my hands in a grip so tight it hurt. He was shaking from head to foot, and for a moment I didn’t understand what I was looking at. Then I did. He was frightened. “It stopped about an hour ago. I was sitting here and I thought, the bakery’s going to catch fire, and it didn’t. I thought, a woman’s going to come round the corner, and nobody came. I tried to see tomorrow. And there’s just a flickering. Little bits. Like a bad radio.” His voice cracked. “I didn’t know what was going to happen next. For the first time since I took it.” He was laughing and crying both at once, a hiccupping, delighted sound. “I’m scared,” he said. “Isn’t that brilliant? I’m so scared I can’t feel my feet.” I pulled him into my arms. He was nineteen and thin and smelled of wood smoke and cold air, and he clung on like a child. “It’s shaken,” said Elliot quietly behind us. “That’s all. Foresight was only ever borrowed time. It sits on top of the Hollow like a skin, and when the Keeper changed, the skin tore.” “Can I give it back?” Jonah pulled away, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “Properly? So it doesn’t come creeping in again?” I thought of the cold clean horror of the empty kitchen in my head. “You can,” I said carefully. “But it costs me. Each time. I don’t know yet how much.” He was quiet. Then he did the kindest thing anyone had done for me in all my time in Ashgrove. “Then not yet,” said Jonah. “I promised my dad I’d be there Thursday. If it’s flickering, maybe it’ll flicker long enough. I’ll hold on a bit. And when I’m done, I’ll come and ask. Properly. And I’ll tell you what it’s worth.” “Jonah.” “Don’t pay for everyone,” he said. “Please. Not all at once. Promise me.” I promised. I didn’t know yet whether it was a promise I could keep. We took Calla up the hill behind the library in the last of the dark. It was steep, over rough grass and loose stones, and we went slowly. Every few yards she stopped to breathe and look up at the stars. I don’t think she’d seen them properly in four hundred years. Not without lanterns. “They’ve moved,” she said wonderingly. “They were different in 1612. There was a bright one over the church. Is it still there?” “I don’t know,” said Elliot gently. “We’ll look.” At the top was a flat grey stone, big enough to sit on, set in the grass with the whole valley below. Ashgrove lay beneath us, a small black huddle of roofs in a ring of black hills. The sky behind the eastern ridge was beginning, faintly, to pale. We sat her down. Pip took off her own coat and tucked it round the old woman’s shoulders. I took my mother’s scarf from my neck and laid it over her knees. “I thought you might be cold.” Calla looked at it. She touched it with one long thin finger. Then she looked up, and for the first time in all those days I saw her without any mask at all. A frightened girl of eighteen with her hair coming down. “Thank you,” she said. “Mira. Will you do something for me?” “Anything.” “My name isn’t Calla Rue.” She said it softly, with a faint embarrassed laugh, like someone confessing to a silly nickname. “The Oak gave me that. It said a Keeper should have a name nobody had ever called her by. I haven’t heard my own spoken aloud since the spring of 1612. I’d like to hear it once more.” “What is it?” “Cecily,” said the old woman. “Cecily Ashe.” It was a plain small brave name. It sounded like a girl who baked bread and sang in the garden. I said it quietly, into the cold grey air. “Cecily.” She closed her eyes. A smile spread over her face, slow and shy and bright. “Oh,” she said. “There I am.” Something touched my ankle. I looked down. A black cat had come up the hill behind us without a sound, and he was standing on the grass with his tail curled round his legs and his candle-flame eyes fixed on the old woman. Marrow. He looked at me once, quite seriously, as if to say he’d decided this was his business after all. Then he stepped up onto the stone, walked across Cecily’s knees, turned round twice, and lay down on my mother’s scarf. Cecily laughed, softly, and laid a hand on his back. The light came up over the ridge as we sat there, slowly, the way real morning comes, in grey bars that turned to pearl and then to rose. The hills lifted out of the dark. The roofs of Ashgrove gleamed. The wet grass at our feet began to glitter, thread by thread, as if someone were stitching a million small lights into the hill. Nobody spoke. Up on the library roof, thirty crows had gathered in a row along the ridge, and for once none of them made a sound. Then, from the corner of my eye, I saw something move. A single light had come loose from the grass at Cecily’s feet. It wasn’t like the others. It was old, much older, a pale clear gold the colour of the earliest morning, and it drifted up slowly and hung in front of her face, trembling. It didn’t speak. It was too old for words. But I felt what it was through the root in my back as clearly as if she’d told me. Her first. The very first. The one the Oak took in 1612. Cecily opened her eyes. She looked at it for a long, long moment. Her face didn’t change, but something in it grew still. “Is that…” “Yes.” “I didn’t think it would still be there.” “It’s been there the whole time.” The sun had cleared the ridge. A thin gold line of it fell across her face, her closed hands, my mother’s scarf. And she said, so softly I had to lean in: “I’d like it back, please. If I may. I’d like to know her name again before I go.” I felt Elliot go rigid beside me. I knew what he was thinking. I knew what Jonah had said. Don’t pay for everyone. I thought of the kitchen, the empty light. But I looked at that small gold flame, four hundred years old, trembling in front of the woman who had kept the Oak’s doors for every minute of it. And I thought: this is the one. This is why I said yes. “Cecily Ashe,” I said. “Do you want back what you gave up in the spring of 1612?” “I do.” “Knowing what it weighs?” “I’ve carried what it weighs for four hundred years,” said Cecily. “It’s the lightness I haven’t known.” “Freely?” “Freely. Eyes open.” The root pulsed once, warm and slow. The little light drifted forward and touched her forehead and went in as softly as a snowflake melting. Cecily Ashe gasped. I’ll never forget her face. It wasn’t joy. It was larger than joy. It was the face of someone who has been underwater a long time and has broken the surface and found the sky. “Annis,” she whispered. “Her name was Annis. She had a curl just here, behind her ear. She smelled of milk and wood smoke. Oh, my little love. I remember.” She wept and she smiled, and the sun came up over the hills and shone full on her, and she sat in the warm grass with her face turned up, saying her daughter’s name over and over like a prayer. I didn’t feel the price at once. Something slid quietly out of me as the little light went in, small and clean as a coin dropped through a hole in a pocket, and for a long minute I felt nothing at all. I didn’t know what had gone. I didn’t reach for it. I think I was afraid to. That’s the cruelty of it, I understood later. You don’t feel the loss when it happens. You feel it when you go looking. She died a little after full sunrise. It was gentle. Her breathing slowed. The old lined face grew smooth. Her hand lay open on my mother’s scarf, on the cat’s warm back, and a single leaf, fallen from nowhere, from some tree that had no business being so high on the hill, drifted down and settled in her palm. Pip was crying. Elliot sat with his head bowed. And I held that thin cold hand in the warm gold light and said the only thing I could think of. “Goodbye, Cecily.” From the roof of the library, one crow called. Once. Not a count. A single flat clear note, the way you say a name. Elliot’s head came up. “They’ve never stopped at one,” he said, low. “In eleven years.” Beside us Marrow rose, stretched, stepped off the scarf and walked down the hill, and did not look back. And from every hive on every roof in Ashgrove, all at once, came a single long low note, as if twelve small engines had been switched on and off. Tomas lifted his head. His eyes were wet. “They’re telling her,” he said. “Whoever needs telling.” The sun rose higher. The valley below filled with light, real light, and for the first time I saw Ashgrove as it truly was: not a lantern-lit fairyland but a small old stone town in a hollow of hills, quiet, shabby, beautiful, with a bakery chimney and a bookbinder’s and a fountain with a stone bird. And in the square, in the clear new morning, an old red bus stood waiting with its engine ticking and its doors folded open. Its destination blind had changed. Where it had read Ashgrove, it now said, in neat white letters, a single word. HOME. “The Turning’s done,” said Elliot quietly. “Whatever the Oak spent on the guests, that’s the last of it for now. The road’s open. Anyone who wants to leave can leave.” He turned to look at me. “Mira. Anyone.” I looked down at the long white root that ran away over the grass behind me, down the hill and into the town and under the library, into the dark. “Not everyone,” I said. This story is hosted at novelping.com.
Chapter Twelve: Cecily
The Night of Names