Fen turned the bell over in her hands.
The bronze was cold, colder than the October air should have allowed. A greenish film clung to the pitted surface where age and river water had done their slow work, and where the patina had cracked away, the metal beneath gleamed like a cat's eye catching lamplight. She could feel the weight of it in her wrists, in the cords of her forearms, a heaviness that did not match its size. It was no larger than a church bell for a dollhouse, but she carried it as though it were a stone from a cairn.
The toll road behind her was empty. Coach tracks ran in twin ruts through the mud, filled with brown water that reflected a sky the colour of unpolished pewter. Somewhere to the north, where the fells folded into mist, a raven called once and did not call again. Fen tucked the bell inside her coat, against the woollen warmth of her mother's shawl that she had not yet had the courage to bury, and started walking.
The village of Hollowspan lay at the end of the lane, where the road gave up its pretensions and became a causeway of sunken slabs between the reeds. She had not been here since she was seven years old. She had remembered it as a place of green water and wooden bridges, of her father's hands lifting her over the worst of the ditches, of her mother's voice singing something low and shapeless about the drowned. She had remembered, too, the smell of peat smoke and the way the willows wept into the channels as though mourning some private loss. None of that had changed. The lane narrowed between two high banks of moss and bracken. A heron rose from the marsh without sound, its legs trailing like broken oars. Fen walked on, and the bell against her ribs made no sound at all.
She had found it in the attic of the steading, wrapped in sacking that had rotted to a brown lace. Beneath the sacking, a square of oilcloth. Beneath the oilcloth, the bell. No letter, no explanation. Only this object, small and impossibly heavy, its surface inscribed with letters that were not English and not Latin and not, she thought, any alphabet made for the living. She had carried it down the ladder, through the kitchen where Ewan was cutting bread, and out the door before he could ask why her face had gone the colour of skim milk. She had walked for an hour before she realised her hands were shaking.
Widow Grella's cottage stood at the last turning of the lane, where the causeway met a patch of solid ground and a chimney leaned against the sky at an angle that suggested long acquaintance with the prevailing wind. Smoke rose from it, thin and blue, carrying the resinous scent of dried yarrow. A cat, enormous and orange, watched Fen from the ridge of the thatch with the sovereign disinterest of its kind. Fen knocked.
A long moment passed. A chair scraped within. A bolt slid back with a sound like a small bone breaking.
Widow Grella filled the doorway the way a boulder fills a ford. She was shorter than Fen remembered, or Fen was taller, but her shoulders had that breadth that comes from a lifetime of hauling water and turning hay, and her eyes, set deep beneath a brow like a lintel, missed nothing. Her hair was the white of bleached rope, pinned under a cap of brown wool. She smelled of woodsmoke and dried apples and something sharper, something green and medicinal that Fen could not place.
'Little Morrigan,' the old woman said. The words came out with the soft, rounded vowels of the West Country, flattened by a lifetime on the fells but never quite erased. 'I heard you were back. I heard it yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, from the ones who come to me with their aching teeth.'
Fen said, 'I need your help, Widow.'
'Hm.' Grella stepped back, a grudging admission of welcome. 'You'd best come in, then. The cold out there is the kind that finds the bones.'
The cottage interior was a single room, low-beamed and cluttered with the apparatus of a life spent among remedies. Bundles of dried herbs hung from the rafters, each tied with twine of a different colour. Shelves lined the wall, crowded with jars of brown glass, clay pots sealed with wax, paper parcels tied with red thread. In the hearth a peat fire burned low, giving off more scent than heat. A kettle sat at its flank, blackened to the colour of a storm cloud.
'Sit,' Grella said, pointing with her chin to a stool by the fire. 'I'll put the kettle on. You'll have a cup of something, and you'll not refuse, because the road you have walked has been a long one and I can see it in the set of your shoulders.'
Fen sat. The stool was unsteady on the flagged floor. She kept her coat buttoned, the bell hidden beneath.
'Your mother,' Grella said from the hearth, not turning. 'I was sorry.'
'Thank you.'
'I was sorry, and I was not surprised. She had the look of her for the last ten years. The look of a woman paying off a debt that wasn't hers.'
Fen's hands, folded in her lap, tightened.
'What do you mean?'
Grella set the kettle over the fire with a care that suggested the conversation, too, was being set over a slow flame. 'I mean only what I said. Now. What have you brought me?'
Fen looked up. Grella had turned, and her gaze was fixed on the shape beneath the wool. It was not a question. Fen unbuttoned her coat and drew out the bell.
In the dim light of the cottage, the bronze looked almost black. The green patina caught the firelight in places, and the inscriptions writhed across its surface in tight, unbroken lines, the letters crowding and curving in a way that made her eyes ache to follow. There was no clapper visible. Where a clapper should have hung, the bronze closed over itself in a seamless dome.
Grella did not move. She stood with her hands at her sides, and Fen watched the colour leave her face the way colour leaves a sky before hail. She watched the old woman's lips press together until they whitened at the corners.
'Where,' Grella said, and her voice had gone flat, 'did you get that?'
'In the attic. In our steading. It was wrapped up.'
'Did your brother see it?'
'No.'
Grella crossed the room in three strides and took the bell from Fen's hands. She did not ask. She simply took it, with the matter-of-fact command of a woman who had handled dangerous things before and would not be gainsaid. She carried it to the table beneath the window, where a square of light from the small pane fell across the scarred wood. She set it down. She stood over it. Her hands, Fen saw, were trembling.
'Sit down,' Grella said again, but this time to herself. She pulled a stool from the wall and lowered herself onto it. 'I am too old to be standing over things like this.'
Fen stayed where she was. The fire popped. The orange cat had come in from somewhere and was washing itself on the hearthstones, supremely indifferent.
Grella reached into a pocket of her apron and produced a pair of spectacles, wire-framed and clouded with age. She perched them on her nose and bent low over the bell. Her breath made a faint fog on the bronze. For a long while she said nothing. She only read.
At last she straightened. She took off the spectacles. She folded them and put them away, and she sat looking at the bell as though she would have liked to look at anything else.
'This is your mother's hand,' she said. 'These letters. She wrote them. She learned them from me, and I learned them from my mother, and my mother learned them from hers, and so on back to a time when the fells were younger and the water ran in different channels. The script is called the Drowned Script, and it is older than the parish church and kinder than the parish church, and we do not use it.'
'What does it say?'
Grella was quiet for so long that the fire seemed to grow louder. 'It says the name of the bell. It says when the bell was made. It says who made it and for what price.'
'Whose name?'
Grella's gaze came up and met Fen's. The old woman's eyes were the colour of river water after rain, and they held something Fen could not read.
'Aelvyn,' Grella said. 'The name is Aelvyn.'
Fen waited. The name meant nothing to her. It should have meant nothing to her, but she felt the bell on the table pulse once against the wood, a faint vibration that had nothing to do with sound.
'You don't know the name,' Grella said. It was not a question. 'Your mother never spoke it to you?'
'No. Never.'
'She was right to keep it from you, then. She was right, and she was wrong, and now you are here with it in my kitchen and the river is rising and the year is turning.' Grella pressed her palms flat against the table. 'Listen to me, child. What I tell you now, you will not like. What I tell you now, you will wish you did not know. But you have brought the bell to my door, and I am too old to lie about the weight of things.'
Fen sat down at last, on the edge of the second stool. The cat stopped washing itself and stared at the bell with a fixed intensity that was new.
'The bell is a memory,' Grella said. 'That is what it is. That is what the script says. The bell remembers every drowned thing it has ever swallowed. Every name spoken into its mouth when the bronze was new. Every river and every flood and every soul the water took. It holds them the way a jar holds water. The script is the jar's label.'
The fire settled. A log fell inward with a soft collapse of sparks.
'My mother told me such things were stories,' Fen said.
'Your mother told you what she needed to tell you to keep you from drowning in the same water she drowned in.' Grella's voice was not unkind, but it was not soft. 'She told you the old woman down the lane was a maker of poultices and a teller of tales. She did not tell you that she herself could read the script, and that she herself once owned such a bell, and that she herself gave it to the river on the night your father went under.'
Fen's mouth opened, and no sound came out.
'That is the price of such things,' Grella said. 'A bell made of memory must be fed memory, or it begins to starve. Your mother fed it. Your mother fed it for twenty years, every All Hallows' eve, she walked to the river and she spoke the names of the drowned into the bronze, and the bell kept its silence, and the river kept its course, and the steading stayed standing.'
She paused. The kettle began to whisper on the hob.
'But your mother is gone, Fen. She died in the upstairs room with the window that faces north. She died without feeding the bell. She died without telling anyone what was to be done. And the bell has been wrapped in sacking in the attic for six months, and it has been fasting, and a fasting bell is a hungry bell, and a hungry bell in a house where a dead woman once lived is a bell that listens for the next name to add to its keeping.'
Fen looked at the bell on the table. It was still. It was silent. It was the size of a child's toy. She thought of her mother, alone in the upstairs room, coughing the cough that would not break. She thought of her mother walking to the river in the dark, every All Hallows' eve, whispering into bronze.
'Whose name is Aelvyn?' Fen asked.
Grella did not answer at once. She rose and went to the kettle and lifted it off the hob with a folded cloth. She poured hot water into two cups that already held a spoonful of dried chamomile. The steam rose between them, and the smell of the herb filled the small room, bright and bitter.
'Aelvyn,' Grella said at last, setting a cup before Fen, 'was your mother's sister.'
The cup stopped halfway to Fen's mouth. She set it down again. The liquid trembled.
'I have no aunt,' she said. 'My mother had no sister. There was no one but us.'
'There was your mother, and there was Aelvyn, and there was the river.' Grella sat down with her own cup and held it in both hands, the way one holds a prayer. 'Aelvyn was the elder. Aelvyn was the bolder. Aelvyn was the one who could read the script before your mother could, and who made the bell in the year she was seventeen, with bronze taken from a drowned church bell and a clapper made from the bone of a swan.'
'Where is she?'
'She is in the bell,' Grella said. 'That is what the script says. Aelvyn made the bell, and Aelvyn drowned in the bell, and the bell remembers her. It remembers her name and the year of her drowning and the place where she sank. It remembers every drowned thing she fed to it between that day and this.'
Fen looked at the bell again. The green film caught the light. The letters curved and crowded.
'Did my mother feed her own sister to the bell?'
'Your mother kept her sister alive in the bell,' Grella said. 'That is what the feeding is. That is what the names are. The bell does not swallow the dead. The bell remembers the dead. The bell keeps them from being forgotten by the river, and as long as the bell is fed, they are not lost.'
Outside, the wind shifted. The willows along the causeway bent and recovered. The cat on the hearth rose, stretched, and padded to the table. It sniffed the bronze once, then recoiled as though it had been stung, and retreated under the stool.
'The bell has not been fed,' Grella said. 'The bell has been silent for six months. The river is rising. The year is turning toward All Hallows' eve. And you, Fen Morrigan, have brought it to my kitchen like a child bringing a wolf cub home from the woods.'
Fen sat in the smoky dim of the cottage and listened to the peat fire tick and settle. She looked at the bell. She looked at the old woman across from her. She thought of her mother's face in the upstairs room, the way it had looked when the coughing had stopped at last and the silence had come in.
'What must I do?' she asked.
Grella drank from her cup. The chamomile left a faint yellow rim on her lip.
'You must learn to read the script,' she said. 'You must learn to feed the bell. You must find every name it holds and speak it into the bronze before All Hallows' eve, or the bell will begin to feed itself.'
'And if I do not?'
Grella set down the cup. She folded her hands on the table, beside the bell.
'Then the river will come to Hollowspan,' she said, 'and it will take what it is owed, and the bell will keep what it takes, and I will be the one who has to tell the mothers why their children did not come home.'
The fire burned. The wind pressed at the thatch. The bell on the table was silent, and was heavy, and was waiting.
The warmth of the cup burned her palms through the fired clay. Fen held it there a moment longer than she needed to, then set it on the worn boards and turned her hands over in her lap. The skin of her fingers was cracked at the knuckles, pale where the chill had been. She had walked from the causeway in the thin rain without gloves. Her mother's gloves were folded in the coffin with her mother's hands.
'You have the look of her,' Grella said. The old woman's voice was different now, lower, as though she were speaking more to herself than across the table. 'Your mother had that look when she came to ask me things. The look that says I am already doing it, I have only come to learn how. She was like that with the bell. She was like that with you.'
Fen raised her eyes.
'What do you mean?'
Grella did not answer at once. She reached for the poker, a twisted length of iron that had been in the family for longer than anyone could remember, and stirred the peats in the fire. A flake of orange drifted up and settled on the hearthstone, still glowing. She watched it die there.
'Your mother came to me the year you were born,' Grella said. 'She was heavy with you. She had the bell wrapped in her shawl and she set it on my table the same way you have, and she asked me what it was. I told her what I am telling you. I told her about the script. I told her about the names. She asked me if there was another way. I told her there was not.'
Fen sat very quiet. The wind pressed at the thatch above them, and somewhere in the eaves a wren rustled and was still.
'She fed it,' Fen said. It was not a question.
'She fed it,' Grella said. 'She read the script. She learned it as you will have to learn it, sitting at this table with a candle and a tallow drop and a finger tracing the metal. She fed it the names of those who had gone from the village in that year, and in every year since. She did not miss a one. She did not let it feed itself. Not in twenty-three years.'
'Until she could not.'
'Until she could not.'
The fire ticked. A log collapsed inward and sent a shower of sparks up the chimney, and Fen saw her mother's hand in the shape of the sparks, reaching for something she could not hold.
'The bell has been hungry for six months,' Grella said. 'Six months is a long time for a thing like that to wait. It has been patient. The river has been patient. The river is not patient any longer.'
Fen looked at the bell on the table. The bronze was the color of old blood. The script crawled across the face of it in ridges and hollows that hurt the eye if you tried to follow them. She had tried, on the walk down from the steading, in the doorways of the village, on the stile at the corner of the moor. She had not been able to make any of it stand still.
'Teach me,' she said. 'Teach me the first name.'
Grella shook her head.
'No,' she said. 'Not yet. First you must hear the story, so you understand what it is you are feeding. Names are not just names, girl. A name is a debt. A name is a promise. If you are to feed it you must understand what was promised, and to whom, and why the promise was broken in the first place. Sit. Drink. I am an old woman and my throat is dry.'
Fen sat. She drank. The chamomile was bitter on her tongue, and sweet after, and left a faint film on her teeth.
Grella drew her shawl about her shoulders and settled deeper into her chair. The cat came out from under the stool and jumped into her lap, and she stroked it with one hand while she spoke with the other.
'Long before your mother's mother was born,' she said, 'long before the village had a name, there was a city on the moor. You will have heard the children chant it in the street, perhaps, when they think no one is listening. The Reed City. Caister-nuadh. They do not know what they are saying. They think it is only a rhyme. It is not only a rhyme.'
Fen had heard the rhyme. She had heard it in the schoolyard when she was small, and from her mother's lips sometimes, half-sung under her breath. She had thought it was nonsense. She had thought it was a lullaby.
'Caister-nuadh,' she said now, tasting the sound of it. 'The Reed City.'
'Built on the black water,' Grella said. 'Built by people who knew the bog. They raised their houses on piles of alder and their floors were of woven reed, and they fished the deep channels and they cut the peat and they traded with the towns to the south. They were a hard people and a quiet people and they did not bow to the gods of the highland.'
'What gods?'
'The gods of the river,' Grella said. 'The gods who lived in the water before any people lived on it. The gods who were there when the bog was a sea, and were there when the sea drew back. The gods who were promised a due.'
Grella paused. She lifted her cup and found it empty, and she made a small sound of disappointment and set it down again.
'The people of Caister-nuadh were great builders,' she said. 'They built a thing across the river, where the gorge narrows, where the water runs deep and quick between the black walls of rock. They built it of stone and timber and the bones of the hill. They built it to hold the water back, so that the land above the city would be made into field, and the channel below would run even, and the fish would come in the season. They called it the Murdstone Sluice.'
Fen thought of the gorge above the village, where the river bent between two shoulders of gritstone. She had walked there as a girl, with Ewan, when they were supposed to be watching the sheep. She had stood at the lip of the gorge and looked down, and Ewan had told her not to lean so far, and she had leaned a little farther.
'The sluice held the water for a hundred years,' Grella said. 'Then a hundred more. The gods were patient. The gods were promised a due of every tenth fish, of every tenth sheaf, of every tenth child born above the line of the water. The people paid. The sluice held. The city grew fat. The people forgot what they had promised.'
'But the gods did not forget.'
'The gods do not forget,' Grella said. 'They are the river. They are the bog. They are patient as stone and slow as the turning of the seasons. A hundred years is nothing to them. A thousand is a wink. They waited until the people had forgotten the sound of their own names. Then they came.'
The fire had burned down to a low red. Grella did not reach for the poker. She sat with her hands folded, and the cat purred in her lap, and her eyes were somewhere far away.
'There was a child,' she said. 'A girl child, born in the city in the year the gods chose. She had a voice that could call the fish into the nets. She had a name that was also the name of the river. The people loved her. The people forgot that she was also the river's. When the time came for the due, the people would not give her up. They hid her in the reed houses. They put guards at every door. They thought they could keep her.'
Fen felt the chill of the room press closer, though the fire had not gone out. She felt it along her arms and at the back of her neck, and she thought of the woman in the doorway of the cottage on the moor, the woman who had turned to look at her in the rain.
'What happened?' she said.
Grella did not answer at once. She rose from her chair with the cat still in her arms, and crossed the room to the dresser, where a row of jars stood on a shelf. She took down one of them, a jar of dark glass with a wooden stopper, and brought it to the table. She set it beside the bell.
'The gods broke the sluice,' she said. 'In a single night, in the season of the dark, they broke it as you would break a stick. The water came down the gorge in a wall. It took the city. It took the houses and the piles and the reed floors and the people in them. It took the fields above. It took the sheep in their folds. It took the child. The child was the last thing it took. The water carried her down to the lower bog, and there she settled into the silt, and the silt closed over her, and she has been there ever since.'
Fen looked at the jar. The glass was thick and dark, and she could not see what was inside.
'The bell,' Grella said, 'is part of that child. I do not say how. I do not say where it came from. I only say that the bell was made from the bronze of the sluice, and the bronze of the sluice was made from the bones of the hill, and the bones of the hill were made from the bones of the gods, and the gods do not forget what is owed them. The bell holds the names of those the river took in that night, and every name since that the river has had a due of, and every name the river will take until the debt is paid.'
Grella tapped the jar with one fingernail.
'In this jar,' she said, 'is a pinch of silt from the bed of the river, taken from the place where the child settled. Your mother put a name to that silt, in this kitchen, twenty-three years ago, when you were three days old. She spoke your name into the bronze, and the bell drank it, and the silt drank it, and the river drank it, and so you were given to the water and the water let you live.'
Fen's hands were cold in her lap. The cup on the table was cold. The bell on the table was cold.
'You were the due,' Grella said. 'You were the tenth child. Your mother paid it with your name. She paid it every year since, with the names of others who had gone, and with the promise of her own when the time came. She paid it until she could not.'
The fire ticked. The wind at the thatch had died. The room was very still.
'Where is the silt now?' Fen said.
'In the river,' Grella said. 'Where it has always been. Your mother took it from the jar and put it back in the water when you were born, and she walked to the bed of the river at the dark of the moon and spoke your name into the current. The river took it. The river let you live. That is the bargain.'
'Where is the village?' Fen said. 'Where is Hollowspan?'
Grella looked at her then, and there was something in the old woman's eyes that was not warmth and was not pity and was not anger.
'Hollowspan,' she said, 'is built on the floor of the city. The houses are on the old piles. The streets are the old channels. The church is on the old temple. The river that runs through the village is the river that took the city. The bog that surrounds it is the bog the city drowned in. You have been walking on the dead, Fen Morrigan, all the days of your life. You are walking on them now.'
Fen did not speak. The bell on the table was silent, and was heavy, and was waiting. The cat in Grella's lap had stopped purring. The dark jar on the table was dark, and the silt inside it was silt no longer, and was waiting too.
She thought of the floor of her mother's kitchen in the steading. She thought of the way the boards gave way a little when you walked across them. She thought of the cellar under the kitchen where her mother would not let her go, where her mother went alone at the dark of the moon, every month, all the years of her childhood.
'Teach me the first name,' she said.
Grella was silent for a long time. The fire popped and settled. The cat stretched in the old woman's lap, unsheathed its claws, and began to knead the wool of her skirt with slow, rhythmic patience.
'The first name,' Grella said at last, 'is not a word you can speak in a house. It is a word that belongs to the bog. It belongs to the dark of the moon. It belongs to the river where the city drowned.'
Fen waited too. She had learned, in the long walk from the steading, in the cold days and the colder nights, in the careful way her mother had taught her to wait for a kettle to boil and for bread to rise and for the first frost to come, that some things could not be hurried. She had learned that the world had its own clock and that the wisest thing a person could do was to hold very still and let the hands of that clock move where they would.
Grella rose. The cat protested, gave a small offended mewl, and dropped to the floor with the soft thump of an aging body landing on worn stone. The old woman moved across the kitchen to the high shelf where the dark jar sat. She did not take it down. She stood before it with her hands folded in her apron, and she looked at it, and she looked at it for a long time.
'Your mother,' Grella said, 'came to me when she was younger than you are now. She came to me with a belly full of you and a heart full of fear. She had heard the bell. She had heard it in the night. She had heard it in the bog. She had heard it in the river. She came to me and she said, Grella, what is this bell, and what does it want.'
Fen did not breathe.
'I told her what I will tell you,' Grella said. 'I told her that the bell is old. Older than the city. Older than the bog. Older than the river. It was made in a time before Hollowspan, in a time before the city, in a time before the temple where the church now stands. It was made to call the names of the dead. It was made so that the dead would not be forgotten. It was made so that the first name would never be lost.'
Grella paused. Her hands tightened on her apron.
'It was made,' she said, 'and then it was lost. It was buried in the bog when the city drowned. It was buried in the silt when the river rose. It was buried in the dark when the temple fell. And for a thousand years it was silent. For a thousand years the dead were forgotten. For a thousand years the first name was lost.'
Fen felt the weight of the bell on the table behind her. She felt it as a presence, as a gravity, as a thing that was listening.
'Your mother,' Grella said, 'heard the bell because she was a Morrigan. Morrigans have always heard it. Morrigans have always walked on the floor of the city. Morrigans have always known, in the blood, in the bone, in the part of them that is older than memory, that the dead are under their feet. Your mother heard the bell and she came to me and I told her the truth. I told her that the bell was waking. I told her that the city was waking. I told her that the dead were waking. I told her that the only way to put the bell back to sleep was to speak the first name into the dark of the moon, over the water, in the bog, where the city drowned.'
Grella turned from the shelf and faced Fen. Her eyes were wet and her mouth was a thin hard line.
'I told her,' she said, 'and she went. She went into the bog at the dark of the moon and she spoke the first name over the water and the bell went quiet. The dead went quiet. The city went quiet. And your mother came back to the steading and she lived and she raised you and Ewan and she never went into the bog again. Until she did.'
The fire had burned low. The kitchen was dim. The bell on the table caught the last of the light and held it in its dark hollow bronze.
'What happened?' Fen said. 'What happened when she went?'
'She went,' Grella said, 'because the bell woke again. She went because she had to. She went because she was a Morrigan and Morrigans do not let the dead stay forgotten. She went into the bog at the dark of the moon and she tried to speak the first name but the name had changed. The dead had been too long forgotten. The city had been too long drowned. The name had rotted in the silt and it would not come out of her mouth and so the bell would not go quiet.'
Grella crossed the kitchen and sat down again in her chair. The cat leaped into her lap and she stroked it with hands that were not quite steady.
'She came back to the steading,' Grella said, 'and she knew that the bell would ring again. She knew that the dead would rise. She knew that the city would wake. She knew that she was the last of the Morrigans who could hear it and she knew that you were not ready. You were not ready because you had not learned the names. You had not learned the old words. You had not learned the way of the bog. And she was afraid, Fen, she was afraid that the bell would wake you before she could teach you.'
Fen felt the truth of it settle into her like cold water into a cracked boot. She thought of her mother's face in the last weeks. She thought of the way her mother had looked at her across the kitchen table, with a gaze that was both tender and searching, as if she were memorizing her.
'She sent for you,' Grella said. 'She sent for you because she was running out of time. She sent for you because she wanted to teach you. She sent for you because she wanted you to be ready. And then she died before you came.'
Fen did not speak. There was nothing to say. Her mother had died and the bell had woken and the dead were rising and she was here in this kitchen with a woman who knew the old words and a bell that was listening.
'I cannot teach you the first name,' Grella said. 'I am not a Morrigan. The names are not mine to teach. The names are in the blood and the blood is in the bog and the bog is in the city that drowned.'
Fen looked at the bell. She looked at the dark hollow of its mouth. She looked at the silt that was no longer silt.
'Then who can teach me?' she said.
Grella stroked the cat. The fire popped. The wind moved in the thatch above them.
'There is a place,' Grella said, slowly, as if the words were being drawn from her, 'where the names are kept. There is a place where the old words are written down. There is a place where the Morrigans who came before your mother kept the record of the dead. It is not in Hollowspan. It is not in the bog. It is in the city of Brackenmere, in the house of the Archivists, in the vault under the library where the books of the old temple were taken when the temple fell.'
Fen felt the name of the city like a stone dropped into her chest. Brackenmere. She had heard the name. She had heard it spoken in the market, in the coaching inns, in the long cold days of her journey north. Brackenmere was three days' ride to the east. Brackenmere was the city of clerks and scholars, of ledgers and laws, of the great library where the records of the old kingdom were kept under lock and key.
'The Archivists,' Grella said, 'are the keepers of the names. They have been the keepers of the names since the temple fell. They took the books from the temple when the bog rose and the city drowned. They have kept the books in the vault under the library for a thousand years. They have kept the names of the dead. They have kept the first name.'
Fen looked at Grella. Grella looked back.
'You must go to Brackenmere,' Grella said. 'You must go to the Archivists. You must ask them for the first name. You must ask them for the book of the dead. They may give it to you. They may not. The Morrigans were not kind to the Archivists in the old days. The Morrigans took the bell from the temple and rang it in the bog and the Archivists have not forgotten.'
The bell on the table gave a single low note, so low it was more felt than heard, a vibration that moved through the stone floor and up through the legs of the table and into the wood of the bell itself.
'I cannot go,' Fen said.
Grella tilted her head.
'I cannot leave Ewan,' Fen said. 'He is alone in the steading. He is alone with the bog. He is alone with the bell that is waking. He is alone with the dead that are rising. I cannot go to Brackenmere and leave him there.'
'Your brother,' Grella said, 'is a peat-cutter. He is a Morrigan. He has the blood.'
'He has the blood but he does not have the names,' Fen said. 'He has not been taught. He does not know what the bell means. He does not know what the bog holds. He does not know what is rising from the river.'
'He knows,' Grella said. 'He has always known. Morrigans always know.'
Fen shook her head.
'I will not leave him,' she said. 'I will not leave my brother alone in the steading while I ride to Brackenmere for a book. I will not leave him to face the bell and the dead and the waking city while I am three days' ride away. I will not. I cannot.'
Grella was quiet. The cat purred. The fire settled into its coals. The wind moved in the thatch. The bell was silent on the table and was waiting and the jar on the high shelf was dark and was waiting too.
'Then you will die,' Grella said, 'and your brother will die, and the bell will ring, and the dead will rise, and the city will wake, and the first name will be lost forever in the silt of the bog.'
Fen did not speak. She sat in the old woman's kitchen with her hands folded in her lap and the weight of the bell at her back and the dark jar on the shelf above her and the long cold weight of her mother's death in her chest.
She thought of Ewan in the steading. She thought of him cutting peat in the bog with his sleeves rolled up and his face turned to the wind. She thought of him coming in at nightfall with the smell of the bog on him and the mud of the marsh on his boots. She thought of him sitting at the kitchen table with his head in his hands and the bell silent on the table and the dark jar on the shelf and the cellar under the floor where their mother had gone alone at the dark of the moon.