The road to Grayhaven wound downward through a valley so narrow the sky pressed close, a pale strip of grey silk pinched between two ridges of pine and slate. Fog gathered in the hollows, pooling around the roots of ancient oaks, and Caelum Ashford walked at the front of the small procession with his collar turned up against the damp. Behind him, Elara Vance kept her own pace, steady and unhurried, her boots finding the stones with a gardener's instinct for ground that wanted to trip you. Between them, half a step ahead of Elara and half a step behind Caelum, Moth walked with the strange, deliberate gait of someone listening to a sound no one else could hear.
Wren darted ahead.
She was a small figure, all knees and elbows beneath a patched coat far too large for her, and she moved through the mist as though she owned every root and puddle. Pip trailed behind her, his thin shoulders hunched, his breath coming in small white clouds that the fog swallowed the moment they formed.
"Are we nearly there?" Pip asked, for what felt like the twelfth time.
"We're nearly there," Wren confirmed, without turning.
"But you said that before."
"I was right before."
"You weren't right before. You said the river was around the bend and it wasn't around the bend. It was two bends."
"That's the river's fault, not mine."
Pip opened his mouth, closed it, and contented himself with a wary glance at the brambles encroaching on the path. The thorns here were thick and dark, blackthorn woven with something older, something that had no business growing at this altitude. Wren, who had spent three years leaving offerings at a garden that the village pretended did not exist, paid them no mind at all.
Elara watched the brambles as they passed and felt the faint vibration beneath her soles, a pulse like the turning of a great, slow wheel somewhere beneath the world. She had felt it since leaving Ashford. She had felt it since the morning Caelum's letter had arrived and the garden had exhaled a long, green breath that rattled every pane of glass in the conservatory. She did not speak of it. There were too many things she did not speak of.
"Cheerful country," Caelum said, without turning.
He had not spoken in an hour. Elara wondered, briefly, whether he was addressing her or the fog or himself.
"Mm," she said.
"My father used to say the Ashford lands ended where the smiles began."
"Mm."
"You're a font of conversation, Elara."
"I'm listening," she said. "To the ground."
He glanced back, then. The movement was slight, a turn of the head, but she saw the quick flash of something in his eyes, something that was not quite amusement and not quite alarm. He looked at her for a beat too long, then faced forward again.
"It's doing it again," he said.
"I know."
"You don't have to be cryptic about it."
"I'm not being cryptic. I'm being accurate. The ground is louder here."
Caelum said nothing to that. He had never been good at conversations about ground that hummed, or gardens that listened, or the particular quality of silence that gathered in a valley where no one remembered their own name. He had been sent away from Ashford for a reason. He was trying, very hard, not to remember what it was.
The path broadened into what had once been a green. A stone wall bordered it, low and crumbled, with a wooden gate hanging crooked on its hinges. A signpost stood at the gate, its board weathered to a pale silver, the letters nearly gone. Wren stopped at the gate, planted her hands on her hips, and considered the village beyond with the critical eye of a general surveying a battlefield.
"Greyhaven," she announced.
"How do you know?" Pip asked.
"Because the sign says so. Look. You can see the G."
"I can't see the G."
"You're not looking hard enough."
Pip squinted. Moth, who had come to stand beside them, tilted their head at the board as though listening for something the wood might say.
The village lay ahead in a small cupped hollow, its chimneys trailing threads of smoke that the fog caught and held. There were perhaps thirty buildings, stone and thatch, gathered around a green where a well stood under a wooden frame. A church spire pricked the mist to the east, its bell silent. Nothing moved. No dog barked. No child shouted. The only sound was the faint, papery rustle of wind through wet leaves and, beneath it, that low vibration that Elara's boots had been counting since dawn.
"Wait here," Caelum said.
He did not wait for agreement. He pushed through the gate and walked into the village with the loose, rolling stride of a man who had learned to make entrances in rooms that wanted him gone. Elara followed, slower, and Moth drifted after her like a leaf caught in the same current.
The first person they saw was a woman hanging washing on a line strung between two apple trees. The washing was grey, not from dirt, from long wearing, and the woman's hands moved with the mechanical patience of someone who had forgotten she was meant to stop. She did not look up as they passed. Her face had the slack, bewildered softness of a person who had woken in a room they did not recognise and could not remember the name of the street outside.
"Good morning," Caelum said.
The woman did not answer. Her hands went on hanging the wet cloth, smoothing it with her palms, and her eyes watched her own fingers as though they belonged to someone else.
"Good morning," Caelum said, more loudly.
Still nothing. Her lips moved, faintly, shaping a word she could not catch. Then she went on hanging the washing, one grey sheet after another, and the mist curled between them.
Elara crouched and picked up a small wooden cup that lay near the woman's feet. It was half-full of rainwater. She looked at it, then at the woman.
"What's your name?" she asked, gently.
The woman looked at her. For a moment there was a flicker in her eyes, a small, lost animal movement, a recognition that someone had spoken to her and that she ought, perhaps, to reply. Then the flicker went out. Her mouth worked. No sound came.
Elara set the cup down, carefully, exactly where it had been.
"Moth," she said, low. "Look at her eyes."
Moth looked. Their head tilted, the way a dog's tilts at a sound too high for human ears.
"They've gone somewhere," Moth said. "Not far. Just... behind their own face."
"Can you see it?"
"No. I can feel it. There's a curtain."
Elara stood. She brushed her hands against her skirt, slowly, the gesture of a woman buying herself a moment to think.
"We need to find someone who knows what this is," she said. "Or at least someone who knows they've forgotten."
Caelum, who had been watching a small boy trying to herd three geese into a pen with the baffled concentration of a chess player losing badly, turned at that.
"Ideas?" he asked.
"The magistrate," Elara said. "Hollis."
"Hollis." He turned the name over, tasted it. "My father corresponded with a Hollis once, I think. Or my mother did. Or someone did. It's the sort of name that turns up in ledgers."
"He was appointed two winters ago," Elara said. "After old Brennan stepped down."
"How do you know that?"
"I pay attention, Caelum."
He looked at her then, a long considering look, and she held his gaze without expression. She had paid attention to a great many things about Grayhaven over the years, because Wren had talked of little else, and Wren had talked of little else because Wren had spent three years leaving bread and ribbon and once, memorably, a dead sparrow at the gate of a garden the village insisted did not exist.
"Magistrate's house is the one with the green door," Wren said, appearing at Elara's elbow as though she had materialised from the mist itself. "I know because I left a beetle on his doorstep once and he never noticed."
"That's not a ringing endorsement," Caelum said.
"It's a very good endorsement. He doesn't notice beetles. He doesn't notice anything. He's very dull. Pip doesn't like him."
Pip, who had been coaxing the last goose into the pen with a piece of bread stolen from his own pocket, looked up sharply.
"I didn't say I didn't like him," Pip said. "I said he made me feel strange."
"There's a difference?"
"Yes. There's a difference. Not liking is in the stomach. Strange is in the teeth."
Wren considered this. She was, Elara thought, the only nine-year-old she had ever met who could hold a distinction like that in her mouth without dropping it.
"Lead on, then," Caelum said.
They crossed the green in a loose knot, Wren first, then Moth, then Caelum, then Elara and Pip bringing up the rear. The well at the centre of the green was old, its wood silvered, its rope frayed to a pale fuzz. A wooden bucket sat on the lip of the well, half full, and beside the bucket lay a small clay cup. Elara picked up the cup. It was dry.
She dipped it into the bucket and drank. The water was cold, faintly mineral, with a taste like wet stone. She handed the cup to Moth, who drank, then to Caelum, who drank without comment.
"Tea would be better," he said.
"Tea would be better," Elara agreed.
They walked on. The magistrate's house stood at the far edge of the green, a square stone building with a slate roof and a door painted the colour of young nettles. Two windows flanked the door, their glass filmed with the inside of the house. A woman stood on the threshold, her hand on the latch, as though she had been on the point of going out for some time and had forgotten where.
"Good morning," Elara said.
The woman looked at her. Her eyes were grey, the colour of the fog, and there was nothing in them at all.
"We're looking for the magistrate," Elara said. "Hollis. Is he within?"
The woman opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. A small, helpless sound came out, somewhere between a sigh and a name.
"I'm sorry," Elara said. "I'm sorry to trouble you."
The woman nodded, once, and went on standing at the threshold, her hand on the latch, and the fog pressed at her back like a patient animal waiting to be let in.
Caelum put his hand on the latch, past the woman's slack fingers, and opened the door. The woman did not object. She did not seem to notice. The room beyond was low-ceilinged, stone-floored, with a desk beneath the far window and a row of shelves crowded with ledgers and a smell of lamp oil and old paper and something else, something faintly sweet, like overripe fruit.
A man sat at the desk. He was perhaps fifty, with a thin, careful face and hair the colour of iron filings. His hands lay flat on the desk, palms down, and he was staring at them as though trying to read the lines.
"Magistrate Hollis," Caelum said.
The man looked up. His eyes moved across them, one to the next, with the slow, patient attention of someone cataloguing unfamiliar objects. He saw Caelum first, then Elara, then Moth, then Wren and Pip, and the corner of his mouth twitched, the smallest movement, the ghost of a courtesy long unpractised.
"You're not from here," he said. His voice was hoarse, as though he had not spoken aloud in days.
"We're not," Caelum said.
"Then you know your own names."
The sentence fell oddly, weighted. Caelum glanced at Elara.
"We do," he said, carefully. "Do you?"
Hollis looked at his hands again. He turned them over, slowly, the way a child turns a stone to find the fossils in it.
"I knew one this morning," he said. "It was mine. I don't remember it now. I remember that I had one. I remember that it was short. I remember that it ended in a sound like rain on a tin roof. That is all."
"Ash," Elara said.
Hollis looked at her.
"Pip," Elara said, turning to the boy. "Your surname."
"Ash," Pip said, surprised.
"That's the sound," Elara said. "Rain on a tin roof. Ash. Like ash."
Hollis considered this. The name did not come back to him. The shape of it lay somewhere in his mouth, he said, behind his own teeth, and he could not push it out.
"How long?" Caelum asked.
"Since the first frost," Hollis said. "There was a fog. We thought it was a fog. It came in the night and in the morning no one could remember. Old Brennan, my predecessor, wandered out into it and never came back. We waited. We shouted his name. We could not remember it ourselves to shout it. We have been here since, looking at them, looking at our own hands, waiting for something to come and tell us who we are."
Wren had gone very still. Pip, beside her, had gone very still in a different way, his shoulders drawn up around his ears, his fingers worrying at the frayed edge of his coat.
"The fog," Elara said. "Was it just fog?"
Hollis looked at her for a long moment.
"It had a centre," he said, at last. "It came from the wood to the north. From the garden that is not there."
He said the last words the way one says the name of a disease one does not wish to catch.
"There is no garden to the north," he added, and his voice was very steady, the steadiness of a man who had decided long ago what he was willing to believe.
"There is," Wren said.
Everyone looked at her.
"There is," she said again, quieter. "I've been there."
Hollis's mouth closed. His eyes, for a moment, had something in them, a small, fierce flicker, and then it was gone.
"You should not say such things," he said. "The wood listens."
"The garden listens," Wren said. "There's a difference."
The silence after Wren spoke had a texture to it. Moth could feel it against his skin, the way the air in a sealed room thickens just before a storm breaks. Hollis's hands, folded on the table before him, did not move, but something behind his eyes rearranged itself.
"You should not say such things," the magistrate said again, but the words came slower this time, and he did not look at Wren when he said them. He looked at the shuttered window. He looked at the place where the wall met the ceiling. He looked at anything but the small girl in the patched coat.
"The wood listens," Elara said softly. "She said the garden listens."
Hollis's jaw tightened.
"There is no garden," he said.
"There is," Wren said, "and I can take you there."
Pip made a small sound. It was not a word. It was the sound a rabbit makes when it knows the ferret is close. His hand found the back of Wren's coat and closed there, knuckles white.
"We are not going into the wood," Caelum said. He had not moved from his place by the frame, but his voice had lost its music. There was a new note in it, something flat and careful. "Not tonight. Not until we know what we're walking into."
"By then it may not matter," Hollis said.
No one asked him what he meant. No one needed to. Moth could see the shape of it in the magistrate's face, in the lines around his eyes that had not been there a season ago, in the way his shoulders sat a fraction lower than a man his age should carry them. The forgetting was not holding. It was settling in, the way frost settles into bone, and he had been counting the days since it began and had stopped believing that counting would save him.
"There is a child," Elara said.
Hollis looked at her.
"In the corner," she said. "A small girl. She has not moved since we came in. She has been watching us."
The magistrate's gaze moved, slowly, to the far corner of the room. Moth followed it. There was a chair there, and on the chair, tucked so far back against the wainscoting that she seemed almost part of the wood, sat a child. She was perhaps seven. Her hair was the color of dust. Her hands were folded in her lap in a way that suggested they had been folded there for a long time.
"Pip," Wren said, and her voice was very small.
The miller's son turned. He saw the child. Something happened to his face. It went blank, the way a page goes blank when the ink is blotted, and then it went worse than blank. It went remembering.
"Pip," Wren said again, and tugged at his sleeve. "Pip, that's not. That isn't. Pip, where is your sister?"
Pip did not answer. He was looking at the child in the corner with an expression Moth could not read and did not want to read, the expression of a boy who had woken from a dream he could not place and found the shape of it sitting in a chair across the room.
"I don't," Pip said, and his voice cracked on the second word. "I don't have a. I don't."
"You do," Wren said. "You have a sister. She is eight. Her name is. Her name is."
She stopped.
The child in the corner lifted her head.
Her eyes were the color of old leaves. They found Wren, and they found Pip, and they did not smile. There was nothing in them that could smile. There was something in them that had once been able to smile and had forgotten how, the way a bird forgets how to fly when it has been too long in a cage.
"Her name is Pip," Wren whispered. "Her name is Pip, and the other one is. The other one is. I can't. Pip, why can't I remember her name?"
Pip made a sound that was not a word. He took a step toward the corner. Then another. The magistrate did not stop him. Caelum did not stop him. Elara took one step after him, and Moth took one step after her, and the rest of the room watched the small boy walk toward the small girl as if the rest of the room had forgotten how to breathe.
"Pip," the boy said, when he was close enough to touch. "Pip, it's me."
The girl in the corner tilted her head. Her mouth opened. A sound came out of it that was not quite a word. It was the ghost of a word, the shape of it, the breath before it, and then it was gone, and her mouth closed, and her eyes went somewhere very far away.
"Wren," Pip said, and his voice was high and thin and breaking. "Wren, she was here this morning. She was here. I left her in the kitchen and I went to the well and when I came back she was. Wren, she was here."
Wren had gone very still. Her hand found the edge of her coat. From somewhere inside the coat she drew a small folded thing, paper-thin, the color of old parchment. It was a rune. Moth could feel it from where he stood, a small pulse of something that was not quite warmth and not quite sound, the way the air feels just before a note is struck.
"A Thornward song-rune," Elara breathed. "Wren. Where did you."
"I didn't steal it," Wren said, and her voice had the fierce, unchildlike gravity that came over her sometimes, the note that made Moth think of old women and old stones. "She left it for me. The garden left it for me. For this."
She unfolded the rune. It was smaller than his palm. It had been folded and refolded so many times that the lines of the creases had become part of the design. Wren held it out, and Moth could see now that the lines were not ink. They were thorns, tiny ones, dried and brittle and still faintly alive, arranged in a pattern that was almost a word in a language he did not know.
"You have to sing to it," Wren said, and her voice had gone strange. "You have to remember her name to sing to it, and I can't remember her name, but I can remember the song her mother sang to her when she was small, and the rune knows the difference."
She looked up at Elara. She looked at Caelum. She looked at the magistrate, and at Moth.
"Somebody has to sing," she said.
Elara stepped forward. Her hand was already out, the way her hand went out when she reached for something she had decided to tend. But Caelum was faster. He was beside the child in the corner before Moth could blink, kneeling, his long fingers careful, his face stripped of all its music. He took the rune from Wren's hand as if it were a wounded bird.
"I knew this song," he said. "My mother sang it. My mother sang it to me when I was small, and she sang it to the children in the village when she was alive, and I don't know why I remember it now. I don't know why I remember anything."
He looked at Elara, and his face was a country she had never seen.
"I know the song," he said. "Let me."
Elara hesitated. Then she nodded.
Caelum bent his head over the rune. He did not sing, not at first. He hummed, low and uncertain, the way a man hums when he is trying to find a melody he has not heard in twenty years and is not sure his throat still remembers the shape of it. Then the melody came, and he followed it, and the sound he made was not pretty. It was cracked. It was the sound of a voice that had not been used to this purpose in a long time, the sound of a thing being asked to do the thing it had forgotten it knew.
The rune began to glow.
It was a thin light, the color of apple blossom, and it pulsed in time with his humming, and the child in the corner made a small sound, and her hands unfolded from her lap, and her eyes came back from wherever they had gone, and she looked up at Caelum with an expression that was almost, almost recognition.
The humming went on. The light grew. The thorns on the rune stirred, infinitesimally, as if a wind had passed through them that was not a wind.
Then the child spoke.
"The singer is sleeping," she said.
Her voice was very clear. It was the voice of a child who has just woken from a long sleep and is not yet sure where she is. It was Pip's sister's voice. Moth knew it without knowing how he knew it, and beside him Elara drew in a sharp breath, and the magistrate made a sound that might have been a name.
"The singer is sleeping," the child said again, and her eyes were on Caelum, and her hand lifted, and her small fingers touched his wrist, and the touch was warm, and the rune flared, and for one breath, one impossible held breath, the child was there. She was whole. She was eight years old and her name was something that began with a sound like water, and she was looking at Caelum with an expression of such clear, such startled trust that Moth felt the world tilt under him.
Then the light went out.
It did not fade. It was taken. Moth felt it go, felt the rune go cold in Caelum's fingers, felt the thorns on it shrink back into the parchment as if they had been touched with frost. The child's hand dropped. Her eyes went somewhere else. Her mouth closed. Her hands folded themselves in her lap again, in the same position, as if they had never moved.
"No," Pip said. He was on his knees beside the chair. "No, no, she was. She was just. She was here."
"Wren," Caelum said, and his voice was hoarse. "Wren, the song. I didn't know it would. I didn't."
"It wasn't the song," Wren said. She had not moved. Her face was very white. "It was me. I couldn't remember her name. The rune needed her name, and I couldn't give it to it, and so it only worked for a breath."
"Then we find out her name," Elara said.
"We can't," the magistrate said. "That is the point. That is the whole of it. We cannot find out anything. We cannot remember. The fog has taken the names of all of us, and you have been here less than a day and you are already beginning to forget, and you do not know you are forgetting, and I have been here since the first frost and I have watched it happen and I cannot stop it and I cannot."
He stopped. His hands had come up from the table and were pressed flat against his face, and his shoulders were shaking, and the sound he was making was not a sound a magistrate should make. It was the sound of a man who had run out of ways to be steady.
"How long," Caelum said, and his voice was very quiet, "until there is nothing left to forget."
Hollis did not answer.
Pip was still on his knees beside the chair. His hand was on the arm of it, and his face was against the wood, and he was not making a sound, and the not-making-a-sound was worse than any sound he could have made.
Wren crossed the room. She knelt beside him. She did not put her hand on his shoulder. She put her hand on the back of his neck, the way his mother must have done, the way a hand goes on the back of a child's neck when the child is very small and the world is too large and there is nothing to be done but be there.
"We will find it," she said. "I promise. I will go into the garden and I will ask her. She will know. The singer will know, if we can wake her."
"The singer is sleeping," Pip said, and his voice was muffled against the chair.
"Yes," Wren said. "Yes. And we will wake her."
Moth looked at Caelum. Caelum looked at Moth. The rune lay in Caelum's palm, dark and spent, and his fingers were trembling, and Elara was already moving toward the door, and the magistrate was still weeping behind his hands, and somewhere outside the shuttered windows the fog was pressing closer, and Moth could feel it against the glass, patient and vast and hungry for the names of things.
The door gave before her hand found the latch.
Moth stepped out into the street, and the fog folded around her like a sleeve, and the street was not there. The cobbles were there. The low stone walls were there. The shuttered windows and the leaning eaves and the smell of wet thatch and the cold mineral tang of the river underneath the village, all of it was there. But the names were gone, and without the names the street was only a channel cut through the white, and she could not have said which way the square lay, or how far, or whether she had ever walked this way before.
She went anyway.
Her boots found the cobbles, and the cobbles found the channel of the gutter, and the gutter ran with the thin bright water that was always running in the gutter of the village, even in summer, even in the long bright weeks of August when the river should have been low and was not. She followed it. She did not think about following it. Her body knew the village the way her body had known the garden, the way a hand knows the handle of a tool it has held since childhood. The water went toward the square. She went with it.
The fog made the world small. Ten feet ahead was the whole of what she could see, and the rest was white, and the white moved, and the moving was not the wind. It was the fog itself, the slow drift of it across her face, the way a curtain moves across a stage when the scene behind it is being changed. She felt it on her eyelashes. She tasted it on her upper lip. It was cold and tasted of nothing, of river water and of distance and of the long patient work of forgetting.
The square opened around her the way a held breath opens.
She knew it before she saw it. The space of it. The particular quality of the air above a place where four roads meet and a well stands in the middle and a stone has been standing for a longer time than anyone can remember. The well was there. The low circular wall of it, the moss between the stones, the wooden cover that was always slightly askew because Old Brennan could never get the warped board to seat properly no matter how many times he planed it. The stone was there.
She had not known there was a stone.
It stood at the well's edge, half-hidden by the wall, set into the ground so that only a foot of it showed above the moss. It was dark stone, river stone, the same stone the gutters were paved with, and if she had not been looking for it she would never have seen it. The fog lay over it like a hand laid over a page. She brushed the fog away. She knelt. She put her hand flat against the stone, and the cold of it went through her glove and into her palm and up into the soft machinery of her wrist.
There were letters cut into the stone.
She leaned close. The letters were small and careful and incised with the sharp end of something. A chisel. A nail. The tip of a very patient knife. They were not the formal letters of the conservatory or the church. They were the letters of a man who had been writing all his life and who knew that a letter is a thing you make with your hand and not a thing you copy from a book.
She read them.
She read them again.
She read them a third time, and the third time was no different from the first, and the fog pressed against the back of her neck, and the well ticked softly beneath its warped cover, and somewhere in the white a bird sang one note and did not sing it again.
The letters said:
ELARA VANCE IF YOU ARE READING THIS I AM ALREADY GONE INTO THE GARDEN THE SINGER WILL NOT WAKE FOR ME SHE WILL WAKE FOR YOU FORGIVE ME YOUR FATHER
And beneath the letters, in a hand she did not at first recognize because she had never seen him write a date without a flourish, the date: two weeks ago. A Tuesday. The day the river had risen and the bridge had been closed and her father had walked out to the gate and she had watched him from the kitchen window and he had not turned around.
He had known.
He had known that morning. He had stood in the kitchen with his hat in his hands and he had looked at her and he had looked at Edmund and he had looked at the bread on the table and the tea in the pot and the morning light on the dog's fur, and he had known he was not coming back. He had walked out to the garden and he had gone in. He had knelt in the long grass at the foot of the singer and he had pressed his hands against the thorns and he had whispered whatever it is a man whispers to a thing he has wronged, and the singer had not woken, and the thorns had grown over him the way thorns grow over everything, slowly and with the patience of something that has all the time there is.
And then he had come out.
He had come out of the garden and he had walked into the village and he had found a chisel and he had knelt at the well in the square and he had cut the letters into the stone with the patience of a man who knows he has two weeks to leave a message for the only person in the world who will need to read it, and he had written her name, and he had written the only thing he had ever wanted her to know, and he had gone back into the house and he had sat down at the table and he had poured himself a cup of tea from the pot she had made and he had drunk it while it was still warm, and he had set the cup down on the table, and the cup was still there, and the tea was still in it, and the surface of the tea was still, and the stillness was the last thing he had touched.
Moth knelt at the well.
The fog moved over her. The well ticked. The stone was cold under her palm, and her father's letters were cold under her palm, and the cold went through her glove and into her hand and up into the soft machinery of her wrist, and she did not move, and the village did not move, and the fog did not move, and for a long time there was no sound in the world except the slow tick of the well and the even slower sound of her own breathing.
Then she heard boots on the cobbles.
She did not look up. She knew whose boots they were. She knew the particular rhythm of Caelum's walk, the way his left foot struck the ground a half-beat before his right, the way he had walked since the riding accident when he was eleven that he never spoke of and that she had pieced together from the way he held his shoulder in cold weather and the way he avoided the chestnut gelding in the conservatory stables.
He stopped behind her. She felt him stop. She did not look up.
"She will wake for you," he read, and his voice was very quiet. "He knew. He knew before any of us."
Moth pressed her palm harder against the stone. The letters cut into her glove. She could feel them through the leather, the careful shapes of them, the way her father's hand had moved when it made them.
"He wrote it two weeks ago," she said.
"Yes."
"He was in the garden two weeks ago. He went in and she did not wake and he came out and he wrote this and then he went back to the house and he sat down and he drank his tea and he was still."
"Moth."
"He was still, Caelum. He was still in the chair in the kitchen and the cup was in his hand and the tea was still warm and he did not move. That is how he left. That is the last thing he did in this world. He sat in a chair and drank a cup of tea and he did not move."
Caelum knelt beside her. He did not touch her. He put his hand on the well wall, close to hers but not touching it. The stone was the same stone. The moss was the same moss. The fog moved over them both with the same patient indifference.
"The rune," he said.
"What."
"The rune I had. The one Hollis gave me. It was spent because I used it. I used it without knowing what it was. I used it because I was afraid. And now it is gone, and I cannot make another, and I cannot give it to the singer, and I cannot undo what I did."
Moth looked at him then. She looked at him and she saw the boy he had been, the boy who had ridden the chestnut gelding into the fence and had not told anyone, the boy who had come home from the conservatory with his hands in his pockets and his smile already wrong, the boy who had walked into his father's house two days ago and had not known what he was walking into. She saw the man he had become, the man with the trembling hands and the spent rune and the question he had asked the magistrate, the question that had no answer.
"You did not know," she said.
"I should have known. I should have asked. I should have come home years ago. I should have done a hundred things I did not do."
"Yes," she said. "You should have."
He flinched. She watched him flinch. She did not soften it.
"But you are here now," she said. "And you are the only one who knows what the rune was. And the magistrate is weeping in his chair and Wren is weeping somewhere in the village and Pip is with him, and Old Brennan is at the gate with his lantern and his bad knee, and the singer is sleeping, and the fog is coming, and the only people left who remember their own names are in this square."
She stood up. Her knees cracked. The cold of the stone had gone through her and she could feel it in her hip joints, in the small of her back, in the place behind her eyes where the cold lives when the rest of the body is too numb to hold it.
"The rune is gone," she said. "But my father went into the garden and came out again. The thorns grew over him and he came out again. Whatever he did, whatever he said, the singer heard him. She did not wake. But she heard."
"Moth."
"She will wake for me. He wrote that. He would not have written it if it were not true."
Caelum looked at the stone. He looked at the letters. He read them once more, slowly, the way a man reads a thing he is trying to memorize.
"She will wake for you," he said.
"Yes."
"And then what."
"Then I will ask her to remember the village. I will ask her to remember our names. I will ask her to do whatever it is she does that keeps the world from sliding off the edge of itself."
"And if she will not."
Moth looked at him. The fog was in her hair. The fog was on her shoulders. The fog was in the cold place behind her eyes, and she let it be there, and she did not push it away.