No One Has to Stay

You breathe.

It comes out ragged, half a sob, and the arm around your waist tightens a fraction, steady as a wall.

"Good," says the voice. "Again."

You breathe again. The air down here tastes of cold stone and something sweet underneath, like crushed flowers. You're moving. Not falling now: sinking, slowly, the dark rushing upward past you like water. Your cheek is pressed to cloth, fine and black, and under it there's a chest that doesn't rise or fall at all.

He isn't breathing.

You go rigid. The arm doesn't let go, but it loosens, very carefully, the way you'd ease your grip on a bird.

"I won't drop you," he says. "I've never dropped one of you. Hold on a little longer. We're nearly at the bottom."

One of you.

You don't hold on. You keep your hands fisted against your own chest, inside the ruined veil. But you don't fight either, because you've done the sum and there's nowhere to fall to but down.

Light comes up from below. Grey first, then silver, then a soft, shifting shine like moonlight seen through water. Your feet touch something that bends. Grass. No: flowers. A whole field of them, tall pale stems and star-shaped grey blossoms, swaying under a sky that isn't a sky at all, only a vast vault of slow silver light, rippling as if the whole world were lying at the bottom of a lake.

He sets you down in the flowers as though you might break.

Then he takes his hands away and steps back. That's somehow the most frightening thing he's done.

You look up at him, and forget for a second that you were ever angry.

He's tall, taller than any man in Hollowmere, and lean, all dark lines in a long black coat. Black hair to his collar. Skin pale as the stone of the Bride's Step. A face carved by someone who was showing off: high sharp cheekbones, a hard jaw, a mouth set in a line so severe that you suddenly, absurdly, want to know what it would look like if he smiled. A thin silver circlet sits crooked in his hair, as if he put it on centuries ago and forgot.

And his eyes. Grey like the ghostlight, ringed in silver, fixed on you with an attention so complete it feels like being touched.

He's the most beautiful thing you have ever seen. He is also, without any doubt at all, the god of the dead.

"You're the monster," you hear yourself say.

"So I'm told." Nothing moves in his face. "Are you hurt?"

"I was pushed off a cliff."

"Yes. I saw." Something flickers in the silver of his eyes, gone too fast to name. "But are you hurt?"

You check, because he's waiting and he seems prepared to wait forever. Your palms are scraped from the stone. The veil is torn. Your heart is going like a hare's.

"No," you say.

"Good." He inclines his head, a small, old-fashioned gesture, like a lord in a story. "Then before anything else, I want this understood." He says each word slowly, as if he has practiced them. "You are free. No one has to stay down here. No one ever did."

You stare at him.

"I have not accepted an offering in three hundred years, Miss..."

"Ashlow," you say faintly. "Ava Ashlow."

"Ava." He says it carefully, as if your name is something he has been handed to hold. "Miss Ashlow. I did not ask for brides. I have never asked for brides. Whatever your elders told you, it was theirs, not mine."

The flowers sway around your knees. Somewhere far off, water moves over stone.

"Then why," you say, and your voice cracks clean down the middle, "why do they throw us?"

For the first time his composure shifts. Not much. A muscle in his jaw.

"Ask them," says the god of the dead. "I've been asking for three hundred years."

He doesn't touch you again. He walks a few paces ahead through the asphodel and waits for you to follow, and when you do, he keeps exactly that distance, like a man walking a frightened horse.

The meadow runs to the foot of a cliff so tall its top vanishes into the silver dark. The chasm wall. The Hollow, seen from underneath. Set into it is a narrow archway of cut stone, and beyond the archway, steps.

"The Rope Road," he says. "It's old. Older than the village. It switchbacks up the inside of the wall and comes out in a shepherd's cave on the far side of the mountain, a morning's walk from Hollowmere." He nods to a niche beside the arch. A wool pack sits in it, and a lantern already lit. "Bread, cheese, water, a blanket. The climb takes most of a night. The dead can't follow you up it. Neither can I."

You look at the pack. You look at him.

"This is a trick."

"No."

"Then what do you want from me?" Your voice climbs. "I'm Ava Ashlow, I keep ledgers, I have nothing."

"Nothing." He considers that, as if checking it for honesty. "I would like you not to have been thrown. Since that isn't on offer, I would like you to be safe. The road is yours. Tonight, tomorrow, any night. No one will stop you. Least of all me."

You think of the wall of faces. Your mother's shut mouth. Osmund's two fingers on your breastbone, almost kind.

"If I go back," you say slowly, "they'll throw me again."

"Very likely."

"Or call me cursed. A bride the god refused." You swallow. "That's worse, up there. They'd say I'd bring the dead."

"I know." He says it quietly. "I've watched it happen."

The way he says it makes your skin prickle. "How many?" you ask. "How many of us have you caught?"

He looks at you for a long moment, and you understand that he's deciding whether you can bear the answer.

"All of you," he says.

You open your mouth to ask the next question, the one already crowding up your throat, then where are they, but he's no longer looking at your face.

He's looking at the ground behind you.

You turn.

Where you were standing a minute ago, at the edge of the meadow, the asphodel has changed. The grey flowers have opened wide, every one of them, in a perfect circle around the trampled patch where your feet were. And they aren't grey anymore. They're white, true white, glowing faintly, and the sweet scent of them rolls over you like a warm wind.

The god of the dead goes very, very still.

You've seen stillness before. Your mother is still. Hollowmere is still. This is something else: the stillness of a man who has just heard a sound he thought he would never hear again.

"What is it?" you whisper. "What did I do?"

He doesn't answer for so long that you think he won't.

Then he says, very low, as if to himself:

"That has not happened since before I was king."