Halfway to the Stars

He won't explain the flowers.

You ask twice. The first time he says, "I don't know," which you believe. The second time he says, "Miss Ashlow, you've had a long morning," which you don't, because the god of the dead is plainly rattled and trying to hide it behind manners.

Then he picks up the pack and the lantern from the niche and holds them out to you at arm's length.

"Go now, if you're going," he says. "The road is easiest while you're angry. Anger climbs well."

You take the pack. You take the lantern. Your fingers don't brush his, and you have the strange sense that he made sure of it.

"You'll just let me walk away."

"Yes."

"And if I tell the whole village there's no monster down here? That you catch the brides and..."

"Tell them." He says it simply. "They won't listen. But tell them, if you like."

He steps aside from the arch. Then he does something you'll remember for the rest of your life.

He turns his back on you.

He stands there in the grey flowers with his hands loose at his sides, facing the far silver distance, and he doesn't look round. He's making himself into a thing you don't have to watch. A thing you don't have to ask permission from.

You go up.

The Rope Road is narrow, cut steps worn into hollows by feet you don't want to think about, with an old iron chain bolted along the wall for a handrail. The lantern throws a small warm circle. Beyond it, on your left, there's nothing. Just air and dark, all the way down.

You climb.

You climb until your thighs burn and your scraped palms sting on the chain. You climb until the meadow below is a smudge of pale light, and then a star, and then gone. You climb past the place where you think you must have fallen, though there's no way to tell. You eat half the bread sitting on a step with your feet dangling over nothing, which is either very brave or very stupid, and you can't decide which.

Somewhere around the middle of the night, the wall on your left opens.

It's a crack in the chasm, a long natural window, and through it you can see the world. Real sky, real stars. The black shoulder of the mountain. And down in the fold of the valley, a scatter of yellow lights you'd know anywhere.

Hollowmere.

You stop. You set the lantern down and press your forehead against the cold edge of the rock and look.

There's the bell tower. There's Wick Lane, and your mother's window, dark. There's the Dross bakery, its chimney already smoking for the morning bread. Ilsa will be up to her elbows in dough by now, eyes swollen, still hearing herself shout Ava, I'll find a way across the wall. And there, at the top of the village, the Merrit house, the only house in Hollowmere with glass in every window, and every one of them blazing.

They're celebrating. You can see shapes moving behind the glass. Music, maybe, if the wind were right. A good bride, a quiet bride, gone into the dark. The dead appeased for another twenty-five years.

You think of Osmund's soft voice. Such a pity.

You think: if I walk in there tomorrow, what happens?

You do the sum, because that's what you do. You walk into Hollowmere at noon, alive. Osmund smiles. He says the god refused you. He says you've brought the dead with you. The village, which stood on that wall and watched you pushed, believes him, because believing him is easier than believing they watched a murder. They drag you back down the Bride's Step. Or they don't bother with the Step. Your mother keeps her chin up and her mouth shut.

And you never find out where thirty-one women went.

Or.

You think of the god standing in the asphodel with his back turned. All of you, he said, when you asked how many brides he'd caught. And then the flowers bloomed, and you never got to ask the next question.

Then where are they?

You sit there a long time. Long enough for the stars to move.

Then you pick up the lantern, and turn around, and start back down.

He is exactly where you left him.

Not near it. Exactly. Same spot in the meadow, same stance, back to the archway, hands at his sides. You realize, with a strange tight feeling under your ribs, that he hasn't moved in hours. That he would have stood there until the lantern ran out and the sky turned, until you were safe in the shepherd's cave on the far side of the mountain, and he would never have known.

The white circle of flowers is still glowing behind him.

Your footsteps scuff the bottom step. He goes still in a new way.

"You didn't reach the top," he says, without turning round.

"No."

"Are you hurt? Is the road..."

"The road's fine." You come out of the arch and set the lantern down, hard, on the stone. "I'm staying."

Now he turns.

The look on his face undoes you a little. It's not triumph. It's not hunger. It's something almost like alarm, as if you've handed him a thing so fragile he's afraid to close his fingers on it.

"Ava..."

"Not as a bride," you say quickly, before he can misunderstand, before you can lose your nerve. "I'm not an offering. I'm not yours. I'm a guest, and I have questions, and you said you'd been asking for three hundred years. Well. So have I, for about four days. I'd like some answers."

For a long moment the god of the dead simply looks at you.

Then, very slowly, he bows. Not the small nod from before. A real bow, deep and old-fashioned, one hand over his heart.

"A guest," he says. "Then you'll have a room with a lock on the inside. And the only key."

The palace is called Duskhall, and it rises out of the meadow like a cathedral made of black glass, every spire edged in silver light. You barely see it. You're too tired. You remember corridors, a staircase, a door.

The room is warm. There's a fire burning in a grate of dark stone, and a bed piled with grey furs, and a basin of water that steams. The key sits on the table. Heavy, black iron, old.

Beside it lies a sliver of black glass, long as your hand, smooth as still water.

"A mirror shard," he said at the door, not crossing the threshold. "It has a twin. Write on it, or breathe on it and speak, and the words come to me. If you need anything. If you're frightened." A pause. "If you change your mind about the road. I will light the stair at any hour. Good night, Ava."

Then he left, and you locked the door, and you stood with your back to it, shaking, for a long time.

Now you're in the bed, in a borrowed nightgown that smells of cedar, the fire burning low. You're holding the key in one hand. You can't seem to let go of it.

The shard lies on the pillow beside you.

It warms.

You feel it before you see it, a soft heat against your cheek like a breath. You lift it. Under the black surface, light is moving, silver and slow, and it's gathering into lines. Letters. Words rising up through the glass the way the fish rise in the millpond at dusk.

He's writing to you.