The Steward

You fall asleep with the shard against your cheek and wake with the shape of it pressed into your skin.

For a moment you don't know where you are. Then the fur under your hand, the black glass ceiling, the silver light moving faintly beyond the window, and it all comes back: the Step, the fall, the god's back turned in the asphodel.

The conversation in the dark.

You pick up the shard. The glass is cool and blank now, but you can still see his words behind your eyes, the careful formal shape of them, as if every line had been weighed before he let it go. You read them three times last night before you answered. You lay awake a long while after, wondering what a god does with his hands while he waits for someone to write back.

The key is still in your fist. You unlock the door yourself.

There's a woman on the other side of it, holding a tray.

"Oh, good, you're up," she says. "I've knocked twice. He said not to knock a third time, he said if you didn't answer by the third you were to be left alone, and honestly I was about to eat your eggs."

She's young, maybe your age, with a long red-brown braid over one shoulder and freckles everywhere and a no-nonsense apron. She's also, very clearly, alive. Her cheeks are pink. She's breathing.

You stare at her.

"Senna Oakes," she says. "Steward of Duskhall. Eggs. Tea. Don't look so frightened, love, I'm not dead. Neither are you. Can I come in? This tray weighs a ton."

She sets it on the table by the fire and pours tea as if she's done it every morning of her life.

"You're living," you say stupidly.

"Last I checked."

"But you're down here. How long have you..."

"A hundred and forty years, give or take." Senna hands you a cup. "Thrown off the Bride's Step at twenty-three. Wedding dress, bells on the hem, all of it. Bells still there? I hated those bloody bells."

"They're still there," you whisper.

"Course they are." She sits on the arm of the chair and looks at you with sharp, kind hazel eyes. "The living don't age down here. Don't ask me why. Something in the light, he says, or something in the bargain. So I'm still twenty-three, and I've been running this house for longer than your grandmother was alive. Drink your tea, Ava. You've gone grey."

You drink your tea. It's hot and sweet and real.

"He caught you," you say.

"He catches all of us." Senna's mouth quirks. "He gave me the speech. You are free. No one has to stay. Turned his back by the Rope Road. Did he do that with you? Stood there like a gravestone?"

"For hours."

"He did that with me too. Only I went all the way up." Something old and tired moves behind her eyes. "My mother saw me in the lane and screamed. My father said the god had spat me out and I'd bring the plague back on us. The elders had me on the Step again by sundown." She shrugs. "He caught me twice. The second time I didn't bother with the road."

You set the cup down carefully, because your hands have started to shake.

After breakfast, the god himself comes to show you the house.

He waits at the end of the corridor, not at your door, and when you come out he inclines his head and says, "Miss Ashlow. Did you sleep?" as if last night's messages hadn't happened at all. But his eyes go to the shard tucked in your sleeve, and away again, quickly.

In the ghostlight of morning he's even harder to look at. You hadn't thought that was possible. Senna, behind you, rolls her eyes at your face.

Duskhall is enormous and strange and quiet. Halls of black glass that hold the silver light like water. A library with shelves that climb into shadow. A long gallery of windows looking out over the asphodel, where the circle of white flowers still glows at the edge of the meadow, brighter than yesterday.

You catch him looking at it. He catches you catching him. Neither of you says anything.

He walks a careful three paces from you everywhere you go. When a corridor narrows, he steps back and lets you through first. When you stumble on a stair, his hand comes up and then stops in the air an inch from your elbow, and stays there, hovering, until you've found your feet.

"You can touch my arm, you know," you say. "When I trip. I won't scream."

"I would rather you asked," he says.

You don't know what to do with that, so you don't do anything.

Last, he takes you to the Gate.

Beyond Duskhall the meadow gives way to streets: a whole town of pale stone houses, lanterns in the windows, figures moving gently through the lanes. The dead. You'd expected horror. They're just people, a little faded, a little transparent at the edges, like a painting left in the sun. An old woman sweeping a step. Two men playing at dice. A girl laughing at something. They all look up as the god passes, and every one of them goes quiet, and the quiet is nothing like fear.

"The Quiet Town," he says. "Most of the dead of the valley come here. They rest. They're gentle. They don't want anything from the living."

"Most," you say.

He doesn't answer. He doesn't need to. The road has ended at a wall.

It's black iron and grave-stone, three times the height of a man, and it stretches away in both directions until the silver dark swallows it. In the middle stands a gate, two vast barred leaves, and before it, leaning on a sword of dull grey iron, a soldier.

He's tall and broad and heavily scarred, with a cropped beard and a coat from some war two centuries gone. He's dead; the light goes through him faintly. He grins when he sees you.

"So this is the one that came back down," he says. "Ruadh Ilverson, Captain of the Gate. Welcome to the worst view in the Undermere, Miss Ashlow."

Then the Gate shudders.

Something hits it from the other side. The bars ring like a struck bell. Through them, in the dark beyond, you glimpse shapes: grey, gaunt, crowding, too many, their mouths open on a hunger you can feel in your teeth. One presses its face to the bars and looks straight at you, and its eyes are holes.

You step back without meaning to. Your shoulder hits something solid.

Him. He hasn't moved toward you; you've moved toward him.

He lifts one hand, not to you, to the Gate. The air changes. A cold so vast and old it makes the hair stand on your arms rolls out from him like a wave, and every grey shape beyond the bars recoils and slinks back into the dark.

"The Hungry," he says quietly, lowering his hand. "The dead who would climb back up and feed on the living. That's what your founders were afraid of. That is what I keep below." His voice is very even. "I have kept them below for three hundred years. I did not need a bride to do it."

You find you're still pressed to his side. You step away. Your heart is pounding, and not only from the Hungry.

On the walk back, Senna falls into step beside you while he talks with Ruadh.

"He likes you, Ava," she says.

"He's barely looked at me."

"Exactly." She grins. "Come to the Orchard this afternoon. Meet the others."

You frown. "The Orchard? What others?"

Senna stops walking. She looks at you in surprise, and then with something closer to pity.

"The Orchard is where the rest of us live," she says.

"The rest of who?"

"The brides, love," Senna says gently. "All of them."