The Hall of Names

The Orchard is behind a wall of white stone at the edge of the Quiet Town, and the gate in it isn't locked.

Inside, there are trees. You didn't think anything grew down here but asphodel. These are apple trees, old and gnarled, their leaves silver-green, heavy with pale fruit that glows faintly in the ghostlight. Between them are cottages with painted doors and gardens and washing on lines. Somewhere a woman is singing. A cat sits on a wall.

It looks like Hollowmere. It looks like Hollowmere would look if anyone there had ever been happy.

"We planted them," Senna says beside you. "Took about sixty years to get them to fruit. Don't eat one unless you want to sleep for a day."

Women come out of the cottages as you walk up the path. Five, then eight, then ten. They're all ages and none: a tall dark-skinned woman in a coat cut a hundred years out of fashion, a plump blonde one with a baby goat under her arm, a thin girl in spectacles holding a book. All of them young. All of them living. All of them looking at you the way you look at a new name in the ledger.

"Another one," says the woman with the goat. "God help us. What year is it up there?"

You tell her. A murmur goes through them.

"Twenty-five years," someone says. "Right on time."

And then a woman pushes through to the front and stops dead.

She's small and fierce-looking, with your mother's dark eyes and your mother's sharp chin, and hair the exact brown of yours, cut short and wild. She looks younger than you. She can't be more than twenty-two.

She stares at your face. Her hand goes to her mouth.

"You're Grete's," she says. "Oh God. You're Grete's girl. You have her whole face."

You know who she is before she says it. You've never seen a likeness; your mother kept none. But you know.

"Elspeth," you whisper.

Your aunt, thrown off the Bride's Step twenty-five years before you were born, gets to you in three steps and holds on as if you're the one who fell.

Afterwards you sit in her cottage with a cup of tea you don't drink, and she tells you everything, fast, the way you'd talk if you hadn't spoken to anyone from home in a quarter of a century.

She was twenty-two. She'd been courting a boy from the mill. She'd made the mistake of laughing at Coll Thorley in the street. She caught your hand and asked about Grete, about her husband, about whether Grete still wove, whether she still sang.

"She doesn't sing," you say.

Elspeth's face crumples, then smooths. "No. I don't suppose she would."

"Why didn't you come home?" you ask. "He showed you the road. He shows everyone."

"He does." She looks at her hands. "The first bride, Maud, went home. Two hundred and fifty years ago. The elders said she'd been spat out and she'd bring the dead. They drowned her in the millpond and said it was the god's will." Her mouth twists. "He watched it in the Glass. He can't go up. He's never got over it, I think. After that, most of us decided it was better to be dead to them than dead."

You think of the god standing for hours with his back to the stair.

I've watched it happen, he said.

He's waiting outside the Orchard wall when you come out. He doesn't ask how it went. He looks at your face and then says, quietly, "There is something else you should see. If you want to."

The Hall of Names is a long, high chamber under Duskhall, cold and dim, lined floor to ceiling with ledgers. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Leather and vellum, spines lettered in silver. A single long desk runs down the middle, and on it lies an open book and a pen.

"Every soul who comes into the Undermere is written here," he says. "The dead and the living. By my hand. I have written every name for three hundred years."

You run your fingers along a shelf. Something in you settles, because you know this. Ledgers. Columns. Names and dates. This, finally, is a language you speak.

"Show me the brides," you say.

He takes down a slim book bound in grey and opens it on the desk. There they are, in neat, slanting, beautiful script. Eleven names, one every twenty-five years. Maud Tibbet. Senna Oakes, aged 23. At the bottom, the ink still fresh: Ava Ashlow, aged 24. Caught.

Above yours: Elspeth Ashlow, aged 22. Caught.

"Every bride," he says. "Every one of them reached me."

"And the others?"

He goes still. "What others?"

"The mist." Your voice comes out flat, the way it does when you're adding a column and the total's wrong. "Thirty-one women in a hundred years. More, before that; I didn't check further back. They walk out on foggy nights. The village says the dead call them down." You look up at him. "So they'd be here. Wouldn't they? If the dead called them, they'd come here."

"Give me names," he says.

You give him names. You don't even have to think. You read them aloud from that column a dozen times by lamplight before Osmund burned it. Idony Thorley, twenty-two. Bethan Pask, twenty-five. Tegan Abernant, twenty-three. Each one you speak, he turns to another ledger, and runs one long pale finger down the columns, and turns a page, and another, and his face gets colder and stiller with every name.

Halfway through, you stop. Because you can already see the answer in him.

"They're not here," you say.

"No."

"Not dead. Not living. Not anywhere."

"They never fell," he says, very quietly. "No one gave them to me. If they had died anywhere in this valley, I would have them. They did not die in this valley."

The door behind you opens. Elspeth is standing there, out of breath. She must have run all the way from the Orchard.

"Senna told me what you were asking," she says. "I should have told you myself. I didn't know if you'd believe me."

"Believe what?"

She comes to the desk. She looks down at her own name in the grey book, in the god's handwriting.

"On my rite night," she says, "they took me down to the Step before dawn. There was mist. And at the top of the lane, by the Merrit stables, there was a cart. With lanterns on it. Pale lanterns, not like ours, like little moons. And men in white masks." She swallows. "They were loading a woman into it. She had a sack over her head. I knew her shoes. It was Idony Thorley."

The Hall of Names is so quiet you can hear the ghostlight hum.

"I screamed," Elspeth says. "Old Merrit hit me. Then they pushed me. And all the way down I kept thinking, they're not giving her to the god. They're giving her to someone else."

You can't breathe. You think of thirty-one names in faded brown ink. Two hundred years of it. You think of the caravans going down to Corrabridge, and the fine glass in every Merrit window.

"Sold," you say. The word is ash in your mouth. "They've been selling us."

Elspeth reaches across the desk and takes your hand, hard.

"They paid in silver, Ava," she says. "I watched Osmund Merrit's father count it."