Who Said Her Name

"Draycott," said Valerian.

He said it slowly, standing in the thin gold light at the edge of the clearing, with his back to a beech tree and his gloved hands hanging at his sides. He turned the name over on his tongue as a man turns a coin he has found in an old coat. He seemed to be waiting for it to do something.

"It was the other one," said Isolde. "The one they called you in the dark. Valerian Draycott."

"Yes."

"Is it yours?"

"I believe so." He frowned. "I wrote the first half in your contract. I did not know that I knew it. It came out of my hand. This—" He touched his throat. "This is different. It has a weight. As if I had been carrying a very large trunk for a very long time and someone had asked me what was in it."

"Does it mean anything?"

"It means that the wolf knew my name too." His voice was dry. "That is all I can swear to. Neither of us has heard it spoken in this place. I do not think anyone has. And I do not think it was a wolf."

She sat on the stump with his coat still round her shoulders and her notebook open on her knee. It was a fine morning. The sun came through the white branches in long slanting bars, and the fallen leaves glowed copper, and a thrush was working itself into a frenzy on a bough. It was, in fact, the loveliest dawn she had seen in the Hollow, and she hated every inch of it.

"Let's go through it," she said. "Once. Out loud. Like a problem."

"As you wish."

"The wolves called Brannoc by his true name. A name from his boyhood. His mother's name for him. Nobody knew it, by his account, in forty years."

"Aye," said the old man, from the root where he sat. He had a flask in one hand and a face like a boiled ham. "Not a soul."

"They called Odile by hers."

"They did," said Odile, faintly. She was wrapped in a blanket, and her hair stood up in tufts, and she had not stopped trembling since sunrise. "I'd forgotten. Odile Mary. Nan used to call me Odie, when I'd been good."

"And they called me by mine, and you by yours." Isolde looked at Valerian. "So the wolves knew everything. Names, voices. They knew the voice of someone you had loved and lost. Brannoc's mother. Odile's nan. Mine—" She stopped. She took a breath. "Mine was a girl of sixteen. That's all I know. I know how it spoke. I can hear it in my head. I couldn't tell you her name."

"Do you wish me to leave off?" said Valerian, quietly.

"No. I want you to hear it." She turned a page. "Where would a door get a name like that? A true name. It's the most private thing a person has. It's only ever written in one place that I know of. A ledger. In the Hospice."

…

She had signed it herself.

It had been on the third night, in the lower ward, after the surgeon's cold courtesies and before the sister with the porridge face and the chamomile. A different sister had come with a book. It had been a large book, bound in black, with a ribbon of lantern-silver down the spine, and she had stood at the foot of Linnet's bed in her gray hood and said, in a pleasant murmuring voice: "It is a custom, miss. We register the family of the afflicted. In case the Bloom is catching."

"Is it?"

"We do not know. But we like to be careful." A smile. "And we like to have the true names. For the choir. It's a kindness. It means that if the worst should happen, we can sing them home in the right voice."

She had written it. She had not thought. She had been very tired. She had written Isolde Marguerite Hale, in her small square hand, under Linnet Hale, bed 41, and the sister had blotted it and carried the book away.

"It was the Order," she said now, quietly.

The clearing was silent.

"They keep the book. Every true name in every Hospice in the kingdom. It's how they sing the dying home. And they were in the Hollow. Lantern Company, in a crowd, with a captain who calls me Miss Isolde and can't say why. And there's a Prioress who—" She broke off. "Maude said it. Tell the Prioress. Sera said it too."

"So you think—" said Brannoc.

"I think somebody who had that ledger told a Door what to say."

"Can a Door be told?"

"I've no idea." She heard the weariness in her own voice. "I've no idea what a Door can do. I only know that it's the single explanation I have that involves a mechanism."

"It is a good one," said Valerian.

"But?"

"But the Order did not know mine." He folded his arms across his chest. It was a defensive gesture, she saw; the first. "They had no cause. I am not in their ledger. I am not in anyone's. I did not know it myself until a quarter of an hour ago."

She stared at him.

He was right. She had no answer.

Then who? she thought. Who knew his name and mine?

She shut the notebook. She sat for a time with her fists in her lap, listening to the thrush. And in the pit of her stomach, where the cold had settled on the night of the first Door and never lifted, something stirred and turned over, like a thing asleep in a cellar that smells the daylight.

…

Odile caught her at the stream.

Isolde had gone down to wash her face. The water was brown and clear and bitterly cold, and she knelt on the bank and scrubbed at her cheeks with both hands until they stung. When she sat back on her heels, the girl was standing a few feet off, with the blanket round her shoulders and the pot lid, which she had refused to put down all night, clutched against her chest.

"Can I tell you something?" said Odile.

"Of course."

"I almost went." She said it fast, all in a breath, looking at the water. "When it called. I was under the root, with Brannoc, and he had his hand on my back, and it said Odie. Nan's the only one who ever called me that. She's been dead three years. She had a way of saying it, a sort of up-and-down, like she was pleased with me." Her mouth trembled. "I had my hand on the earth. I was going to push it away."

"But you didn't."

"Brannoc said your name." She gave a shaky laugh. "He said, 'Think of the lass. Think of what she'd say.' And I thought, she'd say I was being a ninny."

"I would not have said ninny."

"What would you have said?"

"Something much longer," said Isolde. "With a subordinate clause."

Odile laughed again, and it turned halfway into a sob, and she dropped to her knees on the bank and put her arms round Isolde's neck. She smelled of mud and tallow and old flour. Isolde held her. She had not been held, she thought, since a girl in a narrow bed had put her chin on her shoulder and said Not the tame ones. She shut her eyes.

"Six days," said Odile, into her collar.

"I know."

"Is that how long you've got? Your sister. You never say."

"I don't remember her name," said Isolde. "But I know the number. Thirteen days from the night I fell. It's been six." She counted it on the inside of her skull, as she had been counting it ever since the Night Market. "Seven left. If a Door is a day out there. If it's not, then I don't know."

"We'll do it."

"We will."

"We will, because I won't let you not." Odile drew back, and wiped her nose on the blanket, and said with a sudden wicked brightness: "Besides. He'd walk through fire."

"Who?"

"Don't who me." The girl sniffed. "I've got eyes. I saw how he held on to you in that hole. I was in the next one. I heard it all. Not the words, I mean, just the— I heard him breathe." She grinned through the tears. "Nobody breathes like that over a contract."

"Odile."

"I'm only saying."

"Don't."

"I'm only saying that if you don't, I shall." She got up, dusting her knees, with the air of a girl who has said her piece. "Come on. Brannoc's found a lock."

…

The lock was in a tree.

They found it a short way from the lodge, past the ruined gate, on the edge of a narrow stream. It was set into the trunk of a vast white beech, at about the height of her chin: a small round plate of black iron with a keyhole and a ring of faded markings. It had been cut into the living wood. The bark had grown up round its edge in a thick pale scar.

"That's it," said Brannoc. "That's the way out."

"And the key?"

"The old trapper's got it. Look there."

She looked. Hung on a nail by the cabin door, in a wreath of dried ivy, a rusted wolf-trap lay open in the dirt, its steel jaws gaping. Between the jaws, glinting, caught by one tooth, lay a black iron key.

She picked it up. It was cold, and heavy, and the same dull shade as the one she had taken from the wax man's hand. The bow was a plain ring. The shaft was thick. And on the flat of the bit, so small that she had to hold it to the sun, someone had scratched a line of writing with a needle.

She tilted it. She read it with her thumb under the letters.

It was Old Aethel. It was in the same cramped cipher as the headboard in the Hospice, the one that had flared and swallowed her. It was written in a quick light hand, a hand that did not hesitate, and it said, in four words:

Read to the end.

She stood motionless. A drop of cold went down her back.

"What is it?" said Valerian.

"It's a message." She did not look at him. "On the key. It's in the Old Tongue. It's the cipher from the headboard."

"What does it say?"

Fourth clause, she thought. Neither shall lie in any matter that touches her life. And the second thing that came, hot on its heels: First clause. I am to read what the Doors hide, and speak plainly all that I find.

"It says," said Isolde slowly, "Read to the end."

…

He took it better than she had feared.

He did not flinch. He did not go white. He stood by the stream with the sunlight on his hair and the water talking over the stones, and he considered the key, which she had laid in his palm, with the polite interest of a doctor reading a tradesman's bill. After a while he turned it over. His thumb passed across the scratches.

"I cannot read it," he said.

"I know."

"It is a kind of writing that I—" He stopped. "No. That is not true. I can see what it says. I can see the shape of the words. It is only that when I look at them directly, they go out of focus, like a face in water." He closed his hand. "I think that I have known it very well. I think that someone made me forget."

"Valerian—"

"I should like to say," he said, in a very even voice, "that I do not wish to read to the end."

She waited.

"I should like to say that I would give a great deal to turn about and leave this Door, and every Door, and walk into the sea. I should like to say that I would rather stay in a drowned ship for another three hundred years than know the last word." He opened his eyes. "But I find that I should like better to know. I find that it matters to me more than I can account for. And I find that if it is a choice between knowing and not knowing, with you beside me—"

He stopped.

"Yes?" said Isolde.

"I would rather know," said Valerian. "With you."

She did not trust herself to speak. She put out her hand and took the key, and her fingers brushed his glove. They lingered. They were warm. Behind her, Odile gave a stifled snort and turned very hard to look at a tree.

"Then I'll read it to the end," she said. Her voice shook, and she did not care. "I promise. Every word. I'll tell you as slowly as you want. And I won't stop."

…

"Look at the break," said Isolde.

She was standing at the great beech, with her hand on the iron plate. It was an odd thing, close up. The lock had been cracked. The break ran from the keyhole diagonally to the rim, a clean bright line a finger's width across, as if somebody had struck the plate with a hammer. A hairline split in the iron; the two halves had been forced a little apart. And through the gap, very faint, there shone a thread of light.

"It's been damaged," said Brannoc. "So? The Doors fall apart, sometimes. It's an old place."

"It's not damaged. It's been broken." She bent closer. "Do you see the edges? They're bent outward. If somebody had struck it from this side, they'd bend inward. Whoever did it was on the other side. Whoever did it was inside."

"A lock hasn't an inside, lass."

"This one has."

She stood back. Her pulse was going. She was a scholar. She was twenty-one, and a very long way from home, and she was looking at a thing that she could not explain, and every instinct in her body was telling her that it mattered more than anything she had yet seen.

"It's been broken from within," she said. "By something that wanted it open."

The wind stirred the beeches. A leaf came down, red, and settled on the black iron.

"Something that wanted me through," said Isolde.

Nobody spoke.

She put the key in the lock. It slid home with a faint sweet click, like a latch lifted by a friendly hand, and she felt the whole tree shiver.

"Wait," said Valerian.

She turned. He had stepped forward. His face was strained, and he had a hand half-raised toward her, as if to pull her back; but it fell, slowly, to his side.

"I will not stop you," he said. "I am only— Be careful."

"I'll be careful."

"You always say so."

"I always am." She turned the key.

The lock gave a long, low, grating groan. The iron plate split along the crack, wide, and fell away in two pieces, and behind it was a door of pure white light. It rushed out through the trunk of the tree, over the stream and the leaves, and she threw up her arm against it, and heard Odile cry out, and Brannoc swear.

And in the light, close to her ear, spoke a voice.

It was not the pleasant voice. It was not a wolf. It was low and quiet and cracked with age and tiredness, and it was a man's. It spoke in the Old Tongue, in a dialect so old that she heard it more with her bones than her ears. It said, clear as a bell struck underwater:

Isolde. Keep reading. Whatever it costs. Please. Keep reading.

She stood frozen. The light roared. The leaves stood up in the wind. And behind her, a tall man in a black coat, with his gloved hands pressed to his temples and his eyes squeezed shut and his whole body bowed like a tree before a gale, said in a voice she hardly recognized:

"That was me."