From the pages

Chapter One — The Trial of the Goatherd (an excerpt)

A scene from Aurefold — House Whitehart, the Bell of Silence, year 396 A.U.

Brother Tomas tests Sela. Mother Alaine watches.

There is no throne in the Bell of Silence. There is only the listening room: a long hall cut back into the mountain's own throat, and along its far wall the griffes — the dead in their open niches, turned to face the valley so their voices might carry. The house had built the room for echo, not for judgment. Tonight it would have to serve for both.

Tomas came early, as he always did, to choose where the light would fall. A single lamp, set low, so it lit the hands and left the face in half-dark. He had learned long ago that people lie with their faces and tell the truth with their hands. He set out his paper and his stick of char, and he sat where the draft from the valley would pass across the girl and not across him. Then he waited, because waiting was the whole of his craft.

Mother Alaine entered without sound. She took, as she always took, the seat furthest in — her back against the stone, against the niches, against the dead. To the novices this looked like humility: she will not crowd them, she gives them room to speak. Tomas had sat across from that stillness for thirty years and never once thought to test it. He nodded to her. She inclined her head the width of a breath, and was still.

Sela came last, and she came wrong.

She did not walk to the center of the room and wait to be placed. She crossed straight to the mouth of the hall, to the arch where the valley wind came in, and she sat facing out — toward the dark and the cold and the long drop to the villages — with the griffes and the two of them at her back. A goatherd's instinct: face the open ground; keep the weather where you can see it. She did not know it was heresy to sit with your back to the dead. No one had ever taught her the names.

Tomas let it pass. It told him more than an hour of answers.

"Sit where you like," he said, though she already had. "I only mean to talk."

"You mean to test me." She said it without heat, the way she might say it will rain. "Everyone means to test me. You are only the one they gave the name to."

Alaine, in her corner, did not move. But Tomas, who read stillness for a living, saw the particular stillness of a woman who has just heard something she will think about for a long time.

"Then we understand each other," he said, and he smiled, and he hated the smile even as he offered it, because it was warm and it was true and it was the sharpest knife he owned. People open to kindness. What spilled out of the opening was the thing he would have to weigh.

He asked her the small questions first. Where she had grazed. How many head. What the winter had taken. She answered short and flat, no reverence, no Icke jag set into the pauses where a proper Called would have set it. It should have made her sound false. It made her sound, instead, unbearably true — she did not know how a Called was supposed to speak, and so she only said the thing that was in her, and the room leaned toward her the way a room leans toward the one person in it who is not performing.

That was the danger. Tomas wrote nothing yet. He was not listening to her words. He was listening to what she did with the silences between them.

"Tell me about the winter of the pass," he said. "When you moved the herd."

For the first time, she was slow to answer. "You know that already."

"I know what the village says. I want what you say."

She looked at her hands. The wind moved the lamp. "The sickness was in the low pasture. The old ones were dying. They were praying — the proper words, the ones I never learned." A breath. "I was sitting with a woman I hardly knew. She was almost gone. And there was—" she stopped.

She stopped mid-word, and she turned her head to the side.

Not toward Tomas. Not toward Alaine. She turned toward the empty arch, toward the dark beyond the valley's mouth, and she went very still, her head cocked, listening — the way a person listens for a sound behind a wall. And Tomas, who had schooled himself for thirty years against exactly this, felt his own head begin to turn toward the same empty point in the air. He caught it. He did not catch it in time to stop Alaine, in the far corner, from turning too.

Three of them, for the length of a heartbeat, facing the same nothing.

Then the wind dropped, the way the valley wind does drop between gusts, and the lamp steadied, and there was only a girl looking at an empty doorway.

"—a direction," Sela finished, quietly. "Not words. A direction. North, over the high pass. Against all sense. I told them to move the herd. They lived." She turned back to him, and her eyes were a goatherd's eyes, tired and plain. "That is all it has ever been. A direction. I never asked for it. I do not ask you to follow me because of it."

Tomas wrote one line on his paper. He did not write she heard. He could not write that; no one could ever write that. He wrote what he had seen and nothing he had not: she stops mid-word and listens outward, and the room turns with her. It could be a gift. It could be a trick a frightened girl had learned worked on rooms. It could be the wind and three tired people. The paper held all three and settled none, which was the only honest thing paper could do.

"Do it again," he said. Gently. It was the cruelest test he had, and the surest: nothing true could be summoned twice.

Something crossed her face — not guilt, he thought, but a kind of grief. "It doesn't come when I want it," she said. "It comes when it wants. If I could call it I would never have needed to." And then, because she was afraid now — afraid of him, or of the silence, or of what she'd nearly said — she did the thing he had been waiting to see. She began to repeat herself. A direction, not words, I never asked, I never asked. Louder. Over and over. As if she could drown a doubt by naming it enough times.

Only Tomas knew what that meant. When Sela was certain, she fell silent and listened sideways. When she was afraid, she grew over-plain, insistent, arguing with something in her own chest. This was fear. Which meant, terribly, that the listening before it had not been.

He wrote nothing. His hand had gone still on the char.

And into that stillness Sela did the worst thing she could have done, and she did it in perfect innocence.

She turned — not to Tomas, but past him, to the woman in the corner who had not spoken once. To Mother Alaine, whom she loved, whom she came to for the discipline she knew she lacked, whom she believed above all others could teach her how to carry the thing she carried.

"Mother," Sela said. "You have sat at the griffes for fifty years. You hear them clearly. You know how it feels." Her voice was a child's, asking a mother to name a fear so it would be smaller. "Tell me what I should be listening for. Tell me how you know it's real."

— the excerpt ends here. What Mother Alaine answered is for the book. —

Chapter Three — The Morning After

Aurefold — Book One: The Bell of Silence. House Whitehart, year 396 A.U.

Sela's POV. The morning after the trial.

She woke before the bell, as she had woken every morning of her life, because goats do not care what has happened to you.

For a moment it worked. The dark had the right smell in it — cold stone, cold ash, the sourness of a house that had been shut all night — and her body did the things it knew. She put her feet on the floor. She reached for the wooden bowl she had brought up from the valley, the one with the split in the rim her father had bound with wire, because a person carries their own bowl and it is nobody's business. She went down the passage with the bowl under her arm and her hands in her sleeves, and the thought in her was so small she could not afterward have said it aloud: today it will be a Tuesday, and I will eat, and someone will complain about the bread.

She got as far as the doorway of the long hall before it stopped working.

The hall was full and the hall was quiet. Not the quiet of a house at prayer — Whitehart made a great deal of noise at prayer — but the other one. The one that happens in a byre when something has come in through the door behind you.

They had left her place.

That was the first thing. Yesterday she had sat halfway down the third bench with her back to the wall, and yesterday there had been a girl on either side of her and an old man across who ate with his mouth open, and the bench had been warm. This morning the third bench was full from the far end inward, and the last arm's length of it, the part where she sat, was empty. It was not even that they had moved away. They had simply never come that far.

Sela stood in the doorway with her bowl and understood, with the plain animal clarity that had kept her alive on a mountain, that if she stood there any longer, somebody would come and bring her to it.

So she walked to the bench and sat down, and the room made a sound like a held breath let out slowly.

She put her bowl on the board. She turned herself, without thinking, until she could see the open doorway — the grey square of morning, the yard, the mist coming off the wet stones, the way out. It was what she always did. It was what a person did in a room with one exit and a mountain behind it.

Down the hall, four heads turned to watch her do it.

She saw them see it, and she took her hand off the bowl, and she did not turn back, because turning back would have been a second thing to look at.

The pots came out. Steward Ansel came behind them with his sleeves pinned and his tally-stick tucked under his arm like a man who had never in his life thought about God and did not intend to start on a Tuesday. He was a wide, cheerful, deeply corrupt old man, and every soul in the Bell of Silence had eaten out of his hand for thirty years without once noticing whose hand it was.

He came down the third bench, and the ladle went into the pot, and he served her first.

Sela had eaten in this hall for two months. In two months she had learned the order of it the way you learn weather: the old ones first, then the Testers, then the working hands, then the novices, then whoever had annoyed the steward. She had eaten fourth from last, twice, for laughing.

The ladle came out full, and he tipped it into her bowl, and then — with the small unhurried generosity of a man doing sums — he tipped in half of a second.

"Eat that," said Ansel comfortably. "You've gone thin."

It was the kindest sentence anyone said to her that morning and it went through her like cold water. Because he had not decided it out of tenderness and he had not decided it out of fear. He had decided it the way he decided which ewe to keep. Something had changed in the value of her, and Ansel, who had never in his life waited to be told anything, had already adjusted.

The girl across from her — a novice, sixteen, with a scrubbed shine on her like a washed step — watched the second half-ladle go in, and something moved in her face that was not envy. It was worse than envy. It was confirmation.

Her name was Ivet, and she had been waiting all night for a chance.

"Sister," she said. She said it carefully, the way you carry a full cup. "Yesterday. On the stair. You said the wind was wrong."

Sela stopped with her spoon in her hand. She could not remember saying anything on the stair. She could remember climbing it, and being tired, and wanting to get out of her wet boots.

"I said the wind had gone round," she said. "It had. It's coming off the ice now. It'll rain by dark."

"Yes," said Ivet, and her eyes were shining. "The wind has gone round." She turned it in her mouth like a coin she meant to spend. "And by evening it will be a different house than the one that went to sleep."

Sela said, "It only means it's going to rain."

And Ivet smiled at her — with love, with real love, the sweetest smile in that hall — and said, "Icke jag," in the pause, the way a proper Called would set it, the way Sela had never once managed; and three people down the bench said it back to her.

They had not said it to Sela. They had said it to the girl who was explaining her.

After that it came in from all sides, and none of it was cruelty, and that was the difficulty.

Bryn Corr came up from the valley with the bread, which she did on Tuesdays, and she came in stamping and swearing about the mud and filling the doorway with the smell of the outside, and Sela was so glad to see her she nearly stood up. Bryn had known her since she was six. Bryn had once thrown a boot at her for leaving a gate open.

Bryn set down the bread. Bryn looked at her for a second and a half, and did not throw anything, and said, pleasantly, "How many were on the road behind me, do you think?"

"I don't know," said Sela.

"Nine," said Bryn. "There were nine of them, coming up, on a Tuesday in the mud." She smiled, and the smile was warm, and it was genuinely warm, and it did not reach any part of her that was doing arithmetic. "Your mother will be pleased. They've all got to sleep somewhere."

Brother Osric sat down across from her a little later, and he was easy and quick and rather funny, and he asked her three questions about the trial that sounded like nothing at all, and one of them was not. When it came, he said, did it come before or after Brother Tomas set the lamp down? And she answered, because it was a small true thing, and only afterward did she understand that he had been testing whether it came when someone was watching.

He thanked her. He was not lying about being kind. He would be a very good Tester one day, and he knew that either she was true, in which case Tomas's method was vindicated and would be worth inheriting, or she was false, in which case Tomas would break on her and the office would be vacant. He liked Tomas. He would have said so honestly and meant it.

And Sister Wilda came the length of the hall with her hands folded, and stopped, and looked down at the bowl with the extra half-ladle in it.

"Eat it all," she said. "They'll want you strong for the next testing."

Then she went on. She had said nothing untrue. It was not over. She had reminded a full room, in eleven words — no; in a dozen words, in a breath, in a voice with no malice in it at all — that the girl had not been confirmed, and that a Called who is not confirmed is a Called who has not yet been Given Back.

The hall heard it. The hall went on eating. And Sela, who had faced a wolf at fourteen with nothing but a stick and had not been frightened, sat with her hands around a warm bowl and found she could not lift the spoon.

She looked for Tomas.

He was there, at the Testers' end, with his back very straight, and he was looking at his own hands. He had seen the whole of it. He had seen Ansel's ladle and Ivet's coin and Osric's third question and Wilda's dozen words, and he had understood every one of them better than anyone else in the room, and he did not lift his head.

He could not. A prover who comforts the proved has already given his verdict. She did not know that. She only knew that the one man in the house whose eyes she wanted did not give them, and she looked back down at her bread, and something in her chest closed over quietly, like a hand.

Then Fen sat down.

He came in late, as he always came in late, with the candle-box under his arm and wax on his knuckles and the cold of the niches still on him, and he walked the length of the third bench and looked at the arm's length of empty board beside the Called of House Whitehart, and he sat down in it.

He put his elbows on the table. He looked into her bowl.

"You've been given the sludge off the bottom," he said. "Congratulations. It's the good part. Nobody knows that except me and Ansel and now unfortunately you."

Sela laughed.

It came out of her like something breaking. It was too loud. It was the first honest noise made in that hall since dawn, and every head came up, and she did not care, because for the length of one breath she was a girl at breakfast being teased by a friend, and she would have given the mountain and everything on it to keep that breath going.

She did not keep it. Nobody in that hall would have let her keep it.

Steward Ansel came down the bench with his ladle still in his hand. He was not angry. He had never been angry in his life; anger was inefficient. He put two fingers on Fen's shoulder, in a friendly way, in the way you move a dog off a chair, and he said:

"That's not your place, lad."

And that was all. It was not a punishment. There was no rule being enforced, no rite invoked, no name said. It was a matter of seating. A man who is not in the book cannot sit at the right hand of the Called, in the same way that a stool cannot be a chair; and Ansel, who had fed Fen out of the house's own stores for five years without ever once being told to, said it kindly, and did not think about it again for the rest of his life.

Fen got up.

Sela opened her mouth.

She had, in that moment, more power in that hall than any person in it. Half the house believed she could hear the dead. She had only to say let him stay. Two words. They would have been obeyed instantly and by everyone, and they would have been remembered, and by evening they would have been carried down to the valley, and by the jubilee they would have been written into a book — and she did not know that yet, and she never would have said them if she had.

What stopped her was smaller and worse. She hesitated. She thought: if I speak, they will do it because I said it, and not because it was right. She thought it for exactly as long as it takes to draw a breath.

And in that breath, Fen picked up his candle-box and walked away down the hall, and the moment was over, and the bench was full of nothing again.

Down the table, Ivet watched him go, and then watched Sela not speak, and her face filled slowly with a terrible and shining understanding.

"She permitted it," Ivet said softly, to no one, to everyone. "Icke jag."

She found him afterwards in the listening room, at the wall, doing the niches.

He had the box open on the flags and he was working along the row with a rag and a bone knife, cleaning the old wax out of the stone cups, one dead man at a time. He did not turn round. He knew every name in that wall. He was the only person in the house who knew all of them, and not one of them had ever been permitted to know his.

"Fen—"

"Don't."

He said it without heat, the way he said everything, and he kept scraping.

"If you come over here and apologise," he said, "then it happened, and we'll both have to have a feeling about it, and I'll have to be gracious, and you'll have to be sorry, and it will be there for the rest of our lives, sitting between us like a wet dog." He knocked the wax out of the cup into his palm. "If you don't, then it was only seating."

Sela stood in the middle of the listening room with her hands at her sides.

"It was only seating," she said.

"There," said Fen. "You see how easy."

He moved down to the next niche. She stood there a moment longer, and then she went out, past the arch where the wind came in, and she did not stop to listen at it, because there were people in the yard and they would have seen her do it.

She had taken the easy thing he had offered her, and it had cost him something to offer it, and she had known that it cost him, and she had taken it anyway.

She would remember, later, that this was the first thing she was ever given by someone who could not afford it.

She could not have said, then, what she had spent.

— end of the chapter —