The Light at Four O'Clock

Aza does not answer Corin at once, because the answer is older than the question and he has spent ten thousand years not saying it.

"It keeps them lit," he says.

Corin's hands tighten on his knees.

"There is a part of the Hush you have not walked," Aza goes on, flat, finding the words in the wrong order, the way he finds all of them now. "Deep in, past the shore, past the ferry, where the shelves are. The things that are useful and will not file, the errors that turned out to be worth more open than closed. It does not send them across. It does not let them fade. It pins the name to a page and it draws on the warmth a little at a time, the way you bank a fire down so it gives heat all winter and never goes out. A name kept does not run out, Corin. That is the point of keeping it. It does not run out because it is never quite allowed to finish." He looks at the boy leaning into Senna's not-quite touch, at the hundred years of cold taking the first warmth it has been near. "It will look at her and it will see a fire it can bank down forever. And it will be right. She is."

The old reaper sits very still on Mara's stool. Then he says the thing Aza was waiting for him to find, because Corin is the only one in the room who has read enough of the books to be afraid of the right page.

"The ferry's a mercy," Corin says, slow. "We always said it. A frightened soul, met and walked across so it doesn't wander. We called ourselves the kind ones." He lifts his head. "And the thing on the glass would call that a waste. A whole soul, spent in one crossing, gone. It doesn't waste."

"No," Aza says. "It does not waste."

The four o'clock light lies grey across the floor, and the boy is warm for the first time in a hundred years, and Aza, who has carried more of the dead than there are names for, understands that he has spent all of that time on the comfortable side of the worst thing the order of death can do, and never once turned around to look at the other side, because a reaper who carries is not given a reason to. He has one now. He files it. The entry will not close.

·

I make tea I do not drink.

It is gone two in the morning and the boy is gone, faded back into wherever the strays wait between hauntings, and Corin went out through the bolted door the way he came, without the bell, and Aza is standing at the cold cabinet the way he stands, as if standing is a thing he has been assigned and is performing to specification, and I have filled the kettle and warmed the pot and put two bags in and poured because my hands needed a task that wasn't counting.

I give him the blue mug. The cracked one. It has become his without either of us deciding it.

"You don't drink it," I say.

"No."

"I know. I make it anyway." I wrap my own hands round my own mug, the chipped one with the faded marigolds, my mother's, and I lean back against the counter and I look at my shop. The buckets have thawed. The carnations have come back from the freeze with that bruised translucence flowers get when they have been too cold and don't yet know they are dying. The seedlings on the windowsill, the ones I moved when the frost came up the glass, are crowded together on the order table now, four eggshells of soil with their thread-thin green just showing, and the four o'clock light, which is not four o'clock light at two in the morning but the streetlamp through the front glass doing its best, lies over everything the same tired silver.

"I keep thinking," I say, "that I should be more frightened than I am."

Aza turns the mug in his hands. Quarter turn. He does this. He is learning the shape of it.

"You heard what it does," he says. "With the ones it keeps."

"I heard." I did. I stood at the black window and listened to him tell Corin, in that flat voice that never once spares me because I asked him not to, that there is a place past the ferry where a thing can be kept lit forever and never let to finish, and I waited for the cold drop, the one I get when a true thing lands, and it didn't come. "Here's the thing nobody in this room understands except me." I take a sip. It is too hot and I take it anyway. "I have spent two years certain I was supposed to be finished. That I walked out of that river with a life that had Mara's name on it. Every morning I open this shop I think, this was hers, this light was hers, this is the day she should have had." I look at him over the rim of the marigolds. "And you've just told me there is a thing that wants to make sure I never finish. Do you understand why that doesn't land on me the way it lands on you? It is the only future anyone has ever described to me that sounds like what I already think I deserve."

He goes very still. Stiller than the standing-still. The mug stops turning.

"That," he says, "is the worst thing you have said to me."

"You said you'd rather have it straight."

"I said it of myself." And there it is, the one note, surfacing through the flat the way the tide surfaces over the mudflat, not loud, just suddenly there where a moment ago was only grey. "I have carried souls who fought, and souls who came easy, and souls who begged me to be quick, and I felt none of them, because feeling them was a thing I could not afford and live. Do you understand. Ten thousand years I have not been able to afford it." He sets the mug down on the cabinet, carefully, both hands, the way you put down something that is not yours. "And I am standing in a florist's at two in the morning and you have told me you think the worst place in the order of the dead is the place you belong, and I can afford it now. I can afford every word of it. That is what you have done to me. You have made me a thing that can be afraid for someone, after ten thousand years of safe, and the first use I have for it is this."

The kettle ticks as it cools. Outside, the late bus that is always late goes by, empty, its lit windows sliding yellow across the ceiling and gone.

I do not know what to say to a death-god who has just told me, in the only way he has, that I have hurt him by agreeing with the thing that wants to keep me. So I do the thing I know how to do. I push off the counter and I cross the cold floor to the windowsill and I pick up one of the eggshells, the one with the boldest thread of green, and I bring it back and I put it down on the cabinet next to the blue mug he will not drink.

"This one's a marigold," I say. "Same as the mug. They come up fast and they're stupidly cheerful and half of them won't make it because I always sow them too thick and can't bear to thin them out. That one there, that green, that came up since the frost. It came up in the cold, after the cold, because it didn't know it wasn't supposed to." I straighten the eggshell so it won't tip. "I'm not telling you I want to be kept lit forever in a shelf in the dark. I don't. I'm telling you I'm bad at finishing. It's the one thing I'm worse at than sending people away." I look up at him. "You want to be afraid for someone. Be afraid for someone who came up in the cold and isn't planning on going back in it. Not for someone lying down in it."

He looks at the seedling. He looks at it a long while, the way he looked at the boy leaning, and I watch a death-god learn the difference between a thing that is finishing and a thing that is starting, and I think it is the first time anyone has put the two of them in front of him close enough to tell apart.

"I have only ever met them at the one end," he says, at last. "I did not know they had the other." He puts out a finger, slow, and stops it a hair from the thread of green, exactly the distance the boy left between himself and my hand, and does not touch it, because he has learned that the cold of him is not kind to growing things. "Ten thousand years of last light. I forgot there is a light that is not the last one. It looks the same. The grey just before dawn and the grey just after dark. The same colour, in your shop, at two in the morning." He draws the finger back. "I have been telling the time by the wrong end of the day."

I do not say anything. There is nothing I could put on top of that which would not weigh less than it.

"Senna," he says.

"Mm."

"Your name." He is not looking at the window. He is looking at the seedling. "Seven letters came back tonight. You counted them. I counted them." He lifts his eyes to me and the flat has gone somewhere I have not seen it go before, gone careful, gone gentle in a way that frightens me worse than the cold ever did. "How many are in your name."

I open my mouth to tell him.

And I find that I cannot remember.

Not the way you forget a word and it sits on your tongue. The way you reach for the bottom stair in the dark and it is not there. I know it is mine. I know my mother said it tired and fond and Mara threw it across rooms. I reach for the count I have kept for two years, six and now seven, the letters coming home one a season, and the count is there, seven, I am sure of seven.

I am not sure of how many there are supposed to be.