Send Me Away

I cannot remember how many letters are in my name.

I sit with that the way you sit with a step that isn't there, the lurch and then the careful settling, the hand going out for a rail. I have my own name in my mouth. Senna. I can say it. I can hear my mother saying it from the back room, tired, fond, here-love-come-and-eat. I can hear Mara throwing it across the shop like something she expected me to catch. The sound of it is mine, all of it, and it does not have a number any more. It is a word that has stopped being countable, the way the tide has stopped being in or out.

"Senna." Aza says it again, and even the saying of it now feels like a thing he is checking, a measurement he is taking before it changes. "How many."

"I don't know." My voice comes out smaller than I want it to. I am holding the marigold mug and the tea has gone the temperature of the room and I do not put it down because putting it down would mean I have nothing in my hands. "I had it. I have had it for two years. Six, and tonight seven, I know seven, I counted the strokes on the glass same as you did. But the whole thing. The number it's supposed to make when it's finished." I make myself look at him. "It's gone. Not the name. The end of it. I can't find where it stops."

He does not move and the not-moving is its own answer, the way the cold dropping is an answer.

Behind him the window is clear again, the streetlamp doing four o'clock's work at near three in the morning, the mudflats out there grey on grey, and I understand without being told that this is worse than the seventh letter. The seventh letter was the thing being added to. This is the thing being taken from. Somewhere out past the bell and the bolted door, a patient hand that has all the time there has ever been is not only writing my name back in. It is taking the keeping of it away from me, one count at a time, the way you take a thread off a spool, so that by the time the name is whole it will be wholly theirs and not at all mine, written in a book I have never read in a hand I will never see, and I will not even have the number to argue with.

"That's it pulling," I say. "Isn't it. Same as the seventh letter. It's not just growing my name back. It's taking it off me while it does."

"Yes."

I wait for the cold drop, the one I get when a true thing lands. It does not come, and I realise it has not come all night, and I realise why. You only get the drop when a thing surprises you. None of this surprises me. I have known, somewhere under the two years of opening the shop and remembering the customers' usual orders and counting the letters home one a season, that the name was never going to stay mine. That was always the shape of the kindness Mara did me. A loan, not a gift. The bill comes.

I set the mug down after all.

"Aza."

He turns his head, that deliberate turning, the gesture of a thing relearning it has a face. The blue cracked mug is on the cabinet where he set it, untouched, his.

"On the first night," I say, "when Corin told me you were the nearest thing to my death in the world. You asked me to do one thing." The words are difficult, the way swallowing is difficult when your throat has decided not to. "You asked me to send you away. Tell you to go, and mean it."

The one note surfaces under the flat, the tide coming up over the mudflat, suddenly there where a second ago was only grey. He knows what I am doing. He has known since I said his name.

"I remember," he says.

"I didn't do it." I am counting my own breath now, in and out, because there is nothing else left to count. "I made you a cup of tea instead. I've made you a lot of cups of tea." I look at all of them in my mind, the chain of evenings, the kettle, the warmed pot, the blue mug becoming his without either of us deciding it, a death-god learning the shape of a thing held in two hands. "And I've worked out tonight what I was doing every single time. I was keeping you near me. The one person who told me the truth straight, the one who didn't tiptoe round the dead sister, the one who counts my heartbeats out loud at the wrong moments and makes me laugh when I haven't got any laugh left. I kept you because you were the only company I had that didn't flinch." My eyes are stinging and I let them. "And every evening I kept you, you got nearer. That's the whole of it, isn't it. You being near me isn't separate from the danger. You are the danger. The nearer you are when my name finishes, the surer it is you're the one bound to take me."

"Yes," he says again, and the word costs him something now that it did not cost him on the first night, and I can hear the difference, because I have learned the seam in his voice the way he has learned the seam in mine.

"So I'm going to do it." My hands are flat on the counter, open, the tray-just-put-down stance, the one he says he has watched ten thousand years of frightened people make. "The thing you asked for. I'm going to send you away. Because if you're not near me when the hour comes, maybe it has to send someone else. Corin, or one of the others, some reaper who never made me tea, who'll do it the way it's meant to be done, quick and kind and gone. And you won't be the one who has to carry me. You've carried enough. You said you've carried more of the dead than there are names for and you weren't allowed to feel a single one, and I am not going to be the one you finally feel and have to walk to the ferry anyway. I won't do that to you. I can do this one thing. I'm good at sending people away. I've been doing it my whole life. I sent everyone away after Mara. You're the only one who wouldn't go."

The shop is very quiet. The seedlings on the order table catch the streetlamp, four eggshells of soil, the bold thread of green standing up out of the cold it came up in.

"Go," I say. "Aza. Go, and don't come back, and let it be someone else's page. Please."

And I mean it. That is the thing that frightens me, saying it across the counter at three in the morning: I have said it before in this shop, on the first night, except I never said it then, I only stood there and didn't, and now I have said it and I find I mean it all the way down, the way you mean a thing you have decided is the last kind thing you have left to give. I sent him away. I sent Death out of my mother's shop to save him from me.

He looks at me for a long time. Then he picks up the blue mug.

He does not leave with it. He holds it, both hands, the way I showed him, the way he holds it when he is trying to find a word in the wrong order, and he looks down into the cold tea he will never drink, and when he speaks the flat is gone somewhere I have not heard it go, gone steady in a way that is worse than gentle.

"I cannot," he says.

"You can. You asked me to. I'm doing what you asked."

"You are." He sets the mug down. "On the first night I asked you to send me away because I believed it would make the hour easier. I believed that if I was not near you, the binding might pass to another, and you are right that it might." He lifts his eyes. "I have done the arithmetic since. I did it tonight, while you were being brave to the boy. I have not told you, because I did not know how to find the words, and I am finding them now in the wrong order, the way I find all of them." He draws a breath he does not need, the new involuntary thing. "A reaper is bound to the nearest. I have been nearest you for two years. To make another reaper nearer than I am, I would have to be further from you than I have been since the night of the river. And I cannot, Senna. Not because I will not. Because I have tried."

The floor does the not-there step again.

"You've tried," I say.

"Tonight. After I held this mug and decided I would stand in the doorway with you, I went to the far edge of the Hush, between two beats of your heart, as far as the grey goes, to see how far I could put myself from you and still be." He says it flatly, an entry read off a page. "The compulsion is a tide. You know this. I told you. I have delayed a death out of pity and borne the pull of it for a lifetime of the one I was delaying, and never once been moved against my will. I am old. I can bear a great deal of pull." He stops. "I could not bear that. I got as far as the shore and the ferry and the thing in me that has carried the dead for ten thousand years turned me round like a stone in a current and walked me back to your street before I had decided to come. I am not near you because I keep choosing to be near you. I stopped being able to choose it tonight, when the boy said your name. I am bound to you already, Senna. Not to the name when it finishes. To you. Now."

The floor does the not-there step a third time, and I stop counting it.

"That's not how it's meant to work," I say. "You said it yourself, the first night. The binding's to the name. When the name finishes. Not before."

"No," he says. "It is not how it is meant to work."

And I watch the same thing land on him that landed on me with the seven letters and again with the lost count, the slow understanding that the rules we have been handed are not the rules being kept any more. He has carried the dead for ten thousand years on one comfort, that the Ledger is never wrong, that the law is the law and he has only ever had to do what was written. And he is standing in my shop telling me he has been bound early, bound to a soul whose name is not finished, by a binding that is not supposed to exist, the way I have been losing the count of a name I am supposed to own.

"Aza." My mouth has gone dry. "If you're bound to me before my name's even written. If the rules round me are bending that far." I make myself say it. "Then what's writing them now."

He does not answer.

He is looking past me, at the front window, where the streetlamp has been doing four o'clock's tired silver work all night, and I turn to follow his eyes, and the streetlamp is still on out in the street, I can see it burning orange through the glass.

But the light coming into the shop has changed. It is not the streetlamp's any more, and it is not the four o'clock grey either. It is the flat even greyness of five minutes before a dawn that is hours and hours away, the colour Aza named not an hour ago, the colour of the held breath between worlds, and it is coming in under the bolted door and up the inside of the glass like water finding its level, and the carnations in the bucket nearest it have stopped breathing, held at the turn, the way they go still only when something that should not be in my shop is standing in it.

I have seen that light only from the inside.

The Hush has come up to the door of Marlowe and Marlowe, and this time it is not sending a frightened child to knock.