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Chapter 1
Chapter One: The Softest Town in the World
In Bellhaven, the hinges never creaked.
Every door in town was oiled twice a month, whether it needed it or not. Gates were fitted with felt. Cartwheels wore leather shoes. The bakers wrapped their trays in cloth so the tins would not clatter, and the schoolmistress taught the alphabet in a whisper, and children learned before they learned to walk that laughter was a thing you did behind your hand, like a cough you were ashamed of.
Hattie Sparrow was eleven years old and had lived in the softest town in the world all her life, and she had never once got used to it.
She was walking home along Kettle Lane with a coil of copper wire over her shoulder, and she could hear everything. Not the way other people heard. Other people heard what was happening. Hattie heard what had happened, too — the leftovers of it, the grain of sound sleeping down inside things the way rings sleep inside a tree.
The doorframe of the cobbler's shop still held a shout in it. A man's shout, old and furious, from some argument forty years gone. Hattie could feel it whenever she passed, like a splinter under the paint.
The railing outside the bakery hummed with a hundred mornings of people leaning on it.
And at home, in the crooked stone house at the end of the lane, her grandmother's cough still lived in the kettle. Grandmother Sparrow had been dead six years. But she had coughed over that kettle every winter of her life, and the copper had kept a little of it, the way copper keeps everything, and on cold nights when Hattie put her ear to the bottom of it she could hear a small dry rasp that nobody else in the world could hear.
She had told Agatha Trimble about the kettle once. Agatha had gone very quiet and said, "Don't tell that to anybody else, chick."
Hattie pushed open her own front door. It did not creak. Otto oiled it himself, every second Sunday, with the patient face of a man doing something he did not believe in.
"I'm back," she said.
From the back room came two small bright rings. *Ting. Ting.*
Two rings meant *yes*. Or *hello*, or *I hear you*, or *good*, depending on which bell he used and how he held it. Otto Sparrow had a tray of little bells beside his chair, each one the size of a thimble or a plum, and he talked with them the way other people talked with their mouths.
Hattie went through. Her grandfather sat by the window with his hands around a cup of tea, a big slow man with white hair and forearms like knotted rope. He had been a bell-founder once — the last one, in fact, in a town that had stopped wanting bells. The forge behind the house had been cold since before Hattie was born.
Otto had no voice. He had given it away thirty years ago, up the mountain, and everyone said he had been very brave and very generous and nobody, not once, said anything else about it at all.
He raised his eyebrows at the wire.
"Agatha wants me to spool it before tomorrow," said Hattie. "There's a lot of tomorrow."
Otto picked up a bell with a long throat and slid his thumbnail down its side so it made a little tumbling run of notes. That was a joke. Hattie was never entirely sure what the joke was, but she always laughed, because it made the corners of his eyes crinkle.
"It isn't funny," she said. "It's Quieting Night. I'm doing my first offering."
The crinkles went out of his eyes.
Otto set the bell down very carefully, the way you set down something you might otherwise throw. Then he tapped one bell, once. *Ting.*
One ring meant *no*.
"I have to," said Hattie. "Everyone does."
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he reached over and put his big warm hand flat on the top of her head, which was the thing he did instead of arguing, and she leaned into it, and the two of them stayed like that while the light went orange over the slate roofs and, somewhere in the valley, absolutely nothing made a sound.
Here is what Bellhaven believed.
Up behind the town stood the Quiet Peaks, four grey mountains with their heads in the weather. In the mountains lived the Hush — an old, hungry, invisible thing that swallowed sound. If the Hush was not fed, it came down. And where it came down, sound simply stopped. A cow would open its mouth and nothing would come out. A woman would call her children and the words would fall dead an inch from her lips. And if you stayed in it too long, you slipped: you went quiet all the way through, and did not come back.
They called that a hush-slip. Hattie's mother had died in one when Hattie was three.
So every autumn, on Quieting Night, every household in Bellhaven gave the mountain one sound. Not a coin. Not a sheep. A sound. A lullaby. A whistle. The particular way you said your husband's name. Something real, something that came out of you and did not come back, and the more it hurt to lose it, the better the mountain liked it — that was what the Ringers said.
The sounds were caught on copper wire by the Sound-Keeper and wound onto spools, and the spools were carried up the mountain by the Ringers in white sacks, and the town got a little quieter every year, and called it safety.
Hattie was apprentice to the Sound-Keeper. She had been for eight months. She was good at it — better than good, Agatha said, better than anyone Agatha had trained in forty years — because Hattie could see where a sound sat on the wire. She could feel it settle. She could tell a wobbly winding from a true one with her eyes shut.
What she could not do, that whole last week before Quieting Night, was decide what to give.
Because she only had one thing.
She had eight bars of a lullaby. Eight bars, no words, in a voice she could not quite picture a face for any more. Her mother had hummed it to her in the dark, and Hattie had been three years old, and somehow it had stuck.
It was all she had.
And on Quieting Night, standing in the square with the whole town watching, that was what she meant to give away.
