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Chapter 1
1. The Bone Bell
The bell was white as a knuckle and rang like wet stone struck with bone. It hung from a thorned bough in the churchyard, where the grass grew coarse and the graves wore mossy lids. When the fog rose from the moor, someone was meant to pull the hemp rope once and let the sound ripple through the valley. That was how folk knew to shutter their windows and tie red thread round their door latches. That was how the living remembered the old bargain.
On the morning I came home, the bell rang by itself. No hand on the rope. No breeze enough to swing it. The sound folded and unfolded the mist so that the beech trees swam in and out of shape like fish.
“It’s welcoming you,” said Gareth Reed, the churchwarden, with a grin too wide for comfort. “Or warning. Can never tell which from a bone bell.”
He took my suitcase though I didn’t ask him to, and together we walked the lane that sagged between stone walls slick with lichen. Beyond lay the moor—a slow ocean of heather and sedge and rusted pools. The village crouched on its edge like a clutch of eggs at the lip of a snake’s nest.
I’d come because Grandmother Owen had died and left me the cottage and the keys registered to the bell. I hadn’t come at her burial; I’d been sitting in a city window, hands around a mug that went cold, telling myself that grief didn’t fit where I’d put my life. Now, with the fog clinging to my fringe and the bone bell’s echo in my ribs, I thought that grief had seeped in anyway.
On my doorstep lay a hare, throat slit neat and its mouth stuffed with marsh marigolds.
A blessing. An omen. Both.
“Ah,” said Gareth, rubbing his trimmed beard. “They’re making certain.”
Of what, he didn’t say. He nudged the hare with his boot. “Shall I take it to Elowen to stew?”
“Take it nowhere,” I said, surprising myself. “Leave it.”
Gareth’s grin flickered. “As you like, Miss Owen.”
He meant to put me where Grandmother had stood, in the old role with the old responsibilities. Every village job here had a shape to it. Someone fetched peat from the cuttings; someone tended the crumbling saints; someone kept the moor’s edge tidy with salt and reeds. Someone listened for the mire.
Grandmother had been the Listener.
I hadn’t.
Not since I was small enough to crawl beneath tables and rest my ear on the flagged floor and swear I could hear singing through the stone.
