The Bell for the Living

The handbell struck my ribs each time I climbed the hill to Saint Orra. I kept one palm over it, as if I could quiet the metal by holding it still.

Behind me, Auden’s shadow crossed the snow. It was so thin that the white showed through its middle. I watched it climb the last steps to the chapel and tried to prepare myself for what Maris had asked me to do: sound the bell once for the dead, once for the person who had to continue.

Vale waited by the open chapel door with Perrin and Eda. Otta had come too, though she’d said little since we left the Bellweather Rooms. Her coat was buttoned wrong at the throat. She held the door against the wind while Vale checked the lane below us.

“We can’t all stay here,” he said. “The list gives me enough to get officers looking for Ivo. Perrin can identify him if we find him first.”

Perrin’s bandage showed beneath his hair. He’d been quiet since Room 42. “I’ll go with Vale.”

I looked at the bell in my hands. The metal had warmed against my body. “Go now. I can do this with Eda.”

Vale glanced at the shadow by my boots. He didn’t ask if I was certain. “I’ll take Maris’s note and a copy of the names. The original stays with you.”

“I don’t want the list.”

“You may still need it.” He folded the note inside his coat. “And if Ivo knows the room is exposed, he may move. We’ll start at the station and send people to the places he’s likely to use.”

Perrin picked up the canvas case containing the Room 42 papers. “I know his face. That’s something.”

It sounded like a small thing to offer. I let it be enough. Vale and Perrin went down the chapel steps together, already speaking in low voices about statements and search orders. The wind took their words before I could make out more than Ivo’s name.

Eda touched my sleeve. “You’re ready?”

“No.” I stepped inside anyway.

The chapel held the chill of a building that had spent the night empty. Dust had gathered along the pews. Above the altar, the stair to the bell tower stood open, its narrow door held by a wedge of wood. Maris had hidden her final record beneath the chapel bell. We’d brought it back here; now the instructions lay folded in my coat beside the key from Room 42.

Otta shut the chapel door. “The bell’s upstairs.”

“I know.”

“I’m telling you because you keep looking at the floor.”

I made myself look at the stairs. The shadow lay at their foot, stretched toward the tower. It seemed to know where we were going. I couldn’t decide whether that was recognition or instinct, and I didn’t want to borrow meaning from a thing that had lost so much of its own.