Prologue

The Name Rehearsal

The cathedral gives us one night to practice forgetting the people we love.

We stand in two lines beneath the mountain, each singer holding a strip of white cloth embroidered with the name she will surrender tomorrow. A hundred strips hang from the rafters. They stir though the air is still.

Mine says SEREN MADDOX.

My mother’s name has been sewn in red silk because she died in winter. The thread catches the rehearsal lamps and looks wet.

"Do not improvise," Gwen whispers beside me.

"I have never improvised during a legally sanctioned extraction of grief."

"Eira."

"That was almost true."

Gwen closes her eyes. She has already given the church three names. The empty places are recorded in her family’s Bible so she can mourn people she no longer remembers. Before each ceremony, she reads their pages and cries with the disciplined uncertainty of someone grieving evidence.

Tomorrow the cathedral will take my mother’s name and the memories attached to it. In exchange, the mountain choir will strengthen the sleeping wards that protect the lower valleys from fire and dragons.

That is what Bishop Morys tells us.

The mountain disagrees.

I felt it when we entered: a second rhythm beneath the organ pipes, too slow for music and too regular for shifting stone. Every fourth beat warms the soles of my slippers. No one else reacts.

Morys raises his baton from the transept. "Again. The sacrificial verse must be clean enough to carry a name without tearing it."

His voice is beautiful in the way knives are beautiful when arranged by size.

We inhale.

The first chord enters the red pillars. I sing the prescribed alto, careful and round. The cloth in my hands tightens. A memory loosens behind my ribs: my mother at a flour-covered table, though her face is already gone; a melody rising from her throat while rain tapped the shutters.

The cathedral drinks.

I stop singing.

The chord buckles around the gap.

Morys’s baton cuts downward. Silence hits harder than sound.

"Sister Maddox."

"There is something under the floor."

No one looks down. Obedience here includes the direction of one’s eyes.

"There are magma conduits beneath the floor," he says. "You feel heat because the mountain protects us."

The pulse comes again.

It is not heat this time. It is a word pressed through stone.

Hungry.

I nearly drop the name-strip.

Morys descends the steps. Gold thread crowds his vestments, each line purchased with someone’s memory. "Tomorrow ten thousand voices will hold the creature in sleep for another year. If one singer indulges her need to be exceptional, villages burn. Do you understand?"

His hand closes around my wrist. The contact is gentle enough to look pastoral from a distance.

"I understand how often power describes curiosity as arson," I say.

Gwen makes a small sound of despair.

Morys’s fingers tighten. "Beneath the bell. One hour. Perhaps pain will teach the note humility cannot."

The punishment chamber hangs under the oldest bell tower. Its copper walls turn every breath into an echo. I am locked inside with my mother’s name tied around my throat.

At midnight the bell moves without ringing.

The copper floor splits along a hairline seam. Red light rises through it. I kneel and press my ear to the metal.

The sound below is enormous.

Chains drag over stone. Wings flex in a space too small for them. A woman takes one breath and holds it for so long that I begin holding mine with her.

Then I hear the melody my mother used to sing.

Not the whole tune. Four notes, repeated imperfectly by something that has only known them through rock.

I hum the fifth.

The pulse below stumbles.

A voice enters my mind, rough as volcanic glass.

Who carries that name?

My hand closes over the cloth at my throat. "Seren Maddox."

The red seam widens.

No. The voice is nearer now, threaded with rage and a loneliness so old it has become architecture. Who carries yours?

I look toward the locked door. In the cathedral above, attendants are arranging ten thousand name-strips for tomorrow. Mine will be fed into the same hidden machinery as all the others.

"Eira," I whisper.

The mountain repeats it.

Not as command. As discovery.

Images break across my thoughts: an adult woman nailed beneath the cathedral in human form, wrists marked by iron; crimson wings forced flat against red stone; choirs drawing power through her blood while priests call the theft protection. I see valleys burning beneath a dragon’s fury. I see the same dragon turning away from fleeing children when vengeance could have swallowed them.

Neither victim nor innocence. A dangerous woman made into a useful monster.

What are you? I ask.

The answer comes with a heat that blisters the copper beneath my palm.

Rhiannon Vawr.

The bell strikes once.

Her name vanishes from my mind as soon as the final vibration fades.

I know someone spoke to me. I know the voice was female, furious, and waiting below. But when I try to hold the name, I find only a red-shaped absence.

That is the cathedral’s magic. Every note that reaches the dragon takes a name from someone who once loved.

I untie my mother’s cloth.

Tomorrow, if I sing the score exactly, the church will consume Seren. If I refuse, Morys will replace me and take Gwen’s fourth name instead. Obedience and rebellion have been composed into the same trap.

Unless the score has another door.

I hum my mother’s melody again. At the fourth note, I bend downward where the hymn rises. The copper floor warms. Far below, something answers with a low harmonic the cathedral never taught us to hear.

The lock opens at dawn.

Gwen waits outside, pale with worry. "Promise me you will sing the clean chord."

I put the name-strip back around my throat.

"I promise I will sing the note the mountain needs."

It is not the promise she asked for.

We climb toward the smoked-glass altar. Beneath every step, the red dragon follows my heartbeat. Above us, ten thousand singers prepare to make forgetting sound holy.

I enter the center ring and wait for Bishop Morys to raise his baton.