Free Dreamhunter by Elizabeth Knox

I’m afraid of,’ Laura said. ‘It’ll be decided.’ She shouldn’t have to explain — he should know. ‘My whole life will be decided.’
    He had walked her to where the platform began to slope down to the trackbed. He stopped, and Laura, looking for an expression of understanding and sympathy, saw instead a look of desperation cross his face. Beyond them the silver railway lines, siding and waiting express all shimmered in the hazy middle distance.
    Laura said to her father, ‘You should have told those people “no”!’ She pointed back at the officials and the special train, keeping her eyes on her father’s face. She was crying now. He should at least say sorry. At least dry her tears. ‘Rose will go there,’ Laura sobbed. At last she let it show — all those weeks and months of being slowly crushed by Rose’s confidence. Rose was her mother, Grace, all over again — fearless and full of appetite. Rose had hung at the front of the crowd that day to look at the corpse, while Laura flinched and fell back.
    Laura cried, ‘Rose will go and I won’t!’
    Her father sighed. ‘Don’t be so soft-headed,’ he said.
    ‘It’s how I feel!’ Laura said. She heard herself, her aggrieved whining.
    ‘As if confidence can affect the outcome,’ her father said — cold and impatient. Then, ‘Laura.’
    His voice had acquired some warmth and urgency, so she looked at him. He was frowning back along the platform. There was a figure apparently wading towards them through the fluid of heat haze, one of the black-clad officials, his hand on his hat, head down into the wind.
    Laura’s father grabbed her arms and leant down to look into her face. Laura could feel the bandages and his fingers beneath them, held stiff so that his palms took the pressure of his grip and not his injured digits. He said, ‘Do you remember any of the songs I taught you?’
    Laura was so surprised by this question that she didn’t answer.
    Her father gave her a little shake. ‘The old family songs. I sang them to you night after night when you were small.’
    ‘The bedtime songs?’ Laura said. ‘“The Hame inheritance”?’ She was unimpressed.
    ‘Do — you — remember — them?’ her father demanded, separating each word.
    He was frightening her. Only the fact she was frightened stopped her from breaking away and shouting at him, ‘What is all this!’ She did manage tomutter, sullen, ‘Why should I bother to remember any old songs when you aren’t going to take the trouble to be there for my Try?’
    Her father’s eyes were wide, his face so pale that Laura could see, very clearly, that the wounds on his lips were crenellations, the marks of teeth, his own upper incisors having bruised and broken the skin on his lower lip. And she saw that his teeth were streaked with blood, as though he’d further wounds inside his mouth.
    He shook her again. ‘The songs,’ he said.
    ‘“Button Thread”, “A Stitch in Time”. The baby songs. Yes!’ Laura shouted at him. She’d heard her aunt calling, far away at the other end of the platform. Aunt Grace yelled, ‘Tziga! It’s time to go!’
    Laura’s father’s grip loosened. He whispered, ‘“Of His Name”.’ It was the title of a song.
    ‘Yes,’ Laura sobbed. ‘That nonsense.’
    ‘Noun sense,’ said her father. Laura felt his wadded hands on her hair, the sticky edges of the bandages catching at her curls. Her father asked her if she could just say the words for him.
    ‘The words of?’
    ‘“Of His Name”.’ Tziga Hame glanced again at the hurrying figure of the official — the nearest one, and all the others coming hard on his heels, Uncle Chorley with them, his pale coat flying. ‘Quickly,’ Tziga said. ‘Please, Laura.’
    She couldn’t sing, her voice was too choked. She recited it, the nonsense nursery song.
    The final measure is his Name.
    Four letters, and four laws.
    The first gives life, the last speech,
    though they are the same.
    Two letters