Before the Hollow Oath

The oath bell rang at midnight, though every adult in Rowanmere said the bell had been dead for forty years. Mara Venn heard it from the narrow room above the old stationer’s shop, where she was supposed to be asleep beneath a quilt embroidered with crooked moons. She had been counting the cracks in the ceiling instead. There were twenty-seven if she counted only the proper cracks, thirty-two if she included the hair-thin one that looked like a river on a map, and one that had not been there before supper.