One Ring Per Soul

In Eldermere the bell rings once for every soul that leaves the town, and it has done so, faithfully, for as long as the town has had a name. One ring per death. The whole town stops when it sounds. People count under their breath, and then go and find out who. Corin had been apprenticed to the bell for two years. He had not chosen the work. The bell chose its own ringers — it had always done so — and one autumn, when Corin was fourteen, the old bellringer had simply stopped him in the lane and said the bell had spoken his name, and that had been that. The work was not hard. The bell told him when. He climbed, he rang, he counted. It was solemn and it was steady and Corin had grown, slowly, almost to like it. Then, on a still night in his third year, the bell woke him at the wrong hour, and it gave him a name to ring, the way it always did. But the name belonged to the baker's wife. And the baker's wife, Corin knew for an absolute certainty, was downstairs in her kitchen at that very moment, alive, and singing.