The Name You Owe

The lot had been cut from the ash on the village green, as it was every seventh winter, and when the reeve turned it to the lantern it said Tam. Maren Quill watched her brother read his own name on a strip of pale wood and understood, with the calm that comes just before grief, that she had already decided.

By midnight she was standing at the Tithe Stone with his coat buttoned over her own and his cap pulled low, though she did not expect the disguise to hold. The stone marked the edge of Thornmere, where the village hedges gave up and the old forest began. Frost had silvered the brambles. Beyond them the trees stood so close that the dark between them looked solid, like a door someone had forgotten to paint.

She had bound books for eleven years. She knew how to make things hold. She had stitched a letter from her mother into the spine of her own ledger, the last one her mother had written before the wood took her, and she could feel it now against her ribs, a small stiff square of paper that said: Maren, keep the fire in. Her mother had come back from Thornmere after her year. She had come back gentle and vague and smelling of cut grass in the middle of December, and she had never again known her daughter’s face.

The bells in the village stopped. Maren did not hear the Warden arrive. One moment the path into the trees was empty; the next he was standing on it, as if he had always been there and she had only now been permitted to notice.

He was taller than the stories made him and less beautiful, which was somehow worse. The stories gave him silver hair and a cruel mouth. In the lantern light his hair was the dull brown of winter bracken, and his mouth was only a mouth, faintly chapped by the cold. It was his stillness that was wrong. Nothing about him moved with his breath. His coat was the grey-green of lichen, and there were thorns worked into the collar, real ones, their points turned inward toward his throat.

“You are not Tam Quill,” he said.

“No.”

“The lot is not a suggestion.” His voice was low and oddly courteous, the voice of someone reading aloud a contract he had not written. “The name was given. The name is owed.”

“Then take mine instead. I’m his sister. I’m older, I’m stronger, and I know how to work.” She had rehearsed it all the way up the lane, and still it came out too fast. “He’s fourteen. He cries when the geese are killed for Midwinter. He’d be no use to you.”

Something moved at last in the Warden’s face. Not a smile, but the idea of one, considered and put aside. “You think we take them for their use.”

“I think you took my mother,” Maren said, “and sent back something that still wears her apron.”

The frost on the brambles cracked all at once, with a sound like a thousand small bones. She did not flinch, though she wanted to. The Warden looked at her for a long moment, and she had the uncomfortable impression that he was reading her the way she read a damaged binding: where the thread had held, where it had given, where the glue had been laid on too thick to hide a tear.

“Elin Quill,” he said quietly. “Seven winters ago. She served in the stillroom. She was very good with bergamot.” He tilted his head. “You have her hands.”

Maren’s throat closed. For seven years no one had said her mother’s name as though it belonged to someone who had once been whole.

“What did you do to her?”

“Less than you think. More than I would like.” He glanced at the dark behind him, and for the first time she saw that the thorns in his collar had drawn blood, a thin line of it, dried and old, as though he had worn them for a very long time. “There are rules in Thornmere older than I am. One of them is that a substitute must be paid for. Freely offered is not the same as freely taken.”

“Name your price.”

“Careful.” He said it almost gently. “In my court, that sentence has undone better people than you.”

He stepped off the path. The forest did not follow him, but she felt it lean. Up close he smelled of rain on stone and, very faintly, of bergamot, and she hated him for that more than for anything else. He held out his hand, palm up, the way a man offers to help someone over a stile. There was nothing in it. There was also, she understood, everything in it.

“There are three ways past the stone tonight,” the Warden said. “You may give me your true name. Not Maren. The other one, the one your mother whispered over your cradle before she forgot you. Then I take you in your brother’s place, and you belong to Thornmere for a year and a day. Or you may bargain with me, as your mother did not, and we will see which of us is better at reading the fine print.” His eyes, she saw now, were the colour of deep water under ice. “Or you may walk past me into the wood with nothing given and nothing promised, and take your chances with the court as it is. Some have. I do not recommend it.”

Behind her, far down the hill, a door opened in the village, and she heard, or thought she heard, Tam calling her name. The ordinary one. The one that meant nothing to anyone but him.

The Warden waited, hand open, thorns at his throat. The frost began to creep back over the brambles, patient as ink.