Her Own Name

When they had eaten, Maeril turned toward Naeris. The young woman set her cup down, but Grim spoke from beside the door before Maeril could ask her next question.

“I hate this room.”

He pointed past the table to the dark arch, then to the seam beside the cupboard.

“I’ve spent the whole meal watching those two. I don’t know what comes through them, and I can’t watch both while listening to you.” His gaze returned to Maeril. “This is going to be a long conversation. We’re having it somewhere else.”

Maeril looked at Naeris. Her eyes were still swollen, but she had stopped clutching the cup. One hand rested on her staff.

“Can you manage a walk?”

Naeris nodded. “Yes.”

Chime rose beside Elisa. “Fortune’s Wheel has rooms above the gaming floor. People pay to be left alone there. Chime can take you.”

Grim opened the ordinary door and looked into the passage.

Elisa folded the papers around what remained of supper. Rishi took the packets while she fastened her cloak. Naeris rose with her staff, and Maeril moved to her side. Grim held the door until everyone had passed, then pulled it firmly shut.

Chime led them through the streets to Fortune’s Wheel. At the entrance, warm air and the noise of the gaming floor met them. Naeris hesitated beside Maeril as a shout went up from one of the tables. Chime turned back, their pink light visible between the moving shoulders, and waited for them.

On their way to the stairs, Maeril passed a table where a patron laid a little stoppered darkness beside a stack of coins. The dealer examined its seal and went on counting. A few eyes followed their group between the tables, then returned to the wagers.

Grim stopped an attendant at the foot of the stairs.

“A room for a private conversation. Five chairs, and nobody coming up to ask what else we want.”

The attendant named a price, took Grim’s coins, and led them upstairs. The clatter of the gaming floor thinned behind them. Naeris climbed with one hand on the rail, her staff in the other. Maeril stayed a step below her.

The attendant opened a room and withdrew. Rishi set the food packets on the table. Elisa drew out a chair, but Naeris lingered near Maeril while she checked the door’s inner edge. Grim waited in the corridor until Maeril nodded, then came in and closed the door. He tried the latch once before letting go.

Before Maeril raised her hand, Naeris shifted aside, clearing the doorframe. Her gaze settled on the wood a handspan above the latch. Maeril paused. That was where she meant to anchor the ward.

She set a modest privacy ward across the frame.

Maeril turned. “You knew where I would put that.”

The young woman nodded.

“And the room at the Ledger.”

Another nod.

“You taught me to think about what a searcher needs.”

Maeril let her hand drop from the frame. The remembered intimacy of the answer was worse than another display of power would have been.

Naeris sat in the chair Elisa had drawn out. Maeril took the place beside her. Rishi sat across from them. Elisa settled near Chime, who hovered above the corner of the table, while Grim chose the seat that let him watch the door.

“Tell us what you can,” Maeril said.

Naeris looked down at her hands. “I am from the future.”

“No.”

The young woman’s head came up.

“That is the version people use to stop thinking. You told me the child is still there and her life is hers. Trust me with the difficult version.”

Naeris’s mouth trembled. For an instant Maeril thought she would cry again. Instead something very close to a laugh escaped.

“You still do that.”

“Apparently I have had insufficient time to improve.”

Rishi leaned forward, his forearms resting on his thighs. He watched Naeris’s breathing settle enough for her to begin.

“I have been Naeris for about fourteen days.”

Grim’s gaze dropped to her staff.

“Fourteen.”

“Days that belong to this life.” She touched her chest. “I remember roughly fifty years after the Moonglade you knew. I remember learning things. Making mistakes. People changing. But Nessari has only lived the few weeks since you left her.”

Maeril stayed still.

“She is not missing those years,” Naeris said. “I have not brought them away from her. They may never happen to her as I remember them.”

“And your body?” Maeril asked.

Naeris opened one hand. There was a small cut beside a knuckle, recent enough to remain red.

“This is the body I woke in.”

Elisa looked at Rishi. “She has been trying to make those three things agree since we met.”

“Too many beginnings,” Chime said softly.

Naeris nodded without looking at them.

Maeril studied the hand on the table. Warm skin, tiny movements, the fatigue of a person who had spent too much of herself in one day. A projection could be made warm. A copy could be given memories. Neither word explained why this woman remembered a life whose child still stood free of it.

“Were you brought here by someone? Through a working you could see?”

“Not in the way you mean.”

“A chronal accident? Something broken around you?”

Naeris pressed the heel of her hand against her brow. “I cannot tell you what happened while I was not yet here.”

Maeril stopped.

Rishi had not asked her any of those questions. He waited through the silence that followed, and at last Maeril heard the useful part of what Naeris had said.

“Then what is the first thing you remember here?”

Naeris lowered her hand.

“Stone.”

The answer came without effort.

“Under my cheek. Cold. Dust in my mouth. A very large room, damaged. There had been people in it. They had gone.”

Rishi sat a little straighter.

“And Aurinax was there.”

Maeril looked at him. He had heard it too.

“The Vault?” she asked.

Naeris nodded. “After the battle.”

“You saw Xanathar?”

“No.”

“The explosion?”

“No. Nothing before the floor. I remember other things as Nessari. I remember what made me want to reach you. But the first moment that continues into this one begins there.”

Maeril pressed her palms against the table.

“What did Aurinax do?”

“He waited until I could answer. He asked whether I could rise.”

“And you did,” Rishi said.

“Yes.”

Something eased in her face at the simplicity of the exchange.

“Later he gave me a name I could use without claiming hers. Naeris. He helped me find a way to Sigil.”

“Why here?”

“A place where I could be someone without explaining all of this first.” Her mouth tightened. “That did not work as well as I hoped.”

Maeril glanced toward the floor, where a distant voice had begun arguing about the terms of a wager. “I imagine it works better for many people.”

She turned to Elisa and Chime. Together they placed their arrival, the days spent finding shelter, and the first encounter with Naeris. Chime distinguished the order more readily than the passage of time. Elisa supplied the rests between one event and the next. Maeril compared them with the Vault battle and the first work beneath Blackstaff Tower.

The sequence fitted closely enough to become frightening.

“Xanathar dreamed things into the city,” she said.

Grim shifted in his chair.

“While awake,” Maeril continued. “Creatures with bodies. Teeth. Weight. They tore people apart. And when he died, the things depending on him went with him.”

Naeris went rigid.

Rishi saw it. “You are still here.”

“I know.”

“Then listen to that too.”

Maeril moved her hand closer to Naeris’s without covering it.

“Xanathar never knew Nessari.”

“I did,” Rishi said.

Maeril looked across at him. He was watching his own hands.

“Manshoon went through my memories. I couldn’t keep him out.”

“Through the staff,” Maeril said.

Rishi nodded.

“That could have left an impression in the wood. Of whatever he reached.”

“Grim broke his hold.”

“Yes. You were free. A trace in the staff could remain after the spell ended.”

She looked at Naeris. “And I broke the staff inside Xanathar. All that power went through a mind that could dream bodies into the world. If it carried traces of Nessari with it—”

“Something Rishi remembered?” Naeris asked.

“I wasn’t there when you built the stove,” Rishi said.

Naeris turned toward him.

“And he has not lived the years you remember,” Maeril said. “Those belong to the life Nessari might yet live. The traces could have given the dream a way to reach you.”

Maeril remembered Rishi’s breath catching while she stood beside him among the coins, still feeling the staff’s magic.

“Vajra called it residue.”

Rishi laid a hand against his breastbone. “I felt something leave me.”

At the time, the blast and all the healing had seemed explanation enough. Maeril pictured the sound wing settling beside Aurinax’s chest, his eyes closing.

“We thought he was resting.”

“And he was there when you woke,” Rishi said.

“He could have perceived you before you were able to perceive anything. Kept the opening from closing until you could live without it.”

Naeris did not answer. She had no memory with which to confirm it.

Grim frowned. “A gold dragon can do that?”

“I do not know what this gold dragon did.” She considered the limits of the question. “There are dragons whose understanding of time reaches beyond ours. He would need something of their wisdom. Enough for one crossing, perhaps. That does not give him every road.”

She looked at Naeris. “Did he tell you how?”

“No.”

“Then we leave the method unknown.”

Rishi rested his hands together. “He told me I could call if the road became too heavy.”

The room grew quiet around the remembered promise.

He looked at Naeris. On the emptied floor of the Vault, after the people who thought the battle finished had gone, she had opened her eyes and found someone still waiting.

“He may have been answering already.”

Naeris drew a slow breath. Her hand moved away from the little cut at her knuckle.

Grim looked at her, concentrating hard enough to make the next question sound entirely practical.

“When you appeared, were you naked?”

Naeris narrowed her eyes.

“That is the dumbest question anyone could possibly have found in this conversation.”

Maeril recognized the frown before the sentence finished. A reluctant warmth moved through her chest.

“Perhaps we have more in common than I thought.”

Grim sat back.

Rishi watched Naeris’s hand settle on the table. The questions had made a little room around her without putting the years into order. She was still holding more remembered loss than the fourteen days of this life could contain.

“The road you remember,” he said. “It has not happened here.”

“No.”

“But you carry it.”

She looked at him.

“What it taught you,” he said. “What it cost you.”

Maeril turned toward him, then back to Naeris.

“An echo,” she said. “Of the woman Nessari might become.”

“Living,” Elisa said quietly.

Maeril nodded. “A living echo. And the life you began in the Vault belongs to you.”

Naeris listened without reaching for the name as a cure.

“What Manshoon found in Rishi’s memories may have helped you cross when the staff broke,” Maeril said. “What his death set in motion gave you a reason to try.”

Her gaze rested on the cut at Naeris’s knuckle, then lifted to her face.

“After that, you chose.”

Naeris turned her hand palm down. “I chose to come here.”

“Yes.”

“I chose to keep you away.”

“Yes.”

The second answer cost them both more than the first. Maeril let it stand.

Chime drifted closer. “Naeris also chose not to leave Elisa alone.”

Elisa reached across the table and touched one of the food stains on Naeris’s sleeve with an almost absent gesture. “And to bring us supper.”

The young woman’s mouth moved, uncertain whether she could bear another kindness.

Maeril no longer searched her face for the child hidden inside it. Nessari had her own face, her own years still to live, and a place no one in this room would take from her.

This woman had a cut on her hand, a terrible day behind her, and a name she had begun learning to answer to.

“Naeris,” Maeril said.

She looked up at once.

Maeril offered her hand across the small space between their chairs. Naeris took it.