Overdue

Before we're allowed down, there's paperwork.

Madame Regina Henrietta Magnus Oliviere II — who, yes, still introduces herself with the full broadside — has commandeered the refectory with forms. Since Master Ilyen's visit, the tower's records are being "brought current," which apparently means every soul aboard writes themselves down properly.

Disciple registration, permanent file. Name, origin, path, blood kin.

The form has a first line I stare at for too long.

True name:

Not "name." True name. Because this is a world where names look back, and the tower's paperwork was written by people who know it.

My quill hangs over the line, and for one long, stupid second, a letter tries to happen. The first letter of a word I haven't written since a steel cable took my head off in another universe. It would be so easy. One line on one form in one flying tower — who reads these?

Names look back.

I write Oliver Hale in fair, boring letters, and if the quill drags a little at the start, nobody sees it but me.

"Wonderful," says Regina, stamping it. "And such legible handwriting. The last disciple wrote like a haunted spider."

"There hasn't been a disciple in generations."

"And his handwriting," she says, with feeling, "was TERRIBLE."

⁂

The lesson in being nobody turns out to be exactly that.

"Down there," Nihil says, at the door in the field, in trader's clothes that make him look like a scarecrow with tenure, "you're apprentices of a modest traveling scholar. No tower. No Glooven. No — " he waves at us in general — "tragic backstory radiating off you like heat. You're bored teenagers buying supplies. Being nobody is a skill. Most powerful people die of forgetting it."

"And if someone recognizes us?" Clara asks.

"Recognizes WHAT? Five foreign kids?" He grins. "Nobody out here has ever heard of you. The world's big, children. Enjoy being small."

⁂

The town is called Greyfen, and it's alive, and being alive is the whole show.

Chickens. Mud. A man arguing with another man about a fence. Kids chasing a hoop down the high street. A market that smells like bread and animals and rain that's coming, and not one soul in it knows what a Glooven is beyond a rumor from the east, and I could kiss the mud.

We do the shopping. We are, briefly, gloriously, nobody.

The news finds us anyway, in scraps, at stalls: something happened east — plague, some say; gods' judgment, say others; a merchant swears the whole kingdom just got up and left one night. The church of Pyreon has gone quiet about it, which everyone finds strange, because the church of Pyreon is never quiet about anything.

The world sees a hole where a country was, and it's already telling itself stories with better shapes.

"They don't know," Joseph murmurs, watching a fishwife laugh. "Any of it."

"Kingdoms here are weather," I say, and he looks at me, and we both leave it there.

⁂

And then, on a side street, between a cooper's and a pie stand: books.

A trunk. A huge, absurd, brass-cornered trunk, standing on end, opened out like a wardrobe — and inside it, impossibly, shelves. Deep shelves, deeper than the trunk, rows of spines running back into a warm lamplit space that has no business fitting where it fits.

Leaning against the trunk, arms crossed, white hair, pointed ears, watching the street like it owes her rent:

Arwen.

"No," I say, out loud, involuntarily.

Her eyes find me. Narrow. Land on my face and go through some archive of her own.

"...Renting district," she says slowly. "Little shop with the good ceiling. You took my Hale."

"You're ALIVE—"

"You took," she repeats, with the gravity of a war tribunal, "my Hale."

"The city — the demons — HOW—"

"I'm asking the questions here, boy." She pushes off the trunk. She looks thinner. There are new lines at her eyes, and her dress has been mended at the shoulder by someone impatient, and she is so specifically, argumentatively alive that my chest hurts. "One volume. 'The Great Sacred State of Hale.' Rented, not sold. Due back in one week." She holds out her hand, palm up. "It has been five."

"...It's under a castle," I say. "The castle is under a demon. The demon may be under new management. It's complicated."

Arwen looks at me for a long moment.

"Late fee," she says, "is one silver a week."

"You're charging me late fees across the FALL OF A CIVILIZATION—"

"The book didn't fall. The book was BORROWED." A pause. One corner of her mouth is fighting for its life. "Five silver, or you tell me how five children I last saw buying candy apples walked out of a dead kingdom, and we call it even. Elves rent stories too."

So we buy her a pie, and she tells first.

⁂

Her escape costs her something to tell — you can see the toll booth in her face each time the story turns. When the voice came ("that VOICE, boy — I dropped a first edition"), she got her trunk open, packed four hundred books in a space that holds four hundred books ("elven space-folding," she says, in the tone other people say "family recipe"), got the trunk on a cart, and drove west with the sky coming apart behind her.

"The roads did the rest. Awful roads. Full of awful people." She pats the trunk. "Nobody robs a book trunk. Bandits can't read; it embarrasses them."

"There are bandits?" Clara asks.

"Girl, there's a dead kingdom one border east. Half the scum of three nations is headed there to pick its teeth, and the roads to it run through HERE." She says it lightly, the way Marla reads recipes, and my neck does the thing it learned in a forest. "Greyfen hires caravan guards at double rates. Everyone's someone's escort now. Interesting times."

She looks us over — five kids, tower-fed, standing wrong for peasants and she obviously knows it — and doesn't ask what we are. Elves rent stories; they don't grab them.

"And my Hale?" she says instead. "You read any of it before you buried it under a civilization?"

"Twice," I say. "The council of five hundred. The fifty philosopher kings. The part where nobody knows who chooses the five hundred."

"Mm. The good part." Her eyes stay on me a second too long, the way everyone's eyes stay on me a second too long lately, like I'm a word on the tip of the world's tongue. "Odd reading, for a boy named Hale."

"It's a common name."

"No," she says, pleasantly, "it isn't."

She turns to dig in the trunk before I can decide what my face is doing, and comes out with a slim, worn copy — a cheaper edition of the same book, corners soft with handling.

"Rental," she says. "One week. I know where you live."

"You genuinely don't."

"I know where EVERYONE lives, eventually. I'm a librarian."