The Name on the Spine
The Collegium bell rang four times, and Sol Maren did not look up.
She was on the third rung of the library ladder with a stack of new books pressed against her hip. The air smelled like dust, candle wax, and old paper going soft at the corners. Somewhere below her, a first-year scratched a quill across a page, stopped, and scratched again. He was probably fixing a mistake he did not want anyone to see.
Sol knew the feeling.
She slid the next book onto the shelf. It was a fat blue volume with gold lettering on the spine. The Veshti Laments. A New Translation by Professor Aldous Brandt.
She stopped.
Her thumb rested on the gold letters of his name. Then she pulled the book back out and opened it near the middle, where the third Lament began. It was the one about the drowned fishing fleet, the one her grandmother used to hum while gutting herring.
She did not need to read the whole page. Her eyes went straight to the line she was looking for.
The sea gave back our men as salt.
In the old Veshti, the word was not salt. It was sorrow. The two words sat almost on top of each other in the dialect, one breath apart, and only someone who had grown up on the Saltmere docks would hear the difference. Sol had changed it on purpose, years ago, in the first draft she handed to Brandt. She had changed it in every draft since.
It was a tiny thing. It was a thumbprint in the wet clay of someone else’s work.
Her words, she thought. His name.
She closed the book. Her fingers were stained black to the second knuckle, as always, and the ink had left a smudge on the gold cover. She rubbed at it with her sleeve until it was gone.
“There she is.”
The voice came from the foot of the ladder. It was warm and a little rough, like a favorite blanket. Sol did not have to look down to know who it was.
“Professor,” she said.
“Ysolde. I have been hunting for you all afternoon.” Aldous Brandt stood with his hands folded over his round belly, silver hair combed back, his gray coat brushed clean. He smiled up at her the way he always did, the smile of a man who had never once been in a hurry. “I see you found our new edition.”
Our.
The word came out a half-beat slow, like a step missed on a dark stair. Sol had noticed that years ago. She had never worked out what it meant.
“I did,” she said. She came down the ladder with the book still in her hand. “It looks lovely.”
“It does, doesn’t it? The printer outdid himself.” He took it from her gently and turned it over, admiring the binding. “Three years of work, and here it is. We should be proud of this one.”
We. Slow again.
Sol opened her mouth. The words were right there, lined up and ready. I did the translation. You signed it. Or the smaller, safer one: Could my name go on the inside page, just once?
She had practiced both in the mirror.
“The Laments are beautiful,” she said instead. “People will love them.”
“They will. And that is thanks to you, my dear. Do not think I do not know it.” He patted her shoulder. His hand was soft and heavy. “You have the best ear in the Collegium. I tell the others that all the time.”
Then tell them in print, she thought. She smiled instead.
That was the problem with Brandt. He was kind. He had pulled her out of a scholarship line when she was seventeen, a fisherman’s daughter with salt in her accent and one good dress. He had fed her, taught her, and sent her letters when she was sick. Every time she tried to be angry at him, the anger turned into something heavier and harder to carry.
It turned into guilt.
Her room at the Collegium was a narrow box on the fourth floor, with one window and one candle. By the time she climbed the stairs, the sky outside had gone the color of old pewter.
Sol sat on the edge of her bed and dumped her purse onto the blanket.
Coins slid out in a tired little pile. She sorted them by hand, the way she did every week. Copper pennies in one stack. Silver halves in another. Two silver crowns, which she had been saving since spring.
Thirteen crowns. Seventy-seven short.
The letter from the moneylender sat folded beside her pillow. She did not need to read it again. Master Hob Maren owes the sum of ninety crowns on the vessel Gull’s Mercy. Payment in full is due on the last day of the month, or the boat passes to the lender.
Her father’s boat. The only thing he had ever owned that was worth anything.
Sol put her face in her hands.
She could ask Brandt for an advance. But that would mean asking, and asking meant telling him why. Then he would be kind about it, and she would owe him again.
She sat there until her candle burned a thumb’s width lower. Then someone pounded on her door.
“Miss Maren! The Professor wants you in his study. Now, if you please.”
It was a first-year, breathless, with ink on his chin. He did not wait for an answer. His footsteps clattered back down the stairs.
Sol scooped her coins into the purse and followed.
Brandt’s study was on the ground floor, behind a green door with a brass lion for a knocker. She had been in it a thousand times. It smelled of pipe smoke and lemon oil, and the fire was always lit. She had always thought of it as the safest room in the world.
Tonight the door stood wide open. A stranger was inside.
He was a tall man in a long red riding coat, mud to the knees, with a leather satchel strapped across his chest. A silver badge was pinned to his collar. It was a crowned key, and Sol knew it at once. Every child in Aurenne learned it before they learned their letters.
A royal courier.
“Ah, Ysolde,” said Brandt. “Come in, come in. Close the door.”
She closed it. The room felt smaller than she remembered.
Brandt stood by the fire with a paper in his hand. It was thick cream parchment, folded in thirds, with a blob of black wax at the seam. The wax was stamped with the seal of the Queen Regent. Sol could see it from across the room.
“The courier arrived an hour ago,” Brandt said. “He has been kind enough to wait while I read.” He gave a small, careful laugh. “It seems we have been honored with a commission.”
We. Half a beat too slow.
Sol looked at the courier. He met her eyes for a moment, then looked away toward the fire, as if he had already guessed how this evening would end and did not care to watch it unfold twice.
“What kind of commission?” she asked.
“A very grand one.” Brandt cracked the seal with his thumb. He unfolded the parchment and began to read aloud, his voice easy at first, almost cheerful. “By order of Her Majesty the Queen Regent, a scholar of the dead tongues is summoned to travel to the palace at...”
He stopped.
The color left his face all at once. It did not fade. It drained, like water out of a basin. His lips went the shade of old candle wax.
“Professor?” said Sol.
He swallowed. “To the palace at Nocthorne,” he read, very quietly. “And there to read aloud, in full and with true understanding, the Treaty of Hollow Vows. This must be done before the Ninth Midwinter. The scholar will be given safe passage, and the Crown’s gratitude.”
The fire popped. Nobody moved. The courier shifted his weight, just once, and glanced at Brandt’s shaking hands with something that was not quite pity and not quite boredom. He had the look of a man who had delivered this particular letter before, to other studies, other fires.
Sol had heard of Nocthorne. Everyone had. It was a place you said in a low voice, like the name of a sickness. It was a black palace in the northern woods, behind the stones where the Hollow began. Mothers used it to frighten children into bed.
It is fear, she thought. She had seen Brandt tired, and she had seen him old. This was neither of those. This was the look of a man who had walked into a room and found something waiting for him in the dark.
“Sir,” said the courier, his voice flat, worn smooth by repetition, like a phrase said too many times to too many frightened men. “I will need an answer by morning.”
“Yes. Yes, of course.” Brandt folded the parchment. His hand shook, a tidy little tremble from the wrist that started a moment after he looked down at it. “Forgive me. My hands have not been what they were. The cold, you understand.”
The study was warm enough to sweat in. The courier’s eyes flicked to the fire, then back to Brandt, and something in his jaw tightened, though he said nothing.
Sol said nothing either.
“I am afraid I cannot go,” Brandt went on. “My health, you see. It would be foolish to try. The roads, the weather, at my age.” He lifted his eyes to her. They were wet. “But we cannot refuse the Crown, Ysolde. Not without consequence.”
We. Slow.
“Professor,” Sol said carefully, “you are the one who has studied the old treaties. You wrote the book.”
“Did I?” Brandt smiled, and it did not reach his eyes. “I wonder.”
He crossed the room, stopped in front of her, and took both of her hands in his. His palms were cold and damp. The tremble was gone.
“Ysolde,” he said. “My dear girl. I need to tell you something I should have said years ago.”
Her heart began to thud. She could not have said why.
“You are better than I am,” said Brandt.
The words landed in the room like a dropped plate.
“You always have been. I have known it since the day you walked through our door, a skinny girl with a salt-stained coat and an ear that could hear a word breathe. Ysolde is better than I am.” He squeezed her fingers. “There. I have said it. I should have said it a long time ago.”
Sol’s throat closed up.
For nine years, she had waited to hear those words. She had imagined them in a hundred different rooms. She had practiced her own reply in the dark. And now they were here, from his mouth, in this room, with the fire crackling and a stranger watching.
He sees me, she thought. He finally sees me.
Then a thought crept in behind it, cold and quiet. Why now?
She pushed it away.
“I want you to go in my place,” Brandt said softly. “The Crown will pay well. Better than well. A commission like this could settle a great many debts.”
He knew about the boat. Of course he did. She had told him once, years ago, on a bad night. He had kept it the way he kept everything.
“It would be dangerous,” she said.
“It would be an honor.” He kissed the top of her head. “And I would not trust it to anyone else. Not anyone, my dear. Only you.”
Only you. Not slow at all.
Sol said nothing for a long moment. She thought of the boat rocking at its mooring, of the thirteen crowns on her blanket, of Brandt’s hand finally, after nine years, resting warm on her shoulder instead of on a book she had translated alone. She thought of the courier’s eyes sliding away from hers, and of the strange, hollow pause before the professor had said *we*.
“How long would I be gone?” she asked.
“Weeks, perhaps. A season at most.” Brandt did not quite meet her eyes when he said it. “You would be home before you knew it, my dear. Home, and the boat saved, and your name finally spoken of in the halls the way it ought to be.”
Sol closed her eyes.
Seventy-seven crowns. Three weeks, perhaps a season. Her father’s grey beard bent over a pile of unpaid letters. The name on the spine of a blue book.
And here was Brandt, holding her hands, finally saying she was worth something.
“I’ll go,” she said.
“Wonderful.” His whole body sagged with what looked like relief. “Wonderful. Courier, she accepts. Ysolde, you are a treasure.”
The courier drew a second sheet from his satchel. He hesitated before holding it out, his gaze resting on Sol a moment longer than courtesy required, as though he meant to say something and thought better of it.
“The terms of the commission, Miss,” he said. “For your records.” He did not let go of the paper right away. When their fingers brushed, something flickered across his face, there and gone, before he stepped back and would not look at her again.
Sol took it. Brandt turned away to the fire and stood with his back to her, his shoulders rising and falling in long, quiet breaths.
She sat down in the chair by his desk and unfolded the paper. She read the way she always did, line by line, with her finger under each word. It was a habit. It had saved her from bad leases, bad loans, and one very bad marriage proposal.
The first paragraphs were what she expected. Duties. Payment. Safe passage.
Then she reached the bottom of the page.
No person shall enter the palace of Nocthorne except by royal commission, and no person shall leave it until the commission is complete.
She read it twice. Then a third time, slowly, with her finger shaking against the paper.
No person shall leave.
Her eyes slid down to the line below it.
Ysolde Maren.
Black ink in a neat, looping hand. She knew the loops. She knew the way the tail of the y curled under, because she had spent nine years copying that handwriting into her own notes.
Brandt’s writing. The ink had already dried.
Behind her, the fire crackled. Brandt did not turn around. The courier stood very still by the door, his eyes fixed on some point past her shoulder, and made no move to leave.
He had signed her away before he ever asked.
