A New Flavor in a New World

He woke because he was hungry.

Not because of pain, not because of noise. Because somewhere under his ribs was the particular hollow ache of a man who had gone too long without eating, and that ache reached up and hauled him out of the dark the way it had hauled him out of a thousand mornings he could not, just now, remember.

He was lying on his back in tall grass. Above him the light came down green and moving, filtered through leaves so high they were only a shifting brightness, and the air was cold and clean and smelled — he took a long breath before he had decided to, because the nose does its work whether or not the mind is ready — the air smelled of pine resin and crushed green stems and, under that, wet earth turned over by something growing. It was a good smell. It was the smell of a place that would feed you if you knew how to ask.

He sat up.

The grass gave up a whole second layer of scent when he moved through it, bruised and sweet, and a small bright ache went through him that had nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with wanting to put his hands in it. His body did that on its own too: his fingers had already closed on a stem and pinched, and the pinch was clean and certain, the pressure of a man who knew exactly how much force it took to part a thing without crushing it. He looked at his own hand as if it belonged to somebody he trusted more than himself.

It was a young hand. That was the first strange thing, and it arrived quietly, the way strange things do before you have any frame to be alarmed by them. The knuckles were smooth. There was a thin pale line across the pad of the thumb that his eye went to as if expecting a scar, an old friend of a scar, a burn earned at some stove — but the skin was unmarked, new, and he found he could not say what stove, or when, or why he had reached for the memory of a burn as though it were the most familiar thing about himself.

He reached further back, the way you reach into a dark drawer for the knife you know is there.

Nothing. Not nothing like a wall — nothing like fog. He could feel the shape of a life the way you feel a room you have walked into in the dark: there was furniture in there, he had lived in there, and he could not make out one single edge of it. A name he was supposed to have. A face, maybe more than one, arranged around him and worried — he had the ghost of that, people leaning in, afraid, and he flinched from it not with grief but with the plain animal wish not to be looked at like that. Then it was gone, and it took no sorrow with it, because you cannot mourn a room you cannot find. He tried, once, deliberately, the way you press a bruise to see if it's real. There was no bruise. There was only the hunger, and the grass, and the green light coming down.

What had not gone was everything below the name.

He knew he was a cook. He knew it the way he knew his own weight — not as a fact he could examine but as the ground he stood on. It was in the hand that had pinched the grass. It was in the way, without any decision, he had already catalogued the plants around him: the tall grass was only grass, but there — a low broad-leaved thing with a purple vein, that was sorrel, sharp, it would cut the fat of anything rich; and there, the little umbrella heads on hollow stems, some kind of wild carrot family, you had to be careful with those, half of them were food and half of them would kill you and the tell was in the stem and the smell; and there, pushing up through the leaf litter in a loose green fist, a wild allium, an onion's cousin, he'd have known it blind by the faint sweet reek it left on his fingers when he brushed it.

To be sure of it — because a man who has lost his own name will grab at anything solid — he reached over and picked a leaf of the purple-veined sorrel and put it on his tongue, and there it was, the whole of him, intact: the sour hit bright and green and lemony, and behind the sour his palate laid out, unbidden, everything it would be good for, a list unrolling faster than thought. It would cut through fat. It would want to go in late so the heat didn't dull it. A spoonful of it, shredded raw, would lift a heavy stew right off its knees; cooked down it would turn to a soft khaki mush and lose its nerve, so you saved it, you added it at the end, you treated its brightness like a thing that could bruise. He knew all of that the way he knew the sky was up. He hadn't decided any of it. Whoever he had been, wherever the fog had swallowed him from, that man had stood over enough sorrel to lay this knowledge down so deep that death — though Eldric did not know yet that it had been death — hadn't been able to reach in and take it. The name was gone. The face was gone. The palate had come through whole, and the hands, and the long patient attention, and he sat in the strange grass and understood, with a steadiness that surprised him, that a man could rebuild almost anything around a thing he knew that well.

He crouched over the allium. His stomach, hearing about food, turned over audibly and unhelpfully.

"All right," he told it, and his own voice surprised him — it was a stranger's voice and it was completely his, and hearing it made the fog feel, for one bad second, very large. He pushed the second past him. He had a thing in front of him. When a thing was in front of him he knew what to do; that, at least, the fog had left him whole.

He pulled the allium. The bulb came up small and pale and stubborn, trailing a beard of pale roots and a clod of black earth, and he knocked the earth off against his knee and brought it to his nose out of pure habit, the way another man might check his watch.

And something happened that he had no word for.

Under the green bite of it — under the ordinary sharp clean onion smell that told him exactly how it would behave in a pan, when to add it and when to pull it back — there was a second smell that was not a smell. It was more like the memory of a smell he hadn't had yet. It sat just behind the allium's real scent like a room glimpsed behind a person in a doorway, and what it was, as near as he could put it, was warmth. Not heat. Warmth. The particular good animal warmth of being fed and safe and drowsy at the end of a hard cold day, of a blanket and a full belly and nowhere you had to be. It came off the raw bulb like a shape he could almost taste, and it was so clearly there, and so clearly not given yet — as if the allium were holding the warmth folded up inside itself and had simply never been asked to unfold it — that he sat back on his heels in the grass and turned the little bulb over and over in his fingers, frowning at it, the way you frown at a word on the tip of your tongue.

"You're holding something," he said to it, quietly, and felt foolish, and did not stop. "What are you holding."

The allium, being an allium, said nothing.

He would have gone on sitting there — he was the kind of man who could lose an afternoon to a single ingredient and count it well spent — but the wood chose that moment to make a sound that was not the wind.

A crackle of dry sticks. Then a low voice, hushed. Then another answering it. Footsteps, more than one set, coming unhurried through the trees, and the small metallic chatter of something — baskets, jars, the tools of people who had come into the forest to take things out of it.

He closed his hand around the allium, and stood, hungry and nameless in a green and unfamiliar world, and waited to see who its foragers were.

They came out of the treeline in a loose line of five, and they stopped all at once when they saw him, the way a flock does — one of them freezing and the rest catching it a heartbeat later.

They were ordinary people, and he took that in with a relief that surprised him. Homespun and leather, mud to the knees, deep flat baskets slung on hips and backs, a short curved knife or two, a stick worn smooth at the top from a hundred miles of leaning on it. Four of them held still and wary. The fifth, out front, was an older woman, broad through the shoulders, gray hair bound back off a weathered face, and she did not freeze so much as stop and assess, one hand going out flat to the side to hold the others where they were. Her eyes went down him and up him once, quick and complete, the way he himself had just gone over a patch of forest floor, and he understood without being told that she was the one who decided things.

Her basket, he noticed — because that was where his eye went, always, to what a person was carrying and how — her basket was better packed than the others'. The forage in it was sorted. Sorrel with sorrel, roots with roots, a fold of cloth over something delicate she wanted kept from the sun. A person who respected what she gathered. He liked her before either of them had said a word.

"Well," she said. Her voice was dry. "You're not a wolf."

"No," he agreed.

"Or a bandit, unless bandits have taken to lying in the grass with their mouths open, waiting to be robbed."

"I wasn't —" He stopped, because he genuinely didn't know what he had been doing, and the honest answer was so ridiculous that he gave it. "I was smelling an onion."

One of the younger foragers made a noise that tried very hard not to be a laugh.

The old woman's eyes flicked to his hand, where the allium's green top stuck up between his fingers, and something in her face eased by a single degree — not trust, but the downgrading of a threat. A man holding a weapon stands one way. A man holding a wild onion he pulled out of the ground stands another, and she had spent enough years reading people to know the difference in a glance.

"Where did you come from?" she asked.

He opened his mouth to answer, and the fog was there instead of an answer, wide and blank and quietly terrifying if he looked straight at it, so he didn't look straight at it. "I don't know," he said, and it came out plain and true and a little lost. "I woke up here. In the grass. I don't —" He touched his own chest, as if the life might be filed somewhere behind the breastbone. "I can't find how I got here. I know things. I don't know how I know them, and I don't know my own —"

His stomach growled.

It was not a small growl. It was a long, mournful, architectural growl, the growl of a building settling, and it went on for an almost impressive length of time in the sudden quiet of the clearing, and there was absolutely nothing to be done about it. He stood there and let it happen. He felt his young unfamiliar face go warm.

The dam broke. The young forager gave up and laughed outright, and then they all did, even the wary ones, the tension going out of the clearing like water out of a tipped basin — because a man you're afraid of does not stand in front of you with his belly complaining at the sky. The old woman didn't laugh, but the corner of her mouth moved, and that was worth more.

"You poor starved thing," she said. "Whatever else you are, you're hungry, and that at least I can read." She jerked her chin back toward the trees, the way you'd summon a stray dog you'd decided to feed. "Come on, then. We're for home. Brindle's an hour's walk and there's a pot on tonight — nothing grand, but it'll fill the hole that's making all that noise. You can tell us the rest when you can. Or when you can't." She was already turning. "You'll not eat my supper and rob me both; you don't have the face for it. What do we call you?"

He walked to catch up, and the walking felt good, his young legs eager under him, and he opened his mouth to give her the name — and there was the fog, right where the name should be, and for a moment the ground tilted.

"I don't have that either," he said. "Not right now."

She took it in stride, the way she seemed to take everything. "Then we'll call you lad till you find it. Names turn up. So do onions." And she led him out of the clearing and into the wood, and the four others fell in around him, wary softening to curious, and by the time they'd gone a quarter mile one of the young ones was already telling him, unasked, everything about everyone in Brindle, and he was listening with half an ear and looking at the forest with the whole of his eyes.

Because the forest was full.

That was the thing he could not stop seeing. He walked through it hungry and nameless and he could not stop cataloguing, and everywhere he looked there was food, and more than food. A stand of the little umbrella-heads he'd have left alone — but beside them, in the shade, a fat cluster of pale mushrooms that his eye went to and his mouth watered for and, behind the mushroom's own earthy promise, that second thing again, that not-smell: a low green note that had nothing to do with taste, a suggestion of steadiness, of a shaking hand going still. There, a bramble past its fruit, but the last withered berries on it carrying, under the sour, a faint bright thread he could only call clarity. There, high up, a cluster of red haws he couldn't reach, and even from the ground they seemed to lean a color at him that meant something.

Nobody else saw it. He watched the foragers as they walked, and they were good at what they did — the old woman's hand darted out and took three things off a bush without breaking stride, exactly the three worth taking — but they took them the way you take coins from a purse, counting, not seeing. They walked through a forest that was quietly holding out a hundred small folded gifts, and they gathered the ones they had been taught to gather and were blind to the folding entirely.

The young forager kept up his running account of Brindle at Eldric's elbow, and Eldric found he could listen to the boy and read the wood at the same time, the way you can mind two pots at once when your hands know their business. The boy was called Nye, and Nye told him the whole village by way of who ate what: that the healer, old Nesta, wouldn't touch mushrooms of any kind and everyone humored her; that Tomas the big one kept goats and made a hard sharp cheese that took the roof of your mouth off; that Anwen's little Pib had been a poor eater as a baby and only ever settled for barley mash, which is why there was always barley in the pot. It was, Eldric thought, the truest way to learn a village — not by its names but by its hungers, what each mouth would and wouldn't take. He filed every word. A cook who knew who couldn't stomach mushrooms was a cook who'd never poison a friend by accident.

And all the while the wood kept offering. A fallen log soft with age wore a shelf of pale bracket fungus that his eye caught and held — good eating, he knew it on sight, and behind the earthy promise of it a low even note like a held breath, steadiness, a shake gone still. A little further on, in the damp shade of a boulder, a spray of some bitter cress carried under its green a thin clean thread he could only call waking, a brightness, the opposite of the onion's drowse. He didn't know a tenth of what he was looking at. Half the wood read to him as pure smudge, shapes behind shapes he'd have to cook and taste and puzzle out before they'd come clear. But even the smudges were there, every one of them holding something folded and patient, and the not-knowing didn't dull the wonder of it — it sharpened it, the way an unread book is worse to leave on the shelf than one you've finished.

"You're staring at my wood like you've never seen a tree," the old woman said, not turning around.

"I've never seen a wood like this one," he said, and meant it more ways than she could know.

They came out of the trees in the last of the light and there was Brindle below them in a shallow fold of the land: a scatter of maybe thirty low houses with turf and thatch, a crooked lane, penned goats, smoke standing up straight and blue in the still evening. On the gatepost of the first house, where the lane began, someone had nailed a little twist of woven straw and dark iron and hung a sprig of some dried herb beneath it, and as he passed he felt it — not warmth, not steadiness, but a thin dry sense of turning-away, a small charm doing a small honest job, keeping something minor and unwelcome off a doorstep.

"What's that?" he asked, nodding at it.

"Gate-charm," the young forager said, as if he'd asked what water was. "Keeps the rot-flies out of the store-room. My gran ties them. They don't always take." He said it the way you'd talk about a hinge that sometimes squeaked — a piece of the furniture of the world, magic worn smooth by use into something nobody looked at anymore.

The world is full of magic nobody knows how to cook, he thought, and did not yet know it was the truest thing he'd think all year, and followed them down the lane into Brindle toward the smell of a supper going on a fire.

The pot hung on an iron hook over the central hearth in the largest of the low houses — a common house, he gathered, where the village ate together on nights that mattered, and a stranger falling out of the sky apparently counted — and he sat where they put him, on a bench worn shiny by years of backsides, with a wooden bowl warming in his two hands, and he watched them cook, and it was one of the small agonies of his life.

He didn't know yet that he had a life to measure agonies against. It didn't matter. His body knew this agony from the ground up: the agony of a cook watching other people make his supper, badly, with good ingredients, and having to keep his hands folded in his lap and his mouth shut.

It was a forage soup. He could read the whole thing off the pot the way another man reads a face. Barley, put in early — good, barley wanted time. A rich brown stock that someone had actually made, bones and long hours, and his estimation of the household went up two full notches, because that stock was the honest work under everything and they had not skipped it. Root vegetables, the sort of knobbled winter-keeper roots he didn't have a name for yet but knew on sight, cut into honest rough chunks. The sorrel from the baskets, and the mushrooms, and a fistful of dried green herb crumbled off a bundle hung from the rafter — thyme, or this world's thyme, he'd know when he tasted it. It should have been good. Every single thing that went into it was good.

And they were killing it by inches, kindly, without the faintest idea they were doing it.

The woman minding the pot — younger, harried, a toddler on her hip and therefore forgivable for all of it — had thrown the wild alliums in whole. Whole, and late, dropped into a soup that was already near done, so that they would neither melt down into the broth and give it their sweetness nor cook long enough to lose their raw green bite; they'd sit in there half-raw and sulking, little sharp surprises in every third spoonful. Nobody had sweated them first. Nobody had sweated anything. Everything had gone into the pot in the order it had come out of the basket, which is to say the order of pure chance.

And — he leaned forward before he caught himself, and made himself lean back — nobody had tasted it. Not once. He'd been watching for a quarter of an hour and the harried woman had stirred it four times and salted it twice, both times by shaking a pinch off her fingers from a crock on the mantel, by habit, by the memory of how much yesterday's soup had wanted, without ever bringing the spoon to her lips to ask this soup, tonight, what it needed. Salt by faith instead of by tongue. It was the single most common sin he knew — he didn't know how he knew it was the most common, only that the certainty was absolute — and it was the one that broke his heart a little every time, because it was so easy to fix and so nearly universal. Taste the pot. You could teach a child to cook in a sentence if the sentence was taste the pot, and half the world went to its grave having never once been told.

His hands wanted the spoon so badly they ached.

He kept them folded. He was a guest, and a nameless one, and a man who has fallen out of nowhere into a village's kindness does not repay the first hour of it by seizing the stir-spoon and informing the woman feeding him that she's been salting blind her whole life. He had, apparently, no memory and no name, but he had that, and he was faintly proud of himself for it. He folded his hands and he waited and he was so hungry he could have wept.

"Here," said the old woman — Maren, the young ones had called her, on the walk — and she ladled his bowl full herself and put it into his hands, and the steam came up into his face carrying every flaw he'd catalogued and something else besides, something warmer than the steam, and he stopped cataloguing and just held it.

Because this was the other half of it, and it landed on him before he'd taken a bite. The bench was full of people who had let him sit down on it. The bowl was warm because a stranger had chosen to fill it and hand it over rather than eat first herself. Around the fire were faces turned toward him, curious and open, a child staring frankly with its thumb in its mouth, an old man nodding at him as if a nameless stranger were the most natural thing to have to supper, and the whole room smelled of smoke and barley and wet wool drying and people, and none of it had cost him anything or asked him for anything, and it went into him through the held bowl and the rising steam and simply warmed him, right down where the hunger was, before the food had touched him at all. Company. The plain animal comfort of not being alone in the dark and being handed something hot. That was the first warmth. That one, he'd have felt anywhere. That one didn't need magic.

"Eat, lad," Maren said. "You're making the baby nervous, staring at the pot like that."

He ate.

The soup was, honestly, exactly as mediocre as he'd known it would be. The barley was good. The stock was better than good — he found it under everything, that patient two-day work, and it half broke his heart, because it meant somebody in this house understood in their bones that the foundation of a thing mattered, had stood over bones and water for two days to make it right, and then had thrown the roof up any old how on top of that beautiful foundation. That was the whole tragedy of the pot in one mouthful: real care in the parts nobody could see, blind habit in every part that showed. And it was all fighting itself — the raw green sulk of the underdone allium jumping out sharp in every third spoonful, the vegetables cooked to two and three different textures because they'd gone in willy-nilly, one root gone to mush and its neighbor still with a chalk of raw in the middle, the salt not quite enough in the broth and then somehow flat too much in one bite where a finger-pinch had landed and not stirred through, the herb wasted, thrown in dry at the death where it could only taste of dust and hay instead of steeped in early where it could have laid its whole green perfume down into the broth. Every fault a small kindness undone. He could have fixed the lot in his sleep — could have named, for each flaw, the one unhurried thing that would have turned it — and the naming ran under his gratitude the whole time he ate, helpless, automatic, the way you can't stop hearing a wrong note even in music you love.

And he did love it. That was the strange doubled truth of the bowl. He ate every drop and mopped it out with the coarse dark bread they passed him, chasing the last gloss of stock around the wood with a crust until the bowl was clean enough to shelve, and it was, all the same and all its faults, the best thing that had ever happened to him — or at least the best since the grass, which was as far back as ever reached, and he was too grateful and too full and too warmed by the hands that had filled the bowl to mind the smallness of his forever.

And then, halfway down the second bowl Maren pressed on him, something else began.

It came up slow and from the inside, and at first he thought it was only the ordinary heat of hot soup in a cold body, the good glow of being fed. But it kept going after the heat should have leveled off. It spread. It was low and gold and drowsy, a warmth with no source in the fire or the broth, a warmth that seemed to come from somewhere under his ribs and unfold outward, and it carried with it, unmistakably, the exact feeling he'd stood in the clearing that afternoon and had no word for: the animal contentment of being fed and safe and warm at the end of a hard cold day, of a blanket, of nowhere you had to be. It settled over his shoulders like a hand. His eyes wanted to close. The bench felt kinder under him. The whole hard fact of waking nameless in a wood went, for a moment, gentle and far away.

He sat up straight so fast he nearly spilled the bowl.

Around him, nobody else had moved. The old man across the fire was heavy-lidded and content, but old men are heavy-lidded and content by a fire after supper; it meant nothing. The harried woman had finally sat, the toddler asleep against her, and she looked worn soft the way you look when the day's over — but that meant nothing either. They felt it too, he was suddenly and completely certain. They felt it every night, this good gold drowsiness after the forage soup, and not one of them had ever once noticed it as a thing separate from the fire and the fullness and the company, had never pulled it out and looked at it and thought: this is more than supper. Something in this bowl is doing something to me. To them it was just how the soup made you feel. It was weather. It was the gate-charm on the post. It was the ten thousandth small folded gift of a world too full of them to count.

He noticed. He, alone in the room, noticed — because he was a cook to the bone in a world that cooked by habit, and a cook is a person who has trained his whole body into one long unbroken act of paying attention to exactly this, to what a mouthful does after you've swallowed it. The warmth he'd smelled folded up inside the raw allium that afternoon — the warmth the little bulb had been holding and not giving — it had been given. Barely. Grudgingly. Wrung out of a half-raw onion by a soup that had done everything wrong. A flicker of it, a candle's worth. But real.

He looked down into the bowl at the pale sulking pieces of allium he'd been picking around, and he felt the last of the gold warmth ebbing gently away as it went — already fading, he noted, even as he chased it, already loosening its hand from his shoulders — and he thought, with the total focus of a man who has just seen the one thing in the room worth seeing:

What would it have given if I'd cooked it right?

He didn't sleep much that first night, and it wasn't the strangeness that kept him up. It was the onion.

They'd made him a bed of sorts in the corner of the common house, a pallet of straw and a wool blanket that smelled of goat and woodsmoke, and around him Brindle had gone to its rest — the fire banked down to a red eye, the household breathing, the toddler snuffling once and settling. And he lay in the dark and could not stop turning it over: the warmth, folded up inside the raw bulb, waiting; the warmth given up half-wrung by a bad pot; the whole village drowsing every night on magic it ate without ever tasting.

In the morning, before the light was properly up, he was crouched at the edge of the garden plot behind the common house where the alliums grew wild along the fence, and he had one in his hand again, and Maren found him there.

"You're an early riser for a man with no name," she said, wrapped in a shawl, her breath smoking in the cold.

"Can I ask you something that'll sound mad."

"You smelled an onion when I met you," she said. "I've lowered my expectations."

He held the bulb up. "These. The little wild ones. What do you use them for?"

She looked at him like the question was the mad part, not whatever she'd braced for. "Soup. Same as anything. They grow where they like and they're free, so we eat them. Sharp little things." She shrugged. "Why."

"Do you ever notice —" He stopped, hunting for how to say it without sounding like a man who'd hit his head. "After the soup. In the evening. Do you ever notice you sleep well? Feel — warm? Settled? More than the fire alone would do?"

Maren was quiet for a moment. Something crossed her weathered face — not recognition exactly, but the small snag of a person being asked to look at a thing they'd walked past their whole life. "We sleep well after a full day and a full belly," she said slowly. "That's not the onions, lad. That's honest work and a good supper. Same as it's always been." But she said it a half-beat too carefully, and he saw her glance down at the little bulb in his hand as though it had, for the first time in her sixty-odd years, done something to earn a second look. "Why," she said again, and this time it wasn't a dismissal.

He turned the allium over. And his eye — his whole attention, the trained unbroken act of it — went into the little bulb the way it had in the clearing, and there it was, clearer this morning than yesterday, sharpening as he looked at it the way a smudge sharpens when you finally stop squinting and let your eyes rest: under the green onion bite, folded up, waiting, warmth. A comfort. A settling, sleepy, good-at-the-end-of-a-cold-day warmth, dormant in the raw bulb, real as the bulb itself, and — he could feel this too, feel it as an instinct in the hands more than a fact in the head — it would only come out if you asked it right. Raw, it was locked. Cooked the way they'd cooked it, thrown in whole and late and never sweated, it gave up a candle's worth by accident. But if you sweated it slow and gentle to bring the sweetness up, if you gave it time, if you tasted the pot and salted it in layers and treated the whole thing like it mattered —

"— it would give you the whole thing," he said aloud, to the onion, to Maren, to the cold morning. "It's holding it. Right now. It's holding a good night's sleep in its two hands and it's waiting for somebody to cook it well enough to let go."

Maren stared at him.

And he laughed — a real one, up out of the chest, the first laugh of his new and forever-short life — because it was so simple and so enormous and so his, the one thing the fog had left him, dropped whole into a world that had never once thought to use it. He didn't remember dying. He didn't know that he had. He had no grief to carry and no old life to mourn and he stood in the cold behind a stranger's house with an onion in his hand and felt, instead of any of that, a wild rising appetite — not for the food, or not only, but for the work: for the ten thousand folded gifts in that forest, every one of them a locked door, and the plain astonishing fact that he seemed to be the only man in the world who could see they were doors at all, and knew, in his hands, how to start finding the keys.

"I'm going to cook for you," he told Maren. "Properly. If you'll let me at your pot. Tonight, or whenever you'll have me. I want to show you what your onions can do." He heard how it sounded. "I know how it sounds."

Maren looked at him a long moment, this nameless starved boy who smelled onions and laughed at the sky, and whatever she saw there — a madman, or the truth, or a village's dull evenings suddenly wanting a look at what he claimed — she made her decision the way she made all of them, quick and complete.

"You'll want a name first," she said. "I'll not shout lad across a supper. Folk'll talk." She turned back toward the house and the morning's work, pulling the shawl close. "Think of one by tonight. And leave me two of those onions — if you're so sure they're magic, I want to watch you prove it before you get my whole garden."

He stayed out in the cold a while, after she'd gone, turning the name over the way he'd turned the onion.

He didn't have his old one. He'd reached for it a dozen times in a day and found only fog. But the young forager on the walk had said something, telling him all of Brindle's business — that the old healer three houses down was named for her grandmother, that names in Brindle came down like tools, handed on, kept in use. Kept in use. He liked that. A name was a thing you used, like a knife, like a pot; it didn't have to be the one you were born with, only the one that fit your hand and did its work. He tried a few against the morning, quiet, tasting them. Most were nothing. One sat right — he couldn't have said why, except that it had a warmth in the sound of it and an edge underneath, which was, he was beginning to suspect, exactly the kind of thing he was.

Eldric. He said it once, under his breath, and it fit the hand.

That night he lay down on the goat-smelling pallet with the name and the whole enormous appetite of the work ahead, and he fell toward sleep easier than he'd have believed — and just as he went under, at the very edge where the day loosens its grip, something brushed him that was not the straw or the blanket or the red eye of the fire. A dark. A distance, vast and quiet. The suggestion of a voice, far off, that had once asked him a question or that he had once answered, he couldn't tell which — and one thread of a feeling, a single clear thing surfacing out of the fog for half a breath before the dark took it back:

that he had wanted this. That somewhere, in a place he could not find, he had been offered something, and the only thing he'd asked —

And then it was gone, the way the warmth had gone, ebbing out of his grip even as he reached, and Eldric slept, nameless no longer, in a village at the edge of a wood that was holding out its hundred folded gifts and waiting, at last, for a man who knew they were gifts at all.