The quill stayed raised. The page stayed empty.
Vihaan listened for the next breath. It did not come on the count he expected. He let his eyes lift from the notched horn to the long lowered curve of her face, and only then to her open eye, which had been waiting for him.
“How do you know that name,” he said. His voice was thinner than he meant it to be.
“I have known it since the courtyard.” Her breath, when it came, was shallow and unhurried. “Your mother told it to me before she gave you the other one.”
“My mother never met a dragon.”
“Your mother knelt at my shoulder for three days,” Suvarna said, “and she was warmer than the fire they had built for me. She was carrying you. She had not yet decided what to call you. She asked me what I thought.”
Vihaan set the codex down on the ice. He had not done that once in nine hours. The brass ink vial rolled from under his arm and came to rest against his knee, and he did not reach for it.
“What did you tell her.”
“I told her a name.” The dragon’s eye did not blink; she had stopped blinking some time ago. “She said it back to me. She said it was a heavy name to put on a child who had not yet been born. She said she would give you a lighter one for the world, and keep the heavy one for herself.”
“She never told me.”
“She told no one. She was a careful woman.”
He thought of his mother’s hands. He thought of the way she had pressed her thumb into the small of his back when he was small, three times, like a punctuation mark she never spoke. He had always assumed it meant be good. He understood now that it had been a name.
“Why are you telling me this now.”
“Because I am the only other person who heard her say it,” Suvarna said, “and in a little while I will not be a person any more.”
The snow had thinned. The shaft of light from the broken vault had moved by perhaps a hand’s width since he had started writing, and the plume of her breath no longer reached as high as it had at breath forty-one.
“I came to record your death,” he said.
“You came to recover something I have been keeping for you,” she said. “The death is a small matter beside it.”
He picked up the quill. He did not pick up the codex. He looked at the parchment on the ice between them, at the long careful list of intervals he had been counting, and he understood that there was one more thing to write and that it would not go on that page.
“Tell me,” he said.
The dragon’s eye closed, then opened, slower.
She told him.
He did not write it down. He let the snow fall on the page where his counting had been, and he listened, and the ink in the brass vial froze the rest of the way through.
What do we owe the keepers of the names we were never told?
