To Catch A Name

I cobble him together, that imagined nighttime boy, out of hawthorn boughs and apple blossoms and the gentle, thumping rhythm of my own heartbeat.

Then I hide him in my garden.

The body is nearly invisible among the overgrown tangle of zucchini vines, and, anyway, anyone who sees him will just assume he is one with the weeds and grasses. After all, those are as much part of him as the consciousness I have yet to imbue him with. Until I give him his name, my name, he will be just a pile of scraps, eminently forgettable.

“Merlin,” I say, and he appears.

Did I forget to mention that names have power?

He lands beside the bean trellis, almost stepping on the spiky, covert bundle of nightshade with a disgruntled clumsiness that makes it clear he was half-asleep moments earlier. Surely, he now wishes that I didn’t know his name and still thought of him as the old wizard who stole into my garden at night to take plants too illegal for him to grow himself. But names cannot simply be discarded, forgotten. They must be freely given and accepted, or yours will cling to you forever, eating away at your very flesh until you and it are inseparable.

“I am not simply a lapdog to be summoned at will,” he says.

“I know,” I tell him. “What if I said I was ready to cast the spell?”

Merlin scoffs. “Names are hardly an easy commodity to obtain.” He clears a spot for himself among the weeds and plops down before me. I’m already taller than him, but he acts like his extra two hundred years mean he knows everything.

“The last time I made a child, it took me three years to find a suitable name. Three years, do you hear me? I tried a few battlefields—I tracked down the men who would meet their demise that day every morning and asked them to sacrifice their names for a noble cause before getting killed and rendering them unusable. But no, they all refused. I don’t blame them, entirely—I hear it’s a terrible thing to wander the world without a name. Still, couldn’t they help an old wizard just trying to make a living?”

I stay silent, because it’s in my best interest to learn where Merlin finds his names. After sixteen months beneath his tutelage, I’ve discovered what’s arguably his most helpful trait: he very much enjoys the sound of his own voice.

“I went off to Wales after that, because there’s a cliff there where I’ve heard you can catch a name with your bare hands if you run quickly enough, but all I managed to snag were a few drops of love and a handful of butterflies. At last, I found a man half a meter from death who knew it, too, and he agreed to give me his name in exchange for a week longer with his daughter. Three years, I tell you, and—”

“I have a name for him,” I say, and that stops him short.

“That’s not—” He frowns, restarts. Merlin is knowledgeable, like I said. He doesn’t underestimate me. “Show me,” he says instead.

I laugh. “If I show it to you, you’ll take it, and then I won’t have my fair chance to perform the spell.”

“You’d risk wasting a perfectly good name on your own stubbornness?”

“It’s not stubbornness.”

I meet his gaze steadily. He looks away first.

“Thirteen years old and already making life,” he mutters.

I roll my eyes. “Don’t pretend you weren’t doing the same.”

He sighs and smooths his ruffled beard. I can’t look at the thin hairs growing from his chin without getting lost in a shuddering revulsion of my own body, so I compensate by not looking at him at all.

Shapeshifting. Memory alteration. Merlin has taught me a bevy of useful skills in exchange for easy access to my garden, the only place in all Britain where dangerous, magical plants can be grown and the king looks the other way. It is, I feel, the only good part about the peculiar fascination that Uther Pendragon, King of Britain, has for my mother.

“Lay the body in the moonlight on a blanket of ash leaves,” he says. “Then walk around it three times counterclockwise and say I name you…”

He looks at me expectantly.

“I won’t fall for that trick,” I say.

I’ve learned all I need to about Merlin over the past sixteen months. Maybe he’s failed to do the same.

“It’s just a name,” he says halfheartedly.

I raise my eyebrows, and Merlin sighs.

We both know there’s nothing just about names. Your name shoulders the essence of your being; it is a powerful, volatile thing that dictates your very existence. To live without one is to be disconnected from that consistent reality.

No wonder so few were willing to part with their names for the sake of a haggling wizard.

He removes the leaves from an ash branch while I check on the body. My spells have held. The woven boughs remain undisturbed, whether by mice or magical decay. Its essential components still hover, suspended, among the apple blossoms at its center: a coil of Uther Pendragon’s hair and three drops of my mother’s blood, given willingly to Merlin in exchange for the impossible.

I glance at Merlin over my shoulder. He kneels in the dirt as he peals leaf after leaf from their stem, his grubby hands and baggy eyes belying the vast power he can manipulate. My mother knows the truth about him, though, and when she sought him out last month, her entreaty was simple: make her a child belonging to herself and Uther Pendragon, so the king would panic and leave her be. He’s visited her regularly for years now, and though she cowers nightly beneath his touch, she lacks the authority to refuse him.

“It’s ready,” Merlin murmurs.

That night, I heard Mother ask Merlin to make her a child. But without any money offered in exchange, he refused.

When I saw Merlin next, I made him my own bargain: I would do the work of creating the body and finding the name, if only he showed me the spells and gave the child to Mother free of charge.

Merlin is brilliant, yes—a genius, even. No other mortal I know can perform his vast catalogue of spells. But he can also be oblivious and lazy, and I knew he’d leap at any opportunity not to track down a name for the bastard boy himself.

He didn’t realize that I already had a name that I needed to be rid of.

Merlin helps me move the cocoon of hawthorn and apple flowers onto the ash leaf nest, and then he steps back. He folds his arms and watches as I stand over the body of my half-brother-to-be.

I flex my fingers, letting the familiar rush of power that precedes a spell set my veins on fire. Then I begin to walk.

Each step I take leaves a dazzling sheet of light in my wake, wrapping a translucent wall around myself and the body. The first circle is gold; the second, silver. The third lap shimmers icy blue.

I stop and hesitate. Emotion coils through me, overwhelming: a bottomless well of joy that comes from knowing that I will finally rid myself of the name that has burdened me since birth, stubbornly labeling me as something I have never been.

“I name you Arthur.”

I see the exact moment that what I have just done hits Merlin: his eyes shoot wider, and his voice shatters out of him. “Arthur, what are you—”

The light flairs, coils, funnels into the body. A baby boy lies on the leaves in front of me, with Uther Pendragon’s dark hair and my mother’s narrow nose.

“What reason could you possibly have—” But Merlin stops, his lips groping for the name that no longer belongs to me and finding only air. His eyes are wide and confused; it’s as if I’ve done the first surprising thing in his two hundred years of life.

And I just smile.

The name Arthur belongs to this baby boy now.

Merlin’s face falls, as he seems to realize that I know precisely what I have done, and I’m glad for it.

“My boy, why did you do that?”

“Because I’ve never been a boy,” I say quietly.

To lack a name has always been described as an emptiness, an absence. How, then, do I feel so free? I’ve rid myself of the one thing binding me to a gender that was never truly mine to begin with.

Understanding dawns then on Merlin’s wrinkled face, and he rests one hand on my shoulder. “In that case, I suggest Wales,” he says. “A sorceress like you will have no problem finding a name there.”

He bundles baby Arthur in his arms and vanishes just like that, leaving me alone in the garden. It occurs to me that he hasn’t taught me teleportation yet.

Oh well.

Nothing more ties me to this place. My note to Mother already lies on my bed: Tell everyone that I have left on religious vocation—I will be back when I have found my name.

I can envision my mother’s confusion, then the odd feeling in her mouth as she tries to speak of me, her lips suddenly missing that mess of syllables that used to belong to me. She will understand, then, at least some small portion of what I’ve done. She’s always known that I’m not really a boy.

I become a bird and take to the sky.

It’s time to find my own name now.

###

The birds accept me easily. The birds don’t have names, either.

They move as a flock, their decisions made collectively. When I merge into their cluster of warm bodies hurdling through a wind-swept sky, they do not make note of me or ask what my name is, that question which I no longer possess an answer to. Their wings tilt westward, and I, too, am headed west, so I fly with them for a while. With every wingbeat, I feel that odd gap in my chest, the absence shaped like the apple blossoms I used to craft my half-brother’s body.

Arthur’s body. That name is his now, and liberation sings on every syllable of this acknowledgement.

When the birds start to turn north, I splinter off from their flock and dive toward the earth. The birds did not greet me. They don’t say goodbye, either.

###

The cliffs that Merlin spoke of rear tall on the west edge of Britain, glowing softly in the fading light. I find myself in human form again and camp on their edge, but I don’t sleep. All night, I watch secrets dart through the air, glassy bubbles of magic that are only there when the moonlight strikes them just right to set them ablaze.

The next morning, I journey out among them.

I spin nettles into thin thread and fashion them into a net, an odd, fluttering affair that leaps as if into wind, despite the air holding utterly still. I can hear the things that stir around me, scattered whispers and half-baked dreams. I listen for names.

Guinevere.

I take off after it, my feet leaping easily from the hard and tired earth to pursue this dim whisper of hope. It drums alongside my heartbeat, and I run—

I stumble away from the main section of the cliffs and into the wood nearby. The name whispers to me, echoes in my ears, and I taste its beauty on my tongue.

Come…

There is a clearing. A cottage lies at its center.

I open the door.

An old woman lies on a cot, white hair streaming around her head. She does not look surprised to see me. Instead, she points to a pitcher of water on the table beside her bed.

“Bring that to me.”

I obey—I know better than to refuse orders from old women—and she accepts the pitcher with shaking hands. She takes two swift sips, then sets it down again.

“What’s your name, girl?” she says, and then croaks out a low cackle, eyes dancing with mirth. “Oh, I forgot. You don’t have one, do you?”

Guinevere, I realize. This is Guinevere. No wonder the name sang so loudly; it already has a home.

I turn to go.

“I wouldn’t leave so quickly,” Guinevere says. “Why rush? You won’t be able to catch a name now, anyway.” She nods at the pitcher of water. “The cliffs took a disliking to me long ago. Now that you’ve helped me, they won’t listen to your pleas.”

I realize then that I’ve been tricked. She sits up in her bed, and I see that even if her age is not an illusion, her appearance is; her face is young now, and her eyes glint with malice.

She snaps her fingers, and the walls of the small hut shudder. I move to the door, but it burns beneath my fingertips, and the hinges melt into the wall.

“What are you?” I ask.

Who is a question I’d answered before entering this house.

Guinevere stands and circles me. “I suppose I can always use you for more magic, another nameless wench no one will ever notice is missing. My other sources of power are running a little dry.” Her voice turns harder, commanding. “Give me your hand.”

I do not give her my hand.

Instead, I summon a fissure of magic and let it snap out of me. She reels as if I’ve slapped her, and I waste no time; I become a bird and bolt for the window, wings slashing at the air.

A wind drives me back, and Guinevere is waiting for me, cat-formed now. Long claws slash through my feathers, and I tumble down to the floor, human again, my shoulder and my arm burning from sudden pain. She moves before I can reconcile my own surprise and latches onto me, vines rising from the floor and coiling about me, holding me, strangling me.

I cannot move.

I feel my magic leaching out into those vines, and I try to thrash, but I can’t move. I’m thrust back into my old body suddenly, the forced change knocking what little breath I have left in my body out of me, and now I burn with not just internal but external pain.

I never thought I’d be stuck in this form, this boy’s body, again.

But there is one place in me she does not know to steal magic out of, one small gap that goes unnoticed beneath her searching gaze. A gap in my chest the size of an apple blossom, holding nothing but raw power.

Guinevere stands over me and laughs.

I say nothing.

###

She leaves me there, on the floor, for three days, materializing only to drip soup down my paralyzed gullet. I know she’s trying to punish me, but all I want is a little more time: time to nurse that small blossom of magic into something more, time to reimagine my former strength.

When Guinevere comes to retrieve me that night, I form a dagger out of shards of wood using only my gaze and propel it through the air and into her heart.

She staggers, falls. Green swarms out of her, and I think she is casting a spell until I realize she is already dead. This is stolen magic, fleeing her body—taken from other hapless wanderers, tasting of human and fey power—and when that strange, earthy power coils its way through my bones, her vines can no longer hold me.

I stand. I am free. Guinevere is dead, and her name dead with her.

I leave the cottage.

My throat burns with thirst. I find a stream and drink from it, the rich water cascading down my throat, and then I walk back to the cliffs.

It is just as Guinevere said. They are silent to me now.

I scream into the night, at the injustice of this place, at the deceptive magic that led me to a name that I could not steal. I scream until every pebble upon these cliffs bears an echo of my nameless self, and even the crumpled remains of the sorceress who tried to cage me vibrate with the sound.

Then I take to the sky on an eagle’s sharp-edged wings.

###

A year passes.

###

I do not make the mistake of trusting someone again.

Magic is sharper now, or perhaps I am. I keenly feel the churning earth around me, and the steady heft of my own power. I do not feel helpless anymore.

I enter villages seeking names borne by the forgotten or the dying. I promise their bearers miracles. All I receive in return is the searching, possessive gaze of the men of the towns, and hands that grope and touch and make this body feel alien to me as the boy’s form that I used to bear.

I do not leave them with miracles. I leave them scared.

###

Two years pass.

###

I underestimated the monotony that is living without a name. It becomes swiftly difficult to nail down variety without that indelible anchor to hold on to. Some days, my body frays into raw magic, and when I glance down at my hands, they shimmer into the red, gold, and icy blue of the spell I used to cast away my old name. Other days, I don’t see myself at all.

Magic is easier than living: power, movement, light. Sorceress, Merlin called me, and the word seems accurate enough.

Merlin was right about another thing too. People are unwilling to part with their names.

I start to lie, even, telling them that we can share the name, telling them it won’t hurt, not even a little. And still, no one says yes.

Three years, Merlin said.

###

Three years pass.

###

One day, I find my way to Merlin’s cabin.

His propensity for teleportation makes it easy to forget that he only lives a few leagues from Camelot, though his home is admittedly so deeply tucked into the woods that one would be hard-pressed to find it on foot. I circle down in bird-form and land outside his door. When I knock, he lets me in immediately.

“I predicted your arrival within one minute of the current time,” he says.

He sounds pleased with himself. I step inside.

“You haven’t changed,” I say.

“You have,” he replies.

He’s right. Inch by inch, I’ve discovered a human form that feels right to me: the body of the girl I’ve always been. But without that ever-present revulsion of my body, the gap of my missing name looms even larger.

Without discussion, I sit at Merlin’s table, and he pours tea from the kettle, the water already conveniently boiled. I’ve never visited his house before, but it feels familiar in the same way that a dream is familiar: it reflects of the lessons that taught me so much about the workings of his mind. This room is all of our shared moments clustered and crammed into a single building. I recognize cuttings of a few of my plants.

“I had to hide Arthur,” he tells me. “Your mother feared for his life.”

“Interesting,” I say.

“I thought you’d be more fascinated by the boy you gave your name to.”

“I thought you’d be more curious about why I’m here.”

Merlin hands me a mug of tea.

“I’ve been searching,” he says. “I think I’ve found you a name.”

###

I shape a boat from reeds and beach sand and push off into the shore of the lake that Merlin pointed me toward. My odd dinghy skims over the water rather than through it. When I reach the lake’s center, she is already there.

Her body has the cast of sea foam, all pale fluidity and unpredictable movements, and water lilies stream through her luscious hair. She simply rises through the lake, rather than swimming up to meet me.

She does not introduce herself.

“You are the girl Merlin mentioned,” she says. “The one in search of a name.” She sets one elbow upon the edge of my boat and raises herself slightly out of the water, so we can look eye to eye.

She dances with such power, such fluid self-assurance, that I can’t believe that she would help me. “Why would you give up your name?”

She smiles. “I have so many—what is losing one of them to aid a friend of a friend? Merlin is no stranger to me. Neither, one day, will be your half-brother, the one made from apple blossoms and the power of the name that your mother gave you.”

“Arthur,” I say.

She smiles.

“Soon, little girl”—I can’t decide whether to smart at being called little girl at seventeen, or surrender to the gentle warmth of being seen as a woman—“you will learn that once you become known, it is far easier to gain a name than it is to lose one.”

“Easy?” I have to laugh. Nearly four years now have come and gone. “I have crisscrossed Britain more times than I can count, been caught and mocked and touched and laughed at, turned to wind to catch a name and still felt it slip between my fingers. If gaining names is so easy, then what have I done wrong these past four years?”

“I don’t mean the sort of name you choose to accept. I speak of those foisted upon you, which often anchor themselves to you with that same incorrigible strength.” She spreads her arms wide, and silver waves dance along her blue-tinged skin. “I am called Ninianne. I, too, am the Lady of the Lake. And in my youth, when I took interest in roaming beyond the waves, I was known as Morgana le Fay. They will call you sorceress, witch, seductress, monster. You will bear those names with no choice and no relief, and all the spells in the world will not shake them from your back. In time, all the earth will curse you as a villain, and you must bear it or become what they accuse you of. And that choice will, I think, hinge on a girl who also bears the name of Guinevere—a name that already has hurt you.”

“Perhaps,” I say, but her warnings bury themselves beneath my own sense of urgency, the old itch and emptiness in that apple-blossom gap which craves the name that she can give me.

“What name?” I ask. “What name would you part with?”

“Morgana le Fay.” She turns away from me, tasting it against the rhythm of the waves. “An old name, and a powerful one. I’ve carried it for three hundred years, and I doubt it’ll last you a day less.”

When the Lady of the Lake faces me again, she’s smiling. “Are you ready?”

“Yes,” I say.

She does not need to circle my boat, or bother with a bier of ash leaves. She simply faces me, grey eyes open, lips slightly parted. Power stirs in the air between us, and a rush of anticipation flickers up my spine.

“I name you Morgana le Fay.”

The name catches me, and I it. It flickers on my tongue. And then it sinks into my bones and fills up that little hollow spot, that apple blossom of regret, and defines me and my body as my own.