“Absolutely.”
“And you let him go anyway.”
“I thought of abstaining, until he announced his willingness to take the contract. No, his intentionof taking the contract. Once he’d done so, I realized that he wouldn’t be coming back safely from Camorr.”
“What, you had some sort of premonition?”
“After a fashion. It’s one of my talents.”
“Patience,” said Locke, “I wouldlike to ask you something deeply personal. Not to antagonize you. I ask because your son helped kill four close friends of mine, and I want to know … I guess …”
“You want to know why we don’t get along.”
“Yes.”
“He hated me.” Patience wrung her hands together. “Still does, behind the fog of his madness. He hates me as much as he did when we parted that day in the Sky Chamber.”
“Why?”
“It’s simple. And yet … rather hard to explain. The first thing you should understand is how we choose our names.”
“Falconer, Navigator, Coldmarrow, etcetera,” said Jean.
“Yes. We call them gray names, because they’re mist. They’re insubstantial. Every mage chooses a gray name when their first ring is tattooed on their wrist. Coldmarrow, for example, chose his in memory of his northern heritage.”
“What were you, before you were Patience?” said Jean.
“I called myself Seamstress.” She smiled faintly. “Not all gray names are grandiose. Now, there’s another sort of name. We call it the red name, the name that lives in the blood, the true name which can never be shed.”
“Like mine,” muttered Jean.
“Just so. The second thing you need to understand is that magical talent has no relation to heredity. It doesn’t breed true. Many decades of regrettable interference in the private lives of magi made this abundantly clear.”
“What do you do,” said Jean, “with, ah, ‘ungifted’ children when you have them?”
“Cherish them and raise them, you imbecile. Most of them end up working for us, in Karthain and elsewhere. What did you think we’d do, burn them on a pyre?”
“Forget I asked.”
“And gifted children?” said Locke. “Where do they come from, if they’re not home-grown?”
“A trained mage can sense an unschooled talent,” said Patience. “We usually catch them very young. They’re brought to Karthain and raised in our unique community. Sometimes their original memories are suppressed for their own comfort.”
“But not Falconer,” said Locke. “You said he was your flesh-and-blood son.”
“Yes.”
“And for him to have the power … how rare is that?”
“He was the fifth in four hundred years.”
“Was his father a mage?”
“A master gardener,” said Patience softly. “He drowned on the Amathel six months after our son was born.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Of course you’re not.” Patience moved her fingers slightly and her tea mug disappeared. “I suppose I might have gone mad, if not for the Falconer. He was my solace. We became so close, that little boy and I. We explored his talents together. Ultimately, though, for magi to be born of magi is more curse than blessing.”
“Why?” said Jean.
“You’ve been Jean Tannen all your life. It’s what your mother and father called you when you were learning how to speak. It’s engraved on your soul. Your friend here also has a red name, but, to his great good fortune, he stumbled into a gray name for himself at an early age. He calls himself Locke Lamora, but deep down inside, when he thinks of himself, he thinks something else.”
Locke smiled thinly and nibbled a biscuit.
“The very first identity that we accept and recognize as us,that’s what becomes the red name. When we grow from the raw instincts of infancy and discover that we exist, conscious and separate from the things around us. Most of us acquire red names from what our parents whisper to us, over and over, until we learn to repeat it in our own thoughts.”
“Huh,” said Locke. An instant later, he spat crumbs. “Holy shit. You know the Falconer’s true name because you gave it to him!”
“I tried to avoid it,” said Patience. “Oh, I tried. But I was lying to myself. You can’t love a baby and not give him a name. If my husband had lived, he would have given Falconer a secret name. That was the procedure … other magi might have intervened, would have if I hadn’t deceived them. I wasn’t thinking straight. I needed that private bond with my boy so desperately … and, inevitably, I named him.”
“He resented you for it,” said Jean.
“A mage’s deepest secret,” said Patience. “Never shared, not between masters and students, closest friends, even husbands and wives. A mage who learns another mage’s true name wields absolute power over them. My son has bitterly resented me since the moment he realized what I held over him, whether or not I ever chose to use it.”
“Crooked Warden,” said Locke. “I guess I should be able to find it in my heart to have some sympathy for the poor bastard. But I can’t. I sure as hell wish you’d had a normal son.”
“I think I’ve said enough for the time being.” Patience moved away from the taffrail and turned her back to Locke and Jean. “You two rest. We can dispose of any further questions when you awake.”
“I could sleep,” admitted Locke. “For seven or eight years, I think. Have someone kick the door in at the end of the month if I’m not out yet. And Patience … I guess … I am sorry for—”
“You’re a curious man, Master Lamora. You bite on reflex, and then your conscience bites you. Have you ever wondered where you might have acquired such contradictory strains of character?”
“I don’t repent anything I said, Patience, but I do occasionally remember to try and be civil after the fact.”
“As you said, I’m not dragging you to Karthain to be anyone’s friend. Least of all mine. Go take some rest. We’ll talk after.”
6
JEAN HADN’T realized just how exhausted the long night had left him, and after settling into his hammock he tumbled into the sort of sleep that squashed awareness as thoroughly as a few hundred pounds of bricks dropped on the head.
He woke, groggy and disoriented, to the smell of baked meat and crisp lake air. Locke was sitting at a smaller version of the makeshift table on which he’d been subjected to the cleansing ritual, hard at work on another small mountain of ship’s fare.
“Nnngh.” Jean rolled to his feet and heard his joints creak and pop. His bruises from the encounter with Cortessa would smart for a few days, but bruises were bruises. He’d had them before. “What’s the time?”
“Fifth hour of the afternoon,” said Locke around a mouthful of food. “We should be in Karthain just before dawn, they say.”
Jean yawned, rubbed his eyes, and considered the scene. Locke was dressed in loose clean slops, evidently chosen from an open chest of clothing set against the bulkhead behind him.
“How do you feel, Locke?”
“Bloody hungry.” He wiped his lips against the back of his hand and took a swig of water. “This is worse than Vel Virazzo. Wherever we go, I seem to get thinner and thinner.”
“I’d have thought you’d still be sleeping.”
“I had a will for it, but my stomach wouldn’t be put off. You, if you’ll forgive me, look like a man desperately in search of coffee.”
“I don’t smell any. Suppose you drank it all?”
“Come now, even I’m not that much of a scoundrel. Never was any aboard. Seems Patience is big on tea.”
“Damn. Tea’s no good for waking up civilized.”
“What’s boiling in that muddled brain of yours?”
“I suppose I’m bemused.” Jean took one of the two empty chairs at the table, picked up a knife, and used it to slide some ham onto a slab of bread. “And dizzy. Our Lady of the Five Rings has spun our situation well beyond anything I expected.”
“That she has. You think it’s odd from where you’re sitting?”