Marissa Harney

For the Sake of Your Name

Novel extract

Chapter 12: Just Remember

The ghost of Caia’s mother vanished, dissolving into a pile of salt in the fountain’s empty bottom. Caia lurched to the stone edge, pouring her heart into the fountain’s cracks where the crystalline remnants of her mother’s phantom landed. She wanted to yell, come back! But even silent, she knew the want was foolish. She’d been yelling that same demand into the darkness for eighteen years, and Vilene had never bothered to answer. It hurt worse now, knowing she might have been able to. Knowing she might have heard.

A mosaic glittered in the fountain’s splintered basin, its agate tiles spelling out something in the Fabric’s silken speech.

Anue Aniamiki.

Falling back on her heels, Caia took in the fountain. Two figures, a man and a woman, rose from a pedestal in its center, their arms clasped around each other as though they needed to become one, both their faces burrowed deep in the neck of the other starved for each other’s skin scent. The woman’s torso rose from a thicket of wildflowers. Blooms coiled around her hips and chest, stretching like vines to caress her lover, too. The man’s chest erupted from a wave, and Caia imagined that wave lifting him from the ocean’s depths to the piece of his heart he’d left earthside. Just like the woman’s flowers, tendrils of his wave wrapped around her shoulders, holding her closer to him.

Caia gazed at the stonework, how tenderly the marble had been rendered, how much feeling had been imbued in something so stoic. She tried to make sense of the words in the mosaic, wanting as badly as the figures wanted each other to understand their story. Understand why her mother had brought her here. Understand her warning.

She flicked through her mental catalogue, all the stories and scraps of language she’d stolen from her father’s library over the years. “Anue Animiki,” she whispered to herself. “Anue Animiki.”

She sucked in a sharp breath as the translation pricked her mind like a needle injecting its serum. Behind her, a stranger’s voice spoke it aloud, “The First Soulmates.”

Caia’s neck snapped around, her hands still grasping the fountain’s edge. She half-expected Evan to have somehow found her. His uncanny and inexplicable appearances over the last few days had made her hopeful. Instead, she found a broad man in fine robes. He stood a ways down the branch, watery blue eyes trained on her with a hungry sheen.

Like a needle tugging at thread, the corner of his mouth twitched. Caia gulped and rubbed her head where she’d felt the prick. It throbbed dully.

“Hello,” said the man. The branch, sturdy as it was, trembled as he stepped forward.

Caia sucked in a sharp breath and dug her nails into the stone rim.

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” he said, spreading his palms in innocence. “Rather, you startled me. It’s rare to see anyone in this part of the palace.”

Caia tugged at the sleeves of her borrowed shift. Her scalp itched, the prickling sensation exploding beneath every one of her hair follicles. Another thought needled her; Evan had cautioned her against dangerous people in the palace, and the flash of ice in this man’s eyes sent a chill down her spine.

“What… what part of the palace is that?” she asked.

“Why, you’ve found yourself in the Alta’s Frond.” He perched on the fountain’s edge. “Only the tragic still visit.”

The curl in his lip reminded Caia of her tabby after he’d caught a mouse.

“It’s a stunning sculpture, no?” he continued. “The Champions of Life and Death, two halves that could not exist without the other.”

Caia sucked in a breath. She couldn’t decide whether it had to do with the way her brain knocked at the walls of her skull, demanding to be let out, or if it was realizing this stone embrace was between her mother and the man she was named for.

“The—the First Soulmates?” she repeated, trying to focus through her throbbing head. The intimacy seemed… misplaced. After all, Vilene had given her heart to Caia’s father—not this man in statue.

“Indeed,” he said. “An artist from Cerba made it, and the White Warlock himself enchanted the stone so it could never shatter. A little… ah, cliché, I think you Ŝiritans would say? That’s my opinion, at least—but the Alta did always like that sort of obvious symbolism.”

He shrugged as though he was sorry to say that there was nothing to be done about other people’s tackiness, then chuckled. “My apologies. I don’t mean to project. Are you alright? You looked rather frightened when I came upon you.”

This time, when he smiled down at her, Caia thought there was something warm in it. Something familiar. She thought she must have imagined the wolfish glint in his eye earlier.

“I’m…” she hesitated, weighing Evan’s warning. But he’d left her with a nymph he claimed could be trusted, so, really, what were his instincts worth? “I’m looking for my friend.”

“A Ŝiritan with a friend in Naede? I only know of one. You must be Caia.”

Relief flooded her. She scrabbled to join him on the fountain’s edge. “You know me?” she exhaled.

“Know you?” the man admonished. “By the Dia’s needle, my nephew never stops talking about you!” He winked. Then, held out a hand. “Arran of Skein Sibulla.”

“You’re Evan’s uncle?” said Caia. A pale memory came to her of the two of them lying in the cottage’s garden, the light spilling on their faces through the magnolia leaves. In the dappled sun, Caia traced a scar at the tail of Evan’s eyebrow. What happened? she’d asked. My uncle, he’d said, and then he’d closed his eyes, and with them, the subject.

Arran’s eyes flashed as though he knew the memory that played in her head. “One of many,” he explained. “You know how Skeins go, all those individual fibers, each one a member of your kin, wrapping and wrapping and wrapping around each other. A boy has hundreds of uncles tangled in a ball of yarn like that.”

Caia wanted to argue Evan had never mentioned more than one uncle, but there was plenty he’d never mentioned, so what were uncles to count amongst them?

She ran a finger through the leftover salt. She also wanted to argue that she did not, in fact, know how Skeins go, as they seemed yet another thing she should have been taught. She knew the word sounded like family though, and that pain went deeper than her indignation.

Arran’s pale eyes glinted again. As though he felt her hurt. “You know, it’s just awful what was done to you, Caia,” he said. “How your life was taken from you. Your fate—restitched. I’m not sure how you stomach all the lies they’ve told you—these men you love most. I hope they’re ashamed—I’m ashamed for them.”

“What are you talking about?”

Arran tutted, his tongue clucking against uneven teeth. He rested a heavy hand on her shoulder.

Evan’s voice was faint in her mind: these people know things that you don’t know about yourself. And though she knew he’d meant it as a warning, the possibility that someone might give her some answers screamed louder.

“Everything your father took from you.” He squeezed her shoulder as though he were the one in pain. “Everything my nephew neglected to share with you all those years—I told him lying to you was wrong.”

Hunger broke open Caia’s stomach. She wanted to gorge herself on the answers Arran held. She knew why, now; she understood why her mother’s ghost had led her here. Not back to Evan, no. To a different piece of his family. A different thread in his skein.

Arran drew back and spread his hands. “But all’s well that ends well, isn’t it? That’s another phrase of yours, yes? You’ll forget, of course. One day, when you’re six hundred years old, those eighteen years you were sentenced to Ŝirita will be but a speck.”

No. Caia shook her head. Her gaze flickered between his mouth and eyes, begging just one of them to say more.

“Just a memory you can hardly grasp,” Arran went on. “Of course, by then, you’ll have watched oceans rise and fall. You’ll have harnessed the tides yourself. That little cottage, your dead bugs, the cat—all the things you occupied your mind with while it searched for the Dia in your dreams… you’ll laugh thinking of them.”

Caia touched her fingers to her scars through the dress. Their texture was easy to map beneath the raw silk. Arran’s words sluiced through her like fresh water through old pipes. She imagined herself like her mother’s statue, embracing Death’s wave… harnessing the tide—what had Evan said? Rewriting the Fabric?

“What do you mean six hundred years?” she repeated. How much had Evan and Emory kept from her? Is this what her mother had led her to? Her potential? Her Fate?

“Tell me what you mean,” she demanded again.

“It’s simple,” said Arran. “Once you learn to touch the Dia, to control her voyage through your veins and slow your aging, you’ll live forever.”

Forever, dwelled Caia. There were so many details of her life that must have slipped through her memory in eighteen years. How much was sifted away when life stretched indefinitely outward, memory after memory piling upon themselves like sandcastles sinking back into the shore?

“You can’t forget your home,” she murmured.

“Precisely,” purred Arran, sweeping her hands up in his own. His palms were dry, sandpaper skin scraping against her own. “Why do you think you find Naede in your dreams? Why do you feel most comfortable in a bedroom you’ve turned into a shrine to this—here—Life and Death’s union?” He turned her chin to face the fountain. “Why does Evander, a boy who carries Naede in his heart and on his skin, feel like your soulmate?”

Caia stole her hands back, wringing them. His words were like honey melting in the bitter tinctures her father gave her before bed; it made the medicine easy to swallow. So easy, she didn’t even stop to question how he knew what he did. How he seemed to be inside her head.

“Because Naede is my home,” she said. Her heart seemed to crack and inflate all at once. Was that all her love for Evan was? A want for home and nothing else? And was she home at last?

“I can make you remember all of it, Caia,” said Arran. “Everything that happened to you before Emory took you to Ŝirita. I can make even the most muddled memories clear. That is where the truth lives. Emory lied to you. Evander hid it all, but you… you would never lie to yourself, would you?”

Caia shook her head, the barest wobble of her chin.

“It’s all in here,” whispered Arran, touching a finger to her temple. “You just have to remember.”

Caia glanced at the way his stubby fingers clamped her own. Sweat secreted where their skin touched, and suddenly, her stomach twisted with the instinct to run, but she was too late.

The pain was like a bolt of lightning, sudden, bright, and paralyzing.

Caia screamed. For a moment, she was separate from her body, and then she’d been slammed back into it, and it felt like Arran’s fingers were in her brain.

The needling sensation that had dropped the translation of Anue Animiki exploded into jackhammers. Caia dropped to her knees, the palace bark biting. She heard her own screams like an echo outside of her. All she knew was Arran digging between every wrinkle and fold of her mind, squelching and searching.

Memories flit by as he probed deeper, the pain incredible, the memories worse. The gaps between her brain’s folds became chasms, yawning in response to Arran’s penetration. Emotions were onslaughts. There were moments she’d forgotten full of happiness so light it seemed only fair the memory of it had floated away from her consciousness.

Her hands pressed against a shop window, mesmerized by a pair of blue earrings. Cynthia buying them for her.

Dragging a holly bush into the house with Emory the year it toppled over a jar filled with water and paintbrushes, staining Bram’s fur until the New Year.

Meeting Evan. Hadn’t she always simply known him? Yet, meeting him had been so, so, so sweet.

Her blood thundered. Too loud. Too fast. Her veins swelled, trying to accommodate the current. Her eardrums screamed. Her heart, her ears. Her organs were going to explode. All over the fountain—all over Arran—all over—

New memories came. Moments so heavy with sadness she’d buried them so they could not keep pulling her down under their grave dirt grief.

Slipping in the creek, too small to catch herself. Her favorite jar of cicada husks floating away, lost to the current.

Girls at school calling her ugly with her too-long hair and too-high sweaters. Cutting her curls short in tearful anger.

Emory snatching Vilene’s ring back. Smashing the teacup, a snarl on his lips, rejecting both her mother and her.

Caia was blind. She could see nothing but her memories, yet she sensed Arran drawing closer. His breath crimped the hairs on her arms. Oily fingers gripped locks of white hair. He was too close. Too warm. Too—

The memories walloped her, one after the other. Her body convulsed, shaking with laughter one moment and sobbing the next.

She was following Evan into the Milkweeds, knees shaking. She was burning in the cottage, gripped by the same panic. She was fighting tears while Evan shouted at her in her room, the revulsion clear in his eyes.

She was arguing with Emory, petting Bram, dreaming of her mother, laying on the grass with Evan. 

Evan.

Evan.

Evan.

His irises exploded in her mind’s eye.

A kaleidoscope shattering.

Her body temperature reached a breaking point. Sweat pooled in every crevice of her body. Her nerve endings fried.

Evan’s voice drowned her, cacophonous and melodious, saying her name over and over. That deep, primal, ineffable need she felt when it came to him multiplied itself tenfold. It was unbearable. She thought her heart might explode out of her chest, flopping over the tree branches, spasming between rawest love and unpasteurized anger.

When Arran moved on, she just wanted to go back. She wanted Evan.

But Arran plunged deeper. To a time before Evan existed. She was cutting her hair, climbing the willow tree, collecting cicada shells, toddling after Emory in the garden, picking chamomile buds, and accidentally crushing them before dropping them in the basket— and then she wasn’t in Breccanbury.

The seizure stopped.

She was an infant, wrapped in softest blankets. The beat of her mother’s heart sounded hard in her head. Vilene was running, carrying nothing but her terror and her daughter. The sound of the ocean grew louder with every one of her mother’s strides. Through the blankets, Caia saw two colossal stone lions jutting from the sea. There were screams. Terror ripped through her, and she began to cry. In her memory, she turned to Vilene’s breast, where it was warm and safe, but she was being lifted away— given to someone.

Whoever accepted her smelled like rotting riverweed. They pulled back the blankets swaddling Caia, and she saw a man’s pointed face covered in a bloody sheen. Wicked pleasure sneered beneath it. He curled back his lips, baring saber-tooth fangs. Caia cried in protest at being taken from Vilene, but her cry curdled into a squeal of slaughter.

Pain ripped through her as those fangs sunk deep into her chest. Crimson geysers erupted from her puncture wounds, and she felt herself shriveling as the saber-toothed man gulped the few mouthfuls of blood her tiny body held.

She remembered wishing for Vilene’s heartbeat, but the wishing dried up.

Everything did.

Arran retreated from her mind. The pain ended. Caia laid sprawled across the branch, sweat beading on her forehead. Her breaths came in small whimpers, and she clutched her chest, clawing at her scars. She kept her eyes squeezed shut, the horrible memory of those blood-stained fangs tattooed on her eyelids.

She felt Arran’s presence kneel on the floor beside her. “You died, Caia,” he murmured. His breath was sour and hot like meat left out in summer. “You were murdered. And still….” He petted her hair, plastering it to the sweat on her forehead. “They could not leave you to rest. They committed you to resurrection.”

Caia whimpered, her eyes still forced closed. It was impossible. She was alive. She was alive. She was alive, but her scars… her scars… her scars….

From a heart trauma she’d suffered as a baby.

Whatever it was, she’d thought it killed her mother, too.

And now, she understood. Vilene was never the thing Emory regretted bringing back from the dead.

She was.