A TRADE IS A TRADE #2
“But it wasn’t always,” he said delicately. “What is your name?”
“Esme.”
“That’s what you’re called. What’s your name?” he asked again. He didn’t have a name. People called him Calamity, Massacre, Tyrant. But none of those were his name. None of them were the man sitting next to her right now.
Was she Esme? Was she the woman sitting in this hole, barely able to think straight? Or was she Bast? Bast was happy. She was full. She had a family, and a goddess, and a place.
Esme felt like nothing. Bast was a priestess, second to her goddess in authority. She was a princess of the world-city of Is-Khan, and she was the daughter of a warrior and an artist. She was a sister and an aunt and a best friend. She was a daughter.
What was Esme?
A destroyer of civilizations. A murderer. A colonizer. A harbinger of terror. A tool. A weapon. A thing.
Amaris’s dark and vicious viper.
Bast was dead. There was only Esme now.
“My name is Esme,” she said.
The Song didn’t fight her. Maybe he knew he couldn’t win. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.
More of his heat slid down her back, and as undone as she felt, she welcomed it. She leaned forward and the heat smoothed down her arms. “It happened. It’s over. I don’t think about it,” she rasped. “You should choose your own name. You deserve to.”
The Song—Ojalla alive, she didn’t want to call him that anymore—sent her a little smile. “I’ll choose something stupid,” he said. “You’re smarter than me.”
Esme sniffled and laughed in the same breath. “Then what’s your favorite color?”
“Green.”
“Okay.” Esme leaned closer to him. “The Early Micrean for green is si, and the word for favoring something was momo-n. So ‘He who favors green’ would be Simomon. And then, when we translate things from Early Micrean, we get rid of the repeated sound. So, Simon.”
“Simon?” He asked.
Esme nodded.
The man soon to be known as Simon leaned back, closing his eyes and letting the name sink into him. “I think I’m a Simon.”
Esme grinned. “Simon it is, then. I’m guessing you don’t have any ideas for a last name?”
Simon shrugged. “Who needs a last name?”
“If you want to get married, you’d better find a last name.”
“Are you proposing to me?” He raised an eyebrow, dipping close to her so his heat fanned out over her face.
“I already have a wife,” she said with a smirk. “Thank you, actually. You saved her, on the platform at the Valosia. That was her. So: thank you.” She tried to bite her lip, but the question slipped out anyway. “Why’d you do it?”
“I saw how you looked at her,” Simon said. “And I know how it feels to lose the woman you love.”
So the Song was in love. He’d loved and he’d lost and he had a sister.
He could make friends and he could give comfort.
Esme’s parents had left all those parts of him out of their stories.
She wondered if those stories were like her snake-orgy myth and opened her mouth to ask him just as he pushed himself up to his feet.
“We should be getting home. You’re very young and need your sleep,” Simon said, offering her a hand.
“I’m not young,” she said with a pout, letting him pull her to her feet.
“Yes, you are. You haven’t even finished growing yet,” he said, tipping his chin up to consider her.
“I’m tall for a woman,” she said playfully, slapping his shoulder. “You’re oversized. It’s unfair.”
“Oh, apologies. I think you said something but, alas, it couldn’t travel from all the way down there to my ears up at a normal height,” he said, pity-smiling at her.
“I named you, but I can take it back,” she said. “Or change it to something terrible. Like Jerem.”
“Oh, Iksha, no! Not Jerem!” Simon gasped in mock horror. “You can’t change my name now. No taking it back.”
Esme grinned at him. Back home in Is-Khan, newlyweds took new names given by their spouses at their wedding. Simon didn’t know that, but it made heat spread out in her stomach to imagine him under a purple shroud with the woman he loved, taking a name she’d chosen for him.
“I should get you back to your dungeon,” she said, nodding him on. “All your followers are probably waiting on you with bated breath.”
They hadn’t given each other’s hands up since he’d helped her stand, and now Simon brought hers to his face as they meandered through Amaris. “You’re colder than I thought you’d be.”
“I was born cold,” she said. “I was born still, and my mother begged my goddess to bring me back.” She grinning at his confusion, then moved his fingers to her neck and pressed them to her pulse. “Do you feel that?”
Simon’s eyebrows drew in and he nodded.
“Magic in my very veins,” she said. “Her magic. It’s the only reason I live. It’s proof they’re still with me, I suppose.”
Simon grinned and Esme swore a second sun dawned in that alley. He nodded, pressing his lips tight. They wobbled, but he didn’t let whatever he was feeling seep out.
“Ojalla.” He rasped the goddess’s name like a devotee would. “Let’s get you home, before the sun gets too strong.” He pulled her on.
If Esme wasn’t so caught up in the solid grip of his hand, she might have asked how he knew that name.