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The woman who was court magician did not sleep easy. Weeks ago, the Regent had called on her, and she had granted his request – something happened to his political rival, or her lover, or her child, or some such. That wasn’t the important part. She spoke the word and waited.
And she waited.
She clasped her hands together and felt no new absences. When she returned to her rooms, she checked herself over from face to feet. Everything in working order, or at least as much as before. She started to feel the fear crawl back up her throat. She cast her eyes about her rooms in a panic: the bed, the desk, the plush settee with each beaded pillow, every stiff-backed book on the crowded shelf…
At a knock on her door – dinner service – she fled into her bedroom.
If the price was not physical, she could not weigh its emptiness in her hands. She would still try, once she found out what it was. She had to find out what it was. She recalled the faces of her parents, her childhood friend. It wouldn’t take too long to exhaust her list of names. She hadn’t spoken to anyone face-to-face in years, except the regent, of course. She recited her siblings’ names. The hallowed generations of her family tree all the way up and back down, trying to pass off familial loyalty as love. With those memories secure, she probed at her familiar losses as if running her tongue over the empty sockets of rotten teeth, struggling to identify the newest among their number.
What had she lost?
With the turn of the seasons into winter, the Regent called her back.
The problem this time was quite simple, he explained. No trouble at all for a court magician such as her. A dowager countess was inconveniencing him at court.
A bitter old woman had never forgiven him for what his peace cost her family, the court magician imagined. Her mind wandered more than usual. Her unknown price had left her unsteady, and this new problem could take the last of her equilibrium. What was the love of a political rival worth? What did the life of a dowager countess cost?
He waved a casual hand. “Whenever you are ready, magician.”
He did not tell her the name of this new problem – perhaps he didn’t know it. She had never gotten the impression that the Regent knew her name either. If he did, he would have to acknowledge her as a person with a name and a life of her own, not just the power to wield the word.
He would look her in the face for once, she imagined. He would clasp her few-fingered hand without flinching, and he would thank her for her sacrifices. All would know of her service. Her name on every tongue. She gathered its syllables behind her remaining teeth, ready to murmur it to herself.
When she opened her mouth, nothing came out.
She shaped her lips around empty air. She had a name, she knew, although she had never been too fond of it. Her mother had chosen it with characteristically ridiculous taste. She privately thought it made her sound like a second-favorite household dog. All the same, it was hers. And it was… her name was…
An empty void.
And all at once, she understood. The relief was so profound that it almost won out over the sense of loss. All hail the court magician! she thought. The stage magician surrenders her true name once, but the court magician twice. She looked upon the Regent in a rush of triumph and despair.
Then she spoke the word for the last time.
🪄🪄🪄
The woman who was court magician arrives at the palace on time with the change of the morning guard, as requested.
She knows what she will find. The bed not slept in. The conspicuous space on the wall where there once hung a painting. The rooms swept clean except the study, which the court magician must have spent the most time in. Now there is no court magician.
The maids are relieved to see her, and they practically leap to clean out the court magician’s rooms at her command. They think nothing of speaking to her, face to face, and greeting her by title. They have never known her as the court magician. She scoffs at their eagerness and takes her leave.
She is in no hurry. The Regent is not an unreasonable man; he understands that to find a new court magician takes time.
On her way home, she walks through the market square. She watches a street magician imitate the Sleeper’s Lament – quite clever, if not at the level of the trick’s original creator – and she does not count his fingers. She sees another watching from the shadows, with one seeing eye and one made of glass, and she does not wonder if cutting open a new space in the smooth skin hurt more than the initial loss. If the watcher loves the new eye even more because they forced it back in with their own two hands. She sees recognition in the watcher’s face, and they do not acknowledge each other.
She returns to her little house. Her home, with its tea-stained books, its mismatched pillows, its bed with one crooked post, and every other object ever handed to her since her retirement. Some nights she counts them all before she goes to bed.
Maybe she will always be afraid to claim too much, but she can have this: each morning, she wakes up next to her wife. Her wife tidies the house and burns the food. The woman goes where she is sent, and her wife does not ask where she goes each day. Her wife – the kindest of creatures on this earth, she’ll tell any old courtier – is no kinder to her than to any crooked-tailed cat off the street. She does not ask if her wife remembers the days when she was the court magician.
She thinks of the clutch of timid maids at the palace in the morning, then of her wife back then, and she struggles to remember how her wife used to be one of them. Her wife almost seems to have forgotten the world where a simple utterance can unmake a province. Without it, life is simple. She did not exist to her wife before; her wife loves her now.
It had taken a flock of doves, a quick-blooming orange tree, and a ring hidden in a fragile shell. She remembers them well. Her wife is so easily entertained by cheap tricks. When she looks at her, she feels the word dancing on her tongue. The weight of magic left unspoken.
I love you, she thinks, as she lays beside her wife at night. I love you to the point of undoing. Then a perverse indulgence. You forget how lucky you are. You are only here because I did not love you.
In the darkness, she conducts her most private and familiar ritual. She wiggles her toes. Knocks her knees together, then holds her arms close around her stomach. She does not wonder what the life of one bitter old woman is worth. Traces each tooth, golden or not, with her tongue. Runs her fingers over her face and breathes out a sigh into her hands.
The woman with no name drifts into the unknowing emptiness of sleep.