A girl reckons with what she must lose–and who she has become–in order to be accepted at the empire’s most prestigious university.
Novelette | 9300 words
When the cutter offered forty thousand shada for all five parts of my name, my mother puffed up. Absolutely not, she said, you brain-gored swindler.
I sat on his bench as they haggled, naked from the waist up. It was a cool morning and my skin pimpled around the ideograms on my bare chest. The full set of five was worth the most; forty thousand shada was more money than we took from ten harvests, and would have covered my tuition with coin to spare. But I was glad my parents had rejected the first offer. I was not prepared to lose the entirety of my name just yet.
“All right, all right,” Durudawanyi relented. Earlier, the rector had murmured and prevaricated as he examined my ideograms, evaluating their specific powers and different combinations, along with my age and other factors. “Twenty-five thousand, for the affective three.”
My mother hesitated. It was unfortunate that I had been born with my more powerful names all at the end: the ones that let me shape earth without cracking, find my way in the dark, share our dogs’ senses. You could only sell from the end, and never out of order, so selling three names would mean losing most of my magic. But where I was going, money was more important than magic. “Thirty,” she said.
Durudawanyi scrutinized her. “Twenty-eight.”
My parents exchanged a look. “Done.”
I clutched my blouse. Two days ago, I would never have fathomed sitting in the rector’s lush, airy hut, the place where people went and came back changed. But then the letter arrived. I had, beyond all hope, tested into the University of Ustonel—a place far, far away—a place that produced consuls and guildmasters and airship captains—a place that had never, until this cycle, accepted students from the Angze Hills.
The tuition for three years’ study was thirty-five thousand shada. A discounted price, as a welcome.
Not going was out of the question. And so I was here, selling the most precious thing an Angze was born with.
When the namecutter sliced the first part-name from my chest, I screamed. I had promised not to, I had sworn to be brave, but it ripped from me with a pain like I had never felt in my life. Blood was running down my chest. “It’s all right, darling,” my mother whispered into my hair. “It’s all right.” She had sold one part of her name to feed us during the drought a few years ago. My father had sold one when I was a child, and one before I was born. Now inducted, I pressed into my mother’s arms, fighting back tears. I thought of my name being carried to the anchorites in the hills, whose prayers from our names the bethel claimed kept the soil rich and the rivers flowing through the valleys. There were even those devout who offered up their part-names willingly. Though our village did not particularly subscribe to the faith, who was I to judge it when the bethel were willing to open their treasuries like this?
Durudawanyi deftly slipped the ideogram into a vial. It fluttered, leaving specks of red on the glass. For all the knowledge of its greater destination I stared at it hazily, wondering how that could have come from me; how such a fragile-looking thing could cause so much pain.
When he took the second part-name, I fainted.
I awoke at home, with pungent bandages around my chest and a throbbing ache in both my skull and my ribs. My sister wiped my face with cool cloths, while at the stove behind her my father was boiling lemongrass tea. A trunk was open on the floor. My mother was putting my things into it. It had been done.
I once had a name of five segments. But henceforth, and onward to Ustonel, I would simply be Ziya.
Two weeks by carriage took me to the port. I barely had time to take in the new surroundings before I was on a boat headed across the ocean.
Ustonel was a coastal empire, but I had never seen the sea. The sight of that much water felt like ascending into a tossing, frothing divine. I clutched the rails, trunk squeezed between my knees, and stared in equal terror and veneration as afternoon bled into evening with a chiaroscuro of color.
As the sun set, the spires of the university emerged on the horizon.
Second-hand tales had done little to prepare me for the city of white turrets, wrapped around a rock pillar that emerged from the beating waves like the many-fingered arm of an old god. It was surrounded by smaller outcrops, which bore smaller buildings and a flashing lighthouse, but the main spire that was the University of Ustonel cast its long, long shadow over us as our boat crawled up to it. I tipped my chin all the way back. Lamps glittered like stars in the slits of its turrets and along its crenellations. As we approached the docks I saw our entrance: a twisting, punishing staircase cut into the rock.
The boat anchored. We bobbed beside the jetty, damp with spray. A minute later, a squad in turquoise cloaks thundered up the gangway. They were not much older than I; metal crests gleamed on their cloakpins. Older students, I thought, before one of them shouted, “Get in line, double-time!”
I and the couple dozen others on the boat with me—largely Ustonels who had spent the journey lounging in the cabin sipping tea—scurried into a nervous queue.
We were marched off the docks and along a precarious path that veered into the caverns within the pillar itself. We came to a shallow cave pool populated by silvery fish, upon which the older girl at my shoulder threw me down onto the bank.
“All right, tadpoles, listen up!”
I was handed a blade, the handle’s leather worn to burrs. I had never seen a knife like this: long and flat, with a wicked hook in its tip that made it look like a silver tooth. The girl took half a second to notice my features. “Huh, Angze,” she said, and I tensed. But then she simply nodded at the pool. “Spear a fish and cut the head off.”
I was so dazed already, a culmination of the long journey and the assault of new sights and here, stepping into an institution where no Angze had ever been before. I would have done anything in that instant if I was told. Numbly, I gripped the knife, and set about plunging it into the water.
Soon the cave echoed with the sound of splashing and whipping tails. Fortunately, I’d caught my share of fish from streams deeper than this pool, although never with a knife. I managed to spear a fat one and drag it onto the ground where it wriggled, gasping.
With a sharp breath, I severed its head. The knife was not made for this purpose; it took three hard hacks to take it off completely. The body stilled surprisingly quickly. Decapitated chickens would continue tottering around the yard, waiting for their death to catch up to them, but the fish instantly flopped cold, slick in the pooling blood. I retrieved the wayward head, ignoring how its bulging eye glinted accusingly, and presented it to the girl with raised, red hands. “Mistress.”
She laughed, raspy and pleased, and accepted the head. Her fingers dipped into its sockets and pressed out its eyes with wet squelches. She tossed the head aside and held the gleaming, accusing spheres out to me. “Together.”
There was only one way to understand this. I scooped one eye from her hand. Together, we dropped the eyes into our mouths and swallowed. It tasted like brine and the blood off my fingers, but otherwise had the consistency of firm jelly, and went down smooth. Down the row, someone vomited into the water.
The girl looked pleased. “What’s your name?”
“My name is Ziyar—”
My awkward, traitorous mouth tripped over its missing syllables. My throat hitched and spat out feed instead: the eyeball shot up my throat like a marble and splattered onto the rock.
The girl’s expression turned cold. She looked from me to the mulch.
Hurriedly, I scooped it up. I couldn’t then, but I can name the parts now: cornea, pupil, retina, sclera—all sloshed into my nails, and dripping in vitreous humor. I picked it up, I fed it past my lips, I swallowed. This time it stayed down. “Ziya,” I repeated. It scratched my throat to say.
She grasped my wet hand and pulled me to my feet. “Ziya,” she said, pleased again. It sounded like welcome.
Once I conquered the thousand sea-slick steps, I found myself sharing a narrow set of apartments with four others: three Ustonels and, to my surprise, an Angze boy. He slipped into the spot beside me as our house gathered in the kitchen to introduce ourselves. I gave him a grateful glance as we drew chairs.
The only other girl, who sported pretty white curls and long-lashed, expressive eyes, was absolutely chirpy. “I’m Caelan Burnetta Karthe Ruh, but you can just call me Caelan.”
“Aradika Denja Orys Dae Chandrea,” said the boy who wore airship goggles atop his short hair. He offered no truncation, but I soon learned he, too, answered simply to Aradika. The indulgence of their names shocked me; it also made me ache.
The final, pouting Ustonel boy was Haval Janika Lott, and there was a slight tsk to the way he cut off the last consonant, as though he was bothered by his name. Or perhaps he was simply bothered by us. He rolled his cuffs carelessly as he spoke.
I was prepared this time. “My name is Ziya.” A brief silence followed, as though I had underused my span of air.
“Ziya,” Caelan repeated savoringly, pronouncing it almost right. “I’ve always thought you’re all fascinating, the way your names are spells. I’m just named after my grandmothers! What does Ziya mean?”
My heart twinged with loss, but I did not want to cause unnecessary awkwardness. “It means nothing on its own.” That was not entirely true. Zi was for fortitude, a purely moral ideogram that built character but lacked actual power. Ya was acuity, which gave me quick reflexes and sharp senses. But I had lost three-fifths of the phrase. Together they were a prophecy. Apart, they meant very little.
“Did you sell the rest of it?” Haval drawled. The matter-of-fact way he asked made my skin prickle. “What were they?”
“Haval!” Caelan chided. “She can’t tell you.”
He shrugged and nodded at the Angze boy next to me. “What about you?”
The boy hesitated. How much of his name did he have left? How much had he sold to be here? His clothes and skin looked as worn and sun-beaten as mine, and his fingers looked calloused. I doubted he was wealthy. I tried to give him a reassuring look, but he wouldn’t turn my way.
Finally he said, “You can call me River.”
“River?” Aradika asked, before being elbowed by Caelan. I was starting to figure out that she was quick, and tactful. She’d realized what I instantly had: River had none of his original name left. He had sold it all to attend.
Haval made a pleased little sound.
That night, tipsy on the ale Haval had produced for the welcome party, I lay in bed staring out the window. The party had been held with about a dozen other Ustonels that Caelan and Aradika knew. It had been my first time trying Ustonel liquors—bitterer, stronger than anything from the Hills, brewed for sailors—and playing Ustonel games (I had turned out excellent at cards). On the effusive arm of Caelan, who seemed to have taken a liking to me, I had even found myself at the fascination of her friends, whose endlessly long names made my head spin. We chatted and discussed upcoming classes, and it was altogether an enjoyable time. I was asked questions about the Hills, and the long journey here, and whether everything was confusing and new.
Despite the niceties, I had the unease of being a leaf dropped into the current: buoyant, yes, but ungainly, impossible not to notice. More than once, Caelan told off someone else for asking about my lost names. Toward the end of the night, some drunk boy tugged insistently at my collar, wanting to see them on my skin. I was paralyzed; Aradika and Haval had to force him from the premises.
Lying in bed with the sound of the sea beneath, higher up in the world than I had ever been, I felt the ache of my missing names acutely. A large part of me had been scooped out and left hollow; not a tangible thing, except for the three scars under my collarbone, but bone-deep all the same. Into its place, something nebulous and tangled was beginning to trickle in. But before I could properly discern it, I drifted off to sleep.
As first-years, we learned everything. I spent my days on mechanics, mathematics, ethics, the chemical and biological sciences. In history I spoke more of the Angze Hills and its hinterland role in the development of Ustonel than I had ever thought to consider in my life. I became the expert. Two evenings a week, we traipsed up to the vast courtyard at the top of the pillar and learned to chart the stars, key for both airship and boat captains alike and the very foundation of guild trade. Back in the Hills, we followed deer trails and birds, the sky too vast for the shorter distances we traveled. These lessons taught me new breadth to the world.
The classes challenged me and I rose to them fiercely, to the compliment of my teachers. Despite my initial discomfort, I determinedly settled into this new sound of myself: clipped, neat, a version that slipped into even the most rushed of conversations. That reminder of what I’d paid to be there spurred me on further with every hello. I made myself efficient. I drew up schedules and assigned myself three books per week from the labyrinthine granite library—I was fluent in Ustonel colloquially, but academia demanded a much greater vocabulary, and a certain flowy, laborious voice quite different from the staccato patterns of the Hills. We were curiosities, I knew, so I was determined to make myself as uncurious as possible.
My second name gave me a talent for mimicry; I could sing birds’ songs back to them. Now I dedicated myself to the way the Ustonels constructed their arguments and, like the birds, fed them back until we both sang. Like names, there was a pattern and a weight to language; words had to be in certain places, in certain orders, before the spell would take hold.
Not all the Angze students were so successful. There were about ten of us, six boys and three other girls that I saw intermittently. One girl, Siluintong, struggled immensely with her inflections. Hearing her attempt to debate was embarrassing; worse, she kept looking at me, as though willing me to translate. It frustrated me that she wouldn’t simply try a little harder to make herself better understood, especially since she was clearly wealthier than I was. Magic or not, I had put in the work; why couldn’t she? She was pleasant enough in the early weeks, and we took lunch together a few times, figuring out the seafood offerings and frowning over strange new tastes. But she eventually began to grate on me, and I found myself meeting up instead with Caelan and Aradika, who all but adopted me. Haval occasionally deigned to join. Surprisingly, I started seeing River and Siluintong together, with a couple other Angze students.
The centerpiece of university life was the full moon dinner. Three weeks after I arrived, we gathered in the courtyard at the very top of the university. Hundreds of sitting mats had been laid out across the stone, beneath the cloudless sky. I was seated between Caelan and River.
After a brief ceremonial address, dinner was served promptly by waitstaff in dark blue suits. That was the first thing that unnerved me; I had never been formally served before. Second was the opening course: a chilled fish head placed before me on a wooden platter, garnished with ginger and seaweeds.
I subconsciously understood, but it was only until I saw the Ustonel students around me vigorously popping out eyes and swallowing them that it truly sunk in. We ate eyes in the Hills too, often stewed, along with tongues, livers, feet, intestines, and testicles—every part of the animal we could, because we couldn’t afford to waste it. But this dish unsettled me. It was the manner in which it was served, a violence made beautiful in the name of luxury.
“You’re not eating?” Caelan asked. She had already polished off hers and set the rest of the head aside. What waste.
“Oh, I—” I was ashamed to say it, when everyone around me was nearly finished. But then from several seats down there was an audible pop and a muffled giggle. I looked around and saw River scowling, fingers dripping and a caved-in, jelly mess pooled where his fish’s eye had been. I turned back to Caelan, heart quickening inexplicably. “I don’t know how,” I admitted with some difficulty.
“Haven’t you got a knife?” I realized she was holding a knife like the one I’d killed the cave fish with, and that every other Ustonel had one in hand as well. They must have had their own, and no one had remembered this little detail for the new Angze students.
Caelan reached over. “Here, I’ll show you.” I watched intently as she slit the fish’s cheek and extracted the eyes. She was sweet, and the eyeballs, especially paired with ginger, were delicious—gooey on the outside and crispy and briny on the inside. But I burned with a particular embarrassment at needing to be helped like a child.
Two days later Caelan knocked unexpectedly on my door, carrying a lacquered case that she opened on my desk. “Choose one.”
Inside were over a dozen fish knives. Longer, shorter, nicked blades and smooth; some diamond shaped, some narrow, some with intricate engravings. “I got that for my fifteenth birthday,” she explained, of one with a particularly fine leather handle. The one she currently carried around, silver inset with lapis, had been a matriculation gift.
I protested, but secretly I was desperate to take one. After the dinner I had looked into purchasing a fish knife, but the ones the university sold—engraved with the academy’s crest—were cripplingly expensive. Now, with this dizzying selection, I kept gravitating toward the leather, and after my fingers brushed it on a fourth pass Caelan pressed it into my palm, ignoring all my exclamations. She closed my fingers around it firmly, until the leather settled into the lines of my hand and I had to admit that I rather liked the weight.
Winter was weeks of early nights and studying by firelight, sipping spiced wine that Caelan brewed. The storms were brutal, mooring the university alone at the axis of its own tidal world. I missed more than ever the mild mists of the hills, but when nostalgia began to distract me I tucked it away. Classes did not stop for the weather.
Eventually the days started warming. Moss bloomed on the rocks, and one day I found Aradika frying fish with his sleeves pushed up to his elbows. Gold peeked from under the hem. It looked almost like Lin, first formulation—but then he shifted and the sleeve covered the lines. It was just a trick of the light, I told myself.
Talk began popping up about the Spring Festival. For the first time, everyone else seemed distracted. It was a big celebration, the Ustonels explained, welcoming the first merchant fleets of the new year. Caretakers draped the courtyard in gossamer curtains woven with flowers and lights. The kitchens smelled constantly of fresh bread and fried fish. Spiced wines gave way to sweet ciders and candied berries, and Caelan emerged one day in a pink dress, tossing her hair and declaring that spring had officially arrived. Her skirt spun; her sleeves billowed. Again, I thought I glimpsed something on the side of her leg, but then her skirts settled and it was gone.
The day of the Festival, I followed my housemates up to the courtyard. “My mother sent my envelope yesterday,” Aradika told Haval and Caelan eagerly. “My first year, they wanted to say congratulations—”
“All right,” Haval sniped. “What did you get, then?”
“Ten, but Caelan got at least fifteen, she won’t tell…” I didn’t know what they were discussing, evidently some Ustonel tradition. Regardless, Haval looked irritated and curtly changed the topic.
The Festival was already in full swing, tables of pastries and snacks and cold salads, merchants with all kinds of trinkets and games that had been arriving by ship in full force for the past few days. One side of the courtyard had been left clear, however, with sturdy platforms extended from the edge.
I didn’t have to wait long to discover their purpose. Within minutes, dots appeared in the sky, steadily growing. Airships.
I gaped despite myself. I had never seen them so up close: sleek miraculous blimps rutted with copper and bronze, tails to the wind, emblazoned with their guilds or other associations. As they descended to the gangways, we had to grab at our hair to keep it from being whipped into knots.
“Come on!” Aradika shouted, already pushing forward. “Before there’s a long line!”
With Aradika’s elbowing, we made it to the somewhat-front of a queue for a blue airship that looked more finely made than all the others. Every strut gleamed. The merchants themselves were dressed equally well, in exquisite blue silk and gold rings. There were racks of shining amulets, stoppered bottles of oils, cut gemstones, and velvet-lined chests glimmering with some kind of glass. Guards with revolvers and batons kept close watch as our line moved.
While the first few people browsed, I noticed a boy taking a seat on a chair near the chests. He rolled up his sleeve as a merchant popped a cork off a vial. With a flat blade, the merchant scooped something from the suspension and plastered it onto the boy’s arm. After a moment it was done; the boy handed over what looked like a staggering amount of shada, and ambled away.
Haval was squinting after him. “I wonder what he got?”
“I hope there’s a good variety,” Aradika said. “I don’t know what I’ll do if not.”
We were ushered into the ring. I was curious about the vials, and my friends made directly for them as well. “Oh!” Caelan exclaimed delightedly, reaching into one of the chests. I came around a moment later, and my breath caught.
Part-names. Suspended in clear liquid, floating in vials like exquisite creatures, or flakes of gold. Like stars in a glassy galaxy. My head spun, recognizing words I hadn’t read in a long time. Pan, second formulation. Yi, eighth formulation. Sek, third formulation. Earth-sense, age-wise, confidence, patience, river-breather, wolf-seer, corn-grower.
Then I saw the price tags, looped onto the vials with string, and everything blurred. Somewhere to my left, Caelan’s voice snaked into my consciousness: How much is that? Fourteen? I can do fourteen.
Fourteen thousand, I realized. Fourteen thousand shada to buy the part-name that the merchant stuck onto the side of her ribs with a flourish of the flat blade. I recognized the gold lines as Ke, second formulation, number-mind. She didn’t need that, I thought distantly, she was already prodigiously good with her accounts.
The anchorites in the hills, I thought. Our names like spells in their prayers. But here our names were in the same vials that Durudawanyi had, starting from five thousand shada. It was an exorbitant amount of money, and yet—how could it be worth so little? This had been part of a person once, one-fifth of their identity. It was the fundamental magic of the universe. It was worth only five thousand?
But equally, the Ustonels were paying five thousand. I saw more shada exchanged that day than I had ever seen in my life, amounts that could have fed our village ten, fifty, a hundred times over. I had known my tuition was at a steep discount. I had never considered just how steep. Despite the confidence I had gained in the past months, that moment swayed me, face hot again with the same fumbling embarrassment I had felt not knowing how to eat fish eyes at dinner. I didn’t know how little I had until I met someone else’s excess, and I burned to think I had ever been content with my own possessions.
“That makes no sense,” I said, struggling to sound casual as Haval handed over eight thousand shada for Han, first formulation. Everyone around me was buzzing, excited; I felt like that leaf again, unable to flow like the water did. “Han is much less powerful than Du, except perhaps the eighth form, but it costs so much more.”
Haval rolled his eyes, but it lacked animosity as he admired his new mark on his right arm, simultaneously chewing hard candy he’d bought by the bag. “It sounds nicer.” His voice came out muffled.
I didn’t understand. Despite my best efforts, I spent my first Festival in a daze. It wasn’t as if they could have used the magic. They couldn’t pronounce the letters; their mouths did not fit. My first part-name, for example, a sharp static scuff of toughness and confidence, became stretched like glue between their teeth. Zee.
But I soon realized that the magic itself was inconsequential. The Ustonels simply collected the part-names to display. It was fashionable. In summer midriffs and biceps emerged, and with them the entire script: part-names curling up the underside of their ribs, dotting their upper arms like freckles, balancing on the nodes of their spine. They cut panels from their clothes to show off the ideograms underneath. Haval had four. Aradika and Caelan both had six. Now that the weather permitted, they compared at every chance.
They were genuinely interested in what the different characters meant, once the topic was broached. They tried their best to learn the pronunciations from me, and I explained their meanings, as well as the different ceremonies we had in the Hills for the reveal of a baby’s name. It was bad luck, for example, for anyone to see the name before the mother. Toward the end of a birth, midwives wore blindfolds, which would only be removed once the mother had read out the name.
These facts they absorbed with fascination; I was glad to see their newfound appreciation, but still seeing the part-names casually adorning their bodies reawakened an ache I should have long resolved. It was pointless, and irrational. We had exchanged the names freely, and such was the nature of commerce—why shouldn’t someone buy what had been sold? Why shouldn’t the Angze bethel draw on the power of storytelling to placate people in such a painful moment of releasing part of their name? Had it not given me peace, in my own moment with the namecutter? Had the sale not enabled me to be here?
Unfortunately, superstition, taught since birth, is not rational. It would be a while before I came to terms with it.
As the summer wore on, news came from the Hills that the dry season had turned into a drought. The harvest was blighted. I walked across the courtyard reading my parents’ letter, hearing the sea splash against the rocks below, feeling the wet air. Yayimindeisi may sell a part-name if the season continues like this, my mother wrote. Though your father insists it’s his turn instead. Do not worry, either way. Your money is safe. Focus on your classes and make us proud.
Someone laughed. I looked up. On the shallow steps leading up to the library, two students had shaken back their sleeves and were comparing part-names on their arms. Somehow, the implications of the trade hadn’t quite sunk in all that time; it was this moment, with the letter in my hand and the two Ustonels on the steps, that made it dawn on me.
Our names could be restored.
Over many months I perfected the delicate art of enucleation: the best place to cut the cheek to get easier access to the eye; the precise angle at which to dig my nails under the skin to sever the muscles without popping the humor; the exact amount of strength needed to break the nerves with a single elegant yank. When the new year rolled around, our house plotted our induction of the incoming first-years. We marched down to the docks that night and cast the wriggling things onto the banks of the rock pool. I handed a gangly Ustonel boy my fish knife and he took it without question. When he presented me the fish with all due respect and I gave him his eye to swallow, I knew I had properly moved up the ranks.
River did not participate. He had become increasingly withdrawn since the Festival, scuttling back and forth from his rooms without even a greeting. He skirted me with particular animosity, and being in any shared space with him became unbearable. I would postpone meals rather than enter the kitchen with him in it. It was juvenile. I remembered what that initial emptiness felt like, the friction of a severed name and the alienation of navigating a new world, but it had been a year past at this point and felt distant to me now. Of course I, too, occasionally wondered what it would be like to regain my old name, or during some conversations with Ustonels felt as though there were an abyss I could not cross. But moping was simply wasting away this opportunity we’d both fought so hard to attain.
“Why’s he like that?” Aradika asked once, and I felt a spark of genuine hatred for River. Because we were both Angze I was meant to understand his moods, like some sort of ethnic augur, and it annoyed me that I didn’t, because he simply refused to act reasonably.
Second year ushered in new fraughtness all around. I saw Siluintong was once again sharing a class with me—The Economies of Airships—and not having seen her for some time, I felt rather guilty in retrospect for the way I had deserted her. “Siluintong,” I called politely, lifting a hand as she walked past the slateboard.
She stiffened, and I thought perhaps my prior coldness had ruined too much. But then she said curtly, “My name is Siluin.” She crossed the room and took a desk on the far other end, laying out her books with exacting deliberation.
And so we began the new year, brisker.
It was a sort of omen. Amidst our sharply demanding new classes came rumors of Angze students going mad. There were almost twenty of us now, between the two years, but rather than increase our presence it seemed to make it more starkly clear which of us had the ability to succeed here—a sufficient sample size, as my professors would have taught it. It was not merely mettle and hard work. Instead, much of it was something more abstract, a certain habitus and versatility, a will and capacity to adapt on an existential level. I flourished, advancing in classes, falling in with Caelan’s friends, and joining the committees of several distinguished societies. But there were others who noticeably flagged behind, who became known for lurking together in corners never speaking to anyone else. Like River, they kept to themselves.
I didn’t immediately take the rumors to heart. Students told all kinds of ghost stories (and those of sirens and leviathans and murderous water spirits to boot), and the whispers that Ruby, an Angze girl in our year, had screamed at her Alchemics professor before collapsing on the ground sobbing and clawing at her chest seemed just like a particularly unfortunate stress episode. Exams were approaching, after all. Everyone was on edge.
But then another boy started drifting around wordlessly at night, buying smokeweed from whoever would sell it and coming to class drenched in the scent. A first-year allegedly sought out affairs with the fervor of the dying and was seen purchasing illicit abortive drugs come spring. There were rumors about black-market merchants being met on the rocky shore in the middle of the night, selling false part-names that poisoned instead of healed, or were just shriveled things cut from cow leather. It was the Festival incident that convinced me, however. Kai, an Angze girl who had previously excelled in Engineering, snuck on board the part-name ship after the Festival and held a knife to the merchant’s throat while turning over boxes of vials. The guards intercepted, but the story went that she had escaped by jumping off the ship in midair, clutching a vial all the way down.
I knew that wasn’t a rumor because we all saw the body washing up on shore, stiff fingers still cinched around the vial, whose cork had been pried off. Her collar was torn, revealing five scars. It seemed that, mid-fall, she’d tried to stick the part-name back on. She hadn’t succeeded. The name was lost now, somewhere in the ocean. Torn apart, perhaps. Or otherwise tumbling over and over in the current, lost without direction.
That episode shook me. I became more determined than ever that I would not succumb to that kind of insanity. It would not be me at the center of those stories, whispered over drinks with raised eyebrows and cautious looks at the next Angze student who walked past. I had a stronger constitution, one that adapted.
I will admit that since the initial realization, my thoughts had strayed to restoring my name more than once. At that Festival which Kai would later ruin, I eyed the merchant’s vials, looking for familiar part-names. I did not find any, though I could not have afforded them regardless. After the incident, however, I put all thoughts of restoring names out of mind. That path had led a first-class student to her downfall. I refused to go the same way. I had gotten along just fine without it.
It was not all terse, though. When not stormy, the university was a place of dreams. The sky seemed bluer than it had ever been in the Hills, and so close I could touch. The intricate stone buildings were so solid, so lasting, the kind of place that featured in tales and legends. They were buildings that would accumulate and hold up to the weight of the history its scholars uncovered: new discoveries, axes of language, policies of governance, ways of knowing the unknowable. It made me dizzy to think I was a part of it. I even learned things about the Angze Hills that I never had while living there: the political and economic forces in which it was a crucial participant, its role in the land’s spokes of commerce and supply, the philosophical value of our cultures and linguistic genealogies. I became aware of the flaws in our systems and the adaptive cleverness of our architecture.
For the first time I truly understood my home in the currents of the world; I realized one must leave a place in order to see it completely.
And finally, the summer of that second year, I fell disastrously in love with Caelan Burnetta Karthe Ruh. How it happened exactly, I couldn’t tell you. It was something between Spring Festival and summer boat trips drifting on the lazy waves, telling stories while she took my fingers and taught me to weave cords in the Ustonel way, her head on my lap on the settee in our apartment as I read through a passage that had struck me in my studies. She kissed me first, and when we pulled apart gasping she rested her forehead against mine and stroked my cheek. “Ziya,” she whispered wondrously. Still dazed, all the blood pounding in my head, I thought it was the most magical thing I had ever heard anyone say.
Third year was a milestone. For the first time, there were Angze in all levels of the university, thirty-six in total. Some had dropped out. One other had been found dead in the ocean, with a botched part-name over the third scar on his chest. Fool, I thought when I heard, you can’t do it out of order. I was restless all day that day, and Caelan noticed that evening while we were having dinner. “What’s wrong?”
I wanted to answer, but I couldn’t explain the apprehension in a way that felt right, even though it sat at the bottom of my stomach in a hard knot, like an unwelcome pearl. I merely shrugged and speared another fillet, changing the topic to ask about her coursework on modeling air currents for predictive flight and adaptive engineering. With third year, our coursework had shifted sharply into practicalities and ambitions. No longer were we learning theories; we were expected to synthesize and apply them in novel ways, preparing a portfolio of ideas for our eventual applications to the most esteemed guild positions. Caelan was a sure thing for the Engineers; her face lit up as she dived into the mechanics of her newest model, which would increase the capacity of airships to change path mid-air. Her sheer enthusiasm, and the way it brightened her entire being, warmed me. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. It loosened the knot in my stomach, just enough for me to forget it.
Our professors drilled us relentlessly, making it clear that they were the ones making recommendations to the guilds and that we could not afford to slip up. Caelan, Aradika, and I spent hours in the library, or, when the weather was nice, in the open squares with picnic baskets. More than one of our classmates developed a reliance on smokeweed; I heard rumors that the Angze boy who’d become addicted the previous year had sold off another part-name to pay for the habit. On the other end of the spectrum, there was no shortage of stimulants circulating, as our hours grew longer and deadlines mounted. Everyone else’s vices meant nothing to me. I had to focus, and that meant my world shrank to only my own necessities.
Winter came as it always did and made our cramming even more miserable. But amidst the dreariness of the storms and early darkness there were hot dinners cooked by Aradika that we ate together by lamplight—clam chowders and milky fish soups and seaweed fritters, paired with warm spiced wine. We read books and played cards and kept the fireplace stoked. I laughed harder than I ever had in my life, wrapped snug in blankets by the flames. Haval mellowed, grudgingly drawn by the excellence of Aradika’s cooking, but River was always absent. Haval mused that perhaps River was a bit mad too, because he saw him mumbling to himself at night, and touching his reflection in the mirror as though not recognizing it.
“Don’t say that,” Caelan said, with the same discomfort I felt.
“It’s not like he’d be the first. Wasn’t he friends with…Kai, or whatever her name was?”
“But it’s different when it’s…” Aradika gestured vaguely, but we all understood. It was different when it was one of us; as little as we saw River, he was still our housemate, and we felt that obligation toward him. Rumors were different when they were under your roof. I pulled my blanket tighter, feeling something strongly but unable to verbalize it.
To stave off the cold, Caelan and I started spending nights together. By the end of it, I was almost always feverish. She left kisses all across my collarbone and along my stomach, carefully avoiding my names.
“You can touch them, you know,” I told her one night.
She sat up. “Really? I didn’t know if—” She fell quiet at my reassuring look, and placed a gentle fingertip over the first curve of Zi, right over my sternum. A ripple went through me. I’d managed to forget hers were there, most of the time; in the dark, especially, they were easy to make peace with. But mine were different, rooted to my core. Even she must have felt the difference because she traced them in slow, tingling awe. “Ziya,” she read. I felt that jolt again through my veins. Magic, or just the way she said it?
“What’s this?”
She had landed on the scars. I knew what they looked like; I had stared at them obsessively in my first year. About the length of my thumb, jagged brown shadows of old names. Caelan’s hand withdrew, understanding dawning. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve never seen it scar. Did it hurt?”
“It was the worst thing I’d ever felt,” I replied honestly. “But I’m all right now. I don’t even feel it.” Then she still looked unconvinced, so I took her hand and placed it over my heart, Zi and Ya and scars and all. My pulse thudded against her palm. I interlaced my fingers over hers. “I don’t regret it. I would do it all over again. Kiss me,” I said.
She kissed me. “Ziya,” she murmured. “Ziya, Ziya, Ziya.”
My third Spring Festival was a more subdued affair, as the first exams were scheduled for the week after, but I let Caelan indulge me in pastries. There was a staggering variety of part-names on sale, some of them going for only four thousand shada. The drought, I thought distantly. It must have driven up sales, depressed prices. Then I thought, Is one of Papa’s in there?
But I didn’t see it.
“I should have gotten it on my cheek. I’ve been thinking about it, just to get on the examiners’ nerves,” Aradika mused that night, as we lounged by the fireplace allowing ourselves the day off. Aradika had sworn that if he spent Spring Night with theorems he would pluck out his own eyes. “I was going to move the one I got last Festival, but I don’t like it that much anymore.”
Caelan perked up. “That was the one I said was pretty. What was it called, Ziya?”
Aradika tugged down his collar helpfully. “Lan,” I read. “Fifth formulation. It means foal-bringer.” Excellent for horse rearing. Useless out here.
“It kind of looks like a horse. Well, I’ve got this one.” Caelan tugged up the hem of her skirt to reveal the ideogram on her thigh: Kan, third formulation. “You said you liked it, didn’t you?”
“Sure. But I couldn’t pay for that.”
Caelan waved it off. “From mine to yours, Aradika Denja Orys Dae Chandrea. So? Shall we trade?”
Aradika brightened. “Let’s.”
Without further ado, Caelan took from her pocket her fish knife, and just like shucking a scale, she snuck the blade under the name and pulled.
It unraveled from her skin with a wet tear. Red welled to the surface where it had been uprooted. I was taken aback both by the casual violence, which she executed without flinching, and by how little blood there was. I had half bled out when my part-names were removed; Caelan simply licked her palm and wiped the specks away before sliding the name off her knife onto Aradika’s cheek. With the flat of her blade, she pressed it into Aradika’s skin, until Aradika grunted that it had taken hold. Then Aradika fetched his own knife, and slit the character in question from his collarbone to stick onto Caelan. They sat there with Caelan’s compact mirror, admiring their new adornments.
In that moment I saw, in the reflection of Caelan’s mirror, River hovering in the doorway. His eyes were wide, inflamed. They did not seem to notice, but River caught my gaze and rapidly whisked away.
It was over in a heartbeat, and Caelan snapped the mirror shut a moment later, pleased. But I could not shake the way River’s stare burned holes through the air, leaving something scorched and empty hovering with the lingering scent of blood.
Unease followed me for days afterward, sapping my focus from the upcoming final exams. I could not understand it, and yet it felt as familiar as an instinct. One day while tucking into a jellyfish salad I thought bizarrely that it felt like how the women back in the Hills described birth.
Angze children are born with their magic, names revealed at the moment of birth. When the name was read out for the first time, the baby drew its first breath. Life was its first magic. But with such a powerful moment, my mother and aunts and grandmothers had described the moments leading up to it as portentous. As they pushed the baby from them, they felt a rising sense of deep significance, one that only broke when the name-magic was first cast. But they knew they were waiting for life—what was I anticipating?
It was the night before the first exam, The Ideas of Good Governance. Everyone was bitterly terse. Caelan claimed she needed ten hours of sleep and had retired early, while Aradika was snappish after not sleeping for days. I had elected to do my last revisions on my own, preparing tedious hypotheses that required thoughtful postulation and reference to the theories of no less than three notable scholars and leaders. Night had come and sunk deep. I was alone in my room with twin lamps and the distant sound of waves echoing up the stone.
My senses felt scraped over a whetstone. Uneven pulse in my ears, scritch of the pen, the coarseness of paper against my skin. In a few hours, I would decide my future. It had all come down to this.
In the fever of memorizing I heard stumbling footsteps outside, but did not think much of it until they stopped outside my room, and my door creaked open.
I pushed sharply back from my desk, but my anger turned rapidly to shock as River stepped in, trembling. He had one hand pressed to his heart, his collar bunched up beneath it. Frenzy played on his mouth, halfway between a grin and a sob. I opened my mouth to demand an explanation—he couldn’t do this tonight, not before the exam—but then my lamplight glinted off something in his hand.
He was holding a fish knife, and it was stained red.
“It won’t stick right, Ziya,” he whispered. He peeled back his hand, just enough for me to see what was under it. There was a flap of someone else’s skin hanging off his chest, bloody around the edges, unevenly thick with bumps of flesh. Beside it was a row of four puckered scars. “I’m trying. But it won’t stick anymore.” In the center of the skin was the character I had seen Caelan press into Aradika’s cheek—Kan, third formulation, meaning—
“Kan,” River cried.
My lamps flared.
Meaning fire.
We were awash in gold, coruscating light, the tears pouring down River’s face white in the blazing glow. It was like weeping in the presence of the sun. His eyes widened, twin moons. “It worked?”
Dread pinned me to my seat, even as the heat wrapped its fingers around me and squeezed. I couldn’t breathe. “River, what did you do?”
“My name is not River!” he screamed, slapping his chest. The flames leapt with fury so bright I ducked my head, gasping.
Footsteps thundered down the hallway outside. The guards, it had to be the guards. I did the only thing that came to mind. “He’s in here!”
River blinked at my outburst. The lamps flickered as the turquoise silhouettes of the night guards appeared in the doorway. One of them raised a revolver.
There was a gunshot, and then there was darkness. The lamps died all at once as River crumpled. My muscles unfroze. The cool air flooded back in, stealing away the heat.
Such a simple, logical exchange. One violence for another, death for a death, because I was certain at that moment that Aradika was dead. Yet the only thought that kept beating against my skull like a broken metronome was not tonight, not tonight, why tonight.
The little bit of moonlight illuminated the dark edges on River’s body—the puncture in his forehead and the protrusion over his chest, flesh shot out and skin stuck on, appended, but too far to keep the wound in his head from bleeding all over the carpet and the turquoise capes as they carried him out. I stared at the blood left behind, thought, if I can clean it up, it will be like it never happened, and I can finish my revisions. I can still save it.
But one guard stayed. “What’s your name?”
“Ziya,” I murmured, still thinking of where I could obtain a scrubbing brush.
She squeezed my shoulder. “Thank you, Ziya. You did the right thing. Come,” she said, “let’s get you into another room.”
I let her usher me into a new, warm bed, with the promise to discuss in the morning. It was only in that new room, without the smell of fire or blood, that everything in me unraveled. It took me a long time to fall asleep; I kept seeing River bathed in light and feeling a deep pit of sorrow. You fool, I nearly sobbed. Look. Look. It’s not so hard to stay alive.
The next day, I put on my formal robes and presented my evaluation of hierarchical leadership in the proliferation of a trading empire.
The university delayed one exam for Aradika’s funeral. We stood on the edge of the cliff, scattering his ashes out to the waves as the organ played a heaven’s lament. The chords echoed over the pillars and the brine beneath. Caelan clung to my hand as she wept. The last I heard, River’s body had been sent back to the Hills.
Not River. Kan. And Sek. In the cleanup, they’d found in his room a carefully kept second vial with Sek, third formulation, swimming in dubious liquid. He must have gotten it earlier, but he was storing it, waiting to recover the part-names that came before it in the pattern.
Months later we stood on that cliff again to graduate. I had done fantastically well, as had Caelan. Already we had met with representatives of all the prestigious guilds. Just yesterday a telegraph had been delivered to my door, appended with the golden seal of the financiers’ guild, offering employment to commence immediately after graduation. The rush of relief had crumpled me; I sat on the floor sobbing, tracing the seal over and over again.
As they read out our names at the ceremony—long Ustonel ones punctuated by the Angze, usually said wrong—I found my parents in the watching crowd.
“Mama? Papa?” I said in disbelief after, temporarily leaving Caelan alone to be fretted over by her countless relatives. “I didn’t know you were coming!”
I had sent them notice of my results and subsequent ceremony, but they had given no indication they would be here, in the bright red-and-yellow of the Hills’ best silk that stood out like a sun amidst the Ustonel blue and the surrounding sea. Their clothes were new and must have been an extraordinary expense, yet it paled compared to the fact that they had found the resources to travel all the way here.
“We had to come see our daughter graduate.” They enveloped me in hugs and endless questions—When did I start work? Was that really what I would be earning? Such a prestigious position, in the most competitive guild! Where would I be living? As I answered I became increasingly distracted by a surreal feeling coming over me from multiple directions at once. I noticed suddenly that their hair had seemed to gray a decade in the past three years; that they seemed smaller, frailer than I remembered, despite their glowing silks. They clung onto every answer I gave, wide-eyed and teary and beaming, as though they were the children and I was their provider. I realized I now was.
“Kaidin, Kaidin—” My mother suddenly gestured effusively at my father—he was shorter a part-name since I had last been home—and he perked up and rummaged in his pockets. He withdrew a folded handkerchief of the same fantastic fabric. With more care than I had ever seen him hold anything, he unwrapped a familiar vial, swathed in his palm and yellow Hills silk.
“We found this for you,” he said reverently. “Now that you will be in the Guilds, they gave us a loan for the expense. You deserve it all, but it’s the only one we could find just now.”
I was used to these vials now, in my classmates’ hands, but I was struck with a dumb strangeness as I turned it over in my palm and recognized the character floating within. Rei, fifth formulation.
Ziyarei.
A shiver of some long-lost memory went through me, right and very wrong all at once. Three-fifths of an echo in the back of my mind: Ziyarei, Ziyarei, Ziyarei. I recognized the voices. They were my mother and grandfather and siblings and old friends, and yet as they overlapped I felt more and more as though I were floating away, swimming in the haze of someone else’s memories.
The bell rang, summoning us to the shore for the final anointing. With a flurry of fragile words and embraces I drifted away from my parents, the vial grasped in a damp palm.
I didn’t know who that person was. A little girl, from a place far, far away. Just moments ago I had been announced to the world as Ziya. The letter stamped and sealed by the guild had unfolded a future for the thusly inscribed Ziya; Ziya upon whose aforementioned future and wealth this formerly impossible luxury was guaranteed. It was Ziya who had become learned, and far-sighted, and transcendent, Ziya who had come this far, against all odds.
And more than that, I had been loved as Ziya. It was Ziya whose name had been whispered like a prayer, Ziya the name spoken again and again, softly and miraculously, like saying it was a magic in itself.
As though summoned by the thought, Caelan appeared by me on the steps, looking radiant in her blue cape and silver headpiece. “Ziya!” she exclaimed, spotting the vial in my hand. “You got one!”
“My parents’ gift.”
Her fingers ran across the glass, light and curious. “So it’s all yours?”
“Yes.”
“Where are you going to put it?” Caelan appraised me expertly, no doubt with manifold ideas about where it would look best, but right now I couldn’t stand the thought of it on my skin. It didn’t feel right. It won’t stick anymore.
“The Name Ziya” copyright © 2025 by Wen-yi Lee
Art copyright © 2025 by Holly Warburton
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The Name Ziya
Great story. Great ending.
I enjoyed this work. Great story!
Fantastic piece. Love it.
Loved it, so many layers… would love to read more about this world