CHAPTER SEVEN

A Kind of Reckoning

I arrived safely enough. My dress was in a terrible state, but it was the hideous one the hospital had given me, so I cared very little. And of course it was already brown! Surely the dirt could not stain it noticeably.

The door to Ma'am and Sir's house was not locked. I entered (letting a few beetles in as an unfortunate result), and found Ma'am sitting by a window. She was mending a pair of shoes, a long, thick needle in her hand, and seemed to be occupied with some particularly difficult stitch— she had brought the work very close to her face, and her eyes did not even flicker from it as I entered.

"Who is it?" she asked, although I doubted she would actually pay attention to the answer unless it was particularly alarming.

"It is I," I said, and then remembered that the language tutor had said nobody really talked like that. " Me. It is me."

She did not look up, but made an unimpressed expression. "I hardly know the voice of every child in Kingsglade," she said.

"I am the girl who lives here now," I said, a little snippily. It was a very roundabout way of introducing myself, I know. But the more I thought about the new names the more I loathed them. Perhaps I could persuade the other children to call me something else, once the fight had been forgiven— but then I could not even think of anything good, and name-wise I would be quite at their mercy—

"Then you are Tíniel?" She glanced up at me, although not long enough to fully observe the state of my dress.

Of course I was not, but the tone of her voice smacked suspiciously of reprimand. I bit my tongue and started to move toward my room.

Ma'am set aside the shoes, slowly, pressing her mouth into a thin, straight line. When she looked at me, however, her expression changed entirely. "What happened to you?" she asked.

"I was playing," I said, which was not technically a lie. I had found I liked fighting, just a little bit.

"Really," she said. Somehow, I got the impression that she did not truly believe me.

"Really!" I said. "And since that is settled, what ought I to do with my dress?"

She leaned against the chair's back, crossing her arms. "Wear it," she said, deliberately, "until the end of the day. And have more care on the morrow, Tíniel."

I hated that name and I hated her and the more I looked at the beetle crawling across the floor the more I hated it too. If I had my way, the beetle would have flown up and bitten Ma'am in the back of her knee— then both of them would know how angry I was. And of course I would have utterly destroyed the name from the memory of everybody who had chanced to hear it. Even as things stood, though, perhaps I could do something.

"Call me something else," I said.

"What was that?" she asked, twitching one of her eyebrows. At the time I thought she had truly not heard me clearly, but now I suppose she must have been giving me a chance to amend what I had said.

"Call me something else," I said, enunciating the words more clearly and doing my best to suppress my accent. "At the very least you could come up with a name that sounds like an elf's name and not a horse's or a cat's. I could settle for a nonsense meaning as long as it sounds dignified!"

"But you are not very dignified," she said. "You are small, and you seem to enjoy shouting for the sake of shouting. A dignified name would not suit you."

"Well!" I said. "I will hardly be small forever, unless you intend to work some horrible spell upon me! And to be a grown elf with a child's name would be more than I could bear."

"It is not so bad a name as all that," she said— an addendum of 'you ridiculous creature' seemed very much to be implied. "And I have better things to do than argue with a child." She picked up the shoes and needle again, apparently determined to ignore everything I had said.

"Why," I said, "you simply do not care to think of anything else! I do wish the people who work for the king had given me to somebody who is in some way intelligent."

This last of my lamentations made her very angry indeed. "Have a care how you speak to your elders," she said, her eyes narrowed.

"I will have a care to speak the truth," I said, shaking with indignation.

Saying anything at all would have been a grave mistake, but saying that in particular was probably among the worst things I could have done. Ma'am's face turned a color paler than I could remember ever seeing on an elf. She opened her mouth, then closed it without saying anything.

She did this a few more times, and in hindsight it would have been a good time to retreat; but that might have made her more angry, especially if I had left the house again. I suppose there is no way to know. What actually happened was this: I watched, fascinated, as she tried to decide what to do.

At last she spoke. "That is— that— that may be what you think the truth is, but it very well is not! And I ought to know better than you—" at this point she began to regain her composure— "for I have been alive far longer, and had time to learn more things. In any event I hardly think you are qualified to know what makes a Sindarin name bad or good, considering that you had never even heard the language two months ago."

She did make good points. It was my turn to be dumbfounded, although at least I was able to keep my mouth safely shut. (I had not forgotten the beetles.)

Ma'am finished with the shoes, and stood to put them away. A beetle crawled across the place where she had been sitting. "Go tidy your room," she said. "The sheets are dreadfully mussed."

"If I must," I said, and I turned on my heel to go.

Fin