I Was the Perfect Queen, But He Forgot My Name novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Ink on My Wrist

The Keeper of Names writes her name on her wrist and shows her that no one else can hold it; the Dowager's guards lock her in as 'unwell'.

I took him to my sitting room because it was the only place in the palace where I had never been interrupted.

Catrin Rook, my maid, was already there, laying out my night tea with her sleeves rolled to the elbow.

She looked at the stranger, then at my bare head, and put the pot down very slowly.

"Your Majesty. Your crown."

"It's on the king's table," I said. "This is Daveth Marrowen. He's a Keeper of Names."

I had no idea how I knew that.

He had said it in the corridor, and I had held onto it.

Daveth bowed to me and then, to my surprise, to Catrin.

"Her Majesty is in trouble," he said. "You know her better than anyone. I'll need your help."

Catrin narrowed her eyes at him.

"I don't know what you mean, sir."

"Then I'll show you."

He took a stoppered bottle from his coat and a pen with a black iron nib.

His right middle finger had a permanent blue stain at the first knuckle.

"Hold out your wrist, my lady."

I held it out.

He wrote on the inside of it, slowly, in neat straight letters.

Isaveth.

The ink was cold and then it was warm, and then it did something I had never seen ink do.

It glowed, faintly, as if the letters held a candle behind them.

"Read it," he said to Catrin.

She bent over my wrist.

"Isaveth," she said, in a small voice. "Isaveth, your name is Isaveth."

She said it twice more, her mouth tasting it.

Then she glanced up at the fire.

When she looked back, her face had gone blank and politely puzzled.

"What was I just reading, Your Majesty?"

I closed my hand over my wrist.

"It's all right," I said.

It was always all right.

It had been all right for eight years.

Catrin saw my face and turned bright red.

"I try," she said. "I swear I try.

Every morning I write it on my arm with kitchen charcoal, and by noon it's smudged away."

She pulled up her sleeve to show me.

There was a gray smear on her forearm that might once have been a word.

My throat closed up.

"You never said."

"You never said either, Majesty," said Catrin, and wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist.

Daveth waited until she had finished.

Then he sat on the edge of the hard chair.

"This is how the Book works," he said.

"Every queen of Caldermere gives her name away at her crowning."

"It goes into the Abbey's Book, and no one else can keep it."

"The Keepers can. We write it down, so we cannot lose it."

"Gives it away," I said. "I don't remember giving anything."

"I don't know yet what you were told," he said, carefully.

"I know what's written. I've read your name every night for a year, since the old Keeper died."

"A year."

"Your page is the last in the Book, and the cleanest," he said.

His mouth twitched.

"The other queens' pages are crowded with notes."

I should have been frightened.

Instead something tight let go in my chest.

For the first time in eight years, someone was explaining the problem to me instead of asking me to be gracious about it.

"The rule for Keepers," I said slowly. "You said it in the corridor. You're not supposed to say my name to me."

"It's called the Silence."

"What happens when you break it?"

"The Abbey unwrites you," he said, as if talking about a haircut.

"My name is struck from the Book and from everyone's memory, like a queen's. I'd become a man people walk past."

Catrin made a small noise.

"Then why?" I said.

He looked at my wrist, where the letters still glowed.

"I watched you read forty dishes off the banquet menu without a stumble," he said.

"Then I watched you put your crown down."

"I thought, a person who can do that should be told her own name."

"That isn't a reason."

"No. It's the one I have."

Someone pounded on the door.

It was not a knock.

Catrin went white and tried to put herself in front of me, which was both useless and the bravest thing I had seen all night.

The door opened without waiting for me to answer.

Four of the Dowager's guards came in first, and then the court physician with his black bag, and then the Dowager herself.

She wore grey silk and her hair was braided in a tight silver crown.

She did not look at Daveth at all.

"The Queen is unwell," said the Dowager, to the room.

"She will rest in her chambers until she is recovered, by my order and the King's."

The physician opened his bag.

Behind her, the guards took up their places on either side of the door.

"Take the Keeper to his bed," the Dowager said pleasantly. "And lock this one in."

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