“I said you have a strength in you, a great one,” the witch said from the darkness. “And you know it too. What you are to do I don’t know, nor do you. That’s to find. But there’s no such power as to name yourself.”
“Why not? What’s more yourself than your own true name?”
A long silence.
The witch emerged with a soapstone drop-spindle and a ball of greasy wool. She sat down on the bench beside her door and set the spindle turning. She had spun a yard of grey-brown yarn before she answered.
“My name’s myself. True. But what’s a name, then? It’s what another calls me. If there was no other, only me, what would I want a name for?”
“But,” said Dragonfly and stopped, caught by the argument. After a while she said, “So a name has to be a gift?”
Rose nodded.
“Give me my name, Rose,” the girl said.
“Your dad says not.”
“I say to.”
“He’s the Master here.”
“He can keep me poor and stupid and worthless, but he can’t keep me nameless!”
The witch sighed, like the ewe, uneasy and constrained.
“Tonight,” Dragonfly said. “At our spring, under Iria Hill. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.” Her voice was half-coaxing, half-savage.
“You ought to have your proper name day, your feast and dancing, like any young ‘un,” the witch said. “It’s at daybreak a name should be given. And then there ought to be music and feasting and all. Not sneaking about at night and no one knowing…”
“I’ll know. How do you know what name to say, Rose? Does the water tell you?”
The witch shook her iron-grey head once. “I can’t tell you.” Her ‘can’t’ did not mean ‘won’t’. Dragonfly waited. “It’s the power, like I said. It comes just so.” Rose stopped her spinning and looked up with one eye at a cloud in the west; the other looked a little northward of the sky. “You’re there in the water, together, you and the child. You take away the child-name. People may go on using that name for a use-name, but it’s not her name, nor ever was. So now she’s not a child, and she has no name. So then you wait. You open your mind up, like. Like opening the doors of a house to the wind. So it comes. Your tongue speaks it, the name. Your breath makes it. You give it to that child, the breath, the name. You can’t think of it. You let it come to you. It must come through you to her it belongs to. That’s the power, the way it works. It’s all like that. It’s not a thing you do. You have to know how to let it do. That’s all the mastery.”
“Mages can do more than that,” the girl said.
“Nobody can do more than that,” said Rose.
Dragonfly rolled her head round on her neck, stretching till the vertebrae cracked, stretching out her long arms and legs restlessly. “Will you?” she said.
After some time, Rose nodded once.
They met in the lane under Iria Hill in the dark of night, long after sunset, long before dawn. Rose made a dim glow of werelight so that they could find their way through the marshy ground around the spring without falling in a sinkhole among the reeds. In the cold darkness under a few stars and the black curve of the hill, they stripped and waded into the shallow water, their feet sinking deep in velvet mud. The witch touched the girl’s hand, saying, “I take your name, child. You are no child. You have no name.”
It was utterly still.
In a whisper the witch said, “Woman, be named. You are Irian.”
For a moment longer they held still; then the night wind blew across their naked shoulders, and shivering, they waded out, dried themselves as well as they could, struggled barefoot and wretched through the sharp-edged reeds and tangling roots, and found their way back to the lane. And there Dragonfly spoke in a ragged, raging whisper: ‘How could you name me that!”
The witch said nothing.
“It isn’t right. It isn’t my true name! I thought my name would make me be me. But this makes it worse. You got it wrong. You’re only a witch. You did it wrong. It’s his name. He can have it. He’s so proud of it, his stupid domain, his stupid grandfather. I don’t want it. I won’t have it. It isn’t me. I still don’t know who I am. I’m not Irian!” She fell silent abruptly, having spoken the name.