Your Name to Take Back

Mira brings five strangers in out of the rain. Her mother's cottage has a pot of stew on the fire and a table set for four, though only one set of dishes sits in the sink. She does not seem to remember anyone, except Lavius: he is the quiet one in the corner at the tavern, she says, always writing after a celebration. Aelion's plan is to tell her nothing and simply put her in front of her mother. On the walk up, he and Lavius finally have it out about the bell. Lavius fears that freeing the town will kill people as fast as it frees them. "Then they will die free," says Aelion, and gives his word that he will fight anyone who tries to ring it. At the inn door, Lavius asks Mira one simple question, whether anyone else lives at the house, and her eyes roll back and she falls. It has happened before.

Nora steps into the common room with her hand on her locket. Mira looks up, polite and blank, and gives the same small wave she gave the party in the garden. Then she looks at Nora's hands. "You weed with your thumb tucked under. Like that." Her eyes fill, and she does not know why. The two of them talk quietly by the fire, and Aelion walks Mira home and stands guard outside her door until midnight. His promise to Nora is kept.

Meanwhile Roger tells La Maestra, over dragon chess, where Lavius came from: seven years ago, with a caravan of about two dozen people chasing gold in the mountains, keeping their records. Every trip up the mountain, fewer came back, and every time they swore they had lost no one. In the end only Lavius was left. Nora tells Lavius the rest herself: he came running, he had been running long before, and he forgot the most. "If it's your name to take back, you just have to remember." When La Maestra asks whether the caravan was Zhentarim, Nora's eyes go wide and she will not say. La Maestra breaks it to Aelion with her hands up, admits her own past with the Black Network, and Lavius strips to the waist in the middle of the tavern looking for a tattoo. He finds none. Torm's protection finds nothing evil in him. Aelion does not hate him, but he will not trust him until he remembers, and Lavius, who never raises his voice, shakes the floor of the Last Lantern with it.

Upstairs, the wardrobe in Tamsin's room is scratched with about a hundred and twenty-five tally marks in two hands, and the last ten or so look different again. Aelion thinks they count the times the bell has rung. By the window is a scorched ring where something once burned hot. That night everyone dreams, and in the morning everyone remembers: a warm hammer on a mountain altar, a cracked bell and an empty green tomb, a burning paper sealed with a winged sword, and a warm stone in Owlin's pocket that hums like the bell. At eight in the morning Aelion goes up to wake Lavius as promised and finds him in a cold sweat, trying to run. "What are you running from?"