"Bring none but your name," Mara read again, and realized the others had already stepped forward, placing their cards on a stand carved like a ribcage. She wanted to leave. She wanted to run until the city remembered her and tucked her back under its mundane hum. But her feet had walked there on their own accord, and the chill in her bones tasted like anticipation.
She would have said yes, but when she opened her mouth she tasted peppermint and felt the half-remembered warmth of a horrorroyaletenokerar better
A dozen figures clustered beneath them, each draped in garments that swallowed the light—long coats, cloaks, evening gowns that smelled faintly of old libraries and wet leaves. Masks hid faces: porcelain smiles, antlers, brass visages like the sun. They all held similar cards and all, like Mara, waited with the quiet of people at the edge of a stage. "Bring none but your name," Mara read again,
"You named him," the throne said. "Naming has power. The court requires payment." But her feet had walked there on their
Silence thinned to a wire.
Mara folded the card twice and slipped it into her pocket. The last of the theater crowd streamed past her, laughter and cigarette smoke trailing down the street. It was the sort of oddity she usually ignored—until last week, when she found a similar invitation pinned beneath her apartment door. The only difference then had been a single word scratched across the bottom: stay.
"Aren't those rules for funerals?" whispered the man beside Mara, a young actor whose papers she recognized—he'd played Hamlet recently at the small theater. He smiled with trembling teeth.