Fever dreams gripped me – nothing frightful, mind you. But my repose was flooded by wild and manic shifts in mood and color. As soon as I wrestled each thought out of entropy into a semblance of clear meaning, a new and raw oneiric mass would take its place. I sweated into my pillow, and woke twice or more past the hour of midnight.

The moon shone through our window, with our curtain drawn back. I listened for some minutes to restless, fitful sounds from the other bunks, and figured sensibly that we were percolating on the same episodes of discontent. Shutting my eyes did nothing to slow the race of ideas, my mind was firing overhot and tangling connections between unrelated precepts. I did not like the thought of letting this malfunction run rampant, of letting my intuitions steer me into wrong conclusions with my logic in a state still too thick to keep pace.

That is the danger of the theurgy of naming. There’s art to asking the right questions, and there’s technique to open your heart and receive. But in the end, it’s providence alone which chooses how to answer us, and all we can do is listen.

I slipped down from my bunk and felt the rug between my toes. I carried my book shut under my arm and slipped quietly out the door, and from there I chose to make my hideaway in the pantry. I crouched along my way, conscious of the floorboards which were all too delighted to creak underfoot. Then, with the door shut fast behind me, I spent an hour alone under candle-light trying to understand how I’d come to write the content of my book and why.

See, while I knew the reason that I filled the start of my pages with the genealogy of Minerva’s names, and I could guess at my intention for the petitions and invocations which followed, every sheet after was like a stranger to me.

In particular, I was at a loss to make sense of my rosaries. I’d laid them out like a chart, as if I’d planned them from start to finish, exactly like so:

(Rudiment)

➙

Cadence

➘

Canticle

➙

Anthem

Verse

➙

Stanza

➚

But for the life of me, I didn’t remember putting my pen to it.

I touched the bottom half of the page, careful of the narrow curls of ink in which I’d derived the formulation of Rudiment. The markings were mathematical in notation, and I knew instinctively they represented the pattern of a musical beat. In fact, I’d already known it – I’d intended it that way, however did I forget?

Closing my eyes, I tapped my palm in rhythm against my thigh. I’ll tell you though, it was strenuous to listen for the Argument that night; the Lady was so reduced by the distance of her arms that my grace had little to push against. Still, there was something there: a sound under my breathing and the subdued clap of skin on fabric. I thought of the familiar clatter of pans and pots, but that wasn’t right. Something about the timbre of the metal was specific and important. Was it tinny? Or brassy? No that wasn’t right either.

It was bronze. It was the sound of shields ringing.

That intuition was the realization I needed to retrace the steps of my hallowing. I had found Anthem at the crossroads of Athena and the grace of music, just like I’d learned Revel at its edge with the Lady. I still wished honestly that I’d have been granted a chance to learn more on Nick Baker’s grace, but I’d lost my opportunity to do so now that I’d been forced to spend it. Though I regretted it some, from what little time I’d carried his Musician I could not guess at their names. I simply knew a handful of words at their edges, and the sound of the guitar. Without more past that, I had little choice but to let them go.

My pages were empty after my first rosary, to my disappointment. I was of the opinion that Anthem would only be one aspect of Minerva – one tiny corner of her influence among many. Yet, I’d not been even able to grasp or fathom more than the elementary basics of that.

Leaning back, I sank my rump further into the burlap folds of the mostly empty corn-sack I’d made my seat. I shut my blessing, and sat as the house simply breathed around me. I roused up only once I saw the candle I’d lit had burned down faster than expected. Keen of the expense of beeswax, I snuffed it urgently, and decided I was altogether overdue to return to bed.

Where’s a person meant to draw the precise line between what’s revelation and imagination? That there’s the hazard that divides the madman from the prophet, after all. How, I ask myself again, am I meant to explain the nature of naming? The only means that comes to mind is by example, so –

The Witch, Arachne, contains within her mechanism a particular function which disjoins the matter-sharpness coupling. I don’t mean to say this to get you started on the subject of the charge interactions, I’m simply saying it to say what’s true. Now, I mentioned it before, but Ashli’d come to name this particular effect as one of her rosaries: the one I spoke on at some length, and that she called her Tensor. But this here’s the dot and curl of the erotreme: how exactly did a seventeen year old girl come to string together such an acrobatic conformation of syllabary?

Well, the answer is that she drank herself sideways off a flask of whiskey, and played a slapdash game of ouija with a thesaurus.

See, that’s the nature of naming. It’s messy, and it’s imprecise – and half of the time it only works if you’re knackered off your gourd one way or the other. Most of all, you’re as like to come out the other end wrong as right. On the other hand, the nature of the crown is to make a choice and so change what right ever was to begin with.

So I’ll leave it to you to decide whether it was the name or the crown which I’d touched, because that morning I opened my eyes just shy of dawn. “I think I’ll need a drum,” I declared to myself, and then I set about to start my day.

Satisfying myself with smells from the kitchen, I took my pre-dawn chore at cutting leather soles for boots. By breakfast, I was in high spirits, talkative and eager until I was scolded by my Aunties. It did not behoove me to be so transparent. Our oatmeal was thin and soupy, and cut with too much or many of both wild greens and bacon grease. It happened now and again if our rations were running low for the month, but I had growing left to do and put the spoon to it happily enough.

Ashli and Ursula joined us shortly, and we traded scraps of paper between us. I copied the meter of my rudiment for them, and Ashli passed her notes on Proskauer for me. We nodded to each other, and our Aunties pretended not to see. Then the girls took their food out towards the cemetery, along with a spindle of wool fresh off of Agares.

Auntie Hektor did not join us. She was indisposed.

“She’s just feeling a little under the weather,” Auntie Mabel persuaded herself. She chewed nervously on a fingernail, then caught herself and placed her hand firmly on her napkin.

“She’ll be fine,” Momma promised me in the future tense.

I cleared and washed the dishware along with Cooper. We shoveled a pan of wood ash into a bucket and scrubbed bowls with grass until our fingertips burned. While we worked, Coop asked me about the biggest and foulest beasts I’d seen, and I answered. The sky above us seemed shallower without the Lady present. The fences at our border didn’t seem quite so far. From there, I changed my shirt and britches, and went out to muck the yard and stables.

Michael O’Carrol would not reply to my good morning; meanwhile Ryder Simons was dragged away by old Maynard before he could, on account of that he was all too eager to. I pitched out shovelfuls of scat from the barn, one at a time into a wheelbarrow. I worked alone, as the men passed by and ignored me. Our man Läp Dāng was new, and spoke not a lick of English. He only shrugged at me, with buckets of water hanging from either end of the yoke across his shoulders. But even that gesture was more cold than usual.

For the sake of clarity, I’ll choose to call the other man who might have been a Michael as Christopher. The young man spat out of the crooked side of his mouth as he saw me, and muttering, led the remaining horses from their small fence away towards their feed.

When Maynard appeared besides me and spoke, I was so busy with my combobulating, I almost jumped.

“Mornin’, young Mister,” the gray haired hand addressed me. He removed his hat, and leaned against the barn wall, turned facing away towards the south.

I squinted at him. But it also wasn’t my intention to cause or carry any offense. “Maynard,” I replied.

“Say,” he said casually, “I don’t suppose y’all up at the house have been keeping an eye on the fence, have you?” He took a sip from his canteen and raised his hand to shade his eyes as he turned towards the east.

I set my pitchfork down. “No.”

“I’m sure it’s nothing’. Some of the boys are just a little wound up. Far as I see it, could even be those dogs again. You and Nick should have learned them their lesson pretty good, but it all depends on where the eating is.”

“I’ll let my aunties know.”

“Yes’sir, little Mister. Don’t worry them though. It’s still our job to keep y’all safe, we ain’t all forgotten that.” Maynard patted me on the shoulder. The lines of his crow’s feet pinched up in what was close enough to a smile, and he left.

After laying down new straw, I took what portion of that morning’s haul was left over from fuel drying, and delivered it to the tannery shed which was abut of the creek. The gentleman Mr Bottner was not officially one of our hands, he was a craftsman of his own employ and paid us some small rent to keep his business on our property and process our leather. His workplace stank so caustically of ammonia that it could wilt a man’s knees, so I shouted my, “howdy,” and swapped my, “how do you do?”. Then I dropped my cart and ran until I found fresh air again.

My lungs burned. My hands burned. It was strange, I was not usually so affected. There was a taste in the air that was sharp, and there was a taste which was missing which was earthy and floral.

I spent the day with my eyes on the south fence, and thinking on how I might assemble my drum properly. As far as I knew, it was just a matter of pulling a good skin over a hollow bowl. But by the end of the day, I’d never found a suitable shell to work with. Meanwhile, my cousins had spent their entire day knitting amulets over the fresh grave of Liam Rondhed. My aunties sent me to them with warm milk in the evening, and I left disquieted after.

We ate dinner as a family nearly in silence. The day had stripped of my gladness, though I could not point to a single cause for it. Auntie Hektor was still abed. A pernicious smell of mold stuck to Ashli; she stared into her griddle cakes, looking hollowed out and distant.

We were abed at an early hour. My cousins requested no stories, and the lamps were spared of service as the sun fell behind the horizon. I dreamed only of roads turned to the wrong direction, or words gone awry. I watched the gibbous moon, and the wind rolling over the grasses, and the colors of the enemy.

And I was not sure if I was awake or sleeping by the time we were attacked.