By Jennie Wren Foster. A free reader bonus.

The Names We Choose ### A bonus scene from The Blood and the Forge #### Kindred's POV

I have had three names now, and only one of them was ever truly mine.

The first was given to me by people who loved me and did not know what they were handing over when they handed it to a god. Ysolde. A soft name, a river-sound name, the kind of name a mother says to a child half asleep. I do not remember the mother. I remember the sound the name made in my own mouth, once, a thousand years ago, before a door swallowed it whole.

The second I gave myself, in the dark, letter by letter, because it was the only thing I had left to make. The First Ink. Not a name so much as a job. A thing that had happened to me, worn like armor because I did not trust that anything softer would survive a thousand years of being nothing. I built a self out of what was done to me, and I ruled two thousand souls with it, and I am not going to pretend, even now, that I regret every part of the ruling. Grief organizes very well. It is one of the few things it is good for.

The third name a man gave me on the floor of a library he had just helped save, and he did not ask me first, and I have never once told him that not asking was the right choice, because if he had asked I would have said no. I would have said, out of a thousand years of habit, that I did not deserve a gift, that gifts were the sort of thing that got fed to doors. He said it anyway. Kindred. Not because I had earned kinship. Because he had decided to extend it, the way you extend a hand to someone standing at the edge of something, not because they have proven they will not fall, but because falling alone is worse.

I am telling you this because tonight, on the keeping rotation, a boy asked me what my real name was.

He is new to remembering himself. Eleven years old, or he was eleven years old when the god took him, and he is eleven years old now, resumed exactly where he left off, which is its own strange mercy and its own strange cruelty, growing up twice in the space of one lifetime. His name is Corin. He asked me the question the way children ask the worst questions, without any sense that it might cost me something to answer, which is, I have come to think, one of the finest things about children. They have not yet learned to be careful with people. I would like the world to take longer teaching him that lesson than it took teaching me.

I told him the truth. All three names, in order, the way I have just told you. He listened the whole way through without interrupting, which the watch tells me is not typical for him, and when I finished he was quiet for a moment, turning it over.

"Which one is you," he said. Not which one is real. Which one is you. A better question than the one he'd started with, and I do not think he knew he had improved it.

I told him I did not know yet. That some days I am still the woman who was fed to a door, because that woman is not gone just because a kinder word got written over her. Some days I am the thing that ruled the dark, because the dark taught me things about holding grief that I have not unlearned and do not entirely want to. And some days, more of them lately than I would have believed possible even a season ago, I am only Kindred, a woman who walks a corridor every evening and says the names of the wronged out loud so that none of them slip back toward forgetting, and that is enough of a self to be getting on with.

He thought about this for a long moment, the way children do when they are deciding whether an answer has satisfied them or only postponed the question.

"I think you get to pick," he said finally. "Since somebody already showed you it works."

I did not have an answer for that. I have had a great many words in my mouth over the last thousand years and several dozen more since I was given a new one, and a boy of eleven, resumed exactly where he left off, found the one sentence none of them.

I have thought about it all night, on the walk back up, past the floor where the door used to be, past the room of nails I have not been able to look at directly since we went down to it, into the school where the lamps are still lit in a handful of windows because someone is up late finishing an essay or writing a letter or simply not ready yet to let the day end. Somebody already showed you it works. Soren did not ask permission to give me a name any more than Sarya asked permission to hold two thousand souls in the dark for a lifetime she never chose. Neither of them waited to be sure the gift was wanted before they gave it, and I have spent every day since deciding what to do with a kindness I did not request and cannot, now, imagine giving back.

I think I understand, finally, what I am going to do with it.

I am going to keep it. Not because I have earned it. Because a boy named Corin asked me a better question than the one he meant to ask, and the answer, it turns out, was never going to be found by waiting for someone to prove I deserved it. The answer was always going to be a choice, made once and then made again the next evening, and the next, the way Sarya opens her witness every night on purpose, the way this whole family has learned that nothing that matters gets decided only once.

Kindred. I choose it again tonight. I expect I will have to choose it again tomorrow. I find, for the first time in a very long history of being made and unmade and remade, that I do not mind the work of choosing.

Tomorrow I will tell Corin that I have an answer. I think he will be pleased, in the offhand way of children who ask enormous questions and then go back to whatever game they were playing, as if the enormity had never happened at all.

Tonight, I am going to go and say the last few names of the rotation, because the keeping does not get to rest, and because I find, walking these halls with a name I chose to keep, that I do not want it to.