Warlock Name Generator

The story

Selven is removing the handles from an empty seed box when Malin comes through the garden gate with two cups. He has already put the tools away. The screws lie in his palm, small bright marks against the dirt that will not come out of his skin. Malin asks why the box needs no handles. He tips the screws into a dish without answering, and she sets his cup on the box’s bare lid. There is a thin skin on the tea. She has carried it all the way from her house because he always forgets to drink anything when he is outside.

At the back of the garden, a square of earth waits where he lifted the old paving three years ago. The paths run round it. Beyond the fence, someone is trying to whistle a tune that Selven has heard attempted every afternoon that week. Each time the same note goes wrong. He starts to call out the right one, then laughs at himself. Malin laughs too. For a moment the afternoon has every familiar piece: the gate sticking, the cups, the neighbor, the argument they will have about the ending of whatever book she is reading. He takes a sip. Then he tells her he means to do it today.

She looks at the bare earth. ‘You said that last year.’ Last year he had meant it until he imagined going through winter without being able to pull a blanket over himself. The year before, he had thought of a certain kind of cold pear cake that required a fork. Both times he refused the change and kept his magic. The Forest pact’s old words are plain: while he declines self-rooting, the power remains with him. If he uses it to take a tree’s body, that retained power is spent. He will be alive, conscious and rooted; human hands, walking and a speaking mouth will be gone. He has never been offered a season’s trial.

Malin sits on the low wall and puts her cup between her knees. She has known him as a gardener for thirty years. She knows the pleasure he takes in fitting one plant among others, then standing back to see what it has done to the whole bed. She has also watched him push his fingers into wet earth and remain there after the work is finished, looking irritated when somebody calls him away. ‘You can stay here as you are,’ she says. He tells her that is what he has been doing. The square has been waiting while he visits it with his hands. He wants to be in it when the first water enters, and still there when the water has gone farther down than fingers can follow.

‘And you think that will be enough?’ He does not know. He says so. Malin gives a short angry laugh. She can name twelve things he will miss before she has finished the tea. So can he. He names three more, and that makes her angrier, because it means he has not simply forgotten their existence. She wants to take him to the new glass-roofed market. He wants to see it. He wants the square of earth more. She gets up and goes to the gate. The latch scrapes. Then she comes back to the wall and says he might at least ask the question he has been avoiding.

The smooth alder tablet hangs inside his coat. Years of his thumb have made a shallow polish along its edge. It is the designated object through which the Root Beneath answers him. He has tried speaking into knots, cut branches and a particularly persuasive-looking stone; they remain knots, branches and stone. He lays the tablet on the seed box beside the cup. ‘Will this give my own voice back after I take root?’ he asks. For a while there are only the marks of the wood. Then letters darken across it: No. This tablet carries my words, not yours. Taking root spends the power that could restore your human form.

Malin fetches the old pact sheet from the open garden drawer. It is wrapped in an oilcloth much newer than the paper. They set the sheet beside the tablet. Selven reads the rooting clause aloud; Malin follows with her finger and reads the tablet’s answer. The two say what they have always said about the price. He had nevertheless kept imagining that the little piece of alder might leave him one ordinary way to call her name. Malin folds the oilcloth, very precisely. ‘I can read,’ she says. ‘I still think you should stay a man.’ He says he knows. She does not put the paper away for him.

He takes the sheet back to the drawer. The tablet stays on the box. He has prepared this place through three years of changing his mind: room within his own boundary, soil left open around it, the paths still passing on either side. No one lives in the garden house. Malin has a house, a job and a leaking roof of her own. When she asks who is supposed to come down here every morning, he points to the slope that catches the rain and the soil beyond his lifted paving. ‘You can come because you want to see me,’ he says. She looks at the wet mark left by her cup. ‘That is not the part I’m asking about.’

He puts his boots beside the seed box and stands in the square. The earth is cool enough to make him curl his toes. Malin moves away from the wall before he asks; she has seen roots lift a path. He tells her the little joke about a gardener who finally stops moving the plants and moves himself instead. It is an old joke. She does not laugh this time. He begins the change. A familiar gathering of power runs from his chest toward his hands, and then turns downward, into a place his body has never had before. He could have kept that power by refusing. He lets it go.

His first surprise is weight. The earth takes hold, not like a pair of hands but like a whole room deciding where its walls are. He tries to shift his left foot and finds no foot with an edge he can lift. There is a spreading reach beneath him. The loose cuff at his wrist climbs into bark. He wants to tell Malin that the ground feels larger than he expected. The thought meets the last shape of his mouth, and the shape is already changing. He has picked up his cup without noticing. It tips from a lengthening hand. Tea spatters the soil; the cup strikes one of his boots and lies whole on its side.

For a moment he wants to step back onto the path. The wish is sharp and complete. The path is visible and his weight cannot travel there. Then something colder moves through the reaches below him. It arrives in parts, from places he could not have distinguished a moment ago. A young branch presses outward into the air. The pressure is neither the stretch of an arm nor the release of a held breath. Leaves open to a wind he had felt only against his face. The wind is enormous. He is frightened of how much of it there is, and wants more of it at the same time.

Malin is standing in front of the pear tree. Selven can see her differently now, in pieces of light and movement among the new leaves, and he can hear her. She says his name once, then again, more quietly. He wants to give the small impatient answer he always gives when she repeats a question. No sound comes. She wipes a hand across her face. After a while she starts talking about the book she brought yesterday, insisting that the woman at the end should have left the city. Selven has an objection so immediate and familiar that he almost mistakes it for speech. A leaf turns against another leaf. Malin goes on without being interrupted.

She stays until the shadow of the garden house reaches the seed box. Then she puts the cups together, leaving his boots where they are. ‘I’m going home,’ she says. She waits a little, and he hears all the things she has left out of that sentence. The gate scrapes and shuts. Dusk cools the wet places underneath him. There is an insect in a fold of his bark, and its movement is unpleasantly close. Beyond the fence the neighbor begins his tune and misses the note again. Selven cannot shut a window. He feels water moving below, an unfamiliar weight above, and the sharp desire to answer Malin’s argument. When the wind returns, he meets it through every leaf.