The Chronicle of Epic Words
Aldric of No-Name
A debt-haunted traveler whose surname was taken as surety — perpetually mid-sentence.
At a glance
Old enough to have a surname worth losing. Not nearly old enough to have stopped reaching for it.
- Home The road, these days
- Kingdom II (The Duke's Roads)
- Faction Common Folk · Debtor
Aldric will tell you, if you give him the chance, that he is Aldric of — and then he will stop, and look at you with the particular expression of a man reaching for a shelf that used to have something on it. It is not shyness. His name simply ends early now, mid-breath, at the exact place a surname ought to begin. He has learned to see the pause coming and to brace against it, leaning forward as he talks as if he might push the missing word out by main force. It never comes. He keeps trying anyway, which is either the most hopeful thing about him or the most stubborn, and after a while on the road with him you stop being able to tell the two apart.
He wasn't always short a name. That is the part he wants you to understand, and the part that costs him the most to explain, because explaining it means walking back over what he did to lose it. There was a woman — a hedge-wife who keeps to the wood beyond Whisper Hollow — and there was a well, and there was cold water, and there was Aldric being the kind of rude that a certain kind of woman does not simply forget. She did not curse him, exactly. She took collateral. His surname, held in surety against a debt, to be returned "when I'd thought about what I'd done long enough." He says the phrase the way you'd handle something breakable. He has decided the terms are fair. A man less honest would call it a robbery; Aldric calls it an account, and has set himself to squaring it.
So he walks. Four days now, toward the very trees a sensible traveler crosses realms to avoid, because the woman who took the name is the only one who can give it back, and the only road to her runs through the cold breath of the Hollow and out the far side into Inkhollow, where the paths go to grey needle-mold and the smoke off a hidden chimney sometimes curls into a shape you could almost read. He tried to pay his toll at Twice-Told Ford on the way and could not finish the telling. He tried to sign for a bed at the Bowed Reed and left the ledger with a blank where the last of him should have gone. Everywhere the world asks a man for his whole name, Aldric comes up one word short, and pays the small daily humiliation of it without complaint. He seems to feel he has it coming.
What's strange — and you'll notice it before he says anything — is how little bitterness there is in him. A man robbed of his own name might be forgiven some venom. Aldric has none to spare. He is too busy being grateful for small kindnesses, too quick to press his luck-coin on anyone who walks a mile at his pace, too plainly relieved to have company that doesn't flinch at the stutter. There is a thing he badly wants to tell you, some warning working its way up from underneath — you can see it building in his face at the treeline, urgency crowding his eyes — but the word he needs to say it is precisely the sort of word that has been going quiet on him lately, and it dies in his throat. He points into the trees instead. Then he walks in, on the Duke's own well-kept roads that lead, past a point, to no law at all.
You do not follow. Not yet. But you keep his coin, and somewhere past the Hollow the smoke keeps drawing its half-finished letter against the sky, and for the rest of that long afternoon every stretch of quiet road puts you in mind of a man who could tell you everything about himself but the one thing that would tell you who he was.
Tales & Rumors
The custom at Twice-Told Ford is a story at each bank — one to be let onto the crossing, one to be let off it — and Aldric, who was raised to honor a toll, meant to pay in full. He got as far as his given name and no further; the surname that should have followed simply wasn't there to be spent, like reaching for a coin and finding the pocket sewn shut. He stood at the near bank a long while, they say, offering the ford everything he had except the thing it asked for.
The debt is real and he does not pretend otherwise. He wronged a woman who lives in the wood — something to do with a well, and cold water, and a rudeness he now recites the way other men recite prayers — and she took a piece of his name as surety against it. She said she'd give it back, he'll tell you, when I'd thought about what I'd done long enough. He has been thinking. He appears to consider this the fairest bargain he has ever been offered, which tells you either a great deal about the woman or a great deal about the rudeness.
He carries a luck-coin, worn smooth, and he is far too quick to press it into the hand of anyone who treats him kindly on the road — as though a man already short one name is anxious to be sure he still owns something he can freely give. Take it and he walks off lighter; the coin has a way of turning up again, later, further down the road, in a place where someone remembers his face.
How They Measure Up
Even a man with half a name keeps a full ledger on himself — his is just missing the line at the bottom where you sign.
Carries a walking staff and four days of road on him. The load he actually can't set down doesn't weigh anything at all.
Steady enough with the staff — right up until he reaches for his own name, at which point everything he's holding goes uncertain at once.
Four days' walk toward the one wood most men would walk four days to avoid. Guilt, it turns out, is excellent for the legs.
Sharp enough. He's had nothing to do but think about what he did for the better part of a week — those being the terms — and he has been thorough about it.
He was rude to a woman at a well, once. He has since acquired, at considerable and ongoing expense, a great deal of wisdom about being rude to women at wells.
Can charm you right up to the surname, where the sentence — and the charm, and the man — fall off the same small cliff.
Incompleteness — the wall every sentence about himself runs into. He can tell you where he's going, what he owes, and exactly what he did to earn the owing — everything except the one word that would tell you who's saying so.
Where you'll meet him
You'll find Aldric on foot in Kingdom II (The Duke's Roads), somewhere along the lip of Whisper Hollow — the limestone cleft where the brook drops underground and the sound of your own voice comes back to you sideways. He'll be trying to introduce himself and failing at the last word, four days into a walk toward the treeline and the wood called Inkhollow, where the woman who holds his surname keeps her fires. He is going there on purpose. Whether you walk him to the trees or point him down the road and watch him go, he'll thank you longer than the errand warrants and give you more than it's worth.