Due laid a blank piece of parchment in the center of the table the next morning.

He didn’t say what it was for, and he didn’t need to. The four of them were sitting at the table again, as they hadn’t really left it from the night before, only slept in shifts and come back.

The parchment in the middle was the next piece of work, and they all knew it.

"It needs a name," said Due. "A face, a history that holds for a Wreath audit. The face we can manage. However, the name has to be one I don’t bring to the table, because every name I’d choose is one a Sovereign Record clerk has already seen on a forgery."

Alistair clicked his tongue. "And you trust her to bring a clean one?"

Due simply smiled. "I trust her to bring the only one that works."

Elara, across the table, picked up the parchment.

She took the pen from beside Due’s hand without asking. She didn’t look at any of them as she wrote, and following that, she slid the parchment back into the middle of the table.

Due read it, then turned it so Alistair could read it too.

’Tobian Marrow.’

Alistair didn’t pick it up.

"Marrow," he said.

"A Caelmari house," replied Elara. "A small one. They hold a townhouse on the western edge of Verissan, and they haven’t produced a notable figure in two generations. There are three sons. The eldest is a clerk in the Caelmari grain office, the second sits in the Royal Guard, and the third hasn’t been heard of in eleven years."

Alistair raised his brows, the corner of his mouth twitching.

"And the third is the one I become."

"The third is the one you become."

"How do you know this much about them?"

Elara didn’t answer at once. She had set the pen back down, her hands flat on the table on either side of the parchment.

"I met a Marrow once," she said. "At a function in Therasia, when I would have been nine. He was older than my father, and he had come because his daughter had married a Vance cousin in the spring. He wanted to be seen at the dinner so the Vance side couldn’t claim later that they hadn’t approved the marriage."

She paused, then continued, "He sat next to my table. He spoke to me twice, asking my name and whether I liked the salmon. Following that, he stood up and walked out without speaking to anyone else in the room, including the man whose daughter his daughter had married."

Alistair was reluctantly impressed. Elara rarely pulled from the Vance side of her memory.

"He died four years later," she added. "The Marrow line lost most of its visibility within Therasia after that. They are the kind of house nobody in the Record offices outside of Caelmar will know enough about to argue with."

Due was watching her while she spoke. He hadn’t, Alistair realized, known the full reason. He’d asked the question to find out, and he had found out.

"And the third son," said Due. "Where is he?"

"As far as Caelmar’s gossip knows, he is in the southern provinces. He left after a quarrel with his father, and he never wrote home. No cousin has seen him in three years. The family doesn’t speak about him, except to say they don’t know where he is."

Elara’s gaze drifted toward Alistair. "That is the cover. Tobian Marrow has been on a road for eleven years, and he has come home now."

Alistair stayed silent for a moment.

He looked at the name on the parchment, two words in Elara’s hand. He hadn’t heard them said aloud at this table before this morning, and in the next minute, they were going to stop being new and start being a thing he’d answer to in rooms for the next six weeks.

He thought he should feel something when he put the name on. However, he didn’t feel much, and that worried him slightly.

The first time he’d taken on a name on the road with Aldous Blackwood, he had felt a small sharp thing in the back of his throat. He didn’t feel the sharp thing now. He felt the way a man feels when he is about to put on a coat in a room that has gone cold.

’It is recent. It will sharpen later. That is how these things work.’

He looked up.

"It works," said Alistair.

"You are sure?" asked Due.

"I am sure."

"Then take it."

Alistair reached across the table, picked up the parchment, and folded it in half along the line of the name. He put it into the inside pocket of his coat. Elara watched him do it without comment, and Due watched her watch him. Silas, by the door, watched all three and didn’t move.

"Tobian Marrow," said Alistair, aloud, in his own voice.

The name didn’t feel like his name, and he hadn’t expected it to. He spoke it a second time with the small adjustment to the throat that the Caelmari nobility used on any name ending in a hard consonant, and the second time, the name was closer.

"You’ll need to say it in your sleep before it sits right," said Elara.

"I know. Run the syllables with me tonight."

She nodded once.

Silas, at the door, finally moved. He came across the room and stood at Alistair’s elbow without sitting down. Eventually, he looked at Alistair’s face, and he spoke for the first time that morning.

"The name is good," said Silas. "However, the face is the harder part, and I am going to need three evenings."

"You have them."

"And the stance."

"Take the stance too."

Silas nodded, then stepped back from the table.

Due didn’t pick the conversation back up. He had what he needed, and he stood up and walked to the shelf where his papers were kept, pulling out the second-to-bottom drawer.

The drawer made a small, sharp sound on the runners. He took out a stack of blank forms in three colors, laid them in piles, and sat back down. He picked up the pen Elara had set down, and the work had started.

Alistair watched him for a moment, then stood up without speaking. He went out the door of the base and into the field, walking the short distance to the slab with the carving on it.

He stood in front of the carving for a long time without scanning it, because he didn’t want to know, this morning, what its reading was.

Behind him, in the open doorway of the base, Elara was watching him through the door. She didn’t call him back, as she didn’t need to. He was going to come back inside, and they both knew it.

’In three days, Alistair Thorne stops being a man people see, and Tobian Marrow walks the road in his place.’

Eventually, Alistair turned back toward the door, and at that moment, a runner’s horn sounded twice on the southern road, far enough that only his ear caught it.

Hearing this, Alistair stilled and counted the two long blasts, recognizing the Wreath signal that was not supposed to be moving this far west yet.