Wordsmith

There is something in a name, isn’t there, that has the power to turn the air in mundane places magical? That was the crux of her problem it seemed. Creating names, titles of importance, something that would make books fly off the shelves, something suggestive or depressive or impressive. She used to be able to do it. That used to be her job. Names for children, titles for those who earned the favor of the Queen, christenings for ships, and descriptors for books. She was a Wordsmith.

She had lost the knack. It faded away like the blooms of the Wintercursed flowers she had named. The court began to grumble and complain about the quality of her newest names. There was something missing, they said. The words didn’t fit right. Soon she was brought before the Blinded Judges that she had labelled, and judged before the seven women that she had seen named by her master when she was only an apprentice. They stripped her of her name before she could even make her case. The person they placed it on, a new favorite poet of the Queen, had exactly the temperament for Wordsmithing, though none of the expertise. She would have ceded to him without resistance, but they did not give her the chance. They sent her from the court, disgraced and bereft of her title. She was to go into exile, was the verdict delivered to the Queen. There are plenty of jobs for writers of cheap fictions in the New World. She would not be starved, degraded into a beggar.

She almost would have preferred to be a beggar. The stories they told on corners for spare change held something special that the newer stories lacked. The New World stories were written by formula, she had heard, with no room for deviation. A sorry place for an inventor such as a former Wordsmith to end up.