The Ferryman’s Toll

The ferryman wanted a name, not a coin. Tamsin had been warned about that at the last inn, by a woman who spat after she said it, but warnings are easy to carry and hard to use.

“Any name,” the ferryman said. He was older than the river looked, which was saying something; the river here was brown and slow and full of the patience of things that have already won. “Yours, your mother’s, a dog you loved. I’m not particular. I only need it to be true.”

Behind her, Orrin shifted the salt sacks on his shoulder and said nothing. He had paid his toll years ago, he’d told her once, and wouldn’t say whose name it had been. Some nights she thought she could hear the gap where it used to sit.

“What happens to it?” she asked.

“It crosses with you. It just doesn’t come back.” The ferryman held out a hand, palm up, as if a name were a thing you could set down there. “You’ll still know the person. You’ll still remember the dog. You’ll only find, when you reach for what to call them, that the word has gone on ahead without you.”

Tamsin looked at the far bank. The Salt Road picked up again there, white and straight as a chalk line, running east toward the sea she had never seen and the city that had taken her brother. Three days, if the weather held. Two, if they didn’t stop.

She thought about the names she carried. Her own, which she was fond of. Her father’s, which she was not. Her brother’s, which was the whole reason she was standing in the mud at dawn with a stranger’s hand held out to her.

“Take mine,” Orrin said suddenly, stepping forward. “Take Orrin. I’ve been meaning to grow out of it.”

The ferryman smiled for the first time. It did not improve him. “You’ve paid,” he said. “The road doesn’t let you pay twice.” He turned back to Tamsin and waited, the way only rivers and old men know how to wait.

So she gave him her father’s name, and felt it go, light as a moth, and stepped onto the boat.