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When she was eighteen, she put off the robes of a novice for the last time and for the first time she put on those of a monk. Nothing changed within her. Her body was as it had always been; her soul’s yearning for God was neither sharpened nor sated. But when she walked home from the house of prayer, past the houses glowing yellow-red in the late-afternoon sun, the washing lines and the women chatting in the market and the old men playing backgammon, every dear face one she knew, she felt as though she filled the shell of her body more, and at the same time as though the outlying parts of herself had been smoothed down into their proper outlines; it was right that people saw her as a monk.
All this is to say: she has cast off a name before. Her priestly name was the name of the mother of the first sage to build a house of prayer to God, who was herself granted foreknowledge of his birth by God and settled in the place where it would be built. This was the name they would all call her by thereafter, even people who had known her since she was a little girl; she would let go of the familiar sounds without regret, cease to think of them as her and swallow the first shapes that came to her tongue and lips when she went to give out her name. So now — leaving behind that name, too, when she leaves behind everything she has from God — she finds the path already worn.
Among Amestrians she allows herself to pass as a boy sometimes, less from thoughts of safety or ease of movement than from a simple lack of a reason to correct their first impressions. It unsettles her how easily she goes unnoticed, when she feels that she must be alight with the fire of her vengeance or stained with the sins she has already committed, and when the war has left its mark on her face. But most Amestrians don’t look twice at her, standing on street corners or passing through crowds in the foreign clothes she stole and the glasses that hide her eyes, sitting apart in the boxcar of a train, as though she is already a ghost. There is nothing, she thinks, to correct these people on. Everything she had been — daughter, sister, neighbor, monk — crumbled along with her village; any shreds that might have been left have burned away in the singular flame of her new calling. Even when she speaks with Amestrians, which is rare, she never gives them a false name, whether female or male. It would be blasphemy, above all — an absurd scruple to hold to after every other commandment she has violated, refusing to steal a name from God, but she cannot abandon everything, she cannot — and every name she can think of belongs to someone else. To some other monk she trained with and called her brother — she remembers the feel of the sweat of his forearm under her hand. To another she studied with, her brother likewise — she recalls his voice, insistently raised, debating a potential allusion by one passage of the scriptures to another. To her neighbors’ daughter, squalling one morning because her mother and father wouldn’t let give her doll a real human name like she’d somehow heard about people doing in Amestris. To the obstetrician — a proper one, who’d gone and got herself a degree in Aerugo with money raised from the village — who put her name on her door, the way a few people did who were not as religious. To a woman who loved God and her people and the world with an overflowing love, whom everyone said was so studious, much better suited to be a monk — even a warrior monk — than her younger sister, who was physical and quick to anger.
This hand has written out heretical notes and symbols, it has gestured angrily in argument with her, it has braided her hair a thousand times into a plait in the mornings, back when she wore it long, to keep it out of her face while she trained and studied in the house of prayer. This arm was less muscular then, but now it’s the twin of her left arm, as far as strength and ability are concerned. She’s kept on training in the martial forms that the monks used, even though she is no longer a monk: it’s kept her strong and focused, kept her in her body with her feet on the ground that is God’s long enough to do what she needs to do. At some point, she began to think of the arm as part of her own body, not her sister’s. The dull shock at seeing the tattooed limb move according to her own will has diminished and eventually faded for good, even as the knowledge, in her mind, of having part of a woman’s body has begun to feel enduringly stranger.
After destroying the State Alchemists there was no future for her. It was not hopelessness in her mission — she had pure and perfect faith that death would not take her until she had ended the last of them — but to be alive now, after, with no vengeance left to drive her, is nothing she ever dreamed. Had she tried to imagine it, she might have thought of a life among the refugees, in the little Ishval they tried to recreate in the slums of Amestris, not in God’s holy land. She should be able to return and take up her name again. She already knows that she cannot be a monk again, cannot take up again the name that she once thought she would die with, no matter that the people need monks to guide them and teach their traditions to the children and the other Amestris-born Ishvalans who have never before set foot there. After all that she’s done, she cannot turn back on that road and pick up her priestly name like a treasure she had let fall by chance. But, she thinks fleetingly, perhaps she can still be the daughter of Ishvalan parents, an older sister to someone or a lover to someone else.
One of the other Ishvalans asks her name, at the end of a day of clearing the ground for a cemetery. Even some of those who grew up in Ishval now sometimes give their names on meeting, but this man is traditional, as she is. Her tongue will not even form the word, like a maimed limb that has lost the faculties it once had. She can’t say it as though things are the way they used to be, as though she is a novice in her own village again surrounded by her family and the people who know her with her life a straight path before her. That person died years ago.
“I don’t know yet,” she says.