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Lodee eyed him sideways as they walked away from the little house. "I could have stolen that," Lodee said, taking the half a loaf of bread Kal handed him.
"They don't have any more than we do," Kal said, tearing off a small piece of his own half to eat and tucking the rest away in his bag. After three days of old cheese and wrinkled apples, the rough bread tasted good as they walked.
"You're going to have a lot less than they do soon if you're not careful," Lodee said, eyeing the bag where Kal had taken Handmaid from to get a penny for their bread. Kal had been careful to not let Lodee see how much he had, fairly sure he'd wake up one morning to find both his bag and Lodee gone, but it was impossible to completely hide it. Kal didn't say anything to that.
"Did you really read that whole book?" Lodee said that night, chewing on a piece of crust as he built their little fire.
"Yes," Kal said warily. Around them, the copse of trees they'd camped in was unsettlingly loud, insects and birds and frogs even though it was cold autumn with the sun gone down. Kal had never missed Marcus–or at least his soft bed–until that first nearly freezing night wrapped in his coat on the hard ground.
"What is it, Marcus' stupid love poems?" Lodee sneered.
"It's about painting," Kal snapped, because even if it was the stupid romantic nonsense Marcus liked, Lodee didn't get to say that.
"Well, excuse me," Lodee said in a pitch-perfect imitation of Marcus, surprising a laugh out of Kal. "Did you really read all of it?" Lodee asked again, eyeing Kal's bag where the book and the pennies in it were hidden. Kal would make sure to sleep with it under him.
"Yes," Kal said, defensive. "A couple times."
"You think you're so special just because Marcus wanted someone to read him love poems," Lodee sneered. "You can't even write your own name, I bet."
"I can so," Kal said, feeling petulant as a child. He'd never wanted to learn to write, had hated every minute with the pedagogue, but that didn't mean he couldn't.
"Can you write my name?" Lodee asked skeptically.
"Yes," Kal snapped.
"Show me," Lodee demanded.
"If I had something to write with," Kal said, snotty because he didn't want to admit he wasn't sure if he could, and the little graphite pencil in its metal holder he'd found in the pocket of the coat he'd stolen had gone missing.
"Like this?" Lodee sneered, producing the graphite pencil seemingly from thin air.
"That's Marcus'," Kal said, trying to snatch it back. It was impossible to mistake, gold plated and engraved, and Kal had felt vaguely ill when he'd watched Marcus pay more for it than he'd paid for Kal. And then Marcus had forgotten the damned thing in the pocket of a ragged, patched coat.
"It fell out of your pocket," Lodee said nastily, holding it out of Kal's reach and daring him to say anything about it. Kal had picked pockets whoring too, he knew exactly how Lodee had gotten it.
"Do you want me to write your name or not?" Kal demanded, holding out his hand. Lodee just wanted Kal to know he could pick his pockets whenever he wanted.
Lodee handed it over with a huff, rolling his eyes. But he watched avidly when Kal opened Handmaid to a blank leaf at the back and began to laboriously spell out L-O-D-I.
"Not that," Lodee sniffed when Kal finished and said it out loud, finger on each letter like a child. "Lodewyck, my true name."
"You could have said," Kal complained as he smudged out what he'd written.
"You're not supposed to tell citizens your true name, Kallius," Lodee snapped, watching Kal start over.
Kal rolled his eyes; that was the kind of superstitious nonsense the old whores whispered about to scare the new boys, and Kal had never wanted to be an old whore.
"Lodewyck," Kal said once he'd spelled out Lodee's real name, L-O-D-U-W-I-K.
"Good," Lodee said, holding out his hand. Kal sighed, annoyed, and carefully tore the small part of the page with Lodee's name out of the book. Lodee took it without so much as a thanks, disappeared into some pocket or other. Kal rolled his eyes and they ate the rest of their bread in silence.
"When are you going to find your real name?" Lodee demanded the next day as they made camp. Most of their bread was gone; Lodee had stolen a dirty turnip from a field, half gone to mush. They weren't the only ones on the roads, and the field helots were more wary of them the closer they got to the city. Kal broke some of the branches they'd gathered into smaller pieces, watching Lodee build up their little fire.
"I told you, this is my real name," Kal snapped, tired of this conversation.
Lodee turned his head to spit and muttered something under his breath.
"What?" Kal demanded.
Lodee gave him a look like poison. "I said a prayer for you, you snotty little brat," he snapped. "No real name to throw in the river when you die, you'll never cross over. You're lucky no one strangled you at the whorehouse before Marcus got you."
"That's just superstition," Kal said, ears hot. Usually no one said that hungry ghost nonsense out loud, or they hadn't in the city, and Kal hadn't been with anyone but Marcus at night when ghosts were hungry in years.
Lodee gave him a sharp look, eyes dark and bright across the little fire. "Marcus spoiled you, up there in that big house. Mayke has it consecrated every year at midwinter so you didn't have to hear the ghosts out in the fields. That family has too many ghosts, and you're going to be one of them if you let Marcus be the last one to say your name."
All the hair stood up on the back of Kal's neck, every nightmare of being chased by something he couldn't see in the grain.
"Well if it isn't our lucky night," a voice said in the dark, and Lodee was up with a knife in his hand before Kal even marked the direction of the sound. So maybe Lodee was going to knife him in his sleep after all.
Three women and two men resolved out of the dark, dirty pieces of several uniforms and a couple of pistols between them. Militia, from the look of them, but hard to tell what side. The pictures in the papers made them look much nicer.
"Nice and quiet, pretty things," the woman in charge said, waving the pistol vaguely in Lodee's direction. "Time to go."
"I'm not that pretty," Lodee said, looking slowly between two women with pistols, "and mother will miss us if we're not home soon."
"The hell she will," the woman in charge laughed. "You're contrabands and you're going back to the army for the reward. Get moving."
"Madame, take pity," Lodee said, shifting so his knife caught the firelight. With Lodee's shorn hair growing in dark, he looked harder and older, like some bandit. Like the two men circling them to either side while the women talked. "Our mother's sick and we're just trying to get home."
The woman in charge dropped all pretense of negotiating, her face hard. "If you've got the same mother I'll eat my left tit. Give us your pretty friend and you can go."
Lodee looked at Kal, weighing, like the pimp had done when he'd measured up Kal for how much he'd thought he could get out of Marcus. Kal's heart raced, watching Lodee think the offer over.
Lodee looked back at the woman in charge, clearly marking her two men who'd circled behind them. "Get fucked," Lodee said finally, stepping between Kal and the women with his knife up.
The women with guns moved at the same time as the men, hard to see in the dark after they'd been sitting at the fire. Kal swept a branch through the fire in the direction of the two men behind them, catching one in the face with embers. Kal couldn't see, but Lodee slashed at one of the women and threw the hot, mushy turnip at the other.
"Run, you dumb fuck!" Lodee yelled, shoving Kal in front of him into the dark.
They stumbled into the trees, the militia bandits cursing and thrashing after them. Kal barely jumped over a fallen log with Lodee on his heels, blindly trying to get away and avoid the open field where they'd be seen and run down easily. Lodee's dark cloak flapped behind them like a hungry ghost. Kal could hardly breathe, cold air and branches whipping his face as they ran.
Someone tackled him into a dry stream bed, Kal kicking and thrashing as he went down, panicked with a cold hand over his mouth. Lodee loomed over him, pressing him down into the mud with his cloak over them and his face just above Kal's.
Lodee lay over him, pointing up in the direction of the militia cursing and thrashing past them–and then away. They lay there for long minutes, listening for any sound of them with Kal's breath harsh in his ears and Lodee dead quiet as the grave.
"Fuck," Lodee breathed when he finally rolled off Kal, what felt like hours later.
"My bag," Kal said, casting around them as he remembered. All his clothes, all the pennies he'd stolen from Marcus.
"I got your bag," Lodee snapped, slinging it out from under his cloak at Kal. "No more fires."
"No," Kal agreed, letting Lodee help him up out of the mud. He shivered as the cold air and the absence of Lodee's weight all hit him, still startling at every small sound in the trees. He pretended not to notice when they were bedding down under a bush, both of them wrapped together in Lodee's cloak, how Lodee touched the pocket with his name hidden in it.
"You have to write to me when you find your true name," Lodee said when they were within sight of Aesica, at the fork where Lodee would go north and Kal would go east. They'd made it without further incident, but it had been long nights sleeping cold. "You write to me and I'll find someone to read it, you need a true name so Marcus can't keep you from crossing when you die," Lodee said.
"I'll write," Kal said. He didn't know what he'd write, or when, because he didn't think he had a true name anymore, but he'd dutifully copied down the name of the village and the names of Lodee's aunt's.
"You be careful, little brother," Lodee said, briefly hugging Kal. "And write to me."
"I will, I promise," Kal snapped, because he couldn't not.
It wasn't until some weeks later, when Kal was bedded down alone in another copse of trees on the other side of Aesica with too much time to think and listen for hungry ghosts, that he realized why Lodee had goaded him into writing his true name for him. In case he didn't make it back for his family to say his name for him, so Kal would be the last one to say it.