What the Moth Queen Kept

The moths came for Ada’s name on the last night of the wet.

She had known they would. Her grandmother had told her the bargain when she was six, sitting on the back step with the rain hammering the iron roof: a light for a name, a name for a light, and the Queen keeps both. Ada had laughed. At six, names seemed like the cheapest thing in the world. You were born with one. You could always get another.

At sixteen, lost on the ridge above the falls with the torch dead in her hand and the dark so thick it had texture, she stopped laughing and said the words.

---

The lantern arrived first. It hung in the air in front of her, a small paper globe the colour of old honey, and inside it something moved: a slow pulse of soft wings, a hundred, a thousand, the light of them cool and green as the inside of a leaf.

Then the Queen.

She was not large. Ada had expected large. She was the size of a hand, grey and powdered and very still, and her eyes were two black seeds that seemed to hold the whole night between them. When she spoke, it was the sound of wings against a window screen.

Your name, please, she said. We are very careful with them.

Ada gave it. It came out of her like a breath on a cold morning, visible for a moment, and then it was gone, folded up and carried off into the canopy by a dozen soft grey bodies, and Ada felt the place where it had been go quiet and smooth, like a stone in a creek.

---

The lantern led her home. Her mother cried at the door and held her and called her darling and sweetheart and my girl, every word but the one, and Ada understood that it was not forgotten, only kept. Somewhere up on the ridge, in a hollow fig, among a thousand others, her name was hanging in the dark like a cocoon.

She sometimes walks up there at dusk, in the season when the moths are thick. She doesn’t ask for it back. She only stands beneath the fig and listens to the soft, dry murmuring above her, all those borrowed names whispered over and over, so they won’t be lost.

Once, very faintly, she heard her own.

It sounded well cared for. It sounded, she thought, a little like someone she might have liked to know.