After lunch, and for much of the rest of the trip, Czes didn't protest leaning against Ennis when he grew tired as she drove. If drowsing shifted to uneasy tension she called his name to wake him. It seemed to help.

They slept in the carriage for several cold windy nights. Ennis curled against the back of the seat and put a cushion in her lap for Czes's head. The nightmares continued, but if she shook him awake when they began he showed less confusion of who he remembered being.

Once, trapped with few distractions in the dark and struggling not to fall back into memory, Czes begged her to talk about anything that didn't include Szilard. Her options were limited. Ennis choked down her own guilt and shared in soft tones a few images of a childhood and an adventurous sea-faring life that should never have belonged to her at all. Those memories meant immeasurably more to Ennis than anything she had ever expected to see or do in her own life. Until now.

If the stories were a comfort to Czes, she thought the man she had murdered might have almost approved.

Czes listened without interruption. A long moment of silence stretched out after her inadequate words faltered. "Was it him who made you want to save me?" His right hand clenched on a blanket in fretful unease, a rustle in the dim carriage.

"Without him I would never have known I had a choice," she admitted. The moment of that murder replayed in her eyes and made her own hand burn. "Even with his memories I couldn't find a good one." Ennis had done her best to help Czes and it had ended with hundreds more years of compiled horror added to his mind. She'd held him through his nightmares...he might have found death easier.

She tried to take comfort in the fact that if Czes found her failure inexcusable, she would already be dead.

His quiet sigh didn't sound angry. "I didn't have any good ideas either. That's obvious now."

Ennis wasn't sure what to say to this. She squeezed his hand gently instead, and when the silence threatened to drag Czes away she made a valiant attempt to interest him in the important question of what the next day's meals should be.

Several weeks of travel at a pace slow enough not to harm the horses brought them far enough away from Szilard's last known location and the fire that Ennis considered it safe to risk finding a home. She hoped it would last them until Czes was well enough to make plans of his own.

It had taken her almost the entire time to convince him to have any opinion on what sort of house or property they should look for. Czes seemed inclined to leave everything up to Ennis, and her own instinct to look to him for orders baffled him more often than not.

A few broad descriptions of things he might like or not like to see in their temporary refuge gave Ennis enough to work with. She chose an empty house and small barn out at the edge of a town well off the main highways. The owner of the property seemed sympathetic to her brief statement that she and her brother were coming back East after the death of their parents, and offered a good rent on the house for a year's time.

Once they had a safe place to unpack, Ennis took Czes along to drive the carriage into the city and sell it. He helped her choose a cheap and less eye-catching cart and sighed in relief at the trade.

Ennis herself was enough of a reminder of her former master without keeping too many others around.

The first year was full of misunderstandings. Czes and Ennis both tended to flinch every time the other did anything that might be taken as a sign of anger or unhappiness. Czes's temper fluctuated with his uneasy control over the memories he'd never wanted, and Ennis was not at all accustomed to allowing her face to show any emotion. Awkward apologies and time spent brushing the horses to give each other space usually got them through. Coal and Dagger shone with the attention.

The nightmares didn't get any better, but as Czes found things to distract him they did seem to allow him a little time to sleep before they took over. Ennis grew accustomed to napping while he read, and reading by candlelight while he slept to be alert for the first restless sound.

Books were a vast new thing that year. Ennis had never been permitted to read and Czes had had very little opportunity for it. Their trip to sell the carriage had also been the occasion when she had asked if he wanted to buy any of the books or newspapers, he had asked if she wanted to read some of them, and they had tried not to exchange sympathetic looks—then both plunged into the purchases with no one to hold them back.

Once Czes began to push for time by himself, Ennis found various odd jobs around town. She told herself it was to keep their money ready for emergencies, but in fact she wanted money mostly in order to permit the purchase of more books.

As Szilard's servant no one had noticed or cared about her gender, or so it had seemed to Ennis. Now for the first time she sometimes wore dresses to blend in. Czes grinned at her frozen bafflement every time a man offered to carry her books, and she didn't mind his teasing if it gave him cause for laughter.

They stayed in that house two years before a few concerned comments about her little brother's slow growth rate meant it was time to find another. By then Ennis had grown more confident of her place with Czes and her freedom, and Czes was at least practiced enough to fight off the memories without losing a thread of conversation most of the time.

The cart was heavy with books when they left, even after selling and giving away quite a few.

For more than a decade longer they moved from one town to another within the distance their horses could cover in a few weeks. Coal and Dagger died peacefully within a year of one another. Ennis had never permitted herself to grieve anyone as she mourned the loss of the mortal animals. She and Czes wept together without shame.

Neither of them wanted to purchase any other horse after that. Within a few more years they bought passage west instead, for the sake of distance from Szilard's remaining network as well as the open space and unfamiliar sights, traveling light except for the books that stayed in their packs. Ennis and Czes were in no hurry. By their third decade together they knew one another well enough to accept the hardships of the journey without fear over how the other might react.

It was Czes who asked, as they reached the coast, whether Ennis wanted to go on traveling west. Once he had raised the possibility the lands she shouldn't remember had a strong pull on her mind.

The fact that Ennis lacked a last name hadn't mattered much in their travels, since most people assumed as siblings they shared the same one. Moving between separate countries was likely to be more complicated. The evening after meeting a fur trader and giving yet another careful order of introductions, she sighed quietly to Czes, "If anyone ever asks me to write my full name, we had better say I can't. It would be easier than trying to explain I don't have one."

Czes blinked at her in surprise and cast a skeptical glance at the books and writing paper she had refused to give up even on the hardest trails. "Maybe. But I didn't realize…" His gaze went distant for a moment. "He didn't permit you to use his. That's typical."

Although Ennis wouldn't have wanted to take her creator's name even as a last choice, she sometimes wished he'd made hers just a little longer. She would have felt some fraction closer to human. That was probably why he hadn't let her.

Her idle thought had pushed Czes into the maze of memories again. Ennis pulled a carefully-hoarded sweet out of her supplies and tossed it at him to spur more pleasant thoughts. "If it's ever a problem, we can figure something out," she dismissed the matter.

The hard sugar vanished at once into his cheek. Czes smiled, only a little lopsided. "What you ought to do is listen for a name you really like, and then let the guy marry you long enough to keep it," he advised.

Ennis prodded his foot hard for that. "If I ever do get married you'll only have yourself to blame for putting it into my head over and over."

He shrugged one shoulder, still twinkling his peculiar blend of innocent mischief. "You're not a terrible judge of character. I could live with that."

A good-humored snort and a wrinkled nose were the only proper responses. "I'm busy enough trying to keep my little brother out of trouble," Ennis pointed out. But she leaned back on her hands, considering the idea. "If I did need a name, adoption might be less complicated than marriage," she mused. "No reason it shouldn't work."

The sudden stillness that followed startled Ennis; even the candy in Czes's mouth had gone motionless and pensive as he watched the campfire. She hadn't meant to imply anything in particular. With no more than moderate difficulty, she fought back the need to apologize and waited for Czes to finish thinking instead. It didn't look like the thoughts were choking him.

"If you like my family name," he began after a time, words slow and measured, "we could find out whether that does work for the rules." Czes looked up at her for an instant, then farther up at the stars. "It doesn't have to be...real, if you don't want that."

Ennis had to consider this a moment herself. "I don't consider our family any less real than anything else about me," she told him. More real in most cases. "But—making it formal. I do want that. Very much."

He smiled, odd and shy, and pulled his pack close to get the battered quill and ink out.

The contract was less than half a page, which was all the room Ennis had left to cut from the letter she'd been composing to a pro-abolition journal. Czes wrote with a legal formality that Ennis recognized. She considered this endeavor a much better use for the training.

Czes signed it with a flourish in his role of head of the Meyer household and held out quill and paper. A twinge of trepidation clung to Ennis, but not because she had the slightest doubt about her small older brother.

The quill moved in her hand. This was her name, the name she could never lie about on paper or in the presence of another immortal.

Ennis Meyer, she read at the bottom of the short contract.

She tried not to wrinkle the paper too much when she swept Czes into a sudden enfolding hug, clinging hard. "Thank you," she whispered.

Czes's eyes were bright in the firelight when she finally let go. "Thank you, Ennis." The note of sincerity rang deep.

Whatever complications the future might hold for them both, Ennis liked the certainty that they would face it together. A true family.

(end)