By the time I was eight months old, I understood nearly everything Berta said.
She had no idea, of course. As far as she was concerned, I was a quiet, solemn baby with large eyes who'd come through a bad fever and now ate everything put in front of him, and who watched people with unsettling concentration whenever they spoke. She found this hilarious. She'd poke my cheek with a floury finger and call me a little magistrate, sitting in judgment on them all.
And because she believed I couldn't understand, she told me everything.
Berta talked the way other people breathed. She talked while she milked the goat, while she scrubbed the floor, while she mended and while she cooked. She talked to the stove, to the broom, to the weather, and most of all to me. For most of my first year I was her only real audience, and she made full use of me.
I learned more about this world from Berta than from any book in the Reading Room.
Every day began with the Duchess.
The goat, I mean.
At dawn Berta would bind me against her chest in a long cloth sling, wrapped so snugly I could move nothing but my head, and carry me across the frosted yard to the lean-to. The frost crunched under her clogs. The air stung the inside of my nose and smelled of hay, woodsmoke, and goat. The Duchess would be waiting with her yellow eyes narrowed, already scanning for something she wasn't supposed to eat.
Berta would set down the bucket and greet her ladyship and ask how her ladyship was this fine morning, then observe that her ladyship was still a miserable old bag of bones, and the Duchess would answer by butting her in the knee. "Charming. Just like the real one." Berta lowered herself onto the milking stool with a grunt, leaned her forehead against the goat's warm flank, and began. "Do you know, sparrow, the real one sent her breakfast tray back three times last week? Too cold. Then too hot. Then she said the eggs were looking at her wrong. Mette in the kitchen told Jonas, and Jonas told Elke, and Elke told me." The milk rang into the bucket in long, even pulls. "Eggs looking at her wrong. I ask you."
The rhythm went on for a while, hiss and ring, hiss and ring.
"She wasn't always like that. Well. She was always a bit like that. But it's worse since—" Her hands stopped. "Never mind. Not for your ears."
It was the first time I heard her stop herself. It wouldn't be the last.
I assembled the Valtier family in pieces, the way you'd reassemble a letter someone had torn up and thrown in the grate.
The Duke, Gerhardt Valtier, was a war hero. Twelve years earlier there had been a border war with a kingdom to the east, and the young Duke had led the northern army through it. His gift was something called General's Command, which, as far as Berta understood it, meant that soldiers who followed him fought harder and braver than they would for anyone else.
She told me this while scrubbing the kitchen table, with me propped in a basket on the floor beside the bucket and the smell of lye and wet wood thick in the air. He'd won three battles everyone said he'd lose, she said. Came home with a scar from here to here, and she drew a wet line with one finger from her ear down to her collarbone. The King gave him a medal and a parade, and everyone cheered. "And then," she said, more quietly, the brush slowing, "he came back here, went into his study, and as far as I can tell he's barely come out of it since."
She scrubbed harder for a while, until a curl of grey hair came loose and stuck to her damp forehead.
Then she said something that startled me so badly I had to fix my eyes on a knot in the table leg to keep my face blank.
"I nursed him, you know. When he was little. Before his father sent me off to look after the kitchen girls." Her hands slowed again. "He was a sweet boy, your father. Serious. Quiet, like you. He'd sit in the window seat in the library for hours, reading about old battles and drawing little maps. Cried his heart out when his hunting dog died. Buried it himself in the rose garden, seven years old." She wrung the rag over the bucket, twisting until the water stopped dripping. "His father caught him crying at the grave. Beat him for it. Said a Valtier doesn't weep for a dog." A long pause. "I never saw him cry again. Not once. Not even at his own father's funeral."
I lay very still in my basket.
For eight months I had quietly hated the man who hadn't come to see me. Who had heard the report of my mother's death and sent me to the annex without lifting his head from his papers. I still did, a little. But now something else sat next to the hate, something with sharp corners that I didn't want to pick up and turn over.
A seven-year-old boy, crying over a dog in a rose garden.
The Duchess, the real one, was called Margarethe. She came from a wealthy family in the south, a count's daughter with a merchant's gift, and she had brought a great deal of money to House Valtier when she married.
"Money," Berta said darkly, "and opinions. Plenty of both."
According to Berta, the Duchess ran the household now. The Duke cared for his soldiers and his maps and his study and left everything else to her: menus, staff, guests, budgets. She decided who was assigned where.
She had decided I would live in the annex.
"She never forgave your mother," Berta told me one evening, very quietly, rocking by the stove while the coals ticked. It was the most she ever said on the subject that first year. "Never forgave either of them. But your father's the Duke, and she can't touch him. So." She looked down at me, and her mouth went flat. "She'll take it out on whoever she can reach."
There were two other children in the main house. Lucius, who was four. Garrett, who was two.
Berta had nursed them both too, before I was born. She had opinions about them. Many.
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She held up her left hand one afternoon and showed me a small white scar at the base of her thumb, a pale crescent of puckered skin. Lucius had done that, she said, at two years old, bitten her right through to the bone because she wouldn't hand him his father's dagger to play with, and then told his mother she'd pinched him, and his mother had believed him. She sniffed. "He's already swinging wooden swords at the stable boys. Everyone says he'll have a warrior's gift like his father. I'm sure he will. He's got the temper for it." Garrett, she went on, was sweet enough when his brother wasn't about, but he did whatever Lucius told him and trailed after him like a duckling. "Which is going to be a problem, mark my words."
I marked them. I would remember them, years later, when the two of them leaned over the garden wall and threw stones at me.
The best stories, though, were about my mother.
Berta didn't tell them often. When she did, it was usually late, with the fire low and the candle guttering, when she was tired enough to forget she was talking to a baby.
She was mending a sock one night by the last inch of candle, squinting at the needle, when she started. Lina had come at fourteen, she said. A skinny little thing, all elbows. Walked in from some village up north with one bag and a letter from a priest. Never said much about where she'd come from, and never once had a visitor, not in five years. Berta bit off the thread.
"She could read, your mother. Did you know that? Better than the steward, I'd wager. Most maids can't read their own names. But I caught her once in the old east library, when she was meant to be dusting. Sitting on the floor with a great big book open across her knees, some old thing in a language I didn't even recognize. And she was reading it, sparrow. Lips moving and everything."
I stopped breathing, and didn't start again until my chest burned.
"I asked her where she'd learned. She just smiled and said her grandmother taught her. Then she put the book back on the shelf and went back to her dusting, and never said another word about it." Berta shook her head slowly and threaded the needle again on the third try. "Strange girl. Good girl. But strange."
A language Berta didn't recognize. I put that away with enormous care, in the most secure corner of my memory, next to a single whispered word. Ilvareth.
On warm afternoons, Berta carried me out to the old bench in the back garden and sat with me under the dead apple tree. The bench was damp and furred green with lichen, and she always spread her apron over it first, grumbling.
This had been a proper garden once, she told me, looking around at the knee-high weeds and the brambles hooking at her skirt. Back when the old Duke's mother lived here. Roses all along that wall, every color. Herbs in tidy little beds. And this tree, she said, patting the grey, split bark beside her, had given the best apples on the whole estate. Little red ones, sweet as honey. Cook used to send a girl out every autumn to fill baskets for pies.
What happened to it? I wanted to ask. I couldn't, of course. Berta answered anyway, the way she often did, as if she could read the question off my face.
"Died the winter before you were born. Hard frost, and nobody to wrap the trunk. Nobody cared enough to bother." She was quiet a moment. "Your mother used to come and sit out here on her afternoons off. Right on this bench. Said it was the only quiet spot on the whole estate. She was sad when it died. More than you'd think, for a tree."
I looked up through the bare silver branches at the sky.
On a shelf beside the desk in the Reading Room sat Plants and Herbs of the Temperate Lands, which I had read twice. It had a chapter on fruit trees. On frost damage. On how some trees that looked completely dead could sometimes be brought back from the root, if someone had the patience.
I didn't have the hands for it yet. Or the strength. Or enough of the knowledge.
But I looked at that tree for a long time, measuring the girth of the trunk against Berta's shoulder, and made a note.
Not all the gossip was serious. Most of it, in fact, wasn't.
I learned that Elke was saving up to open a laundry of her own in town. I learned that Tomas had been married once, a long time ago, and that his wife had died of a winter fever, and that every year on her name-day he still walked to the temple and lit a candle. I learned that the head cook in the main house was secretly feeding three stray cats behind the kitchen, and that everyone knew except the Duchess.
And I learned, to my enormous satisfaction, how things ended between Jonas and Mette.
Berta came through the door one afternoon with a basket of turnips on her hip, her cheeks pink from the wind, absolutely delighted. She had smiled at him on purpose, Berta announced to the room, dumping the turnips on the table with a thump that sent one rolling onto the floor. Elke had heard it from Mette's sister. The poor girl had been smiling at him for months, and he'd been too much of a turnip to notice, so in the end she'd had to march up and ask him herself to walk her to the harvest dance. "Men. Honestly." She bent, grunting, to retrieve the escaped turnip. "Don't you grow up like that, sparrow."
I'd been following that story for three months. I would have cheered if I could. Instead I kicked both legs as hard as I could in my basket, which Berta took as agreement. "That's right," she said approvingly. "You tell them."
Some of the news came from much farther away.
One spring morning, the temple bell in town rang and rang and kept on ringing, well past the hour, wild and uneven, as though several people were hauling on the rope at once. Berta went out into the yard to listen with me in the sling. Tomas came out of the lean-to, wiping his hands on his trousers. Even Jonas stopped with an armful of firewood. Berta shaded her eyes and called over the wall to a farmer passing in the lane, asking what it was, and he shouted back, grinning, that word had come from the capital: the Queen had given birth again, another princess, the third one, born healthy. Berta laughed and clapped her hands together and declared that the King must be tearing his hair out. Three girls!
She went back inside humming. "Born the same year as you, that little princess," she said, setting me in my basket and tickling my chin with one rough finger. "Fancy that. Her in a golden cradle in the palace, and you in a draughty old annex with a goat." She chuckled. "I know which one I'd rather be. You've got me. She's only got a pack of stuffy nursemaids who've never milked a goat in their lives."
I thought about a baby girl in a golden cradle, very far away, and wondered idly what her life would be like.
I had no idea, then, how often I would wonder that again.
Every night ended the same way.
Berta banked the fire, raking the coals together with the iron poker until they glowed in a single red heap. She pinched out the candle. Then she lifted me out of the cradle and sat with me in her chair by the coals, and sang.
Always the same song. The five-note tune, rising and falling and rising. The one my mother had hummed in the only hour we'd had together. The one they'd sung over her grave.
For eight months it had only been a melody. Now I understood the words.
It was simple, the way lullabies are. It was about a lantern. A mother sets a lantern in her window on a dark night, so that her child, wherever they are, however far they've wandered, can always find the way back. Each verse sent the child farther: across the fields, through the forest, over the mountains, across the sea. And every verse ended the same way, with the mother's promise that the lantern would still be burning when they returned.
The lamp is lit, the lamp is lit,however far you roam.The lamp is lit, the lamp is lit,and it will light you home.
I lay against Berta's chest and listened, and my throat swelled shut around something hot and painful until I had to breathe through my nose in short little pulls.
On the last night of that eighth month, when the song was finished, Berta sat in the dark for a long time, rocking.
"Your mother used to sing it with another verse," she murmured, more to herself than to me. "At the very end. One I'd never heard before. Something about a library, and a keeper, and a door." She sighed, and I felt it go all the way through her. "I asked her once what it meant. She only laughed and said that was how her grandmother sang it."
Her hand moved slowly up and down my back.
"I wish I'd paid more attention to the words, sparrow. I wish I'd written them down."
I lay rigid against her, my heart slamming so hard I was certain she'd feel it through her nightgown.
A library. A keeper. A door.
Somewhere far away, behind that door, a page turned. And outside the window of the Reading Room, in the soft gold light, my sprout put out its first small bud.