After that night, I couldn't stop thinking about my family.
Not Berta and Tomas and the goat. The other one. The family in the big house on the far side of the estate, whose windows I could just make out from the garden when Berta held me up high enough: tall pale stone, rows of glass flashing in the sun, a slate roof bristling with chimneys. It sat on its rise above our squat little annex the way a cathedral sits above a tool shed.
A father who had cried over a dog at seven and never again. A stepmother who sent back her eggs for looking at her wrong. Two half-brothers, one who bit and one who followed. A mother who had read books in languages nobody recognized and sung about a library and a keeper and a door.
I'd spent eight months learning to understand the people around me. Now I wanted to understand the rules they lived under. The machinery that had put my mother in that bed, my father in his study, and me in the annex.
So the next night, I went to the Reading Room, said good evening to my sprout and its bud, sat down at the desk, and opened The Kingdom of Aldmere: Its Founding and Its Houses.
It was big, heavy, and old-fashioned, written by a royal historian who evidently believed no sentence was finished until it contained three clauses and at least one flattering adjective about the royal family. I'd read worse. At the archive I once spent a week transcribing a provincial governor's memoir in which he devoted forty pages to his own mustache.
I took notes as I went, as I always did, the pen scratching steadily in the quiet.
Aldmere was about six hundred years old. Before that, the book said vaguely, had come "the age of the Old Empire," which ended in something called "the Sundering," about which the historian would say nothing except that it had been "a time of great darkness and the loss of much that was wise." I underlined that phrase twice. Archivists notice when a writer steps carefully around something.
Out of that darkness rose Aldric the First, a warlord with a warrior's gift, who united a dozen squabbling territories by marrying into some and conquering the rest. He crowned himself, built a capital called Aldencrest on a hill above a great river, and divided the land among his most loyal commanders.
Those commanders became the five great ducal houses. I wrote them in a column down the left margin of my notes. House Rosenmark in the south, rich in vineyards and trade. House Corvane in the west, which held the coast and the navy. House Ashford in the east, along the mountains, known for its mines and its mages. House Halvard in the heartland around the capital, which supplied most of the kingdom's priests and judges.
And in the north, guarding the long border with the dark forest and the wild lands beyond it: House Valtier.
The Shield of the North, the historian called it, with considerable enthusiasm. For six centuries the Dukes of Valtier had held the northern border against monsters, raiders, and rival kingdoms. A house of soldiers, the book explained. Generals and swordsmen. Its banner was a silver sword on a dark blue field. Its motto was carved over the gate of the main house in letters a meter high.
Steel Before Words.
I sat back and looked at that line until the letters began to swim.
Then I laughed, a little helplessly, the sound too loud in the small room. "Well," I said to nobody. "That explains a few things."
A house that put steel before words. And I'd been born into it holding a gift made of nothing but words.
At the end of the chapter on House Valtier there was a family tree.
It was beautifully drawn in black and silver ink, branching down the page from one name at the top: Aldo Valtier, First Duke, Sword of Aldric. Beneath him came generation after generation of Dukes and wives and children, each name neatly lettered, each with a small note on its gift. Warrior. Warrior. Mage. Warrior. Warrior. Here and there a Clergy, usually a younger daughter sent to the temple. I ran my finger down every branch, twice, and found not one Scholar in six hundred years. Either there had never been one, or they'd been quietly left off the page. I'd catalogued enough family records to know which was more likely.
Near the bottom, the names became familiar.
Konrad Valtier, Fourteenth Duke. Warrior (Iron Will). Beside it the historian had written admiringly: a stern and unbending lord, who held the northern march for thirty years without a single defeat.
The man who had beaten a seven-year-old for crying over a dog.
Below him: Gerhardt Valtier, Fifteenth Duke. Warrior (General's Command). Victor of the Eastern Border War. Joined to him by a neat silver line: Margarethe, née Delacourt, of the County of Delacourt. Merchant.
The book was old enough that the tree ended there. Below the two of them was only a small blank space, where the next generation would one day be inked in.
Lucius would go there, I supposed. And Garrett.
I looked at that blank space until my eyes started to sting. Then I turned the page, and finished the chapter, and when I closed the cover the card in my pocket had ticked over to seven.
The next book was On the Nature of Gifts.
I'd been saving it. Of the forty-eight volumes, it looked like the most important one, the one that would tell me exactly what I was up against. It was slim and severe, bound in black, written about two hundred years earlier by a temple scholar named Brother Anselm, and its own introduction described it, without a trace of modesty, as "the definitive treatise on the subject."
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Brother Anselm was very clear about gifts.
Every human, elf, dwarf, and beastkin received one gift at birth, bestowed by the gods. A gift was not an ability. It was what Brother Anselm called "a vessel's shape." Water poured into a tall jar becomes tall; water poured into a wide bowl becomes wide. In the same way, a person's talents grew into the shape of their gift. A child with a warrior's gift would find the sword natural. A child with a mage's gift would feel mana as easily as warmth.
Gifts were revealed at the age of five, in a ceremony at the temple, by means of an appraisal crystal. Before that, Brother Anselm explained, the gift was "still settling into the soul" and could not be read clearly.
I wrote age 5 — appraisal crystal — temple in the margin of my notes and drew a box around it. Four years and four months away. I didn't yet know what I'd do with that number. I wanted it somewhere I could see it.
Then came a long chapter on the gift families, ranked in what Brother Anselm called "their natural order of worth." Warrior first, "for they defend the realm." Mage second, "for they wield the power of the gods." Clergy, craftsman, and merchant in a vague middle. And at the bottom, with obvious distaste:
The Scholar gifts are the least of the families, being concerned only with the retention and arrangement of what others have already discovered. A scholar may make a competent clerk, tutor or keeper of records, and in a merchant household such a gift is no misfortune. But in a noble house, where the strength of the blood is measured by the strength of its gifts, a scholar's gift is to be regarded as a polite misfortune, to be borne with dignity and not spoken of unnecessarily.
A keeper of records. I read the line three times, my thumbnail pressing a crease into the page margin before I caught myself and smoothed it flat.
"I was a keeper of records, Brother Anselm," I told the book. "I was a very good one."
The book did not apologize.
But reading between the lines, the way I'd trained myself to at the archive, I noticed something else. Brother Anselm spent page after page describing what each gift family could do. He described skills, and how they flourished when they matched the gift. He described the rare and precious skill books that could grant a skill directly, "the most treasured possessions of the great houses."
What he never once described was how any of it worked. Why a gift shaped a skill. What a skill was made of. How a book could put an ability into someone's head. He wrote about gifts the way a farmer writes about weather: this is what happens; don't ask why.
Most of the people in that world think the System is a wall that cannot be climbed, the Keeper had said.
Brother Anselm had never even thought to look for a ladder.
I closed the book. The bell struck once inside my skull, flat and clean.
[VOLUME COMPREHENDED] On the Nature of Gifts
Volumes Comprehended: 8 / 48
There was one more thing I needed to know. I found it, finally, near the back of Customs and Courtesies of the Noble Houses, the book I'd liked least of anything in the room, in a dull chapter I'd read once without much attention, back when it had seemed to have nothing to do with me.
It was a section on what the author delicately called "children of irregular birth."
Aldmere law recognized two kinds of noble children born outside marriage. A lord could choose to acknowledge such a child by writing their name in his house's Blood Register at the temple. An acknowledged child counted as family. They could use the family name, and in rare cases, if no legitimate heirs remained, they could even inherit.
Or a lord could choose not to.
An unacknowledged child had no name and no claim. But the law did not leave them entirely unprotected. An old statute, dating back to Aldric the First himself, required any lord who fathered a child to provide that child with what the book called "bread and roof": food and shelter under his household's care until their twelfth year.
At twelve, the child was considered old enough to make their own way. They could be apprenticed to a guild, given to the temple, enlisted in the army, or simply sent out into the world. At that point, if they wished, they could formally renounce any connection to the noble house. Or the house could release them. Either way, the obligation ended.
Bread and roof until the twelfth year.
I went very still. My pen hovered over the page until a bead of ink gathered at the nib and dropped, and I had to blot it.
Then I closed my eyes and reached back, carefully, into my own memory.
This was something I'd only recently discovered I could do.
Ever since I'd started making flashcards in the Reading Room, my memory had been working differently. Not only for the things I wrote down in the Library. For everything. Sounds, smells, the exact wording of a conversation. If I concentrated, I could call up a moment from months ago as clearly as if it were happening again, like rewinding a tape and pressing play.
So I went back to my eighth or ninth day of life. To a tall, thin man with a grey beard and heavy boots, standing in the doorway of my room, reading from a sheet of paper.
At the time, it had been sound and nothing more.
But I had heard it. And now, eight months later, I knew the language.
I let the memory run. Harlan's dry voice filled my head, every syllable distinct.
"By order of her grace the Duchess, on behalf of his grace the Duke. The child born to the maidservant Lina, deceased, is to be recorded in the household ledger as natural-born and unacknowledged. He shall not be entered in the Blood Register of House Valtier. He shall be housed in the east annex under the Law of Bread and Roof, until such time as his twelfth year is reached. The nursemaid Berta is hereby reassigned to his care, at a wage of three silver per month, reduced from her current wage of five. The child is not to enter the main house. The child is not to be presented to the family. Signed this day..."
I opened my eyes.
So that was it. Not even a name. Not a place in the register. A line in a household ledger, somewhere between the cost of candles and the repair of the stable roof. Housed because the law required it, and not one copper more.
And Berta. Berta had taken a cut of two silver a month, very nearly half her wage, to look after me. And then she'd danced around the room.
I went and sat in the armchair by the window and didn't read anything for a long time. My hands lay open on my knees. Outside, the sprout and its small bud swayed in a breeze that came from nowhere.
I expected to be angry. I waited for it the way you wait for the pain after stubbing a toe, that half-second of blankness before it arrives.
It didn't arrive. Or rather, something else got there first and shouldered it aside.
Twelve years.
Twelve years of bread and roof. And at twelve, the law said I was old enough to make my own way. I could join a guild. I could renounce a name I'd never been given in the first place. I could walk out through the gate under Steel Before Words and never come back.
On Earth, at twelve, I'd been in my first year of middle school, worrying about homework and whether my voice would crack in choir. Here, twelve was a door.
And I had a Library, at ten to one. I picked up the pen and worked it out on the back of my notes. If I kept to my rules and studied steadily every night, how much could I learn in twelve years? A hundred years' worth? More?
By twelve, I would know more than Brother Anselm. More than the royal historian. More, perhaps, than every scholar and mage in Aldmere put together.
I took out the card and looked at it.
Holder: Elias (Haruto Kanzaki)
They hadn't even given me a family name. But the Library had given me a name, two lives' worth of memories, and a door that no one in this world could lock.
"Twelve years," I said quietly. "All right."
I put the card away. Then I took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote across the top, in careful Japanese, a title I would keep adding to for the next eleven years.
Things I will need to know before I leave.
It was a long list by the time I finished that night. It started with how to grow food and how to make medicine and how to defend myself, and somewhere in the middle, underlined twice, what my mother knew.
And at the very bottom, in smaller letters, almost an afterthought:
How to repay Berta.