I spent an embarrassing amount of time deciding what my first word should be.
In fairness, I had a great deal of time. By nine months old I understood the Common Tongue almost perfectly. In the Reading Room I had a vocabulary of several thousand words, written on flashcards in a stack that stood nearly as tall as the lamp. I could follow every conversation in the annex, every one of Elke's ridiculous songs, every turn of Jonas's endless worrying about Mette.
The problem was my mouth.
It still refused to cooperate. The tongue was too big, the lips too clumsy, and what came out when I tried was wet, babbling, shapeless. I practiced in secret whenever I was alone, which wasn't often: at night while Berta snored, and in the mornings while she was out with the goat. I lay in my cradle and shaped vowels at the ceiling beams like a very small, very determined opera student, until the corners of my mouth were sticky and my jaw ached at the hinge.
"Aaah. Ohhh. Mmmm. Buh. Buh."
Progress was slow. It was still progress.
And the closer I came to managing a real word, the more I worried about which word it should be.
I took it seriously. Probably too seriously. But it mattered, in a way I couldn't quite justify. My first word in this world. The first thing I would ever say aloud, in my own voice, to anyone here.
I went through the candidates one at a time, lying in the dark, the way I'd once sorted documents for an exhibition: what does it say, who is it for, what does it cost.
Lessa. Milk. The word I'd heard most often, and perfectly natural for a baby. But undignified. I didn't want my first word in a new world to be a demand for a drink.
Ofen. Stove. Tomas would be thrilled; he'd been pointing at that stove and naming it for months. But it was a strange thing to lead with, and it would mostly be a gift to Tomas's pride.
Geit. Goat. I considered this briefly, purely for the face I imagined Berta making. I rejected it. The Duchess hadn't earned the honor.
Mamma. That one hurt. In nearly every language on Earth it comes first, and the Common Tongue word was close enough to feel familiar. But my mother had been in the ground behind the stables for nine months. There was no one to say it to.
Or was there?
I turned my head on the mattress and looked across at Berta, asleep in her narrow bed with one arm flung over her face. Her grey hair was spread across the pillow. One sock had worked its way off her foot and lay on the floor beside the bed.
No. Not mamma. That wasn't fair to either of them. Berta had never tried to replace my mother. She talked about Lina constantly, gently, so that I'd know who she had been. She always said your mother, never your first mother, never anything that pretended.
But there was another word. A name. I'd heard Tomas use it, and Elke, and Jonas. I'd heard the steward say it coldly in the proclamation I could now replay word for word: the nursemaid Berta is hereby reassigned.
I had never heard anyone say it the way it deserved.
I decided.
It took another month to get right.
The B was easy. Babies manage B early; it's only pressing the lips together and letting go. The vowel was harder. And the r in the middle, which in the Common Tongue is a soft roll at the back of the throat, was close to impossible.
I practiced every morning while she milked.
"Buh. Beh. Behh. Beh-ta. Behh-ta."
Close. Not there. The r kept vanishing, and the end kept collapsing into a wet tah.
At night, in the Reading Room, in my grown body, I said the word out loud over and over until I could feel exactly how the tongue and throat should move, the precise point where the back of the tongue lifted. Then I went back and tried to make my baby mouth do the same. It was like playing a piano piece I knew by heart while wearing mittens.
"Behr-ta. Behh-rta."
Closer.
I nearly got caught once. It was a cold morning, frost feathering the inside of the window, and I was lying in the cradle working on the growl of the r, very focused, saying "Behhh. Behhh. Behhrrr" at the ceiling, when something thumped in the doorway. Elke stood there with a basket of sheets on her hip, staring at me. I froze. She stared. Then, slowly, she asked whether I'd just been growling at the ceiling.
I did the only thing I could think of. I jammed my fist in my mouth and blew a large, wet bubble around it.
Her face cleared at once. Teething, she decided, with enormous sympathy; poor little mite, her sister's boy had growled like a bear for a month when his first tooth came through. She bustled over, rubbed my gums with one cold, red, soap-smelling finger, clucked over me, and went off to tell Berta to put clove oil on them.
Berta did, that evening. It tasted like a rusty nail dipped in perfume, and my tongue went numb for an hour.
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I practiced more quietly after that.
It happened on an ordinary afternoon in early autumn, about ten months after I was born.
Nothing marked the day. It was grey and drizzling. Berta had spent the morning fighting the kitchen chimney, which was smoking again, and the whole annex smelled of wet soot. She had a black smudge on her nose and a smear of ash across one cheek, and she was muttering as she stirred a pot of porridge on the stove. Useless chimney, she told the pot. Useless roof. Useless steward. Four times she'd asked for a sweep, and four times she'd been told her grace would consider it. "Her grace'll consider it when we've all choked to death in our beds."
I was sitting up on a blanket on the floor nearby. I'd only learned to sit unsupported a few weeks earlier and was extremely proud of it. Tomas's little wooden sparrow was in my fist, its oiled body warm and slightly tacky from being held.
I looked at her. The soot on her nose, the frown, the tired curve of her shoulders under the shawl. The woman who'd cut her own wage nearly in half to look after me, and danced about it. Who'd sat up three nights singing the same five notes while I burned. Who'd told me about my mother so that I would know her.
I took a breath. I pressed my lips together.
"Behr-ta."
It came out small and wobbly. The r wasn't quite right. But it was a word. It was unmistakably a word.
Berta stopped stirring.
She stood completely still with the wooden spoon in her hand and her back to me. Porridge slid off the spoon and dropped back into the pot. Plip. Plip.
Slowly, she turned around and asked me what I had just said.
I looked up at her and said it again, clearer.
"Behrta."
The spoon fell out of her hand, hit the floor, and sprayed porridge across the boards. She didn't look at it.
I'd expected her to be pleased. During all those weeks of practice I'd pictured her laughing, maybe clapping, calling for Tomas. A nice small moment of happiness.
I hadn't expected her to cry.
She dropped to her knees beside me, straight into the spilled porridge, gathered me up against her chest, and sobbed. Huge, shaking sobs that seemed to come from somewhere very deep and very old, a place that had been shut up for a long time. Her whole body heaved with them. Her apron was damp and smelled of smoke.
I didn't understand. I held on to the front of the apron with both fists and waited.
She whispered into my hair for me to say it again. I said it, obligingly, into her shoulder. She cried harder.
It was a long time before she stopped. When she finally sat back on her heels and wiped her face with the back of her wrist, she smeared the soot across both cheeks, so that she looked like a very tearful chimney sweep. She laughed shakily at herself and called herself a silly old woman, crying over porridge.
She was quiet for a while, holding me in her lap, rocking a little.
Then she told me something I would never forget.
"I had a boy once," she said softly. "A long time ago. Before you were thought of. Before your father was even born." Her hand moved over my hair. "Pieter. Red cheeks and a laugh like a little bell, and he followed me everywhere. He said my name first, too. Before mamma. He couldn't get mamma yet, so he called me Behta, like that. Just like you."
Her hand stopped.
"Winter fever took him. When he was three. Three days and three nights, and nothing I did made any difference, and then he was gone." She swallowed; I felt it move through her chest. "His father went not long after. Drink, mostly. And after that I came to work here, because there was nothing else left for me to do."
She looked down at me, and her eyes had filled again.
"Thirty years I've been minding other people's children. Rich ones. Noble ones. Not one of them ever said my name first. Not one of them ever said it at all, if they could help it. I was Nurse. Like a piece of furniture."
She pressed her lips to the top of my head and held them there.
"Thank you, sparrow," she whispered. "Thank you."
She told everyone, of course.
Tomas was first. She marched out to the lean-to with me on her hip and porridge still drying on her apron and ordered me to say it for Tomas. I said it. Tomas took his unlit pipe out of his mouth, stared at me, and then laughed so loudly the goat bleated in alarm and backed into the wall. He clapped me on the back with one enormous hand, hard enough that I nearly pitched out of Berta's arms, and then put on a face of deep injury: first word, and it was her. Not Tomas. After all those evenings he'd spent on Ofen. There was no gratitude left in the world. Berta, glowing, told him the boy had taste, that was all.
Elke cried when she heard. Elke cried at most things, I had learned by then: weddings, funerals, sad songs, and once a particularly handsome turnip. She hugged Berta, then me, then Berta again.
Jonas came in with the evening firewood, stopped in the doorway, and blinked at all of us. When Berta explained, he went red to the tips of his large ears, mumbled something into his collar, and vanished. Half an hour later he was back with a small honey cake wrapped in a cloth. Mette had given it to him, he said, studying the floor. From the main kitchen, left over from her grace's tea. He'd told her it was for a celebration. Berta wanted to know whether he'd told her what celebration, and Jonas, going redder, said he'd told her the sparrow had learned to talk, and she'd said that was lovely and given him two. Elke immediately asked where the other one was. Jonas looked at his boots and admitted he'd eaten it on the way back.
Everyone laughed. We sat around the stove that evening, all five of us, with a bad-tempered goat poking her head through the back door to see whether anything edible was on offer, and shared one small honey cake cut into slices so thin the lamplight showed through them. I got a crumb, softened in milk. It was the best thing I had tasted in this world.
Tomas raised his cup of watered ale. "To the sparrow," he said gravely. "Who knows who matters."
Everyone drank to that. Berta didn't say anything. She only held me a little tighter.
That night, after everyone had gone, I lay awake in my cradle for a long time.
I was thinking about my fever.
About Berta sitting up three nights, singing. Emptying her little purse onto the table. Shouting at the steward that I was the Duke's own blood.
I'd thought, at the time, that she was frightened because she was kind. She was. But now I understood there had been something else underneath, something much older. She'd sat beside a sick child before, three days and three nights. And she had lost him.
And I had done that to her. Through my own greed and impatience, I'd made her live through it again.
My stomach cramped with it, a dull ache that had nothing to do with hunger. I lay staring at the beams and let it sit there, all the way through, without looking away, because I thought I owed her that much.
Then I made a promise.
I made it formally, the way I'd have entered a line in an official register, in Japanese, under my breath, so that only I could hear.
I will take care of you, Berta.
Not someday. Not when I'm grown. As soon as I can. As much as I can.
You will never sit by a sick child's bed again unable to do anything. Not mine. Not anyone's. I'll learn how to make sure of it.
And when I leave this place, you're coming with me.
The next time I went to the Reading Room, I took out my long list. Things I will need to know before I leave.
I found the line at the very bottom, in small letters, almost an afterthought: How to repay Berta.
I crossed it out. Then I wrote it again at the top of the list, in large letters, and underlined it three times.
Below it I added a new line.
Medicine. Fevers first.
Then I went to the shelf, took down Plants and Herbs of the Temperate Lands, turned to the chapter on willow bark, and began reading it for the third time.
Outside the window, the sprout had reached the height of my knee. Its leaves stirred in the still gold air.