I understood walking perfectly.
That was the infuriating part. I had walked for twenty-nine years in my first life. I knew exactly how it worked: weight rolling from heel to toe, knees flexing, hips swinging, arms moving against the rhythm of the legs. I'd even read a short section on the mechanics of the body in one of the Reading Room's books, out of curiosity. If there had been a written exam on walking, I'd have scored full marks.
My body hadn't read the book.
My body was sixteen months old, with short, fat legs and a head far too large for the rest of it, and every time I let go of the table edge and tried a step, the head pitched forward, the feet stayed exactly where they were, and I sat down hard on my well-padded bottom.
Thump.
I'd sit there on the floorboards glaring at my own feet, and Berta would laugh so hard she had to hold on to the back of a chair. She'd wheeze that it was my face, that I looked like a little magistrate who'd just been told the court was closed for the day.
Knowledge is not strength, the Keeper had told me. You may read every book on swordsmanship ever written and still drop your sword the first time you lift it.
I'd assumed, at the time, they were talking about swords.
It took three weeks of falling to get it right.
There was no trick. No rune, no shortcut. Only doing it, over and over, falling, getting up, doing it again, until my legs stopped needing instructions and simply knew. It was humbling in a way I hadn't expected. I'd spent the past year feeling clever, racing through books, picking apart spells. Now my own knees were teaching me a lesson, and they were not gentle about it. Both of them carried bruises in overlapping layers of yellow and green.
The day I finally crossed the whole room, stove to Berta's bed, seven wobbling steps without falling once, Berta whooped so loudly that Tomas came running in from the yard with a hammer raised, convinced something terrible had happened.
Berta was already shouting at him that I'd walked, all the way across, look at him. I was standing at the foot of her bed with both fists knotted in the blanket, very pleased with myself and slightly dizzy. Tomas lowered the hammer and looked at me, and a slow grin cracked his walnut face. About time, he said; he'd had a copper riding on the thaw, and Elke had bet midwinter, so it looked like he'd won. Berta, scandalized, demanded to know whether he'd actually bet on me. "Everybody bet on him," Tomas said comfortably, tucking the hammer into his belt. "Jonas said midsummer. Jonas never wins anything."
Once I could walk, the world opened.
Until then, the annex had been my room, the kitchen, and wherever Berta happened to carry me. Now it was a whole building. Corridors. Staircases. Doors. Rooms I'd never seen, full of things I'd never touched.
Berta couldn't watch me every minute. She had a household to run, small and shabby as it was, with a goat to milk and a kitchen to scrub and a leaking roof to set buckets under. So after a few days of following me around anxiously, she gave up and let me roam, as long as I stayed indoors and didn't go near the stairs alone.
I went near the stairs alone constantly. I was careful, though, and quiet, and went up and down on my bottom one step at a time, and I never fell. Mostly.
The annex was bigger than I'd realized. On the ground floor, besides my room and the kitchen, there was a long, cold dining hall with a table that could have seated twenty, every chair draped in a grey dust sheet, so that it looked like a meeting of patient ghosts. There was a storeroom of broken furniture and crates of chipped crockery. There was a small tiled room with a huge copper bathtub gone green with age, and my bare feet went numb on its floor within a minute.
Upstairs was better. A row of bedrooms, all shut up and silent, beds stripped, windows shuttered. Thin bars of light came through the cracks in the shutters and lit the dust in the air, so that every room seemed full of slowly drifting gold. The dust got into my nose and made me sneeze, and every sneeze sent a fresh cloud swirling through the light.
And at the end of the upstairs corridor, there was a sitting room.
It must have been beautiful once.
The walls were papered in a faded pattern of green leaves and small white flowers, peeling at the seams near the ceiling. There was a fireplace with a carved wooden mantel, two armchairs under dust sheets, and a writing desk by the window. Heavy green curtains, threadbare and bleached pale where decades of sun had touched them. A thick carpet, worn through in a path from the door to the window, as if someone had walked that path every day for years.
Above the fireplace hung a portrait.
It showed an old woman seated in one of these same armchairs, before it had been covered. She was small and very upright, dressed in black, with silver hair pinned up and a string of pearls at her throat. She wasn't beautiful. Her nose was too long and her chin too sharp. But her eyes were remarkable: grey, clear, and amused, as though the painter had just said something foolish and she was deciding whether to forgive him.
There was a small brass plate on the frame. I had to stand on tiptoe, gripping the edge of the mantel, to read it.
Ingrid Valtier, Dowager Duchess. Mother of Konrad.
My great-grandmother. The old Duke's mother Berta had talked about, who had kept roses along the garden wall. The last person, as far as I could tell, who had truly lived in this house rather than been stored in it.
I stood looking up at her until my calves began to tremble from holding myself on my toes. Her grey eyes looked back, amused, and I found myself wondering what she'd have made of me. A great-grandson she never knew she'd have, living in her old house because nobody else wanted him.
I had a feeling she might have found it funny. I had a feeling she might have liked me, a little.
The best discovery of all was on the bottom shelf of a cabinet beside the writing desk.
Books.
Real books. Not in the Library. Here, in the world, made of real paper, under my real hands.
There weren't many. Perhaps two dozen, crammed together and furred with dust. Account books from decades back in a spidery hand. An almanac. A book of prayers. A slim volume of poetry with pressed flowers between the pages that crumbled to brown powder when I opened it. And, tucked in at the very end, a picture book.
It was a child's book, large and thin, its leather cover cracked across the spine. Inside were bright, faded paintings of knights. Knights on horseback, knights fighting dragons, knights kneeling before kings. Each painting had a few lines of large, simple text beneath it.
On the inside of the front cover, in the careful, crooked letters of a child who had only just learned how, someone had written a name.
Gerhardt. Age 6. From Grandmother.
I sat down on the dusty carpet with the book open in my lap and stayed there a long while.
My father had been here. As a little boy. He'd sat in this room, perhaps on this same carpet, with this book, and his grandmother had given it to him, and he'd been proud enough of it to write his name inside. Before the dog. Before his own father taught him that a Valtier doesn't weep.
I turned the pages slowly. On one of them, beside a painting of a knight holding a book instead of a sword in front of a great library, someone had drawn a small, wobbly star in pencil.
I didn't try to sort out what that did to me. I put the book back exactly where I'd found it, spine aligned with its neighbors, and went downstairs on my bottom, one step at a time.
I nearly gave myself away in that sitting room a few weeks later.
I'd taken the old almanac down and was sitting on the carpet with it open across my knees, reading. Properly reading, finger moving along the lines, because the almanac had a section on planting dates for the northern provinces and I wanted to know when this region's last frost usually fell. I was so absorbed that I didn't hear Berta on the stairs.
She was halfway through saying she'd been calling and calling when she reached the doorway and stopped.
I looked up. She looked down. At me, twenty months old, cross-legged on the floor with a thick almanac open in my lap and one finger halfway down a column of dates.
My heart gave one hard thump against my ribs and then seemed to skip the next beat entirely.
Berta asked, slowly, what I thought I was doing with that.
I turned the almanac upside down, pointed at a small woodcut of a plough in the corner, and said, very clearly, "Horsey."
There was a long pause.
Then Berta burst out laughing. It was a plough, she told me, you silly thing, there wasn't a horse in it anywhere. She came over and scooped me up, almanac and all, kissed my forehead, called me a little magistrate pretending to read the law books, and said I'd be wanting spectacles next.
She carried me downstairs, still chuckling. I let her, with my face pressed into her shoulder so she couldn't see how hot it had gone.
After that I only read the real books when I was certain she was busy in the kitchen, and I always kept a picture book open on the floor beside me, in case.
But I came back to that sitting room often. It became my favorite place in the annex: just me, the dust, the faded green leaves on the walls, and a sharp-chinned old woman in a portrait who looked as if she knew a joke she wasn't going to tell.
Berta let me outside on my own in early summer, when I was about twenty months old, as long as I stayed inside the garden wall where she could see me from the kitchen window.
The garden was enormous to me then. A tangled kingdom of weeds taller than my head, brambles that hooked my clothes, and nettles that stung my bare legs until I learned to recognize them, which took exactly one afternoon and left me with a rash of white welts from ankle to knee. I pushed through it like an explorer in a jungle, finding things.
There was a sundial half-buried in the long grass near the center, its bronze face gone green, its stone pillar cracked. I scraped the moss off with my fingernails and found a line of runes carved around the edge. Real runes, not decoration. My pulse jumped. I traced them with a fingertip and read them slowly.
Turn into. Shadow. Repeat until sundown.
A simple inscription. Old, faded, long since stopped working. But someone, a long time ago, had known how to write runes into stone. Here. In this garden.
There were low walls of stacked stone, almost buried under weeds, outlining rectangular beds in neat rows. Old vegetable beds, I realized. Or herbs. When I pushed my fingers into the soil inside them, it was dark and soft and crumbling, cool a few centimeters down, full of worms. The best soil I'd touched since my balcony.
Along the south wall, wild rose canes had grown into a thorny thicket as tall as a man, still putting out a few small pink flowers after decades of neglect. They smelled sweet and old-fashioned, like a grandmother's garden.
And in the middle of it all stood the apple tree.
I walked up to it slowly and laid both palms flat against the trunk. The bark was grey, cracked, and rough enough to scratch. Up close, though, I could see it wasn't completely dead. Near the base, where the roots went into the ground, a thin strip of bark showed faintly green when I scraped at it with a fingernail. Living wood. Not much.
I thought about the sapling in the window of the Reading Room. Its oval, finely toothed leaves.
"Hang in there," I whispered, the same words I'd said to my tomatoes on the last morning of my first life. "I'm going to need you."
I fell, of course. I fell a great deal that summer. Over roots, over stones, over my own feet. I scraped my knees and elbows and once, memorably, my nose. Each time I picked myself up and toddled back to the kitchen with my lip trembling, trying hard not to cry and usually failing, and Berta would sit me on the table, clean the scrape with warm water that stung worse than the fall had, and dab on a salve that smelled of beeswax and calendula. Then she'd kiss the top of my head, announce that I was all mended, and send me off again.
And off I went. Back to the garden.
Standing by the apple tree one evening, with the sun going down and the shadows of the wild roses stretching long across the grass, I looked toward the far side of the garden wall. Beyond it, across a wide lawn and a gravel path, rose the main house, tall and pale, every window burning gold in the sunset.
In one of those windows, high on the second floor, I thought I saw something. Two small faces pressed to the glass. Looking down at the annex. At me.
Then they were gone.
I stood watching the empty window until the light left it.
Then I turned around and looked at the garden. The weeds, the old beds, the dark soil, the dead apple tree with its one thin strip of life.
Mine, I thought. This is going to be mine.
And I went inside for supper.