They came on a hot afternoon in early summer, the summer after my second birthday.
I was in the garden, kneeling in one of the old stone-edged beds with a wooden spoon borrowed from the kitchen, digging. Not for any particular reason. I wanted to know how deep the good soil went. It was dark and cool and crumbling, and every few spoonfuls I turned up a fat pink worm, which I would examine seriously and then put back, gently, so it could get on with its work. Worms are the best friends a gardener ever has. I wasn't about to start this life on bad terms with them.
Bees were working the wild roses along the south wall. The sun pressed on the back of my neck, and sweat had pasted my shirt to my shoulder blades. Through the open kitchen window came Berta's voice, singing to herself as she kneaded bread, and under it the slap and thump of dough on the board.
It was, in short, a perfect afternoon. Which is probably why I didn't hear them until they were already on the wall.
"There it is."
The voice came from above and behind me. A boy's voice, high and clear and very pleased with itself.
I turned around, still on my knees in the dirt with the spoon in my fist.
Two heads had appeared over the top of the garden wall on the side facing the main house. They must have been standing on something on the other side, a crate or a barrel, because the wall was far taller than any child. All I could see were heads and shoulders and the hands gripping the top stones.
The one who'd spoken was the elder. Lucius would be six by now, by Berta's reckoning, but he was tall for it and held himself like someone older: a narrow face, pale gold hair cut neatly to the collar, and sharp, cold blue eyes that looked even colder for being set in so young a face.
The other boy was smaller, about four, with a rounder face, messy reddish-brown hair, and freckles across his nose. He clung to the wall with both hands and looked at me with wide, curious eyes, the way you'd look at an animal in a pen at a fair.
Lucius. And Garrett. My half-brothers.
I'd heard so much about them from Berta. Lucius, who bit. Garrett, who followed. I'd pictured them many times. Somehow I'd never pictured them looking so ordinary. Two boys, sweaty and pink-cheeked from the heat, in fine linen shirts with grass stains on the sleeves.
Garrett spoke first, and he sounded faintly let down: that was it? It was just a baby. Lucius corrected him at once, as if fixing a small and stupid error. It wasn't a baby, it was the maid's brat; Mother said so. Mother said it was dirty and lived in the shed with the goat. His lip curled. "Look, it is dirty. It's playing in the mud like a pig."
Garrett giggled, not quite sure he was supposed to.
I didn't say anything. I knelt there with my spoon and looked up at them.
I want to set down exactly what happened inside me in that moment, because it surprised me.
The grown-up part, the part that was still Haruto, wasn't angry. Not really. What it registered was closer to sadness. I looked at Lucius, six years old, repeating his mother's words with perfect, careless cruelty, and I thought: Someone taught you that. You didn't come up with it on your own. Someone sat you down and told you exactly what I am, and you believed them, because you're six, and that's what six-year-olds do.
And I thought about his father at seven, crying over a dog in a rose garden. And his grandfather, who had beaten him for it.
The cruelty hadn't started with Lucius. It was just running through him, the way water runs downhill.
That was the grown-up part.
But I wasn't only grown-up. I was also two years old, and the two-year-old part was frightened. These were big boys, much bigger than me, looking down at me with contempt, and my small body knew, the way small bodies always know, that bigger creatures looking at you like that means danger. My heart was going fast and light. My lower lip wanted to tremble. My eyes had started to sting.
I didn't let them spill.
I'm not sure why. Pride, maybe. Or because the grown-up part of my mind knew tears were exactly what Lucius wanted. Some children are like that. They poke at things to watch them squirm.
So I did the only thing I could think of. I looked at him. Steadily, without blinking. The same long, solemn stare that made Berta call me a little magistrate.
It worked better than I'd expected. Or worse, depending on how you count.
Lucius's smirk slipped. He shifted on whatever he was standing on, and something wooden creaked under him. He demanded to know what it was staring at. Garrett offered that maybe it was simple; Mother said maids' children often were. Lucius wasn't listening to him. He was telling me, louder now, to stop staring at him, that I wasn't allowed to stare at him, that he was the heir.
I kept staring.
His face went red. I watched it happen, the flush climbing from his collar to his ears. He wasn't used to being looked at like that, I realized. By anyone. He was the heir. Everyone in the main house bowed to him, smiled at him, agreed with him. Nobody ever just looked at him, quietly, as if he were something to be weighed.
He ducked out of sight. When he came back up, he had a clod of dry earth in his hand the size of an apple.
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"I said stop staring!"
He threw it.
It hit my shoulder and burst into a spray of dirt and dust. It didn't hurt much at first; it was mostly dry soil, and he'd thrown it badly. But it knocked me sideways, and I toppled onto my side in the bed I'd been digging, and grit went into my eyes and my mouth, and the spoon flew out of my hand into the weeds.
Now the tears came. I couldn't have stopped them. My eyes were full of grit and streaming, and I coughed and spat, and dirt crunched between my teeth.
Lucius laughed. A high, triumphant, slightly shaky laugh. See, he said, it was a pig. Rolling in the mud. He bent for another clod.
Beside him, Garrett had stopped giggling. He was looking at me lying in the dirt, coughing, and his face had gone uncertain. "Lucius," he said. "Maybe we should—"
"WHAT," roared a voice behind me, "do you think you are DOING?"
Berta came out of the kitchen door at full speed.
She had flour to her elbows and a broom in her hands, and her face was a color I'd never seen on it, a deep, furious brick red. She crossed the garden in about four strides, straight through the weeds and the nettles, without seeming to notice either.
Lucius froze with the second clod in his hand. Garrett squeaked and dropped out of sight below the top of the wall.
Berta was already bellowing at Lucius to get down from there this instant, you nasty little toad, before she came round and gave him the hiding his father should have given him years ago, and she brandished the broom over her head. Lucius went white, then red again, and drew himself up as tall as a boy on a crate behind a wall could manage, shrieking back that she couldn't speak to him like that, he was the heir, he'd tell Mother, Mother would have her whipped, have her thrown out. "Tell her!" Berta roared. "Tell her you were throwing rocks at a baby! See what your father says about that! Go on, run and tell her!"
The broom swung. It came nowhere near him; the wall was far too high. But Lucius flinched back anyway, lost his footing on the crate, and vanished with a yelp and a thump. A moment later two pairs of feet were running away across the gravel, and Lucius's voice, high and outraged, faded into the distance: "I'm telling! I'm telling Mother!"
Then silence. The bees. The roses. Berta breathing hard through her nose.
She dropped the broom and knelt beside me in the dirt, murmuring that I was her poor sparrow, and to let her see.
She wiped the grit from my eyes with the corner of her apron, very gently, a little at a time, and checked my shoulder, and held me while I coughed and cried. Her hands were shaking, and it took me a moment to understand that they were shaking with rage.
"Nasty little toad," she muttered into my hair, over and over. "Nasty, nasty little toad."
It was while she was carrying me back toward the kitchen that I saw the third child.
A path ran along the outside of the garden's west wall, from the main house down to the orchard. There was an old iron gate in that wall, rusted half shut, and through its bars I could see a young woman in a nursemaid's grey dress walking slowly along the path. She was carrying a bundle wrapped in white lace.
A baby. Very new, by the size of it. Two or three months, perhaps.
The nursemaid had stopped, the way people do when they hear shouting, and was looking through the gate toward us with wide, worried eyes. She was young, eighteen or so, with a kind, plain face. When she saw me in Berta's arms, filthy and streaked with tears, her expression softened into something very close to an apology.
But she didn't say anything. She glanced back toward the main house, then hurried on down the path.
As she went, the bundle stirred. A tiny hand worked its way free of the lace and waved at the air, the way babies' hands do, at nothing in particular.
"Who," I said. It was one of my words. It came out as hoo.
Berta followed my gaze, and her face did something complicated.
"That's Isolde," she said quietly. "Her grace's new little girl. Born this spring." She was silent a moment. "Your sister, sparrow. Half-sister. Though I don't suppose anyone will ever tell her that."
I watched the small white bundle until the orchard trees closed around it.
A sister.
I didn't know where to put that. So I tucked it away carefully, alongside everything else I was keeping, and laid my dirty head on Berta's shoulder.
Harlan came the next morning.
He stood in the doorway of my room in his dark coat with the silver buttons, holding a sheet of paper, and read from it in his dry voice exactly as he had the first time. Except that now I understood every word.
"By order of her grace the Duchess. The nursemaid Berta, having raised her voice in anger to the young masters Lucius and Garrett Valtier, and having threatened the heir of this house with violence, is hereby formally reprimanded. She is to forfeit one week's wages. Any further incident will result in her dismissal from the household without reference."
He folded the paper.
Berta stood very straight beside my cradle, hands folded over her apron, face perfectly calm, and asked politely whether there was anything else, Master Harlan.
Harlan said no. Then he hesitated, which I had never seen him do. His eyes flicked, very briefly, toward me. I was sitting on the floor with my wooden horse, and the bruise on my shoulder had come up overnight, dark purple and spreading, plainly visible above the collar of my shirt. It throbbed whenever I moved that arm.
Harlan looked at it for a moment. Then he looked away, said no again, nothing else, and left.
I did the arithmetic before the outer door had finished swinging shut. Three silver a month was sixty coppers; a week of that was fourteen, near enough. Nearly a quarter of a month's money, gone, because a six-year-old couldn't stand being looked at.
When the door had closed, Berta let out a long breath. Then she bent, picked me up, and kissed the bruise on my shoulder. "Worth every copper," she said firmly. "Every single one."
Tomas didn't say anything when he heard. He just went very quiet, the way he did when he was angry, and spent the rest of the afternoon in the garden.
When I toddled out to see what he was doing, he was up a ladder against the inside of the east wall, the side that faced the main house. He'd cut great armfuls of thorny canes from the wild roses along the south wall and was laying them along the top of the stones, weaving them together and lashing them down with twine, until the whole top of the wall bristled.
He saw me watching and climbed down, sucking a bleeding thumb. Roses grew where they liked, he observed mildly, to no one in particular. Couldn't be helped. Very prickly, roses. Anyone climbing that wall would get a nasty surprise. He looked down at me, and one eye closed in a slow wink. "Shame, that."
The boys didn't come back that summer.
That night, in the Reading Room, I didn't read.
I sat in the armchair by the window for a long time, watching the apple sapling move in the gold light, and thinking.
About Lucius's face going red when I wouldn't look away. About Garrett saying maybe we should, and not finishing it. About a tiny hand waving from a bundle of lace. About Berta forfeiting a week's wages she couldn't spare and calling it worth every copper.
And about the bruise, which out there, in my real body, ached every time I rolled onto that side.
I could have hated them. It would have been easy. Part of me wanted to. Part of me wanted to imagine everything I might one day be able to do, with runes and spells and every book in this Library, to a cruel little boy who threw rocks at babies.
But I thought about the scorched black journal the Keeper had shown me. Why does no one come to see me anymore?
I didn't want to become that.
So I took out my long list, Things I will need to know before I leave, and added a new line near the top, just below How to repay Berta and Medicine. Fevers first.
How to protect the people I care about.
I looked at it for a while. Then underneath, smaller, I added one more.
Without becoming like them.