On the morning of my fourth birthday, Berta forgot.
At least, she pretended to. She got up at dawn as usual, milked the Duchess as usual, made porridge as usual, without honey, and set it in front of me without a word. Then she bustled off to scrub the kitchen floor, humming, as if it were any other late-autumn day in the world.
I ate my porridge and said nothing.
I knew she hadn't forgotten. Berta never forgot anything. She remembered the name-day of every servant on the estate, the birthdays of Elke's three nieces, the name-day of Tomas's wife, forty years dead. She'd marked my first birthday with honey porridge, my second with a pair of thick knitted socks, my third with a new shirt she'd sewn herself from an old blue curtain out of the dowager's sitting room.
She hadn't forgotten. She was planning something. And at some point in my second year I'd decided that the kindest thing I could do in return was let her surprise me.
So I spent the morning in the garden, pretending not to know.
My garden had grown in the months since Berta's lesson.
Sparrow's Corner had expanded, through careful negotiation and a great deal of staring, until it took up nearly the whole end of the herb bed. The twelve peas had given way to beans, and the beans to a late row of small radishes, which I'd pulled with enormous pride and presented to Berta one by one, like a cat bringing home mice. Berta's herbs had thrived exactly as she'd said they would. The mint, trapped in its sunken pot, was trying to climb out over the rim. The silverleaf by the kitchen door had spread into a shimmering mat. The chamomile still held a few last white flowers, browned at the edges by the cold nights.
And the apple tree's single shoot had become three, each as long as my arm, growing up from the old dead trunk like the first lines of a new page. Their leaves had begun to yellow at the tips and would drop soon. That didn't worry me. In spring they'd come back.
The ground was cold through the knees of my trousers. My breath showed faintly whenever a cloud crossed the sun. I knelt among the last of my radishes, pulled weeds, talked to the plants, and every so often glanced up toward the iron gate in the west wall.
I didn't notice I was doing it at first. It was only around midday that I caught myself. My eyes kept going to the gate. To the gravel path beyond it. To the far-off windows of the main house.
I stopped, a weed in my fist with clumps of soil dangling from its roots, and made myself look at what I was doing.
You're waiting, I told myself. You're waiting for someone to come.
I didn't even know who. My father, maybe, the man who had once written his name in a picture book of knights. Or some message from the main house. A note. A word. Anything at all to say that someone over there remembered that four years ago today, a maid named Lina had given birth to a son and died.
I sat there a long while, holding the weed, until the soil on its roots had dried and begun to crumble onto my knee.
Then I put it on the pile with the others, went back to work, and didn't look at the gate again.
At about four o'clock, with the light already gone thin and amber, Berta called me in for supper in the brisk, ordinary voice she used every day.
I went in, wiping my dirty hands on my trousers, and stopped in the kitchen doorway.
They were all there.
Tomas, at the end of the table with his unlit pipe, trying to look as though he just happened to be passing. Elke, beaming, in her best green dress, with her hair brushed for once. Jonas, tall and awkward and red to the tips of his ears. And beside him, holding his hand, a small, round, cheerful young woman with dark curls and flour on her apron: Mette, from the main house kitchen, who had married Jonas that spring and had heard so much about the sparrow that she'd begged to come and meet him.
The table was covered with a clean white cloth I'd never seen before. Bread. Cheese. A dish of my own radishes, sliced thin and salted. A pot of something that smelled of chicken and thyme, its steam fogging the window above it.
And in the middle of it all, on a chipped blue plate, there was a cake.
It was small, round, brown, and a little lopsided, glazed with honey that had run down one side. Stuck in the top were four candles. Only stubs of cheap tallow, the kind Berta saved from the ends of old candles in a tin by the stove; I could smell their faint mutton-fat odor from the door. But they were lit, all four, and their small flames shivered in the draft and reflected in the honey glaze.
"Well, don't just stand there," said Berta gruffly. Her eyes were very bright. "Happy birthday, sparrow."
I don't remember what I said. Probably nothing. I think I stood in the doorway with my mouth open until Elke burst into tears, as Elke always did, and Tomas laughed, and Berta came over and steered me by the shoulders to my stool at the head of the table.
Mette leaned forward eagerly and told me to blow them out. I had to make a wish first, she explained; that was how it was done in her family. You made a wish and blew them all out at once, and if you got every one, it came true.
I looked at the four small flames.
On Earth I'd done this twenty-nine times. I barely remembered most of the wishes. A bicycle, once. Good marks on an exam. A job at the city archive. Things that had seemed enormous at the time and small afterward.
I closed my eyes. And silently, in Japanese, where no one in this world could hear it, I made my wish.
Let me keep them safe. All of them. Every person at this table.
Then I took a deep breath and blew.
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All four flames went out at once. Thin grey threads of smoke curled up from the wicks. Everyone cheered, and Tomas thumped the table so hard the radishes jumped on their dish.
There were presents, too.
Elke gave me a scarf she'd knitted herself, in dark blue wool, long enough to go around my neck three times, with a slightly crooked white stripe near one end where she'd run out of blue and had to improvise. It was for the winter, she said, sniffling, so I didn't catch cold out in that garden. The wool scratched against my jaw and smelled faintly of her soap.
Jonas and Mette gave me a sweet bun from the main house kitchen, still warm, studded with raisins and dusted with sugar. Mette whispered, conspiratorially, that it came from the batch meant for the Duchess's afternoon tea; she'd made one extra, and nobody would ever notice.
Tomas gave me a watering can.
He'd made it himself in his shed, out of an old tin pail and a length of pipe, cut down and hammered and soldered together. It was exactly the right size for my hands. The spout ended in a little sprinkler head made from a disc of tin he'd punched full of holes with a nail, so the water would come out in a fine, soft rain that wouldn't flatten the seedlings. On the side he'd scratched a picture of a small bird.
He'd seen me using that tin cup, he said gruffly, not quite looking at me. Drowning everything. Thought I'd better have a proper one.
I held the watering can against my chest with both arms. The tin was cold through my shirt. My throat had closed, and nothing came out of it at all.
And when the others had finished, Berta put a small parcel in my lap, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string.
Inside was a book.
A real book, small and thin and second-hand, its cover worn soft at the corners. A child's primer, with the alphabet of the Common Tongue on the first page, each letter painted beside a picture. A for apple. B for bread.
"I know you can't read yet," Berta said, a little self-consciously, smoothing the brown paper flat on the table. "But you're always looking at those old books upstairs. Pretending. So I thought, next year, when you're five, I'll start teaching you your letters. Properly." She cleared her throat. "Your mother could read, you know. Better than anyone. I think she'd have wanted you to."
I looked down at the little primer, at the painted apple on the first page, and had to blink hard several times.
I know you can't read yet.
I thought of the forty-eight books in the Reading Room. The First Grammar of Runes. Eleven pages of my own soul, copied out in black ink, with one rune struck through in red.
"Thank you, Berta," I said. And I meant it more than I'd ever meant anything.
We ate. The chicken and thyme stew was the best thing Berta had ever made, and everyone said so, and she pretended the fuss annoyed her. The cake was cut into six slices, mine the biggest. Tomas told a long, rambling story about the time he'd fallen through the roof of the old dairy, which everyone except Mette had heard a dozen times and which got funnier with each telling.
It was Mette who brought up the appraisal, eventually.
She didn't mean anything by it. She was simply a chatterer, like Elke, and she'd had a cup of Tomas's watered ale, and the main house had been full of gossip all autumn. Next year was my big year, then, she said brightly, leaning toward me across the table. Five! I'd go to the temple and have my gift read, same as everyone. Then, turning to Berta, she mentioned that her grace had been talking about it only last week in the morning room; Mette had heard it when she brought up the tea.
Berta's knife paused over the bread. "Oh?"
Her grace had been saying, Mette went on, that Lord Lucius's appraisal was the proudest day of the Duke's life, and Lord Garrett's nearly as good, and that she'd have both boys stand beside the Duke at mine, so the whole household could see what a proper Valtier gift looked like next to— Mette glanced at me, and her cheerful face faltered. "Well. Next to yours."
Berta asked quietly what else her grace had said.
Mette hesitated. Jonas nudged her under the table, but she'd already started, and her voice dropped. "She said, 'We'll see what the maid's brat turns out to have. Something fit for the stables, I expect.' And then she laughed."
The table went quiet.
Elke stared at her plate. Tomas took the pipe out of his mouth and studied it, the way he did when he wanted to say something he shouldn't. Jonas had gone dark red. I found I was counting the raisins in the half of my bun that was left. Seven.
Mette looked around at all of them, stricken, and began to apologize: she shouldn't have said, she didn't mean—
"It's all right, love," Berta said. Her voice was calm, but her knuckles had gone white around the bread knife. "Better we know." She set the knife down very carefully, its blade lined up with the edge of the board. Then she turned to me, and her face softened. "Doesn't matter what any crystal says, sparrow. Doesn't matter what she says. You hear me?"
I nodded.
I didn't tell her that I already knew exactly what the crystal would say. A scholar's gift. A polite misfortune. Something to be pitied and quietly forgotten.
I didn't tell her that I wasn't afraid of it at all.
I reached for another slice of cake, and after a moment Tomas launched into the story of the time the goat ate the steward's hat, and everyone laughed, a little too loudly, and the evening went on.
It was full dark when the others left. Mette hugged me at the door and told me I was the most serious little boy she'd ever met and she liked me very much. Jonas shook my hand, very formally. Elke cried again. Tomas patted my head twice and went out to see to the goat.
Berta and I stood in the doorway together, watching them go, the cold coming in around our ankles.
Across the wide lawn, beyond the garden wall, the main house was lit from end to end. Every window blazed. Music drifted across the frosted grass, faint and sweet: violins, laughter, the clink of glasses. Colored paper lanterns had been strung in the trees along the gravel drive, red and gold and blue, swaying in the evening breeze. Carriages were lined up by the front steps, their horses blanketed and stamping, breath smoking in the lantern light.
I asked what it was.
Berta's mouth tightened. It was Lady Isolde's name-day feast, she said quietly. Her grace had invited half the county. She paused. "Mette's been baking for three days."
I watched the lanterns swaying. The carriages. The windows full of light and music.
Then I looked down at the tin watering can in my arms, with a small bird scratched on its side, and the blue scarf wound around my neck with its crooked white stripe, and the little primer tucked under my elbow. I could still taste honey.
I thought about the gate. About how I'd kept glancing at it all morning.
And I realized I wasn't waiting anymore.
"Berta," I said, and when she looked down, I told her firmly that this was the best birthday. Best ever.
She stared at me, startled. Then her whole face crumpled, and she laughed, and wiped her eyes with the corner of her apron, and scooped me up, watering can and all, calling me a silly sparrow into my hair. A silly, silly sparrow.
That night, in the Reading Room, there was a note on the desk.
Thick cream paper, folded once. Elegant, old-fashioned handwriting with long looping tails. In Japanese.
Happy birthday, Haruto.
—K.
I held it for a long time. Then I tucked it into my sweater pocket beside the first note and the library card.
Volumes Comprehended: 36 / 48
Twelve books left. Then the dark door at the back of the room would open. A year, perhaps, if I kept to my rules. Just in time for my fifth birthday, and whatever a temple priest and an appraisal crystal had to say about me.
I went to the window.
Outside, in the soft gold light, my apple tree had grown taller than the window frame. Its branches had spread wide, full of oval, toothed leaves that moved in a breeze from nowhere.
And at the very end of one branch, just opening, was a single flower.
Small and white, five round petals, a faint blush of pink at the center. An apple blossom. The first one.
I stood at the window and watched it for a long time.
Over in the main house, I supposed, the feast was still going. The lanterns were still swaying in the trees. Half the county was dancing to violins.
I didn't need any of it. I had a watering can, and a scarf, and a primer with an apple on the first page. I had a goat named after a duchess, a handyman who bet coppers on my first steps, and a laundress who cried at turnips. I had an old woman who called me sparrow.
And I had a tree, blooming in a window, in a library at the edge of the world.
It was enough. It was more than enough.
It was home.