The summons came a week after my fifth birthday, on a cold, bright morning in early winter.
I was in the garden when I heard the boots. I knew them at once, even after all these years: heavy, crisp, measured, crunching up the gravel path toward the annex door. I could count on one hand the times those boots had come to us. The night I was born. The morning Berta was reassigned to me. The night of my fever, when they came as far as the outer door and no farther. The morning after Lucius threw a clod of earth at me.
None of those had been good days.
I set down my trowel, wiped my palms on my trousers, which only spread the mud more evenly, and went to stand just inside the kitchen door where I could listen. The frost on the step had soaked through my socks by the time I got there.
Harlan stood in the kitchen doorway in his dark coat with the silver buttons. Tall, thin, grey-bearded, as dry and neat as a page in a ledger. If he'd aged at all in five years, I couldn't see where.
He held a sheet of paper. Of course he did.
Berta stood by the stove with her arms folded. She didn't offer him a chair, or tea, or so much as a nod.
"By order of his grace the Duke," Harlan read. "In accordance with the laws of the kingdom of Aldmere, every child of noble blood, whether acknowledged or not, must have their gift appraised in their fifth year and entered into the temple's Register of Gifts. The child Elias, natural-born son of this house, having reached his fifth year, is summoned to the Great Hall of House Valtier three days hence, at the second bell after noon, to be appraised by Father Osric of the temple of Valtier, in the presence of the family."
He lowered the paper.
Berta repeated in the presence of the family slowly, as if checking each word for rot. Harlan answered, without any expression at all, that her grace had requested the young masters and Lady Isolde attend, together with the senior household staff. "Has she," said Berta.
They looked at each other for a long moment. A great deal passed between them that neither said aloud.
Then Harlan added that the child was to be clean, and suitably dressed. His eyes moved around the kitchen as he said it: the chipped plates on the shelf, the patched curtains, the bucket in the corner under the leak. Me, in the doorway, in muddy trousers and the shirt Berta had made from an old blue curtain, which now stopped well short of my wrists. "Insofar as that is possible."
"He'll be clean," Berta said through her teeth. "And he'll be dressed."
Harlan inclined his head a fraction, folded the paper into his coat, and left.
The moment the outer door shut, Berta sat down hard at the kitchen table and put her face in her hands.
I went and stood beside her. After a moment I put my hand on her arm. Her sleeve was damp from the washing and smelled of lye.
"Berta?"
She spoke into her palms. In front of the family. In front of the whole household. Her grace wanted an audience; she wanted them all to watch. Berta lifted her head, and her eyes were wet and furious. "She's going to make a show of you, sparrow. That's what this is. Lord Lucius on one side with his warrior's gift and Lord Garrett on the other with his fire, and you in the middle, so everyone can see the difference."
I'd known that since my fourth birthday, when Mette repeated what the Duchess had said in the morning room. I didn't say so. I squeezed her arm.
"It's all right," I said.
At five I allowed myself more words. Short sentences, simple ones. I still had to be careful. But that much I could say.
"It's not all right. It's cruel, is what it is." She scrubbed her eyes with her sleeve. Then she took a long breath, and I watched her face change the way it always did when she'd decided something: the fear drained out, and the anger came in to take its place. She stood, and the chair legs scraped the flagstones. "Right. Clean and suitably dressed. We'll see about that."
Clean turned out to be the easier part.
The bathing room on the ground floor still held its enormous copper tub, green with age for as long as I could remember. Nobody had used it in decades; we washed at a basin by the stove like everyone else in the servants' quarters.
Berta decided that wasn't good enough.
Tomas was summoned. Tomas grumbled. Tomas spent an entire afternoon on his knees scouring the green off the inside of the tub with sand and vinegar, the sour reek of it filling the whole ground floor, muttering about her ladyship and her ladyship's opinions until the copper gleamed a dull reddish gold. Then he and Jonas spent another hour hauling buckets from the pump and heating them on the stove, bucket after bucket, until the tub was full and steaming and the little tiled room was thick with fog.
I was put into it.
In theory, I should have enjoyed it. I hadn't had a proper hot bath in five years, and in my first life a long soak at the end of a day at the archive had been one of my great pleasures.
But Berta wasn't interested in letting me soak. Berta was interested in getting me clean. She came at me with a coarse cloth and a cake of hard yellow soap as if I were a stubborn stain on a kitchen floor. She scrubbed behind my ears. She went after my fingernails, permanently black from the garden, with a little brush until the skin around them was pink and stinging. She scrubbed the backs of my knees and the soles of my feet. She washed my hair three times and rinsed it with a jug of cold water that made me shriek, and when I protested that it was cold, she said good, cold made it shine, and poured another jug over my head. Nobody in that house was going to say I'd come to them dirty. Nobody.
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By the time she finished, I was pink from scalp to heels, my skin prickling all over, and I smelled so strongly of yellow soap and lavender that the goat sneezed when I walked past her shed.
Suitably dressed was harder.
I owned three shirts, two pairs of trousers, Elke's blue scarf, and a pair of boots that had been mended twice and had started to pinch at the little toes. Everything was clean and carefully patched. None of it was fit for the Great Hall of House Valtier.
Berta knew it. That evening she stood in front of my little chest of drawers for a long time, frowning at the contents, one hand pressed to the small of her back.
Then she went upstairs.
I followed. She went to the end of the corridor, past the dowager's sitting room to the shut-up bedrooms, and began opening chests. Big old wooden ones whose lids I'd never managed to lift myself, full of folded linens and moth-eaten blankets and things wrapped in paper that smelled of cedar and age. The dust she raised made us both sneeze.
She went through four of them. In the fifth, near the bottom, she stopped and said, very softly, "Oh."
She lifted something out and unwrapped the paper.
It was a coat. A child's coat, about my size, of fine dark blue wool, with a short stand-up collar and a double row of silver buttons down the front. The buttons had tarnished nearly black, and there was a small moth hole near one cuff. But the wool was still thick and soft, and the cut was elegant in an old-fashioned way, like something from a portrait.
Berta turned it over in her hands. Then she folded back the collar and looked at something sewn inside, and she was quiet for so long that I came closer to see.
Two letters, embroidered in silver thread, faded but clear. G.V.
"He wore this." Her voice had gone thin and far away. "Your father. The summer he was five. His grandmother had it made for him when he came to stay here with her. I remember him in it, running up and down this corridor with a wooden sword, making the dowager laugh." She smoothed the collar flat with her thumb, once, twice. "I'd forgotten. I'd forgotten it was still here."
I looked at the coat. At the two small silver letters.
A little boy, running up and down this corridor, making his grandmother laugh. Before the dog. Before everything.
I asked, quietly, whether it would fit.
Berta looked at me, then at the coat, and something hard and stubborn came into her face, an expression I'd seen many times before, usually just before she said something rude to a steward. "It'll fit," she said. "I'll make it fit."
She stayed up two nights in a row altering it by candlelight.
She took it in a little at the sides. She darned the moth hole so neatly you couldn't find it unless you knew where to look. She cut off every silver button, polished each one with wood ash and a soft rag until it shone, and sewed them all back on with new thread. She brushed the wool until it was as soft as a cat.
On the second night I sat up in bed and watched her work, the candle throwing her shadow huge across the wall, and asked her why that coat.
She didn't look up from her needle for a while. Then she said that her grace had said suitably dressed, and Berta couldn't think of anything more suitable than a coat that had belonged to a Valtier. She bit off the thread. "Let them look at it. Let him look at it. And let him remember."
On the last night before the appraisal, Berta taught me how to behave in the Great Hall.
She stood in the middle of the kitchen floor to demonstrate. I was to walk in slowly. No running. No gawping around with my mouth open like a fish, however grand it was. Straight to the front where the Duke sat, stop a few steps off, and bow. She showed me: a stiff bend at the waist, hands at her sides. A good bow, for someone who'd only ever watched nobles from the edge of the room. "Now you try."
I had read Customs and Courtesies of the Noble Houses cover to cover, twice, and hated every page. I knew exactly how a natural-born child was expected to bow to the head of a noble house: lower than a servant, not so low as a commoner; right hand over the heart; eyes on the floor; hold for a count of three; rise slowly; do not speak unless spoken to.
So I did it. Exactly as the book described.
When I straightened, Berta was staring at me, and she asked, slowly, where I'd learned to do that.
I went cold from the stomach outward. Rule eight. No one can know.
"Watching Jonas," I said. "When he brings the firewood. He bows to you."
That was even true. Jonas did bow to Berta, a little, out of respect. Not like that, though. Nothing like that.
Berta looked at me for a long, long moment with the small thoughtful frown she got whenever I did something she couldn't account for. Then she shook her head, muttered "little magistrate, watching everything," and went on with her instructions. If the Duke spoke to me, I was to say Yes, Your Grace or No, Your Grace, and nothing else. And whatever the priest said, whatever happened, whatever anyone said—
She knelt in front of me so our faces were level and took both my hands. Hers were rough and warm and smelled of candle wax.
"You hold your head up," she said fiercely. "You're your mother's son. You're my sparrow. And you're worth more than the whole lot of them put together. You hear me?"
"I hear you, Berta."
That night, in the Reading Room, I didn't read.
I sat in the armchair by the window, under the branches of my apple tree, which was in full blossom now, every branch heavy with small white flowers, and thought about tomorrow.
I knew what the crystal would say. Scholar family. A polite misfortune. That didn't worry me.
What worried me was what else it might see.
I had no idea how an appraisal crystal worked. There was no book on it in the Reading Room. Brother Anselm had said only that it "reveals the gift's nature as the gods intend it to be known." Did it read the whole of a gift? Only the surface? Could it see the sealed door and its band of unreadable runes? My skills? The rune I'd removed from Language Comprehension?
I took a sheet of paper and did what I always did when something frightened me: I made an inventory. Every heading on the written pages of my soul, as I'd last read them.
[Language Comprehension — Level 3]
[Rune Literacy — Level 1]
[Memory — Level 1]
[Gift: Akashic Library — SEALED]
Four lines. A five-year-old had no business owning three of them. Rune Literacy alone, glowing in the air above that crystal in front of the whole household, would undo everything I'd spent five years hiding.
I looked at my rules propped against the green lamp. Eight. No one can know.
There was nothing to be done about it. I couldn't hide my gift from a crystal; I didn't know how. I couldn't refuse to go. All I could do was walk in, bow, put my hand where the priest told me, and hope.
Carefully, I told myself. Be a five-year-old. Be ordinary. Be a polite misfortune.
In the morning, Berta dressed me in the blue coat with the silver buttons.
It fit. Not perfectly; the sleeves came down past my knuckles. But it fit. She brushed my hair flat with water. She tied Elke's blue scarf around my neck, then took it off because it wasn't grand enough, then put it back on because it was mine. She polished my old mended boots until they very nearly looked new.
Then she took my hand, and we walked out of the annex together, across the frost-white garden, the grass crunching under our boots and our breath going up in clouds, through the iron gate in the west wall, and up the long gravel path across the lawn toward the main house.
I had never been this close to it.
It was enormous. Four stories of pale grey stone, tall windows flashing in the low winter sun, a slate roof bristling with chimneys, two long wings reaching out on either side. A wide flight of stone steps rose to a pair of great oak doors banded with iron.
And over the doors, cut deep into the stone in letters a meter high, just as the royal historian had said, were the words of House Valtier.
STEEL BEFORE WORDS.
I stood at the bottom of the steps and looked up at them for a long time. The cold was working its way in through the cracks in my boots.
Then Berta squeezed my hand, and we climbed.