The doors opened before we reached the top step.
Two footmen in dark blue livery stood on either side, holding them wide. Young men, not much older than Jonas, with stiff faces and white gloves. Neither looked at me. Their eyes stayed fixed on some point in the far distance over my head, the way I'd read servants in great houses were trained to do.
But as I passed between them, one of them glanced down. Only for a moment. At the blue coat, and the polished silver buttons, and the small boy inside them.
Then his eyes went back to the distance.
The entrance hall of the main house was larger than the whole ground floor of the annex, and warmer by several degrees; my cheeks began to burn the moment we were out of the wind.
The floor was white marble veined with grey, polished so hard I could see a blurred reflection in it: a small dark shape in a blue coat holding the hand of a larger one. A great staircase rose from the center and split halfway up into two curving flights. Tapestries of battles hung on the walls, armored men on horseback charging across fields of red and gold, and between them stood suits of armor on wooden stands, gleaming dully, each one holding a sword.
And everywhere, portraits.
Rows of them, climbing the walls beside the staircase. Stern men in armor or dark coats, every one with a sword at his hip or in his hand. Pale hair, mostly. Cold eyes, mostly. I recognized the names from the family tree in the royal historian's book. Aldo Valtier, First Duke. And near the top of the stairs, larger than the rest: Konrad Valtier, Fourteenth Duke. A heavy, square-jawed man with grey hair cropped close to his skull and a face like a closed fist.
My grandfather. The man who had beaten a seven-year-old for crying over a dog.
I looked at him. He looked back with painted, unforgiving eyes.
I looked away first. I'm not ashamed to admit it.
Harlan was waiting at the foot of the staircase. The nursemaid, he informed Berta, would stand with the household staff at the side of the hall. The child would walk forward alone when he was called.
Berta's hand clamped around mine hard enough that my knuckles ground together. She told him I was five. Harlan replied that those were her grace's instructions.
For a moment I thought Berta would argue. I could feel the anger coming off her like heat from the stove. Then she let a long breath out through her nose, knelt in front of me, and straightened my collar, which didn't need straightening. "Head up," she whispered. "Remember." I told her I remembered.
She kissed my forehead quickly and stood. Harlan led us down a long corridor lined with more portraits, more armor, more tapestries, toward a pair of tall double doors at the far end. Behind them I could hear the low murmur of a great many voices.
The doors opened.
The Great Hall of House Valtier was a cathedral built for swords.
That was my first thought, and I never found a better one. It was long and narrow and very high, its ceiling a run of dark timber beams arched like the ribs of an enormous ship, vanishing into shadow far overhead. Tall windows of thick leaded glass ran down both sides and let in pale stripes of winter light. At the far end was a fireplace so large that the whole annex kitchen could have fitted inside it, and a fire roared in it now, logs the size of my body cracking and spitting. Even from forty meters away I could smell the resin.
Above the fireplace hung a banner. Dark blue, embroidered with a single silver sword, point downward. It must have been ten meters long.
And all along both sides of the hall, the household stood waiting.
Dozens of them. More people than I'd seen in one place in five years. Footmen and maids in livery. Cooks in white aprons. Grooms smelling of horse. Gardeners with dirt under their nails. A row of soldiers in dark blue tunics with swords at their belts. A few in finer clothes whom I took to be senior staff: secretaries, the housekeeper, the master of the stables.
Every one of them turned to look at me as I came in.
I'd prepared for a great deal. I hadn't quite prepared for that. All those eyes at once, curious and pitying and indifferent and amused. My mouth went dry, and I found myself counting the leaded panes in the nearest window to give my attention somewhere to go. Fourteen across. A low murmur ran along the walls like wind through dry grass, and I caught pieces of it: the maid's boy; Lina's, wasn't she, the one who—; look at the coat.
Harlan led Berta off to the right, to a place near the end of the line of servants. As she went, she nodded to a small, round young woman with dark curls in a kitchen apron. Mette. Mette caught my eye and gave me a tiny, nervous wave, half hidden in the folds of her skirt.
I didn't wave back. I didn't dare. But my shoulders came down a little.
Then I was alone, just inside the doors, at the far end of the long hall.
At the other end, on a low stone dais in front of the great fireplace, sat my father's family.
The Duke sat in a tall carved chair in the center.
I had never seen him. Not once, in five years. He'd never come to the annex, and I'd never been allowed near the main house. Now I could look at him properly. He was tall even seated, broad through the shoulders, in a dark blue coat cut like a military uniform, with no ornament but a small silver pin at the collar in the shape of a sword. His hair was pale gold going grey at the temples, cut short. His face was lean and hard and handsome in a stern, weathered way. And running from just below his left ear, down across his throat and under his collar, was a scar. Long and pale and ridged, exactly where Berta had drawn it on the kitchen table with her wet finger.
His eyes were blue. Pale, cold blue, like a winter sky. Lucius's eyes.
They weren't looking at me. They were looking at nothing in particular, somewhere in the middle distance, with the faint, patient boredom of a man waiting for a tedious duty to be over.
Beside him, in a slightly smaller chair, sat the Duchess.
Margarethe was beautiful. Somehow I'd expected that from the way Berta talked about her. Slender and pale, thick auburn hair coiled high and pinned with pearls, a gown of deep green silk that rustled when she moved, emeralds at her throat. Her face was fine-boned and flawless.
But her mouth was small and tight, like the clasp of a purse snapped shut. And her eyes, a pale, clear green, rested on me with an expression I'd never seen on anyone's face before.
It wasn't hatred, exactly. Hatred would have been warmer. It was the look of someone examining a stain on a tablecloth and deciding how best to have it removed.
The two boys stood on either side of the Duke's chair.
Lucius was on the right. Eight, nearly nine, taller than he'd been on the garden wall, dressed in a miniature version of his father's military coat, with a real sword at his hip. A small one, sized for a boy, but real; its silver hilt caught the firelight. He stood very straight with his chin up, and when he saw me his lip curled exactly the way it had the summer I was two.
Garrett was on the left. Six now, with his mother's red-brown hair and freckles across his nose, in a deep red coat instead of blue. He wasn't standing as straight as his brother. He kept shifting from foot to foot and glancing up at Lucius as if to check he was doing it right. When his eyes landed on me they went wide and curious, the way they had over the wall.
A little to one side, on a cushioned bench beside the dais, sat a young nursemaid in grey. I knew her: the plain, kind-faced girl I'd seen through the iron gate that same summer, carrying a bundle of white lace down the orchard path.
The bundle sat on her lap now, and was no longer a bundle. A little girl not quite three, in a white dress with a pink sash, a mass of golden curls tied up in a ribbon, and enormous blue eyes.
Isolde.
She was staring at me with her mouth slightly open, the way small children stare at anything new. When she saw me looking back, she smiled. A small, shy, uncertain smile.
At the foot of the dais, a little apart from the family, stood the priest.
Father Osric was old and round, with a fringe of white hair around a pink bald scalp and a soft, tired, kindly face: the face of a man who had blessed and married and buried half the county and had long since stopped expecting to be surprised by anything. He wore white robes trimmed with gold. Beside him, a young acolyte in plain grey held something on a small silver stand, covered with a cloth of dark blue velvet, about the size of a melon.
The appraisal crystal.
From somewhere behind me, Harlan announced me: the child Elias, natural-born son of this house.
The murmuring along the walls died away.
I began to walk.
It was a long walk. Perhaps forty meters from the doors to the dais, straight down the center of the hall with the household lined up on either side. My mended boots, polished to a dull shine, clicked on the stone, and in that silence every click sounded enormous. The right one pinched at the little toe with each step.
I kept my head up. I walked slowly, as Berta had told me. I didn't gawp. I looked straight ahead: at the dais, the fire, the great silver sword on the banner.
And as I walked, I thought, for no reason I could name, of the Library. The endless avenues of shelves under the golden haze, the lanterns drifting overhead, the Keeper walking ahead of me with their robes rustling like turning pages.
It helped. I don't know why. It helped.
I stopped three steps from the dais and bowed. Right hand over my heart, eyes on the floor, bending from the waist, lower than a servant and higher than a commoner. Hold for three. Rise slowly.
Exactly as the book described.
A murmur ran along the walls again. Surprised, this time.
The Duchess's lips thinned. "Well," she said. Her voice was low and cool and very clear, pitched to carry to every corner. "At least the maid has taught it to bow."
A few people along the walls laughed. Not many. Most looked at the floor.
I kept my eyes down. My face was burning. I thought of Berta, standing at the end of the line, hearing that, and my hands curled into fists at my sides until my nails bit into my palms.
Head up, I told myself. Remember.
"You are the boy."
The voice was deep and quiet and rough, like a voice seldom used for anything but orders. It came from the carved chair.
My father was speaking to me. For the first time in my life.
"Yes, Your Grace," I said.
He told me to look at him.
I lifted my eyes.
He was looking at me now. Directly, for the first time. His pale eyes moved over my face slowly, the way you'd skim a report you'd been handed and had no particular interest in. I don't know what he saw. A small boy with dark hair, I suppose. My mother's hair. Perhaps my mother's eyes, the green of new leaves, though I'd never seen my own reflection clearly enough to be sure.
I looked back. I tried to read him, the way I'd learned to read people from Berta's stories, the way I'd once read the margins of old ledgers. I searched that hard, scarred face for anything at all. Anger. Guilt. Curiosity.
I found only tiredness. A great, grey, silent tiredness, like a field after a battle, when everyone has gone home.
Then his eyes moved downward.
To the coat.
To the high stiff collar, the double row of polished silver buttons, the dark blue wool.
They stopped there. And stayed.
It was the smallest thing. If I hadn't been watching so closely, I'd never have seen it. Something shifted behind his eyes, very briefly, like a door long locked moving a single centimeter on its hinges, and stopping.
He asked, slowly, where I had got that coat.
The hall was utterly silent. Beside him, the Duchess turned her head with a small frown and looked at the coat as if seeing it for the first time.
"Berta found it, Your Grace," I said. "Upstairs. In a chest."
The Duke didn't answer.
He looked at the coat for what felt like a very long time. His hand, resting on the arm of the carved chair, tightened until the knuckles stood out. Then it loosened.
And the door closed again, as quietly as it had opened. His eyes went back to the middle distance, and his face was exactly as it had been before.
"Proceed, Father Osric," he said.
The priest stepped forward. Before he could speak, the Duchess raised one slender, jeweled hand and asked sweetly for a moment, Father, before he began. She thought perhaps, for the boy's benefit, he might first show the household how the crystal answered a true Valtier gift. She smiled, and her pale green eyes settled on me. "So that everyone may understand what they are about to see. By comparison."
Father Osric hesitated and glanced at the Duke.
The Duke said nothing. He didn't even turn his head.
Father Osric sighed, very quietly, the sigh of a man who had served noble houses for a long time and had learned which arguments were worth having. "As your grace wishes," he said.
He nodded to the acolyte. The young man took hold of the dark blue velvet and drew it away.