The appraisal crystal was beautiful.
I hadn't expected that. I'd imagined something ominous, a dark orb full of swirling mist, the kind of prop a fortune-teller keeps in a cheap play. Instead, when the acolyte drew back the velvet, there was simply a sphere of perfectly clear crystal about the size of a melon, resting on a stand of polished silver. It was so clear it was nearly invisible. Firelight passed straight through it and threw a small, trembling rainbow across the stone of the dais.
The stand was shaped like a cupped hand, silver fingers curling up around the base of the sphere. And all over its surface, etched into the metal in fine, delicate lines, were runes.
My heart jumped.
I couldn't help it. I leaned forward, very slightly, trying to see them better. I'd read The First Grammar of Runes cover to cover. I'd read my own soul. I could read these.
Most of them were hidden from where I stood, curving around the back of the stand or worn smooth by centuries of hands. But a few on the front, near the base, caught the firelight and stood out sharply.
Read, I made out. An action rune. Then a substance rune I'd met only once, in the chapter on inscriptions, meaning something like name or title. Then family. Then show, and a measure rune for color.
Then the line curved away around the back of the stand, out of sight.
Read the name. Read the family. Show the color.
I stood very still and turned that over, the way I'd check a sentence for a missing clause.
ather Osric asked Lord Lucius, if he would be so kind.
Lucius stepped forward with the air of someone who had been waiting all morning for this. He didn't look at me as he passed. He walked straight to the crystal, chin high, and laid his right hand flat on top of it.
For a heartbeat, nothing.
Then the crystal blazed.
Light poured out of it, red and gold, so bright and sudden that half the hall flinched and threw up their hands. It wasn't like firelight, flickering and warm. It was hard and steady and fierce, like sunlight striking a blade. The whole Great Hall went red and gold: the timber ceiling, the stone walls, the faces along both sides. I had to squint, and when I blinked a green afterimage swam across my vision.
Inside the crystal the light gathered into a shape. Long and narrow and gleaming. A sword, point down, exactly like the one on the banner.
Above the crystal, glowing letters appeared in the air.
[Sword Saint's Blessing — Warrior Family]
Everyone in the hall could see them; I could tell from the gasp that ran along the walls. The voice of the world, written in the air for anyone to read.
But only I, I think, could see what was underneath.
Beneath each glowing letter, faint as a watermark, lay runes. The same tiny interlocking shapes I saw under my own notifications. The same ones that headed each block of script on the pages of my soul. This is the name of the gift. This is its family.
That was all. Only the heading. Nothing about what was written beneath it.
The soldiers along the right-hand wall broke into a cheer, a rough, enthusiastic roar, stamping their boots on the stone until I could feel it through my soles. A few of the older servants clapped. Someone near the doors shouted "The Shield of the North!" and the soldiers took it up as a chant until the hall rang with it.
And on the dais, my father smiled.
It wasn't large. A slight lift at one corner of his mouth, a softening around the eyes so faint I might have missed it if I hadn't been watching him so closely. But it was there. For the first time since I'd walked in, his face wasn't grey and tired and somewhere far away. For a moment, it was proud.
I watched that smile, and something in my chest twisted, small and sharp, like a splinter under a fingernail.
I didn't want it to. I told myself it didn't matter. I'd decided on my fourth birthday, standing in the annex doorway with a tin watering can in my arms, that I didn't need anything from anyone in this house.
But I watched my father smile at my brother, and the splinter twisted anyway.
As the cheering died and the light in the crystal sank to a soft red glow, Father Osric made the announcement in a voice that carried well from long practice. The Sword Saint's Blessing. The rarest of the warrior gifts. Its bearer would find every skill of the blade came to him as naturally as breathing, and would grow in them at twice the pace of other warriors. It had not been seen in the northern provinces in three generations.
"Since my great-grandfather," the Duke said quietly.
It was the first thing he'd said since proceed. He was still looking at Lucius, and the smile hadn't quite left his face.
The Duchess told Lucius to show them. Show the household what his years of training had done.
Lucius didn't need asking twice. He stepped back into the open space on the dais and drew his sword. It left the scabbard with a clean, bright ring that came back down off the timber ceiling. And then he moved.
I'd read about swordsmanship. Customs and Courtesies had a few pages on the forms young nobles were expected to learn, and I'd pictured them vaguely as something stiff and formal, like a dance.
It wasn't. Not the way Lucius did it. He flowed through a sequence of cuts and parries and turns, the small blade flashing, his feet shifting across the stone without a wasted step. High cut, low cut, a spinning turn, a lunge that stopped a hand's breadth from one of the soldiers along the wall, who didn't flinch, only grinned. It lasted perhaps twenty seconds. It was fast and precise and genuinely beautiful, and it was being done by a boy not yet nine.
He finished with the point grounded on the stone and both hands on the hilt, chin high. The soldiers roared again.
Above his head, a smaller line of light appeared and faded.
[Swordsmanship — Level 4]
Level four, at eight years old. I remembered the passage in On the Nature of Gifts: most trained soldiers reached level three in their twenties, and many never went higher.
Whatever else Lucius was, I thought, watching him sheathe the blade with a flourish, he wasn't lazy. More than three years of training, every day, since he was five. The gift had made it easy. He'd still done the work.
I filed that away too.
Behind him, the last red glow in the crystal faded out, leaving it clear and empty. Lucius faced the hall, flushed with pride, and as the cheering died away his eyes found mine.
He smirked. A small, satisfied smirk that said, plainer than words: See what I am? And what you're not?
I looked back without expression. After a moment the smirk slipped, the way it had over the garden wall, and he turned and went back to stand at his father's right hand.
Then it was Lord Garrett's turn.
Garrett hesitated and glanced up at Lucius as if for permission. Lucius gave him an impatient jerk of the head: go on. Garrett swallowed audibly, stepped forward, and put his small freckled hand on the crystal.
This time the light was different.
It came slowly. A deep, smoldering crimson rose from the bottom of the sphere like embers being blown to life. Then, all at once, it caught. The crystal filled with fire. Not a picture of fire, but something that moved like it, swirling and twisting and leaping inside the glass, orange and scarlet and gold.
And the hall grew warm.
I felt it on my face from three steps away, a wave of heat like opening an oven door, drying my eyes. The nearest servants stepped back. The great fire behind the dais seemed to lean toward the crystal, its flames stretching sideways as if drawn.
[Flame Lord — Mage Family]
The cheer was louder this time, if anything. Not only the soldiers but the household staff too: cooks and grooms and gardeners. A mage gift, in a house of warriors. A fire mage, and a strong one.
Garrett's face split into a huge, delighted grin. He turned, glowing in the crimson light, and looked straight at Lucius, eyes shining, waiting for his brother's approval.
And I saw something cross Lucius's face.
It was very quick. He hid it almost at once behind a stiff, approving nod. But for a moment it had been there. Something sour and pinched and uncertain.
He hadn't expected Garrett's light to be that bright. He hadn't expected the cheering to be that loud. At its peak, for a moment, the hall had been louder for Garrett than it had been for him.
I filed that away. Carefully. Alongside everything else.
When the fire in the crystal had sunk and the heat had drained out of the air, Father Osric pronounced it: the gift of the Flame Lord, a greater mage gift of the fire aspect. Its bearer would command flame with ease and learn fire magic far beyond the reach of ordinary mages. Under proper instruction, the young lord might one day stand among the foremost fire mages of the kingdom.
"With proper instruction," said the Duchess, "he certainly will." She laid one jeweled hand on Garrett's shoulder as he came back to her side and smiled down at him with real warmth. The first warmth I'd seen on her face.
She loved her sons, I realized. Whatever else she was, whatever she'd done, she loved them. It was there in the way her fingers lingered in Garrett's hair and her eyes followed Lucius.
It didn't make me like her. But it made her a person instead of a monster out of one of Berta's stories, and I found that harder to know what to do with.
On the cushioned bench beside the dais, little Isolde was clapping.
She'd watched both displays with her mouth open, and when the fire swirled in the crystal she'd squealed and bounced on her nursemaid's lap. Now she was clapping her small hands, laughing, looking around at everyone to see whether they were enjoying the pretty lights as much as she was.
Her eyes landed on me again. She stopped clapping and tilted her head, as if wondering why I wasn't clapping too.
I didn't know what else to do, so I gave her the smallest smile I could manage.
She smiled back, enormously.
The nursemaid noticed, and her plain, kind face tightened with worry. She glanced quickly toward the Duchess. But the Duchess was still looking at Garrett, and hadn't seen.
I looked along the line of servants to where Berta stood.
She was very straight, hands folded over her apron, the way she stood when Harlan read his proclamations. Her face was calm. Perfectly calm.
But her eyes were fixed on me, and in them I could see everything she'd said to me the night before, as clearly as if she were saying it aloud.
Head up. You're your mother's son. You're my sparrow.
I lifted my chin a little higher.
Then I looked back at the crystal, clear and empty on its silver stand, and thought hard and fast.
Read the name. Read the family. Show the color.
If I was right, if the crystal read only the heading of a gift, it would see nothing of what lay beneath. Not my skills. Not my soul's blank pages. Not the rune I'd removed. Not whatever was written in that band of impossible runes around the sealed door. It would read the title the way a clerk reads the label on a book's spine without opening it, and that would be all.
The heading of my gift, as I'd seen it in the quiet dark, was [Gift: Akashic Library — SEALED].
No family. I'd noticed that at the time and wondered about it.
So what would the crystal show?
I didn't know. I couldn't know. In a moment I was going to find out in front of every person in House Valtier. My palms had gone damp. I wiped them on the lining of the coat's pockets, where no one would see.
Father Osric turned to me.
Up close, his face was even softer and more tired than it had looked from the end of the hall. His eyes were a faded, washed-out blue, and kind. He looked down at me, a small boy in an old-fashioned coat standing alone at the foot of the dais in front of the whole household, and something in his expression shifted. Something gentle, and a little sad.
He knew, I thought. He'd seen enough of these. He knew exactly what this was, and why the Duchess had wanted an audience, and what was likely to happen next.
"Come here, child," he said quietly. Not his carrying, announcing voice. Just for me. "There's nothing to be afraid of. It doesn't hurt."
I stepped forward.
The crystal was taller than I'd realized; its top was level with my chin. I could see my own face in its curved surface, small and warped, and behind it, upside down, the dais, the Duke in his carved chair, the great silver sword on the banner.
Father Osric told me to place my hand on it. Flat, the way my brothers had. And hold still.
Brothers, I thought. He'd said brothers. Not the young lords. Not their lordships. Just your brothers, plainly, as if it were obvious.
No one else in that hall had ever called them that to me.
I took a breath. I thought of the Keeper, and the tea, and the little brown book.
And I put my hand on the crystal.