I fell for a long time.
There was no wind and no sense of speed. Only light, warm and gold, sliding past me in a steady current. Things surfaced in it and sank again: the smell of rain on asphalt, my mother's laugh on the phone, the scratch of a pen nib, the dry rustle of the Keeper's robes. One by one they went out, the way shop lights go dark along a street at closing time, until there was only the light. Then a pressure, enormous and squeezing, from every side at once, and then—
The first thing I knew in my new life was cold.
Not the mild chill of an autumn morning on the balcony. A total, shocking cold, everywhere at once, as if I'd been hauled dripping out of a hot bath and dropped into a snowbank. Air rushed into my chest for the first time and burned all the way down. Light stabbed at my eyes. Everything was enormous and loud and wrong.
My body did the only thing it knew how to do.
I screamed.
It came out as a thin, furious wail, and some far-off part of my mind, the part that was still Haruto Kanzaki, twenty-nine, municipal archivist, observed with complete clarity: Oh. I'm a baby. I am an actual, literal baby.
Then a pair of rough, strong hands wrapped me in cloth, coarse and scratchy against my skin, and the cold began to back off.
I couldn't see much. Newborn eyes, it turns out, are terrible. The world was a smear: the orange flicker of firelight, a dark ceiling crossed by heavy beams, pale blurs of faces looming in and out.
I couldn't understand anything, either. Voices moved around me, a woman's, older and gruff, and another, younger and softer, but the words were only sounds. Rounded vowels. A rolling r. A language that sounded a little like German and a little like Italian and exactly like nothing I had ever heard.
Tone, though, I could follow. Tone turned out to be a language all its own.
The gruff voice was worried. It spoke in short, fast bursts, and under it I heard water sloshing into a basin and the long rip of cloth tearing along a seam.
The soft voice was exhausted. Under the exhaustion, it was happy.
The rough hands lifted me through the air and laid me down on something warm.
A heartbeat, fast and fluttering, right under my ear. The smell of sweat and lye soap and something sharp and metallic that I decided not to think about. Above me, a face came slowly into focus as it bent close.
She was young. Much younger than I'd been when I died, nineteen or perhaps twenty. Her dark hair was soaked and plastered to her forehead in strands, and her skin was very pale, almost grey around the mouth. Even with eyes that could barely resolve an edge, I could see she was beautiful in the plain, unvarnished way of someone who had never had the time or money to try.
Her eyes were the green of new leaves.
She smiled at me. It was the most tired smile I have ever seen, and the warmest.
This was my mother.
Much later I would learn that her name was Lina, that she was a maid in the house where I'd been born, and that she had loved my father for a short time, in the foolish, hopeful way that young people sometimes love those who will never love them back. I knew none of that then. I knew her heartbeat against my cheek, and her smile, and that I was safe.
She talked to me. I didn't understand the words, but I understood they were meant for me, soft and slow and pitched high, the way people talk to babies in every world, I suppose. She stroked my cheek with one fingertip. My hand flailed up on its own and closed around a damp strand of her hair, and she gave a small, breathless laugh and didn't pull away. She let me keep it. Under her breath she hummed a simple tune, five or six notes that climbed and fell and climbed again, back and forth like a child on a swing.
Then she said one word very clearly, and touched my chest as she said it.
"Elias."
She said it again, slower. "Elias." Her smile widened, as if she'd just handed me the best present in the world.
Oh, I thought. That's my name.
I liked it.
The gruff voice spoke again, sharper. I rolled my head toward it, clumsy, my neck useless, and caught the blurred shape of an older woman, broad and grey-haired, sleeves shoved past her elbows. Her hands and forearms were red to the wrist. She was pressing wadded cloths against something below the edge of my vision, and her voice had gone tight and high.
My mother's heartbeat was slowing.
I felt it through my cheek. The fluttering was tiring out. Each beat came a little later than the one before, and the skin where her arm touched mine was cooling, degree by degree, the way a cup of tea cools when you forget it on the desk.
I understood then. Not in words. With the part of me that had been an adult, that had sat in hospital corridors on molded plastic chairs while my grandfather was dying, that knew exactly what it meant when the people in a room stopped using their normal voices.
No, I thought. No, no. Not like this. I only just got here. I only just met you.
I tried to do something. Anything. I reached for the smell of old paper, the way the Keeper had told me to, and for one dizzy second I thought I saw it: a door of honey-colored wood, very far off in the dark behind my eyes. But my brain was the size of a fist, and exhausted, and the door slid away from me the way a dream slides off when you wake.
I didn't know anything yet. I couldn't help her. All the knowledge in the world was locked behind a door I couldn't reach, and I couldn't save the one person in front of me.
I would carry that for the rest of my life.
My mother turned her head toward the older woman and said something very quiet. The older woman shook her head, crying openly now, tears running into the creases beside her mouth, and kept pressing the cloths down.
Then my mother looked back at me.
Her face had changed. The tired, happy smile was still there, but behind it something had set hard. Something urgent. A decision, already made.
She gathered me higher against her, until my head lay right beside her lips, and whispered.
It wasn't my name. It wasn't the lullaby, or the soft meaningless sounds of comfort. It was a single word, spoken slowly and with enormous care, each syllable shaped separately and deliberately, the way you'd hand someone a key you had carried on a string around your neck for years.
"Ilvareth."
Once more, so faint it was mostly breath against my ear.
"Ilvareth."
Then she kissed my forehead, let her head sink back into the pillow, and smiled at me one last time.
I felt the moment her heart stopped.
The older woman wept. She wept for a long time, kneeling by the bed with my mother's hand pressed between both of hers. Then she lifted me, very gently, and held me against her broad chest and rocked, murmuring words I couldn't understand in a voice that kept cracking and starting over.
I would learn later that her name was Berta. That she had been a nursemaid in the house for thirty years and had known my mother since Lina first arrived to work there as a frightened girl of fourteen. That when the bleeding started, she had begged the household to send for a proper healer, and had been told the healer was attending the Duchess, who had a headache.
That night, though, she was only a pair of strong arms and a warm, heaving chest and a voice that wouldn't hold steady.
After a while she set me down, very carefully, in a basket lined with a folded shawl that smelled of cedar. She went back to the bed. She smoothed my mother's damp hair off her forehead. She closed my mother's eyes with two fingers. She drew the blanket up and tucked it in neatly at both sides, the way you would for someone who was only asleep.
Then she said something to my mother, low and fierce, one red hand pressed flat over her own heart.
I didn't understand the words. I knew a promise when I heard one.
When she picked me up again, her hands had stopped shaking.
I didn't scream anymore. I didn't have it in me. I lay against her and listened to her heartbeat, slower and steadier than my mother's had been, and fought to stay awake.
At some point the door opened. Heavy boots, crisp on the floorboards. A man's voice, clipped and formal, asked a short question. Berta answered in a choked whisper. The man said something shorter still, and the boots turned and went away, and the door clicked shut.
Much later, I would learn that the man was the head steward of the house, sent by the Duke of Valtier to ask whether the child had lived. When he returned and gave his report, the Duke nodded once without looking up from his papers and said the child should be placed in the annex, and that was all.
My father did not come to see me that night.
He didn't come the next day, either. Or the day after that.
That night, wrapped in a borrowed blanket in a cold little room, I stayed awake as long as my new body allowed. Berta dozed in a chair beside me, her chin dropping to her chest and jerking back up, one hand resting on the rim of my basket as if to make sure I didn't vanish too.
Twice I woke hungry and cried, and both times Berta was on her feet with me in her arms before the first wail had finished. No wet nurse had been sent. No one in the main house had thought of it, or if they had, they hadn't bothered. So Berta warmed goat's milk, begged from the kitchens, I'd guess later, in a small pan over the fire, dipped a twisted rag into it, and let me suck the milk off the cloth, drop by drop, muttering what I was fairly sure were curses aimed at the main house the entire time.
It took forever. My stomach was the size of a walnut, and I was so bad at it that half of every drop ran down my chin and pooled in the crease of my neck, warm and then cold. Berta wiped it away with her thumb each time. She never hurried me. Between curses, she hummed.
I remember thinking, with the grown-up part of my mind that was still awake: This woman owes me nothing. She could have left me in the basket. Nobody would have blamed her.
She didn't. She sat with me until the fire burned down, then got up, knees cracking, and built it up again, and sat with me some more.
I decided right then that one day I would repay her. I didn't know how. I didn't even know her name yet. I decided anyway.
Through the small window across the room, I could make out two moons. One large and silver. One smaller, with a faint blue cast, like the skin of watered milk. Another world. Truly another world.
And I repeated the word in my head, over and over, so I wouldn't lose it.
Ilvareth. Ilvareth. Ilvareth.
I didn't know what it meant. I didn't know whether it was a person, or a place, or a prayer. I didn't know why my mother, with the last breath she had, had chosen to give me that instead of anything else.
But I was a keeper of records. And I knew what it looked like when someone handed you something they couldn't bear to see lost.
So I held on to it.
They buried my mother three days later.
I only knew because Berta took me with her. She wrapped me in the cedar-smelling shawl, bound me against her chest with a long strip of cloth wound twice around her back, and walked out of the annex into the grey morning without asking anyone's permission.
It was my first time outside. I couldn't see much: a pale, flat sky, dark smudges that were probably trees. The wind bit at my face and made my eyes water. I could smell wet grass, woodsmoke, and, fainter, horses. Berta walked for a long time, her breath puffing white above my head, the cloth binding creaking a little with each stride.
The servants' burial ground lay at the far edge of the estate, behind the stables, where the land sloped down toward a stream I could hear before I could make it out. There was no priest. There were four or five people in plain dark clothes: a thin young man who kept dragging his sleeve across his nose, two maids holding hands, an old man leaning on a shovel. I would learn later that these were the few friends Lina had had in the household, and that every one of them had risked a scolding to be there.
No one from the main house came.
They had wrapped my mother in a plain white sheet. There was no coffin. The old man and the thin young man lowered her into the ground with great care, adjusting their grip twice on the way down, as if she might still feel it if they were rough. One of the maids crouched and dropped a handful of small wildflowers in after her, purple and white, the kind that grow along fence lines.
Then Berta stepped forward, with me still tied to her chest, and began to sing.
I knew the melody on the first note. Five or six notes climbing and falling, back and forth. The tune my mother had hummed while I held her hair, in the few minutes we'd had.
Berta's voice was low and rough and broke on the high notes, and she didn't care. After a moment the others joined in, one at a time, quietly. It must have been a song everyone in this world knew, a lullaby or a hymn or something between the two. I didn't understand the words. I didn't need to.
When it was over, the old man began to fill in the grave. The shovel bit into the heap of earth with a wet crunch, again and again. Berta stood and watched until the last shovelful was patted smooth with the flat of the blade.
Then she bent her head close to mine and said something very softly. I caught one word I knew.
"Lina."
I couldn't speak. I could barely move my arms. But inside, where nobody could hear, I answered the only way I could.
Ilvareth, I thought, as clearly as I could manage, as if the earth might carry it down to her. I have it. I won't lose it. I promise.
The wind picked up, rattling the bare branches over the stream. Berta turned and started the long walk back to the annex, one broad hand cupped over the top of my head to keep off the cold.
Somewhere far away, behind a door I couldn't yet open, I could have sworn I smelled old paper, and heard the soft sound of a page being turned.