I made a schedule.
Of course I did. I'd made schedules my entire life. In high school I color-coded my study timetable so thoroughly that friends started asking me to do theirs. At the archive I kept a spreadsheet tracking the restoration status of every fragile document in the building, updated every afternoon at four. A schedule was how I made sense of things.
The problem was that a two-month-old has almost no control over his own day.
So I scheduled the part I could control, and that part turned out to be sleep.
A newborn sleeps constantly, in short stretches scattered across the day and night with no regard for anyone's convenience. Every one of those stretches was an opportunity. I found that if I settled myself before drifting off, lying calm and thinking about old paper and tomatoes and the warm weight of a brass handle, the door would be there more often than not. Not every time. If I was overtired, or upset, or had a wet nappy chafing the backs of my thighs, I simply slept like any other baby. But perhaps two times in three, I closed my eyes in the annex and opened them in the Reading Room, standing on my own two feet in my old grey sweater.
Naps. Night sleep. Every chance I got.
The Library became my school. The annex became the place where I did my homework.
I started with A Primer of the Common Tongue, Volume I.
It was a plain, sensible book in dark green cloth, obviously written for foreign merchants and travelers who needed to get by in the Western Kingdoms in a hurry. It opened with the alphabet: twenty-six letters, oddly the same number as English, though they looked nothing alike. Rounded, joined letters with little hooks and tails, written left to right. Each came with a pronunciation guide comparing its sound to sounds in a dozen other languages.
One of those languages, to my astonishment, was Japanese.
I sat and stared at the page. The letter rho is pronounced like the Japanese "ra," with the tongue held slightly further back. Whoever wrote this primer could not possibly have known Japanese. Yet there it was, in the margin, in a smaller and slightly different hand, as though someone had annotated the copy specifically for me.
The Library, I was beginning to suspect, paid very close attention to its reader.
I copied the alphabet onto a sheet of paper, then again, and again, until I could write it with my eyes shut. Then I started on vocabulary.
The language, which most of its speakers simply called the Common Tongue, turned out to be pleasingly regular. The grammar reminded me a little of German, with verbs that drifted to the ends of sentences, and the sound of it a little of Italian, all open vowels. Nouns came in two genders, which the primer called warm and cool instead of masculine and feminine. Fire was warm. Water was cool. Bread was warm. Milk, for no reason I could find, was cool. I decided not to argue with it.
I learned it the way I'd learned English in school and classical Chinese for my archival work: brute repetition. Word lists written out by hand. Conjugation tables. Practice sentences in a column down the page.
The man walks to the market. The woman buys bread. The child drinks milk.
That last one felt personal.
The paper and pen in the Reading Room turned out to be a gift in their own right.
I noticed it on my third or fourth visit. Anything I wrote in the Library, I remembered exactly. Not only the words, but their shape on the page, the slant of a particular letter, the small blot in one corner where the nib had caught. And the pages stayed. Every time I came back, they were waiting on the desk where I'd left them, stacked and squared.
When I was awake in the annex, lying in my cradle with nothing to do but study the ceiling beams, I could close my eyes and call those pages up as clearly as if they were lying in front of me.
So I made flashcards. Hundreds of them. I cut sheets into small squares with a little brass letter knife from the desk drawer, wrote a Common Tongue word on one side and the Japanese on the other, and drilled myself in the armchair by the window until I knew them cold.
Then I went back to the annex and listened.
This was the hard part.
A book can teach you how a language is written. It can give you rules and vocabulary and pronunciation guides. It can't give you the sound of real people talking: the speed, the slurring, the way everyone swallows the ends of their words when they're tired, the slang and the regional vowels and the hundred small noises people make that never appear in any primer.
The first weeks were miserable. I'd lie in the cradle while Berta bustled around the room talking to me, to herself, to the stove, and I'd strain to catch a single word I recognized, my whole body rigid with the effort until my toes curled inside the blanket. Mostly I couldn't. She talked fast, in a thick, rolling country accent that a merchants' primer had certainly not prepared me for.
But slowly, a word at a time, shapes started to come up out of the noise.
Milk was first. She said it every time she set the pan of goat's milk on the stove, and one morning I finally matched the sound to a flashcard: lessa. Cool gender. Naturally.
Then bread, and fire, and cold. Then goat, which she said a great deal, usually followed by words I didn't know yet and suspected the primer wouldn't include.
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Then my own name, which I already had. And alongside it, a word she used even more often than Elias, so often that I'd stopped hearing it as a word at all and had filed it away with the clatter of pans and the creak of the floor. It took me weeks to find it in the primer. When I did, I put the book face down on the desk and looked out the window at the empty soil for a while.
Sperl. Warm gender. Sparrow.
That was what she called me. Not "the boy." Not "the maid's brat," the way the steward did. A dozen times a day, without even thinking about it.
Little sparrow.
Tomas helped, though he never knew it.
He still came some evenings to sit by the stove and hold me while Berta mended, and he still talked to me in that slow, serious rumble, pointing at things. Before, it had been pleasant noise. Now it was a lesson. He pointed at the stove: Ofen. At the window: Fenst. He tapped his own enormous nose, Nas, and let me grab it, and laughed.
Every word he gave me, I checked against my flashcards that night. He was right every single time. Without the faintest idea he was doing it, a bald handyman with an unlit pipe had become the best language tutor I'd ever had.
I wanted to answer him. That was the hardest part of all. I wanted to point at the stove myself and say Ofen back, so he'd know it had gone in.
I tried, once, alone in my cradle while Berta was out with the goat. I knew exactly which sound I wanted. I could hear it perfectly in my head. My mouth wouldn't cooperate. My tongue lay thick and heavy on the floor of my mouth, and my lips wouldn't hold any shape I gave them. What came out was a wet, burbling noise with spit in it.
"Oh-buh," I told the empty room. "Ohhh. Buh."
I gave up and lay there with my face hot, even though nobody had heard.
It was probably for the best. I'd read enough by then to know that babies here were no different from babies on Earth. They didn't talk at four months. A baby who did would be talked about. Wondered about. Possibly reported to the main house.
Be careful who you show your light to, the Keeper had said.
So I kept quiet. I listened, and learned, and let everyone think I was an ordinary, slightly too solemn baby who stared at people a lot. Inside, I collected words the way I used to collect documents: carefully, patiently, one at a time, each one logged and cross-referenced.
The first time I understood an entire conversation, I was nearly four months old.
It was laundry day. Elke came in from the yard with an armful of clean sheets, her freckled face red from the cold and her knuckles cracked and raw from the washtub, and she stopped in the doorway of my room to warm her hands at the stove while Berta folded nappies on the bed.
They talked. And for the first time, I followed all of it. Not because they said anything difficult, but because every single word was one I knew.
Elke started with the weather, holding her palms out to the stove and complaining that it was cold today, and Berta, snapping a nappy straight, said it was cold every day, and her knees were telling her there'd be snow before the week was out. Elke pointed out that Berta's knees were always telling her something. "And they're always right, aren't they?" Berta laid the nappy on the pile and went straight on to whether Tomas had fixed the pump. Elke said he claimed he had, but it was still making that noise, and Berta sniffed and said that man would tell you the roof was fixed if it was lying in the garden, and then, in the same breath, without looking up from the folding, asked after Elke's mother's cough. Better, Elke said. She was taking the tea Berta had given her. "Honey in it, not sugar," Berta said. "Tell her. Sugar's no good for a cough."
That was all. The weather, a broken pump, somebody's mother's cough. The dullest exchange imaginable.
I lay in my cradle and listened to it with my heart thudding under the blanket as if I were hearing an orchestra.
I understood. After four months of noise and guesswork, the world had finally started to make sense. These weren't strange giants making strange sounds over my head anymore. They were two women with sore knees and a sick mother and a handyman who never fixed anything properly. Ordinary people, talking about ordinary things.
I laughed. Out loud, a high, gurgling baby laugh that made both of them jump.
Elke turned and stared at me and asked what had got into him. Berta leaned over the cradle, and her whole face loosened. "Laughing at you, I expect. Can't blame him. Look at the state of your hair."
Elke swatted her with a sheet. I laughed harder, because I'd understood that too.
After that, the annex filled up with words.
The tall, quiet footman with the big ears turned out to be called Jonas, and turned out not to be quiet at all. He talked constantly under his breath while he hauled firewood: long, anxious conversations with himself about whether a girl named Mette in the main-house kitchen had smiled at him on purpose or by accident. I listened to him go around and around it for weeks, logs thudding into the box beside the stove one after another while he weighed the evidence. I never found out the answer. I was more invested than I'd like to admit.
Elke's songs became songs instead of noise. Most were silly. One was about a farmer whose pig kept escaping to the tavern. One was about a sailor who married a mermaid and then discovered she snored. And one, which she sang more quietly than the rest, bent over the tub with her forearms in the grey water, was about a girl who waited at a crossroads for someone who never came back. The third time I heard it, I noticed she was wiping her cheek against her shoulder between verses.
I didn't know who she was thinking of. It wasn't my business. But it was beginning to sink in that every person in that cold building had an entire life I knew nothing about, full of hopes and losses and small private worries, exactly like the people in the margins of the ledgers back at the archive.
That, I decided, was the real reason to learn a language. Not to read books. To hear people.
That night, in the Reading Room, something happened.
I was at the desk finishing the last chapter of the primer, a section on polite forms of address that I'd been putting off because it was tedious. The final page covered how to greet a nobleman versus a merchant versus a priest. I understood it. I thought about how Berta had spoken to the steward, and how she spoke to Elke, and to Tomas, and to me, and I understood that too: not just the rules, but why they mattered, who used which form and when, and what it might cost them to get it wrong.
I closed the book.
A single clear note sounded somewhere inside my skull, like a bell struck once in an empty hall. Text appeared in the air in front of me.
[VOLUME COMPREHENDED]
A Primer of the Common Tongue, Vol. I
[SKILL ACQUIRED]
Language Comprehension — Level 1
It hung there, square and plain and utterly without ceremony, like a stamp on a form. I'd known in theory that skills existed. The Keeper had told me. Reading about it and watching one get entered against my name were different things. A skill. My first. Not given. Earned, by sitting in a chair and reading a book until I actually understood it.
The text faded. I dug in my pocket for the card and held it under the lamp.
Volumes Comprehended: 1 / 48
One. Forty-seven to go.
I didn't care. I held the card in both hands and grinned at it.
Then something caught the edge of my vision, outside the window. I looked up.
In the middle of the square of empty earth, there was a sprout.
One green sprout, no taller than my thumb, with two small round leaves opening toward the pale gold sky. It had not been there an hour ago. I was completely certain of that; I'd looked out that window on every visit, and the soil had been bare and smooth every time.
I went and stood at the glass for a long while. I didn't know what it was, or what it would become, or why it had chosen now.
I knew exactly what it looked like, though. The first seedling on my balcony every spring, pushing up through cold soil just when I'd started to give up on it.
"Hello," I said softly. "Hang in there."
Then I went back to the shelves and took down Volume II.