Chapter Four — Marima

The mouth was equipment.

He'd worked that out around the fourth month, taking stock of what the body had given him. Legs: ahead of schedule. Hands: dangerous to blankets. Eyes: fixed, weaponized, deployed as needed.

Mouth: a disgrace.

So he trained it. At night, under the blanket, quieter than Loretta's breathing in the next room.

Consonants first. The hard ones. T. K. D. Then the ones that needed his lips to work properly, which they refused to do, being four months old and busy with other things.

He drilled anyway. Reps. Sets. Past the point of interest, past the point of comfort, stopping only when the equipment failed.

By the fifth month he could say anything he wanted.

Which left the actual problem.

The actual problem was that a baby who talks is a baby who gets looked at.

"—and then she says to me, she says, well the fish came in on Tuesday. Tuesday! I said, Marta, I was here on Tuesday—"

Loretta had him up on one hip and was doing the rounds of the room, which meant the window, the wardrobe, the window again. She talked the entire way. She had talked the entire way for five months.

"—and don't you look at me like that, my lord, don't you look at me, I know what that face means—"

He knew what being looked at cost. He had spent a long time in rooms with a window that gave him back his own face and let him be watched through it the whole while. Where he came from, the ones who tested unusual got a second appointment. Nobody came back from those the same.

This house was not that place. He'd checked, repeatedly, for months, and it kept on not being that place.

"—you've gone thoughtful again. Look at him, my lady, he's gone thoughtful."

"He does that."

"He does it at me."

Still.

He worked out what his words needed to be. Few. Simple. Badly said. The kind of word a baby picks up off the floor.

Nothing that suggested grammar. Nothing that suggested a person in here.

He set an allowance. Two words a month. Badly.

That was the plan, and he was proud of it, and it did not survive contact with the first word.

Because he'd been honest with himself about the training, mostly, but not about what he'd actually been practicing.

The useful words were obvious. Milk. Up. No. The ones that got you fed, moved, or left alone.

He hadn't drilled any of them.

He had drilled names.

All of them. Loretta's, Marta's, Rufo's, the horses', the dog's. Marika's. His own, over and over in the dark, to check it was still there.

And one more than the rest.

He didn't examine that. The pile had its own corner of the crib by now.

He picked his moment.

Morning. His mother alone with him, Loretta downstairs in something with Marta that had been coming up through the floor for an hour. Small audience. Nothing that could get out of hand.

"—and she'll be up here in a minute to tell me about it," his mother was saying, "and I shall have to have an opinion about fish. Do you know how many opinions about fish I've had this year?"

"Ah."

"Six. Six opinions about fish."

She had him on her lap by the window, talking about nothing in that low running voice that didn't require anything from him at all.

He waited for a gap.

She looked down.

"Mother," he said.

It came out perfectly.

That was the mistake. Five weeks of drilling and it came out crisp, both syllables squared away, flat as a man reporting for duty.

His mother went completely still.

Too clean. Far too clean. Recoverable if—

"Muh," he added. "Mmuh. Ma."

A baby, ladies and gentlemen. A baby who got lucky once.

She was not looking at the edges.

"Say it again," she said. Her voice had gone somewhere.

"Buh."

"Avon. Avon. Say it again."

"Ma."

"That's not—" She laughed, and the laugh came apart in the middle. "That's not what you said. You said—"

She stopped. She put a hand over her mouth.

"You said mother."

She had both arms around him and her face in his hair and she was crying — quietly, the way she did when she was happy. He'd known she would. He'd planned around it.

It was a completely different thing on top of his head, because of something he'd said.

"Five months," she said, into his hair. "You're five months."

He lay against her and let it happen.

Cost: the monthly allowance, blown in one morning.

Return: unknown. In his favor? Immeasurable.

Loretta found out within the hour, obviously.

The sound she made was heard in the yard.

"He never."

"He did."

"My lady. My lady, he never."

"Loretta—"

"Say it for me. Come on, my lord, say it for—" She had him off the bed and up in the air. "Say mother."

He said nothing whatsoever. He had a policy about repeat performances and he'd only just written it.

"He's not going to do it on command," his mother said.

"He did it for you."

"He likes me better."

"My lady."

By evening it had been retold enough times that it gained a syllable in some versions and a witness count that exceeded the household. Marta claimed to have heard it through the floor. Nina cried and got told off for crying by Loretta, who was crying.

"Five months," Loretta kept saying, to anyone, to the walls. "Five months. My sister's boy didn't say a word till past a year, and that word was no."

"That's the Bellamy side," said Marta.

"That's what I said."

"They're all late. Late and loud."

"He'll be a talker. You mark me. He'll be one of those ones that never stops."

He lay in his crib and listened to his own legend being drafted downstairs.

Nothing in this house stayed contained. It wasn't built for it. Whatever happened in one room was in every other room by nightfall, wearing new clothes.

Nobody, he noted, had scheduled a second appointment. They had scheduled, as far as he could tell, a celebration of some kind, involving pastry.

His father heard it on the third evening.

He came in the usual way — doorway first, then the crib, then the standing. He'd been told, obviously. Nobody in this house went untold about anything, not with Loretta in it.

But he hadn't heard it.

"She says he's been saying it all week."

"He says it when he wants to," his mother said, from the bed. "Not when he's asked."

"That's not a thing a five-month-old does."

"I know."

"Janet. That's not a thing a five-month-old does."

"I know, love."

He stood there, hands at his sides, looking down.

Avon looked back and made the decision he'd been holding for three days.

"Father."

Nobody said anything.

His father didn't move for long enough that Avon started running scenarios. When he did, it was one hand, coming up to the crib rail. Slowly. The way you put weight down on ice.

"...Janet."

"I heard it."

"He said—"

"I heard it, love."

"He said—"

"Love."

His father stayed at the crib a long time that night. He didn't say anything else.

But at some point the hand came off the rail.

It came down into the crib and stopped — open, palm flat, a hand's width above Avon's head. Not touching. Just held there, the way you'd hold a palm over a lamp to see whether it was still lit.

The size of it was absurd. It covered him crown to chin with room left over.

But it stayed where it was. He'd been in reach of hands his whole first life and not one of them had ever stopped short.

He waited for it to come down. It didn't. Something in the arm above it wasn't quite steady, and then it withdrew, slowly, the way it had arrived.

At the door, lamp already down, his father stopped. Quietly, to the room, in the voice with the guard on it:

"Good night, Avon."

The equipment failed. He'd meant to answer and nothing came out at all.

The crib had begun life as furniture and was now equipment.

The kicks had stopped paying what they used to. Back there the answer was easy, because back there they had rooms full of iron.

This room had a crib. Carved, enormous, oak by the smell, four times his own weight near enough.

He started at one corner.

Grip the rail, brace, lift. The first week: nothing. The second week: a creak, which cost him a night flat on his back while Loretta turned over next door. After that he rebuilt the whole thing around silence. Lift slow. Set down slower. Anyone can drop a weight.

In the third week, one corner came off the floor.

An inch. Held. Down, without a sound.

The payment that came back that night was the biggest he'd ever drawn — not just refilled, deeper, the ceiling higher — and he lay in the dark thinking about a woman at a door with an ember in her hands.

The answer is the life.

He was starting to suspect the answer had compound interest.

By the sixth month he could take the corner up past his own head, slow and silent, and hold it while he counted.

There was one incident.

Late. House asleep. Loretta down in the kitchen over something to do with Marta and a disputed pie, and he'd kept working, because she'd come back up the main stair and the main stair announced everybody.

She came up the back stair. In stockings.

The crib was over his head, all of it, when she stopped in the doorway.

He heard her breathe in. He didn't hear her breathe out.

Down. No sound, no hurry, both hands. Four seconds. By the time she'd turned properly he was flat on his back with his eyes shut.

The door swung the last inch open.

Silence. A long one.

"...Loretta," she whispered, at last, to herself, with feeling. "You great daft fool."

The door closed. Then opened again, a crack, for one more look, which he weathered without moving so much as a lash.

He heard her turn over four times that night.

In the morning she was at the crib early. She looked at it hard. Then she took the rail and gave it a heave, and got what anyone gets heaving two hundred years of oak.

"Ngh."

"Loretta?" his mother said. "You've gone a funny colour."

"It's my back, my lady."

"What have you done to your back?"

"Don't ask."

She didn't tell anybody what she thought she'd seen. She did stop drinking for a week, which in Loretta was the louder statement.

The books were his mother's doing, and she had no idea what she'd handed him.

She read to him in the afternoons. Not baby books — a book of coasts, a book of roads, a long one about birds she'd clearly never finished. And she always held the page where he could see it.

"—and then the road goes down to the water. Your father's been. He said it smelled awful."

"Buh."

"Four pages he wrote me. About a smell."

"Ah."

"Don't take his side."

He wasn't taking a side. He'd been making baby noises on schedule for weeks now and could do it without paying attention.

"Here's the bit I like. And beyond the last of the houses, the road turns and runs beside the sea—"

He was looking at the page when she said it.

I've seen that.

Not the word. The shape. A small black thing near the middle of the line — and she'd said sea over that same shape on Thursday, and the Thursday before, in a different book, in a different place.

He went completely still.

It's written down.

"Avon?"

"Ah," he said, four seconds late.

"You've gone quiet. Is it boring? It's a bit boring. There's forty pages about tides."

"Buh."

"That's what I said."

He'd never looked at a book properly because he couldn't read the language and had assumed that was a wall.

It wasn't. He had the language already. He'd been handed all of it at the door, spoken, for free.

He was only missing the code.

"Buh," he said, with feeling.

"All right, all right." She turned back a page and settled him against her. "From the top, then. Since you're so invested."

He gave it a week. It took six days.

Method: brute. He had the sounds. He had the shapes. And he had a woman who would say the shapes out loud, in a low even voice, for as long as he wanted, provided he lay still and looked interested.

That last part was the only difficult bit.

"You want the roads one again."

"Ah."

"We did the roads one yesterday."

"Ah."

"You're a very strange baby."

Small words first — the, and, of, the ones that came back constantly. He cracked the vowels off those, and the vowels gave him the consonants next to them.

By the third day he could read a line if it was slow and simple and nobody was watching his eyes.

By the fifth he had the exceptions, of which the language had a great many, most of them stupid.

On the sixth day his mother turned a page and he read the whole of it before she got there, and had to lie flat for a moment with his heart going.

Then she read it out.

Twelve words wrong.

He set about the twelve.

After that came the problem of supply.

Being read to was a ration. He wanted a shelf.

So he crawled. Badly, on one elbow, with a sideways drift he hadn't bothered to fix, because fixing it would have looked like something.

He got to the low shelf under the window, got a hand on the nearest book, and hauled it down onto himself.

Behind him, the entire room dissolved.

"Oh — oh, look at him—"

"He's gone for a book—"

"My lady, he went past the ball. He went straight past the ball—"

They stood over him. He turned a page, because he'd finished it.

"He's turning the pages," his mother said.

"He's reading them."

"Loretta."

"Well, he thinks he is! Look at his little face, he's thinking about it terribly hard—"

"He's five months old."

"And he said mother at five months, my lady, so I'll thank you not to tell me what he can't be doing."

His mother crouched down and looked at the open book for a while. Then at him. Then she laughed.

"Darling. That one's got no pictures in it at all."

He processed this in about a quarter of a second.

He put his mouth on it.

"Oh — no. No, we don't. That's a book, that's not for—" Loretta had him up and the book away. "That's your mother's, that is."

"Let him have it."

"My lady."

"He likes the weight of it."

The weight of it, he thought, from a shoulder, watching the book go back onto the shelf where he now knew exactly where it lived.

They gave him picture books after that. Bright, thick, about four sentences long. He took every one with visible enthusiasm, read it in under a minute, and then sat staring at it for the correct amount of time.

"He loves his books."

"He'll be a scholar," said Loretta. "God help this family."

The real ones he did at night, off the low shelf, by whatever came in through the window. It wasn't enough light. It gave him a headache. He paid it.

Six days from illiterate to fluent, and the whole household had settled on he likes the weight of it.

He lay in the dark and couldn't decide which half of that was funnier.

He got careless exactly once, and it cost him a page.

They were on the big bed. He had a book he shouldn't have had — a real one, moved the length of the room under a blanket during an argument about pastry — and he'd been on the same paragraph a while, because it was about the coast road, and the coast road connected to something Loretta had said about the border, and he was busy.

He forgot about Marika.

Not deliberately. He simply stopped taking readings, the way he'd stopped taking readings once before and noted it and done nothing about it.

She had been talking to him. She did that now — long, serious, meaningless, punctuated by hitting things.

"Ah," he said, at intervals, without looking up.

"—buh buh ba."

"Ah."

"Ba."

"Ah."

The intervals got wrong.

He caught the silence four seconds late, which was three and a half seconds later than he'd ever caught anything, and looked up into a face working through it.

Confusion. Then something slower behind it, arriving.

Then the wind-up.

And before the noise came out of her, she reached across, took hold of the page he was reading, and pulled.

The sound it made was terrible.

"Marika Guesclin—"

"The binding! Oh, the binding—"

"It's a book, Loretta, it's not the Crown Jewels—"

"It's my lady's!"

Somebody took the book away and the wailing started properly, and he lay on his side in the middle of it with half the coast road in one fist, and understood.

She had not torn the page because she wanted the page.

She had aimed. She'd looked at the entire bed — the blanket, the ball, her own foot — and gone for the one thing his eyes were on.

She knew where I was.

He thought about that for the rest of the afternoon and about half the night.

The solution was obvious once he stopped being annoyed about it.

Next time, he opened the book with his left hand.

Then he stuck his right arm out sideways, into the middle of the bed, at roughly Marika height, and left it there.

She had it in about a second and a half.

Grip: still nothing. Duration: forever. She got two hands round his wrist, pulled it into her chest, and started telling it something at length. One finger went into her mouth. He decided not to think about that.

He read four pages.

She never once looked at the book.

It became the arrangement. He'd get set down, get the book open, and the arm would go out before he'd found his place — ahead of thought, the way his hand had gone for his father's finger.

"Look at that."

"What?"

"That." Loretta, from across the room, at a volume she believed to be a whisper. "He's put his arm out for her. He does it every time. He puts his arm out."

"He's holding her hand."

"He's holding her hand, my lady, while he does his reading, and I'm not going to say a word about it."

"Good."

"Not one word. But you know what my mother would have said."

"I know what your mother would have said."

"She'd have said that's a match, is what she'd have said—"

"Loretta."

"—and she'd have been right, and I'm not saying it."

He knew what it cost. An arm is an arm. He couldn't turn pages fast, couldn't turn over, and if she fell asleep on it — which she did — the afternoon was finished.

He ran the sums twice and let it stand. One arm, against the whole shelf. He'd have taken worse terms than that without thinking about it.

He put it in the same column as the growth, the one marked wrong in my favor, and didn't go back and look at it.

Miss Guesclin heard about the talking the way everyone heard about everything in that house: through a wall, at volume, from Loretta.

She came up that evening with a bottle and sat down on the end of Janet's bed without being asked, which was how the two of them had done things since they were fifteen.

"Five months."

"Alina—"

"Five months, Janet."

"He's said it twice since. Perhaps three times. It's not—" Janet stopped. "It's not a thing I can make smaller in the telling."

"You've tried."

"I've tried very hard."

"You've never been able to lie to me. Not once, not since we were girls." Miss Guesclin poured. "My son was early too, you know."

"Was he?"

"Everyone says so now. After." She looked at the glass. "He wasn't. He was a baby, then he was a boy. Then one morning he was twelve and the priests were at the door."

"And then?"

"And then everybody remembered him walking early. Talking early. Doing everything early." She shrugged. "None of it happened. They just needed it to."

"Was he ordinary?"

"He was wonderful. He was also completely ordinary. Both things were true and only one of them survived."

Neither of them said anything for a bit.

"Say the thing," Janet said.

"No."

"Alina."

"It's not a thing to say out loud."

"You've come up here with a bottle to not say it."

Miss Guesclin turned the glass a half turn on her knee.

"She can't sit up," she said. "Six months, near enough, and she goes over sideways every time. She was sick down the Archdeacon of Redmont. In his arms, Janet. All down the front of him."

"Babies do that."

"Everyone in that road went down on their knees the night she was born. Every one of them. And I lay there in the mud with her on my chest and thought, well. Here we are, then. Twice in one house."

"Alina—"

"And six months on there's nothing. No marks. No signs. No priests." She drank. "Just a girl who can't find her own feet twice running."

Janet didn't answer that.

Miss Guesclin looked at it from every side, the way her father had taught her to look at ground before putting anyone on it. Then she put it down.

Not because it was wrong. Because it changed nothing she could reach. If she was right, the girl had years before anyone came. If she was wrong, nobody was coming at all, and that would be the best news of her life.

Either way the girl needed the same thing. Two years of being nobody, and something steady nearby that didn't spend anything on being upset.

The steady thing was down the corridor, asleep. Her daughter had stopped screaming the day they met.

"Well," she said. "They were born in the same house on the same night."

"They were."

"There's a version of the next twenty years where that's the only thing that matters."

"There is."

"I don't trust it." Miss Guesclin held out her glass to be refilled. "I'm a soldier's daughter. I don't trust anything that quiet."

"You'll stay anyway."

"I'll stay anyway."

Marika's first word was not Ma.

Miss Alina had been working on Ma for a month. Patiently at first. Then less patiently. Then with the grim persistence of a woman who's worked out she's in a competition nobody told her about.

"Ma."

"Buh."

"Ma."

"Bwuh."

"You're doing it on purpose."

Marika produced it on demand exactly never. She had sounds — a whole inventory of them, deployed at the ceiling, at the window, at her own feet, which she'd recently discovered and did not trust.

Then, on an ordinary afternoon, on the big bed, Avon was carried in, and Marika turned her head, and her whole face opened.

"Avu."

The room stopped.

"Avu. Avu." Both arms up. Full extension. "Avu!"

Nobody said anything.

"...Her first word," Miss Alina said, to nobody, "is his name."

"It might not be—" Janet started.

"Avu," said Marika, arms still up, staring directly at him.

"It's his name, Janet."

"...It's his name."

"A month. A month I've been at her. Ma. Two letters. The easiest sound a mouth can make." Miss Alina sat down on the edge of the bed. "And she's gone and learned him."

He was set down. The arms came down and got him, one hand closing on his ear, immediate and proprietary, and he lay there being hauled slightly closer by a person with no grip strength worth measuring, and let it happen.

Avu.

Two syllables. Wrong ones, technically.

He'd been collecting the sounds people made about him since the day he arrived. This one stood alone. Nobody had taught it to her. Nobody had argued about it for nineteen days. She'd assembled it herself, out of whatever she had.

A name is what somebody is allowed to call you.

He was, he found, going to allow it.

He gave her one back the same week.

It was only fair. He told himself that. The telling took more effort than it should have.

She was mid-wind-up — the scream hour, arriving on schedule — and he leaned into her line of sight.

"Mari."

The wind-up stopped.

"Mari," he said again, at baby speed, badly, for the audience he could hear going still behind him.

Marika looked at him the way she looked at her own feet. Deep suspicion. Total attention.

Then she laughed — the whole-body one, the bell falling downstairs — and hit him in the face, open-handed, with tremendous affection and no warning at all.

"Marika. We don't hit—"

"She's not listening."

"She's never listening."

She was not. She had a fistful of his hair and was saying it back at him.

"Avu."

"Mari."

"Avu."

"Mari."

"Avu avu avu—"

"How long can they keep that up?" said Miss Alina.

They kept it up the better part of an hour, according to Loretta, and it was the finest thing she had witnessed in all her years of service, also according to Loretta, who had once seen the King.

Loretta did not ask.

He noticed that, and then noticed that he'd noticed, which by now was its own recurring event.

She'd been in the room for all of it. Mother. Father. Mari. She retold every single one downstairs, daily, with additions.

And she had never once put her face in front of his and said her own name at him, slowly, the way she did with cup and cat and duck and no.

"Cup. Cup. Say cup."

"Buh."

"Duck. Look. Duck."

"Ah."

"You'll do it when I'm out of the room, won't you. You'll do it for your mother." She turned him over. "You little article."

He worked out why eventually, and didn't like the answer.

It wasn't hers to want. A woman who'd come over on a list, somewhere under the plate and over the linens, didn't stand around waiting to be named by the heir of House Strade.

So he gave it to her on an ordinary afternoon, in an empty room with the door shut, which was the only place she was ever entirely herself.

She was mid-flight. Something about his cheeks and the legal consequences of them.

"Retta," he said.

She stopped talking.

She stopped talking, which he'd never once seen her do, and stood there with the folded cloth in her hands and her mouth still open on the end of a word that hadn't arrived.

"Retta," he said again, because the data was incomplete.

"...That's—" Her voice came out wrong. She got hold of it. "That's not a name you're to be saying, my lord. That's not — I'm Loretta, and I'm not even that, to you, I'm—"

He waited.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, you little—"

And then she sat down on the floor beside the crib, in her good apron, in the middle of the afternoon, and put her hands over her face.

He lay there listening to a grown woman come apart quietly over two syllables, and he knew exactly what it was worth.

He'd priced it himself. Twenty-one days on his back, waiting for one.

"Right," she said eventually, from behind her hands. "Right."

She got up. She blew her nose. She was fierce about it.

"Not in front of the family. Not in front of your father. Not in front of anybody, do you hear me — they'd have my head and they'd be right to."

He looked at her flatly.

"Retta."

"I know it's Retta! I know what it is!" She scrubbed at her eyes. "Behind a closed door. That's the arrangement. That's — yes. All right, then. All right."

He'd seen that arrangement before. The same shape every time. The door shut, the room empty, one word, from the only person allowed to use it.

He'd thought that was a rule about names.

It was a rule about being alone with somebody, and it worked in both directions.

Loretta finished the swaddling with unnecessary care and didn't say another word for nearly four minutes, which stood as a household record until the day she died.

The next one he built himself too. That one he did in front of witnesses, and it caused more of a stir than he'd budgeted for.

Miss Alina came for her daughter at the end of an afternoon. She bent over the bed the way she did, and reached for Marika the way she did, and Avon looked up and delivered it.

"Marima."

She stopped with her hands halfway out.

"...What did he say."

"I don't—" Janet was sitting up. "Say it again, love?"

He weighed it. Repeating on command was a bad look. Repeating on command for her was worse.

But the word was doing something to Miss Guesclin's face, and he wanted the rest of it.

"Marima," he said, and pointed at her, which he'd learned people did, with a fat and inaccurate finger.

Silence.

"He's — that's—" Loretta, from the corner, in a whisper like a kettle three streets away. "He's made it himself. Mari's ma. He's taken the two and gone and stuck them together—"

"He can't have."

"He has! It's got her in it!"

"Babies don't build words, Loretta."

"Then where's he got it from? You tell me where he's got it from. Nobody in this house says that. I've never said that. Have you said that, my lady?"

"I have not said that."

"There. There you are, then."

Miss Guesclin looked down at him a long moment, and something in her face went careful.

He'd seen that once before, in his sixth week. He'd been waiting five months to find out if it would come back.

It came back. It stayed longer this time.

Then it went somewhere he hadn't mapped — the careful thing didn't leave, it settled, the way a decision settles — and she reached down past her own daughter and put one hand flat on his head, briefly, the way you touch something to check it's real.

"Marima," she said. "Well. I've been called worse by better."

She picked up Marika, who objected loudly, and paused at the door.

"He calls you two something yet?"

"Mother," Janet said. "And Father."

"Mm." A pause long enough to mean something. "And mine gets a whole construction."

"Alina—"

"No, no. I'm delighted. I'm thrilled."

"You're smiling."

"I'm nothing of the kind."

She left before anyone could see what her face did about it. Loretta caught it anyway, because Loretta caught everything, and reported to the kitchen that Lady Guesclin had gone down the corridor smiling like a cat in the cream — "and what do you make of that, Marta?"

The walking he'd meant to keep for himself a while longer.

The night work had covered it for two weeks. Rail first — hand over hand around the inside of the crib, which was invisible and far too easy. Then the floor. Cold boards, counted steps, one hand on the slats. Then no hands.

By six months he had eleven steps and a turn, in the dark, in silence, plus a way of landing that had taken longer to work out than the walking. Falling was easy. Falling quietly took work.

The plan was another month of nothing. Then a wobble. Then a lucky step. A discovery, professionally staged.

Then came the afternoon of the sixth month, and the plan met Marika, and the plan lost.

It was the scream hour, and for once it was going badly.

Usually he was already on the bed for it. The mothers had arranged the visits around that hour months ago and never once admitted that was what they'd done.

Today the corridor had run late. He'd been parked on a rug by the window with Loretta while, a full room away, Marika wound up and let go.

And it was the old kind. The whole-body one, the one that came out of her every afternoon before she'd ever laid eyes on him — face gone purple, fists shut, both legs going, aimed at the ceiling and nobody in particular.

Nobody in that house had heard it since the day the two of them met.

"Give her here."

"I've got her—"

"Alina, give her here."

"She's not hungry, she's not wet, she's not tired, she's just—"

"Furious."

"She's furious."

Loretta half-rose with him and got waved back down.

"Let her settle. Don't reward it."

"My lady—"

"Let her settle."

The screaming went on, and on, up through registers he had real professional respect for.

He sat on the rug and ran the sums.

Distance: a room. Call it twenty steps. Nine over tested range.

Surface: rug, then boards. Acceptable.

Witnesses: four. All adults. All facing the wrong way.

Cost: the whole discovery arc. A month of careful staging, spent in one go.

Marika hit a note that cracked at the top, the way it did just before the crying stopped being angry and turned into something worse.

He got up.

He didn't decide to. His legs did the thing his hand had done with his father's finger, and by the time the accounting caught up he was four steps out onto open floor with nothing to hold and his balance running on drills nobody in the room knew had ever happened.

Loretta saw him first.

Loretta made no sound at all, which from Loretta was the loudest thing available to her. Her silence turned Janet around. Janet going still turned Miss Alina.

Nobody moved.

Twenty steps. He took them at baby speed, the only speed that was safe on boards — arms out, feet slapping, walking like a small drunk sailor — and the room watched him cross it without a sound. The only noise in the place was Marika, still going, face to the ceiling, with no idea.

He reached the bed. Took hold of the coverlet. Hauled himself round the corner of it into her line of sight.

The scream stopped like a door closing.

"Avu," Marika said. Soaked, blotched, hiccupping. Both arms up.

He sat down where he was, mostly on purpose, and let her get a fist round his nose.

Behind him, quietly, somebody's knees hit the rug.

"...Loretta?"

"I'm all right."

"You're on the floor."

"I'm aware that I'm on the floor, my lady."

The house did not recover for some days.

He had walked. At six months. Twenty steps, unassisted, first attempt, having never — to any witness's knowledge — so much as pulled himself up to stand.

That last part was the problem, and there was nothing to be done about it now. One wobbling step could be luck. Twenty steps and a turn around a bed was a finished skill that had come from nowhere.

He sat through the aftermath and took notes on how each of them handled it.

Loretta handled it by weeping, then by pride, then by rewriting history entirely.

"I always said he'd walk early. Didn't I say it? Ask Marta."

"You said he'd be late."

"I never said that."

"You said, that boy's got no interest in his legs."

"That was months ago, and I was wrong, and I've said so."

That night she shut the door before she put the lamp down, which was new, and which she did every night afterward.

His mother handled it by holding him rather more than usual and saying rather less.

His father was told that evening. He stood at the crib a long time. Then he said the single most Strade thing Avon had heard either parent produce.

"Walking at six months." A pause. "And talking." A longer one, and then, with the guard almost holding: "He'll want teachers."

"He'll want teachers."

"Janet—"

"He's six months old, Julian."

"That's rather my point."

"He wants a childhood."

"He can have both."

"Can he?" The bed creaked. "I've met the men in your family. Not one of them had both."

"...That's fair."

"I know it's fair."

"He'd be bored. You've seen him. He's bored now."

"Then we'll get him a dog."

"A dog."

"Julian."

"...A year."

"Two."

"One."

"Two."

"...Two."

His father's name was Julian.

Six months he'd lived with the man, and it took a walking scandal to shake the name loose.

He lay there adding it to the collection while above his head, in the low fond voices of people who have had this fight before and will have it again, his parents had the first argument he'd ever caused.

He found he didn't mind being argued about.

It was one of the ways they said it.

The word arrived that week, and it didn't travel far.

Genius.

Out of Loretta first, obviously. Then Marta, up through the floor.

"He's a genius, is what he is."

"He's a baby."

"He's a genius baby."

"There's no such thing as a genius baby, Loretta. There's early and there's late, and then there's what they turn out to be at twenty."

"Six months, Marta."

"I heard."

"Twenty steps."

"I heard that too. I've heard it nine times."

Then Nina, who used it wrong and got corrected. Then out to Rufo in the yard. Then it stopped, at the wall of the house, the way everything in that kitchen stopped.

It didn't go into a letter. Nobody wrote to the Bank. His father heard it said in his own hallway by his own cook and walked past without breaking stride.

Twenty steps at six months was the largest thing that had ever happened in this room.

Out past the room, it was a nice piece of news about somebody's baby.

He turned that over at night, between sets.

They had it wrong, of course. All of it. The talking was fifteen years old. The walking was drilled. The strength was bought nightly, paid for by someone who never showed their face.

But they'd got it wrong in his favor, which was the only direction that had never once happened before, and he'd checked the sums three times.

Genius explained everything they could see and nothing they couldn't. The house priced it at roughly a fortnight of pastry and a great deal of pinching, and then went back to the ordinary business of the day.

Nobody came. Nobody wrote. Nobody scheduled anything.

He'd been braced for six months. When the not-coming finally settled, it wasn't relief. It was an absence he kept going back to check on, the way you keep touching a tooth that's stopped hurting.

Let them watch the girl, he'd said, once.

He left it exactly where it was.

Two doors down, as if in agreement, the girl in question chose that week to produce her second word.

"Ma."

Miss Guesclin, by report, sat down where she stood.

"...Say that again."

"Ma."

"Janet. Janet."

"I'm here, I'm here—"

"Ma. Ma." — with the arms up, the full extension, the one that until now had belonged to a boy down the corridor.

Miss Alina picked her up and held on and said nothing for a long time, and did not let Loretta see her face.

"Second," she said at last, thickly. "Second, after five weeks of— I'll take second."

"You'll take it."

"I'll take second. I'd have taken tenth."

That night the two mothers sat up late with a bottle out of the Strade cellars.

"To second place."

"To second place."

"You know she'll say his name first every morning for the next ten years."

"Probably."

"Twenty."

"Alina."

"I'm only saying what I can see." A glass being set down. "...She stopped screaming the day she met him. Did you know that? The day. Not the week."

"I noticed."

"I've thought about it more than I'd like to admit."

"And?"

"And nothing. There's nothing to do with it." Miss Guesclin held her glass out to be filled. "She's got two years of being nobody and I mean to give her every hour of them. If a boy down the corridor makes them quieter, I'm not going to go looking for reasons to mind."

"That's a very Strade answer."

"That's a tired answer."

"It's the same one I'd have given you."

"I know. I've been listening to you give it for nine years."

Their laughing came up through the floor past midnight.

In two cribs in two rooms, two small programs — one running, one only just started, neither of them aware of being anything of the kind — slept straight through it.

The scream hour, for the record, never came back.