Chapter Two

"He's breathing. He's breathing — look, he's breathing—"

"I know. I know. I'm looking."

"He wasn't. For a moment he wasn't, I heard it—"

"He is now."

Someone was crying. Someone else was trying very hard not to.

He opened his eyes.

Everything was blurry, too bright, and much too large. A ceiling somewhere impossibly far up. Shapes leaning over him, huge and pale and moving.

He tried to ask where he was.

"Aah."

...

He tried again, more carefully this time, putting real effort into the consonants.

"Ah. Guh."

Okay.

He took stock, the way he'd been taught to wake in unfamiliar rooms. Injuries: none. Restraints: —

He tried to lift his arm.

It went up about four inches, wobbled, and fell on his own face.

Restraints: yes, apparently.

He lay there with his own hand on his nose and worked through it with a calm he was mildly proud of.

Limbs: four. Present. Non-functional.

Size: catastrophic.

Conclusion: he was a baby.

Huh.

He waited for panic. None arrived. He'd already died once this week — as far as he could tell — and panic had not been especially useful then either.

He checked the one thing that actually mattered.

Asterid.

Still there. All of it. The light, the floor like polite water, the ember in her hands, the eyebrow, the wave.

He'd been half expecting it to be gone.

It wasn't.

He would have grinned, if his face had been taking requests.

Then the light came.

He couldn't focus on it. His eyes were about four minutes old and everything past the face above him was a smear. But the room went from amber to white, and stayed white, and the white had a weight to it — it pressed, the way strong sun presses through a shut eyelid.

Except it was coming through the walls.

Somebody dropped something heavy.

Somebody else said a word he didn't know, three times, fast, in a voice that had gone completely out of control.

"—it's outside. My lady, it's outside—"

"Get to the window—"

"It's over the house, it's right over the—"

Feet. A great many feet. A door banging somewhere below, then more doors, then shouting out in the yard that didn't sound like alarm and didn't sound like joy either but had a bit of both in it.

Through all of it the woman holding him did not let go, not once, and did not look at the window either.

He knew, because he was watching her face, and her face never came off his.

The light went on for a long time.

Then it stopped — all at once, the way a held breath stops.

And in the quiet afterward, from somewhere further down the corridor, a second baby started crying.

He thought about that second baby quite a lot over the following days.

It was, he was fairly sure, in this house. The crying arrived at odd hours, thin and far off, through what he estimated was one wall and a stretch of hallway. Sometimes his own room's door opened and the sound got briefly louder and then muffled again.

So: another one. Roughly his age. Very close by.

He had no idea what to do with this information, but he refused to be the only person in the building who hadn't noticed it.

"Look at him. He's thinking about something."

"Babies don't think."

"This one does. Look at his face."

"That's just how his face looks."

"That is not just how his face looks."

He turned his head — slowly, badly, with enormous effort — toward the voices.

The blur resolved a little.

A woman, propped up on what seemed like nine hundred pillows, hair stuck to her forehead, absolutely wrecked and absolutely radiant. And a man beside her, too big for the chair he was in, holding her hand in both of his like it might get away.

They were both looking at him.

Not at him. At him the way the children on the bench had looked at each other. Like he was a person who had already been decided about.

He didn't have a word for it. He kept it anyway.

Then something else caught up with him.

He'd understood every word.

He ran it back. He's breathing. That's just how his face looks. That is not just how his face looks.

He had never heard this language before in his life. Either of them.

He turned that over for a while, got nowhere with it, and set it down next to the pile of other things he'd been told he would get to.

Days passed.

He learned things.

The room was enormous. His crib had carvings on it. There was a window with real glass, which someone had put in a room he slept in, apparently for no reason except so he could look out of it.

Everything was warm. That was the part he kept getting stuck on. It was simply, continuously warm, in a way that didn't seem to be a reward for anything.

He kept waiting for the terms.

They didn't come.

On the third day, they put a rock in his mouth.

He would like it noted that he did not agree to this.

It arrived with ceremony. Loretta carried it in on a folded cloth, holding it out in front of her the way you'd carry something that might go off, and his mother sat up against the pillows and made a small delighted noise, and there was a general air of occasion that he did not understand and was not consulted about.

Then a hand came down and the thing went in.

He conducted an immediate assessment.

Weight: considerable. Front-heavy. Would drag on the jaw over time.

Temperature: cold. Notably cold. And it stayed cold, which was strange; everything in this house eventually warmed up if you held it long enough.

Hardness: total. No give anywhere. He applied pressure, then more pressure, then the kind of pressure that had recently destroyed two blankets.

Nothing. It didn't even scuff.

Taste: none. Not bad. Just — absent. It tasted the way a wall tastes.

Structural verdict: poor. His own fist was warm, soft, correctly sized, always available, and free.

Because that was what this was. He'd worked it out somewhere around temperature. They had looked at the thing he had been putting in his mouth for three days — the fist, the perfectly adequate fist — and they had gone down to a strongroom and come back with a replacement.

This was worse than a fist in every measurable way.

He noted it as a possible thrown weapon and stopped there.

"Oh, look at him with it," Loretta breathed. "Oh, that's a portrait."

"It's too big for him."

"They're all too big for them, my lady, that's the point. You don't give a Strade a bit of chewed leather like a farm baby. My mother had one in her mouth, and her mother, and — my lady, is that the Corvera stone?"

"Mm."

"The Corvera stone?"

"He's the firstborn."

"That's — my lady, that stone doesn't leave the strongroom. There's a man whose whole job is knowing where it is." Her voice climbed. "And he's teething on it."

"Then let's hope he doesn't swallow it," his mother said comfortably.

He rejected it.

He did this by opening his mouth and letting it fall out, which he considered a clear and professional statement of position.

The room reacted as though he had set something on fire.

"Catch it—"

"I have it—"

"Oh, don't let it touch the floor, don't you dare let it touch the—"

It went back in.

He let it fall out again.

"He doesn't like it," his mother observed.

"He can't not like it. It's been in this family two hundred years."

"And yet."

Third attempt. Third rejection. He was, if nothing else, consistent.

Loretta made a sound of genuine anguish and retreated with the rock clutched to her chest, muttering about the strongroom.

His mother looked down at him for a moment. Then she laughed — quietly, in a way that shook the pillows — and offered him her knuckle instead.

He took it immediately.

It was warm and soft and correctly sized and it tasted faintly of soap, and it was, without any competition at all, the finest object he had encountered since arriving in this world.

On the sixth day, he tried to fix his eyes.

Everything was still soft at the edges. Faces arrived as shapes and resolved late, which was unacceptable — he had spent his entire previous life reading faces, and doing it at a two-second delay felt like trying to fight underwater.

So he ran the drill. Focus on the near thing. Focus past it. Focus back.

Blink. Refocus. Blink. Refocus.

Blink blink blink.

He heard a sound above him like a kettle giving up.

"Oh."

Loretta had both hands over her mouth.

"Oh, my lady. My lady, come here. Come here—"

"What? What's wrong—"

"Nothing's wrong, nothing's wrong, just — look at him."

The bed creaked. A second face swam into the frame, and he took the opportunity to run the drill again, because two faces at two distances was better data.

Blink. Blink. Blink blink.

Both women made a noise he had no reference for at all.

"He's doing it again—"

"Look at his little eyes—"

"Oh, that's not fair. That's not fair. He's too — my lady, he's too much—"

"I know."

"It's the lashes. It's not fair, on a baby."

"I know."

He lay there being looked at by two grown adults who appeared to be in some kind of distress, and reviewed his data.

Hypothesis: blinking was significant to them somehow.

He tested it.

Blink.

"Aaah—"

Confirmed.

He tucked that one away, carefully. It seemed like the sort of thing that might come in handy later.

He found out about the light from Loretta, because he found out about everything from Loretta.

She told him while changing him, in roughly nine hundred words, none of which she appeared to have planned.

"You won't remember it," she said, "but you were there, little lord, you were there for the whole of it. Right in this house. And the light was so big they saw it all the way out at the coast."

She leaned in. The walls, apparently, had ears.

"A ring. Just — hanging. Right over us, big as a lake and burning like a second sun, and every soul in Redmont on their knees in the road looking up at it." She shook her head slowly. "It's been a long time since the last one. My grandmother saw that one and talked about it till the day she died."

He waited.

"It means a hero," Loretta said. "A real one. Born-marked. The sky doesn't do that for anybody else."

Then she got on with the swaddling, and said the next part like it was weather.

"So of course it's the Guesclin girl."

He learned the shape of it over the following week, in pieces, because Loretta could not hold a subject for longer than a minute but always came back to it eventually.

The other woman in the house was Alina Guesclin, who had come to stay for the last stretch of the confinement because she and his mother had been friends since they were girls, and who had gone into labour four hours after her, one corridor away.

The Guesclins were the other kind of great family.

Not banks. Not ships. Not six-largest-anything.

"Soldiers," Loretta said, with real reverence. "Generals. Four hundred years of them. When Redmont's in trouble, little lord, the king sends for a Guesclin."

Her father was at the border right now, a general with more stars on him than Loretta could remember the number of, and he had not come home for the birth and would not be coming home for it, because the border did not care whose child was being born.

And her brother — her brother was a hero.

Not a courtesy title. Not a family boast. An actual, sworn, sky-marked hero of the kingdom, sixteen years old, already halfway to a legend, with a ring of his own that had hung over that same house when he was born.

"That's twice," Loretta said. "Twice in one bloodline. It's never happened in Redmont, not once, not ever, and now they've gone and done it twice."

She said it with the delight of someone repeating a very good piece of gossip about people she would never have to meet.

"So there's no mystery in it. Everybody knew before they'd finished looking up."

He turned that over for several days, and he was honest with himself about it, because there wasn't much else to do.

He remembered a woman in a place made of light saying everyone becomes a hero. Not a word they choose. Just a true thing about them, after.

And he remembered, very clearly, that she had not said whether it applied to him.

She'd had every opportunity. She'd looked right at him and gone quiet instead.

So the ring over the house was one of two things. It was for the girl down the corridor, whose brother had one and whose family had four hundred years of them and whose blood the sky apparently kept an eye on.

Or it was for him, and the entire kingdom had spent one long night on its knees in the road looking at the wrong window.

He examined how he felt about that, and the answer surprised him a little.

Good.

He felt good about it.

Because he had spent fifteen years being the most closely watched thing in a building, and a great deal of that time working out how not to be, and here was a whole kingdom that had looked directly at the house he was lying in and decided, unanimously, cheerfully, that he was not worth a second glance.

He couldn't have arranged it better if he'd tried.

Let them watch the girl.

Then there was the business of the names.

It started as a small thing, a background hum he only half-noticed. But he had been built to notice, and once he'd started he couldn't stop.

Everyone in the house had a word.

The man was my lord. Every mouth, every day. My lord. Yes, my lord. At once, my lord. The woman was my lady, the same way, in the same tone, from the same people.

But that was only in the daylight, with the door open.

Underneath the titles there was a second layer, and that layer was made of names.

The maid was Loretta. He got that one first, because she said it constantly, mostly to herself. Loretta, you great fool. Loretta, mind the water. Loretta, if you drop that, so help me.

The cook was Marta. He learned her by the shouting, which came up through the floor twice a day and had a great deal of personality in it.

There was a Nina, who was younger and dropped things, and got told off by Loretta in a tone that suggested Loretta had also once been a Nina.

There was a Rufo, out past the window somewhere, who was apparently in charge of the horses and had opinions about them.

The other mother was Alina. He got that one through a wall, in his own mother's voice, laughing at something.

The horses had names too. He heard four of them.

Then, on the eleventh day, a dog came into the yard below the window and somebody called it in, and the dog had a name, and the name was Beso.

He lay very still in his enormous carved crib and thought about that for a long time.

The dog has a name.

He was not, he decided, going to make anything of that. It was simply a fact and he had noted it.

He noted it approximately nine hundred times over the next two days.

At night the layers came apart.

The room would empty. The lamps would go down. The door would shut. And then, in the dark, once, quietly:

"Janet."

That was it. That was the only time it happened. One man, once a day, in a room with the door closed.

He lay awake listening for it, every night, and it came every night, and every night it did something to him he didn't have the equipment to describe.

Because he understood it, better than anyone in the house could have.

He had stood in a place made of light and asked a woman what she was called, and she had told him, and her voice hadn't been steady.

So he knew exactly what he was hearing.

A name isn't what you're called. Anyone can call you anything.

A name is what somebody is allowed to call you.

Which raised the question.

He started listening for it deliberately. Made a project of it. Lay there through feedings and changings and long boring afternoons with his whole attention pointed at the sounds people made when they were talking about him.

The results came back, and they were not encouraging.

The baby.

The child.

Him. He. This one.

The little lord — which was a title, and titles he now knew were the outer layer, the daylight layer, the one that belonged to everybody.

Nobody ever said a name.

Not once.

The girl down the corridor didn't have one either. He established this early and returned to it often, the way you press a bruise. The Guesclin girl. The little miss. The other one. Two of them in one house, sky-marked and celebrated and entirely unnamed.

He found it unreasonably comforting.

There was one exception, and for about a day and a half he thought it might count.

When the door was shut and the room was empty and it was only the two of them, Loretta changed.

The maid who said little lord in front of his mother, and a crisp my lord in front of anybody else, and went pink to the ears if his father so much as walked past the doorway — that woman went somewhere else entirely the moment the latch clicked.

And what came out instead was this:

"My little lord."

"My little lord, my lambkin, my duckling."

"Who's the finest small gentleman in all of Redmont? Who is? Is it you? It's you."

"My sweet. My poppet. My treasure. My tiny terrible tyrant."

"Oh, those cheeks. Those are unlawful cheeks. I could be hanged for those cheeks."

"My little cabbage. My darling. My small and serious sir."

"His lordship," she would say, in a voice she used for absolutely nobody else alive, "would like his blanket straightened, would he. Would his lordship care for that."

He lay through all of it with the expression of a man attending a briefing.

It went on for hours. It went on every day. She had an inexhaustible supply and deployed it at a volume suggesting she had never once considered that anybody might overhear — which, given that she also told him about the Bank and the two kings, was probably accurate.

And for a day and a half, he thought it might count.

Then he checked them properly, and it didn't.

Because a name doesn't change. That was the entire point of one. Janet was Janet — in the dark, once a day, the same word every time, and it meant the woman it belonged to and nobody else in the world.

But lambkin would fit any baby anywhere.

So would duckling. So would poppet, and treasure, and my small and serious sir.

They were lovely. They were the loveliest things anybody had ever said to him.

They just weren't his.

He ran the possibilities.

One: he had one and they simply weren't using it in front of him, which was stupid, because they said everything in front of him. Loretta had told him about the Bank, two kings, a ring of fire over the house, and her opinion of Marta's pastry.

Two: they hadn't decided yet.

Three: they weren't going to.

He didn't like three. He had no evidence for three. Three had nothing supporting it except fifteen years of being a number in a corridor, which was not evidence, which was a habit, and he knew the difference, and knowing the difference did not appear to help at all.

He waited.

He got very good at waiting; he'd had practice.

Meanwhile, he ran diagnostics.

He waited until Loretta was turned away and tried to make a fist.

His hand closed. Sloppy. Weak. Normal.

He tried to squeeze.

Something in his fingers answered — a hard, clean, immediate response, way past what should have been there — and the blanket in his grip tore with a small polite sound.

He froze.

He looked at the blanket.

He looked at his hand.

Then he did what any responsible person would do, and tore a second one to check it wasn't a fluke.

It wasn't a fluke.

Interesting.

He tried kicking. His legs went off like they'd been waiting for permission — a snap of speed with no wind-up, the whole motion arriving before he'd finished deciding on it. The same wrongness he'd had in the old body.

Except that body had taken ten years and a great deal of money to build.

This one was six days old and hadn't been taught anything.

He kicked again.

Once. Twice. Three times.

Then twenty.

Then a hundred.

Somewhere around two hundred he noticed the thing that actually mattered, and it wasn't the speed.

He wasn't tired.

Not not very tired. Not holding up well. He had done two hundred of something at full effort, in a body that could not lift its own head, and the tank read exactly as full as when he'd started.

He lay there in the world's most comfortable crib and thought about a woman with one eyebrow raised, saying the answer is the life.

"Asterid," he said.

"Ah-guh," is what came out.

Loretta turned around. "Aw! Was that a word? Was that a word?"

He looked at her flatly.

"Aah."

"Ohh, he's talking to me. Yes he is. Yes he is."

He would work on it.

He kept up the kicking. Partly for the data. Partly because there was nothing else to do in a crib, and a man needs a hobby.

By the third day he noticed the second thing, and the second thing was stranger than the first.

The kicks were getting harder.

Not harder the way things get harder with practice. He knew that curve intimately — he had spent ten years on it, being measured against it, in a place where improvement was logged in fractions and bought in months. Strength was expensive. Strength was the single most expensive thing he had ever purchased, and he had paid for it in a currency he didn't like thinking about.

This body was handing it out overnight.

Every session, the same shape: work to full effort, sleep, wake up with a higher ceiling. Not much higher. But every time, and by margins that would have gotten his old instructors accused of falsifying records.

So he tested it properly, because that was the only thing he knew how to do with a suspicious gift.

One quiet day: no kicking, no gripping, nothing. Lie there. Be a baby. The next morning — no change. Baseline.

One working day: everything he had. The crib knocked against the wall, and Loretta looked up from her mending and asked the room whether somebody was having a tantrum, hm?

He went still.

He stayed still until she'd gone back to her needle, and lay there with his heart going, thinking about how little it had taken. One noise. One head turning.

In the place he came from, the ones who tested unusually got a second appointment.

Nothing happened. Loretta hummed at her mending. The window went on being a window.

Still.

After that he worked at night, in the dark, with the door shut and Loretta's breathing steady in the next room, and by day he kicked exactly as hard as a baby ought to kick and not one degree harder.

The next morning — a jump. Clean, obvious, repeatable.

The growth followed the work. Exactly the work. Nothing else moved it.

Babies grew fast; he allowed for that. Everyone said so, constantly, usually while pinching some part of him. But babies grew like weather — all over, on their own schedule, whether you did anything or not. This grew like wages.

Paid promptly. Slightly over the agreed rate. By someone who never showed their face.

He lay in the dark and turned that over for a long time, and got exactly nowhere, and eventually did the only sensible thing, which was to add it to the growing list of matters that were wrong with this body — in the column marked wrong in my favor — and go back to work.

If someone insisted on paying him, he was going to be a very expensive employee.

Loretta talked. Constantly. To him, at him, over him, on the apparent theory that a baby was the one person in the house who couldn't repeat anything.

It was the most efficient intelligence source he had ever encountered.

By the end of the second week he knew that his father's elder brother ran something called the Bank, which was the sixth-largest on the continent, which Loretta said in the tone of someone faintly embarrassed about coming sixth. That the family had soldiers — not guards, soldiers, in numbers that made small kingdoms polite and large empires careful.

That the Strades had, twice in four hundred years, decided a king wasn't working out.

And that both times, the histories had called it a correction.

She said all this while changing him.

"Very old family you've landed in," she said, cheerful as weather. "Very big family."

Then her voice went a bit different.

"Not like ours."

He turned his head.

"Oh, we're grand too, don't mistake me. Dodola." She said it the way you'd set something down carefully. "Up in the high kingdom. Magic in the blood, proper magic, the kind kings write letters about. Your mother's people." A pause. "Not — this big. Nobody's this big."

She tugged the swaddling straight.

"I'm a Dodola as well, you know. Very far off. So far off I went on the dowry list — somewhere under the plate and over the linens, I should think." She laughed at that, but not much. "Came over with your mother. Came over for your mother. So there'd be one face she knew."

He looked at the ceiling.

Loretta had a name. Loretta had a family name, and she'd said it out loud, twice, and she'd said it like it was hers even though she'd arrived on an inventory.

He was going to need to hear a great deal more from Loretta.

His father came in the evenings.

He would arrive still wearing whatever the day had been — smelling of horse or ink or cold air — and every time, without fail, he stopped in the doorway first.

Like he was checking he had the right room.

Then he'd cross to the crib and stand there with his enormous hands hanging at his sides, looking down, saying nothing at all. Just looking. For minutes.

He could not work out what the man was doing. He tried. He had spent his entire first life reading men, and this one read as: nothing. Blank. Standing. Occupied by something happening entirely inside him.

On the ninth evening, his father put one finger into the crib.

He didn't say anything about it. He just left it there, resting on the blanket, close enough.

An offer, maybe. Or a test. Or nothing.

He grabbed it.

He didn't decide to. His hand simply went — that same fast wrong thing, arriving ahead of thought — and closed around his father's finger before he'd finished having the idea.

He remembered, a beat too late, about the blankets, and dumped about ninety percent of the grip.

His father went very still.

Then he made a sound. Small. Cut off almost immediately, like it had got out past a guard.

"...Janet."

"Mm?"

"He's holding on."

"I know, love."

"No, he's—" The man stopped. Started again. His voice had gone strange around the edges. "He's holding on."

His mother didn't answer that one. He heard the bedclothes shift, and after a while he heard her crying again, quietly, the way she did when she was happy, which he had decided was one of the least efficient things about these people and had privately started to like.

His father stayed exactly where he was. Didn't move his hand. Didn't sit down. Didn't say another word for a long, long time.

And then, still looking down, still not moving:

"We have to name him."

Everything in the crib stopped.

"I know," his mother said.

"He's nineteen days old."

"I know."

"Alina named hers a week ago."

"Let her."

A pause.

"Why haven't we?"

"Because," his mother said, "you keep saying no."

It took another two days.

He spent both of them in a state he would not have admitted to. He was fifteen years old in a body that couldn't roll over, he had died and come back and been given something with no bottom to it by a woman at a door — and he lay in a carved crib in an enormous warm room and thought, with total sincerity:

Please.

He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't have to. It was just the one word, over and over, aimed at nobody, in a language he'd never been taught.

On the twenty-first day, they came in together.

His mother sat on the edge of the bed with him in her arms, which she had done a hundred times, and his father stood in the doorway, which he had done a hundred times, and something in the room was different and he could not have said what.

"Say it, then," his father said.

"You'll say no."

"I've said no eleven times. Say it again."

"Avon."

Silence.

"...It's a river," his father said.

"It's a good river."

"It's a river in a country neither of us has ever been to."

"It dries up," his mother said.

His father waited.

"Every so often it just stops. The whole of it. The bed goes to stone and you can walk it end to end in your good boots and never wet your feet, and everyone who's ever lived along it stands there looking at the stones and says, well. That's that, then."

"You are selling this to me extremely badly."

"And then it comes back."

In his mother's arms, the baby had gone very still.

"It always comes back. It's been coming back longer than anyone's bothered to keep count of, and it's never once come back smaller." She shifted the bundle in her arms, which did not need shifting. "Wider. Every time. Until it's too wide to bridge and too wide to own, and then it runs out into the sea and nobody can tell you where it stops being a river."

Nobody said anything.

"I know," his mother said. "I read it in a book when I was nine and I have never once forgotten it, and I would like my son to have it, and you have said no eleven times, and I am asking a twelfth."

The man in the doorway didn't move for a moment.

Then he came into the room, and crossed it, and looked down at the bundle in his wife's arms, and he was quiet for so long that the baby in question genuinely considered doing something drastic.

"Avon," his father said.

Trying it.

"Avon Strade."

And that was it. That was all of it. Two words in a warm room from a man who'd said no eleven times, and it was done, and it was his.

Avon.

He turned it over.

Two syllables. No number in it. It hadn't been stitched into a collar and it hadn't been assigned in a corridor by a man with a clipboard, and if he lived a hundred years nobody would ever say it in the flat congratulatory tone they'd used for promotions.

Somebody had chosen it. Argued about it. Lost sleep over it. Said no eleven times and then said yes, because someone else wanted it badly enough to ask a twelfth.

For him.

Avon.

He thought, with great sincerity: that is a stupid number of syllables to hand out for free.

And then: Asterid would like it.

And then he had to stop thinking for a minute, because his face had started doing something on its own and he had absolutely no control over it.

"He's crying," his father said, alarmed. "Why is he crying?"

"Babies cry."

"You said he thinks."

"He can do both!"

Four weeks. Then five.

He drank. He kicked. He got very, very slightly better at consonants.

The blanket supply of House Strade continued its mysterious decline.

Loretta said his name roughly nine hundred times a day, in a voice normally reserved for very small dogs, and he let her, because it turned out that hearing it was not a thing he got tired of.

Down the corridor, the girl who had been given the sky went on being fed and carried and adored by people who had ridden a very long way to look at her, and he went on not being looked at by anybody, which suited them both perfectly well.

In his sixth week, the two mothers finally got tired of shouting through a wall.

Loretta carried him down the corridor in his good gown, delivering a lecture on manners to an audience that had none, and set him down on a wide bed in a room that smelled like a different woman's soap.

Then the long-awaited bundle arrived.

Everything he had of her, he had built out of noise. Six weeks of corridor traffic, of the little miss and the darling and ohh, look at her.

Six weeks of testimony. No face.

He turned his head, at last, to sketch the perpetrator.

What arrived was very small.

He ran the assessment out of habit and it came back strange.

She was glowing. Not a figure of speech — she actually caught the window light and did something with it that his own arm, tested immediately, did not. Dark hair, more of it than he had. And the eyes were bright. Wet-bright, catch-the-light bright, big and dark and pointed straight at the ceiling.

He had spent five weeks looking at faces. He had a range now — Loretta's, his mother's, his father's, Marta's, the ceiling's.

This one did not belong to that range.

Ah, he thought. So that's why they ride out here to look at her.

He was still working out what to do with that when she started screaming.

Not fussing. Not the thin wind-up-and-see-who-comes cry he did himself when the situation called for staff. This was full, whole-body, professional-grade screaming, produced at a volume that had no business coming out of something that size, and aimed at the ceiling.

He listened to it with genuine respect.

That's a good set of lungs.

The room went to work. Alina lifted her and rocked her. Alina's woman took her and did something more complicated. His mother offered an opinion. Loretta offered three. She was walked, jiggled, patted, turned over, and sung at.

She screamed through all of it.

"She does this," Alina said, over the noise, with the particular calm of a woman who has stopped being embarrassed some weeks ago. "Every day. About this hour. There's nothing wrong with her."

"There is definitely nothing wrong with those lungs."

"Please."

"I'm agreeing with you!"

Out of options, they put her down on the bed to scream it out, which is how she ended up laid on her back an arm's length from him, red and soaked and furious, and how she happened, mid-breath, to turn her head.

And saw something looking at her.

The scream stopped like a door closing.

He met her eyes and held them. Six weeks of drilling on faces at every distance in the room, and this one was well inside good range, so he had her in focus — wet lashes, blotched cheeks, an expression of complete and personal outrage.

Ruined, in other words. Red and swollen and leaking, hair stuck flat to her forehead, absolutely nothing left of the finished thing that had come through the door.

Still worked.

He noted that as a fact about her and not about him, which was, he would later concede, the first mistake he ever made in this life.

She stared.

He blinked.

She kept staring.

He blinked again. Slow. Deliberate. The full weight of the lashes, deployed at the only target in the house that hadn't been softened up by them yet.

Her mouth stayed open. Nothing came out of it.

He blinked a third time and waited.

She hiccupped once, wetly, and gave up.

The room had gone completely silent, which he registered as a secondary result and did not particularly care about, because he was busy. She was still looking at him. He was still looking at her. Neither of them had any idea what came next and neither of them was willing to be the one who stopped first.

"...What did he do," Alina said.

"Nothing," his mother said. "He does that. He just — looks at people."

"She hasn't stopped like that in six weeks."

"I know."

Alina bent down over the two of them, and looked at him for a long moment, and something in her face changed into something more careful.

"What's his name?"

"Avon," his mother said.

It was the first time he had heard her say it to somebody who didn't live in this house.

He decided he would like to hear that again.