"I hope this doesn't mean they'll be allowed back into the main house," someone else muttered, and a third voice, colder than the first two combined, added: "This baby is no more Ashvale than his foreign mother is."
The room, Kael realized as the fog of his new senses cleared, was crowded with high-ranking members of a clan called Ashvale, and every one of them was looking at the woman holding him the way one looks at a stain that refuses to lift.
The woman who held him, his mother now, in whatever sense that word applied to a man who had died a professor and woken up an infant, straightened her spine against the disapproval pressing in from every side. Her voice stayed soft, quiet enough that the elders had to lean in to catch it, but it carried the flat, unshaking strength of a woman who had already decided not to bend.
"His name shall be Corren," she said. "Corren of Clan Ashvale. A name that will carry the weight of our lineage, and carry it with honor."
The murmuring around her sharpened into something closer to outrage.
"She dishonors the name," one of the elders said, loud enough to fill the small room. "She should have asked before laying claim to the name of the one they called Ashheart."
Whoever Ashheart had been, the name clearly still meant something to this family, and clearly this woman had just spent a piece of that meaning without permission. She did not flinch. She only looked down at the small, squirming bundle in her arms, the hard set of her mouth easing by one small degree even as the room around her hardened, and for one long moment, the newly minted infant named Corren forgot entirely that he had once been anyone else.
The truth about a baby's body, Corren discovered over the following months, is that it lies to everyone watching it. His parents noticed, of course. Parents notice everything eventually, even when they talk themselves out of believing it.
"Did you see that?" his mother said one evening, staring at him with an expression somewhere between delight and unease. "He looked at us like he understood every word."
His father laughed the observation off, though the laugh came a half-second too late to be fully convincing. "He's a baby, Karma. He probably just wants something new to chew on."
Corren, watching this exchange from his crib with the sharp, unblinking attention of a man who had spent a career reading between the lines of much older texts, understood exactly what was being said, and exactly how badly it was being explained away. He said nothing. There was no advantage yet in revealing how much he understood, and a scholar's instincts, it turned out, survived reincarnation rather better than a scholar's bladder control did.
The moment his small hands were steady enough to manage it, he made straight for the one shelf in the annex that held actual books, and pulled down the one with the most worn spine. His fingers were clumsy. His attention was not. He remembered, with a clarity that startled even him, the pleasure of chasing a stubborn grammatical pattern until it finally gave up its logic, and he set about chasing that same pleasure now, one baby-fisted page at a time.
The world he had woken into, Corren came to understand as his understanding of it deepened, was not kind by default. Poverty pressed close on every side of the small annex his family occupied, apart from the main house where the wealthier branches of Clan Ashvale lived in considerably more comfort. But his parents, for all that the clan looked down on them, were decent people: warm where the clan was cold, generous where the clan hoarded, patient where the clan sneered. It struck something in him, watching them, that had nothing to do with magic or reincarnation and everything to do with the parents he'd had the first time around: two celebrated academics who loved their son the way one loves an accomplishment, at a careful, evaluative distance, and who had never quite forgiven him for choosing linguistics over the physics career they'd mapped out for him before he could talk. He had disappointed them simply by wanting something for himself. His new parents, dirt poor and clan-shunned, had never once made him feel like a disappointment, and the contrast sat in his chest like something he didn't have a word for yet, in either language.
By the time he was ten, thin-framed and quick, with his father's dark hair and a stranger's amber-brown eyes that had taken him a full year to stop expecting to be a different color, the cruelty of the wider clan had sharpened from whispers into something with teeth. On one particular morning, clutching a carved wooden lion his father had whittled for him out of driftwood, a knot of older Ashvale boys descended on him with the casual malice of children who have learned cruelty is free where they live. They wrenched the toy from his hands, laughing, and in the scuffle that followed Corren went down hard, his knee meeting packed dirt with a jolt that shot white heat up through his leg.
He did not cry. He clenched his jaw against the pain, felt the sting travel from knee to teeth, and rose back to his feet, chin level and eyes dry, staring back at the boy who'd shoved him hardest until the laughter around them died mid-breath, starved of the reaction it had been fishing for.
"Freak," one of the boys spat, backing away.
His mother reached him a moment later, breathless from running, and closed her hand around his arm before he could take another step toward the retreating boys. "Let them have it, Corren," she said, low and urgent.
"But I hate bullies," he protested, and meant it with the full, uncomplicated fury of a child.
Her laugh came out short and rueful, more sadness in it than amusement. "If you truly want to teach them a lesson, my darling, become strong. Strong enough that one day, they come to you and beg for forgiveness on their own."