Two summers later the world grew a little louder.
Time, in other people's hands, moves like neat ledger entries: birthdays, harvests, taxes paid. In my case—being a thirty-one-year-old mind strapped into the body of a small boy—time dragged and rushed in equal measure. Days bled into each other while my head hatched plans the size of fortresses. I learned to sleep less and listen more, which is an underrated skill if your body is frequently sticky with porridge and your vocabulary is traded mainly in squeals.
By the time I could stand with only a wobbly hand on the table, the household had adopted a new rhythm: the steward fussed over ledgers at dawn, the midwife visited with a wicker basket of herbs, the scholar arrived weekly with an armful of crude chalkboards and even cruder opinions. They all treated me like a child—accurate—and a curiosity—also accurate. I, meanwhile, treated them like sources.
Language, mercifully, is sticky. Infants in Ravendorf still babble and cry in the early months, but the name-root system meant that everyone expects a baby's first, single utterance to be the seed. After that, children learn at the usual human pace. In practice that meant I could understand adult speech from the moment I opened my eyes—useful—and that forming adult phrases would take months, then years—annoying, but fair. It was a rule I could plan around.
"Master Kai," the steward would say, tapping a fat ledger as if paperwork might be a toy. "Today the shipments from Northfield arrived. You should know what coin comes and goes."
He said it like a promise. I listened like a student committed clandestinely to a syllabus.
My vocal progress was comic for onlookers and frustrating for me. My mouth produced consonants with the punctuality of a clumsy apprentice: "Ma," "Da," "ka," followed by long vowels that dissolved into purrs. One afternoon I surprised myself by repeating a sound a visiting scribe used when trying to persuade a pigeon to eat from his hand—"peep." The cat blinked at me as if I'd made an impressive bargain.
Babies broadcast every small achievement as if they were heralds. The household celebrated my first deliberate grip of a spoon with claps and baskets of extra porridge. The steward's wife called me stubborn in a tone that suggested the term was a compliment when balanced with a tax-paying smile. These little social rituals were useful; they greased the wheels of favor.
But rituals alone are poor armor in a world with kingdoms and hungry men. I wanted tutors. I wanted books with actual bindings and ink that didn't flake like old mud. Tutors cost coin; coin came from land and favors and carefully cultivated reputations. So I executed the plan most toddlers can't conceive of: I listened for openings and pushed on them.
The first opening came as gossip. The scholar—ink on knuckles, hunched like a man perpetually trying to hide his excitement—was arguing with a farmer about the proper spacing of trees in an orchard. They both used words that meant more than their sentences: "yield," "guild," "register." I made a map of those words in my head. Later, while the steward fussed with his quill, I babbled "book" in a pleading tone that, to be fair, only the steward's wife read as something meaningful. She laughed and, in an act of maternal misinterpretation, told the steward I had interest in learning. He winked at the scholar as if I'd suggested a board meeting.
Within a week, a tutor arrived.
She introduced herself as Marta. She smelled of dust and lemon, and the way she wore practicality like armor told me she was the sort of person who had survived being useful for a long time. She carried a small basket of wax tablets and a wooden ruler. Her hair was cropped, her hands were ink-stained at the nails, and she had a frankness that suggested she had less patience for nonsense and greater pleasure in ordered progress.
"Master Kai," Marta said, kneeling to set a tiny chair by a low table. She adjusted a wooden stool so I could prop my feet. "You are to learn your letters today."
Letters. The word made my mind—the part of me that loved lists and systems—thrill like a smith's bell. Letters were the simplest kind of power: compact, repeatable, transmittable. Where I'd failed in my other life wasn't because I lacked imagination; it was because I had never learned discipline. Letters could be disciplined. Words could be scheduled.
Marta's approach was brisk and merciless in a comforting way. She showed me one smooth, crude chalkboard with a single character carved into it. "This is the sound for 'a'," she said, pronouncing it like a gentle blade. "Repeat."
I answered with a sound that approximated the vowel and Marta clapped very softly. Small praise goes a long way when you live in a house that specializes in grown-ups giving each other sighs.
You cannot learn words easily in infancy without gestures. I learned letters with my hands: tracing characters into soft wax, then feeling the grooves. There is memory in texture; my fingers learned the rhythm before my tongue did. Marta was patient because she had to be—children who learned early were assets in households; they could later tutor others, keep ledgers, and increase prestige. She treated me like an investment.
The first time I formed a word that matched what I meant, the room filled with a kind of fragile disbelief. I had been practicing the syllable for days—"ma" for the steward's wife who brought milk, "da" for a rough uncle who visited rarely and smelled of iron. Then, one evening after a lesson on the character for "earth," I traced the loop with my small finger and looked up at Marta with an adult sort of question.
"What is this?" I wanted to ask in full. Instead, my throat tightened and a sound came out, clear and bright, aimed at the syllable I'd been repeating in my head.
"Ma," I said.
The steward's wife who was passing by froze like a woman who had found a coin on the road and not yet realized its value. Then she laughed and folded me into a hug that smelled of bread and rosemary. Marta beamed as if the small child before her were a daily miracle.
But the single small spoken syllable was not my triumph—only a milestone. I had to ask myself whether what I wanted was to say words or to make meaning with them. The difference is enormous. Most people think speech is the thing; I began to see that the true power lies in convincing others what your words mean.
While adults celebrated my babble as proof of normalcy, my mind kept mapping for larger goals. Tutors could be bartered for; loyal servants could be nurtured for influence; a studied approach to magic—if I discovered its rules early—could become a formula to ascend. I made lists in my head while the household praised my sound. The lists were not exactly stealthy. I practiced syllables with the solemnity of a man rehearsing a treaty.
And then something happened that made those lists move from hypothetical to interesting.
It was a hot afternoon and I had been playing with a flat stone near the door, propping it up and knocking it down like a tiny god of household detritus. The midwife—who visited more than was necessary and whose regard I had come to prize—sat on a low bench and patted my head. She hummed, a tune without words that made the house feel older and steadier.
"Master Kai," she said, watching me with the patient fondness one only gives to children you plan to watch grow, "do you not like the river? Or the garden?"
I, who had never been good at subtlety, grunted and pushed the stone again. A pebble jumped from the doorstep and rolled a hair's breadth closer to the crack in the paving. Then, without intention or theatrical flourish, the pebble in the crack—small, dull, ignored—trembled. It eased a hairline forward and toppled onto the dirt.
I stared. The midwife's humming stopped like someone pressing mute. For half a breath the yard held the silence of people waiting for a second act of a trick.
Marta, who had been washing a small cup, looked up with the expression of someone who had just read a sentence that suggested its author might be better than ordinary. The steward stiffened. The scholar, who'd been dozing with a book on his stomach, peered at me as if I might at any moment produce a chapter on local phenomena.
I felt nothing but a slight pressure in the soles of my feet—call it intuition, call it a pulse. If there are currents beneath the ground, I thought, they are like sleeping beasts—avoid poking their noses unless you want them awake. No thunder boomed. No lights flashed. It was absurd and small. The pebble had simply moved.
Later, in the privacy of Marta's quill-inked lesson, I described it as best I could: a nudge, a feeling, a tiny cooperation between my attention and the thing. Words failed me and I resorted to gestures. Marta's eyebrow arched in the worried way tutors make the face of a person who has seen talent before—talent that requires care.
"You felt something," she said finally. "Perhaps you have a tendency with earth. Keep it quiet until we understand."
Keep it quiet. That phrase should be the motto of anyone who finds power early in a world of hungry eyes. Power, even as an idea, draws predators. I understood this better than most because in my past life I'd watched opportunities eaten by people better at reading the room. This time, secrecy would be a defensive art.
The pebble incident was both trivial and pivotal. It confirmed that the world was not simply wood and mud and ledger lines; it had seams. The seams might be magic. The seams might be nothing. Either way, they were worth noting, and I noted them in the only way available to me at the time a toddler: in a running internal file tagged Possibility—Investigate Later.
That evening the steward spoke to the midwife in low tones while I sat in a corner making letters with a stub of charcoal. He asked if there were any lessons available for children of modest standing—reading, arithmetic, basic sword drills. He did not mention magic. He did mention the scholar's name as someone we might call upon. The midwife, who had heard pebbles tremble and seen tutors' faces go pale with interest, smiled like a woman who had placed a bet on the future and wanted to be polite about it.
Marta put her hand on my shoulder that night as if to confirm an alliance. "Do your learning early," she whispered. "It is easier that way. And Kai?" Her voice dropped to something meant only for me and the low roof timbers. "Do not let too many people see things they should not. The world takes quickly."
I nodded because nods are a toddler's version of solemn contracts and, privately, I agreed. Secrets were things to cultivate. Knowledge was a kind of currency I could accumulate while my mouth caught up with my mind.
Before sleep came—a fitful, dream-stuffed nap of images and the sensation of small achievements—I reviewed the lists I had started as a baby. Tutors to ask: Marta first, then the scholar for letters, a retired soldier for footwork, and a mage if one could be found without alarm. Habits to form: reading aloud (even if I only mouthed), practicing persistence, and asking for small responsibilities that would teach me how the house's economy worked. Social capital to cultivate: the midwife's goodwill, the steward's trust, the scholar's curiosity. Keep secret the pebble.
The rain that had been a steady background drummer in my newborn days had backed off into a polite murmur. The redwood beyond the yard swung its heavy boughs and made patterns against a sky sun-torn with late light. The house smelled of porridge cooling and ink drying. Somewhere, a child laughed.
My vocabulary was small and my hands still bore the chubby certainty of childhood, but ideas lived larger in me than my body suggested. I had a plan that could be executed in small steps: learn letters, learn to count, secure tutors, practice secretly with the seams of the world. I had, in short, mapped the scaffolding of a life.
If you have ever watched a small bird peck at the edge of its shell, you know there is a stubbornness in beginnings. I felt that same animal quality in my chest, a flint of insistence. When sleep finally snagged me, the last coherent thought before dreams took over was petty and pragmatic: tomorrow, I would try to keep the pebble moving without anyone else seeing it. Not for show, but for safety.
And also, he added to himself with a humor only a thirty-one-year-old could appreciate, maybe if I keep this up I can get Marta to teach me to write the ledger numbers so the steward stops hiding them in the top drawer.
In a house of practical adults and soft small joys, a plan is the most adult thing a child can have. I fell asleep carrying mine like a stone in my pocket—heavy enough to be noticed, small enough to keep.