The ceiling of the nursery is painted with stars.
Not real stars. Deliberate ones, gilded at their centers, connected by thin silver lines into constellations I don't have names for yet. They catch the candlelight and throw it back in small, careful glimmers. Someone took time with this. Someone believed the child who would sleep beneath it deserved something beautiful to look at.
I stare at them for a very long time on the first night.
The body is the primary problem. I've assessed this within the first hour of consciousness and nothing in the subsequent days has revised the conclusion: the body is warm and well-fed by instinct, possessed of a pair of lungs that express displeasure at considerable volume, and almost entirely nonfunctional as a vehicle for anything I actually want to do. My hands — small, impossibly soft, hands that have never held anything heavier than they currently weigh — move when I direct them, but imprecisely, with the maddening lag of a mechanism not yet calibrated. My eyes focus slowly. My neck cannot reliably support the weight of my own head.
I am, in every practical sense, helpless.
I file this under conditions of the environment — the same category I used for acid rain and radiation zones and the particular quality of silence that meant the street ahead was not as empty as it looked — and I begin the work of adaptation.
The first priority is language. I understood this the moment the woman in the delivery room spoke to me in words I couldn't parse. Language is infrastructure. Without it, nothing else can be built. I can't assess my situation, can't understand my threats, can't build anything functional here until I know what people are saying.
So I listen. From the first hour, from the first day, with everything I have.
The nurses speak to each other in quick practical sentences while they work. My mother speaks to me in the slow, deliberate tones adults use with infants everywhere — rounded syllables, exaggerated cadence, the same words in the same contexts until the pattern reveals itself. My father's visits are shorter and quieter, but his voice is distinctive. Low. Unhurried. The voice of a man who has never needed to raise it. I add his words to the architecture the same as the others.
Three months in, I have approximately two hundred words. Six months in, I can follow most conversations that happen within my hearing, including the ones people assume I can't.
I don't show it. Four years in a world where revealing capability too early was a reliable way to become a target. I see no reason to assume this world operates differently until I have more data.
The Dawnspire is a fortress that has been domesticated.
That's the most accurate description I can construct from the limited vantage of infancy: the bones of it are military. Walls three meters thick at the base. Corridors wide enough for armored men in formation but with choke points at every significant junction — the original architect understood that even a fortress needs interior defensibility in the event of a breach. Whoever designed this place thought about what happened after the gate failed.
I respect that kind of thinking. It's the kind I do.
Four hundred years of habitation have layered themselves over the military structure — tapestries on the bare stone, permanent magical lighting in the corridors, a garden along one edge of the courtyard. The fortress has acquired a domestic skin without losing its structural intent. Most people see the skin. I see the bones.
I find this genuinely comforting. It means the people who built this understood, on some level, what the world was. I can work with people who understand what the world is.
My father visits the nursery three times a week with the regularity of a scheduled inspection, which I don't think is accidental. He stands at the edge of the room with the careful posture of a man uncertain of the correct protocol for engaging with something this small, and he watches me with amber eyes that are always doing several things at once: assessing, hoping, carefully suppressing the hope so as not to be caught at it.
I watch him back.
He is not a complicated read — he is a man of profound consistency, which is either strength or vulnerability depending on context. He loves his wife and is afraid of losing her, though she is in perfect health; the fear is residual, I think, left over from the delivery, which I'm gathering was difficult. He is proud of this House in the structural way, the way load-bearing columns are proud — not displayed, but present in everything. He wants his son to be worthy of what he'll inherit.
I look up at this large, earnest, carefully controlled man who is my father in this life, and I think: you have no idea what you're working with.
I don't know whether that's reassuring or not. I sit with the uncertainty. I'm becoming accustomed to it.
My mother is the variable I didn't account for.
I categorized her in the first days the way I categorize everything: primary caregiver, political actor, intelligent, useful source of language data and household intelligence. Asset. I noted her competence, her careful management of everyone around her, her violet eyes that were always doing more than they appeared to be doing. I was thorough.
She declined to be categorized.
She comes to the nursery every morning before the household wakes, in the hour when the sky shifts from black to the deep blue before dawn. She comes without her ladies, without the performance of Grand Duchess, in a plain robe with her silver hair unbound. She sits beside me and she talks.
Not to an infant. Not to an heir. To me.
She tells me about the Duchy — the political pressures from the south, the seasonal supply logistics for the northern garrisons, the history of House Voss and what she gave up to become a Dawnmere. She tells me these things in the gentle cadence of bedtime stories, and I absorb every word with the attention of a man who knows information is survival. But she also does something else, something I didn't prepare for.
She looks at me.
Not at an infant. Not at a symbol. At me — at whatever is behind the grey eyes that don't track the way infant eyes are supposed to, that fix on faces with an attention the nurses find mildly unsettling. She looks with the quality of someone who is trying to understand something and refuses to look away when she hasn't finished understanding it.
I don't know what to do with this. I spent four years practicing invisibility. Being seen — being looked at with this quality of attention, by someone intelligent enough to notice I don't add up — is uncomfortable in a way that is not entirely unpleasant.
That second part is the more unsettling discovery.
She says it at four months. She's been naming the constellations on the ceiling, pointing to each one, giving them their names in this language I'm still building. She pauses. She looks at me.
"You understand more than you should, don't you."
Not a question. She doesn't expect an answer. She simply says it and moves to the next constellation as though she didn't just demonstrate that she is considerably more perceptive than anyone else in this household.
I lie very still.
I think: I need to be more careful.
I think, underneath that, quieter: I need to be more careful, because she's paying attention, and she isn't afraid of what she sees.
I don't examine the second thought. I have a language to master and a world to map and no time for things that don't serve a function.
The thought persists anyway.
I sleep on the floor sometimes.
Not always. The bed is warm and I am not so inflexible as to refuse warmth when it's available — warmth was something I spent four years rationing and my body has opinions about its absence that I've learned to respect. But there are nights when the softness is wrong. When the silk and the warmth sit too far from everything my nervous system learned to understand as safe, and my body routes me toward the cold stone by the window without quite asking my permission first.
The nurses discover this twice and are appropriately horrified both times.
My mother discovers it once.
She comes in on one of her early mornings and finds me on the floor beneath the window, awake, watching the sky. She stands in the doorway for a long moment. She doesn't call the nurses. She doesn't make a sound of distress. She crosses the room and sits on the floor beside me — the Grand Duchess of Dawnmere, on cold stone, before dawn — and looks at the same sky I'm looking at.
She says nothing.
After a while she picks me up and carries me back to the bed and holds me there until the sky is fully light. She doesn't mention it to anyone. She doesn't ask why.
I've been trying to keep my distance. I've been doing it deliberately, carefully, for all the reasons that made sense: I don't know this world, I don't know what I am in it, proximity and attachment are vulnerabilities I can't afford until I understand the structure I'm operating in.
That morning made it harder.
I filed it under variables requiring further analysis and did not return to it.
I have returned to it, involuntarily, approximately forty times since.
I am four years old on the afternoon everything changes.
The day is unremarkable. Grey sky, light snow since morning, the kind of day that presses the household inward. My father is in the war room with his commanders. The ladies have been dismissed. For the first time in what feels like weeks, the suite is empty except for the two of us.
My mother has decided we're going to play.
She produces a set of carved wooden pieces — knights, towers, mages with staffs, and at the center of each side two slightly larger crowned figures. She sets them on a board between us on the rug before the fire and tells me the game is called Kingfall. Her grandfather Voss taught it to her when she was small.
She explains the rules with the clarity she brings to everything she teaches me. Each piece moves according to its nature. The crowned pieces move in any direction but only one step, making them powerful in position and vulnerable in isolation.
"The crowned piece is strongest when it is not alone," she says, arranging the starting positions. "This is the first lesson of Kingfall. I've found it's also the first lesson of most things that matter."
She looks at me when she says it. I hold her gaze and say nothing, because there is nothing a four-year-old is supposed to say to that, and I am trying to be a four-year-old.
She smiles slightly and moves her first piece.
I let her win the first game. I make deliberate errors — exploratory rather than random, the kind a child makes when learning a new system — and she corrects each one gently, explaining the logic. I listen and store the game theory alongside everything else.
The second game I play honestly, because I'm curious about her.
She is very good. She controls the center efficiently, protects her crowned piece with elegant redundancy, applies pressure on two flanks simultaneously. Long practice and natural instinct both, I think. The combination is harder to read than either alone.
I hold her to a draw. I could win — I identify the path halfway through and choose not to take it — and she notices. I see it in the slight shift of her attention, the way her eyes move from the board to my face and back.
"You are being careful," she says. Not quite an accusation.
"I don't want to make mistakes," I say.
Both things are true. She knows the second one is doing more work than the first.
"Neither do I, Aldric," she says quietly, almost to herself. "Neither do I."
We play in comfortable silence after that. The fire settles beside us. The snow continues outside. And I allow myself, for the space of one careful breath, to notice that this is not an unpleasant way to spend an afternoon.
That's when the door opens.
I register several things at once, in the order my instincts have learned to prioritize them.
No knock. A breach of protocol significant enough to mean the person doing it has decided protocol is no longer the relevant consideration.
Sir Aldous Crane. Knight-Captain of my father's personal guard. In campaign plate — not dress uniform, campaign plate, still dusty from hard riding. A man I have categorized over two years of observation as disciplined to the point of stoniness and reliably unshakeable.
He is shaking.
Not visibly — not to anyone who hasn't learned to read the microtremors of adrenaline in a person trying to contain them. But I see it in the set of his jaw, the controlled breathing, the hands held very still at his sides in the manner of hands that have been deliberately stilled.
My mother has already risen. She moves with her usual composure, but I watch the color leave her face in the half second between recognizing Sir Aldous and saying his name.
"Sir Aldous." Her voice is perfectly even. "What has happened."
Not a question. The people in this family don't ask questions when they already know they won't like the answers.
Sir Aldous looks at her. Then, briefly, at me — at the child on the rug beside the unfinished Kingfall board — and something moves across his face that takes me a full second to name.
Grief.
"My Lady," he says, in the voice of a man carrying something almost too heavy to carry and still speaking around it. "There has been a breach."
My mother stands very still.
"The Hollowed have crossed the Ashenwall."
The fire crackles. The snow falls silently outside the window. The Kingfall pieces stand in their positions on the board between two players who have both stopped pretending they are only playing a game.
"The Grand Duke," my mother says.
Three words. Stripped of everything except the question she can't make herself finish asking.
Sir Aldous opens his mouth.
The pause before he answers is the longest silence I have ever survived.
And I have survived a great many silences.
— End of Chapter One —
Chapter Two: What the North Took