Solomon Valdraig was six years old, and he had decided somewhere around month two of being six that six was the worst part of reincarnation.
Not the powerlessness.
Not the indignity of needing help with buttons.
Not even the body falling asleep mid-sentence during conversations he was genuinely enjoying — though that one came close.
The worst part was remembering thirty-four.
Thirty-four had its own desk, its own shelves, cold tea going cold at its own pace without anyone calling him downstairs about it.
Two hundred and fourteen browser tabs left open like a man who had quietly committed to understanding everything before he let himself rest — which, in retrospect, was both the most accurate description of his character and a clinically concerning one.
He looked at the book in his lap. Celtic land covenants, third read, not because it was good but because his room had run out of better options three weeks ago and going downstairs meant talking to people, and people before noon were a tax he hadn't budgeted for in either of his lives.
Then Aldric called from two floors below.
"Sol! Come down. The Ashfords will be here within the hour."
His father never needed to be loud. Rooms simply agreed with Aldric Valdraig — the way rooms agree with a fire, not because the fire asked, but because warmth is just what a fire does.
Solomon looked at the book.
The Ashfords, he thought. Right. Today.
He put it down and went downstairs.
His father was already in the entrance hall wearing the blue coat.
The coat his mother had laid out the previous night, on the chair his father always reached toward in the morning, at exactly the angle a man's hand finds without thinking — so that Aldric had crossed the room at half seven, seen it, and felt the comfortable certainty of a man making his own decision.
He had not made his own decision.
Solomon had understood this about the household by age three. His mother didn't argue, didn't instruct, didn't raise her voice. She arranged the world into the shape of conclusions she had already reached and waited for everyone else to walk into them feeling pleased with themselves.
The elegant part was that they always did.
"There he is!"
His father crossed the hall in three strides and straightened Solomon's collar with both hands — the gesture of a man who needed somewhere to put his happiness and had settled on collars.
"The Ashfords are good people. Duke Ashford stood with us in the restoration — one of only two families who didn't turn when it mattered. Without him and the Nolans, we don't take back the throne. Simple as that."
"I know," Solomon said.
"Smart boy."
His father ruffled his hair.
Four times, Solomon noted. That story, four times. I've cross-referenced it. I have questions about the sequencing in the third month. I am keeping those questions entirely to myself.
His mother appeared at the top of the stairs.
She came down the way she always moved through rooms — unhurried, taking inventory. The flowers. Aldric's coat. Solomon's collar, freshly straightened. She passed Aldric without stopping, said "the blue works," and adjusted one stem in the arrangement by the door two inches to the left.
"I'm wearing the blue," his father said.
"I know," she said.
She turned from the flowers and her eyes went to Solomon — brief, not obvious — and then away.
Something is happening today, he thought. Beyond the obvious.
He waited.
The Ashford carriage came up the drive at half past ten.
Good horses. Matched bays moving with the ease of animals that have never been asked to hurry because no one in their household has ever needed to.
Duke Ashford stepped out first — a solid, still man, the kind of stillness that doesn't announce itself. He looked at the estate and gave one slight nod, the nod of a man confirming something he had already expected.
He knows what's being offered today, Solomon thought. He came to receive it.
The Duchess followed.
Then a girl stepped out of the carriage.
Copper hair. Five years old, maybe just turned six. She stepped onto the gravel and looked at it, then at the house, then at the gardens, then — working through some internal checklist with the brisk efficiency of someone who had been doing assessments since before she had words for them — at the window where Solomon was standing.
He didn't move.
She looked at him for three full seconds with the eyes of someone taking a measurement.
Then she looked away.
Huh, he thought.
The adults disappeared into the drawing room.
The children were left in the entrance hall with instructions to play nicely — the adult phrase for we have arrangements to finalize and prefer no witnesses — and Solomon stood at the bottom of the stairs while the girl conducted what appeared to be a thorough inspection of the hall.
She turned to him.
"Your hall is smaller than ours."
"Probably," he said.
A pause. That wasn't the response she'd prepared for.
"The proportion is off. Someone made a poor decision about the east wall."
"It was rebuilt in 1683 after a fire," Solomon said. "The original proportion was better — you can see the join in the plasterwork just below the cornice."
She looked at the plasterwork.
Then at him.
Something shifted in her expression — not much, just a quiet recalibration, the look of someone updating a prior assumption.
"You read."
"Constantly. It's becoming a problem."
"I read as well." A short pause. "My governess says it's unladylike."
"Your governess made a poor decision."
She almost smiled. She caught it before it arrived and looked at him instead with the eyes of someone who has decided a situation requires more attention than she initially allocated.
"You're strange for a six-year-old."
Lady, Solomon thought, you have genuinely no idea.
"I've been told," he said.
She wanted to see the grounds.
Not a question — an announcement. He took her out through the formal garden toward the wilder land at the estate's edge, where the grounds stopped being managed and became simply old, the kind of old that doesn't ask permission.
She walked beside him and had opinions about the garden.
Several were accurate.
She is five years old and she has a position on the drainage arrangements, he thought. This is remarkable. I mean that with complete sincerity.
The stone outcropping sat at the far edge where the earth rose into a shelf of grey rock before dropping eight feet to the boundary ditch below. Solomon always felt the ground differently here — lower, older, like something that had been waiting with the patience of things that have never once doubted they have time.
She walked toward the edge without slowing.
"The stone near the ledge isn't stable," Solomon said.
"It looks stable," she said, and stepped onto it.
She stood at the edge looking out at the tree line, the drop behind her, not looking at it — the posture of someone who considered gravity a suggestion.
"Your grounds are larger than they appear from the drive."
"Please step back."
"I'm perfectly fine, I can see exactly where—"
The crack came from the base.
One clean sound, like something that had been deciding for a long time and had finally decided.
The shelf tilted — not gradually, all at once — and Elizabeth's weight went forward with it and she had nothing to grab.
Solomon moved without thinking.
Two steps and he had her arm, and that was where any plan ended, because the stone under his feet chose that exact moment to finish what it had started. The shelf lurched. He had her arm. She grabbed his coat. They went down together onto the tilting rock and —
The ground moved.
Not a tremor. The earth at the cliff's edge surged — stone pushing up through soil, thick and sudden and deliberate, a ridge of it rising just fast enough to catch them both before the drop.
Solomon's back hit it. Elizabeth hit him. They stopped.
The stone held.
Silence.
He lay on his back against a ridge of freshly raised earth, the cliff edge eight feet to his left, a five-year-old on top of him, and the distinct internal awareness of a man who has just done something he cannot explain and is choosing to file it under later.
That was me, he thought. I don't know how. Later.
Elizabeth lifted her head.
Her face was three inches from his.
Copper hair completely loose, a streak of earth across her cheek, eyes wide — not frightened, past frightened, the specific expression of someone who has just survived something and hasn't yet decided what to do about it.
They looked at each other.
Later, Solomon would struggle to account for what happened next.
He had been a historian. He understood cause and effect, the gap between stimulus and response where all human dignity lives. He knew he was six. He knew she was five. He knew this was 1753.
None of that reached the part of him that had spent his entire previous life alone — that had crossed an ocean of dark and a death and a rebirth and was still, underneath everything, a man who had never learned what to do when someone was three inches away looking at him like that.
Close, and real, and there.
He closed the distance.
It lasted the length of a single heartbeat. Barely a touch, more the idea of one than the thing itself — and then his mind caught up with his instincts and he pulled back.
The expression on his face was the expression of a man watching the full weight of a significant error assemble itself in real time.
No, he thought.
No no no. I am six years old. She is five. I have standards. I have always had standards. Where did my standards go. I would like them returned immediately—
Elizabeth hadn't moved.
She was looking at him with an expression he had never seen on a five-year-old and suspected he would never see again — the expression of someone who has had something happen that their entire framework for the world has no category for, who has looked at every available reaction, found all of them inadequate, and selected the only one that doesn't require her to figure out what she is actually feeling.
The colour in her face was very high.
Solomon carefully sat up. She sat up. They were no longer three inches apart, which was an improvement.
He looked at the cliff edge. Then at the ridge of stone that had not existed ten minutes ago and currently existed very much. He looked at his hands.
Sixteen, he told himself, with the firmness of a man establishing policy under adverse conditions. Minimum. Possibly seventeen. This is not negotiable. This is not up for discussion. I am filing the last thirty seconds under Things That Did Not Happen and I am moving on.
He stood and offered her his hand.
She looked at it for a long moment.
Then she took it and stood — without actually putting any weight on it — which he noted and filed quietly under her general character.
They stood on the outcropping looking at the ridge, the drop, the tree line, everything except each other.
"You could have just said something," she said finally. Her voice was admirably steady.
"I didn't have time," he said.
A pause.
"You're going to be very inconvenient," she said.
The most accurate sentence in either of my lifetimes, Solomon thought.
"Probably," he said.
She turned and walked back toward the estate — straight back, precise steps, the performance of someone who is absolutely fine and does not need anyone to look at them.
Solomon stayed where he was.
He looked at the ridge of stone — still raised, still there, permanent — then at the drop it had stopped, then at his hands, then up at the estate.
His mother was at the upper window.
Not looking at the grounds. Not at the tree line.
At him.
She turned away before he could read her expression.
She arranged today, he thought. She was at that window because she wanted to see what happened. She knows what the ground just did. She has always known.
He stood there a moment longer, looked briefly at the sky in the manner of a man with several things he'd like to raise with whoever was responsible for his current situation, received no answer, and went inside.
Elizabeth was sitting on the bottom step of the stairs.
Back straight. Looking at the front door with the focused composure of someone performing calm for an audience of zero.
Solomon stopped on the step above her.
She didn't look up immediately. When she did it was with the eyes of someone who had spent the last ten minutes making decisions and was committed to all of them.
"Valdraig," she said.
"Elizabeth," he said.
She held his gaze for exactly long enough. Then she looked back at the door.
He went upstairs.
Seventeen, he decided. Minimum. I'm moving the number. This is final.