The baby arrived in the deep of winter.
Not dramatically — Wren was not a dramatic person, had the specific, practical relationship with her own body that women develop when they have spent their lives in circumstances that require reliability rather than sensitivity, and she had gone into labour on a Tuesday morning, informed Sera with the matter-of-fact directness of someone reporting a weather condition, and produced her son by the fifth bell of the afternoon with the focused efficiency that characterized everything she did.
He was healthy and he was extremely loud about it.
He arrived into the world with the specific, comprehensive vocal protest of a person who has opinions about the transition from warm to cold and is not prepared to moderate those opinions for anyone's comfort, and the east servants' wing had rearranged itself around the noise with the accepting, slightly amused adaptation of a household that has not had a new person in some time.
Gerffron heard him from the library.
He set down his book and thought; she is all right.
He picked the book back up.
He could not read.
He set it down again.
Three months passed.
Three months of the specific, reconfigured rhythm of a household that has accommodated a new presence — the sounds different, the morning schedule adjusted, the servants' wing producing at various hours a quality of noise that was either cheerful or alarming depending on the hour and the lung capacity of its source.
The baby's name was Oswin.
He was, by the end of three months, recognizably a person — not yet a full person, still largely operating as an extremely demanding and surprisingly opinionated small animal, but one with a face that had settled into something specific rather than the generic expressiveness of newborns, and with a personality that had begun to declare itself in the particular ways that infant personalities declared themselves: through preference, through response, through the very clear communication of exactly who and what he wanted at any given moment.
Wren had recovered.
This was the word the physician used, and it was accurate in the strictly medical sense, but what Wren had actually done was something larger than recover — she had reconstituted, which was different, which was the specific process of a person who has been at the edge of their own erasure and has come back from it not exactly as they were before but as something that includes the having-been-there.
She had submitted her application to Orreth on a Monday.
The application was written — not the verbal request of a servant seeking reassignment but an actual written document, three paragraphs, composed with the care of someone who has very little formal education and has used every bit of it. Gerffron had helped her with the writing, though she had told him what to say and he had only corrected the spelling, because the words were hers and she had been clear about that.
Orreth had looked at it.
She had looked at it for longer than a three-paragraph document typically required.
Then she had looked at Wren.
"You are aware," Orreth said, with the specific tone of a woman raising an objection she already suspects will be overruled, "that personal attendance is a demanding position even for experienced household staff. You have a three-month-old infant."
"I'm aware," Wren said.
"The duties—"
"I know the duties. I've been on household staff for eighteen months. I know what personal attendance requires."
"And the infant—"
"Oswin will come with me during the morning hours, when the nursery staff aren't available. The consort keeps library hours. A library is a quiet environment. Oswin is—" Wren paused, selecting her word with precision "—adaptable."
Orreth regarded her.
"Adaptable." she repeated.
"He sleeps when I work. I have tested this."
"You have tested this."
"Yes. For three weeks. I can prove it."
Orreth set the application on her desk.
She picked up her pen.
She looked at Wren with the expression of a woman who manages a household with the precision of a military campaign and who has just encountered something that her existing categories do not fully contain.
"Fine," she said. "One month's trial. If the infant becomes a disruption to the household's schedule or the former consort's requirements—"
"Oswin won't." Wren said.
"If he does," Orreth said firmly, "the arrangement ends and you return to general staff. Is that understood?"
"Understood."
"And Wren?"
"Yes, Mistress Orreth?"
"If you find yourself on any terrace," Orreth said, in a tone that was not unkind but was entirely serious, "at any time, for any reason, you tell someone. That condition has not expired."
Wren met her eyes.
"I know," she said. "I will. Thank you."
Orreth signed the application.
Gerffron was in the library on a Tuesday morning three weeks after Wren's application was approved, at the reading table with the constitutional history he had been working through, when the door opened.
He looked up.
Wren stood in the doorway.
She was in her new attendance uniform — the slightly better gray of personal staff rather than general staff, a practical apron over it, her hair up. She looked well. She looked, he thought, like the person she had been becoming since the terrace, which was someone who had decided to be here and was being here with her entire self.
In her arms was Oswin.
Oswin was three months and two weeks old and currently in the philosophical state that infants occupied between sleeping and full alertness — the slightly vacant, deeply inward-looking state of a person who has recently woken and is still deciding what they think about the world.
Wren crossed the library. "Greetings master Gerffron. I am Wren and from today I'll be your personal attendent."
The word 'attendant' prickled Gerffron's ears. All he was surrounded with were his wife's or her unofficial lover crown prince's spy. He simply nodded and smiled.
She stopped at the reading table.
"I have to dust the upper shelves," she said. "They haven't been done properly in six weeks. It will take approximately forty minutes."
"All right." Gerffron said.
"Oswin is fed and dry and has been awake for twenty minutes which means he has approximately—" she tilted her head, performing a calculation "—another forty minutes before he requires attention again."
"All right," Gerffron said again, and then, because something about this conversation had a destination that he was beginning to see, "Wren."
"Yes?"
"Are you about to—"
She placed Oswin in his arms.
He did not drop the book in time.
The book went sideways. Gerffron made a sound that was not a word. Oswin, transferred from the familiar warmth of his mother's arms to the unfamiliar arrangement of a man who was holding him with the specific, slightly desperate care of someone who has been handed something extremely breakable without adequate warning, opened his eyes fully.
He looked at Gerffron.
Gerffron looked at him.
"Wren," Gerffron said, in the tone of a man negotiating from a position of limited leverage.
"Forty minutes." Wren said, already moving toward the upper shelves with her duster.
"Wren, I don't—"
"He likes motion," she said, from the ladder. "If he starts fussing, walk. Not fast. Slow. He also likes humming, but he's not picky about what."
"I cannot—"
"You'll be fine." she said.
"I have literally never—"
"Nobody has, there's a first time for everyone," she said, with the serene authority of a woman who survived a south wing terrace and considers a small infant well within the range of manageable challenges. "You'll figure it out."
She climbed the ladder.
Gerffron looked at Oswin.
Oswin looked at Gerffron.
This had the quality of a mutual assessment.
Oswin's assessment took approximately four seconds. Then his face, which had been in the philosophical middle state, did something that travelled through several configurations — mild interest, slight suspicion, deeper consideration — and arrived at a destination that Gerffron had not expected.
The baby grabbed his finger.
Not accidentally. With the specific, deliberate grip of a person who has decided that this particular finger belongs in their hand and is acting accordingly.
Gerffron looked at the small fist wrapped around his index finger.
He looked at the baby's face.
Oswin looked back at him with enormous, completely serious dark eyes.
"Right," Gerffron said, to the baby, in the careful tone of someone entering a negotiation with an entity whose terms are unclear. "Right. Well."
Oswin did not release the finger.
From the upper shelves, the sound of industrious dusting.
"He's holding my finger," Gerffron said.
"Good," Wren said.
"He's — is he supposed to hold it this tightly?"
"Grip reflex. It's normal."
"He's remarkably strong for something this small."
"Yes."
"Wren."
"Mm."
"He's looking at me."
"He does that."
"Very — intently."
"He looks at everything intently. He gets it from his mother."
Gerffron looked at the intently looking baby.
The baby continued to look back.
There was, in the baby's expression, an absolute and complete absence of any social performance — none of the calculation or management or careful presentation that characterized every adult interaction Gerffron had had in two years of house confinement and one year of the east tower before that. Oswin was looking at him with the pure, unmediated assessment of a being who has not yet learned that looking at things with full attention is considered impolite.
Gerffron found this, unexpectedly, restful.
"What does he want?" he said.
"At the moment? To hold your finger and look at you."
"That's it?"
"That's enough for him."
Gerffron looked at the baby holding his finger.
He settled back in the chair. Carefully. With the specific, concentrated deliberateness of a man who has been given a responsibility he did not ask for and is deciding to take it seriously.
Oswin, apparently satisfied with this development, made a sound.
Not a cry — something rounder, more exploratory. A sound that was testing the air, checking what it produced.
"What was that?" Gerffron said.
"He's talking to you."
"He's—" Gerffron looked at the baby. The baby made the sound again, slightly different this time. "What is he saying?"
"I have no idea," Wren said, from three shelves up. "I've been trying to work it out for three months. I think it means something like I am here and you are there and this is interesting."
Gerffron looked at Oswin.
Oswin looked at Gerffron.
"I am here," Gerffron said, very quietly, to the baby, "and you are there, and yes, this is interesting."
Oswin made the sound again.
He tightened his grip on the finger.
From the shelves, the dusting continued.
From the reading table, a silence of the specific kind that is not empty — the silence of two people engaged in a conversation whose language one of them hasn't fully acquired yet, and which is nonetheless entirely comprehensible to both.
Twenty minutes later, Oswin fell asleep.
He did not release the finger.
Gerffron sat very still for the remaining twenty minutes of the dusting so as not to disturb him.
He could not reach his book.
He did not mind.
He looked at the sleeping baby and felt something that was not complicated — was, in fact, the least complicated thing he had felt in years. The simple, immediate warmth of a person who is being trusted by something that has no reason to trust anyone and does it anyway, with the complete, unreserved confidence of something too new to the world to have learned caution yet.
He thought: you are very small and very new and you have already decided I am safe.
He thought: I will try very hard to deserve that.
He held very still.
He held the finger.