— ✦ —
There was a universal truth about death, and it was that no one really knew what came after.
Priests had theories. Philosophers had theories. The drunks in the taverns of Iztheria had the best theories of all, though they rarely remembered them the next day.
None of them mentioned being a baby again.
Corvus Romulus II, who in his previous life had thought deeply about many things and superficially about this one in particular, considered during the first days that this was, probably, a specialized form of hell.
It made sense. There was a certain theological rigor to it.
That a man who had given thirty years to the discipline of steel ended up unable to control his own bladder seemed like the kind of irony only the gods knew how to design.
The crying came on its own.
That was the worst part.
It wasn't that he wanted to cry. It was that the body cried, and he was inside the body, and there was nothing else to do about it. He was hungry and the body cried. He was cold and the body cried. Sometimes, with a particularly sharp humiliation, he had nothing wrong at all and the body cried anyway.
Corvus —who was no longer Corvus, though he still hadn't gotten used to being something else— observed the process from inside with the distant fascination of a man witnessing a battle he could not influence.
The baby cried.
He thought.
They were two separate activities occurring in the same flesh.
The first months were humiliating in such a complete way that even the humiliation began to grow bored. It was hard to sustain the inner drama when you spent eighteen hours a day asleep. It was hard to maintain the dignity of a defeated prince when someone was changing your diapers. By the sixth month, Corvus had made peace with an uncomfortable truth: suffering, like everything else, had a ceiling.
Once you touched the ceiling, you started looking at the ceiling.
And when you looked at the ceiling, you started noticing things.
The first thing he noticed was the language.
He didn't understand a word.
Corvus had spoken three languages in his previous life: the common tongue of Iztheria, the coastal dialect of the Grey Sea, and a reasonable amount of the southern kingdoms' tongue. He had read texts in four more. He considered himself, with the modest pride of a man who had been forced to educate himself alone, someone with a good ear for languages.
None of the languages he had known resembled in the slightest the one that now surrounded him.
It wasn't the accent. It wasn't a variant. It was something else entirely.
Interesting, he thought, the first time he understood it.
He thought interesting because it was safer than thinking the other thing.
But the other thing was there, and it grew, a little more each day.
The second thing he noticed was his mother's face.
The features were... different.
In Iztheria, people looked like people. There were variations —paler in the north, more bronzed in the south, the people of the maritime kingdoms with that olive tone everyone recognized— but they all looked like what one expected of a familiar human being. Faces were familiar before they were individual.
His mother's face was not like that.
It wasn't ugly. It was the opposite of ugly. But there was something in the bones, in the shape of the eyes, in the angle of the jaw, that Corvus did not recall ever having seen in thirty years of observing faces.
The same with his father. Blond, yes. Broad, yes. But there was something in the structure of his body, a density in the shoulders and forearms — he had never seen a human soldier whose own sword he had measured against look anything like him.
Interesting, he thought again.
The word was beginning to lose its usefulness.
He decided he was not going to speculate without information.
That was an old rule of his. Men who speculated without information died in lost wars. Speculation was what had led his father to believe that Zazha was the most dangerous kingdom when all along the most dangerous front had been Darius's own cowardice.
No.
Information first. Conclusions later.
The first thing was the language. Without the language there was no access to anything else.
So Corvus, inside the baby called Lucius, did something no baby in the history of that world had ever done: he began to learn systematically.
He listened.
He listened to everything. Every conversation between his parents. Every word the maids exchanged when they thought he was asleep. Every lullaby. Every morning complaint. Every brief order his mother gave his father about things they did in that kitchen Corvus still hadn't fully seen because he couldn't yet sit up.
He classified.
Words that appeared when they carried him. Words that appeared when they fed him. Words that appeared when someone was upset. Words that appeared when someone was leaving.
By the first year, he understood enough to follow basic conversations.
At a year and three months, he began to speak.
His parents —Isa and Ron, those were the names, he had deciphered them in the third month— thought their son was a genius.
Corvus, inside the baby, thought his parents had remarkably low expectations.
But he didn't tell them. Nor could he have.
Isa was in her twenties.
That much Corvus calculated from observing her body, her skin, the way she moved. In Iztheria she would have been a young woman, almost a girl still. Here she seemed a complete woman, at the exact peak of her strength.
And she was strong.
Corvus knew this with absolute certainty the first time she carried him with one arm while holding a full bucket of water with the other. There was no effort in the gesture. The bucket was heavy —Corvus knew because she had made a small grunt when lifting it from the floor— and yet she moved it through the house as if she were carrying air.
It wasn't the strength of a peasant. It was the strength of someone trained.
The body said it too. Athletic without being bulky. Firm shoulders. Forearms marked with the kind of muscle that only appears when you have wielded something heavy for years. Pale, with an almost lunar paleness beneath hair as black as a raven, and eyes of the same color that swept rooms with the unconscious precision of someone who checks perimeters without realizing they are doing it.
She was beautiful.
Corvus noted it without sentimentality. It was a fact. Like noting that a sword was well balanced.
But beyond the beauty, she was a warrior.
And that interested him much more.
Ron was something else.
Blond, broad-shouldered, Corvus recalled a kind of body he had seen in the miners of the northern mountains of Iztheria. Strong, no doubt, but strong the way an ox is strong: from work, not from training.
He was a farmer. That also became clear quickly.
He spoke about the land the way other men speak about women. He knew the cycles. He knew when the clouds would bring rain before the sky even darkened. He knew fifty different words for soil, and each meant something slightly different, and Corvus filed them away with the patience of a strategist who would one day need them all.
Ron was also a merchant. He sold what the land produced, and bought what the land did not give. He traveled sometimes. He came back with things.
And he cried.
That was the part Corvus had not expected.
Ron cried when Lucius took his first step. He cried when Lucius said a new word. He cried, one afternoon for no apparent reason, simply because the boy had fallen asleep on his chest during a nap.
At first Corvus found it uncomfortable. In Iztheria, men did not cry. Men died. It was cleaner.
After a few months, he stopped finding it uncomfortable.
He even began to find it...
He didn't have a word for that yet.
He left it pending.
The house was not alone.
It took Corvus a while to understand the logic of the matter. In Iztheria, servants worked in castles and the mansions of wealthy nobles. Common folk did not have servants. Common folk were the servants.
Here, apparently, the matter was different.
Ron and Isa lived in a spacious house in the middle of the countryside. A house of farmer-merchants, yes, but with two young employees. And those employees were not a sign of ostentatious wealth. They were, according to the conversations Corvus had been deciphering for months, a practical matter: domestic service was a profession with its own schools, with standards, with reputation. A good maid was hired the way one hired a craftsman.
The two who lived with them were fifteen years old.
Nina and Ela.
Nina was small.
Small in a way that confused.
When Corvus first saw her, he thought she was a girl of nine or ten. It took him weeks to adjust the calculation, because the other indicators didn't match: the way she spoke, the certainty with which she moved through the house, the way Isa and Ron treated her —with the respect one reserves for a young professional, not the tenderness one reserves for a child.
One day, while Lucius pretended to play with a wooden block on the floor, he heard Isa say something to Nina about "your sixteenth birthday next month."
Corvus, on the floor, looked up.
Nina was fifteen years old.
She measured, generously, four feet three.
Ah, thought Corvus. Then she's not a child. She's simply... small.
He observed her more closely over the following days. She had the body of someone much younger, yes, but her face —if one looked carefully, without prejudice— had the slightly more defined bones of an adolescent. Freckles crossed her nose with an almost comic density. The purple hair, cut into an uneven bob, fell to her shoulders when she didn't tie it back. The eyes, also purple, looked at the world with a seriousness disproportionate to any age.
She was not a dwarf. She was not a child. She was simply Nina: an adolescent who, for some biological reason Corvus had not yet deciphered, had grown less than her age suggested.
And she was, without any doubt, the most terrifying presence in the house.
Especially during meals.
When Lucius didn't finish the vegetable purée —and Lucius's body, with the independent opinion of baby bodies, hated vegetable purée— Nina would stand beside his high chair, cross her little arms, and simply stare at him.
She didn't say anything.
She didn't do anything.
She just stared.
And Corvus, who had faced barbarian warriors at the other end of his sword and looked death in the eye, discovered with intimate bewilderment that he could not hold the gaze of a fifteen-year-old girl who measured four feet three.
He finished the purée.
Humiliating, he thought every time. Profoundly humiliating.
But he finished it.
Ela was different.
Blond, tall, with eyes blue as the sky on a clear day, her hair almost always pulled back in a long ponytail. She was nearly as tall as Isa. She was kind in a way that did not seem put on: kind as she breathed.
Corvus quickly noticed the resemblance to Ron.
The hair color was the same. The structure of the shoulders, though adapted to a younger and more feminine body, had the same pattern. Even the way they both laughed —opening their eyes wide first, then tilting the head slightly back— was identical.
A cousin?, Corvus wondered. A niece? Some relative who ended up in service?
He never asked directly. Babies didn't ask those kinds of things.
But he filed the observation, along with all the others, in the orderly place in his head where things that did not yet make sense but eventually would were kept.
Ela held him often. She sang to him. She told him things in a soft voice when she thought he didn't understand. Corvus discovered he waited for those moments with an expectation he didn't know quite how to classify.
Sometimes, when Isa was working and Ron had traveled, Ela was the one who put him to sleep.
Corvus, inside the baby, would fall asleep against the shoulder of this blond girl who sang songs in a language he had learned from scratch, and he would think, with a surgical precision he could not soften:
This was not given to me in my previous life.
It was an uncomfortable thought.
He filed that one too.
The countryside stretched as far as the eye could see.
That was the first thing Corvus thought, the first time they took him outside. Not the first time he felt the sun on his face —that had been more of a confused sensory surprise— but the first time he looked at the horizon with eyes that focused properly.
Green.
Everything was green, and flat, and clean.
In Iztheria, the landscape always had something: a wall, a road, a village, the smoke of a distant chimney, some sign that the world was inhabited. Here there were meadows. And more meadows. And on the horizon, the only thing that broke the line was a low, bluish mountain range that seemed a day and a half's journey away.
The air was different.
That he noticed immediately. In Iztheria, even in rural areas, the air had layers: smell of earth, of animals, of smoke, of burnt wood, of the thousand small things people do when they live together. Here the air had an almost aggressive purity. It smelled of grass, of sun, of clean water. Nothing more.
Few people, thought Corvus.
Or none nearby.
He filed that too.
On his second birthday, he asked for books.
It was the first thing he asked for out loud in a complete sentence. He was sitting in the high chair, with a piece of honey bread in his hand —which, he had to admit, was a considerable improvement over the vegetable purée— and he said, with all the clarity that the vocal apparatus of a two-year-old allowed:
—Books. For my birthday. Please.
Isa dropped the spoon she was holding.
Ron, who had just walked in from the field, stopped at the door.
Nina blinked once and then went back to looking at the floor as if she had heard nothing.
Ela brought both hands to her mouth.
—Books?— said Isa, slowly, with a caution adults reserve for small wild animals. —What kind of books, my love?
—Any kind— said Lucius, keeping his voice in the childish register but the words in a carefully calibrated order. —Whatever there is. I like letters.
There was a silence.
Then Ron began to cry.
Corvus, inside the baby, thought: Again.
And he also thought: It's not bad.
The second sentence surprised him more than the first.
Knowledge was the highest form of power.
That Corvus had known all his previous life, though no one had taught him with those words. He had learned it alone, night after night, in the library of the palace of Iztheria, stealing hours of sleep to read what the royal academy denied him by birth.
Now, with real books for the first time in this new body, he applied the same discipline.
He hoped to know where he was.
He hoped, ideally, to discover how much time had passed between his death and this rebirth. Whether any kingdom resembled Iztheria. Whether any name sounded familiar.
Whether Strunggel still lived.
Whether Darius and Kayn still lived.
Whether he could still fulfill the oath he had made beneath the moon, with his mouth full of blood, while his hand faded toward the sky.
Books, as books sometimes do, had another idea.
The first book was on basic geography.
Corvus opened it with the hands of a two-year-old and the eyes of a thirty-year-old strategist, and on the third page he found the first blow.
The world was divided into five continents.
Not into kingdoms. Into continents.
And the names, in the elegant calligraphy in which they were printed on the page, were these:
Valendar, the continent of men.
Sylvaria, the continent of elves.
Grondheim, the continent of dwarves.
Vhalmyr, the continent of dragons.
Noctheria, the Empty Continent.
Corvus stared at the page for a full minute.
Elves, he thought.
Dragons.
Dwarves.
In Iztheria, elves were characters from stories grandmothers told their grandchildren when they wanted to scare them or put them to sleep, depending on the type of grandmother. Dragons were the same category, one rung higher. Dwarves were tavern drunks: those were the worst, because sometimes drunks swore they had seen one, and the other drunks believed them just enough to buy another round.
Here they had continents.
Each their own.
Corvus looked back at the name Valendar. Then Sylvaria. Then Vhalmyr.
Ah, he thought.
Of course.
He turned the page.
Valendar was divided into six kingdoms.
Each kingdom was governed by a noble House.
The names, in the translation Lucius was making mentally into the language of Iztheria as he read, were:
House Frost, bearers of the element of Ice.
House Ember, bearers of the element of Fire.
House Zephyr, bearers of the element of Wind.
House Terran, bearers of the element of Earth.
House Tidal, bearers of the element of Water.
House Storm, bearers of the element of Thunder.
The six houses, according to the text, swore loyalty to a single absolute sovereign: the Great Supreme King Orga Frost.
And the six kingdoms, together, had once had two more houses: House Lumen, of the element of Light, and House Umbra, of the element of Shadow.
Both had disappeared five hundred years ago, in the War against Noctheria.
Lucius lifted his eyes from the book.
He looked out the window.
Outside, the green meadows stretched to the distant mountain range. A clean wind moved the tall grass. Isa was outside, in the back garden, crouched doing something Lucius could not see from where he was.
It was not his world.
It was not simply another place in his world. It was not another era of his world. It was not some forgotten corner of Iztheria his home.
He had been reborn into a completely different world.
And that meant Darius did not live here.
Kayn did not live here.
Strunggel did not live here.
The twelve knights who had turned their swords on him beneath an indifferent moon did not live here.
There was no possible vengeance.
There never would be.
Lucius closed the book slowly.
He set it on the low table he could barely reach.
He stayed sitting on the floor, his short legs stretched out in front of him, staring at a crack in the wood of the floor as if it were profoundly interesting.
Inside, something sank.
It wasn't rage. Rage had been the only thing that had sustained him during the last minutes of his previous life. He had carried it inside the way one carries a torch in the dark: it was uncomfortable, it burned, but it gave light. He had slept with it. He had planned with it. He had died with it.
He had made an oath with it.
And now the oath was impossible to fulfill.
Not because he had failed. For something worse. Because the object of the oath was in a place he could not reach, in a world that probably no longer existed, separated from him by a distance not even the gods —if they existed, if any sun goddess had truly heard him that night— could cross.
His father would die without paying.
Kayn would die without paying.
Strunggel would die without paying.
The traitors would die without paying.
And there would be nothing —absolutely nothing— that Corvus Romulus II, now Lucius, could do about it, ever, in any of the lives that remained to him.
He stayed staring at the crack in the wood for a long time.
So long that Ela, passing through the hall with a basket of laundry, peeked in and asked if he was all right.
—Yes— said Lucius, in his child's voice. —Thinking.
Ela smiled at him.
—You think a lot for a two-year-old, baby.
And she stroked his hair and kept walking.
Lucius stayed staring at the door she had gone through.
Inside, something changed.
The torch did not go out. The torch was no longer needed. But where there had been only rage before, now there was something else as well, warmer and stranger, that Lucius did not finish naming in that moment and that would probably take him years to name fully.
Isa.
Ron, crying in the doorway because his son had asked for books.
Ela, singing songs in a language learned from scratch.
Nina, watching him eat his purée with the severity of an imperial judge.
This house. This countryside. This life.
No one, in thirty years in Iztheria, had ever looked at him the way Isa looked at him when she thought he was asleep.
No one had cried with happiness for him.
No one had cared whether he finished his food.
...
Corvus —Lucius— breathed deeply.
He realized, with a clarity that surprised him, that he did not want to die again.
Not soon. Not for a long time.
These people loved him.
That was new.
And that changed things.
He spent entire afternoons thinking.
Not about impossible vengeance. That door was no longer open. He closed it deliberately, the way a strategist closes a front he cannot win, to free up resources for the fronts he can.
He thought, instead, about the following.
This world had magic.
The next books, the ones Ron brought the following week —he brought seven, which had been expensive, but Ron was the kind of man who did not check the price of important things— made it clear. The humans of Valendar did not channel something as modest as essence. Here there were warriors who manipulated fire. Water. Wind. Lightning. Earth.
There were mages who did things that in Iztheria would have been considered miracles of the gods.
There were abilities, according to one text, "that manifested only once a generation and changed the shape of the world when they appeared."
Essence —his essence, the highest achievement of Iztheria, the multiplier of ten that only six people in the entire kingdom had reached— seemed by comparison the toy of a child.
Lucius read that and, for the first time in months, smiled.
It wasn't a big smile. It was barely a minimal contraction at the corner of his mouth that Isa, had she seen it, would have interpreted as gas.
But it was a smile.
Interesting, he thought.
And this time the word actually meant something.
He had two years, a useless body, and all the time in the world.
He had a warrior mother who could teach him things.
He had a father who loved him.
He had two maids who cared for him as if he were the most valuable thing in the house —one affectionate, the other small and terrifying, both, in their own way, part of his life now.
He had a house surrounded by infinite green meadows.
He had books.
And he had, somewhere out there beyond the bluish mountain range, five continents he had never seen. Sylvaria, where the elves who in Iztheria were grandmothers' tales actually lived. Grondheim, where the dwarves who were tavern drunks had whole cities carved in stone. Vhalmyr, where the dragons his ancestors had placed in legends apparently breathed and ruled their own land. And Noctheria —the Void— which had devoured two entire elemental houses and which the books mentioned with the care men reserve for things they prefer not to speak of.
He had, in short, an entire world to explore.
Corvus Romulus II had died with an oath on his lips and blood in his mouth.
Lucius —who was beginning, for the first time, to feel that name as his own— would live with something different.
A simpler ambition. A newer one. More his own.
I'm going to grow strong, he thought, looking out the window at the green meadows that stretched to the horizon.
I'm going to protect these people.
And I'm going to see every corner of this world before I die.
Outside, Isa was coming in from the garden with a basket of something red on her shoulder. Ron, in the back, was repairing a fence that had fallen in the last rain. Ela was singing in the kitchen. Nina, from somewhere, was watching.
Lucius, on the floor of the living room, closed the book.
He smiled again.
This time, a little more.
— ✦ —
End of Chapter 2