When Liv Brodbeck was twelve years old, she saved a girl from drowning in the river, during the frost fair at Whitehill Upon Aspen.

The morning of the fair, she woke warm and safe, wrapped in her mother’s arms on the cot they shared in the servant’s quarters of Castle Whitehill. They’d wrapped up in wool blankets the night before, to ward off the winter chill. Even better were the soft furs they had bought on a market day two years ago, from Master Forester, the Baron’s woodsman. Liv had asked her mother once wasn’t it funny that the best hunter in the town was named for the woods, and been shushed in return.

“That’s how it is for most people,” Maggie Brodbeck had told her. “Someone’s grandfather’s grandfather got their name by doing something well, and taught their son how to do the job. They’ve all been Millers or Tanners ever since.”

“What did my father do?” Liv had asked, and that had been the end of the conversation, earning her a rap on the knuckles with a wooden spoon.

This morning, she hugged Rosie, her rag doll, to her chest, screwed her eyes up tight, and pretended not to hear the horologe in the kitchen chiming the sixth bell.

“Up and out of bed, my dove,” her mother murmured, and pressed a kiss onto Liv’s cheek before pulling the blankets off. Mama always smelled of spices: clove, nutmeg, cardamom and mace.

“I don’t wanna,” Liv complained, scrunching up her shoulders against the winter cold. A linen shift and stockings were hardly enough to stay warm.

“You want to sleep through a market day, is that it? Sit up and let me at your hair.”

Market day promised sweet treats - and this was no ordinary market day, but a frost fair. Liv couldn’t remember the last one; they were only held when the river froze thick enough to support the weight of everyone in town. She sat up, but kept her eyes closed while her mother pulled off her night cap and went to work with a fine toothed comb of polished Aspen wood. It didn’t take long; her hair was very fine, hardly ever tangled, and wasn’t good for anything but hanging straight down or being pulled back.

“There,” Mama said after one last sweep of the comb. With quick, practiced movements she tied Liv’s hair up in a tight bun. “Get yourself dressed, now, and off with you. The hearth won’t light itself.”

Shivering, Liv stripped off the shift and hose she’d slept in, kicking them across the stone floor in a tangle, then hurried into the clean clothes set out before they’d gone to bed. It wouldn’t warm her up, exactly, but being dressed was better than being bare. Her hose were thick wool, at least: a luxury only possible since she’d begun earning coin as a scullery maid this year. She tied them up tight with garters at the knee, then settled her skirt at her waist and pulled on a sleeved bodice stiffened with buckram, both pieces in the green of Baron Summerset’s arms. Mama helped with that, and then Liv tucked in a white apron and settled a cap over her bun. Once she’d tied on her shoes, she was off.

As the older servants were still dressing in their rooms, Liv tromped down the stairs and into the kitchen. The room was massive, and the hearth at the end was big enough for Liv to stand in - which wasn’t saying much. She guessed that it could fit a grown man, like Archibald, the first footman, or even Baron Henry in his jousting armor.

A fire was already laid from the night before, and a stack of split logs neatly arranged to the left of the hearth. All Liv had to do was get it lit, for the morning tea, imported all the way from Lendh ka Dakruim, and this was her favorite part of the morning chores, because it meant that she could use magic.

For the first month that Liv had worked as a scullion, she’d had to use flint and steel, striking them against each other until she got a spark. Sometimes, the kindling caught, but sometimes it didn’t, and she couldn’t give up, no matter how frustrated she got or how late it made her.

“It’s your job, and no one else’s,” Archibald had told her sternly the one time she’d been silly enough to ask for help. Baron Henry ran the castle, but Archibald ran the servants.

“But you know the spark charm,” Liv had argued. “And so does Mama, and Gretta, and you could all have it done so much faster.” There didn’t seem to be a point to making her do something she found so difficult, when everyone else in the servant’s quarters could have gotten the fire lit with a few words.

“I do,” First Footman Archibald had said, his eyes as cold as the snow on the peaks of the mountains that Mama said never melted, even in summer. “If you don’t want to use flint and steel, you’d better learn it, too. Now, back to work.”

Mean Archie, as Liv called him in her head, made it sound so easy, but it truly wasn’t. You had to get the sounds just right, but they didn’t make any sense - they weren’t normal words at all. The spark charm sounded kind of like jelly-leg-aim, except not.

“It’s in the old tongue,” Gretta had explained one evening after all their work was done, while the fire was being laid. “The tongue of the gods, from long ago when every word was magic, and just speaking a thing made it so.” Gretta had been head cook before Mama, but now she said that she was too old for it, so she was only a kitchen maid and she also told a lot of stories. Some of them were wonderful, like the ones about Miriam when she was a little girl growing up in the house of Tamiris, and some were terrible, such as the battle against Ghveris, the Beast of Iuronnath, but Liv never stopped wanting to hear them.

“Maybe I can’t do it,” Liv has complained with a scowl. “It isn’t fair.”

“You can do it,” Gretta had assured her, and groaned as she bent down by the fire to demonstrate all over again. The old woman never stopped complaining about her knees and her back and her hands, especially before it rained during Flood Season. “Tamiris gave us all The Gift, and he didn’t do something so grand only to leave one little girl out. Say what I say, and mind where it gets loud or soft.”

But Liv hadn’t gotten the charm to work that night, nor the one after either. She’d taken to murmuring the sounds under her breath all throughout the day, so that she couldn’t forget it. When she finally got the charm right, she’d been scrubbing a greasy pan that had immediately caught fire. She’d nearly burned her eyebrows off, but ever since the magic had come every morning, without fail.

“Ghelet legæm,” Liv whispered the morning of the frost fair, and a spark appeared at the touch of her finger, down among the dry kindling. She opened the flue so that the hearth would get enough air, and the dry wood caught as quick as a stooping hawk. Though the charm had never failed to work, not since the first time she’d done it right, Liv couldn’t help grinning all the same. She could do magic.

The grin lasted about as long as it took her to get back up the stairs to the servants’ rooms, passing her mother and Gretta on their way down to the kitchen. Starting with Gretta’s room, Liv took the chamber pots out from under the beds, one after the other, to the servants’ privy, where she tried not to breath while she dumped them. Liv was partial to the younger footmen, Bill and Tom, who almost always slept through the night without using their pots. Gretta and her mother she forgave, but the worst was dealing with Archibald’s chamber pot, which sometimes had blood in it.

Once she had a stack of dirty but emptied pots, Liv had to scrub them out with a rag soaked in vinegar, which was just about the most foul task she could imagine. When she’d first started her duties, she’d had to choke down her own vomit every morning. Once the chamber pots were scrubbed, dried, and back under the beds, it was time to sweep the servants’ quarters, halls, scullery, and pantries while her mother and Gretta cooked.

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Liv always tried to finish the sweeping as quickly as she could, because if she got it all done before the horologe rang the eighth bell, that meant she could help with breakfast. In the winter, the kitchen was the best place to be: the roaring fire in the hearth warmed the entire room, the scent of cooking food and spices cleared her nose of the stench of the chamber pots, and there were always scraps to be eaten as treats.

This morning, Liv found a great iron skillet of chopped potatoes resting on the grate in the hearth. Gretta tossed the potato chunks regularly to keep them from burning, and Liv’s mouth got as wet as the ground in flood season at the scent of garlic, onions, and frying butter wafting up from the pan. There were two kettles of water hung on iron hooks that swung over the fire: one for tea, and the other for making oats. Mama had two skillets on her end, one frying bacon and the other fresh eggs. Together, the two women sang a cooking song, one Liv had heard every morning for as long as she could remember.

Say, she brought my breakfast, she didn't know my name

Say, she cooked my breakfast on that hot open flame.

I like fresh eggs, with hot ground peppers

I like bread hot from the oven

Say, she brought my breakfast

Cesemus co fa, cesemus co fa.

Liv lifted her voice to sing along, then grabbed a stack of pewter trenchers and set them around the table. She’d just turned to get the forks and knives when her mother interrupted her.

“Livy, dove,” Maggie Brodbeck called, breaking off the cooking song. “I need you to take a plate up for Master Grenfell. Sophie’s sick in bed.”

“Aye,” Liv said, feeling suddenly as if she might be sick herself. “He isn’t eating in the great hall? In his rooms, then?” Who knew what Baron Henry’s Court Mage might keep in his rooms. Crystals and glasses for looking at the stars and the rings? Books of spells? Magic rings and wands?

“No,” Mama explained, shaking her head. “He’s working in the Old Baron’s Room of Curiosities. Here,” she said, bringing over a silver tray. Unlike the pewter used for the servants’ meals, every dish on the tray was finely made, and each one heaped with steaming food. “Mind you don’t touch anything in there,” Liv’s mother warned her, and then turned back to her skillets. “You can eat when you get back down. Gretta and I will set the table.”

Holding the silver tray carefully, Liv made her way up the servants’ stairs as quick as she could, making for the second floor of Castle Whitehill, where the Room of Curiosities was located. It was a disappointment not to see the court mage’s private chambers, and all of their treasures within, but the sting was alleviated by the promise of a rare glimpse into the Old Baron’s collection.

Liv had been in the Room of Curiosities only twice before; it was not often used, since Baron Henry’s father had died, and so when someone actually did need the chamber, it was a disruption to the routine of the castle. That was perfect, because the only time Liv was sent out of the servants’ wing, up to where the Baron himself lived, was when something unexpected left no one else available.

Someone - probably Head Footman Archibald - had already come by to unlock the chamber door, so Liv had no trouble getting in. A fire burned in the hearth, as well, which combined with morning light from the open windows to chase away nearly all the shadows. As Liv made her way over to a desk next to the bookcase, many grotesque and bizarre objects seemed to leer at her, some of them even to follow her movements with their eyes.

There was a massive, fanged skull said to be that of a wyrm, and so big that it couldn’t be mounted, but had to be left on the floor; a two headed calf, which Gretta had told Liv was born ten years ago on a local farm; an entire wooden case along one wall stuffed with papers, scrolls and bound books; a statue of white stone that her eyes brushed over, depicting a nude woman who certainly did not seem to miss her clothing; and a second, lower shelf filled with wood that was hard as stone, strange sea-shells dug out of the quarries at Bald Peak, and rocks with the impression of scorpions and odd tentacles creatures in them.

Most impressive of all, mounted on one wall, was the preserved and stuffed body of a bat of incredible size, eyes replaced by glass orbs and mouth open wide in a fearsome lunge, as if it was about to fly off the wall and rip out her throat. The creature’s leathery wings stretched out to cover near half the wall, and Liv guessed that if you measured a grown man against those wings, the man would come up short. Knobby, dull gray stones stuck out of the skin in odd places, most strangely on the bat’s head, where a v-shaped ridge of stone thick as a grown man’s thumb trailed back along the skull toward the ears.

Liv set the breakfast tray down on the desk. She should leave; breakfast was waiting, and kitchen servants weren’t supposed to stay in the pubic parts of the castle once their duties were done. The bat, however, fascinated her. Liv crept toward it, and raised a hand. Did those ridges on the head feel like normal stones - the kind you could find in the gardens?

Something dark slinked out of the shadows and brushed against her skirt, and Liv cried out in fright, jumping a step back. She thought her heart would fall out of her chest until she recognized the arched back of a black cat, one of the castle mousers, brusing up against her legs.

“Charlie,” she gasped. “You scared me.” The cat purred, thrusting its head against her.

“Close the windows before you go,” a man’s voice told her from the doorway. It was so quiet that Liv almost couldn’t catch the words, and something about the tone shook, trembling nearly as badly as Liv’s own hands were doing now.

“Master Mage,” Liv said, lowering her eyes and making a curtsy.

Kazamir Grenfell, guild mage in service to Baron Henry, ignored her entirely. He walked across the room, pulled a volume off the bookshelf, and brought it over to the desk, where he sat down with it and took a sip of his tea. He looked to be a man of his middle years, edging on into old age but not quite arrived yet, and both his hair and his beard were more gray than black. He wore a robe of heavy dark wool, with sigils embroidered all over in shining thread, and Liv was certain they were all magic. She rushed over to the windows; someone must have opened them to air the room out. When she closed the pane of expensive glass, Liv had another jump: a bat that had been hanging from the ceiling, just inside the room, fluttered off into the morning sky.

Master Mage Grenfell looked up from his book and his tea, watching Liv catch her breath. “You are the cook’s bastard girl, are you not?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” Liv said. She hated that word. Bastard.

“I could tell from the ears,” the Guildmage said. “Come over here a moment.”

Liv crept closer, keeping her eyes down. Servants didn’t make eye contact with their betters. She stopped just out of the mage’s reach, but he stood and reached out, taking her left ear between his thumb and his fingers. “Interesting,” he muttered. “How old are you, now?”

“Twelve years old,” Liv told him.

“I would have guessed six,” Grenfell said. “You look half-starved. Are those white eyebrows? I can see why the Baron keeps you downstairs. Impossible to hide the Elden blood. Run along now, girl. I have work to do.”

Liv fled the room, not feeling safe again until she’d ducked through the door into the servants’ stair and shut it behind her. There, she leaned back against the wood and closed her eyes until her heart had slowed and her hands stopped trembling. He’d touched her ears. He hadn’t even asked, first.

If she hadn’t had to wear her hair in a bun and under a cap, Liv could have hidden them; but as it was, they stuck out from the cap no matter what she did. Unlike the round ears of everyone else in the castle, everyone in the entire town of Whitehill Upon Aspen, they were pointed at the top. They were a constant reminder, to everyone who saw her, that her father was not human.

Eventually, Liv crept back down the stairs. She’d almost reached the servants’ quarters when the door below her opened, and Tom and Bill, the footmen, came through, carrying trays from the great hall. Liv pressed herself to the wall and slid back up the stairs, out of their sight. The last thing she wanted was anyone to ask her questions right now.

“I feel bad for her, is all,” Tom was saying. The conversation must have started outside the stairs. “Just think about it. She’s gonna be an old woman by the time her daughter’s grown. It’s not natural.”

“It’s her own fault,” Bill answered back, as the two descended the stairs, their voices echoing. “All she had to do was not open her legs to some freak from over the mountains.”

It’s me, Liv realized. They’re talking about me.