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village, but we never did find out his provenance: he was heir to no house that anyone could discover, even though the king claimed him as kin, and that meant that he had no part of the royal tax as his birthright, and no fortune of his own. He appeared to have no mother, and indeed said later that she had died when he was a little boy and that he didn’t remember her, although it is hard to say whether that was the truth or whether he simply didn’t want to acknowledge that he was of low birth. It is most commonly supposed that he is one of the king’s bastard children, perhaps of a favored mistress, since the king acknowledges him, but he may have been a by-blow of any of the near relations of the royal house.
    I should explain that fostering used to be a means of making an alliance among the various factions of the northern nobility; male children would be exchanged between houses as guarantees of peace. But it was a custom that was dropped long ago, and fostering is all but unheard of in these present times. It must have been a condition of the king’s pardon that the master foster this child, although he never explained one way or the other. If Damek was indeed a bastard child, which seems most likely, then it was as close as may be to an insult, and certainly no child was sent in return. Perhaps it was just a fancy of the king’s, that he could at once solve an inconvenience of his own and saddle the master with a responsibility that was in fact a royal rebuke. All agreed that it was at best an odd arrangement, and the old women shook their heads and said no good would come of it.

I remember the first days of Damek’s residence as a kind of dark tunnel, a memory reinforced by the continual rain which kept us indoors. It seemed endless, although it must have lasted little more than a week or so. The master left the day after delivering Damek into our care, and Lina blamed Damek, for no reason at all, for her father’s absence. It simply confirmed the boy’s evil in Lina’s eyes; she resented him bitterly and did her best to make him run away.
    She confessed as much to me the first morning. “We don’t want him here, do we, Anna?” she said as I brushed her hair. “He’s nothing but a dirty peasant. Look at his skin! Why has Papa done this to me?”
    “I’m sure he has his reasons,” I said. “The king —”
    “Oh, the king!” Lina swept that aside impatiently. “What could the king care for a lowborn bastard?”
    I was shocked and told her that she ought to show some respect. At the back of my mind, I saw the Wizard Ezra and his talk of some mysterious truce; although I didn’t understand the complex dealings of adults, which took place in a universe over the top of my head, I couldn’t but believe that somehow Damek’s presence and the wizard’s obscure warning were connected.
    “I’m going to make him run away,” she said. “I hate him. I don’t want a brother. And if he runs away, Papa can’t do anything about it. It’s not his fault, is it? How could the king blame him then?”
    I began to tell her that if Damek ran away, it would shame our house, but Lina tossed her head and said she didn’t care. And nothing I said in the following days could persuade her to care for the honor of the king or her father.
    Her strategy was simple: she made herself as unpleasant as possible to everyone in her vicinity. This was sufficient to turn the household into a purgatory. There was Lina at breakfast, brows like thunder, throwing her plate at Damek and scalding him with hot porridge; Lina in the passageway, screaming and kicking my mother, who was attempting to stop her from pulling Damek’s hair; Lina brooding in the front room, sending black clouds of dolor through the entire house, so that everyone was cross and impatient and out of sorts.
    The part of me — a very small part — that wasn’t irritated with Lina beyond endurance couldn’t help but admire her stubborn persistence in the