Asking for bread in the Gallant tongue was easy. Saying that the bread was left over from yesterday was hard. By the end of the third week Lukan could do both, and he felt a small pride in it that he did not admit even to himself.
The lessons took place every morning in a small study on the tower's fourth floor. The room held a table, two stools, a writing board, and more books than Lukan had seen in his entire life. Rona came every morning, wrote words on the board, and Lukan's world grew by a few words each day. Bread, water, stairs. Then the verbs came: to go, to come, to wait. Then sentences. Rona was a patient teacher; she corrected mistakes without wrinkling her face, and once, when Lukan asked for "boiled boots" instead of "boiled roots," he saw her bite her lip to keep from laughing, and in a strange way, it pleased him. It meant she had wanted to laugh. People do not want to laugh at what they fear.
Because everyone in the tower feared him. Or felt something that closely resembled fear.
He noticed it in the corridors. Every noon, with Ogmios's permission, Rona took him down to the courtyard; a quiet court walled in stone, with an old plane tree at its center, and all along the way everyone made room for them. Robed students drew back against the walls, old masters inclined their heads, and all of them, without exception, looked at Lukan from beneath those bowed heads. At first Lukan searched for a flaw in his clothes. Then on his face. Then he stopped searching, because he had understood that the cause was not himself. What they looked at was not Lukan. What they looked at was something they had set in his place.
At the start of the fourth week, he learned that something's name.
They were going down to the courtyard. At the foot of the stairs stood an old woman with a laundry basket; one of the servants who came to the tower from outside. The woman saw Lukan, set the basket down, and before he understood what was happening she stepped forward and seized his hand in both of hers. Her hands were calloused and warm. She pressed her forehead to the back of his hand and spoke quickly, repeating one word over and over. Then Rona's sharp warning brought her back to herself; she bowed, snatched up her basket, and hurried away at something close to a run.
Lukan stood where he was. The warmth of the woman's forehead remained on his hand.
"What did she say?" he asked in the church tongue.
Rona did not answer at once. They walked to the stone bench beneath the plane tree and sat. Rona looked at her hands, then turned to Lukan and spoke the word the woman had repeated, slowly this time, in the Gallant tongue. Lukan knew the word; he had heard it many times in the corridors, inside whispers, but he had never asked its meaning. He had been afraid to ask.
"What does that word mean?"
"In your tongue..." Rona searched for the right match. "Like savior. Like hero. Something between the two."
"Why do they call me that?"
Rona looked at the leaves of the plane tree for a while. When she spoke, her broken sentences in the church tongue were more careful than ever; she chose the words one by one.
"Do you remember the man they told you of? The man who founded the city?" Lukan nodded. "When that man died, the people did not forget him. Two thousand years, Lukan. For two thousand years every grandmother told her grandchildren about him. And every tale ended with the same words: If the world falls into darkness again, one of his blood will return." Rona turned to him. "Three weeks ago, forty mages drew a circle, and you fell into the middle of it. You speak his tongue. You come from his world."
"I am a farmer." The word came out of Lukan's mouth harder than he expected. "I herd sheep. I cannot even drive my father's plow properly; our soil is full of stones. What do these people expect from me?"
Rona did not answer, and her not answering was an answer.
Lukan leaned forward, elbows on his knees. The stones of the courtyard were old and cracked; thin weeds grew up between the cracks. Somewhere beyond these walls lived a million people, and those people's grandmothers had told their grandchildren that he would come. He could not measure the full weight of what had been set on his shoulders, because he had not yet seen the whole of it. But he could see its edge, and even the edge was heavier than his father's most heavily loaded plow cart.
"Do you think so too?" he asked at last. "That I am... him?"
Rona had not expected the question; her face showed it. She thought for a while, and in that moment Lukan understood that this girl could not lie easily. It was the most valuable thing he had learned about Rona so far.
"I do not know," Rona said. "But I know one thing. I did not come from a great town. I was born in Kisabra, in a fishing village by the sea. Until I was fourteen I gutted fish. My hands always smelled of scales." She looked down at her own palms. "Then one day a mage passing through saw a gull I had healed, and showed me the road to the tower. Everyone in my village laughed. No healer ever came from a fisher girl, they said." She raised her head and looked at Lukan. "I have been here four years. I still know how to gut fish. But now I know other things too. The world changes people, Lukan. Who you are does not end with where you came from."
Lukan looked at her. My hands always smelled of scales. His own hands smelled of earth; perhaps they still did, perhaps they never would again. Two village children sat on a stone bench in the middle of the greatest city in the world, and no one knew it but the two of them.
"Is gutting fish hard?" Lukan asked.
Rona laughed. It was the first time she laughed like that; short, real, with no lesson in it. "Easier than herding sheep."
"Herding sheep is not hard."
"Then gutting fish is not hard at all."
That day the lesson ended in the courtyard, in laughter. And that night in his bed, looking up at the flameless sphere on the ceiling, Lukan thought of something else before he thought of his father, for the first time in three weeks, and several minutes passed before the guilt of it settled on his chest.
The next morning, it was not Rona who came to the lesson, but two people.
Rona came first; she held her usual chalk, but her face did not hold its usual morning calm. Behind her stood a short, flustered man in a blue robe, and in his arms lay a bolt of cloth. It was a dark, heavy, embroidered cloth; Lukan had seen such fabric only once in his life, in church, on the bishop's back.
"What is this?" Lukan asked.
"A tailor," said Rona. Her voice was level, but she was turning the chalk between her fingers. "He will take your measurements."
"Why?"
Rona hesitated a moment, and Lukan knew that hesitation by now; it was the moment when the girl weighed what she was about to say inside herself first.
"In five days you go to the palace," she said. "The Emperor wants to see you."