Brienne-le-Château, May 1779
Nobody at Brienne bothered to learn how to say his name properly. By the end of the first week they'd stopped trying.
"Buonaparte" came out of most mouths as something closer to a cough than a name, and within a few days it didn't matter anyway, because a boy two years above him tall, easy in his own skin the way only boys who'd never once worried about money could be had found a better one.
"Say it again," the boy said, in the yard between lessons, a small crowd already gathering the way crowds gathered whenever something in a school promised to be funny at someone else's expense. "Go on. Napoleone."
Napoleone said it.
"God, listen to that. Sounds like he's got straw stuck up his nose." The boy grinned at his own joke, pleased with it, and repeated it to the others like he'd minted a coin. "La paille-au-nez."
It caught. These things always caught fast in a dormitory faster than lessons, faster than prayers, faster than anything the monks actually wanted to teach them. By supper that evening three different boys at three different tables had used it, and by the second week even boys who'd never spoken to him directly knew him only by it.
He didn't fight back that first week. He wasn't sure, yet, what fighting back at Brienne was even supposed to look like. In Ajaccio a taunt got you a shove, and a shove got you in the dirt with somebody, and it was over in a minute either way. Here the taunts came dressed up polite, delivered with a smile in front of a monk who'd only scold you if you were the one who reacted, so he mostly said nothing, and let it slide past him the way water slides past a stone, and told himself that was the same thing as winning.
It mostly wasn't.
His shoes were the wrong kind. His coat, mended twice at the elbow by Letizia's own careful hand, was the wrong kind. He had no pocket money for the little luxuries the other boys traded sweets smuggled in by an indulgent uncle, a better quality of paper, small favors bought and sold the way boys with families of means did without ever noticing they were doing it. He noticed. He noticed everything, actually, which was its own kind of curse, because noticing meant knowing exactly how much he didn't have and exactly who was watching him not have it.
At meals, a boy named Verrier soft-faced, well-fed, the kind of boy who'd never once gone without a full plate in his life took to counting Napoleone's portion out loud, as if it were a game the whole table could enjoy. "Look at him eat. Like it's the last bread in France. Does your family not feed you, Corsican, or do you just enjoy performing for us?"
The others laughed. Napoleone kept eating, jaw tight, saying nothing, because saying something would only prove he'd heard it, and proving he'd heard it would only make it happen again tomorrow, and the day after that.
It happened again tomorrow anyway.
By the third week it wasn't just words anymore. Someone knocked his inkwell over onto his letter home the one he'd promised his mother, half-finished, three careful sentences about how well he was settling in and stood there watching him blot uselessly at the spreading black stain with the sleeve of his only coat, grinning the whole time like he'd done something clever instead of something small and cruel. Napoleone didn't even see who it was. By the time he looked up, the boy had already melted back into a knot of others near the window, all of them very interested, suddenly, in something outside.
He rewrote the letter that night, by a stub of candle, and didn't mention the ink.
The one time he did lash out, it wasn't over the accent, or the shoes, or the ink. It was over nothing much at all a boy named Lelièvre, not even one of the ones who usually bothered with him, tripped him crossing the refectory and laughed when his tray went clattering across the stone floor in front of forty other boys. Something in Napoleone simply came apart. He was on the boy before he'd decided to be, fists swinging wild and unpracticed, more fury than fight, and it took two older boys hauling him back by the collar to end it Lelièvre with a bloodied lip, Napoleone with a torn sleeve and a look on his face that made even the boy pulling him off take half a step back.
Brother Léotade gave him three days of kneeling in the chapel for it, alone, on the cold stone, and told him not unkindly, which somehow made it worse that a soldier who couldn't master his own temper would never be trusted to master a battlefield.
He knelt the full three days without arguing. He didn't fight anyone again after that. Not with his fists, anyway.
But something had shifted in him, quiet and unspoken, somewhere between the ink-stained letter and the chapel floor. He started watching the dormitory the way he'd once watched the boys by the well in Ajaccio, the way he'd once mapped a scuffle in the dirt before it happened except now there was more to watch, and more time to watch it in, and nothing better to do with the hours the other boys spent on friendships he wasn't invited into.
He noticed, for instance, that he wasn't the only one who ate alone.
There was a thin, anxious boy named Picot, a scholarship case like himself, mocked for a stammer he could never quite master under pressure. There was a stocky, silent boy called Davout, newly arrived from Burgundy, who said almost nothing to anyone and seemed, if anything, to prefer it that way but who Napoleone had twice caught watching Verrier's little cruelties with an expression that wasn't amusement. There was a small, sharp-eyed boy named Rocher, poor as Napoleone was, whose father had bought his way into a bursary through some connection nobody quite trusted, and who took a version of the same abuse Napoleone did, minus the accent, plus a limp that made him slower to escape it.
None of them spoke to each other. None of them had any particular reason to. They were simply four separate boys enduring four separate versions of the same thing, scattered around the edges of a room that belonged, in every way that mattered, to boys like Verrier and the tall one who'd invented the name that had already replaced his own.
Napoleone didn't do anything about it yet. He only noticed, the way he noticed everything, filing it away the way he'd once filed away the shape of a scuffle in an Ajaccio street before he'd ever needed to use it.
Lying awake that night, listening to Picot's breathing go uneven two cots down the particular ragged breathing of a boy trying very hard not to be heard crying Napoleone stared at the dark stone ceiling and thought, with a coldness that surprised even him, that there had to be a better way to survive a place like this than kneeling on a chapel floor waiting for the next humiliation to arrive.
He didn't know yet what the better way looked like.
But for the first time since the ink had spread across his letter home, he found himself thinking less about how much this place had already taken from him, and more about exactly how many boys in this dormitory had something taken from them too and what four separate small humiliations might add up to, if they ever stopped being separate.