The word list for the island test has grown shorter every year for two hundred years. No one on the school's governing staff has ever struck anything from it.

Minutes of a staff meeting, item 7, "Any Other Business"

Chapter 7

The Blood and the Bread

The Golden Book was at the other end of the high street, and we found it by following a sign shaped like, well, a golden book that floated above the pavement and slowly turned round and round.

Inside the shop there were books from floor to ceiling. Not books like the ones in the school library at Fjordskolen, with plastic covers and barcodes and greasy corners. These books were alive. Some of them shifted faintly on the shelves, as if they were turning over in their sleep. Others whispered, a faint, rustling murmur that sounded like leaves in the wind. A book on the nearest shelf changed its title while I was looking at it: first it said "Spells for Beginners", then "Spells for the Unsure", and then just "Spells", as if it had given up trying to impress me.

The shop smelt of old paper and new ink and something spicy that reminded me of cinnamon, and the light was dim and golden and fell in from round windows in the ceiling like little suns. The floorboards gave under our feet with a soft, old sound.

Ahra and Retia went straight to the counter, and Ahra asked for three first-year sets before I could say anything. The bookseller, a small man with half-moon glasses and ink stains on his fingers, took the sets down from a shelf behind him and wrapped them up with a speed that suggested he had done it a thousand times. I put a handful of the shiny coins from the vault on the counter and let him take what he was owed. He pushed the rest back to me with one finger.

While the others waited for their change, I walked along the shelf at the back. The books here were older. Quieter. They didn't whisper. They watched. I don't know how a book can watch, but that was what they were doing, as if they were waiting for someone in particular to come past and take them down.

My hand touched one of them. A spine of black leather, gold lettering faded almost to nothing. The title was illegible. The moment my fingers touched the spine, the book vibrated. Short and hard, like a heartbeat, and a warmth ran up through my fingers and into my wrist.

I pulled my hand away.

The book stood still again. As if it had never moved.

The gold lettering on the spine wasn't faded any more. Now it said, clear and distinct, a single word:

Godrand.

I stayed where I was. My heart was beating in my throat, and the leather smelt of something dry and old, like a drawer that hasn't been opened in many years. Then I went back to the counter.

"The book over there," I said. "The black one. At the back of the bottom shelf. How much is it?"

The bookseller looked up over his glasses. He looked past me, down along the shelves, and his gaze stopped where I had been standing.

I turned round. There was a gap in the row. A narrow, dark space between two thick volumes, and no book in it.

"It has never been for sale," he said. He said it quietly, as a piece of information, not as an apology. "It comes in in the morning and it's gone by the evening. It has done that for fifteen years." He took a cloth and wiped ink off his fingers, even though there was nothing to wipe off. "I've stopped asking where it goes."

"Chris!" Ahra waved from the door. "We need to get going."

I looked at the gap in the shelf one last time. Then I left.

"And then the Smith's Den," said Retia, when we came out into the street. She rubbed the inside of her arm with her thumb, as if it already hurt.

"Are they real swords?" I said.

"What else would they be?" said Retia, and Ahra laughed, but not unkindly.

I had been assuming that "sword" was an old-fashioned way of saying something else. Apparently it wasn't.

The Smith's Den was a hundred metres further up the street. From the outside it was a small, unremarkable shop with a narrow door and a sign of wrought iron. From the inside it was a hall.

The first thing that hit me was the heat. It came from below, from somewhere under the floor, and it carried a smell of metal and charcoal and that particular sharp scent of iron that has been heated and hammered and heated and hammered again, many hundreds of times. Sparks drifted in the air like fireflies, slowly and at random, and deep in the building I could hear a sound like singing, a deep, rumbling note, as if the metal itself down in the forge were singing while it was shaped.

And then there were the weapons. They hung everywhere, along every wall, from floor to ceiling: swords and daggers and axes and things I had no names for, in steel and silver and something that glowed faintly blue in the dim light. Some of them looked as if they were asleep. Others looked as if they were waiting.

A man stood behind the counter at the back of the hall. He was dark and broad and didn't wear the same sort of clothes as everyone else. What he wore was plainer, harder: leather and heavy cloth and an apron marked with soot and sparks. A long sword hung at his side, and in his belt sat a dagger so well kept that it looked as if it were polished every morning.

"You'll be wanting a sword and a dagger, then," he said, when we came up to him. It wasn't a question.

"Yes, all three of us," said Ahra. "The dagger has to be silver."

"Come with me. You need measuring and weighing." He led us into a back room with a tape measure on a table and a set of scales on the floor. All three of us were measured and weighed, and afterwards it was our Amícûs' turn. Alôpex sat still on the scales and looked up at the smith with her black eyes, and the smith nodded as if he were satisfied with something he didn't say.

"I need a drop of blood from each of you. From your Amícûs as well." He drew a small dagger from his belt. "The blood is melted into your sword. It binds the sword to you. A sword forged with your blood can only be used by you and your line. In any other hands it's just metal."

Ahra held out his arm without hesitating. The smith nicked his skin with the point of the dagger, quickly and precisely, and caught the blood in a test tube. Then Lynx. He mixed the two drops, and the tube glowed faintly golden for a moment before it went out.

Retia was next. The same ritual. Fulmen screeched once when the point touched its talon, but Retia calmed it with a hand on its breast. The tube glowed golden again.

Then it was my turn.

The smith didn't ask me anything. He just took my arm and turned the inside of it up to the light, and his fingers were rough and warm and smelt of oil and iron. The blade was sharp, and the cut burned briefly and hotly, and the blood came fast, dark red and thick. Then he gently took hold of Alôpex's paw and took a single drop from her too, and she growled softly but let him do it. Her blood was paler than mine, almost pink.

He mixed our blood in the tube.

It didn't glow golden.

It glowed white. Sharp and brief, like a camera flash, and in the split second the light lasted, I saw something. Or thought I saw something. A face in the light, too quick for me to catch, too blurred for me to recognise. A woman's face. Or just a shape that looked like a face. Or nothing.

The smith held the tube up to the light and looked at it for a long time. He turned it a quarter turn between his thumb and forefinger, as if he wanted to see it from another side. Then he lowered it and looked at me.

Just that. He looked, and it lasted no more than a couple of seconds, and then he put the tube in a rack on its own, a little way from Ahra's and Retia's.

"The swords will arrive within the first week of term," he said. "I'll send the daggers tomorrow."

"What does it cost?" I asked.

"One gold daler for the dagger." The smith laid his big hand flat on the counter. "The sword I don't sell. There's blood in it. The school pays for that, the way it always has."

I didn't know which of my coins were gold dalers. I took them out of my pocket and held them up in my palm, and the smith took the biggest without counting and nodded. Ahra and Retia put their own on the counter. Ahra looked at my hand, and then he looked away.

When we were in the street again, Retia said quietly: "Did you notice the way he looked at you?"

"Yes," I said.

"And the white glow. The others were golden."

"Yes."

"What do all these people know about your name that you don't?"

I didn't have an answer. But I had a pattern. Haltora by the river. Headmaster Edrin in his office. Surain in his hut. And now a tube that glowed white. Three people who had heard my name and reacted to it, each in their own way, and a smith who hadn't even needed to hear it.

They all knew something about me, and not one of them would say it.

It wasn't curiosity any more. It was something that burned, quiet and low, down in my chest, in the place where trust sits when you still have it, and where there's just an empty space when you don't.

"We ought to get something to eat soon," said Retia. "Shall we go home to mine?"

Home. It was a word I knew the definition of, but had never had the meaning of. Fjordly was a place I lived. It wasn't a home. It was an address with a bed and a wardrobe and a staff rota on the fridge and empty walls.

"Yes," said Ahra. "Let's."

We turned off the high street into a neighbourhood I hadn't seen yet. The street was narrow and cobbled and quieter than the high street, and the houses stood close together with small gardens in front, all with flowers in pots and bushes clipped into shapes that weren't quite natural. One of the bushes looked like a bird. Another looked like a sleeping snake.

It was late afternoon, and the light that filled the street was golden and heavy and made everything warm. Through an open window I could smell another family's supper, something with spices and roast meat, and through another window I heard a woman's laughter and a little girl's voice telling a story that was evidently very funny.

In one of the gardens two children were playing with something that looked like a ball, except that the ball floated a few centimetres above the ground and changed colour every time one of them touched it. They laughed and shrieked and shoved each other, and their mother stood in the doorway watching them with the kind of look mothers have, half tired, half filled with a love so big it can't fit into a single face.

I watched them as we walked past. And I felt something that wasn't jealousy. It was something gentler and more painful. It was the discovery that this was what a life could look like. That this was what people came home to, every day, without thinking about it. A floating ball. A child shrieking with laughter. A mother in a doorway.

I had never had it. And it wasn't anger I felt. It was just a quiet wonder that it existed, and that all that time it had been lying waiting somewhere I didn't know was there.

Retia stopped in front of a three-storey house with a white front and a red roof. She took out a key. When she opened the door, the smell hit me in the face.

Freshly baked bread. Fried onions. Warm butter. Fresh herbs, something like rosemary and thyme. And under it all, faint and invisible but present everywhere, the smell of a house where someone has been cooking with love for many, many years. It wasn't just food. It was the smell of a life being lived by someone who meant it.

I had never stood in a doorway that smelt like that. At Fjordly the corridor smelt of soft soap and coffee from the staff room. Here it smelt of a life.

The hall was narrow and warm. The floor was of dark tiles, and the walls were covered in pictures. Not a great-great-great-grandfather in oils over a fireplace, like at Frederik Holmsted's. Small drawings in ink and watercolour, in thin wooden frames, of people who were alive. Retia as a child, with sand in her hair and a crooked smile. Arvia with a baby in her arms, and eyes that were red but happy. Cajis on a swing with her legs stretched out towards a sky bluer than it ought to be. And a single drawing, a little further down the hall, half hidden behind a coat hanging on a hook: a man with dark hair and two different eyes, one grey and one blue, and a face that was handsome and hard and had a scar running from his ear down over his cheek.

Retia's father. It had to be. But the picture had been pushed aside, not taken down, just pushed.

I thought about my own wall. The empty wall at Fjordly. No pictures. No memories. Nothing to push aside, because there had been nothing to begin with.

"Is that you, Retia?" came a voice from the kitchen.

"Yes, Mum."

Arvia came out with a dish in each hand and a basket of bread under her arm, and she pushed the kitchen door shut behind her with her heel without looking back. The table was laid for five. Five plates, five glasses, five sets of cutlery. Not six. Five.

"Sit yourselves down at the table, we'll eat in a minute," said Arvia, and put the dishes down. She was on her way back into the kitchen when her eyes fell on the picture of the man with the scar, half hidden behind the coat. Just for a moment. Her steps stopped, and something in her face went hard and soft at the same time, and then she went on into the kitchen and called "Cajis! Supper!" in a voice that was completely normal again.

Footsteps on a staircase. A girl came down with a book in her hand and a faraway look, still inside whatever she had been reading. She was younger than us, thirteen perhaps, with very fair hair and blue eyes like Retia's. When she saw us, she stopped on the stairs and looked.

"This is Chris and Ahra," said Retia. "Friends from school."

"Hi," said Cajis. Just hi. Then she sat down at the table and opened her book again.

We all sat down. Ahra pulled his chair in under him with a scrape on the floor and put his napkin in his lap with polite movements you could tell he had learnt at home. Retia sat up straight with her hands in her lap and waited. Arvia came in with a pot held between two oven gloves, and the lid sat tight, and when she lifted it the steam rose in a white tower. The pot was just as hot when she took the last spoonful an hour later. It was the only magic I saw her use all evening. She sat down last, wiped her hands on a tea towel she threw over her shoulder, and said, "Just help yourselves."

And we did. I took the first spoonful of the stew. And I stopped chewing. My eyes closed by themselves. It wasn't a decision, it was a reaction, the one the body has when it receives something it wasn't prepared for.

It wasn't just food. It was warmth in solid form. The gravy tasted of something my body didn't know it had missed, of time and patience and of hands that had stirred a pot while they thought about the people who were going to eat it. The meat fell apart on the spoon. The potatoes were soft as butter and smelt of earth. The bread was so fresh that the steam was still rising from it when I broke it open, and it crackled under my fingers with a sound that felt like comfort.

I could taste the difference. I could always taste the difference. Between food that is made because someone has to eat, and food that is made because someone loves the people who eat it. Ahra's grandmother's packed lunch on the ship had been perfect and had tasted of nothing. Hanne's rye bread was cut crooked and had too much butter on it. This was something else again.

I sat and watched them while we ate. The way Arvia filled Cajis's plate without Cajis asking. The way Retia laughed at something Ahra said and for a moment forgot that she was the girl nobody wanted to sit next to. The way Cajis looked over the edge of her book and smiled without saying anything, just the small smile you give when you're glad there are people in your living room, even if you can't quite be bothered to say so.

It was a family. Not a perfect family. But a real one. With love in the small things: a plate being filled, a laugh being shared, a smile over the edge of a book. And the warmth in the room wasn't only from the food. It was the warmth that comes about when people love each other, not dramatically, not loudly, but quietly, in an everyday way, present in everything, from the way the salt was passed along to the way someone got up to fetch more water without anyone asking.

I felt my body let go. My shoulders sank into the chair. My jaw, which was always tight, always on guard, slowly loosened. My hands lay open on the table instead of gripping the edge of the seat the way they usually did.

I had never sat in that warmth. And it hurt a little to discover that it existed.

In the middle of the meal I got up to wash my hands. Arvia pointed down the hall, and I went.

The hall was narrow and smelt of lavender and warm wood, and the walls were full of more drawings. Cajis's childhood. Retia's childhood. And that one drawing of the man with the scar, still hanging half hidden behind a coat.

"That's my dad."

I turned round. Cajis was standing at the other end of the hall with her book pressed against her chest.

"He looks like you," I said, even though it wasn't quite true.

"Everyone says that." She looked at the picture, and her fingers tightened a little around the spine of the book. "He's hardly ever home. But when he is, he's nice." She said it in the matter-of-fact way children say things that hurt, in a voice that is flat because it hasn't yet learnt that it ought to shake. It's the most dangerous kind of truth: the kind that comes from someone who doesn't know yet that it's painful, or who has decided that it isn't going to be.

"I've never met my father," I said. I don't know why I said it. It was just there.

Cajis looked at me. Not with pity. With something that resembled recognition.

"Maybe that's better," she said quietly. "Then you can't miss him."

She went back into the living room with her small, quiet steps. And I stood in the hall looking at the picture of the man with the scar and the two different eyes, and thought that Cajis was cleverer than any thirteen-year-old ought to be.

And it was only when we were back at the table and I looked towards the end of it, where no place had been laid for anyone, that the silence came.

"Where's your dad?" asked Ahra. He said it lightly. A casual question.

Retia looked down at her plate.

"He's at work," said Arvia. She smiled, but the smile was a practised one. A smile you give when you want people to stop asking.

I knew that smile. It was the same smile Hanne always gave me when I asked about my family.

Cajis didn't look up from her book. But her fingers held the edge of the page a little more tightly. And for a split second our eyes met across the table, and I knew she was thinking about what she had said to me in the hall. "Maybe that's better. Then you can't miss him."

But you missed them anyway. We both knew that.

Nobody said any more about it.

We said goodbye after the meal. Arvia hugged Retia in the doorway, and this time it lasted a little longer than it had on the quay when we arrived, and Retia held on a little harder, and when they let go of each other Retia's eyes were shining, but she wiped them quickly and said nothing.

We walked down the garden path and out into the street. Ahra was already a few steps ahead of us, talking about the ferry times.

Retia walked beside me. Quiet. Her scent was there again, salt wind and wild roses, and the evening air carried it over to me as if it wanted me to notice.

"He was good once," she said. Very low. So low that Ahra didn't hear.

I looked at her. She wasn't looking at me. She was looking straight ahead, at the street and the evening light and the flowers that were still in bloom. Her hands hung at her sides, and one of them slowly opened and closed, a grip searching for something to hold on to.

"My dad," she said. "He was good. Once."

I said nothing. Because there was nothing to say. Sometimes the only right thing you can do is walk beside someone and let them say what they need to say, without trying to make it better or smaller or different.

We walked on. And she didn't say any more.

We caught the last ferry with a few minutes to spare. Tés Aváir grew smaller behind us, street by street, light by light, until it was a silhouette against the evening sky.

Ahead of us lay the island of Déynáir. The castle was drawn against a sky that was burning gold and red and a little purple right at the edge, and the river in front of it caught every single colour and threw them back like a mirror that had been broken and put together again in a new order. The wind had turned from cool to cold, and it carried the smell of salt and seaweed and that coppery something that lay under everything here, and the sun was a hand's breadth above the horizon, casting long golden stripes across the water like paths you could walk on.

I stood on deck with Alôpex around my neck and looked, and Ahra stood next to me, and Retia stood on the other side, and none of us said anything, because there was nothing to say. By the fjord I had watched the sun go down at the end of the water a hundred times, alone, on my way home along the path with wet shoes. I had never watched it with anyone beside me.

And I thought, for the first time, that this might be mine. Not the castle. Not the island. But this. These two people beside me, and this silence that wasn't awkward, and this evening that smelt of salt and copper and wild roses.