The year had passed quietly.
Arthur Arwin was one year old and already the house felt smaller than it had when he first started crawling through it. He was upright now, mostly. Walking was still a work in progress, more of a controlled stumble from one piece of furniture to the next, but he got where he needed to go and that was enough for him.
His hair had come in jet black. Dark enough that his mom sometimes paused when she looked at him, something unreadable crossing her face before she smiled and moved on. Against it his eyes were even more striking than they had been at birth. One purple, one light blue, the kind of combination that made people look twice.
He could talk now. Basic things, short sentences, nothing complicated. But the words came easier than they had at three months when dragging a single syllable out had felt like moving stone. His mouth was getting used to itself. His tongue was learning the shape of this language the way it had once learned another, a lifetime ago.
His parents had noticed he was sharp. Sharper than a one year old had any business being. They didn't say it out loud but he caught the looks they exchanged sometimes when he said something that landed a little too cleanly for his age.
He didn't worry about it. He had bigger things on his mind.
Today was his birthday.
He knew what birthdays were.
In his past life he had watched them from a distance, the way you watch something through a window you are not allowed to open. The children of the people who owned him had birthdays. There would be food, more than usual, and noise and laughter and small wrapped things passed between hands. People would smile in a way that was different from their everyday smiles, looser somehow, like the day had given them permission to mean it.
He had never had one.
He didn't know his own birthday. Nobody had thought to tell him and he had never been in a position to ask. He knew roughly how old he was the way you know the weather is getting colder, gradually and without anyone announcing it.
No food. No noise. No small wrapped things.
He hadn't thought much about it back then. Wanting things that were never going to happen was a luxury he couldn't afford. You learned quickly to stop reaching for what wasn't yours.
But he was one year old today in a small house with a garden and two people who had been planning something since yesterday if the hushed voices through the wall were anything to go by.
He sat in the middle of the floor and waited.
For the first time in two lifetimes, something was his.
His mom came in first, carrying something flat and rectangular wrapped in brown cloth, tucked under her arm. His dad followed close behind her, hands behind his back, wearing the kind of smile that meant he was very pleased with himself about something.
They stood in front of him and looked at each other once.
Then they started singing.
It was not a particularly good performance. His mom had a decent enough voice but his dad was slightly off key in a way that suggested he sucked at singing. They sang it anyway, loud and completely committed, the words filling up the small room and spilling out into the hallway.
Arthur sat on the floor and watched them.
Something was happening in his chest that he didn't have a name for yet. Something warm and a little overwhelming that he was fairly certain he had never felt before in either of his lives.
He didn't show it. Old habit.
But he felt it.
When they finished his dad did a small bow that made his mom laugh and shake her head.
"Okay," she said, crouching down to Arthur's level, her blue eyes bright. "We have a surprise for you."
His dad grinned. "Two actually."
His mom shot him a look. "We agreed on an order Edric."
"I know the order."
"Then let me finish."
His dad gestured for her to continue, still grinning.
His mom sat down cross legged in front of him and placed the brown cloth package on the floor between them.
"This one is from me," she said.
Arthur looked at it. Then at her. Then back at it.
She smiled. "Go on."
He reached out and pulled at the cloth. His fingers weren't quite coordinated enough to unwrap it cleanly so it took a moment, more pulling than unwrapping, but eventually the cloth fell away and the book was in his hands.
A Beginner's Guide to Magic.
It was small, thin, the cover a deep green with simple gold lettering across the front. Well made but not expensive. The kind of book meant to be read, not displayed. He turned it over in his hands, feeling the weight of it, the texture of the cover under his fingers.
His mom was watching him carefully.
"I know you can't read all of it yet," she said. "But we can read it together. I thought you might like to know about the world a little."
Arthur looked up at her.
He wanted to tell her that he already knew quite a bit about the world. That he had lived and died in one not entirely unlike this.
Instead he held the book against his chest and said "twank ywou."
His mom blinked. Then her eyes went soft in that way they did sometimes when he caught her off guard.
His dad's grin had been getting harder to contain for the last few minutes.
"My turn," he said.
His mom straightened up. "Edric."
"Relax."
"I will not relax, we talked about this."
"We talked about a lot of things." His dad was already pulling whatever it was from behind his back. "And I considered all of them."
His mom pinched the bridge of her nose.
His dad crouched down and held it out.
It was a dagger. The blade caught the light in a way that ordinary metal didn't, a pale shimmering blue that ran through it like something had been woven into the steel itself. The edge was clean and perfect. The handle was wrapped simply but the craftsmanship underneath it was evident in every line. It was not a small blade. It was meant to be grown into, the kind of thing you bought for what a person was going to become rather than what they were right now.
It looked like it cost more than everything else in the house combined.
Arthur stared at it.
The blue of the blade was almost exactly the same shade as his left eye. Not close. Exactly. Like his dad had held the blade up to his son's face in the shop and decided that was the one.
His dad set it carefully on the floor in front of him, looking very proud of himself.
The room was quiet for a moment.
"Edric." His mom's voice was very calm. "He is one year old."
"I know how old he is."
"You bought our one year old son a dagger."
"A quality dagger."
His dad picked the dagger back up and held it out to Arthur handle first.
Arthur reached up and took it.
Or tried to.
The moment his dad let go the weight of it pulled his arm straight down. He grabbed it with both hands and managed to lift it maybe an inch off the floor before it dragged back down again. He tried to grip the handle properly, the way something in the back of his memory told him a blade should be held, but his hands were too small. His fingers didn't even reach around the handle fully. The dagger lay half in his lap and half on the floor, the pale blue blade catching the light, completely indifferent to his efforts.
He stared at it.
His dad was grinning so wide it looked like it hurt.
His mom was staring at her husband with an expression that had moved somewhere beyond exasperation into a kind of exhausted disbelief.
"He can't even hold it Edric."
"He'll grow."
"He is one."
"Which means he has plenty of time to grow into it." His dad crossed his arms looking thoroughly satisfied with his own logic. "I'm thinking ahead."
His mom turned to look at Arthur, still struggling with the dagger in his lap, and opened her mouth.
Then she closed it.
Then despite everything she laughed.
Arthur sat on the floor with both gifts in front of him.
The book on one side, small and green, a beginner's guide to a world he was only just starting to remember how to live in. The dagger on the other, pale blue and catching the light, too heavy and too large and completely his.
He looked at them for a long moment.
His mom was saying something to his dad in a low voice, the tone that meant she wasn't actually angry, and his dad was laughing quietly in that easy way he had, the sound filling up the small room without trying.
Arthur looked at his gifts.
In his past life he had owned nothing. Not his time, not his labor, not the ground he slept on. Nothing had ever been given to him. Nothing had ever been his.
And here on the floor in front of him, on the first birthday he had ever had in two lifetimes, sat a book and a dagger that belonged entirely to him.
He smiled.
Not the polite careful expression he sometimes put on without thinking, the one leftover from a life spent making himself small and unthreatening. A real one. The kind that came up from somewhere deeper than habit, slow and a little unfamiliar on his face, like a muscle remembering how to work.
His mom caught it first.
She stopped mid sentence and just looked at him.
His dad followed her gaze.
Neither of them said anything. They just let it be what it was.