Ochto nodded. Delighted, I jumped to my feet and followed the other men away from the megaron. We took the road toward town and then cut in the direction of the shore on a narrow path that led us to a break in the rocks where we could climb down to the sand to swim and then lie in the sun or the shade as each was inclined to be warmer or cooler.

I was happy. As difficult as that must be for you to believe, and in spite of the grief I still carried for my mother and my sisters, I was happy. No one was angry at me, disappointed in me, burdened by me. I had nothing to do but sit in the warm sand and look at the sea.

Oreus, the man who’d provided my day at the shore, dropped to the sand beside me. “So, man-killer,” he asked. “Do you have a name?”

I thought before I answered. Wisdom is not a name for a slave. Stone, Mark, Faithful, Strong are slave names. I had a nurse once who had named her son Shovel. She was a foreigner, from somewhere far north, and she told me that she liked the way it sounded. She’d taught me a few words of her own language, but the only one I could remember was Zec, and I couldn’t quite retrieve the meaning, though it sat on the tip of my tongue.

“Zec,” I said, as if my tongue had decided to speak for itself.

“That’s a Hurrish name.” Oreus looked surprised. “You are from Hur?”

“No,” I said. “My mother heard it once.”

“It means ‘rabbit,’” Oreus said.

I smiled. Rabbit was perfect.

“Tell me, Rabbit. Is that your happy face you make? I can’t tell.”

I felt my upper lip and rubbed my thumb against the scar tissue. I could feel it distorting my mouth. My nose had a new bump in the middle of it as well. Maybe I looked more like a man-killer than I’d realized.

“Zecush, we should call you,” said Oreus. “Bunny.” He punched me lightly enough in the arm, and I almost fell over. “Come for a swim.”

The other men seemed to think that a man-killer called after a rabbit kit was a good joke. From then on they sometimes called me Zec or Zecush, but more often just Bunny. That night I slept more lightly than before and dreamed for the first time since my capture. I dreamed of a library with books and scrolls in ranks on shelves, all flooded with clear light. When I opened my eyes, the shed around me was still dark. The call to rise hadn’t yet come. I lay in the dim quiet of the predawn, listening to the breath of the sleeping men around me and thinking of my dream.

I was still happy. It was no rest day. I faced a day in the hot sun, shifting dirt and stones, with scant food and ignorant company, and I’d never felt so much at peace. I laughed at myself as I shifted on my pallet for a more comfortable spot and a few minutes’ more rest. Let me be beaten, I thought, and then see how well I liked being a slave. Too soon the overseer knocked on the doorway with his stick, and we all rose, grumbling, for another day.

I had grown more skilled at shifting dirt. If I couldn’t compete with some of the men in the field with me, I could keep up with most of them. I worked hard, I slept well at night, and I dreamed often. I grieved, but a part of me felt a lightening of a burden I had carried all my life: that I could never be worthy of them, that I would always disappoint or fail them. As an unknown slave in the fields of the baron, I knew the worst was over. I had failed them. At least I could not do so again.

My dreams were lucent and vivid, as if the peacefulness of my days had put spurs to my imagination, and I dreamed again and again of the same place, the distant library with its endless collection of books and scrolls.

In my first dream, I only wandered through the space in awe, sensing that I was impossibly far from the ordinary world of Hanaktos’s field hands. I was in an enormous room, filled with light from windows high up on the walls near the white coffered ceiling. On the wall that faced north, glass-paneled doors opened onto a balcony that looked over a green valley far below. Beyond the valley was a wall of snow-covered mountains with tops so bright they hurt the eye, and behind them an even brighter blue sky that never showed a single cloud.

Inside the room, opposite the glass doors, were carved wooden ones that remained closed in all my visits. I had no idea what might lie beyond them, probably because I had no interest. Everything I desired was in the room with me. Between these doors, and on every other space of wall, were shelves for books and scrolls and packets of papers and every kind of writing you can imagine, even tablets impressed with minute scratches that I not only knew were writing but could read, by the magic of dreams.

There were painted pillars to hold up the ceiling high overhead, each one covered in its own design of interleaving foliage, people, and animals. The figures repeated on the carved trim of the shelves: a set of lions on one case, a set of foxes smiling on another. They drew my touch like lodestones, and I ran my fingers over them as I explored.

In my later dreams I wandered the shelves, selecting books and scrolls and bringing them to the tables to pore over. There were tablets of wax and clay impressed with tiny characters. There were books I knew and had already read, books the magus had told me of that I’d never seen, and even books I knew of only because their titles had been listed in ancient times. Plax’s lost plays, Dellari’s histories of the Peninsula’s War, the poetry of Hern. They all were there.

And I had a guide as well. Still resenting Malatesta, I dreamed myself a far better tutor, who could answer my questions on every subject and never switched my hands. She was waiting for me one night. Tall even for a man and much more so for a woman, she wore a white peplos and looked just as if she had stepped from an ancient vase painting. She was like the Goddess appearing as the mentor in an epic, and I felt like a young Oenius. It was her library, I was certain, and I a welcomed guest.

I’d dreamed the night before that I had held Poers’s History of the Bructs in my hands and read the first part of it. The magus had once summarized the book for me, from his notes. He had read it in a library in Ferria but had no copy of his own. I had been thinking lately of my uncle and what sort of king he was, and no doubt that is why the book had been on my mind.

“What do you think of Poers, Bunny?” my tutor asked me. “Was Komanare of the Bructs a bad king?”

She waved me to a chair and sat in one opposite.

I wasn’t sure how to begin.

“Do you trust Poers?” she asked.

“No.”

“Well, that was clear.” She smiled, and I relaxed. “Tell me why?”

So I picked through Poers’s arguments, looking for the places where one might suspect the author was concealing something, without knowing exactly what. It was my first talk with my imaginary tutor and the first of many times that she listened patiently, as Malatesta never had, to everything I had to say and then asked a gentle question or offered an observation. Poers makes excuses for Komanare of the Bructs. The king was forever arriving on the scene too late to do anything but patch up a mess his own people had made, always trying to get them to work with, instead of against, one another, and Poers offers one reason after another why each attempt of the king’s failed to make a lasting peace. Poers insists that none of it was the king’s fault, but Poers shows signs of fudging his historical facts in order to get his arguments to hold water, and I say that if a king can’t make his people behave, then yes, he is a bad king.