Things changed after my birthday and formal introduction to court. After all, it was also my introduction to society at large. I was moved to a different area of the palace: the imperial crèche.

  The little princess from my party was in the room next to mine, the princes were both down the hall. It wasn’t any grander than the nursery, even though it was larger. The rooms were filled in age order at two years old and vacated the same way at five years old. One end of the hall led to the toddle garden I was already used to. The other end led to a large indoor playroom with a plethora of toys and games.

  Trevor was not in the group. He was already at the Imperial Lower School by the time I thought to ask about him.

  At that time Aunt Glory confirmed he was my betrothed. It was a political alliance to tie the Earl, his father, tighter to Aunt Glory’s cause of security. She explained as simply as possible that she wouldn’t want the Empress throne even if she was the last candidate of her father’s descendants.

  I even believed her.

  Another swift, even abrupt change in my life was that my faithful Griselda was reassigned to another infant. I was weaned overnight and assigned three nursery maids from her highness’s household.

  Lara was a sweet, if slightly ditzy girl. She was pretty and most of her conversation revolved around romances in the lower levels of the palace.

  My nurses slept downstairs in servants quarters, giving Lara ample opportunity to hear the gossip.

  Cora was my nighttime watch nurse, so she slept in the daytime. We only interacted if I couldn’t sleep. I tend to be a sound sleeper. At least I was as a coddled toddler.

  Sir Amelia was the one who escorted me when I left my room. She was more personal knight than maid. She usually carried me wherever I wanted or needed to go.

  I now had a lot more places to go.

  My mother now sent for me regularly. She took me to the library almost immediately and gave me a token on a cord which proved the head librarian authorized me to be in the library.

  My bodyguard took me everywhere, so I was supervised, but apparently the condition was that mother provide (pay for) a personal library page for me. That person would work in the library at all times and personally attend me whenever I was present. My page, Kaia retrieved and shelved books and scrolls for me, and turned the pages for me, since I wasn’t supposed to touch anything.

  I took notes in English with a quill pen in notebooks my mother provided. I carefully lined them up in my room and threw a huge fit anytime one went missing. They were numbered. I always knew when one went missing.

  I am fairly certain that the only reason I was allowed to study some of the books I was shown was that I never showed any evidence of reading or understanding them.

  In those early days I searched for information on the system, which was apparently not identical for every user. When everything seemed to be repeating, I moved on to magic and in particular runes and talismans.

  Carter had drilled me incessantly on the few he gave me, but he also taught me runes in general. These books went deep into magic theory.

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  “Lady Mira,” Kaia said pensively one day when my day nurse, Lara was distracted in conversation with another junior librarian. Sir Amelia had an errand. “Are you actually reading the books? I can barely read this one.”

  I looked up, interrupting my perusal of a bestiary with particularly good illustrations and particularly bad handwriting. I pointed.

  “The average Noghtdrake” I would have assumed he meant Nightdrake except I had seen bestiaries where both were listed and given quite different descriptions, “gives a mere five experience points, a disconcertingly low number compared with its danger ranking. However, they are prized for their leather and horns and can always be found in swarming quantities to make up for the small reward.” I read clearly, without the accent I had carried over from English.

  Page Kaia looked at me considering my demonstration for a long while. “Huh.” She finally said.

  After that conversation, Kaia procured magazines and novels for me that I could keep in my room to practice reading. There were a variety of ladies craft pattern magazines and an unhealthy amount of gossip magazines informing court ladies what was happening in their absence.

  I drank in all the information, organizing it all in the mind palace I could now envision. I had always been good at sighting patterns and pulling together diverse information to reach a conclusion that wasn’t readily apparent to other people.

  I always thought that was a spectrum thing, but I could still do it.

  I began to listen to gossip, rather than ignoring it all. Lara was a significant resource. One I eventually came to value highly. I made her an agent of sorts by asking her for specific information. Without even going downstairs I learned a lot about Imperial Palace culture. Many of the people who worked for the megacity sized palace had been employed here for generations.

  Lara was my maid because she had been identified as a potential concubine for the emperor when Aunt Glory was a gleam in her mother’s marriage minded eye.

  The girls deemed not beautiful enough by the Empress Mother were trained in lady arts and cleaning duties in the harem where no man dared enter.

  The nursery and the crèche were technically part of the harem. I was unaware that my father was escorted closely by two female knights just to visit me.

  Mother had met him when she went to retrieve thread from the spinners. It should have been the scandal of the century, but Aunt Glory refused to lose her closest friend. Since she was the Imperial Princess and of age she spoke and it became true.

  I learned all about this from Lara through careful questioning over time.

  Directly after my second birthday Mother also arranged pre warrior workouts for me. One of my new maids, Sir Amelia, was actually a bodyguard.

  She was one of the guards who patrolled closest to the princess and often trailed her. She assured me it was an honor and a promotion to become my nurse and bodyguard.

  Sir Amelia was a short, compact woman who served me as this world’s equivalent of a mixed martial arts instructor.

  We spent two or three ‘bells’ a day in my much larger room, punching and kicking the air. She even held up pads for me to attack her with my current meager toddler strength.

  I demonstrated my carefully constructed body weight workout to her, an intense combination of yoga, Pilates, tai chi and weightlifting motions.

  Instead of denigrating my efforts, Sir Amelia learned my routine and commented on how strenuous it was and how easily I managed to complete it.

  We did the workout daily and eventually convinced Lara to join us.

  Mother came through with the art supplies she had promised. Lara quietly replenished them and added to them as I showed dedication and interest. I practiced my talismans in sections to avoid suspicion. But practice them I did.

  Once I even tested them on thin paper. Even more interesting than that they worked properly, my cut finger healed at three times the rate I expected.

  To mask my interest in books as trying to teach myself to read while I looked at pictures, I filled page after page with initially clumsy letters and numbers.

  I even strung them together, using the new alphabet to record my notes in English phonetically. I even began interlining Arabic and local lettering, giving someone who found my journals in distant times a chance to decipher English. Eventually as I ‘learned’ to read I left a third line for words I ‘knew’ in the local language, which was called Common.

  Strangely, the word common in the local language was a direct cognate to the English word common. They sounded the same and meant the same thing.