A couple of the others cast envious glances at him as he headed for the Big House and the back-kitchen door.

By some mysterious alchemy, the kitchen had already heard of his good fortune, for he was presented with a bowl of cabbage soup and two slices of barley bread. He carried both to a long shed with a single big table in it that was called the “schoolroom.”

He took the nearest empty seat on one of the long benches and picked up the piece of charcoal waiting there for him. Because that was what you did. You ate, and you learned how to read and write at the same time.

Why? He had no idea. It didn’t exactly make sense, and he knew Master Cole fumed over the “wasted time,” but for some reason it was something he had to allow.

One of Cole’s daughters was there; it was their job to teach the kiddies. She had a big piece of slate mounted onto the wall and chunks of soft, white chalk. This one wore a clean blue dress and had hair that was almost yellow braided in a tail down her back, but otherwise she looked like every other Pieters girl; round white face with very pink cheeks, eyes like a couple of round blue berries shoved into the white dough of her face, and no expression whatsoever. She wrote on the slate, the kiddies wrote what she did on the tabletop in charcoal, they sounded it all out, and then they got to take a bite of food before erasing what they had written and going on.

This was the one part of the day that Mags loved, unreservedly. He was far, far beyond this sort of thing himself, actually. He could read and write entire sentences, and often did so around the word that the others were sounding out. It seemed a kind of magic to him, that he could put these things down and someone else could make the same sense of them that he did. Somewhere, he had heard, there were things called “books” that were full of sentences that told you entire stories and facts about things, and—well, all manner of things it was good to know, or things that answered questions. Master Cole had no books in his house. But other people did.

As if in an echo of his thoughts, the Pieters daughter wrote book on the slate. Obediently, but struggling, the others wrote it down. “B—oo—k. Book,” they sounded out, while he was writing, I open my book to read.