Nona couldn’t do the forbidden bone tricks either, even though Palamedes did nearly the exact same thing with big grey lumps of bone as Camilla did with the sword. She had to hold them, and listen when he told her to do nonsensical things—“Pretend you can stretch it; stretch it now,” or “Pretend you can touch the insides; split it open.” He never made Nona feel bad for not being able to do any of these things, only acted like it was interesting that she couldn’t.

In the beginning she hadn’t been able to do much for herself at all, but over time she had remembered how to button her shirts, and tie up her laces, and soap herself in the bath, and pour water into a glass so that her hand didn’t tremble and the water didn’t slop out. It shamed her, remembering how little she could do at the start. She had been so frustrated, in those slow early days. But now she could do nearly everything. She knew important facts like what was expected and what was unexpected at different parts of the day, and that people’s ears weren’t so interesting that she had to put her fingers inside them. In those early days Palamedes and Camilla and Pyrrha had often looked at her in a sort of stupefied shock; now they were still stupefied but they were not so shocked, and often she made them laugh.

And now they touched her, sometimes not even by explicit request. Pyrrha would roughly hug her in one big suddenness, or sweep Nona up in her hard, wiry arms before setting her down on the sofa; Palamedes would pull the blankets up over her if she was getting into bed and tuck them in softly at the corners. If she slipped her hand into Camilla’s, when they were walking down the street, Camilla would hold it. Nona didn’t understand how the others could walk around and go through their lives only touching each other as much as was necessary. When Nona asked, Camilla said that this was because they needed to get the washing-up done.

Nona could do all the basic things now, but there was still distressingly little that she was good at. Nona was good at:

1. touching,
2. wiping dishes,
3. running her hand over the flat cork carpet in a way that got all the hair out of it,
4. sleeping in lots of different ways and positions, and
5. speaking any language that was spoken to her, in person, so she could see the person’s face and eyes and lips.

It turned out that Palamedes and Camilla could only speak one language, and Pyrrha could speak all of that one and some of another two and a little bit of about five more. The one language all three were fluent in was a kind people used for business transactions, so it wasn’t strange that they used it—but it was falling out of favour, because it was a language used by awful people. Even then, the dialect spoken in the city didn’t always make sense to them, or the pronunciation was strange. Nona understood everybody, and could speak back to them so that they understood her, and nobody ever said she had an accent. This confounded Palamedes. When she first said that she could speak back by watching them talk and making her lips look like theirs, it confounded him so much more that it gave Camilla a headache.