The night the future king of Migard arrived in Manachy, he did so in a vegetable basket, wrapped in a stolen curtain, and screaming loud enough to wake every chicken in the eastern coop.
Old Bertrand, who had guarded the gates of the Queen's manor for thirty-one years and had, in that time, successfully repelled exactly zero invasions, two drunk minstrels, and one extremely persistent goat, was not prepared for this.
"Oi," he said to the basket, as though it might apologize and leave.
The basket did not apologize. It screamed harder.
Bertrand looked left. He looked right. The road behind the gate was empty, swallowed by fog and the kind of silence that follows someone who has run very far, very fast, and does not intend to be found. Whoever had left this bundle had not stayed to explain themselves, which Bertrand personally felt was rude, given the circumstances.
"Right," he muttered, crouching with the enthusiasm of a man whose knees had filed a formal complaint against him years ago. "Let's see what kind of trouble you are, then."
He pulled back the curtain.
The baby stopped screaming.
This, more than anything else that would happen that night, unsettled Bertrand. Babies did not simply stop. They wound down, hiccupped, sniffled their way into silence. This one looked up at him with eyes the color of a storm deciding whether to happen, and went quiet like it had simply finished saying what it needed to say.
"...Huh," said Bertrand, which was the full extent of his philosophical commentary on the matter.
He did, eventually, remember that he was a guard, and that guards were supposed to do things, and so he did the only sensible thing available to a man holding an infant at midnight: he panicked very quietly and went to find someone whose job title outranked his.
Lady Sabrina's mother, the Queen of Manachy, had not expected to be woken at this hour for anything short of war, fire, or her sister-in-law visiting unannounced — all roughly equivalent disasters in her mind. She came down the manor stairs in a robe thrown on sideways, hair still in the elaborate braid her maid hadn't finished, looking less like royalty and more like a woman who had been personally betrayed by the concept of sleep.
"This had better be good, Bertrand."
"It's a baby, Your Grace."
"I can see that it's a baby." She said this the way one might say I can see that it's on fire, which was, in fairness, also somewhat true of the situation. "Whose baby?"
"That's — that's rather the question, isn't it."
The Queen pinched the bridge of her nose. Manachy was a small region, a neutral pocket of calm wedged stubbornly between two nations that hated each other with the patient, generational hatred of people who'd simply never gotten around to forgiving anything. Hizosshu to the north, proud and overtaxed and simmering. Migard to the south — or what was left of Migard, since most of its people now lived as captives wearing other men's chains. Manachy survived by being useful to neither side and threatening to no one, a diplomatic tightrope the Queen had walked for two decades without dropping so much as a teacup.
A baby on her doorstep was not a teacup. A baby was the kind of thing that started wars, ended marriages, or — worse — turned out to be important, and important things had a nasty habit of arriving at her gate uninvited.
She looked down at him.
He looked back, entirely unbothered by the fact that he was a stray on a stranger's porch in the middle of a kingdom that wasn't his.
"There's no note," Bertrand offered, as if this were helpful.
"Of course there isn't." The Queen exhaled through her nose. "Whoever left him wanted him found, not explained. That's not abandonment, Bertrand. That's a decision made by someone who didn't have a choice in making it kindly."
Bertrand, who had not considered the political implications of curtain-quality swaddling, simply nodded along.
Inside the manor, woken by the noise nobody had quite managed to keep quiet, a much smaller person leaned over the second-floor railing in her nightgown, hair an absolute catastrophe, and squinted down at the scene below with the focused outrage of a child who has just discovered she is not the only baby that matters in this house anymore.
"Mother," called Sabrina, age four and three-quarters, deeply unimpressed, "why is there a peasant in the vegetables."
"He's not in the vegetables, darling, he's in a basket that used to have vegetables in it."
"That's worse."
The Queen decided, then and there, that she was too tired to win this argument and far too tired to lose it either, so she simply scooped the baby up — curtain, basket-smell, and all — and carried him inside like a woman accepting a verdict she hadn't agreed to but couldn't appeal.
***
Far to the north, on a hill that overlooked nothing in particular except its own self-importance, Master Tarus, eldest of the Watchers, woke from a dream he hadn't asked for and would very much have preferred to keep sleeping through.
He sat up. He lit no candle, because Watchers did not startle easily and lighting a candle felt, to him, like admitting otherwise.
"Laiman," he said to the empty room, in the tone of a man addressing someone who was not present and was, frankly, lucky for it, "you absolute fool."
The dream had shown him exactly what he'd warned Laiman it would: a field dimension passed not by gift but by forfeit, torn from a father who'd ignored every warning a man could be given and handed, instead, to a son who hadn't asked for it, hadn't earned it in the way the old stories liked to pretend these things were earned, and certainly hadn't been consulted.
Tarus had told him. He had told him plainly, in the flat, patient voice the Watchers reserved for warnings they already suspected would be ignored. Do not go to that battlefield. Laiman had gone anyway, because men who are warned about their own ruin tend to walk toward it slightly faster, as if outrunning the warning might also outrun the consequence.
Now there was a baby in a basket two hundred miles south, wrapped in someone's stolen curtains, and a prophecy that had just quietly clicked one tooth forward on its gears.
"Three sons," Tarus murmured, rubbing his eyes like a man who hadn't slept properly in a decade and didn't intend to start tonight. "Three destinies. And the fool who started it all is currently somewhere getting drunk, no doubt, blissfully unaware that his idiocy has consequences with names."
He was not entirely fair to Laiman. Laiman was not, in fact, drunk. He was simply sitting in the dark of a borrowed room, staring at his own hands as if they belonged to someone else, which — in the specific matter of a certain field dimension he no longer possessed — they sort of did now.
But Tarus didn't know that, and honestly, it wouldn't have improved his mood much either way.
***
Back in Manachy, the Queen had settled the baby into a crib that had, until an hour ago, belonged exclusively to her daughter's collection of increasingly judgmental dolls. Sabrina stood at the bars of it like a tiny, furious warden inspecting a new prisoner.
"What's his name," she demanded.
"He doesn't have one yet."
"Everyone has a name."
"Not everyone gets one before they're born, darling. Sometimes you have to earn it a little first."
Sabrina considered this with the gravity only a four-year-old negotiating palace politics could muster, then reached into the crib and prodded the baby's cheek with one finger, testing — apparently — for sturdiness.
He grabbed her finger and held on like he meant it.
"...Ragna," she announced, with the absolute, unimpeachable confidence of someone who had simply decided this was true and dared the universe to disagree.
Nobody in the room asked where she'd gotten the name. Nobody ever really would. But it stuck — the way names given by children stubborn enough to insist on them always seem to — and from that night on, the boy who had arrived in a vegetable basket, son of a man who'd lost everything for refusing to listen, grandson of nothing anyone in that house yet understood, was Ragna of nowhere in particular.
He would, in time, become a great deal more than that.
He would also, eventually, find out about the curtain. He would not be pleased.
But that was a problem for several years, several wars, and at least one furious empress-to-be from now.