I was seven when I first understood what I actually had.
Not strength. Not height or speed or the particular quiet authority that older children in Ashfen wore when they wanted to settle a dispute. None of that. What I had was arithmetic.
It sounds like a small thing.
It was not.
The market square on trade days was organized chaos, which mostly meant it was disorganized chaos with a thin layer of tradition on top. Merchants argued. Buyers argued. Scribes miscounted, then argued about the miscounting. The temple kept a man there on market days to settle weights disputes, and he was forever three trades behind and not particularly apologetic about it.
Old Fenwick ran the grain merchant's stall two rows from the bread sellers. He was sixty-something and had outlasted three apprentices through sheer stubbornness and what Nessa called a fundamental disagreement with delegation. He kept his own ledgers in a handwriting that was either genius or catastrophe, and tracked his takings with a method that seemed to involve faith as much as mathematics.
I had been watching him make the same error for six market days.
On the seventh, I stopped.
"You are adding the standard weight twice," I said.
Fenwick looked at me the way adults often looked at me: with the specific affront of someone who had not invited an opinion.
"I am adding it correctly," he said.
"You weight-subtract for the cloth tare and then you count the cloth separately as a line item. So the cloth is in the subtraction and in the count. Two places."
He stared at me.
I pointed to the relevant lines in his ledger.
He looked at the lines. He looked at me. He looked back at the lines.
"You can read," he said, as though this were the suspicious part.
"Nessa taught me."
"You are seven."
"I know."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he picked up his stylus, crossed out the line in question, and marked a correction with the air of a man who had decided the quickest solution was also the most dignified one.
"Come back next market day," he said.
I did.
By the third week, I was doing his morning count before he opened. He paid me in small coin that I was honest with Nessa about, which she seemed to both appreciate and find faintly alarming. By the sixth week, I had reorganized his ledger structure into something that would no longer require the temple arbiter to intervene in weights disputes, because the weights were now tracked in their own column instead of buried in line notes where they kept getting counted twice.
Fenwick complained about every change I suggested and implemented all of them.
That was when I understood something important: the power was not in being smarter. It was in being useful. Those were not the same thing, and confusing them was one of the more common mistakes people made in any world.
On Earth I had taken arithmetic for granted because everyone around me had it. In Ashfen, clean accounting was a skill with real scarcity, and scarcity meant it could be traded.
I was not going to save enough coin to buy myself out of the village, not at seven, and not at seventeen either. I did not have delusions about what small coin and a grain merchant's goodwill could actually purchase. But I understood, in the way you understand things after you have already died once and started over, that agency came in increments.
One small increment at a time.
That was enough.
Cael noticed the coins when I brought them home the first time.
He turned one over in his palm. He looked at me. He put the coin back in my hand.
"Yours," he said. "You work for it."
"I thought—"
"Yours," he said again, with a finality that did not leave room for argument.
Nessa looked at him over my head with an expression I had learned to read by then. It meant something between I told you so and also this child is going to be an interesting problem when he is older, and we should probably discuss that at length.
Cael had the grace not to look smug about the coins.
He looked a little smug.
I spent the first half of my earnings on a decent knife, because even at seven I understood that a practical tool outlasted most purchases. The second half went into a clay jar in the corner of my room, which was the simplest form of future-proofing I had access to.
There was a feeling that came with the coins. Not pride exactly. Not satisfaction in the way a completed task is satisfying. Something quieter.
I had needed it badly, I realized.
The small proof that I could do something.
That Ashfen could not simply happen to me the way Brindle Hollow had happened. That I was not just waiting inside someone else's story.
That if I was careful and patient and applied what I carried, I could matter to my own life in ways that counted.
The clay jar gained four more coins by winter.
It was a beginning.