The first visit by the tutor to Tybalt and Viola’s hut was a revelation.

  It revealed both in the way that Viola reacted to the gift of food and clothes—she burst into tears and had to excuse herself, a sort of warning to Tybalt that his family’s situation was rather more desperate than he’d realized without the Baron’s help—and when Tutor Balthus laid out the curriculum he would follow with Tybalt.

  “History, geography, reading and writing, mathematics, rhetoric, and morals,” Balthus said, speaking with an air of nonchalance.

  The long list gave Tybalt his first awareness of how ignorant he was of the world. He knew nothing of these subjects. Farming, that had been his only education. Even a couple of the words Balthus used were unfamiliar.

  “Rhetoric? Morals?” he asked his mother later. “What are those?”

  “Nothing that you can eat,” she replied with a grim smile.

  The Baron began to occasionally sneak down to reconnect with the boy, though in a cautious way, as it seemed to Tybalt in retrospect. He did not want to be caught by the Baroness, clearly, but he also did not want to spend more time than he had to around Tybalt’s mother. Instead of lingering near their hut, he would take the boy out hunting and talk to him about matters of strategy and history—important subjects, but it began to feel as though he was testing Tybalt’s competency as a student rather than trying to bond with his son.

  He caught Tybalt a young falcon and provided food to feed it, even gave the boy pointers on the proper practice of falconry, but even that, in retrospect, felt closer to a test than a real effort to bond with Tybalt.

  Would you fit in with my circle? Can you be of use? This seemed to be as far as the Baron’s interest extended.

  Fortunately, in a string of memories that Tybalt quickly breezed through for the angel’s convenience, the boy proved an extraordinarily quick study, consistently impressing father and tutor with his aptitude. Despite starting years behind his half-sister, he progressed so rapidly over the next few years that one evening, as he sat scribbling away on parchment, Balthus made a confession to him.

  “I dearly wish that you were not a bastard, young Tybalt,” he said. “You are a far better student than Lady Miranda, though you have had a much delayed start. Only in morals does she perform better than you, and I have no doubt that in time, you will make up lost ground. You know, the educated among us would prefer to be ruled by educated nobles—not children who would rather play dress-up and order the servants around—er, excuse me, I may have said something amiss.” He cleared his throat.

  Tybalt looked at the tutor’s face carefully and recognized that the gray-haired, balding old man was slightly drunk. Tybalt had seen intoxication before. Though his mother would hardly touch alcohol anymore, Sebastian would occasionally visit them while he was tipsy, and Tybalt knew the signs.

  The red face, unsteady voice, bloodshot eyes—and a distinctive decrease in inhibitions.

  He did not much care to hear his half-sibling slandered, but he was curious about this idea in Tutor Balthus’s head—the concept of Tybalt as a potential ruler.

  “A bastard cannot inherit, though, correct?” Tybalt asked. He had already learned this much law through his history and rhetoric lessons.

  “Normally, no,” Balthus admitted. “But your half-sister is a girl, and girls are also disfavored to inherit land and titles. There are loopholes that might be pursued, if your father had a mind to do it.” He sighed. “Unfortunately for you, last week, with her birthday, dear Lady Miranda acquired a class. Her father’s gift has descended to her. Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering he married his cousin, to keep the bloodline strong. Another nature mage, to continue the family tradition and make Greentear prosper.” He snorted slightly.

  “Will I get a class, too?” Tybalt asked. He had heard of these, but only rarely before he began receiving history lessons.

  Classes seemed to have great relevance in politics and war. They were also rare. Even out of the people mentioned in his history lessons, perhaps one in five had a class—a minority, despite the disproportionate power that individuals with classes accrued. The best available information was that something like one in twenty-five people or one in thirty in the country possessed a class, and those who did were typically nobility or wealthy merchants—and if they did not start out that way, they became nobility or wealthy merchants.

  People with classes married their offspring to each other and so passed the strength down.

  “The gods only know, my boy,” Balthus said. “But I hope so. If you do obtain a class—” He hesitated, then nodded to himself as if he had gathered his courage—“then I will be your advocate with your father. You may be unlikely to inherit, especially now that Lady Miranda has her class, but there are many ways that a nobleman can employ a talented natural son.”

  The day of Tybalt’s thirteenth birthday came, and his mother and uncle managed to scrounge together the ingredients to make him a cake.

  The tutor, the Baron, and even Lady Miranda came for dinner—her mother being away on a trip for some purpose, the Baron seemed to feel more freedom of action on that day.

  They stayed, had light conversation, and made merry with Tybalt and his family through the night. Lady Miranda even allowed Tybalt to serve her a slice from his cake, which was of course an honor, since she was of noble birth, while he was just a bastard.

  Midnight came, and the Baron seemed to have been keeping track of the time. He nudged Tybalt.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  “Well, boy?” he asked.

  Tybalt was confused for a moment.

  Tutor Balthus tapped Tybalt on the shoulder and whispered in his ear, “The Baron would like to know if you have acquired a class. You merely need to say or think of the word “Status,” and you will learn what the gods have in store for you—if you have not received a message already.”

  Tybalt’s eyes widened. He had received no word from the gods, but his heart was full of hopes that he scarcely dared articulate even to himself.

  “Status,” he whispered, not trusting his mind to simply focus on the word.

  The interface that he would become extremely familiar with appeared.

  He didn’t see any sign of a class.

  Tybalt avoided meeting his father’s or Miranda’s eyes and slunk over to his tutor to whisper in his ear.

  “How will I know if I got a class?” he asked.

  “It would appear prominently, just below your name,” Balthus said, in a tone of disappointment.

  “No class?” asked the Baron.

  Tybalt nodded. “No, sir.”

  “I thought not,” the Baron said. He turned to the tutor. “We have wasted your time, Balthus. You have been splitting it between the heir to my house and my bastard, when the boy should have simply been learning to farm.” He looked up at the sky next. The moon was high. “Looking at the time, my daughter and I should be going.”

  “So soon?” asked Viola. The tone of her voice was sharp, as if she was trying to deliver a warning.

  But if she had been attempting to get the Baron to stay, the effort failed.

  “I have pressing obligations in the morning,” he replied. “We have already stayed too long.” He tried to put a friendly smile on his face as he spoke, but Tybalt could see through the false face. Then the Baron leaned in close to Viola. He whispered, but Tybalt still heard, “Do not trouble me with the boy again. What we had is well and truly over, and you know as well as I do that he has no potential to participate in my world. He is your burden only now. Do your best with him.”

  Viola stiffened and paled at the words, though she tried to give no sign that anything was wrong.

  Tybalt’s eyes widened, and he stood paralyzed as half of his family simply left—left him behind as if he was worthless.

  “No,” he whispered to himself. “I can—I’ll get one. I’m just a late bloomer. I—you’ll see…”

  But he did not vocalize his protests above a whisper.

  Tybalt was already a dyed in the wool realist. He could not even make himself believe the words that crossed his lips.

  —

  “I think I am beginning to understand,” the angel said.

  Tybalt opened his eyes and saw her smiling slightly. He tried not to get pissed off that she was clearly pleased at how painful his old memories were.

  “Just wait,” he snapped. “It’s far from over.”

  —

  Another four years passed.

  Tybalt had turned seventeen, with nothing to look forward to but a life of farming.

  A bitter streak could be seen in his eyes now, as the life he had once imagined could be his drifted further and further out of reach.

  The only bright side to his situation was that working the soil every day had made his body lean and hard. The village girls liked the look of him—and even liked the status of “Baron’s bastard” that hung over him. To them, it was as if he had one foot into a higher class. He was simultaneously above them in some way, yet attainable.

  He was unimpressed by their admiration—most of them would never leave a few square miles of where they had been born, and he had always had larger ideas for himself.

  But he took advantage of it. He had a few girlfriends, and he enjoyed their affections and the way they competed with each other to be first in his heart.

  Two of them gave him their maidenheads. Both of them were older girls who knew that they would marry soon and wanted to experience something else before they committed themselves to a life of monogamy.

  Other girls were willing to throw themselves at him, but he left the younger ones alone. He had some qualms about spoiling their innocence if he wasn’t serious about them. It reminded him unpleasantly of the Baron, who was around five years older than Tybalt’s mother and had begun their relationship when she was just fifteen.

  The one thing he did not do with any of the women interested in him was father a child. Tybalt was careful about that. He used the primitive forms of birth control available to peasants, and whether it was those or mere luck, he never got a girl pregnant. He did not want to marry one of these floozies, nor make a bastard with them. He had seen what that did to his mother.

  As Tybalt recollected his sixteenth year, he showed the angel highlights. Moments where he had noticed things going terribly wrong.

  How his mother was no longer eating like her usual self, even though with Tybalt’s strength and a decent level of farming skill, the soil was producing better than ever.

  How he noticed her losing weight.

  How she sometimes had trouble getting up and moving around in the mornings.

  How he saw that despite her face and arms growing thinner, there was a growing lump in her belly that did not resemble a baby.

  Tybalt was no expert in medicine, but he knew something was wrong with his mother.