There is a sleeping toddler in a basket beneath this tree now.

That is a very bad place for a toddler! She’s going to bring the whole basket inside now.

The toddler stirs a little but does not wake up right away, just shifts in her completely inadequate blanket.

...This is better than being left outside but she seems like she might still be cold. The servant (who totally has a name and it is Suni) thinks for a minute and then carries the basket into Mile's bedroom where multiple people are already cuddling under blankets and not asleep yet.

"My lady, I found a child in the snow and I thought maybe you'd want something to happen to her other than being left there all night."

" - Yes. All right. There's room in bed for a child that small."

Squirm. Yawn.

"Hello, baby, what brings you here on such a night?" Mile singsongs barely above a whisper, not really expecting a meaningful answer.

"That's a great question but I don't know because I seem to have amnesia."

"...Well. That's no good. Do you know if you're cold or hungry?"

"I'm not particularly cold or hungry, thank you."

"Well, you're welcome. You're so articulate for how small you are, do you have any idea how old you are?"

"Sorry, I don't at all."

Nod. Yawn. "We'll figure out what to do with you in the morning, for right now the only real choice is for you to stay where it's warm."

"I appreciate that."

When morning comes, there still isn't anything obvious to do with her, but at least it's not snowing and it's a reasonable time to talk.

She wakes up (again) when there's activity around her and sits up in her basket.

"Good morning! Remember anything today?" Mile asks.

"...I remember yesterday evening, but nothing before I woke up in your house."

"Mm-hm," says Mile. "Well, let’s get you some breakfast - what do you like to eat?"

"I don't even know that I do like to eat. Can I look at what you have?"

"Sure." Mile can show her the kitchen herself (the servants could also handle this but Mile is curious how it'll go) and also take the opportunity to say, "By the way, I'm Mile. I don't believe I got your name last night."

"I don't remember my name either."

Mile looks at her sharply. "I'm sorry to hear that, it sounds like the sort of thing I'd find disturbing if it happened to me."

"It honestly doesn't rate against having lost all of the other memories I may have ever had too. I can just pick a new name."

"So you can. What name would you like?"

"I don't know, what kinds of things are normal names?"

"Hm. There are mostly two categories for different sorts of people and I wonder if you can sort them given a list - you know things like how to talk, see, and I want to know what other things you might not have noticed you know - people can have names like Mile, Feris, Zaira, Tana, Taren, Teru, Rie, Valan, Dira, Lonan, Lanan, Lenu, Relu, Fere, Zatar, Sumi, Lili, Lile, Luna, Eli..." She really rattles them off.

"I wouldn't know how to sort those except by things like whether I like them or not."

"Huh! Names like Teru and Relu are for girls and names like Zaira and Lanan are for boys. Feris is mostly for boys and Rie is mostly for girls but they can be either."

"I'm not sure what makes a name like Teru and Relu instead of like Zaira and Lanan if it's a very different name that doesn't sound much like any of them like Sumi. I'm a girl though so probably should have a girl's name."

"Sumi is for girls but less... insistently so. You know, I've been trying to tease out what exactly you do and don't remember implicitly - you knew what a girl is, for instance, or at least I assume you're right about that - " and here is the kitchen but Mile's going to finish this thought anyway. "What I've noticed is that you're consistently and dramatically more articulate than you ought to be and if you're lying about having lost your memory you're doing it oddly well. And that... you know about food, which of course you'd need, and about girls, which you are, but not about which names are for girls. And no one's remarked to me about a local child learning to talk very quickly, which they might not have, but - I wonder if you haven't actually been exposed to other people beyond whoever was caring for you before."

"That's an interesting guess... I will note it if things seem weird to me instead of merely unfamiliar like the names, I guess. Rie is a pretty okay name but I bet there are nicer ones."

"What would make a name nicer?"

And here are some foods she might recognize, such as lentils and pickles and cheese and sausage...

"If it -" She is brought up short by the sausage. "What's that?"

"Sausage. It’s meat."

"Like... an animal? A dead animal? What's it for?"

"When you eat the flesh of a creature you take a little of its strength into yourself."

"You eat it? Ew!"

"That’s a rude thing to say. Meat is good for you and other people want it even if you don't."

"They can have it!"

Mile laughs. "Do you already know about cheese? And vegetables?"

"I know about vegetables. Is that the cheese?" She points at the unidentified item. "Other people can have that too."

"You didn't know about cheese, either... do you know about milk or fish?"

"I know what a fish is. You're saying people eat them?"

"Yes. What do you know about them?"

"They're animals. They swim in water and have fins and scales."

"Huh. Aside from the foods, do you know what everything else you've seen here is?"

"We're in a house, I woke up in a basket, we're wearing clothes..."

Mile nods. "Do you know what country we're in and what a country is?"

"I have a sort of vague idea what a country is, like, it's whoever has a particular queen or king. I don't know what one this is or what ones there are."

"This one is Sesat, which is next to Niazon, Iral and Azan. There are more farther away."

"Sesat. Okay."

And eventually there is lentil soup.

She inspects it. She tastes it.

"It's very salty," she remarks.

"Is that surprising?"

"It is not to my taste."

"You're so articulate. Well, if I decide to keep you, it's no trouble to have less salty lentils sometimes, though I'm not committed to keeping you in the first place."

"Keep me?"

"Have you live in my house in the longer term."

"Oh. I guess I need somewhere to live but if you don't want a houseguest I can probably find somewhere else? Or maybe I can't, I am realizing now I have no idea."

"We can try to find you another place if necessary. I haven’t ruled out keeping you either, though. You’re very smart."

"I seem to agree with you even though reasonably I shouldn't have much opinion because I don't know how smart other people are."

"Most people aren't smart enough to notice that they've just thought something for no reason and change their minds."

"Wow. That's concerning."

"Most people only have to do simple work and get told what to do and how much of it and how. The people who make decisions - like our Star-of-Stars, of course - are plenty smart. All my family is as smart as you or smarter. It's one reason I'm thinking of keeping you - I think carrying water and digging in the dirt would be a waste of your talents."

"It doesn't sound like it would be great."

"It isn't. It's a hard life and a very bad one if you're an intellectual sort and like to make your own choices, or if you turn out small or weak."

"Is that importantly different from being small and weak right now?"

"Yes. At some point you'll stop getting bigger and stronger and that means that hard physical labor will stop getting easier for you. And no one would make you do anything very hard at your age."

"Okay."

"...I do think I like you."

"Thank you. You seem decent so far too."

"Do you know how to read?"

"Of course I - oh, do a lot of people not?"

"Especially at your age and in out-of-the-way places. I'm not sure if more people can read than can't; it varies a lot. Children do also sometimes insist they can read when they can't; perhaps while someone is looking into where you came from you can demonstrate for me."

"Okay, what do you have around for me to read?"

Once she's given an order to a servant and made sure no one will be getting the books dirty she picks one out. It's not chosen to be easy to read; quite the opposite. Mile wants to find out if she can choose anything too difficult. So here's the book about urban planning. (There are not any other books about urban planning known to Sesat.)

It doesn't occur to the basket child immediately that she might be supposed to read it aloud, but she is sure staring intently at it and turning pages at a plausible rate.

At this point, Mile basically believes that this tiny child can not only read things most adults would struggle with but do it silently. She asks her to read some of it aloud anyway, though, and asks some questions about the content.

"Oh, sure, are you one of the people who doesn't know how? This part is about having streets at different angles to each other! It says -" And she reads it.

Mile smiles in a way that shows more in her eyes than her mouth and waits for a reasonable stopping point before clarifying that she's read this before and was testing her mysterious houseguest.

"Oh." She resumes reading silently.

...Well, that's remarkably convenient, really. If she likes reading, Mile is just going to let her do that until the servant can report back about her complete lack of history.

She likes reading, or city planning, or both!

What an absolutely adorable creature who apparently appeared out of nowhere. Mile has heard a story about a child that never grew up, but even if this person is secretly thirty, that just makes it weirder that there's no evidence anyone's ever met her before. Maybe the fair folk did it somehow.

Well, nothing for it but to introduce her to the rest of the household. The servant who found her is named Suni and Mile's husband is Tana (everyone who doesn't call him by a family relation or a term of endearment calls him Greybeard, though he doesn't have a beard) and their sons are Zaira and Feris and the other servants are Tena and Emi and Lili and Tana (everyone calls him Other Tana, though he does have a beard), and some unspecified set of the servants (one of them is definitely Emi) have a baby named Elu.

"That's a lot of names. Can I have something to write them down on?"

She can.

She takes them all down neatly. Draws family-tree lines.

"Don't share this kind of thing around too freely," Mile warns her. "People get to know each other but when strangers come to town we don't like them to know who's related to whom and how."

"Why?"

"Well, you don't want them using your fondness for someone against you, do you?"

"I don't want... anyone ever using anything against me, but that's mostly about the 'against me' part and I don't see how a family tree would much affect that."

"Well, if someone who hates you finds out what you like, they know what to take away to hurt you, and if someone who hates you knows about a person you like, they can hurt that person, and it's typical for people to care about their parents and children and siblings and spouses."

"If someone hates me that seems like it's already pretty bad all by itself! Why would someone hate me?"

Sigh. "All sorts of reasons, and more broadly there are reasons people might turn against you without feeling hatred about it - to list just a few, you might have something someone wants, or you might have insulted them or someone they care about, or you might have hurt them, or they might just be cruel, or they might think you'd get in the way of something they want to do, or, especially for girls, it can be because they wish they could marry you."

"Because they wish they could marry me?"

"Probably not at your age but as you get older."

"Why would that make them hate me? Wouldn't somebody want to marry me if they liked me?"

Mile sighs. "You really are full of questions, aren't you."

"If you have a book about it that would work too."

"I don't. I'll explain later."

"Later like this evening or later like when somebody wants to marry me?"

Feris interrupts to enthusiastically offer to explain. Mile makes a despairing face and presses the heels of her hands into her forehead.

"Okay, you explain then," she says to Feris.

"So what she doesn't want to say is that they'll want to have sex with you, for which marriage is only a prerequisite, and they'll be mad at you for not having sex with them, but only if you grow up to be pretty enough that they really want to."

Mile sighs.

"Oh. I don't know if I'll be pretty. Let alone pretty enough that people would want to have sex with me without even liking me enough to not want to hurt me!"

"Actually - "

"Thank you, Feris, for explaining as much of that as is appropriate at her age, and demonstrating restraint and good sense."

Feris rolls his eyes.

"I don't know my age."

"You're too smart to be two and too small to be five."

"Maybe I'm two and the smartest person in the world. Or I'm five and the smallest."

"Only one person can be the smallest or the smartest and there are lots of people."

"I suppose if I were the second-smallest you might still think I was too small to be five. But really I don't know."

"We'll have a better idea in ten years."

"Why?"

"Because twelve and fifteen are very different and they'll be very different in the same way even if you're very small."

"Huh. I don't know what you mean but I don't know a lot of things."

Feris sighs. "I don't know what it's like for a girl to grow up or I'd tell you."

"Is it very different?"

"Very," says Mile, cutting Feris off, "and of course you’ll need to know all about that before you marry, which won’t be for quite a few years."

"I don't want to get married."

"And I sincerely hope you don't change your mind this decade," says Mile. Feris laughs.

"I guess I'll keep that in mind if I am thinking about whether to change my mind, then!"

So they do decide to keep her. She's old enough it makes sense to let her pick her own name and not old enough that it's so urgent they can't wait for her to learn a little more history and have a better sense of what kinds of names there are and what kinds of people have had them. (Mile will take point on introducing her to a variety of mythic and historical women, or men with unisex names. Relu who ruled a country. Rie who invented spinning. Zizu the sage. There's no need to pick something that's just okay if a few days will introduce her to something she really likes.) They can make lentil soup without salting it for her; Mile doesn't insist that she eat anything she doesn't want but Mile insists that she take at least the smallest possible bite of everything and put it in her mouth before pronouncing it non-food on the grounds that it is literally impossible to say whether anything is food just by looking at it. She's a little young for chores, really, but she can do some tidying, right? And given that she can read so well, it seems fine if she studies some of their books and gets more oriented that way. Strange, but fine.

Feris likes her. Actually the whole family likes her, but Feris especially does.

She decides to call herself Zizu after the sage. She develops a protocol of holding tiny bits of animal product between her teeth and then dropping it back on her plate. She doesn't eat much. She likes reading, and can do some tidying but she does trip and drop things; she's better at spinning once she's gotten the hang of that.

Mile speculates that she’s small for her age because she doesn’t eat enough, and opines that it would be embarrassing to the household for Zizu to keep eating poorly now that she’s one of them.

"I'm not hungry though."

"You might need to eat more often if you can't eat much at once."

"I'm not hungry between meals either."

"Well, you're clearly small for your age and you clearly don't eat enough, so you might not be able to notice when you're hungry. Eat more than you feel like eating and see if you feel better."

She tries it. She reports feeling worse.

Mile makes a face at this. "Worse how?"

"...like I ate too much. Maybe you can tell everyone that I am very smart for my size instead of very small for my smartness."

"I can. It won't work if you don't grow."

"I will probably grow eventually!"

"Many people do and you've obviously made it through your first year, at any rate." Mile clicks her tongue. "Some people are made sick by certain foods. I wonder if you have that problem, maybe with everything you've tried yet so you'd have no way to tell 'sick' from 'full'."

"I don't think any of the things that seem like food to me are making me sick but I guess I wouldn't know. I could try not eating for a couple days and see what happens."

Mile looks heavenward and bites her lip. She sighs. "You could try it. Or you could try eating one thing at a time for a while, see if you feel different eating different things."

Shrug. "Okay."