Andereia Shaker held the metal disc to the candle and still could not read her own name. The crest was all she had from the family that left her on Juniperfall's roads as a child. Twenty years of thumbing it had worn the lines to ghosts. She traced the grooves again. A bird, maybe. A tree. Nothing she could chase. Her raven watched from the rafter of her forest cabin, its blue-black feathers catching the firelight. It knew when she was restless. "Tomorrow," she told it. "I find someone who reads old marks." She had asked in three villages. Each time, a shaking head. But a trader had named a scholar who studied bloodlines beneath a silverleaf ash. Andereia had one thing left worth trading, and she pulled it from her satchel: a cutting of pale moonlit petals, the rarest thing she owned, coaxed from a vine outside her door. She walked all morning. The scholar sat under the tree exactly as described, an old woman with ink-stained fingers, sorting dried leaves into clay bowls. She did not look up. "People come to me for names," the woman said. "They rarely like the ones they get." Andereia knelt and set the crest in the woman's palm. "I only want mine." The scholar held it against the silver light coming through the canopy. She turned it, wet it with spit, tilted it once more. Her thumb went still. "Payment first." Andereia laid the flowering cutting across the woman's lap. The scholar touched the petals, then nodded, and something in her face closed like a door. "This mark belongs to House Verel," she said. "The bird is theirs. So is the ash tree. Your family did not lose you, girl. They struck their own child from the record. There is a mark carved beneath the crest that means cast out. Blood-cut." Andereia's hands went cold. "You're certain." "I have seen this cut twice. Both times it was punishment." The woman pressed the disc back into Andereia's fingers. "Verel still holds land north of here. Ask, and they will know you by this. Whether they open the door is another matter." Andereia closed her fist around the crest. For the first time it had weight. A name. A house. A reason she had been abandoned that was worse than being forgotten. She had wanted the truth. Now she carried it, and it pointed north to people who had already decided she should not exist. The raven dropped from a branch and landed on her shoulder. She stood. "House Verel," she said, testing the sound. It fit her mouth like a stolen thing. She turned toward the northern road and started walking, before the fear could catch her.