Two winters had passed since Louis-Auguste first woke inside a child's body with the memories of a dead salaryman.
Now seven years old, he no longer looked like porcelain.
The softness of infancy had retreated from his face, replaced by sharper lines beneath pale skin. His posture no longer wavered. He walked Versailles with a confidence that unsettled men twice his age.
Étienne Moreau still rose before dawn to train him in the eastern gardens.
"Your breathing is wrong," Étienne said, tapping the boy's ribs with a wooden rod.
Louis corrected his stance without complaint.
Cold air burned his lungs.
Pain was instruction.
France, however, was not improving.
The winter of 1761 had been cruel. Grain shipments stalled in the north. Prices rose in Paris. In taverns, men cursed tax collectors while nobles danced in candlelight.
Louis watched the numbers change in Necker's ledgers like creeping rot.
Debt had not exploded yet.
But it was gathering weight.
History always began quietly.
His grandfather summoned him to the hunting lodge at Fontainebleau.
King Louis XV had aged visibly. The king's laugh came less often, and when it did, it sounded forced.
"You walk too seriously for a boy," the king said as Louis bowed.
"France is not in a playful mood, Sire."
The king studied him over a crystal goblet.
"You think like a priest or a minister."
"I think like a ruler."
A pause.
Then laughter.
But the king's eyes were no longer amused.
Back at Versailles, Louis encountered Duc de Noailles again.
The duke smiled thinly. "You grow quickly, Monseigneur."
Louis met his gaze.
"So do rumors."
The smile faltered.
Victory was not loud.
It was cumulative.
That night, snow dusted the palace roofs. Louis stood at his window, watching servants struggle through the white darkness.
Seven years old.
And already marked.
In his previous life, this was the age when he had been memorizing multiplication tables.
Now he was memorizing enemies.
The future was still years away.
But winter always came first.