Page 20 of Elvenbred

She smiled to herself as she reclosed the door. A more awake guard would have heard even the small sound of the lock turning or seen the slight movement of the door. Completing her night’s work involved the tiniest of magics, the sort used for fixing a broken necklace clasp. She adjusted the lock, so that she could open it when she wished, without needing the tools. Then, to fully cover her tracks, she replaced the spring, and gently molded the piece of bronze back onto its fitting. It didn’t quite match, but she doubted anyone would be peering at the pipe threads.

Unfortunately, the lock proved to be the only real problem she had to solve, and she had never acquired the gift of … patience. She did her best to keep herself busy the second day. Then the third. By the fourth day, she was ready to climb the walls. She had been reduced to singing songs, trying to recite ancient poems, and even doing the dance steps she had always hated, along with exercises and physical activity to try and wear herself out in order to sleep. Anything to pass the time. She had never been comfortable with just her own company, wasn’t particularly interested in learning things, preferring passive entertainment. She altogether did not care for the long periods where memory roused and the unpleasant things stirred. Too many shadows that she kept locked tightly away escaped during those nights, and the nightmares left her shaking and sweating. She became waspish with Marag the servant, more demanding and imperious … which Marag reacted to with glowers and small slights.

On the morning of the carefully counted ninth day, the lock turned. Instead of the servant Triana expected, she saw a slim and tallish woman (tall at least for here … at home the woman’s height would have been a … disappointment to any family of decent breeding).

“Am I healthy?” she asked dryly.

“It would appear so,” the woman replied, “my simple name is Nora.”

Triana blinked and smiled. “That is the first thing that anyone has said to me since I arrived here that I have clearly understood.”

“Yes,” Nora replied, “it took me a while to deduce where your form of proper language came from, and then learn to speak it myself. An old philological study commissioned on the street slang of low-birth workers in Tourmaline. All washed through what feels like a thousand years of dedicated linguistic butchery. You really don’t like the nominative or declarative cases, do you?”

Triana felt her smile slip. Well, those were words. And they were in a row, forming a sentence. But the sentence itself made no sense at all. She grabbed the first words she clearly understood. “Low-birth workers?” “Tourmaline?” What could she possibly be talking about?

“Who are you, again?” she asked, still feeling lost.

“I am your tutor,” Nora replied. “My job is to make your speech presentable, so you don’t sound like you just rolled out of a gutter.”

Triana drew herself up, offended. She worked to keep her voice steady … a lord speaking to an upper servant on another’s estate. “I am V’dann Triana er-Lord Falcion, master of mine own estates, and ennobled to the fourth degree … and I do not consort with … ‘tutors.’ I will have speech with whatever passes for nobility here, that I be rightfully reinstated to mine own world and mine own lands. I demand to be treated according to my station.”

Her attempt at a calm voice eroded as her speech progressed, and by the end her voice had risen and her anger had gained free rein.

Nora shrugged, unimpressed. “A pretty speech ruined by the bad grammar, mushy pronunciation, and the syntax of a guttersnipe. But, your message was clear enough. Given that you don’t consort with my kind, I’ll leave you to it. Good day.”

With that, Nora departed, pulling the door shut afterwards. Triana shouted, and swore and raged for a while, but a proper tantrum requires an audience. She soon slumped back on the bed, and looked up, counting the bumps on the ceiling and seething.

The day passed with dreary slowness, made worse by the brief glimmer of novelty. She still chewed on what little she understood of the woman’s words … low birth. Tourmaline? Was that a place? Low birth.

Triana, given a very long day to consider her situation, came to the obvious, if unpalatable conclusion: if the tutor held the keys to her room, then she needed to play along. Sweet as cream.

The next morning Triana stood, ready, when the lock opened. She managed a friendly smile.

Nora entered. “Good morning. I am Nora, I am to be your tutor.” She paused, her hand on the door. Triana got that message very clearly and moved to head it off. A few words of courtesy in exchange for something, anything that didn’t involve staring at the walls. Cheap at the price.

She dipped her head in greeting. “Good morning, Nora. My simple name is Triana.”

Nora replied with a hint of a smile. “Good morning Triana … I hear it now. Tri-ana as in trip, not as in tray. Depending on how you inflect it … it sounds like our word for a sort of fairy, a lesser creature of the forests here, a wood-sprite. Pretty, but with a nasty bite. I will remember that.” Another smile, professional but with a hint of warmth. “I will be supplying you with books in the future, but for now, we’ll concentrate on the fundamentals.” She waved at the guard, who brought in two stools. Triana sat first, a small rebelling, a tiny nonverbal clue to show this woman who outranked whom, here. The stool was surprisingly comfortable, something she had not expected.

Nora gave her a slightly larger smile, suggesting she knew exactly what Triana was about, and acknowledging it … which diminished the gesture a bit .

“The best way for us to proceed is in natural conversation. We’ll start with a verb, move to more complicated forms, and then weave in the declensions as we go? Paying very close attention to pronunciation, of course. Don’t worry, your ear will attune quickly. You’ll be able to understand us much faster than you will be able to make yourself understood by us.”

“De-what?” Triana asked, completely lost.

Nora nodded, answering without sounding condescending. In Triana’s experience, a skill few could manage “Word inflections that change how the word is used in a sentence.” Nora smiled. “We’ll take it as slow as we can, and start with fundamentals.”

Triana took a deep breath. “All right, what do we talk about?”

“Let’s start with something easy. We’ll do the words for everyday things. Listen to how I shape my vowels. My name is Kilfenora. My birthplace is the Alla-lily Quarter of the city of Amethyst. What is your full name and your birthplace?”

Triana had once watched her father’s slaves washing clothes, then squeezing them through a mangle to force the water out. At the end of the first day she felt exactly the same way. Nora proved to be a gentle, yet implacable, taskmistress. Triana wasn’t used to having to work at much of anything, and while she could manage brief bursts of intense activity, the sustained work of having to think about what she was saying, left her little room to consider what they discussed. It also exhausted her.

She also saw that, with a few notable exceptions, the tutors her father used had been lazy sods. To be fair, she had little interest in what they taught, but still … they had earned good coin to do very little. She scanned the book Nora left for her to study. Nursery rhymes, naming things that ate you. How quaint. She flipped through it. A pretty long list, done in a tum-tap rhythm to learn how nouns and verbs sat next to each other. This came from Nora’s dry observation that sentences generally liked having at least one of each, and not one or the other. She flipped to the next page …. Lots of things that eat you.

Gro-mi-ched. Eats your head.

She yawned, and wiped at her eyes. What the hell is a Gro-mi-ched?