badges, but so little that everyone had soon become used to it and most never gave it a second thought.
She grinned at him as she closed her slender-fingered fist around both enchanted objects. “Wait here.”
She ran down the beach for roughly forty yards and set them on a large rock. Then she came running back, her heart pounding in her chest—not from the exercise, for she ran every day, but from nervousness. She hoped she didn’t sound a fool, or worse, like some crude, croaking old hag, for her surprise was to reveal to him that she’d taught herself to speak the common tongue of Kurr.
She’d been very careful about trying to learn as much as she could before she finally sprung it on him, and Kettle and Pernie had been a big part of teaching her. The original plan had been to reveal her secret when he finally proposed, but she’d grown impatient waiting for that, and for whatever reason the mood struck just right this day. Besides, keeping the secret was agony now that she had developed considerable mastery. And not just the words, but the accents. Or, at least, the local one, the accent of the northern parts of Kurr. She was dying to try it on him.
Learning the language challenged her far more than she’d thought it would when she’d first made up her mind to do it for herself. The difficulty was not because it was harder than any other language might have been to learn, but because learning it was made more difficult by the same magic that was making it easy to understand everyone. Everything was rendered into the language of the listener, so no one really heard the words that the other spoke. Inflection, syntax, even dialects were impossible to detect within the radius of the translation spell. Only the pitch and rhythm, the essence of the speaker’s voice, were conveyed. In Crown City and even in Calico Castle, it was impossible to escape the effects of the translation spell at all. Every officer of the Queen’s court, every officer in her military, every noble and lord had been ordered to wear a ring or a locket with the spell on it, and even that was not enough for Her Majesty. The Enchanters Guild had covered every square inch of the city with the spell, casting it on lampposts, sconces, and, on some streets, the very cobblestones. Even the parks had seen enchanters climbing about enchanting trees. The Queen was nothing if not obsessive, and when she took a mind to have a thing done thoroughly, she saw that it got done. And of course Altin and Tytamon had seen to it just as thoroughly in their home at Calico Castle as well.
Further complicating the task, she couldn’t find an unenchanted spot on Tinpoa either, because she couldn’t get any of the blank laborers they’d contracted to stop planting the Prosperion-made lamps and torches every ten feet they dug. Each oil lamp and reedy torch came to the moon already enchanted in an ongoing display of modern Prosperion efficiency, and that efficiency frustrated her to no end. Her plan to secretly learn the language should have been made simple with the benefit of so many Prosperion miners around. A pretty young woman couldn’t possibly have had difficulty finding plenty of laborers willing to share a lunch break or two speaking quietly with her, but between the mercilessly efficient production of enchanted mine supplies and a general fear of crossing the ironclad dictates of Ilbei Spadebreaker, the master miner who had been sent to supervise them, none of the miners had been willing or able to comply with her requests. So, in that, her simple plan for making at least something good come of her torturous time on Tinpoa had fallen apart.
However, clever girl that Orli was, she’d found allies in Kettle and young Pernie, the latter having helped her in secret on more than one walk taken beyond Calico Castle’s gates, and the former having dug out and given Orli a stack of Pernie’s earliest reading scrolls and children’s books. Orli picked up the
She grinned at him as she closed her slender-fingered fist around both enchanted objects. “Wait here.”
She ran down the beach for roughly forty yards and set them on a large rock. Then she came running back, her heart pounding in her chest—not from the exercise, for she ran every day, but from nervousness. She hoped she didn’t sound a fool, or worse, like some crude, croaking old hag, for her surprise was to reveal to him that she’d taught herself to speak the common tongue of Kurr.
She’d been very careful about trying to learn as much as she could before she finally sprung it on him, and Kettle and Pernie had been a big part of teaching her. The original plan had been to reveal her secret when he finally proposed, but she’d grown impatient waiting for that, and for whatever reason the mood struck just right this day. Besides, keeping the secret was agony now that she had developed considerable mastery. And not just the words, but the accents. Or, at least, the local one, the accent of the northern parts of Kurr. She was dying to try it on him.
Learning the language challenged her far more than she’d thought it would when she’d first made up her mind to do it for herself. The difficulty was not because it was harder than any other language might have been to learn, but because learning it was made more difficult by the same magic that was making it easy to understand everyone. Everything was rendered into the language of the listener, so no one really heard the words that the other spoke. Inflection, syntax, even dialects were impossible to detect within the radius of the translation spell. Only the pitch and rhythm, the essence of the speaker’s voice, were conveyed. In Crown City and even in Calico Castle, it was impossible to escape the effects of the translation spell at all. Every officer of the Queen’s court, every officer in her military, every noble and lord had been ordered to wear a ring or a locket with the spell on it, and even that was not enough for Her Majesty. The Enchanters Guild had covered every square inch of the city with the spell, casting it on lampposts, sconces, and, on some streets, the very cobblestones. Even the parks had seen enchanters climbing about enchanting trees. The Queen was nothing if not obsessive, and when she took a mind to have a thing done thoroughly, she saw that it got done. And of course Altin and Tytamon had seen to it just as thoroughly in their home at Calico Castle as well.
Further complicating the task, she couldn’t find an unenchanted spot on Tinpoa either, because she couldn’t get any of the blank laborers they’d contracted to stop planting the Prosperion-made lamps and torches every ten feet they dug. Each oil lamp and reedy torch came to the moon already enchanted in an ongoing display of modern Prosperion efficiency, and that efficiency frustrated her to no end. Her plan to secretly learn the language should have been made simple with the benefit of so many Prosperion miners around. A pretty young woman couldn’t possibly have had difficulty finding plenty of laborers willing to share a lunch break or two speaking quietly with her, but between the mercilessly efficient production of enchanted mine supplies and a general fear of crossing the ironclad dictates of Ilbei Spadebreaker, the master miner who had been sent to supervise them, none of the miners had been willing or able to comply with her requests. So, in that, her simple plan for making at least something good come of her torturous time on Tinpoa had fallen apart.
However, clever girl that Orli was, she’d found allies in Kettle and young Pernie, the latter having helped her in secret on more than one walk taken beyond Calico Castle’s gates, and the former having dug out and given Orli a stack of Pernie’s earliest reading scrolls and children’s books. Orli picked up the
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