His black eyes met mine—so unnerving once, and now so dear. “You wanted me to be happy. That’s something.”
I looked away. I did want him to be happy. It almost hurt, how much it mattered to me.
When had I started caring about him so deeply?
And what was I going to do about it?
Winter was the bleakest time of year, not just in Talum but all of Ena-Cinnai, the days short, the nights long. The temperature dipped below freezing in the night as the season deepened, and we often woke to frost covering the Lyceum lawns. Students exhaled white puffs of air as they hurried across campus.
The Trio Winds intensified. Though the second wind, the Ver, came less often than the Clo, it was far worse. It blazed down from the northeast and tore shingles from rooftops. Then the Den arrived, and when it collided with one of the other winds, it created gales so fierce they howled together like dogs pursuing a wild hunt.
The Maestril was worse, I’d been told by proud locals. Like the Trio Winds, the Maestril was bitter and violent, but it was helpful, too. It dried out the soil for the harvests and churned the river, which improved its ecosystem. When the Maestril left, it carried away the dirt and grit of winter in a golden haze—so beautiful, locals bragged, artists came from all corners of the continent to try to capture it during the two weeks it blew.
“But this year, the Trio Winds are as fierce as the Maestril,” Leah told me one day as we walked to class in the bitterly cold dawn. She sounded stressed; she’d had a letter from her parents describing the wreckage the Trio Winds were causing. “Only, they’re more chaotic. And if the Maestril doesn’t function like usual…I don’t know.”
“When’s it supposed to arrive?” I asked. “Spring?”
She nodded. “You can smell it on the air even earlier. When spring begins, it settles in and really blows.”
The Trio Winds howled as the winter weeks bled into each other. To my disappointment, Daziel and I continued without change as well. I’d hoped we were building toward something, but maybe I’d been mistaken, or maybe neither of us were brave enough to try. Now, though, I was excruciatingly aware of every time our hands brushed, or our eyes held an extra beat, or our legs touched on the sofa.
I spent most of my time in the Keep, trying and failing to make any progress with Language X. “Even if wecanmake sense of articles and common verbs, how are we going to figure out unique words?” Stefan said mournfully as our cohort gathered one Saturday afternoon. The weekends were often best for working, with no other classes to distract us. Outside, the Ver shrieked downthe Lersach, unsettling in its rage, and from the windows we could see violent waves. “They could be adjectives or weird verbs or names—there’s no way to know.”
“Names,” Yael mused, moving her pen in circles on a scrap of paper, as though hoping ideas would spring forth. “That would be useful. If we could find, say, ‘Stefan’ in Language X, then we could pronounce those characters.”
Stefan laughed. We were at the point of exhaustion where everything seemed funny. “Itshouldsay ‘Stefan’ in there.”
“Not ‘Stefan,’ ” Gidon said suddenly. He had pulled out a bag of dates, and I was wondering if I could steal one. “But what about—the name of an ancient king? Ena-Cinnai was ruled by royalty twenty-five hundred years ago. Maybe the king’s name is there—or ‘Talum.’ ”
“Talum wasn’t founded yet,” Yael said, but absently, as though correcting a mistake through sheer force of habit rather than because she was focusing on it.
Because she was probably focusing, as I was, on the potential of this idea. This could be a breakthrough. While we could potentially translate words based on frequency—in our language, the most common words were “the,” “be,” “to,” “of,” and “and,” with much of our work so far based on theorizing similar frequencies in Language X—we still wouldn’t know phonetics. If we could match a name from Ena-Cinnaian to Language X, we would be able to pronounce letters.
“It doesn’t have to be a king’s name,” I said slowly. “If we could figure outanyword—probably a proper noun—that’s remained unchanged all these years, we could match Language X characters to ours.”
“Are there going to be any?” Stefan asked skeptically. “Pronunciations probably shifted over two thousand years.”
“Do you have a better idea?” I asked.
Stefan shrugged. Apparently not.
For a few minutes, we racked our brains. Stefan took one of Gidon’s dates, so I did too, and we stood around, munching on them and staring at each other. I couldn’t think of a single ancient noun. Surely nouns existed. Probably.
“The tribes,” Gidon said.
Right. Of course. Old thingsdidexist. “Place names,” I added. “I can pull a map from the library, and we can see what’s stayed unchanged.”
“The Great Beasts,” Stefan added. “Other religious stuff, probably? Shedim?”
“Good.” Yael’s pencil stilled, and she ripped off her page of doodles to leave a fresh new page. “Let’s make a list.”
~~~
“You’re distracted,” Daziel saida few hours later, probably not for the first time. “What’s going on?”
“Sorry.” I returned to slicing the pears I’d picked from the pear tree in the corner. They weren’t seasonal, but they were very sweet. “We’re trying something new. We’re coming up with words that might have stayed the same for thousands of years—ancient nouns.”
Daziel looked confused. “Ancient nouns? Like what? Why?”
