“Why two?”
“Big ones are for the first letter of names, and when you begin a sentence.”
“What’s a sentence?” I realized I had a lot to learn, but Wilkie was patient, watching my face as he explained. I tried hard to concentrate, but it was difficult with his face so close to mine, an unruly strand of his soft hair skimming my cheek.
“A sentence is an idea. It begins with a capital letter and it ends like this.” He drew his quill from the inkpot, sliding it gently against the lip to remove the excess. Then he touched the tip to the parchment to make a tiny dot.
“A dot,” I said.
“Aye. You need to learn each letter and what it sounds like, and I’ll teach you that soon, but first, let me show you what the letters are used for.”
“Tell me a sentence,” I said. I wasn’t sure what he meant by this.
He thought for a moment, then smiled. “‘One day, I went for a swim in the loch.’”
“Is that a sentence?”
“Aye. And it looks like this.” He wrote some letters, and I could see that the first one was bigger than the others, and that, at the end, he drew a dot.
“Tell me another one.”
His smile lingered. He wrote more letters. The ink made curled shapes on the parchment in a pleasing, lengthening design. “‘I saw a small thief.’”
“The first sentence is longer than the second one.”
“Aye. A sentence can be long or short. It all depends on what you want it to say.”
“What’s the next sentence?”
“Hmm,” he said, narrowing his eyes as though in deep concentration. “‘I chased the small thief up a very steep hill.’”
“Warrior,” I said softly. “Are you really going to writethisstory?”
“Aye. I like this one.” He continued to write the sentence and finished with the dot.
“Is that anI?” I asked, pointing. I thought I remembered that one, too.
“Aye, it is.”
“I don’t want to hear the sentence that comes next. I don’t like to think about it.”
“Which one?”
“The one where we fight.”
“All right,” he said. “We’ll skip that one. Let’s go to my favorite part.”
“Which part?”
He wrote down another sentence.
“What does it say?”
“What does it start with?” he said. “You can read the first letter.”
I smiled at him. I could. “You’re a good teacher, warrior. It saysI.”
“It does, lass. You’re a natural.”
