《Of Frost and Steel》Chapter 18

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On the morning of the day after the match Denzel came to see me, accompanied by a dwarven woman. She was stout, at only four and a half feet tall, and dressed in simple cotton clothes, with a leather bag hanging from her shoulder. Her hair was already grey, but her brown eyes held a firm determination. He introduced her as Arvia Flatstone, my new language teacher, then introduced me to her before leaving to our thing.

I welcomed her inside my room and made her sit on the chair at the table, then sat on the larger armchair opposite to her.

"So," she said, crossing her arms, "Mr. Smith told me you needed a teacher. You know no language apart from your own, right?"

I nodded. "That's right."

She raised an eyebrow. "How did you even manage to get all the way here from your lands up north without not even knowing Commercial Common?"

"Tied up in a cage."

She closed her eyes and sighed. "I should have figured." She looked back at me. "I'm sorry."

I shook my head. "Don't worry about it."

She just nodded, not pressing the issue further, then said, "so, is there anything you'd like to ask before we start our lessons?"

"Yes, actually," I said, a bit embarrassed, "what is Commercial Common?"

She gave me a blank stare for a few seconds but quickly recomposed herself and got to explaining. Commercial Common was apparently the lingua franca that merchants used when dealing with clients of different countries. It was called commercial because another lingua franca existed, called Academic Common, which was used mostly by mages and scholars, although some countries wrote their laws in it too.

She then explained how the commercial version was actually an evolution of the much older academic one, and that many languages on the continent shared similarities with it, including Emestrian, the language spoken in the Kingdom of Emester, or at least the area closer to the capital, which was where we were now. As for her lessons, she would focus on Emestrian initially, but would also point out similarities and differences with Commercial Common whenever they'd pop up.

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When she had finished her quick explanation, she asked, "is that all you wanted to ask?"

"Actually…" I said, a bit hesitant, "I was wondering if you could tell me something more about Denzel. Or Mr. Smith, if you prefer."

"He's rich. So rich that, despite not being a noble, he's more influential than many of them. He's also an asshole with little regard for the wellbeing of other people."

"I figured that."

She nodded in affirmation. "But," she raised a finger, "he is also very strict when it comes to adhering to a contract. When he signs a paper or gives his word, you can be sure he will maintain it, which is why so many merchants like dealing with him, despite the person he is. Mind you, it's not like he goes around eating children and kicking horses, he's just an asshole. If he does something good, or he does you a favor, you can be certain that it's for profit and profit alone."

"So…?"

"Try to stay on his good side, which means, bring him money, and you will be practically untouchable inside the city."

"What if I decide to stop working for him?" I asked.

She shrugged. "It depends. He might just ignore you or try to find a way to bring you back into his schemes. Considering that he probably went through quite some trouble to get you here and he's now accomodating you so much, you're probably very valuable to him, at least right now, which means I advise against trying to cut him off."

"I see… Oh well, it's not like I can do much without even knowing how to speak with people here."

"Exactly." She pulled out a piece of papyrus from her bag. "Let's start the lesson, then, shall we?"

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Her lesson was pretty easy to follow. Being the first lesson, she kept her vocabulary to a minimum, teaching me first about subject pronouns, then articles, then simplet words like man, woman, child, et cetera. She then went on to teach me about the nouns of some objects in the room.

It was a lot of stuff for a first timer, but she made sure to repeat things time and time again, and have me do the same after her. After every few words she introduced, she'd ask me the translation for one she had introduced ten, twenty, forty minutes earlier, or even more, so that I wouldn't just forget them.

After two whole hours of lesson, I was finally able to say things like, "I am Anya," or, "the papyrus is on the table."

Satisfied with my progress, she left for lunchtime, saying that she would be back in a couple of hours. After learning that I was supposed to go train with the guards of the city in the afternoon, she had proposed to accompany me to both serve as a translator, and help me ease into the language by trying to understand actual speech with her help.

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