When Faye found the schoolmaster, he was standing in the market square, in front of the class of children, once again. He smiled and nodded to her but didn’t pause in his lecturing. She didn’t want people more annoyed at her, so she left him to it.

Faye kept going over what the bookseller had said. She hadn’t met anyone that had been unable to read her books, barring illiterate people. She hadn’t thought to ask, but Faye presumed that everyone was under the effect of the translation magic if that was the case.

Wondering how something of that magnitude would even work, Faye spent some time wandering the town, getting a stronger feel for who the people were, what they did from day to day, and get used to each area of the town as much as she could.

Translation magic was mind-altering in ways that she could barely comprehend. Without knowing how that kind of magic worked at the basic level, she just had to assume it was totally benign and that everyone was okay with it.

Wait, did it work out in the wilderness?

She shook her head. There was no way to know unless she went out there herself. The adventurers wouldn’t have ever thought to check. This was the kind of thing that people would easily forget about or never question when it’s a part of their daily life like this had been.

As she wandered, a few things stood out to her about Lóthaven that filtered through her musings about powerful world-spanning magic spells.

From what she could tell, there wasn’t any kind of strict boundary between rich and poor, weak and strong, in terms of the town’s areas. In her hometown, there had been clear areas of lower incomes where all the working-class families lived compared to the richer folks in newly-built estates.

There were small seas of poorly-built houses, like Faye expected, but then she’d emerge around a corner to see a larger, more ornate building she couldn’t help but think of as a manor — they usually took up multiple plots in the city and were often surrounded by walls. These manors weren’t clustered together. They were points of interest seemingly scattered at random through the town’s buildings.

People didn’t seem to avoid the areas by these manor houses, either, and there were one or two that directly adjoined workshops of one type or another. She assumed those belonged to families that had done very well through their trade, compared to the isolated and Old Money-feeling manor houses she’d also come across.

These workshops were busy, everyone nearby also involved in the work in some way or another. They didn’t seem to mind Faye watching, so she stood nearby to watch. When one of the matronly women overseeing operations looked toward her, she smiled and tucked her hair behind her ears, clasping her hands behind her back like an attentive child.

The woman sniffed and turned away to deal with a problem, real or imagined because no one had called out to her. She shouted something at the workers as she wandered away.

If people want to think of me as a child, I’ll use that to my advantage, Faye couldn’t help but think.

As with most of the shops she had seen in the town and market, the workshop had large, open shutters that essentially turned the building into an open-plan warehouse with large supporting pillars inside and struts along the exterior walls. Inside this particular workshop, Faye could see large bins that workers kept reaching into. She wasn’t sure what they were taking out or inserting, but they would quickly move from the bins over to the right-hand side of the workshop.

There, they would deposit whatever it was they’d picked up, where another worker would bend over the large, room-spanning tables.

Eventually, one of the workers that were leaning over the table would call something out, and a man or woman that had until then been sitting to one side on stools, drinking and chatting, would stand up and hurry over.

Once there, the new arrival would lay a hand on the table for a few moments, before they turned, dusted their hands, and returned to their stool at the side of the room.

Faye itched to get a look at the table. She couldn’t decide what it was they were making. Judging from the number of people in the warehouse and the amount of talking, shouting, and gesturing, it was a massive operation.

Eventually, without seeing more and not wanting to get in their way, Faye decided to walk back towards the schoolmaster’s outdoor classroom. She hoped that he’d be either finished or close to a stopping point.

The children he’d been teaching were still seated in a semi-circle around the old man, but instead of talking he was simply watching as they all practised something on the ground in front of them.

As Faye approached, she realised that each child had their own desk that rested about a foot from the ground. By kneeling or sitting on the floor, or a cushion in some cases, the children were able to use the slightly slanted surface as an ideal writing platform.

Faye was surprised to see that they were using what looked like a Victorian-era slate, essentially a small A5-sized blackboard. Each child had a pencil-like implement of dark rock that they were using to mark the slate’s surface, allowing them to write.

On a school trip in Primary school, Faye and her classmates had been allowed to try writing on slates. It was much harder than she had thought it would be. A modern pen and paper were so easy to use. Slate had a particular knack to it that required practice.

“Hello, Faye.”

She looked up and saw Taveon coming closer. He was smiling, his pipe held in one hand. The scent wafting from it wasn’t the same as tobacco, which made sense but also made her wonder exactly what it could be.

“Taveon,” she said in greeting. “I was hoping to ask you a favour. But someone said I shouldn’t bother you with it.”

Taveon chuckled. He looked around at the children, who were mostly engrossed in their task. “The parents of the town take the education of their children seriously, you’ll find. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have time to fit in another pupil, eh? So, what is it you’re after?”

“I need to learn to read Cró.”

Taveon blinked, then broke out into a loud guffaw. “Of course! Hah!”

Some of the students had looked up at Taveon’s outburst. He turned to them. “Faye here wants to learn to read, class. What do you say that, eh?”

“It’s boring, miss, if you don’t have’ta, then don’t do it!”

“But if you can’t read yet, miss, it’s really important to start as soon as you can.”

The little faces looking up at her and giving her such serious advice, which immediately devolved into an argument between two core factions: learning to read is boring and learning to read is amazing.

Taveon smiled and turned back to Faye, “I let them argue amongst themselves like this every so often. Builds character. Their parents don’t thank me, but the children will… one day. Now, about reading. It’s a skill that takes two, usually. It’s unusual that way.” He reached into a wide but thin pouch that hung from his belt and withdrew a collection of paper. “This is a primer. It’s specially made for youngsters. I have plenty, so you can have this one.”

Faye automatically took the proffered primer, realising that it wasn’t a series of loose leaf, but was carefully bound with thread where the spine would be in a book. Leafing through it, the first few pages had very few markings written on it.

“It’s the basics. Our lettering, arranged in order of the alphabet.” Here, Taveon turned back to the arguing class. Once he retrieved their attention, he asked them to recite the alphabet for Faye.

There were roughly the same number of letters in the Cróian alphabet to English, it seemed. Unfortunately, it seemed that some sounds were completely foreign to Faye’s ear and she knew she’d already forgotten them.

“I don’t think I got all that,” she admitted. The kids obliged by giving her the sounds again, twice. There were definitely some sounds in there that would prove problematic for Faye’s tongue, but she would try.

“Don’t worry, I don’t expect you to learn this immediately. As I said, this is a primer. It will ready you for more involved lessons, eventually. I don’t have the time to give yet,” Taveon said, the last with a measure of sadness. “I already have some evening appointments that take up much of my time. I will try and free myself of them as soon as I can.”

“Oh no,” Faye said, holding up a hand. “No, I don’t want to deprive another student of anything, Taveon. I mean it. Let me know when you have legitimately more time, and not before, understand?”

He looked surprised but nodded. “If that’s what you wish.”

She sighed. “I will admit that taking years to learn to read or write will definitely grate on my nerves… so I’ll do everything I can to understand what I see myself.” She grimaced. “I have no idea if that will help or not, but it’s not like I have another choice.”

Taveon nodded.

“Before I go,” Faye said, turning to the children, “I don’t want to take up much more of your time, class… but I was hoping someone would be able to count out the numbers for me?”

She saw a few students immediately jump to attention, as much as they could on their knees. She pointed to one of them, with a smile.

“Yes, thank you for volunteering!”

“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen…”

It was around fourteen that Faye’s brain registered that the child was reciting different names for each number, rather than adding a word to the earlier number like in English.

She stumbled over the last few.

“I’m sorry, I missed that. How many is the biggest number?” she asked.

Some of the kids put on thinking faces.

Taveon interrupted them. “Faye is not asking for the largest number you can think of, class. She is asking what is the biggest number that has its own name?”

Faye nodded.

“Oh, that’s easy, that’s twenty!”

Concentrating, Faye caught the Cró word for the number: lag.

“Okay, so there are different names for every number up to twenty?” she asked, and she consciously said the Cróian word. The children nodded.

Taveon told the class to return to their slate and carry on with their work.

“Some of the advanced reasons behind our language and naming systems is a little beyond them,” he said. “It’s actually beyond most people. I don’t mean that to belittle my fellow townsfolk, of course, it’s just that most people don’t have to think about this.”

He gestured for Faye to follow him over to the bench he used when facing the children. Sitting, he pulled a larger piece of smooth slate from behind the bench and perched it on his knees.

“Now, as the children told you, there are names for each number up to twenty. After that, you return and add one, twenty-one, see?”

“So, lag,” she said, “becomes lagi.”

“Correct. After that, you add each word to the end of twenty until you reach two twenties. There, we say forty.”

Faye’s brain short-wired a little. “Can you say that again?”

“Forty,” he said. Gémlag.

“Gémlag,” she repeated, slowly. “Which is two twenties. Then, we add the numbers again, so gémlagi?”

“Exactly right,” Taveon said. He smiled. “Once you reach twenty twenties, we say one fourhundred.”

She heard i tá, which was surprisingly easy for her ear and brain. The translation seemed to copy the Cróian word literally to English for her. There was no single word for four hundred in English.

She nodded. But then grimaced.

“I can’t believe I’m going to have to learn to count again.”

“It’s very different, where you are from?” he asked.

“My people count to ten, then start repeating from there,” she said, but then she frowned. “Except that’s not right, really, because we have names for numbers higher than ten, but everyone knows they mean ‘ten and one’, or ‘ten and two’.”

“Ten?” Taveon murmured, looking down at his hands. “You can count ten fingers, it makes sense.”

Faye nodded, then looked at her own hands. “How do you count to twenty?”

He showed her, counting first the tip of a finger, and then the knuckle at the base of the finger.

“Taveon!” someone called, interrupting as Faye attempted to recall the numbers again on her own fingers and knuckles.

A middle-aged man was approaching them. He was wearing some kind of apron, covered in marks and streaks of something Faye couldn’t identify.

“Taveon Schoolmaster, we don’t pay you to sit around with strangers like her. We pay you to mind our children.”

Taveon’s face didn’t outwardly change, but he slowly drew on his pipe for a few moments. The man had come to a stop only a few paces away. He was alternating between glaring at Faye and at Taveon, his fists resting on his hips.

“Good sun and fresh rain, Adept Deorsa,” Taveon said, blowing out a small cloud of grey fumes.

The man, Deorsa, flushed and chopped a hand through the air. “Don’t good sun and fresh rain me now, Schoolmaster. You’d best be teaching my lad the way, not this stranger, a lass without ken.”

“Adept Deorsa, you might have noticed that my students are in the middle of a task.” Here, Taveon gestured with the end of his pipe, not removing his gaze from Deorsa’s own. “I can do naught else whilst they complete it.”

The man glared around at the children, who were doing their best to ignore the distraught adult in their midst.

For her own part, Faye was glaring at the man, but was holding her tongue. She didn’t know him and wanted to return to the house without causing many problems.

“I saw what she was doing, Taveon! She was interrupting, talking to ‘em, distracting you from your role. It was us that appointed you, us townsfolk! You should be teaching our kids, not this tramp.”

A fiery sensation ignited in her chest, and the words that she’d held back threatened to burst forth.

“That’s enough,” Taveon said. He stood, casually but with a gentle anger that tricked you into a false sense of security. “Deorsa, I take my role and responsibility to these children and this town seriously. I do not compromise that for anyone. These children have benefited from the presence of this young lady being here today, mark my words. Of course, if you believe that there is someone better suited to the task than I…”

Taveon stalked forward, each step slowly and deliberately placed. “Someone who might listen to your every command, someone who has a level befitting such a lowly excuse for a Schoolmaster that might be swayed by any angrily shouting opponent, then by all means, please, bring them here to take my place.” Then, Taveon bared his teeth in a smile that seemed more threat than grin. “Or, remove your son from my classes if you are dissatisfied.”

The man blanched. He looked at Faye, a flash of anger colouring his features, but a glance aside at one of the boys seated in the semi-circle made him deflate almost as dramatically as a balloon.

“No, of course not, Schoolmaster. I wish him to learn all he can. That’s all.”

Taveon’s features immediately smoothed out. He put the stem of the pipe back between his teeth and spoke around it. “Adept Deorsa, each of my pupils here today is a good student and will go far.”

Meeting the old Schoolmaster’s gaze, the man nodded, consciously wiped his hands on his apron, then turned and strode away.

“Class, I think that was enough disruption for one day. Please line up and bring me your slates, I wish to check your work.”

As the children lined up in front of the bench, with only some minor pushing and jostling of position, Taveon turned to Faye.

“I’m afraid that ends our lesson for today, young Faye.” He smiled; a grandfatherly smile of comfort that made Faye realise she’d been worried he would be annoyed with her. “As I said, I can’t take much time away from my current duties. But I will speak to you again when I can. Farewell!”

Faye nodded, held up the primer on the alphabet he’d given her and smiled. “That’s alright, I have something to get on with myself. Thanks, Taveon.”

The old man nodded, then turned and chivvied the pupils into proper order. Leaving them to it, Faye turned and walked away from the market square. She’d made a start. She just hoped that it wouldn’t take her too long to learn how to read, how to write, and — rather unexpectedly — how to count again.

She sighed. Just when she had thought she’d escaped homework forever, she’d landed herself here.