The next morning, he woke to the noise of Jake screaming whatever counted for obscenities for a child. Florian was pretty sure he caught “you fudging frick!” among the insults levied at who he believed to be Ellie, given that Joe was yelling loudly at them to quiet down so Florian and Theo wouldn’t wake up. If his head didn’t feel like someone had driven a stake through it, he might’ve found the situation hilarious.

He poured himself a cup of water, having uncovered Theo’s secret stash of bottled water behind some crates late into his watch. The other man slept like a rock; the slight rise and fall of his chest was the only thing that distinguished him and the dead.

There must be some kind of response to using magic, and whatever that feedback was, it must have hit like a truck. Florian wished that he had gotten further in Theo’s English studies, though realistically he had to be happy that Theo was such a swift learner, accustoming himself to the alphabet and some basic words before the sun went down the previous day.

Instead of waking Theo, Florian decided to drag his mace and himself over by the front door, as far as he possibly could be. He didn’t anticipate the process of cleaning his mace and performing whatever checks he could to make all that much noise, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

The spikes that were embedded in the head of the mace, reinforced though they were, had begun to show stress, little cracks running down their length. They remained firmly attached to the baseball bat section of the mace. He could get some more utility from the thing. Its performance stoked a bit of professional pride in his work as a blacksmith.

Theo stirred. “Water,” the man croaked in heavily-accented English, far from the crisp and almost robotic translation his magic yielded. Florian rushed over and gave him a water bottle, the other man gulping down its contents. That probably wasn’t ideal for a dehydrated person, but Florian only knew about as much as he could learn from television medical dramas.

“Thank you,” Theo said, wiping a stray drop of water from his chin. And with that, Theo had just about exhausted half his vocabulary in the span of thirty seconds.

“No problem, Theo,” Florian smiled.

Theo glared. Oh no, Florian realized. He hadn’t actually called Theo, well, Theo to his face just yet. Oh well, the cat was out of the bag now. When Theo realized that Florian wasn’t going to do more than shrug and grin, Theo stopped glaring, but his scowl never left his lips.

“Did you want to continue the English lessons?” Florian asked, figuring that it might be best just to get Theo’s mind off of things.

“Yes.”

And so their day continued much like the last, but with much more time to dedicate to studying English, Theo’s progress was even more remarkable than the previous day’s. His vocabulary had expanded remarkably to encompass probably somewhere between fifty to a hundred words, and while grammar remained elusive, Theo proved to be a decent conversationalist over their lunch of canned tuna – which was disgusting, in Florian’s opinion.

Through a combination of charades and the occasional word sprinkled in, Florian was able to deduce that Theo was using some kind of magic to understand him, which evidently hurt him less than using that same magic to respond. Florian didn’t get how that worked, but he was sure that Theo would tell him more one day.

As the sun went down and the wolves began to appear at the edge of the vineyard, Florian watched as Theo returned to his place at the table, this time without a chair. Leaning his back against the wall and adopting a lotus position, or as Ellie put it, crisscross applesauce, Theo closed his eyes and worked whatever magic had made the wolves disappear.

True to form, the wolves made a hasty retreat, and the vineyard was peaceful once more. The children went to sleep not long after, much more comfortable than the previous night. Joe alone decided to sit at the window and watch for anything unusual while Florian sat next to Theo in case that something unusual came for their resident wizard.

But of course, nothing did, and so the night passed much like the last one, with Florian collapsing in exhaustion alongside Theo at the break of dawn.

The next few days were almost identical, down to the cans of tuna they ate for lunch. The only difference was how haggard Theo looked, and by the end of the week, Theo looked as if he had tried to pull two all-nighters in a row. Which wasn’t far from the truth, given that Theo had probably gotten five hours of sleep in any given day, if not less.

Florian felt much the same way, but he logically knew that whatever Theo was doing at night wasn’t as easy as just staying up and twiddling his thumbs for hours like Florian did. It was over a can of tuna on the eighth day that Theo announced to him what proved to be most promising, according to Theo.

“I don’t need translation magic now. I can understand most of your words,” Theo said. “This will make my head hurt less.”

Florian didn’t waste time. “Can you teach me magic, then?”

Theo didn’t answer immediately, turning his head this way and that as he thought it over. “Give me two more days. I can’t explain it too good like this,” Theo shook his head, upset at the idea himself.

Still, the idea of learning honest-to-god magic in just a couple of days was enough for Florian. He could wait, even if that meant explaining things he barely understood himself. Who in the world knew why some languages – like Theo’s own – allowed for the use of double negatives while English had them cancel each other. Theo asked questions that, quite frankly, would stump many of Florian’s old English professors, not that his professors were all that great; the online reviews had said otherwise, back when the internet still functioned.

“Sounds good. Are you ready to get back to the lesson, then?” Florian asked, finishing up the rest of his tuna.

“Yes. First, one question. Who is this Shakespeare you keep telling me to ask my questions to?”