Celyn Learning Languages

When Llinos was five, Blodwen declared that she was going to learn Sembaran. It became a whole thing, because “learning Sembaran” was not the sort of thing that the family tended to care much about; the vines didn’t care about the language of a distant and largely irrelevant capital.

“I don’t understand why.” Hywel, their father, was not the sort of man who would end that ‘why you want to waste your time on that’ but he was the sort of man who liked straightforward, clear explanations and expected to receive them.

Blodwen, on the other hand, was the sort of person who would not propose a course of action without having an answer, and thus responded immediately, “The vintners have to talk with traders and take orders from Tafolwern wealthy and earls and what have you. If I want to advance in the winery, not just the field labor, then knowing how to speak Sembaran will put me at an advantage over others striving for the same goal.”

Hywel grunted and nodded; it was an explanation he understood.

Llinos was too young to really remember the conversation later, save that it was mentioned, sometimes, as a family story, as Blodwen pursued her goals and advanced. What Llinos did remember was how hard Blodwen worked at it, refining the dross of the trade pidgin into clear, alien sounds, training herself to speak with less and less of her home accent, to be more and more acceptable to strangers.

It was an uncomfortable transformation, and Llinos liked it best when Blodwen dropped the pretense of it all and spoke normally, in the language of family.

Sembaran was not Llinos’s concern at the age of twelve, either. Tudur had done very little of the actual going into the hills, as predicted; that had been cousin Ilean. But Tudur had laid the groundwork for speaking Sylvan, and that had only gotten better from occasional encounters with the actual fey, including, most particularly, Ampelos.

This day, the satyr was looking thoughtful over the cup of wine he had poured.

“What is it?”

He gestured with his cup. “You’re having trouble understanding what I’m trying to teach you, little bird,” he said, the Sylvan rolling and lyrical and full of nuances that Llinos was not yet sufficiently fluent to understand. “I am wondering if I need to find a way closer to mortal thought to present it.”

“Oh,” said Llinos. “Okay.” There wasn’t much to be done with that.

“Tell me, did your first tutor in my tongue teach you Elvish writing?”

Llinos pouted. “Yeah. He said he couldn’t teach me real Sylvan writing, he didn’t know it, but he taught me how to write the sounds down.”

Ampelos nodded slightly. “That will make things easier. Come, little bird, we will learn a little Elvish. Perhaps then I can explain this magic to you.”

Llinos did have to laugh. “I’m not sure elves are that much closer to mortal, but sure.”

“They are at least native to these lands, and that matters, some, for what can anchor and what can hold. Here, pronounce this.” He flicked his fingers, lighting up the side of a stone with illusory script.

It took time to learn Elvish, to get the basic ideas of it down enough that Ampelos could, more often than not, conduct most of their conversations in the language, forcing Llinos to practice it, to learn how to shape thoughts in it, to hear the nuances of how it described magic. And, of course, to demand the names of birds, or plants, but mostly birds, a quirk that made the satyr laugh and laugh.

“Try again,” he said. “You are too direct, you think in straight lines.”

This was not something anyone else would ever have said to Llinos.

A lot of it washed over Llinos’s head, but Ampelos was not interested in theory beyond trying to explain what Llinos needed to do, anyway. There was a word that meant, more or less, opening-the-gate, which was not what was supposed to happen; that was for other sorts of magic, or maybe it was for the way the fey did the fey magic, at least the ones who frequented the Mostreve Hills. Llinos was not sure.

The drum was soothing, at least, and fingers could find rhythms even if the magic did not come when called.

“Are you well, little bird?” The endearment sounded odd in Elvish, but it was at least the same endearment.

“Frustrated. I know opening-the-gate is wrong but I don’t know what it is anyway so I can’t tell if it’s what I’m trying to do. Open-the-senses I think I know - actually my sister’s been working on that one with me - but it doesn’t mean that enchantment-song flows properly.”

Ampelos gestured. “Drum for a little, you will feel better and can try again.”

He was not wrong, of course, and Llinos drummed, letting fingers patter against the drumhead, finding patterns, unravelling them, letting them reshape. The human patterns eventually gave way to the more complicated patterns that came from the fey, common time into three-beat jig and from there into more complex and odd rhythms, things that demanded both hands rather than just the backs of the knuckles of one, to patter against the rim of the drum or brush the head from the backside to mute in preparation for a flourish. Here an accent was a sharp rap with a knuckle, there a roll shifted its tone as the hand slid from center of the head towards the rim. Some of these things would be easier with a tipper but Llinos had misplaced it again and had instead worked on trying to coax interesting tricks out of the drum with hands alone, though there were a few things that still eluded mastery.

Drumming did more than soothe the nerves; when it got good, which this time it had, Llinos settled into a sort of light trance that seemed timeless. The rhythms breathed against the drum, vibrating with the hands, catching up the pattering sound of the wind in the leaves, as if there was an enchantment intrinsic in being. Llinos’s fingers brushed the drum, coaxing a whisper out of it like the breeze, trailing into the irregular popping of an acorn shaken loose before its time, dropping downwards and pinging against branch and foliage until it reached the ground.

It was entirely unclear how long the playing lasted. When Llinos’s eyes opened, the satyr was a little too close, startlingly so, waiting, but perhaps the enchantment of the drum was such that this was not so much startling as merely unexpected.

“Try it now, little bird. You have it.”

“I have it?” Llinos’s voice sounded strange and high, fluting like a bird instead of deep and rooted into a human body, and that was a fleeting perplexity for later. For now, there was the thump to this side of the drum that made that side vibrate against a thumb, and that was very like the way ‘here’ and ‘there’ were tricks of harmony, the drone of the crwth, a misty illusion. Sitting under this tree was not that different from sitting in that tree. Placement was a circumstance, an illusion, and illusions could be broken.

Movement was just a gliss of fingertips - not a thing for drums, but a known thing, a known enchantment-song, and was this what the word meant? This was not a direct way of thinking, this sort of fluidity, this sense of underlying rhythm, and Llinos had no idea if it was what Ampelos was talking about. The magic - if it was magic - was not a force to be directed, it was a partner in a dance. It did not obey, it exchanged; a breath, a song, something internal, in a strange intimacy that Llinos was not sure how to parse, except that it rippled in the mist, and then it was a tree branch and not ground beneath.

Llinos managed - barely - not to drop the drum, and quickly hooked legs around the branch, sliding around to hang upside-down and looking for Ampelos. “I did it!”

“In Elvish, little bird.”

“I did it!” The repetition came out in the desired language this time.

“Now explain what you did. In Elvish, it has the better vocabulary.”

Llinos rocked back and forth, readjusting one leg to hook properly over the other ankle for security. “Playing the drum put me into a state where I could perceive the enchantment-song. I think it was because I was getting deep into the more complicated rhythms, the ones mostly you taught me, and that’s going to have,” fingers tapped against the drumhead as the child searched for vocabulary. “The ripples on the surface of the same pond. Like that. I don’t know the specific word for it.”

He nodded. “Go on, little bird.”

“Recognizing the ripples isn’t the same as doing magic, but it’s…” Llinos swung back and forth a few times, thinking. “The thing about the way ripples are, is they touch everything in the pond, but when they touch, it sends the ripple back. It’s an exchange, a trade. And I thought maybe the magic itself is like, you said you’d teach me this for a bottle of wine.”

“The wine that goes in glass bottles,” Ampelos corrected with a grin.

“That’s the sort that goes in bottles!” Llinos laughed, and disentangled from the branch to flip down to the ground again. “But the magic needs a trade, a bargain. I don’t think I can do it again for a bit, because I’m tired, I traded my not-tired to the magic to be in the tree.”

“That’s an interesting way to perceive it, little bird. Do you think you can do it again tomorrow?”

“I can come back to try if you like!” Llinos tapped hands against the side of the drum. “I have a better sense of what it feels like, the way it’s twisted differently from how I’d look at things normally. Too direct, you said. Not shimmery enough, I think. I don’t know the words for it.”

“That’s all right, little bird. What else do you want to learn, when you have this right?”

Llinos scowled. “I told you about the fey who was making fun of the archery contest at the fair. I want to know what he did.”

Ampelos laughed. “Oh, little bird,” he said.

“Tudur says that learning how to read Sylvan is a bad idea and he won’t tell me why.” Llinos was furious, as was often the case these days, but at least this time the fury had a direction to it, something other than vague and raging dissatisfaction with the entirety of the world. “And he doesn’t know how anyway, unless he’s lying to me, but I don’t think he is.”

Ampelos took a swig of his wine. “And you want to learn, little bird?”

“I want to know why he thinks I shouldn’t.”

“The short explanation is that properly written Sylvan is enchanted, and he is cautious about it. To read is to awaken the enchantment, which may merely guide you to a deeper understanding of the words - it would be difficult to figure out how to read things without that guidance, I would think - but which might bespell you.”

“What sort of bespell?”

“A love poem might awaken love, or,” the satyr considered Llinos over the rim of his cup, “or more. But those are comparatively rare.”

“Will you teach me?”

“Mmmm.” Ampelos eyed his cup of wine. “I imagine we can come to an arrangement, little bird, let me think about what I might want. You are not worried about the dangers?”

“The fey of the Queen’s domain wouldn’t put an enchantment that would do me harm in a text I might come across. Probably.” Llinos shrugged. “So there isn’t much to worry about, is there?” Unlike the Crowther boys, Llinos had no desire to leave Clawyn.

Ampelos nodded. “In that case—”

It was Llew who started learning Sembaran first. He had traded some of his hard-earned extra coin for a book of miracle stories with songs printed in it, and now, of course, he had to figure out how to read it. He and Ellis would go up to the edge of the hills and practice, bouncing words back and forth, until Llinos joined them to make faces at them.

“Why don’t you learn with us?” Ellis asked.

Llinos shrugged. It was another thing to do with Ellis, even if it was not terribly useful knowledge. “Maybe a little, so you can practice.”

Ellis lit up at the offer, though, and that was worth it. “We’ll need to know Sembaran when we go to seek our fortune,” he said.

Llinos frowned a little, but tried to hide it, instead saying, “Teach me something, okay?”

The brothers were notably more haphazard about teaching than Ampelos, and Llinos did not actually learn much. But it made Ellis smile.

It wasn’t until the temple in Ruthin that the person who was now Celyn learned Sembaran properly. It was a larger town even than Nefyn, and with more trade, and there were people who did not speak Tyrwinghan at all, including one of the temple acolytes, who was a shy girl that Celyn found he wanted to befriend. She was a poet, and composed hymns, and he learned enough to write them down in his growing book of devotions, leaving the facing pages blank so that he could go back and translate them into Tyrwinghan. He was fairly sure that his translations were bad, and they were not coming out as proper poetry, but he made them anyway.

He got better at it, though, enough to go dicing with, enough to understand what Flavie was saying when she spoke, enough to translate her work. There was a pragmatism to learning the language that was very unlike the other languages he had learned, and he was not sure what he thought of that.

“What’s that?” Flavie asked, pointing at something he had written in his book.

“It’s a copy of some Sylvan writing. Not a proper copy, but all I can do.”

“It’s pretty.”

Celyn smiled. “They like their writing to be pretty. The fey.”

Flavie nodded. “What does it mean?” she asked, and then studied his face long enough to say, “Or is it private?”

“It’s … It’s a little bit private,” Celyn murmured. “I appreciate you, um. Noticing that.”

She nodded. “It had to be important for you to copy it down.”

“Yeah.” It had been something Ampelos had written for him, when he took his leave to go to Ruthin, a blessing on travel, a pride, a shimmering echo of drumbeats, and he could trace out the symbols without the emotion behind them and remember how it had felt. He did not feel at all able to explain any of it. The temple was not like home, it was strange in ways he did not know how to explain in any language he knew.

When he learned to summon light, when the hope came through hard enough to leave a lingering sensation and an actual effect, he said “Opening-the-gate” in Elvish, because it was that, and it was different, and he had words for that. But Elvish didn’t help enough, it wasn’t his cradle language, it didn’t feed him.

It was, in the end, a relief to turn his feet back home, to go to a place where the sounds of familiar language would be everywhere. Even if he also went to sit with the Crowther brothers and greeted them in Sembaran, just to see what would happen.

“You have a strong accent, you know,” Llew said. “Some people might have a hard time understanding you.”

Celyn shrugged. “I’m not worrying about that? It’ll work out, or it won’t.” He flicked his hand, a gesture as of someone throwing dice, and Llew snorted.

“Suit yourself.”

Celyn had mostly spent his time in Tafolwern near the edges of the city. The size of it intimidated him, the complexities of it, the way it had whole shapes and patterns that were entirely beyond his scope of familiarity. He would have gone somewhere else - anywhere else - save that his dreams said no, his dreams said stay, and so he endured, doing odd jobs and trying to learn whatever it was the Wyrdling thought he needed to know.

Finally, he found his answer, when he found Mahaut’s Miracle Players, and signed on with them. The dreams let him settle there, without pressing him, and so he shifted his odd jobs to things the caravan needed and went on with life.

One day sent him on an errand deeper into the city, though, in the company of the halfling illusionist, who was not thrilled with him and not at all inclined to make casual conversation. She seemed like someone who mostly kept to herself, and he did not wish to invade her clearly closely-cherished privacy, save that they had a job to do.

As they crossed a park, he stopped short and stopped laughing.

“What is it?” asked the halfling gruffly.

“That’s not real writing,” he said, pointing to a carving with mosaic inlay on a wall. “It’s funny.”

“Not real writing?”

He looked around and found a stick and a bare patch of earth. “Sylvan writing is like this.” He sketched out a character, and embellished with others, just three, a simple thought, with tracing arcs indicating it should be read sunwise. “Only I can’t write it properly, I don’t have the magic for it. You see how the wall looks similar? It’s like someone saw writing and didn’t know it was writing and just thought it would be pretty.” He tossed the stick aside and scuffed out the marks he’d made with a toe. “But since they don’t know how to write things it’s just kind of like writing.”

“I see,” said the halfling, and after a respectful enough pause, she gestured. “The shop we need is just this way. Coming?”

“Yep.”

Over time and travel with the Players, Celyn listened to the actors rehearsing, listened to them working on accent and tone, and he felt his own familiar language wearing away a little, as his Sembaran sounded more like the way Sembarans said it. He picked up the trade-tongue, along the way, almost accidentally, but that was another thing that wasn’t from home.

Turning towards Tafolwern always felt complicated, that return to the sounds more like home, without being home, but raising the odds that his next throw of the dice would bring him someone he could speak to in his cradle language. And of course it did not last, because Tafolwern was the usual end of the arc, and they would turn back towards Sembara proper, and the familiar words would fall away again.

And then he had to leave the Players, too, like he’d had to leave home, and it was before the Tyrwinghan sojourn, and he was too distracted by other things to really think about what that meant until Tavoise and the spiders and the chance meeting of people who could fight them and the shimmering vision of the fey warrior in the Wildling’s colors, echoes of home that were only made sharper when the actual rider spoke.

He was Tyrwinghan. The accent was not as deep as Celyn’s, and not from near Clawyn, but he sounded like home. Or at least, enough like home.