She stared at him. He had yet to lose his nasal Orfelian accent, which grated Laya’s ears to no end, but something had changed in his inflection⁠—the rolling dips within words, the slight upturns at the ends of his phrases. In the few days since Ariel had arrived, he had begun to adopt Maynaran’s songlike speech patterns.

Fascinating. Laya smiled to herself. The Orfelian was definitely not a fool.

“Ariel can speak over a dozen languages. He’s traveled around the world,” Eti piped up between them. “Laya, did he tell you that?”

“No, he did not.” Well, that explained how fast Ariel had picked up Maynaran. Once more, she met his gaze. “I suppose we have a great deal to learn from each other.”

“Yes, Dayang. I suppose we do.”

Ariel stared back at her with the same brazen openness, which Laya might have mistaken for insolence in other circumstances. This time, she didn’t mind. She understood the intent she saw behind those spectacles. Ariel wished to read her, the same way he wished to read the book splayed out on the desk between them. The same way Laya wished to read him.

She had not forgotten the vow she’d made to Ariel before their first language lesson. She would discover his true business in Maynara. In the meantime⁠—

Laya reached for a sheet of paper on the other side of the desk. “Another lesson,” she said without preamble.

Ariel chuckled and reached for his pen. “Certainly, Dayang. Whatever pleases you.”

They went over the Salmantican alphabet once more. He taught her how to link the letters together to form words. Laya found the alphabet easier to understand than she had the first lesson, but perhaps that was because she poured every ounce of her concentration into mastering it. The paper she had stolen from Ariel’s desk earlier that week was still hidden beneath the floorboards in Laya’s bedroom, and she had pored over it the previous night to distract herself from her sorrows. She quickly discovered it was a letter, addressed to someone named Nelo and written in Orfelian. Her first lesson with Ariel had not taught her much, but she was able to cobble together a baffling string of words and transcribe them into Maynaran: comrade, prince, and most cryptic of all, precioso. Laya would learn to read the rest of it, no matter how painful.

With the letter in mind, she watched Ariel’s gestures and mimicked them, committing each stroke to memory. The awful, ugly script kept her hands occupied⁠—and her thoughts oceans away from Luntok and Bulan.

When Ariel complimented Laya’s progress, her stomach betrayed her and fluttered in excitement. “Now that you know this writing system, you’ll be able to read most western languages as well as Orfelian,” he explained.

“I’m not sure what good it will do me, but that’s satisfying to hear,” Laya said with a shrug.