“Really.” Laya nodded and reached for the pen. The paper she’d stolen rustled faintly in her pocket. It would be written in the same script as the rest of Ariel’s damn notes⁠—how else would she learn to read it?

They began with the alphabet, which she hated. She found it lifeless and ugly, and at first, she didn’t understand how it worked. Ariel was so patient in his explanations Laya began to question whether he was brought there to be her tutor after all.

“You mustn’t think of it in terms of the Maynaran script, where each symbol represents a syllable. Because in the Salmantican alphabet, each letter represents a distinct sound. See, this is your name here.” He etched out her name on the paper. In Maynaran, she could spell Laya with two symbols, but the Salmantican alphabet required four arrow-like shapes that didn’t appear to represent her name at all.

Ariel wrote out all the letters for her on a fresh sheet, leaving space for her to copy them beneath. Laya felt like a child again as she clumsily retraced his scrawl. It was a humiliating exercise, and she wanted to give up after less than an hour.

“How tiresome,” she said, throwing down the pen. “Perhaps I ought to teach you the Maynaran alphabet instead.”

Laya had intended it as a joke, but Ariel nodded. “I would like to learn. I can only recognize a few symbols.”

“You come to Maynara, and you cannot even read the language?” she asked, shocked.

“I never had to learn, as spoken Orfelian shares many similarities with Maynaran. It’s the writing system that’s different.”

“Uncultivated fiend,” Laya chided him. She reached for another sheet of paper. “Here, I will teach you, lest you wander my country looking like a fool.”

They spent the next hour going through the Maynaran syllabary. Ariel, admittedly, was a better student than Laya could ever hope to be. He mimicked the swoop of her script with surprising precision and laughed in delight upon writing his name in Maynaran for the first time.

To her shock, Laya found herself warming to him, which didn’t sit well with her. She tossed him a thinly veiled insult to make things right. “For an ignoramus,” she said, “you certainly are a fast learner.”

Ariel chuckled. He didn’t appear to take offense. “You chide me, Dayang, for knowing so little about your country, but how much do you know about the rest of the world?”

Her smile faltered. He was right. She had never left Maynaran soil and never cared to. This was her home, her kingdom⁠—the only country that had ever mattered to her. But she wouldn’t let the Orfelian make her feel like an ignoramus herself.

She turned up her nose and said, “I’ve heard how people like us are treated in other parts of the world, Ariel. Those places do not interest me.”