Ophelia

  As Taylor struggled to grow his mana and improve his magic, midwinter came and went. Taylor had no idea midwinter was his birthday until he received a small cake with his dinner. Blake placed it in front of him and backed away.

  "A special treat for your birthday. Congratulations on turning nine."

  Blake brought all his meals to Father's office and took away dishes when he was done. Chambers dusted the room only when Taylor wasn't in it. Cook preferred not to see him at all if she could help it. If Taylor passed through the kitchen, he made sure to announce himself or stomp his way through the mudroom. In spite of her initial kindness to him, his presence annoyed her after fifteen minutes, so much so that she would chase him out with a metal pan in one hand.

  Despite all that, Cook made him a birthday cake.

  Taylor turned up the magic lamp to get a good look at it. There were no candles or sparklers on it, like some cultures used for special occasions, but it was decorated with a ring of candied fruits, and the frosting was whipped cream. It was a pretty little thing, and Taylor didn't know how to feel about it. The insides were light and citrusy.

  "Wow, tart and sweet! Thank Cook for me."

  The lamp flickered as the mana stone that powered it ran low. All the lighting in the house ran on mana stones, but the office and library were the two rooms where stones had to be changed most often because Taylor was always studying.

  "I'll get a new one, Master Bilius."

  "No, I've got this." Taylor removed the stone and rolled it around in one hand, filling it with mana. These were poor quality, cheap rocks harvested from the thousands of mana beasts killed at the frontier. They were cheap and disposable. But a magician with even the tiniest degree of mana control could fill one. It was good practice. And it saved money.

  Taylor put the stone back inside the lamp, and it shone bright again. "In fact, from now on, bring all the dead mana stones to me."

  Soon after his birthday, there was a knock on the front door during breakfast. Nobody ever knocked on the front door. The only visitors were vendors and tradesmen who did business with the estate, and they came around to the back door by the kitchen.

  "Let's go see who it is, shall we?" Blake shooed him to the entrance hall where they opened the door. Standing on the porch was an exceedingly short woman with red curly hair. She wasn't much taller than Billius, but her hips were those of an adult and her eyes had fine crinkles at the corners. Her ears were broad and slightly pointed.

  Taylor had no idea what species of person he was looking at.

  "My name is Ophelia Brooks," she said with an odd bouncing-bowing motion, "and I'm here to tutor Billius d'Mourne."

  "Welcome to our home. I am Billius. Thank you for coming." Blake had drilled him in greetings every day for the past week, and now he knew why. "Please come in."

  "Thank you." Ophelia and her satchel stepped over the threshold and looked around the entrance with naked interest. "Where will we be studying?"

  "In the library. Please follow me." He rushed up the stairs, charged into the library, and opened shutters to let full sunlight in. When Ophelia caught up to him, she looked around the room, noted the books and two writing desks, and the obsidian statue of Shitukan on a shelf where he could see the room. She nodded her approval.

  "This will do nicely. You have a most pleasant library." She installed herself at one of the study tables and proceeded to unpack supplies: cheap ink, pens, and paper suitable for a child. A board book of letters completed the set. Somehow, she managed to do all of that without looking at him. Looking too hard at another's face seemed to be taboo in this world, but Taylor did it anyway.

  "Is there anything in particular you want to achieve?"

  "I want to read and do numbers."

  "I gathered as much. But, is there a specific book you want to read? Something in here that you can't understand yet, but want to? Maybe there's a picture book you want to know the words to?"

  "Oh yeah!" Taylor dove for the oversized folio and showed her the maps. "I have all these great maps, but I can't read them. I don't even know where I am on them."

  "Well, we're right about … "

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  "Don't tell me!" He snapped the folio shut before she could point at anything too specific. "You'll ruin it! What's the point of reading them if you just tell me?"

  She regarded the closed atlas with amusement. "Very well, Master Billius. Let's begin with letters."

  "One question first. I don't know how to ask without sounding rude but, what does your race call yourselves?"

  She smiled at her teaching supplies. "You're very tactful for an eight-year-old. I'm an arc. We're quite short compared to humans, but we live very long lives. That's part of the reason so many of us become teachers for a part of our lives: we have plenty of time to study."

  Three weeks later, Taylor was in love. He knew it was his Bilius brain acting up, seizing on the first person to spend significant time with him and investing all his hopes and needs for familial affection in her. Nonetheless, the feelings were real, and so was all the awkwardness. He waited for her on tutoring days but took pains to act like he wasn't waiting for her. He wanted to know what she was doing when she wasn't with him and was jealous of the other children she might be tutoring. He wanted to give her gifts but had to ask awkward questions about what she liked. He lost sleep because he did far more self-study than she required. He liked the smell of her, like fall leaves. He fantasized about saving her from goblins, or any danger, so she would admire him.

  It was blissful, awful, and stupid. But he learned to read his maps of the Gordian Empire in record time, and he could find the tiny township of Mourne described in thin outlines. If she was astonished at his rapid progress, she didn't say anything. She kept teaching him as fast as he was willing to learn.

  It wasn't long before he could find Grisham's Wall on his maps. To get there, he'd have to travel halfway across the empire and across a narrow channel of ocean, then up the peninsula to its narrowest point. According to Ophelia, it was the outer edge of a resettlement zone. The Empire had given up part of that peninsula a few decades back, and now they were trying to reclaim it. Tens of thousands of people had moved there, with promises of land they could keep.

  It wasn't until he found their place on the map that Taylor understood. Bilius' parents hadn't deployed. They had moved away.

  After learning the dominant Orlut written language well enough to get by on his own, Taylor asked Ophelia about the loopier script and showed her samples from the library.

  "That's Arcaic, the language of my people. It's very difficult to learn as a second language. Most humans call it Demi, but we don't like that term."

  "Why not?"

  "Demi is an old Orlut word that means 'half'. We object to being thought of as lesser, like anyone else would. It isn't just Arcs who speak it. Dwarves and Elves do too. Even Beastfolk speak it. It's like a common tongue for all the non-human races."

  "Where did Arcs come from?"

  "Bring out your maps, and I'll show you." They found a map of Gordia at its peak. It stretched over thousands of miles of the continent, across a sea encompassing major islands, and a rim of territory on the landmass beyond. "Gordia wasn't always held together by force like it is now. They used to expand by exporting their culture and commerce. Joining the empire was exciting. It brought security and prosperity, new foods, and new ideas. People wanted to be part of it. They gladly paid their tribute because they got so much in return.

  "Arc used to be here, at the edge of the empire. We were some of the last people to join because we were so far away. There's good, fertile land there, deep soils that could grow anything. We were mostly pastoral, with a few small cities for trading hubs. But then the dungeons started acting up, spewing manabeasts all over the place, and the empire shrank. It had to. There weren't enough people to defend all the borders."

  Taylor understood the dynamic all too well. "They forced people at the edges to relocate closer to the center, to concentrate their resources and make the empire easier to defend. But refugees are unpopular, especially if they're different from the natives. The empire needed Arcaic-speaking people to shore up its defenses but ended up treating them like lesser people."

  "You catch on fast, Billy. Beastfolk have Rossignol, and Elves have Okujulie, but Arcs and Dwarves lost their homelands and are spread out all over the empire."

  "You're a diaspora."

  "Yes, an excellent word."

  Billius' heart swelled with intense, irrational pride.

  "You have to listen carefully in the Arcaic language because tone conveys much of your meaning. Let's start with some simple greetings."

  Arcaic was indeed an old language, one that fed off other languages and carried their corpses around in steamer trunks full of wild phonemes and obscure verbs. The tonality was less of a problem for Taylor than the sheer irregularity. Grammar, conjugation, spelling, and pronunciation rules were slight suggestions. Most of the language seemed to break at least one rule. Reading it was ten times easier than speaking it.

  But Ophelia seemed to like teaching him Arcaic, and her lessons grew longer because of their complexity. So Taylor applied himself as much to keep his beloved tutor nearby as to read the strange books on his shelf.

  The books in question were very old indeed, carefully preserved and re-bound when their covers started to decay. That's why so many of them had identical bindings. Many dated to the Middle Empire, before the emperor's cultured hand turned to iron, and Arcs and Dwarves lived in their ancestral homelands. He had histories written by people who had walked the streets of Gordia's capital before it became an imperial seat of power almost a thousand years ago.

  On a whim, Taylor checked the dates of his more recent histories, the ones written in Orlut. The youngest was fifty years old. Apparently, the last two generations didn't read much. Or, his parents had taken all the current books with them. Maybe that explained why a quarter of the shelves were empty. Come to think of it, there wasn't anything related to military tactics or strategy, even though Father was a professional soldier. Nor was there anything recent on governance or finance.

  He wrote a note for Ophelia to carry to the curator, asking for a regular supply of newspapers. He knew they existed, Ophelia had shown him one, but he needed to read them regularly to know what was going on in the world.