They’d reached the distant boundary of Blackthorn by then. The ambassador took his leave with another low bow and much wrist-twirling before striding off into the forest and vanishing into the mist.
Nell, however, lingered.
“Well?” she asked when the ambassador had thoroughly gone.
Shrike waited for her to say more.
“You mislike this plan,” she added when the silence between them had stretched beyond its breaking point.
Shrike thought it useless to deny the truth. “It’s my own plan. I’ve no one to blame but myself.”
“Even if the ambassador becomes your Lofthouse’s tutor?”
“Even so.” Shrike hesitated. “Do you trust him?”
“With my twin’s life.”
Shrike stared at her. She’d spoken without hesitation. Others might have said such a thing in jest. Her blunt tone, which Shrike knew well, suggested she spoke from experience.
Nell cocked her head to the side to meet his stare. “Take heart—if Lofthouse learns something from the ambassador’s tutelage, then he is certainly better off than before. And if he learns nothing, you may still truthfully say he’s been instructed in the deadly arts by the Ambassador of Spindles.” A wry half-smile plucked at the corner of her mouth. “Which would give even the most ambitious assassin pause.”
Shrike had to admit she made a compelling argument. It was certainly more of a plan than he’d proved capable of concocting since Beltane.
Nell clapped him on the back and strode off.
~
“Is there anything to hand I might use for writing?” Wren asked as Shrike entered the cottage. “Larger than my sketch-book, I mean.”
No sooner had Shrike left to show Nell and the ambassador out than Wren had set to work on the question of teaching literacy. His own education had begun at home with his mother reading to him from her copy of Audubon’sOrnithological Biographywhilst he stared at its accompanying engravings. The combination of his mother’s scientific enthusiasm and the vivid watercolours had set fire to his youthful imagination, inspiring him to both art and literature. His father sold off book and prints alike within a fortnight of her death.
Aside from his mother, however, Wren had learnt from seeing the alphabet laid out before him, hearing what sounds corresponded to which letters, and copying it out again and again until he knew it all by rote—enough to sound out words which struck him unfamiliar and to seek them out in Johnson’sDictionary.
Wren had not yet seen anything like Johnson’sDictionaryin the fae realms. An alphabet, however, he thought he could manage.
At present, Shrike fixed him with a puzzled look, his antlered head cocked to one side like his songbird namesake.
“About yea wide by yea high,” Wren added, holding his palms roughly two feet apart in either direction.
Shrike nodded and went to his work-bench. From a cedar chest beside it—rather like a bride’s trousseau, stocked with leather instead of linen—he retrieved a remarkable delicate sheet of pale ivory vellum.
“Not fit for your gyrdel-book,” Shrike explained as he gestured to a thin dark blotch running across the page.
Wren thought it more than fine enough for what he intended and said so, which provoked a smile from Shrike.
Wren smoothed out the vellum over Shrike’s work-bench, retrieved his pen and ink from his satchel, and, with Shrike peering over his shoulder in fascinated silence, began to draw. Small letter followed large letter, and beneath each a simple illustration of a single word, with the word itself written out below. Apple, bee, cat, duck… Wren hoped the ambassador wouldn’t think it too childish, but each letter had to be something he might have already encountered in order to make a useful point of reference, and nature, from what Wren had seen, seemed the connective tissue between the fae and mortal realms. This left him struggling towards the end of the alphabet. Few enough words began with X or Z. Fewer still which one could illustrate in a simple drawing. He settled upon “axe,” with two lines under the X, as he’d seen one in Shrike’s own woodpile. And as for Z…
“Do the fae have astrology?” Wren asked.
“Aye,” Shrike replied, though he looked no less puzzled by the question.
Wren supposed that would suffice and wrote out “zodiac,” drawing the twelve signs beneath. If worse came to worse, the ambassador could interrogate him on the point when he returned for the second lesson.
“Would you teach me as well?”
The sudden speech after so many moments spent in reverent silence startled Wren almost as much as the question itself. He knew Shrike didn’t have his letters, as he’d said, but had assumed he felt content with his considerable skill in myriad other pursuits. Had he realized Shrike desired to learn, he’d have offered to tutor him long before now.
Wren glanced up from the parchment page in time to catch a curious expression on Shrike’s face—a hesitant uncertainty tinged with wistful longing. The sight of it tugged at Wren’s heart-strings. He could do no less than reply, “If you’d like.”
