I sigh heavily and go to my bedroom and rummage through the wardrobe. I swear I saw something in here when I moved in. Something that might help.
My fingers hit cardboard at the back, behind a stack of old spell notebooks. I pull it out.
Scrabble. A battered old box, the kind that’s been through several homes, the lid slightly buckled and the corners worn soft. Someone’s name is written on the side in faded biro. Not mine. The previous tenant, probably, or the one before that. Forgotten here like a lot of things get forgotten.
I carry it into the living room and set it on the floor.
Dis looks at it. Then at me. His sulk shifts slightly into something more like curiosity, which he’s clearly trying to suppress.
“What is that?”
“Scrabble. It’s a game.”
“Another competition?”
“Yes. You make words out of letter tiles and score points.Longer words on better squares score more. It’s about vocabulary and strategy.”
I open the box and start setting up the board, unfolding it on the floor between us, sorting through the tiles. Some are slightly sticky from years of other people’s hands, and one of the triple word score squares is obscured by a faint ring from a mug somebody rested on the board once. These things have had a whole life before me. I find that oddly comforting.
Dis watches me set up with the focused attention he gives to everything, that quality of observation he has that makes you feel like you’re being catalogued.
I pause. Something has just occurred to me.
“Can you read English?”
Dis blinks. “Clearly I speak it, Little Witch.”
“Right, but speaking and reading are different. You might be speaking it because of magic. Telepathy. I might just be hearing your words as English because of some translation effect you can emanate.” I frown at the tiles. “I honestly don’t know how I understand you.”
There is a pause in which Dis appears to consider this possibility with more intellectual seriousness than it might strictly deserve.
“I suppose anuneducatedbeing could use magic so. If they needed to. I, however, can speak your language perfectly.”
I sigh heavily. “Great. Good to know. But can you read and write?”
Blue eyes blaze at me. A silent glare of insult and outrage.
I have a feeling that this is going to be a long night.
“I can read and write,” he says finally, drawing himself up with an air of someone about to deliver important information, “every human language that has ever existed.”
I look at him. “Every one?” That is genuinely impressive. No wonder he was insulted that I thought he might be illiterate.
“Every one.”
“That has ever existed?”
“Yes.”
“Including the dead ones?”
“Particularly the dead ones.” He says this with a faint note of superiority, like being fluent in extinct languages is just obviously the baseline standard.
I stare at him for a moment. Then I go to the kitchen and get a bottle of wine. Red, the cheap kind, the sort that comes in bottles with very simple labels. I get two glasses because it seems rude not to offer, even if I have no idea whether shadow beings can actually drink wine or if Hex just fakes it, or whether Dis would consider it beneath him.
I push one glass through the circle, placing it on the floor in front of him. He looks at it. Looks at me. Picks it up with the careful interest of someone encountering a new specimen, and takes a sip.
He doesn’t comment. But he doesn’t put it down either.
