Chapter Fourteen #3
Sephie envisaged being surrounded by conversations she could not understand or participate in. “Will you teach me some Cymraeg?” she asked. “Even just please and thank you?”
Taz’s brows drew together in a frown.
“Not if you do not wish,” Sephie hastened to say. “I just thought I might be accepted more easily if I spoke the language.”
“It is a good idea,” Taz reassured her. “I was just remembering the stories about bards who spoke all the tongues of men and animals. No doubt they are exaggerated, but what if we could sing a spell that allowed you to speak and to understand Cymraeg instantly, or at least quickly?”
“Can we?” Sephie wondered. “How would that work?”
He took the question seriously, and they soon had the parameters of a song.
They needed her mind to be open to language the way a baby’s mind is open.
But faster. Much faster. They needed her to quickly absorb vocabulary and grammar, and make sense of the sounds she heard, fast enough to follow a conversation.
Taz took his harp from its bag and slung it so he could use both hands to play as they walked.
They were accustomed to singing together now, and the music flowed easily, Sephie being careful to imagine easy conversation with people whose language began as random sounds and shifted in her ears and her mind into words she could understand.
“How will we know if it worked?” she asked, when the song drew to a close.
“We talk in our tongue,” answered Taz. It took a moment for Sephie to realize that the sounds he had made were not in English. He was speaking Cymraeg, and she understood him!
After that, they continued talking in Cymraeg. Taz described growing up in Caerywell, and she talked about the country estate where she had lived with her mother and later with her servants.
When she hesitated over words or phrases, Taz would explain them—first in other Cymraeg words, and only in English if she was still stuck. The need for English grew less as the afternoon wore on.
When they moved on from their childhood years, Taz volunteered some tales about his wandering as an agitator and spy for the Welsh. He had first been sent out—into local villages and towns—as a child of fourteen. By the time he was eighteen, he was trusted with missions into England.
Sephie had no such adventures to share, having lived in seclusion with her Granny since she was a girl, seeing few people other than the servants and those who came to teach music, flower arranging, painting, dancing, and the other skills considered appropriate for her status.
“Granny and Father were molding me into a prospective bride for whatever scion of the aristocracy was prepared to accept a flawed mage for a chance to link his family to the Findlater dukedom,” she explained to Taz.
“I was not allowed to use my magic or even learn to control it, because of the potential damage to my fertility—the only valuable thing about me being the mage blood that runs in the family.” She shuddered.
Even though she had discovered her strengths, even though she had proved them wrong—Granny, Father, and all the governesses and tutors—their assessment of her still ached, an old wound that had long since ceased bleeding but still hurt when she remembered it.
An old deep scar tearing at her newfound confidence.
“They were wrong,” Taz said. “You didn’t fit their assumptions about how magic works, so they ignored your gift. You are strong and powerful. Beautiful, too.”
His words soothed the pain, for he knew what he was talking about. He, too, had been discounted and criticized because his gift didn’t fit his sponsor’s preconceptions. Sephie tried to put her thoughts into words.
“You and I were pushed to one side because we were not what people expected. Cousin Jasper and his wife both experienced it, too. I wonder how many people are treated as failures when all they need is the chance to learn their own gift?”
They reached another steep slope, and needed their breath for climbing, and they didn’t return to the subject once they resumed their conversation.
But Sephie continued thinking about it. About how she and Taz had been accepted, even admired, during their sojourn with the fae.
About Cousin Jasper’s insistence she was not broken or twisted, but that her teachers had been narrow-minded and ignorant.
About how her yearning for her father’s approval had made his cause her own and led her to deceive the only relatives who had ever treated her as worthy of their respect and affection.
And from what Taz had said about Hebog, the man was no better.
Would he welcome her and Taz once he knew about their joint gift?
And did Sephie want him to do so? She shook her head at her own thoughts.
Where else could they go? Certainly not back to England, where she and Taz no doubt had a price on their heads and a prison cell waiting.
Taz’s choice of Hebog’s village, where he had allies and friends, was a sensible one. But Sephie couldn’t help feeling she and Taz would face more challenges than he believed in the place he thought of as refuge.