The Weight of Legacy

The fact that she understood just why Veit couldn’t personally start teaching her right now didn’t curb her annoyance in the slightest. With The Forgetting’s arrival, guests for the wedding had started to make their way to the estate, and ensuring their safe passage to the guest houses apparently fell squarely under ‘forester duties’.

Grumbling, Malwine turned another page on the book, with it laying flat on her bed. Even alone in her room—well, save for Adelheid who might have been in a corner at any point in time—she didn’t want to risk getting too comfortable with her instinctive usage of [Remote Reading]. The habit of at least pretending to flip the pages was one she had to try and keep.

Does Grēdôcavan have a syllabary instead of an alphabet just for funsies? She hadn’t really batted an eye at it when she’d first found that manuscript with the seafarer script—languages having differences was par for the course. But when she’d asked just why this thing had an alphabet—a question that admittedly sounded dumb as she recalled it outside its original context—he’d told her that was normal.

Yet as much as she wanted to treat her new native tongue’s apparent quirk as a personal affront, there were ultimately bigger concerns for her—namely, she was working on a time limit now. A trivial one, strictly speaking, but one nonetheless.

As the time for Thekla’s wedding approached, more and more resources would be diverted for it. From what she’d overheard, at some point the family would even be expected to participate in rehearsals. Even if all the kids had to do was hand over their gifts, it’d likely eat into at least a bit of her time, and she couldn’t actually excuse zoning out for it. Her aunt seemed nice enough, and Malwine did want to put some effort into not ending up being as terrible a relative as some of her new family members were being to her.

The widow would have been proud.

… valley … the …

It was slow work—the book Veit had gotten her was more than a dictionary, though she didn’t know the exact term for it. It came with some supplementary reading material that had her scratching her head, no matter how ‘simple’ it was supposed to be.

At the end of the day, the widow had been raised fully bilingual. While she had learned countless words and studied many languages, her grasp on them had been utterly circumstantial—it left the task before her feeling way more daunting than it had any right to, even after learning Grēdôcavan and getting a glimpse of the seafarer script.

Still, with how thorough this seemed to be, by the time she was done, Malwine feared she might end up with a better understanding of the underlying rules for this than what she had for Grēdôcavan itself. Even with how limited her chances at social interaction had been in her earliest years, she’d still learned most of it almost instinctively.

But for this? She’d have to do it wholly on her own. Her languages Skill could only do so much, as she actually had to learn for any of it to matter.