But she ran headfirst into Orryn-minnaoi and would have fallen, had ao not moved to catch her and keep her balanced. The tarènaoi took one look at her and said, “You’re all dismissed for the day. Tomorrow, I would like you to have prepared an essay on the nature of promises and the danger they pose to the Balance if not kept.” Ao kept a gentle grip on Eiryn’s arm and said, “Not you, safai. I’d like to talk to you.” Ao smiled at her and guided her to a chair. Radèn-minnoi lingered in the doorway and moved into the shadows when aos back was turned.
“I can hear you,” Orryn-minnaoi said. Ao was walking towards aos desk as ao spoke. Ao poured a glass of water from the pitcher that always stood on it without turning around. Eiryn huddled on the chair.
“She’s upset.” Radèn didn’t bother trying to hide after that and Eiryn was both impressed by and scared of the fierceness in his stance.
“Yes, I can see that. I doubt you were helping just then.” Orryn-minnaoi’s voice was gentle, though, and brimmed with a farakaoina Eiryn didn’t know. It reminded her of sea foam. Orryn-minnaoi’s skirts swishes as ao walked back to Eiryn. “Pour yourself a glass of water if you’d like a drink too. I suspect you’re not going to leave yet.”
Eiryn was confused, but she didn’t dare ask. She did drink when she was urged to, though. “You made it cold!” Very, very cold. Orryn-minnaoi smiled at her again and sat down in a chair opposite her. It was far too small for aon to sit in comfortably, so that made her giggle a little. Radèn glared at her and he didn’t move from his spot. Like this, he towered over her, but it didn’t feel bad the way that Janyn always made her feel. Still, Eiryn tried to make herself small and invisible just in case.
“I did indeed. Radèn-doi, why are you here?”
Radèn bristled. Orryn-minnoi didn’t seem upset or angry. Aos voice was the way it always was when ao was teaching a lecture and it didn’t make Eiryn want to hide and put things between her and the speaker. “I’m taking extra good care of her,” the boy said and he’d balled his fists. Eiryn whimpered a little and after glancing over the boy tried to relax. It didn’t make Eiryn feel much better to see him struggle to keep from bristling further, but she didn’t know how to tell him.
“And I’m sure she appreciates that. I wanted to focus on teaching her writing and reading today, Radèn. You already know those skills, though your penmanship leaves much to be desired. Eiryn-minnai, do you want him to stay?”
Eiryn blinked, then started to fiddle with her hair. She had only one hand free, but that was all right. The other was already occupied holding a glass that she didn’t want to drop, not at all. She looked from Orryn-minnaoi’s dark face to Radèn’s pale one. Radèn clearly wanted her to say ‘yes’, though Orryn-minnaoi only shone patience at her. “No?” she asked in a small voice. If Radèn-minnoi already knew what Orryn-minnaoi wanted to teach her, he’d only be wasting his time. He could spend it learning how to be rysharoi instead of being with her.
It was silent. Then Radèn announced that he’d wait outside and flounced off like a cat, slamming the door behind him.
“Why is Radèn-minnoi angry?” she asked in a small voice.
“He cares for you and while I do intend to teach you today there is something I have to say to you first. It’s about Janyn-minnoi. Has your uncle told you anything about what’s happening?”
“No…” Eiryn tried not to huddle even more because if she did she’d spill all the water left in her glass. Carefully, she took another sip. “Arèn-minnoi never tells me anything.”
“Ah. Well. You know that Janyn did a very bad thing when your doll was destroyed?” Eiryn could almost taste the delicacy ao was using to pick aos words and frowned. She didn’t understand why ao was being so careful, but she nodded. “His father did a very bad thing too, so they’ve left Lir for a while.”
“Oh.”
Orryn-minnaoi continued, “They might never come back. You’ve been struggling in class since Janyn-minnoi left, so I wanted to make sure you knew.” Ao pulled a hand through aos messy hair. “I don’t want to tell the class until we know for certain what will happen. Do you still hear voices when people use farakaoina?”
Eiryn shook her head.
“Good. Anou-minnoi wanted me to ask. Let’s start your lesson for today then. We’ll start with recognising letters. There won’t be too many, though, because –”
Eiryn interrupted aon. “I can read!” She tried to look grown-up and lady-like while she spoke, but she knew she’d just blurted it out while Orryn-minnoi was speaking and she spilled water when she realised. At the cry, Radèn burst into the room, looking around wildly before focusing on Eiryn and relaxing a little.
“What happened?” the boy asked and, even though she knew and trusted him, Eiryn wanted to vanish into her desk because she kept hearing Janyn’s voice in her head and she kept expecting the older boy to turn up.
“Eiryn-minnai startled when she saw a spider,” Orryn-minnaoi said. “But it’s scuttled away now.” Eiryn wasn’t sure why Orryn-minnaoi had said that, but it soothed Radèn into a chair and she was grateful for that. Other children were afraid of spiders too, so it wasn’t so bad if Janyn called her names for that. “She was just about to show me her reading skills.”
Radèn grinned. “How about she reads something I wrote?” Without waiting for an answer he was already up and gathering materials. A piece of paper, an ink well and a quill. “It’ll mean I practice too.” He winked at Eiryn and settled at a desk at the front of the room, so Eiryn couldn’t see what he was doing even if she stood on her desk, though Orryn-minnaoi swept her into aos arms and put her on the ground quite swiftly. Ao also gave her a grin, and she decided that she didn’t understand people at all today. Arèn-minnoi would have scolded her. It took Radèn a long time, but finally he presented Eiryn with a sheet with letters on it. His handwriting looked nothing like her uncle’s careful work. Eiryn hadn’t started to learn how to write yet, but even she could tell that Radèn’s handwriting was terrible.
Staring at the sheet, Eiryn sounded out the letters under her breath to make sure that she’d understood them. There weren’t many words, which was good, and it helped that some of them were clearer than others. She had to guess entirely at one, but finally she said, hesitantly, “You are very smart. I am not. I am very stupid.” Saying the words was different from reading them. When she was reading them she hadn’t quite managed to understand what they meant yet, but now they made her burst into tears.
Before she really knew it, Radèn and Orryn-minnaoi were beside her and one of them — brown skin made it Orryn-minnaoi — was wiping her face with a piece of cloth. Radèn was muttering ‘I’m sorry’ over and over and she tried to stop crying for his sake as much as anything else. She didn’t like people being upset. She just wanted them to be happy. Neither Radèn nor Orryn-minnaoi asked her why she was crying. They were just there until she was calmed down.
Radèn said, “I’m sorry, Eiryn-dai. I didn’t mean to upset you. I didn’t think it would.” He smiled wryly, but he didn’t add anything else and Orryn-minnaoi smiled sadly at him.
“Would you leave us, please?”
Radèn nodded. “But I’ll still be waiting for you in the courtyard!” he said and left. He closed the door behind him and Eiryn watched him go without a word. She didn’t know what to say.
Eventually, she asked, “Does he think I’m angry with him?”
“I don’t think so. He’s angry with himself. You read very well, though. I’m quite proud.” Orryn-minnaoi rose to fetch Radèn’s abandoned material and put it onto Eiryn’s desk. Ao took the quill and crossed out the last two of Radèn’s sentences. Then ao dipped the quill back into the ink and crossed out part of the first sentence and added a new word. Ao also reworked some of Radèn’s letters so they were clearer. “Do you want to try and copy that?”
Eiryn nodded and took the quill from aos hands. She wasn’t cert
ain that she really did, but she wanted to see the changes that Orryn-minnaoi had made. Very carefully she started to copy the first letters, sounding them out as she did. “Ei.” Copying letters was hard! She didn’t get the top loop right at all and it looked even worse than Radèn-minnoi’s letters had, but Orryn-minnaoi said nothing. She didn’t even think that ao was watching her or she’d have felt very uncomfortable. She didn’t want aon to make fun of her or say bad things.
It took her a lot of tries before she was happy with the ‘ei’ she’d written and moved onto the next letter. That was an ‘r’ and it took her much shorter because it was just a little circle with a wavy line through it. When the next letter was an ‘y’, with all its sharp edges and a squiggle running almost into the next letter at the bottom, Eiryn frowned and stared at the sheet so hard her eyes hurt. “That’s me!” she said. “That’s me!”
“Yes, that’s how you write your name. It’s a very useful thing to know.”
“How do you write ‘Orryn-minnaoi’?”
The tarènaoi laughed. “Have you finished the sentence already?”
“No…”
“I’ll show you once you’ve finished the sentence.”
Eiryn was in such a hurry that she didn’t pay too much attention the first time she wrote the whole sentence and Orryn-minnaoi made her do it three times before ao was satisfied with it and showed her how to write aos name. Radèn’s name was next and then Arèn-minnoi. She was more careful with those because she tried very hard to make those legible. After those, Orryn-minnaoi wrote down the entire alphabet for her. Ao wrote even neater than her uncle did, but she didn’t dare ask why they and Radèn and herself all wrote the letters so differently.
“How old are you?” she asked instead.
“How – Why do you want to know?” Orryn-minnaoi chuckled and held out aos hands. “No, don’t tell me. I’m ten and ten and seven. Do you know how much that is?”
She had no idea.
“It’s twenty-seven.”
Eiryn stared at him. Orryn-minnaoi didn’t seem to be upset or hurt. Ao just sat patiently. Ao had shifted to sitting on the ground, resting aos hands on aos knees as ao looked up at her. There was no expectancy in aos gaze, no judgement to tell her she was stupid and dumb. Only patience and gentleness. She wasn’t certain if that scared her more or less.
“How many fingers do you have?”
Hesitantly, she said, “Ten?”
Orryn-minnaoi nodded. “Yes. So you have all of your fingers and all of my fingers together, how many have you got?”
“Ten and ten?” When her tutor nodded Eiryn clapped her hands in delight. “So that’s twenty-seven? When I have my fingers and Radèn-minnoi’s fingers?”
Orryn-minnaoi shifted aos position a little. “No, that’s twenty. With twenty-seven you need to add seven fingers more. Ten fingers and ten fingers and seven fingers.”
“People don’t have seven fingers.”
“But –”
“Ten,” she repeated. “Ten fingers.” To emphasise it, she gave a quick nod. People had ten fingers, so if you had hers and Orryn-minnaoi’s and someone else’s you had ten and ten and ten, not ten and ten and seven.
“So how many do you have on one hand?” Orryn-minnaoi’s voice was more hesitant than she’d ever heard it and she didn’t quite know what to do with it. Ao was messing up aos hair again and tapping on the ground with aos other hand. Eiryn pointed at the fingers as they tapped. “One, two, four –”
“Three,” Orryn-minnaoi interrupted. Ao took her hand in aos and pointed at her fingers in turn, saying “One, two, three, four, five.”
“Why?”
Orryn-minnaoi shrugged. “Because that’s the order the numbers go in. After ‘two’ comes ‘three’. That’s how we’ve called the number.”
“What’s a number?”
“It’s…” Her tutor hesitated and got up. Ao wandered around the room for a while collecting things and then ao put them down on the ground between aon and Eiryn. She slipped off her chair and sat down on the ground opposite aon and looked at the books ao’d collected. They weren’t big books. They fit comfortably into Orryn-minnaoi’s hand, but they were still a little too big for her hands. “I have six books here. Six is the amount of books on the floor.”
Eiryn reached out to touch the books. She shoved them around, picked them up, turned them over, opened them, reordered them. Then she looked them over and reordered them again. “There’s no six.”
“You can’t see ‘six’. It’s abstract. Here. If I take a book away there are five.” Orryn-minnaoi did as ao’d said and now there were fewer books.
“They’re books,” Eiryn said.
“Five books.”
“Why not four?”
Orryn-minnaoi took another book away. “Four.”
“Four books.” If she’d been standing, Eiryn would have stomped her foot. As it was, she didn’t quite know what she wanted to do and just raised her voice to yell. “I can see books! I can touch books! What is ‘four’? What is a number?”
Orryn’s reasonable tone only made her want to shout louder. “Numbers are abstract, like colours.”
“You can see colours!” the girl complained and pointed at aon. “You’re wearing a green dress and an orange sash. If I close my eyes outside then its red and purple. If I close my eyes inside then it’s black and all sorts of colours. I can’t see numbers.”
“Of course you can, Eiryn. Just like colours. Look. This is one book.” Ao patted the book nearest to aon. “This is another.” Ao patted the next-nearest book. “Together they make two books. One and one is two. Here’s another book and that makes three. Try it.”
Dubiously, Eiryn did and earned herself an encouraging nod. One was easy. Two wasn’t so bad.
“See? When we talk about numbers, you should just think of them as many single things together. Like you do with your fingers.” Orryn-minnaoi rose to fetch more books. When ao returned, there was a large pile of them, none too carefully cared for, and ao counted them out again. “Twelve books. Why don’t you try taking ten away.”
She could count to ten. Carefully, Eiryn-minnaoi worked through the list. She was certain to do it loudly enough for Orryn-minnaoi to hear, but ao didn’t interrupt her or help her. She lost count and started over a few times and she lost courage and started over a few times more. From aos face she could tell that she was still making mistakes, but since ao said nothing she couldn’t tell what they were. Ao was staring very intently at the books she was pulling to her side of the floor, so perhaps ao was paying attention to the books instead of to her.
So Eiryn looked intently at the books too and tried to compare the books to her fingers until she felt certain that she had as many books as she had fingers. She turned the books on their side, so that she could put her fingers against them. If she had ten fingers then if she put all her fingers against a book, she’d have ten books. She thought. It was still hard, but she looked to Orryn-minnaoi when she thought she’d managed to get ten books.
“Very good.” The grin Orynn-minnaoi gave her was like one Radèn might give her whenever he was planning mischief. “How many books do I have left?”
Eiryn hesitated. If she started with ten-and-two books and she’d removed ‘ten’, then… “Two?”
“Wonderful. You’ll learn yet.”
“Will you make me a list?” Eiryn asked.
“Of what?”
“Of numbers.”
“Of course. I’ll draw shells on them too, so you can picture shells when you’re counting.”
“Thank you!”
Orryn-minnaoi grinned again. “Don’t thank me just yet. You haven’t seen me draw shells before.” Ao got up with a soft groan. “So that’s an alphabet for you to practice and numbers for you to learn. Shall we go back to the letters? I think you liked those better.”
Eiryn nodded. But first she went about carefully reading the book covers and putting them all back where they belonged. Orryn-minnaoi made a game out of it. Ao would remove some books and strew them around desks while Eiryn was putting another away. Sometimes it was frustrating, but mostly Orryn-minnaoi was using farakaoina or hiding other things on top of the books as well and that made it more fun. Sometimes there’d be a small sweet on the book or other times a little treasure and one time Orryn-minnaoi pretended to have lost a charm from one of aos bangles only ao’d hidden it in the middle of the ‘r’ on one of the book covers ao’d scattered through the room, and sometimes ao told little stories about Eiryn’s uncle or her mother that made her laugh.
And when ao sent her on her way again, she was feeling much better about the whole day and she let Radèn convince her it was a good idea to sneak into the kitchens to get food for a picnic in the gardens.
“Arèn-minnoi!” Eiryn bounced over to her uncle and put the sheet of paper she’d been using on top of the reports that he was reading. Trying not be too upset that he sighed, she looked up at him hopefully.
“It’s very pretty, safai,” the man answered.
“You didn’t even look.” Eiryn pouted. Her uncle took the sheet in his hands carefully and put it aside on a still-empty side of the desk. She wanted to make a present for Radèn. It was his birthday celebration tonight. She’d thought very hard about what she wanted to give. Radèn had given her something very beautiful for her celebration, but she didn’t know where to get anything as pretty to give him. Keilan-minnai had suggested that she make something herself, so that’s what she was doing. Her uncle should be helping her to make it a perfect gift, but he’d already turned back to his papers.
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