"Exactly right."

He beams. "Can I show you the books, Rúmil? They're beautiful."

Bella giggles. "I can go get the other two, at least for the time being, too."

He's bouncing on the balls of his feet. "Yes, yes, do!!"

When she returns Fëanáro is sitting on Rúmil's shoulders, hands bouncing on a shawl that Rúmil has pulled over his head, and reading to him from her stolen textbooks.

Bella giggles and sits by them and provides vocabulary when Fëanáro runs into something he doesn't know how to read.

He seems to find all instances of this extremely frustrating, and the first few times he can't seem to look at Bella afterwards.

"I don't want you to think I'm stupid."

"I don't think you're stupid. I thought it'd take you years to be even halfway conversational in Pax and here you are."

"So I'm not as stupid as you thought."

"I thought it would take that long because that's how long it normally takes to learn a language. I've never heard of someone learning one this fast without magic - even subtle arts translation doesn't usually help this much. I'm not a slouch myself and all I have to show for a couple years of high school Kharoline is, like, excusez-moi, ou est la salle de bain and stuff like that."

"But...there's more than enough information," he says, wondering. "Languages have rules about word ordering and you can figure them out from just the first couple sentences, and then it's just learning what everything is called and how to do complicated things like poetry."

"It's hard to remember for most people," Bella says. "And Kharoline gives all the nouns genders, which was a headache, and it has more verb tenses than Pax, and it's really tricky to get the accent right - people who learn languages after they're like, eight if they're a human, usually have an accent in their new languages for their whole lives. And there's not that many chances to practice Kharoline and I didn't think it was the most beautiful thing in the world so I didn't pay attention to it outside of classes."

"Do you have any books in it?"

"No, the only books I have are the ones I was carrying with me to class and I wasn't taking college level Kharoline. You've seen them all now. I would have had fewer but I'd just gone to the bookstore to get all my texts for the year - usually I wouldn't haul around this many."

"Do you suppose I could go to your world once I figure out how - not to fix everything, just to take a trip to the bookstore and take all the books home?"

"I think you'd be better off learning to send some payment to and swipe some books from a store without having to set foot there. I think my universe might well take exception to you even if literally the only thing you wanted to do in it was buy books."

He giggles delightedly. "I think that makes me feel good."

"I'm not surprised. I think growing up there and, you know, wanting to live, stunted my growth. I wonder what I'd be like if I were from somewhere better."

"Well," he says, "how long did you live there?"

"I'm - actually, it's probably already past my birthday, I was distracted, so I guess I'm nineteen now. Nineteen of those years, of course."

"You're not much older than me," he says wonderingly. "So once you've been here for nineteen years, you'll be half Valinor and half your world, and you'll be a bit more like who you'd have been if you'd always been safe."

"I hope so! But sort of like the accent thing I think it might stick with me just because it was first."