Well, she can teach baby Khemet Taldane, and ask Zakiya to find some other people to speak to him in other languages. And of course the baby can always visit him and he can talk to the baby in some of the languages that stuck.
She's sorry that he's so sad. She writes him a poem about the baby, and another one about the ocean. She's proud of him for working on his brother's plans, even if it's just a little.
She tries to start learning Osirian again, with Zakiya. She wants to be able to write in it. It is slow work, but it's interesting. She feels capable of tackling it in a way that she didn't before. She tries reading Osirian poetry, familiarizing herself with their forms and their themes and their history. She keeps painting. The misshapen figures begin to look more like people and less like melting half-remembered monster faces. She asks Zakiya for a lute, and experiments with it in front of baby Khemet, who is very easily impressed. She keeps telling him stories, and there are fewer nights when she can't think of anything. She keeps taking him to the beach. She teaches him to pick up seashells, and amasses a respectable collection of the prettiest ones for her room. She tells him about the gods, and their struggles, and of heroes of legend, without limiting herself to stories that are meant to breed lawfulness. He will have plenty of that from the his tutors. But a wise pharaoh will need more stories than that, more tools with which to understand other people.
She does not keep track of time. It is not healthy, she thinks, to wonder how long it's been, or give herself a timetable for recovery. She is a person who writes, who plays, who sings, who paints, who reads, who walks along the beach and collects seashells, who sews, who cleans, who dreams. She does not need to be anything else, not yet. Not until the darkness has all been pulled out of her and into the words and the music and the paints and sand and the sky and the ocean. They can hold it for her, until there's enough space inside her to grow something else.
The baby starts speaking. Only a little, at first, and mostly Taldane. She asks Zakiya to make a habit of speaking to him in Osirian, and to see that he spends more time with speakers of other languages, too. She tries to speak to him in Osirian sometimes, too, for practice, but she keeps telling him stories in Taldane.
She feels like her magic is progressing, even when it's been a long time since she last gained a spell; she can feel herself getting closer to being able to pull together the sorts of stories that will be able to move the world more directly. She finds that she wants to be able to move the world. She wants to have done something. She wants to move feelings, and people, and plots. She writes a collection of fables, over the course of a few months, many of them more polished versions of bedtime stories for her son. She translates them into Osirian, leaning on Zakiya some. She wishes she could send them outside, to be read by other people. She's not sure whether there's any way to send them out that's appropriate. She asks her husband in a letter. She wouldn't want anyone to know who they were by. It's not really very important that anyone sees them at all. It just seems worth asking about.
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