"Uh, the Prince Fe-Anar wants to learn drow. He - heard you were in town and figured it was the best opportunity, I guess."

"...if he wants to pay for my time I guess I don't mind, but he could also wait to see if you wind up with drow traders coming and going and get one who doesn't charge for time as a mid-level wizard."

"He seemed, ah, very impatient. I did mention the consulting fee."

"If he wants to overpay for language lessons to get them pronto that's all right with me."

"All right. I'll tell him." He writes something down and hands it to someone.

She sketches while she waits. A sunflower.

The Prince Fe-Anar looks a generation older than the Prince Merenre - father? uncle? half-brother? - and far more cheerful. He bounces on the balls of his feet. "Teach me drow."

"Sure, but tell me where you want to start, I have learned a bunch of languages and everybody does 'em differently. Personally I like alphabets, do you like alphabets?"

"I like alphabets fine, sure - but I made one up for transcribing sounds, because they mostly don't do that very well -"

"I can start somewhere else if you want. My surface Elven teacher started with numbers." She holds up a finger and says, in drow, "one", and so on through ten, and then she loops back and covers zero.

He takes notes and repeats things she says with very careful enunciation.

She'll just keep going, speeding up and choosing her sentences with less emphasis on repeating concepts as he seems to be keeping up exceptionally well. Drow don't talk about colors very much - there are words for them but they're not common or very different from the Elven - but they do have basic words for black, white, and five intermediate shades of grey. They've got great words for talking about being in and moving through and digging out caves. Her name means "bottomless pit" - that's an idiomatic translation. More literally it would be "hole in the ground that goes on forever" - belm is hole too small to live in, ar is ground but without the connotation that it's all under you, niss means limitless as in "limitless up" for sky and "limitless life" for immortality and "limitless misery" for wishing hyperbolically on your enemies or just limitlessness all by itself.

That is delightful, he is delighted, is it how most drow children are named? 

"I haven't met many drow from other countries besides mine so their customs might differ but it's not a weird sort of thing for a girl's name to mean. It's not all that common, though I did know another one - some common names are, like, Ilvaria, that means silk knot, and Johysis, that means sharp stone edge, and Pharnox is white haired. Boys get named kind of random nouns but usually are going by nicknames that just vaguely riff or pun on their real names by the time they're thirty if they live that long. I knew a Zov, which means spoon, that was his original and it stuck."

"Random nouns? That's - I wonder why there aren't any surface cultures that do that."

"You're less likely to murder your babies?"

"Well, I assume people who murder them don't name them first, at least."

"Yeah, the boys don't even get called 'spoon' if it's obvious right away they're gonna die."

"But a lot of them get killed after the stage where you name them? Why?'

"Uh, the typical thing is to kill a lot of boys right off and wait longer with girls to see if we're worthwhile but that doesn't actually mean a sickly girl baby is safe or a boy who pisses off his mom is either. Also sometimes 'right off' is like a year later if you can afford to dither."

'Huh, do drow have faster language development than surface elves, do you know?"

"Don't know, have never socialized with surface elves much."

"How soon do drow talk - or would I say, how early do drow talk -"

"Either's okay but 'early' is a little less awkward. Five to ten, anywhere in there, depends on the kid, my mother told me I had two-word sentences by age four but she might have been making that up."

"At that age you're how small? Or would it be, at that age how small are you?"