She says a different polite thing and takes the tray, holding it out for him to take his own food off.

He squints, trying to catch what she's saying, but it's too fast and foreign, so he just takes his own portion and brings it back to his room and locks the door again. He's going to hide there the entire rest of the day unless someone comes looking for him. 

That doesn't happen.

What does happen, just a few minutes later, is that DZ wakes Deskyl up, and - she's not projecting, but she's still not shielding, either, and she's very upset. If Van looks, he'll notice that her mind is in somewhat worse shape than earlier; some of its fragile structures seem to have collapsed while she slept.

Vanyel is trying pretty hard to not-look. The walls aren't shielded, this is a small rural town not the Palace, so he does catch a quick accidental glimpse when he Reaches to talk to Yfandes, enough to notice the upset and that something is wrong, more wrong than before. But he pulls his senses away as though flinching from a hot stove, and manages to avoid seeing anything more. 

She calms down over the course of maybe twenty minutes, and another twenty minutes or so after that she goes back to sleep.

It turns out that hiding in his room the entire afternoon is both boring and kind of embarrassing. And he promised to help the droid learn the language, didn't he? Vanyel doesn't actually have any idea how to teach a language to someone when they're starting from nothing, he was hoping he could cheat from the fact that at least he and Deskyl can communicate mind-to-mind, but probably he can point at objects and make any progress that way even while she's asleep. 

He gets up, combs his hair and puts on clean Whites and checks them in the mirror, and then goes next door and very-quietly-knocks again. 

...Oh no how is he going to communicate the concept of 'teaching you to communicate' without being able to communicate? He hadn't thought of that problem. 

DZ answers promptly.

All right, how to do this?

...Just give an example? He keeps his voice low because it does look like Deskyl is asleep again, but he taps the door. "Door," he whispers, and then makes a questioning face at DZ. 

She cocks her head curiously, but touches it and repeats the word, then points across the hall to another one and repeats it again, questioningly.

"Door!" he agrees, smiling and with an exaggerated nod. He looks around for more examples, and squats to touch the floor. "Floor." 

"Floor," she repeats, nodding, and steps out into the hall and shuts the door behind her.

Vanyel isn't sure how far she'll be comfortable going from Deskyl, but he figures he can follow her prompts there. "Stairs," he points. "Lantern. Rug. Bannister." Lots of nouns. He's still unsure how to get from there to the other parts of language. 

She repeats them back, her accent perfect. When he starts running out of words, she points to herself.

"...Person?" It's not like Valdemaran has a word for droid. To make sure it's clear, Vanyel quickly points at himself as well. "Person."

"Person." Okay. She makes a show of looking around and then heads downstairs, presumably in search of more things to get words for.

He follows her, still mulling over how to explain words slightly more abstract than objects and actions. 

They end up in the taproom, where she solicits more nouns. Eventually she catches someone serving someone else a meal; she points this out to Van, and asks "person aukoti person food - aukoti?"

They're getting some very confused looks from the other patrons, but no one seems frightened; maybe the sight of a Herald alongside the weird stranger is enough to make the weird stranger seem safe. 

"Serves," he says. "Person serves person food." He has an idea. Point at the server again – a matronly woman, balancing several trays rather acrobatically. Wait until she sets one down in front of a white-haired bearded old man who blows her a kiss. "Woman serves man food." Next patron is a young lady. "Woman serves woman food." Then he mimes that he's holding a tray himself, and offering it to her, like he did upstairs. "Man serves woman food." He has no idea if that got across but maybe? 

She can demonstrate for him that she understands this concept, yes, and then she leads him out to the front of the building to ask for the word for the sign above the door.

...All right, hmm, does she want 'sign' or does she want the word that the sign says? 

"'Bear's Head Inn'," he reads off, pointing slowly to each words. "Sign," he makes a sort of square gesture that's meant to encompass all of it, then trails his hand to point at each word, and reads them again. 

"Bear's head inn", she repeats back, and then points along the line of text, all in one gesture rather than pointing at each word individually, and looks to him again.

"Sign," he says again. "Writing?" 

More inspiration. He runs down the steps, scrapes a spot in the dirt smoothish with his foot, and uses his magic to scratch the same letters there. "Writing," he says. 

"Writing!" she nods. "Person serves DZ writing?"

Blink. It takes a few seconds for it to make any sense, and then he thinks he has a guess at what she means, maybe, so he beckons for her to follow him back upstairs. 

She follows.