"I imagine that would make it hard! --I'm terrible at learning things from books, Lev can back me up here, he's been teaching me Yiddish."

"I think you do fine. It's just that you can't learn languages from books."

Lev looks at Inaaya speculatively wondering if she can be taught something.

"Half the Esperanto speakers in the world would disagree strenuously!"

"You know Esperanto?"

"Better receptive than expressive but yes."

Radiant smile. "I like it when people learn totally useless things."

oh no she's so good. "I used to get obsessed with random subjects and not be able to put them down -- I say used to like I don't still -- the obsession with auxiliary languages has lasted, uh, about ten years. My roommates were sick of me."

"What else were you obsessed with?"

"Oh god. Uh, Norse mythology in my early teens, birds of prey before that, at some point I got very into the development of Old and Middle English but I don't remember when, Shakespeare's tragedies, Protestant history, this is no longer in any particular order --"

😍

Much more quiet and sedate 😍.

"I wish I had been able to have... interests. Before I was sixteen I just had whatever books I could pick out of the garbage."

HORROR

"On the other hand I had no idea what was supposed to be for people who knew as much as I did and so I wound up stretching a lot. It wasn't all bad. I didn't know eleven-year-olds weren't supposed to read college-level medical textbooks, so I could."

"That's good at least but I still kind of want to go back in time and take eleven-year-old you to a bookstore and tell her she can have as many books as she wants."

"To be honest, I hoard them a little bit. Mariam complains every time we go through customs and I have four suitcases of books with me, as if she doesn't have two suitcases of clothes."

"Mary used to bring an electric bike everywhere, I feel like I've lost any sense of proportion I ever had regarding what it's normal to bring with you when you travel."

"Well, we don't really have houses, if I want to own something I have to carry it with me everywhere I go. When I was first part of the Emporium I used to try to memorize the books because I was so scared that they would go away."

Mordred's feeling that he wants to give Inaaya a library is only increasing.

Then she laughs. "Do you want to hear me recite something? I still have some things memorized."

"Sure!"

In a clear, crisp voice, with excellent enunciation, Inaaya recites:

"There was nothing of the giant in the aspect of the man who was beginning to awaken on the sleeping-porch of a Dutch Colonial house in that residential district of Zenith known as Floral Heights. 

His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in April, 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay. 

His large head was pink, his brown hair thin and dry. His face was babyish in slumber, despite his wrinkles and the red spectacle-dents on the slopes of his nose. He was not fat but he was exceedingly well fed; his cheeks were pads, and the unroughened hand which lay helpless upon the khaki-colored blanket was slightly puffy. He seemed prosperous, extremely married and unromantic; and altogether unromantic appeared this sleeping-porch, which looked on one sizable elm, two respectable grass-plots, a cement driveway, and a corrugated iron garage. Yet Babbitt was again dreaming of the fairy child, a dream more romantic than scarlet pagodas by a silver sea.

For years the fairy child had come to him. Where others saw but Georgie Babbitt, she discerned gallant youth. She waited for him, in the darkness beyond mysterious groves. When at last he could slip away from the crowded house he darted to her. His wife, his clamoring friends, sought to follow, but he escaped, the girl fleet beside him, and they crouched together on a shadowy hillside. She was so slim, so white, so eager! She cried that he was gay and valiant, that she would wait for him, that they would sail—

Rumble and bang of the milk-truck.

Babbitt moaned; turned over; struggled back toward his dream. He could see only her face now, beyond misty waters. The furnace-man slammed the basement door. A dog barked in the next yard. As Babbitt sank blissfully into a dim warm tide, the paper-carrier went by whistling, and the rolled-up Advocate thumped the front door. Babbitt roused, his stomach constricted with alarm. As he relaxed, he was pierced by the familiar and irritating rattle of some one cranking a Ford: snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah. Himself a pious motorist, Babbitt cranked with the unseen driver, with him waited through taut hours for the roar of the starting engine, with him agonized as the roar ceased and again began the infernal patient snap-ah-ah—a round, flat sound, a shivering cold-morning sound, a sound infuriating and inescapable. Not till the rising voice of the motor told him that the Ford was moving was he released from the panting tension. He glanced once at his favorite tree, elm twigs against the gold patina of sky, and fumbled for sleep as for a drug. He who had been a boy very credulous of life was no longer greatly interested in the possible and improbable adventures of each new day.

He escaped from reality till the alarm-clock rang, at seven-twenty."

(If Lev were not extremely gay, he would have a crush on Inaaya. As it is, he is wondering with vague displeasure why all of the cultists of the evil god of power are so sexy.)

"...sorry."

"....no don't be, that was incredible and you're incredible!"

^_^

"You're awfully earnest for a cultist."

She spots a likely tree and starts to climb it.