"I'm a thorough kind of person."

Smile. "I can see that."

Okay. Go on. Say the thing. Distract the torturer with your charming personality.

"Though I'm probably still going to need some help with it. Speaking, at least, I could see myself being able to read and write it on my own."

"Well, I've never taught a language before, but I'd be happy to try."

She smiles back at him.

"Thanks, I appreciate it."

Smile!

"Might want to wait until I finish clearing out the old capital, though," he adds as the thought occurs to him. "There's only so much time in a day."

... Of course he'd take time out of that before taking time out of the torture. Sigh.

"Oh, yes. How long do you expect it'll take? It might give me time to get a decent vocabulary list memorized first."

Shrug. "A week or two?"

"Yeah, I could get myself a decent vocabulary in that amount of time."

"You scholarly types," he says, smiling. "No wonder you get along with Iri. I like books all right but I couldn't disappear into them for weeks at a time if I tried."

"I do need breaks occasionally," she admits. "But, I don't know. It doesn't feel like it's weeks. It feels like using the available information to solve a problem."

"And sitting still for hours!" he says, laughing. "How do you do it?"

"What, are the mechanics of sitting eluding you?"

"Now you're just making fun," he accuses. It is not a very intimidating accusation, not with him giggling like that.

"Me? Making fun?" She sniffs slightly, as if insulted. "Well, of course I am."

He laughs.

She smiles.

"You are just delightful," he says.

"Thank you!"

She is going to end up actually befriending him, isn't she.

This isn't the worst thing in the world, just - not what she would have expected from her life.

And now he looks like he wants to kiss her again.

"—I think I'll go work on the capital some more," he says. "Enjoy your books." And he's gone, riding the wind.

"Sure," she agrees. She recognizes that look. She doesn't protest his departure.

Her host leaving without warning mid-conversation is preferable to kissing her, she thinks, but it stills sort of throws her off balance. She lets herself have a few moments to be perplexed, wondering if he'll ever start actually being predictable.

Then she decides this line of thought isn't helpful, and she goes back to learning a new language. She'll have to start actually learning it eventually, instead of just figuring out how she's going to learn it.

The books are happy to help. Or they would be, if they had feelings, which they don't, being books.

She eventually moves on to actually learning the language!

... Learning a language is tiresome and annoying and she thinks she doesn't like doing it. The first set of sentences she needs to disentangle are, quite frankly, boring. Except she can't just move on from them, she very clearly needs to practice with these simple sentences and phrasings. The words seem straightforward to learn, but she's constantly plagued by words looking foreign and scary instead of like a thing she can actually translate. Rote memorization and constant repetition seems the only real solution that she has, and while she can do both, they don't seem like they can get her the language at the speed she wants it, so - she needs to come up with a better way to get these words into her head. The best idea she comes up with is creating slightly obnoxious labels for common objects in the castle, and then obnoxiously labeling them. She - decides that she'll keep that to her room for now, and then goes and labels all of the objects in her bedroom.

By the time this is done, she thinks she's done attempting to cram an entirely new language into her skull for the day. She got a lot done, but also, ugh this is hard. She will not make it easier by throwing herself at it mercilessly, she wants retention not just looking very busy. Which involves taking breaks.

Well. There is a thing she wanted to do, isn't there, though doing it perhaps doesn't count as a 'break.' Still, it's night, so the 'swans' will not actually be in their swan form, and she'd rather get it over with sooner rather than later. She has dinner, and then, it's off to the little lakeside village.