The First Lesson
Morning sunlight spilled through the window and flooded the room with brightness.
"Saintess! Good morning!"
It was a full hour earlier than usual. Nina came bursting in with a basin of wash water, and the bright slosh of it at every step seemed to speak for just how excited she was.
"You're here awfully early today, Nina."
"Yes! Let's wash up and get ready, quick! We said we'd start studying today!"
She urged me on with shining eyes, and I answered her only with a bitter smile I kept to myself. I had spent the whole night tracing out a name, and all I had managed was to copy its shape. Not knowing the letters was not, in truth, the greatest problem. What I needed was a way for me, the Saintess, to sit beside my maid and learn the most basic characters without anyone growing suspicious.
If I start learning the alphabet from scratch right next to my maid, the inquisitors will be here before the ink is dry. They'll say this wench isn't Elysia at all—that a demon has taken her body.
I had told Nina yesterday that we would learn the basics together, and there had been nothing else for it. Deceiving her sat poorly with me, but I could hardly confess that I did not know a single letter of this world's script. Do that, and an inquisitor might truly come calling.
So I turned the problem over until I found a scheme that would have Nina taught to read while letting me study quietly at her side.
"Scribe, I'm truly sorry to summon you when you must be so busy."
Breakfast had only just ended when an elderly scribe of the Papal Palace was brought to my room. The sudden summons had left him plainly flustered.
"Ah, not at all! If the Saintess calls, I must come at once. But... why would you send for an old man like me?"
"It's nothing grand. I was hoping you might teach my exclusive maid, Nina, how to read and write."
"Pardon? The maid?"
"Yes. And I would like to sit beside her and see for myself how well she learns."
I put on the gentle, benevolent smile expected of a saintess. Under the pretext of supervising Nina's education, I meant to sit at her side and steal the lesson for myself.
"Ah... truly, your mercy is as vast as the sea. To look after even a lowly maid's studies with your own eyes."
A lowly maid.
The phrasing grated, but I did not let it reach my face. Fortunately the scribe never suspected what I was about. He only nodded, visibly moved.
Right now, in his eyes, I must look exactly like the original Elysia—the merciful saintess.
And so the lesson began in earnest at the small desk in one corner of my room. On a large sheet of parchment that would serve as a blackboard, the scribe set down the foundational characters, the consonants and vowels.
"Now then. These are the most basic characters of all. Watch the shapes carefully..."
I rested my chin on my hand and pretended to watch Nina, while out of the corner of my eye I fought to commit every character he wrote to memory.
"Saintess! I can write this perfectly now!"
The lesson had barely begun when Nina proudly thrust a sheet of paper at me. Written there with fair clarity was the name she had been practicing for days: Elysia.
"My, you've written it well."
"Hehe. Would you like to try too, Saintess?"
Nina held out the quill. I swallowed a dry cough, took the pen, and slowly drew the lines, calling up the shapes the scribe had just written.
Crooked. Uneven.
It was better than last night, but anyone could see I was only mimicking the outline, with no idea of the proper stroke order.
"..."
"...Huh?"
Nina tilted her head, looking from my handwriting to my face and back again.
"Saintess, your lines are terribly crooked today! You didn't train too hard yesterday, did you? Is your hand shaking?"
"Ah... y-yes, I think so. I may have overdone it."
"Here, give it to me. I'll guide your hand!"
Nina laughed brightly and laid her small hand over mine. Then, with a perfectly serious face, she moved the pen with me and finished the letters of Elysia all over again.
A maid correcting a saintess's handwriting. A strange sight. By rights it ought to have been blasphemy, grounds to be driven out for slighting the Saintess, yet the scribe only watched us with a warm, satisfied smile. He seemed to have decided I had written poorly on purpose, to bolster Nina's confidence. I already had a few words stored away, and my hunger to learn was overflowing.
But as the minutes crept by, something strange began to happen inside my head.
That absurdly high figure on my status window. Because of it, my speed of thought, my memory, and my comprehension had risen past any comparison with what they had been.
...I remember.
The characters the scribe had set down across the parchment. At first they had looked like nothing more than worms crawling over the page, but from some point on they began to break apart and reassemble according to fixed rules. See a letter once, and its shape and stroke order lodged in my mind like a photograph and would not fade. When he pointed out the pronunciation, the link between sound and character came clear, and as a handful of words and example sentences piled up, the way letters combined—and the structure of a sentence itself—sorted itself out in my head of its own accord. Where the subject belonged. The rules by which a verb changed form. The scraps of spelling that kept fastening themselves to words of the same meaning. I had not even been given a proper explanation. I had only seen a few examples, and yet the scattered pieces joined themselves together and built a system.
It was not that I was clever. The intelligence and talent dwelling in this body were running wild.
"Now, Miss Nina. You haven't learned this word yet, but..."
The scribe wrote a new word on the board. I had never seen it before, and still I could guess its meaning from the forms and spellings I had already learned. The front of it meant light. The form attached behind meant the one who wields it.
So it must mean "one who wields the light."
A moment later, the meaning he explained matched my guess exactly. I had never been taught the word itself. I had only found the forms that kept repeating in expressions I already knew, and inferred the meaning from context and the rules of combination.
Once the principle clicked, my pace became impossible to rein in. Of course, no matter how high my intelligence, I still needed material to analyze. No one masters a language in a single day from nothing. Even so, in only a few hours I had reached the point of reading and writing simple words. Technical terms and complicated sentences would still take time, but at this rate I could more than prepare for the Academy's written exams. With a memory and a comprehension that kept everything I saw exactly as it was, I could reach the level the tests required before I ever arrived.
As the lesson drew toward its end, I set the quill to a fresh sheet of parchment and, calling the letters up one by one, carefully wrote two words.
Elysia
Nina
Letters that until yesterday had been nothing but unfamiliar symbols now read, clear and plain, as the names of two people. The hand that had been crooked and clumsy at the start of the lesson had somewhere along the way become an elegant script, a perfect imitation of the scribe's own example.
"Is this my name?"
Nina's voice trembled thinly as she pointed at what I had written. I nodded and pressed the parchment into her arms.
"Yes. That is your name, Nina."
She gathered the parchment close, precious as treasure, and smiled with her whole face. The moment I saw that smile, I felt something inside me change for certain.
The first reason I had decided I must learn to read was to hide what I was and enter the Academy. Last night another reason had joined it: I wanted to read, with my own eyes, the letter Nina would one day write me. And now, watching her laugh with the parchment that bore her name held against her chest, the resolve I had made last night finally took on its true weight—in the instant she smiled, her own name gathered in her arms.
The first letter she would someday write me, in crooked, halting letters. I wanted to read it myself.
"Thank you for your trouble, Scribe. Thanks to you, this was a very fruitful hour."
"It was an honor for me as well, to behold the Saintess's profound mercy up close."
The scribe left a polite farewell and departed. Nina, declaring she would review it all tomorrow, gathered the parchments they had used against her chest and went out with a spring in her step.
Alone in the room once more, I was tidying the desk when I picked up a bundle of documents that had been left neglected in one corner since before. It was an official paper drawn up by the Papal Palace of Luminaris—the Saintess's itinerary for the journey to the Imperial Capital of Aeternia, a departure plan. Only a few hours ago it had been nothing but an incomprehensible string of characters. Now, here and there, it resolved into words that carried meaning.
I sat down and began to decipher it slowly, tracing the page with the tip of my quill. I could not grasp every sentence with perfect accuracy, but I could pick out, haltingly, the items that repeated and the words I already knew: the date of departure, the route, the number of escorts. Working my way down the document, my gaze locked hard on a single word.
The borderlands of Luminaris. The road we would have to take to cross into the Empire, and the place where the escort force was scheduled to join us. I bit down on my lip and read the border place-name in the official document aloud.
The place where the ambush had happened in the novel.