Kalten groaned.

‘It won’t be nearly as painful this time, dear one,’ she smiled. ‘We don’t really have the time for you to actually learn the language, so Zalasta and I are going to cheat.’

‘Could you clarify that a bit for me, Sephrenia?’ Emban said, looking puzzled.

‘We’ll cast a spell,’ she shrugged.

‘Are you trying to say that you can teach somebody a foreign language by magic?’ he asked.

‘Oh, yes,’ Sparhawk assured him. ‘She taught me to speak Troll in about five seconds in Ghwerig’s cave, and I’d imagine that Troll’s a lot harder to learn than Tamul. At least Tamuls are human.’

‘We’ll have to be careful, though,’ the small Styric woman cautioned. ‘If you all appear to be linguistic geniuses, it’s going to look very curious. We’ll do it a bit at a time – a basic vocabulary and a rudimentary grammar right at first, and then we’ll expand on that.’

‘I could send you instructors, Lady Sephrenia,’ Oscagne offered.

‘Ah – no, thanks all the same, your Excellency. Your instructors would be startled – and suspicious – if they suddenly found a whole platoon of extraordinarily gifted students. We’ll do it ourselves in order to conceal what we’re up to. I’ll give our pupils here abominable accents right at first, and then we’ll smooth things out as we go along.’

‘Sephrenia?’ Kalten said in a slightly resentful tone.

‘Yes, dear one?’

‘You can teach people languages by magic?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then why did you spend all those years trying to teach me Styric? When you saw that it wasn’t going to work, why didn’t you just wiggle your fingers at me?’

‘Kalten, dear,’ she said gently, ‘why was I trying to teach you Styric?’

‘So that I could perform magic tricks, I guess,’ he shrugged. ‘That’s unless you just enjoy making people suffer.’

‘No, dear one. It was just as painful for me as it was for you.’ She shuddered. ‘More painful, probably. You were, in fact, trying to learn Styric so that you could work the spells, but in order to do that, you have to be able to think in Styric. You can’t just mouth the words and make them come off the way you want them to.’

‘Wait a minute,’ he objected. ‘Are you saying that people who speak other languages don’t think the same way we do?’

‘They may think the same way, but they don’t think in the same words.’

‘Do you mean to say that we actually think in words?’

‘Of course we do. What did you think thoughts were?’

‘I don’t know. But we’re all human. Wouldn’t we all think the same way and in the same language?’

She blinked. ‘And which language would that be, dear one?’

‘Elenic, naturally. That’s why foreigners aren’t as clever as we are. They have to stop and translate their thoughts from Elenic into that barbarian gabble they call language. They do it just to be stubborn, of course.’

She stared at him suspiciously. ‘You’re actually serious, aren’t you?’

‘Of course. I thought everybody knew that’s why Elenes are smarter than everybody else.’ His face shone with blinding sincerity.

‘Oh, dear,’ she sighed in near-despair.

Melidere put on a lavender gown and swished off to the emperor’s private apartments bearing a blue satin Elene doublet over one arm. Mirtai followed her. Mirtai did not swish. Melidere’s eyes were ingenuously wide. Her expression was vapid. Her lower lip was adorably caught between her teeth as if she were breathless with excitement. Emperor Sarabian’s courtiers watched the swishing with great interest. Nobody paid the slightest attention to what she did with her hands.

She delivered the gift to the emperor with a breathy little speech, which Mirtai translated. The emperor responded quite formally. Melidere curtseyed and then swished back to the Elene castle. The courtiers still concentrated on the swishing – even though they had already had plenty of opportunity to observe the process.

‘It went off without a hitch,’ the Baroness reported smugly.

‘Did they enjoy the swishing?’ Stragen asked her.

‘I turned the entire court to stone, Milord Stragen,’ she laughed.

‘Did she really?’ he asked Mirtai.

‘Not entirely,’ the Atana replied. ‘A number of them followed her so that they could see more. Melidere’s a very good swisher. What was going on inside her gown looked much like two cats fighting inside a burlap sack.’

‘We should use the talents God gave us, wouldn’t you say, your Grace?’ the blonde girl asked Emban with mock piety.

‘Absolutely, my child,’ he agreed without so much as cracking a smile.

Ambassador Oscagne arrived about fifteen minutes later bearing an alabaster box on a blue velvet cushion. Ehlana took the emperor’s note out of the box and read aloud:

Ehlana,

Your message arrived safely. I get the impression that the members of my court will not merely refrain from interfering with the baroness as she moves through the halls but will passionately defend her right to do so. How does the girl manage to move so many things all at the same time?

– Sarabian

‘Well,’ Stragen asked the honey-blonde girl, ‘how do you?’

‘It’s a gift, Milord Stragen.’

The visiting Elenes made some show of receiving instruction in the Tamul language for the next few weeks, and Oscagne helped their subterfuge along by casually advising various members of the government that he had been teaching the visitors the language during their long journey. Ehlana made a brief speech in Tamul at one of the banquets the prime minister had arranged for the guests in order to establish the fact that she and her party had already achieved a certain level of proficiency.

There were awkward moments, of course. On one occasion Kalten grossly offended a courtier when he smilingly delivered what he thought to be a well-turned compliment. ‘What’s the matter with him?’ the blond Pandion asked, looking puzzled as the courtier stalked away.

‘What were you trying to say to him?’ Mirtai asked, stifling a laugh.

‘I told him that I was pleased to see that he was smiling,’ Kalten replied.

‘That’s not what you said.’

‘Well, what did I say?’

‘You said, “May all of your teeth fall out.”’