After humiliating myself enough, I thankfully ran out of any more ideas. A small blessing. So I sat by the fire, wishing I could just talk to her. Well, I wasn’t really the best at making friends… or good at making friends. Pretty bad at it, actually.

But I hated how she must have thought I was an idiot. I knew I’d acted weird, but I didn’t want her to hate me. If we could talk, I knew so much, so some of it would definitely be useful for her.

Glancing up, I looked to see if she was still reading. She wasn’t, something else in her hand, hard to see it from this far away, but she soon brought it to her mouth and started chewing.

Okay, maybe she didn’t need my help finding food to eat. That thing she sat on was probably a blanket or sleeping bag or something like that. The sword she carried probably better at dealing with wild animals than my little axe, not to mention she probably knew how to actually use it.

Sighing, I curled up, gaze back on the dancing flames. No point feeding the fire, so it was already dying out. The reeds burned really well, left only ash behind, hot while it lasted.

If I could talk to her, maybe she would want to hear about combustion equations or something else I’d memorised for a test. That kind of stuff stuck in my head pretty well—once I stuck it in there, not like I had a photographic memory—so I had plenty to tell her.

But maybe that stuff wasn’t true here. Maybe sticks burned because of magic, maybe the air was made up of entirely different elements. Would she want to hear me try and mess up reciting the story of Romeo and Juliet? Since she had a sword, maybe she’d want to hear about the Battle of Hastings… but I couldn’t remember anything about the battle itself, just that Harold Godwinson had died in it.

The French lessons I’d sat through would definitely interest her, right?

Giggling to myself, I honestly did feel better from that silly joke, my spiral into despair stopped in its tracks. There was no point thinking how pointless it would be if I could speak to her when I couldn’t speak to her.

Wanting to prove that to myself, I went through all the classes I could think of. History, geography, art, drama, religious studies, music, maths….

Maths?

My heart throbbed, a sudden burst of joy pumping through my veins. Numbers didn’t need words. However, as excited as I was, I remembered my humiliation keenly. Stopped myself from running over to Hyraj right now and instead took a deep breath, then let it out.

Numbers didn’t need words, but they did need numbers and she probably used different ones… and twos and threes. But the whole point of numbers were that they, like, meant something, sort of a real thing.

Trying to come up with some way to “talk” numbers with her, I looked over at my firewood. If I put some sticks down, then counted them one at a time, that would be obvious, right?

Just that, while I was looking there, I noticed my calendar. The tally.

Of course: I could draw lines, even just dots. And they didn’t have to be on the tree—I could make charcoal or use ash or, even better, just scratch it in the dirt. Wasn’t going to run out of dirt.

A plan in mind, I went over to my firewood. The reeds were a pretty good size for drawing in the dirt. So I took one and squatted down, grass not growing under the broad tree, then started making marks: one dot, space, two dots, space, three dots. I went all the way to ten, then paused, wondering if she maybe didn’t count in tens. I knew computers only used ones and zeroes, but maybe she counted in twelves like a clock, or something else entirely.

Well, I would have to try and learn how to do it if it came to that. For now, I just added more dots, going up to twenty.

First part of the plan done, I didn’t go and drag her over yet. Once she told me what the numbers were, what next? Well, I wanted to show her I could do maths, so I’d need to write something in the dirt….

What if she used different, like, symbols for plus and equals?

Face scrunched up, headache tingling, I really wanted to give up, thinking not something I was good at. Remembering wasn’t too bad, something I could just do over and over until it stuck. So I had remembered the important things for tests and done okay. Hadn’t cared enough to remember everything, wouldn’t get many more marks if I did. The older I got, the questions became all about thinking and that really wasn’t something I could just sit down and learn, no matter how often the teachers said you could.

Stolen story; please report.

When I put it like that, maths kinda was my favourite. Even if they tried to hide the question with a bunch of words, the end result was still putting numbers into an equation, then following the steps to get the answer.

Put the numbers down…. An idea coming to me—maybe not a good one, but it was better than nothing—I smiled.

Walking back to the fire pit, I subtly looked to see what she was doing. Apparently finished eating, she was reading again, a metal cup in her hand that she took a sip from. I hadn’t noticed her go to the stream, but I had been pretty focused on my thoughts.

Well, nothing for it, I took a deep breath in, let it out, and started walking to her. Almost as soon as I did, she looked up from her book. Even though I could barely see her eyes, I felt her stare, pulse going that little faster as it beat in my ears.

I couldn’t remember the last time I had been so nervous to talk to someone. Presentations hadn’t been this scary.

But I kept walking, step after step, her sharp gaze becoming clearer and clearer—as did the feeling of being a nuisance. Still, I walked until I was just a few steps away.

“Hyraj,” I said, careful to say it right.

She pursed her lips, leaving me thinking she would send me off for a moment. But she didn’t, mouth opening and a softly said, “Louise,” her answer. For as much as we’d both struggled earlier, she now spoke my name like she had always known it. I smiled before I realised it; stopped myself, pursing my lips a moment.

Off-balance from that, I tried to come up with something to say, breathing in to say it, only to stop myself again. Maybe because I’d been alone for so long, maybe because her stare was pressuring me, I just felt so flustered, had to look away to collect myself, taking another deep breath.

That helped, reminding me of my plan. Words didn’t work, but gestures were kind of, like, obvious. So I pointed at her and then pointed to the tree where I’d made my dots.

She looked at me like I was an idiot, which, to be fair, yes, I knew I had messed up a lot already today. All I could do was point, though. Once, twice, trying not to get frustrated, but my fingers were honest, trembling.

Turning away, she clicked her tongue. I waited to see what she would do and what she did was take something out of her backpack. A green bottle, probably glass, a tuft of brown sticking out the top. She showed it to me—not handing it to me, but holding it up for me to see. I wasn’t sure what it was, the only other clue I had the kind of strong smell coming from it, reminding me of vinegar, but not really.

She let out a sigh, lowering it to the ground. Her hands didn’t go far, though, one coming to the brown bit sticking out the top and—the moment she made a ring around it with her thumb and forefinger, I realised.

A flame flickered in the ring, then a small flame grew from the wick, that “bottle” an old-fashioned lamp like I’d seen in books about Victorian times. There wasn’t a twisty gear on the side or anything, but I wasn’t sure what those even did.

After a couple seconds, she put a cap over the wick, then looked up at me with an expression of, “I have this.”

I bit my lip, wondering why she showed me, then it hit me: she thought I wanted to giver her firewood. My mouth started moving on its own; thankfully, my voice didn’t. I hesitated over how to tell her that she misunderstood, thinking and thinking.

“Um, acht?” I said, trying to copy the sound I had barely heard and only once.

Her eyebrows lowered even more, but she didn’t frown. I didn’t know if that was a good sign.

Falling back to the gestures, I pointed at her and pointed at the tree. “Hyraj,” I said again, hoping that maybe hearing me say her name made her feel a bit happy too, make her willing to humour me.

She let out a long sigh. With more elegance than I’d ever shown since coming here, she rose to her feet, smooth and unhurried like gravity didn’t affect her. Then she gave a sort of pushing gesture.

Hoping that meant to lead the way, I started walking, but glanced back to make sure she followed. She did.

Although a short walk, I still had plenty of time to feel like an idiot. All I could do was settle myself with knowing I probably couldn’t leave a worse impression on her. Probably.

Underneath the tree, I stopped and pointed at the dots I’d neatly dotted. Didn’t dare look at her. If she looked at all unhappy… I already felt like running off to my room and shutting the door until she left.

Lost in my thoughts, I almost jumped when she knelt down and picked up a reed, long fingers holding it like a pen. Unhurried like always, she drew shapes in a smooth motion, never stopping, going from one to the next.

I assumed she understood. If so, then, in her language, one was like a parenthesis, two like an s with the start and end shortened. I stopped trying to relate them to things I knew after that, clearly very different. Three was this shape, four that shape, and so on.

A small blessing, eleven onwards looked like how we did it. One one, one two, one three. And ten—their zero was a slash.

Giddy, I waited for her to finish, then immediately picked up another reed and wrote down an equation using her numbers: “1 + 2 = 3”. Even if she didn’t know the plus and equals signs I used, I just knew she was clever enough to work it out. Nothing else would make sense there.

There was a longer pause this time, then she wrote down those three numbers. However, rather than put symbols in between, she wrote it like a receipt or how you added a bunch of numbers together, one number on each line and a line across for the sum.

1

2

3

I could work with that. Coming up with a few sums off the top of my head, I showed her another simple one, then added a few numbers together in the hundreds.

Pausing there, I finally looked at her. Well, her eyes were narrowed, lips thin, but that was how she normally looked. At least, she didn’t look upset.

Maybe my second impression wasn’t quite so bad.