Jump-touch backed up a step.
An-jel had spoken, but her accent was wrong. All the words were jumbled up and bouncing around, but that had been somewhat understandable Given Tongue.
She hadn't spoken any of Jump-touch's languages a moment before, what had changed, what was the-
"Child, understand me does?"
Jump-touch frowned, working through the garbage. The woman, to her credit, also didn't seem to be enjoying the experience, moving her mouth like she'd eaten something distasteful.
"What did you do?" Jump-touch asked finally, making sure to enunciate each word, trying to drop her Mountain accent into something more neutral.
The woman licked her lips. "I used a —" something in Human, a pause, and then "— used a small bit of Stone. It granted me the power to speak your ——" a lapse into Human again.
Jump-touch took almost a minute to work out what she'd said, to put the words in the right place and fix the tonal problems until she sort of understood what the woman had meant. No other kobold would have managed it, but Jump-touch was a genius.
"Well, you're not very good at it," she responded finally. Beside her the dog was alert and interested, looking between them both.
An-jel caught her downwards look, then said something in Human- Oh, it was the dog's name probably- Teb-sie?
"Teb-sie is trained for whistles," she had said, "this is upsetting him."
Jump-touch shook her head, getting into the swing of it now. "He's not upset, he's confused because you're very, very bad at this. You need to go lower with your whistles, try-"
She spent a moment trying to explain exactly what was wrong with the woman's speech, but was cut off in the middle.
"It doesn't matter," An-jel butted in, "this will only last an hour or so. You understand me now. Show me your —"
Jump-touch squinted, "I don't know what that is," then, a thought, "Rat-tail warned me about people like you. You-"
An-jel rolled her eyes. "Your magic, I mean! You have magic?"
"Human magic?" Jump-touch said hesitantly, and the woman nodded.
"Human magic, sure!"
"I don't have human magic. I have to touch the Stone to get it. But once I do, then I can start counting the days until I get to go home. If you could show me where the Stone is then I can get it over with."
An-jel made a frustrated noise. To her side, My-he-kal was staring between them, much like the dog, but more worried. "You're going too fast, be slowing. You have never touch the Stone? This?"
She waved her hand at Jump-touch, and the girl saw it contained a small fragment of something grey. It had the same glitter as the road, but if it was magical, she couldn't see it. Could you see magic?
"We didn't have one in my village." She reached out, but An-jel pulled her hand back, "we only had regular stones. Do you want me to touch that one?"
"No. The magic is gone," An-jel said, the most coherent thing she'd managed so far, with almost all the words in almost the right order.
"This-" Jump-touch had to catch herself and stop for a moment, could you ruin your language skills simply by talking to people who didn't know how to speak properly?
She lost her thread of thought, trying to untangle the jumble and An-jel took the opportunity to butt in. "You never-" extra emphasis in the wrong place, but she was pretty sure this was where it was meant to be, -"touched a Stone, never?"
Jump-touch sighed, "No. Never. Look. I just need to find it, touch it, and then do whatever job it gives me for a while. Once that's done, I can go home, right? Simple-as. Just lead me there, let me do the thing, and then I'll be off your scales. Out of your claws. Out from under your paws. Gone. I shall March home, and you never need think of me again."
"Stone-" the woman said something in human, frowned, frowned again and then had a rapid-fire conversation with My-he-kal.
He shrugged, responding something snippy, his posture unhappy.
An-jel looked at him silently for a while, before turning back to Jump-touch.
"Stone needs trade," she managed finally, after three more attempts.
Trade? Like, if she wanted to touch the Stone then she had to give something in return?
"I'll work. That's my trade? It gives me a job, I work the job."
An-jel shook her head, trying to twist her mouth around something her limited skill didn't seem able to translate. "Human trade!" she shouted, waving her arms. "You know, ——— coins!"
"Coins?" Jump-touch asked in Lower Tongue, and the woman glared at her, before spitting some rapid-fire Human jabber at her, waving her arms.
"Oh. I can switch languages if you want?" she tried in Other, then in Mud-people, dredging the forms out of the depths of her memory. "How's this? This language is very simple. The opposite of Given Tongue."
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She thought the woman was going to kick her, she was almost as red now as when My-he-kal had eaten the chilli peppers, but somehow the situation wasn't as funny.
"That is scramble." An-jel shouted, "you are speaking scramble. A stupid animal tongue for-" her translations gave out again, and Jump-touch turned away. This wasn't getting either of them anywhere.
There had to be another gate somewhere, or she could go through the house?
"Yes." She said in Lower Tongue as she turned to try the house, "like you, except now we're both speaking scramble. And unlike you, I speak it perfectly."
Mountain help her, her speech patterns were adjusting to match whatever this was. It was going to take her forever to get it out of her brain.
An-jel tried to grab for her shoulder again, but she was ready for it. "If you grab me," she switched back to Given Tongue, clear and concise, away from the mash she'd been speaking for the past few minutes, "then Teb-sie will bite you. I will tell him to bite you, he will bite you, and then I will bite you also, to make it fair. Human trade."
If the woman had been kobold, rather than human, then Jump-touch would never have considered behaving like this, but during her birthday party the village had come together to give her a 'talk' about humans.
Ok. So Rat-tail had done most of the talking, and the rest of the village had done their best, but a lot of it had gone over her head, and the heads of all the others to be fair.
She still didn't really understand what they'd been trying to tell her, but enough had sunk in that she knew not to get cornered by a human under any circumstances, and to not take help if she could avoid it, as they would always expect something extra from her in return.
"Okay," An-gel said, sighing and stepping away from the gate, raising both her paws in a gesture of supplication, "No bite. We'll take you to the Stone, but you have to listen to me first."
Jump-touch spared her a glance, bee-lining for the exit while she had the chance.
An-jel fell in behind her, and My-he-kal followed behind.
"You can't ——, only the ——, too much-" the rest of the sentence lapsed into incomprehensible Human, and there was a lull in conversation as she thought about it.
Behind them, My-he-kal was muttering to himself, the dog by his side. He had been very quiet, was he okay?
"To use the stone," An-jel finally pulled herself together, "you must have coins. Not enough coins, people will get angry at you."
Jump-touch hummed to herself. If she used her blanket as a bag, she could ditch the pack entirely. She probably didn't need the water-skin anymore either, she had seen plenty of troughs as they entered the village.
"But how will they know?" she asked, only half-listening.
"They have magic to see," An-jel replied, one hand against her throat, then she winced in apparent realisation. "We should wait, until what I did with the Fragment wears off. They will question it."
That wasn't happening.
The three of them kept walking, and Jump-touch let herself be directed towards the centre of the village. It was later in the day now and there were fewer people around than earlier, but it was still overwhelmingly noisy. Lots of animals of all different shapes and sizes, pulling carts and small wagons over the stone streets, a constant clatter-rattle of wheels, hooves, speech and shouting.
The streets were paved here with split cobbles, rather than flat slates, and that only exacerbated the noise. Still, she enjoyed the feeling of them beneath her feet as she walked, still warm from the afternoon sun. She could learn to like it here, eventually.
****
A five-span walk later the three of them came to a gateway, situated in what looked like a side-street. The area was much quieter than the rest of the village, at least.
She stood and looked at where they'd stopped. She couldn't help but compare the building to the area surrounding it. Like the village in miniature. There were high stone walls surrounding a stone arch, and through it she could see only grass. Two guards were standing either side of the arch, as there had been on the outside gate, and both were holding similar spears, but their clothing was a dark grey, rather than the deep green of those at the village gate or the deep blue of My-he-kal's now abandoned coat.
An-jel babbled something to My-he-kal as they walked closer, and with a sigh he agreed to take over for her as she turned to leave, taking Teb-sie with her.
She spared one moment to look back at Jump-touch.
"They will hunt me to the death!" she said enthusiastically, which seemed a bit drastic. She couldn't have meant that, right? Right?!
Jump-touch moved closer to My-he-kal just in case, as they headed towards the archway. If these two were murderers, she wanted at least one human on her side.
My-he-kal looked down at her with confusion, babbled something, and then shrugged, talking to the guards. They seemed interested in whatever he had to say, and not nearly as hostile as An-jel had implied, then a moment later the two of them were through the gate.
****
Inside was a grassy field, unlike anywhere else she'd seen since entering the village. Most of the buildings she had seen so far were made of stone. Stone streets, stone houses, stone roofs. That wasn't unusual, she had grown up on the top of a mountain, where there wasn't exactly a huge amount of greenery, but here everything was tamed, managed, Human. Stone and wood, chipped and and sanded into human shapes.
This area was still tame, but at least it was green.
In the distance, a huge spire of stone took up the centre of the field, and out from it spread a sea of grass, knee-high but with paths worn through where people had pushed through it. There was a tree in one of the far corners, casting shade down onto the grass, and she could hear the sound of running water somewhere in the distance.
It took her a moment to realise that all the noise of the city- village wasn't a big enough word for this place, so she was going to make up her own- the noise of the city had vanished.
She cast a glance behind her, back out of the arch, and My-he-kal cracked a smile at her, pointing towards the spire.
So that was the Stone. Perfect. All she had to do was touch it and she would be given her job.
Then all she had to do was put in the work for a year, and then she could go home.
****
It took them several minutes to push through the knee-high grass, My-he-kal insisting she made her own way through, pulling her back every time she tried to take one of the already open routes.
Little flowers were growing in the grass. Daisies and poppies, along with little round blue flowers and tall yellow ones, and he also told her off when she tried to pick them.
There were insects too, and she stopped for a moment to watch a huge bumblebee drift from flower to flower, only moving when My-he-kal touched her back.
There weren't many insects up on the Mountain, and she always found them fascinating when they travelled to the Valley for the summer.
My-he-kal nudged her back into walking once again, and she rolled her eyes at him.
"But why can't I use the paths?" she grumbled. For him, the grass was barely up to his knees, but for her it was almost up to her chest. She wasn't tall like him. Why were all humans so much taller than her!
Will touching the stone make me taller?
She hoped not, she'd never be able to fit through the doors back home, she'd kept bumping her head on the doors. She'd never be able to see the flowers or the bees living in the grass.
She grumbled in Other as she forced her way through.
Around the base of the spire, the grass faded in height, until it was soft beneath her feet, and she found herself standing there, staring up at the Stone.
So this was it, then. This was what she'd left her village for, this was the whole reason for her journey. This would, if what Rat-tail had told her about human magic was right, change the rest of her life.
My-he-kal had stayed back in the grass, unwilling to go any closer. She was on her own here.
Jump-touch took a deep breath, and laid her hand on the Stone.