Their fourth year in the seminary saw them prepared for the test of the tongue under the tutelage of Father Ulbrant. They rose at the fourth hour and attended mass. The fifth hour would see them climbing as they had done in preparation of the test of awareness with Father Ulrich. In the room they had used with Father Ulrich they would sit in decency. They would position themselves in a posture that made them look the part of civilized boys. It was an act forced upon them by Father Ulbrant.
All their years they always wondered how Father Ulrich always sat awaiting their arrival in the room. It was obvious that the priest climbed but they had never beheld it. Father Ulbrant proved a priest that, if not anything else, was perpetually enraptured in his tardiness for their lesson. He never arrived on time, but he was never later than thirty minutes. What annoyed them most was in the way he carried himself. He would walk the room with a sense of superiority as he taught them, as though he had not climbed up the edge of the room before their very eyes. Late.
Having only worn his cassock on their first day, Ulbrant never wore it again when he taught them. And their lessons were the only time they ever saw him. His cassock had borne a hood, something the priests in the seminary never wore. It had fit him snugly, and with each step he took on the first day, Ezril had found himself waiting for the ripping sound that would tell the priest the cassock was not sewn for him.
Suffice it to say, it had never come.
There had been little surprise when the next day Ulbrant had climbed in a simple black vest and trousers fastened with a leather belt. The cloak he wore was of the exact same design as theirs but doused in black. He was a huge man, his skin brown as wood, as if the sun had scorched him. And while one of his eyes was brown, the other was a pale blue placed in a face on a head that bore no hair upon it. His voice also reminded Ezril of Father Gareth; a sweet soprano.
“Tomorrow, you will begin a new lesson,” Father Talod had told them after one of their grueling practices with the sword with him. “Father Zakarid has already taught you only a piece of the language of the seminary using nothing but the signs of the hand, but from tomorrow you will begin learning it in earnest.”
He had taken them below the keep after their evening meals, into Father Gareth’s territory. As they walked Ezril made a conscious effort of keeping his mind from the dark corners of the hallways. Keeping his eyes forward, he remained with his brothers as they made their way to the vaults.
Gareth waited for them at the entrance with a welcoming smile that did good at hiding the dangers they were more than certain he was capable of. As was always the case in the presence of Gareth, Talod had spent the entire event with a scowl on his face.
Gareth vanished into the vaults, and while they wondered at what kind of weapon they were required to wield to learn a language, Gareth returned with stacks of books encased in leather which he proceeded to offer each of them. In the same manner he produced a small glass of black liquid and quills for each of them.
“Father Ulbrant might seem a bit eccentric,” he’d told them before they left, “but I assure you he is as much a priest of the church as any other. Maybe more dangerous.”
His voice had born good humor, but they had stayed long enough in the seminary to know not to trust Gareth’s tone.
Ezril and his brothers carried their books, each with their own glass of ink and quill, as they attended their lessons with Father Ulbrant. They had learned the basics of the oral language from their time with Father Zakarid in the wild but had never known it by name.
Father Ulbrant called it Vrail.
“Some of you can read and write,” Ulbrant told them. “Those of you that can, will continue to write, while those of you who cannot, will learn.”
Ulbrant began with the Alduin tongue and, when he was convinced they were capable of writing it fluently, only then did he begin to teach them Vrail. Vrail proved a confusing language and even Salem showed difficulty in its mastery.
In their second month the priests had reason to whip them even more than they did during their first year in the seminary. Save their practice of the bow under Priestess Ellenel, all the priests instructed them in vrail, dishing out punishments in no small measure not only for their usual failures but also for any lack of understanding the boys displayed. Father Talod employed the cane with a fervor that took none of them by surprise, and even Darvi was not spared.
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By their fifth month they escaped the punishments for misunderstanding as they developed a slow fluency in the language.
While Salem proved quicker than them at an understanding of it, to everyone’s amazement, Olufemi grew adept in reading and writing, often speaking with much fluency that they sometimes required him to talk slowly to comprehend whatever he was saying. Though, as remained the case, he rarely spoke to them.
Ezril, like most of his brothers, enjoyed conversing in it as it came with a sense of achievement. But he detested putting it in writing. The language of the Kingdom presented itself in writing in the form of letters and words. Vrail, however, proved an annoyance for him as it presented itself in the form of mixtures of shapes, dots and lines, as if he was making an attempt at drawing. The inscriptions always seemed to jump at him when he looked upon them. But what he disliked the most was how terrible it looked in his handwriting, often drawing laughs from his brothers whenever they caught glimpses of it.
“There is no point in writing if the reader cannot read it,” Ulbrant had told him once.
Olbi, however, suffered the most.
Where his mastery of the oral language proved mediocre, his mastery of it in writing was abhorrent at best. The boy seemed to bear the scorn of Father Ulbrant the most. And most of the time Ulbrant seemed not to care whether the others mastered it or not.
“Some of you might be wondering why we have chosen to teach you something to be taught early on so late into your stay here,” Ulbrant announced in Vrail into the third hour of high noon a day before the test. “This is because not just anyone should be taught the language, and you will be required to go to places where the language spoken is foreign to you. The seminary deems it best that you acquire the conscious skill of understanding. We require you to learn how to learn a language you do not speak.”
He then taught them into the night, not releasing them for their trainings as was the norm in the evening. They put quill to paper, scribbling away with each sentence he made in his narration of Father Orumik, the first evangelist of the seminary, in Vrail.
On normal days they left their materials in the room when they left, but tonight Ulbrant instructed they take them, requiring they write down the tale of their favorite part of the seminary’s history in both languages for the sake of their test.
“Are they really going to send us away if we fail tomorrow’s test?” Unkuti asked while they ate, “over a stupid language?”
Tonight they ate alone. Having returned late from their lesson, the hall was empty and they enjoyed their meal along with their solitude.
Since the events of the kennel, Ezril had found his natural zeal to talk with Unkuti waning faster than it took for the pain of a flame’s heat to pierce the skin. So gone was it from him that he found a certain proximity with the brother disturbing. It was a sensation he struggled to overlook even during training.
Not much attention was afforded Unkuti at first until Olbi spoke between bites. “If you want to stay, you best stay up all night reading, brother.”
“You will be missed, brother,” Salem joked, “but I’m sure if you beg nicely, brother mistborn over here could teach you.”
Ezril was certain his brothers knew he was not mistborn but, since his arrival at the seminary, the nickname had lingered, and they often, though very rarely, addressed him by it.
“Why would I do that?” Unkuti protested. “Haven’t you seen his writing? It looks like he’s scratching his parchments.”
Ezril ignored the obvious jab at him. He picked another piece of meat and tore it into smaller pieces. He watched Olbi eat his meal as though taking stock of each bite.
When they came to the seminary the boy had been the biggest of them and, even now, he retained his place. His shoulders grew larger than the rest of the brothers, and his chest was broader.
Ezril wondered just how big the boy was going to grow.
“It is better than yours though,” Olufemi answered Unkuti in Vrail. By the expression on Unkuti’s face, Ezril judged Olufemi had either used complex words or had spoken too fast for him to understand.
In the end, Unkuti’s response was simple.
“Huh?”
Unkuti displayed his knowledge of the language in the expression, laughing along with them as their laughter filled the hall amidst their banter.
After their run in with the Venin guild Olbi had been destitute of any form of happiness. Only when Father Talod had informed them of the Monsignor’s decision to offer his sister to the convent for work purposes had he slowly regained his usual self. But sometimes Ezril wondered if the boy feared his sister would come to one day become a nun. Or perhaps worse, a priestess.
They retired to their room after their meal where the lantern burned late into the night and no priest came to put it out and mete out due punishment, perhaps knowing the purpose of their action. As the flame burned its life away they scribbled, quill on parchment weaving in confused jumbles of shapes and dots. With lines and dots they brought to life with the signs of Vrail tales of priests long gone. Tales of evangelists and their adventures. Exorcists and their encounters. Monsignors and their reign. All heroic and tragic. And as the flames burned out, sleep took them each, one after the other. Ezril’s eyes closed last as he put a finish to the tragic tale of Father Don, the priest devoted to a nun.