The first line took me four hours to pronounce correctly.
Not because it was long. It was nine syllables in the old language, which Cass transliterated phonetically into a notation system she'd developed herself, with vowels marked by small numbers indicating pitch and consonants by dots indicating where to place pressure in the mouth. The system was precise and thorough and completely unlike anything I'd encountered before, and by the second hour, I wanted to throw the paper into the Hollow's pool and watch it dissolve.
I didn't. I kept going.
Cass was not a patient teacher in the soft sense. She didn't encourage. She didn't say good try or you're getting closer. She said again and that vowel is wrong and occasionally stop, start from the beginning. She had been reading the old languag
