Fledglings

Two: Smugglers

The second that the outline of the city had crested over the horizon, Kalin felt a deep sense of relief wash over her. She had travelled a lot for a girl who technically wasn't yet old enough to be sneaking the drinks she did when waiting on at the clubs. Her feet had stood on every continent now, and yet, she still was painfully aware she had not been built with sea legs.

It wasn't just the disconcerting lurch of the deck, or even her morose travelling companions, it was simply that Kerch was her homeland. She had been born in Ketterdam, grown up discovering its labyrinths and mazes of alleys and streets. She was a girl born of street brawls and penny cons. When she was four she lost her first tooth in a clumsy infantile fist-fight, a dare from one of her brothers. Though she was left with a lisp for the best part of a year, her brother had agreed to teach how to hold her own for next time. When she was seven she was pulled in by the stadwatch for pickpocketing the snobbish well-to-dos of the Zelver District. Her mother was furious and demanded that she put her time to better use. Why couldn't she find some honest work?

But why would Kalin ever waste her time with honest work when there was far more rewarding work to be had in the field of trickery? All you had to do was look hard enough, sweat enough, bleed enough and there were scraps of a fraudulent fortune to be found in every gutter. The dregs of riches draining into all those dark places and crooked corners that any sensible person would steer clear of, that would make any decent person avert their eyes and pick up their pace. The beams of the buildings were practically bloated with the wet rot of dishonesty, all she had to do was wring it dry.

When Kalin was ten she liked the docks. One of her brothers was apprenticing with a fisherman and it was almost too easy to sneak a free lunch there, a tasty supper here. Her hands smelt like fish oil around the clock, but her stomach was full. It was during one such miniature heist she had heard a pair of merchers conversing in Ravkan. A funny sort of cousin to Kerch, one which was undoubtedly older, more serious and probably hardly ever gets in trouble with its parents. The words were strong and sturdy, falling heavily, deliberately, like the pounding march of an infantry unit walking in lockstep. Ravka may not be at war anymore, but their country spoke like soldiers. Next day, she wandered down to the university library and took out a heavy book. Lexa Ravka. Language of Ravka.

For the next six months, said book lived a solitary life beneath Kalin's bed, hidden from the dangers of siblings ransacking her room. Lexa Ravka's only duties were its nightly lesson for a very curious little girl. She studied its pages in the dim rays of the gas lamps outside her thin slice of a bedroom window, the orange glow filtering in through the fogged glass. During the day, she still went to the docks, she spoke to the workers, pestered the harbour master and even dared to call after merchers. All in Ravkan. At first she was given strange looks, as if she was some peculiar creature escaped from a local zoo. Eventually, she perfected her pronunciation, tweaked her accent, softened her vowels to velvet slippers and sharpened her consonants to a knife blade. And she could speak Ravkan.

The other languages had come easier, though not easily. Fjerdan was as cold and desolate as the place itself, governed by a harsh syntactical regime, grammar stuck to with militant precision. It had to be spoken on the tip of your tongue, pushed up against your teeth, as if to keep your lips warm. Kaelish was difficult, unpredictable and full of odd idiosyncrasies, but once you put the accent to it, it became infinitely more pleasant. Warm and wholesome, like hot buttered toast or toffee melting in your mouth. Suli was tricky simply because of the lack of resources. There were no books in the library at the university, nor any documentation to request from the constabulary (not that Kalin ever made it her business to be within shooting distance of the stadwatch headquarters). It wasn't until she met a boy who was slaving away in one of the brothels - which Kalin had been visiting for a wildly different reason than one might assume - that she made headway.