the fifth note

Horace the half-giant was a boy of small words and big ideas. His latest big idea was that he should become an attorney.

"DAU HWA?!" his mother said. Rock tongue for "What do you want to do with that?!" and also "Are you not satisfied with the last idea you had?!" and "I haven't gotten enough hairs on my head for every notion you've got tumbling in your skull!" Rock tongue can be very good at communicating many things in a nice, small package. Mountains in pebbles, as they say.

Mainly, underneath all that, his mother was asking Horace why he wanted to go into law and not something a little less punishing. Like basket-weaving, or ship-making, or even clay-beating.

And even deeper still, Horace knew that his mother was really saying, "You have a fragile heart and a beautiful mind, son, but I don't want you to get hurt."

All that was exactly why he needed to go into law. He was tired of all the complicated politicks that now governed magicks, as if that were a thing that could be governed. He was tired of how inaccessible so many things were to his own mother, simply because she couldn't speak grass tongue like him. He was tired of living his life in translations.

He knew it wouldn't be easy. In order to get into law school, he'd first have to learn a handful of new languages. Not just grass tongue, but the gnomes' many dialects, and not just gnome tongue but their specific legalese. Full of complicated vowels and too many extra sounds. And then the attorneys, who added tails to every 'a' and used a thesaurus for any word longer than five letters, who would never take his speech seriously.

But he knew what he wanted. What he wanted was for the city to stop taking advantage of his mother. No more asterisks. No more court meetings without a rock tongue translator. No more subsections or sub this or sub that. No more people cheating her out of money, or housing, or dreams.

Horace didn't tell her all that. Instead, he said, "Duun bai." Which means a lot of things in rock tongue. But in this case, Horace wasn't speaking in riddles or subtext or layers. He meant the most simple understanding of the phrase: "Because I love you."

"Duun bai sa," his mother muttered back.