Enna Burning Read Online Free PDF Page B

were a robin waiting for a predator to pass. When she spoke, it was in her softer voice that Enna remembered from evenings around the hearth when Isi would tell stories to the animal workers. “Fire. It must have a language, though I never learned it. According to the old tales, most everything has a language.
    “The story I know says that the Creator first spoke the word to make the world, and then all things could speak to one another, but each thing multiplied and withdrew into its own kind and forgot the languages of the others. Once snail and stone spoke, wind and tree, frog and water.” She took Enna’s hand and looked at her fingers as though for comfort. “Once, people could speak to all things, and that means to me that it’s possible for us to learn all those languages again.”
    “Anyone can?” asked Enna.
    “Some people have more of a knack for it than others, it seems, just like a good wheelwright can burn bread and a good baker might miss a nail. Once, before knowing wind speech gave me any trouble, I tried to teach Geric, but he just couldn’t learn it. Fortunately.
    “There are three different gifts—people-speaking, animal-speaking, and nature-speaking. Some people are born with the ability to learn one. I knew others from my home kingdom who had people-speaking from birth, and all their lives they knew how to talk to people just so, to encourage love and loyalty. I wasn’t born with wind speech—I was sixteen when I first understood its words, so who knows when and how a person can learn?
    “Even for people with the knack, I think most languages are too difficult for us to figure out on our own. When I was little, my aunt taught me how to hear birds speaking to one another, and I had a skill for imitating the sounds back. Even with natural talent, I needed her help to understand in the beginning.”
    “But no one taught you to hear the wind,” said Enna.
    “No,” said Isi, “that was different. I was ready to hear it, I guess, and seeking it. With the wind, all it took was one word to get the sense of it. After wind gave me a first word, I began to hear many more, and then I began to be able to suggest a breeze go this way or that.”
    “Well, I don’t know who would’ve taught Leifer to understand fire speech, unless that vellum gives him power,” said Enna.
    “I doubt it,” said Isi. Enna smiled and remembered that for someone with such uncanny abilities, Isi was remarkably unbelieving when it came to superstitions or reports of magic. “Maybe the vellum contains writing about fire- speaking, and he’s learned it on his own.”
    “That blasted vellum. You know, it makes me mighty uneasy, Isi, that my brother is chest-deep in something sticky and I can’t haul him out.”
    “Fire.” Isi’s eyes looked unfocused, as though she were seeing something far away. “It must be extraordinary and . . . and terrible. I don’t know what it would feel like to understand it.”
    “Well, it’s bound to be something like wind, right?”
    “I wonder.” Isi rubbed her forehead and looked down. “Wind is unique. Its very existence is a language, and it can’t help but carry the images of where it’s been. Every air movement that touches my skin tells me of what else it’s touched. But fire doesn’t move like wind, and it’s so much more intense. I don’t know what to do for him.”
    “So, you don’t know of a way to, I don’t know, erase it? Maybe if I could learn the fire tongue myself, I could figure out how it works and help him.”
    Isi blinked. “Erase it? I read once, somewhere in that old library, accounts of a desert kingdom called Yasid, to the south. Travelers from there reported of a people who had some kind of relationship with fire. Maybe they would have an answer to that, but I don’t.”
    Enna looked at the orange heart of the smoky torch on the wall and was surprised to feel hopeful. “So, maybe the best thing after all would be for me to—”
    “No,”