Wyndy escorted Rassler toward a booth set up on a street just off the main square. In the booth stood a tall, very pale young human, with long black hair, bloodshot eyes, and lips as red as blood. Next to the human was a creature with the head of a deer and the body of a man. Large antlers sprung from its head, reaching almost to the roof of the tent. Both wore pitch black robes and beckoned to Rassler as he approached. Both had human hands, with sharp pointed nails painted black.

  “You are courtly enough and all, Count Rassler. But you don't speak High Goblin. We need to fix that!” explained Wyndy. She seemed even more excited about the “fixing” than she had about the dance-off.

  Rassler recoiled from the beckoning hands. “What are you going to do to me? Tell me exactly how you mean to ‘fix’ me!”

  The deer-man threw his hand up in the air. “Oh, for love of the gods! We were just saying ‘hi.’ Get a grip on yourself, Vatharian human!”

  The darkly-clad human continued to move his hand in a beckoning motion. “Do not fear us, Vatharian. We will give you understanding. Come and see.”

  Wyndy went up, gave a big hug to both, then put an arm behind each of their backs and pushed them a few steps toward Rassler. She grabbed each of their right arms, and held them out as if for Rassler to shake their hands. “Count Rassler. Let me present to you two of our most talented young wizards. This is Bedo,” she waved the young human’s arm, “and this over here is Marthor, Son of the Wild Hunt, but everyone calls him Bobby,” she said as she waved the arm of the deer-man, who looked pained as soon as his nick-name was mentioned. “Now, Bedo and Bobby, please explain the simple and painless procedure we are going to perform.”

  “The procedure… yes, it is a fine procedure and extremely painless. We are going to cast a spell on you, and then you'll be able to speak and understand High Goblin. It won't hurt. You just need to pay attention, listen carefully, and keep your mind open to the spell. It's a great day for it too, as we are at the Equinox, when the gods roam the earth. Magic is more powerful in these periods, so the spell should be even more effective now. Maybe you'll have better pronunciation or something.”

  “Okay, that sounds good. I agree with your proposal. How do we do it?”

  “Oh, he agrees does he? How nice of him,” Bobby said.

  Bedo was back to his dark wizard pose. “Understand this, Mister Count Vatharian, or whatever sort of noble you are. This wasn't my idea, and I do this only at the request of our fair princesses Myla and Wyndy. Understand the trust they are placing in you, to reveal this knowledge and give you this understanding. I only hope you live up to their trust.”

  Wyndy's almost ever-present smile dropped. “Bedo! We can trust him. I saw the army that was after him. It is clear he isn't going back to Vathary. And what are you worried about anyway? What is the knowledge of our language going to reveal to him?”

  “It reveals everything. He will now understand what is really going on here.”

  “But we have human sight seers all the time. What more is he going to learn that they don't already see.”

  “The sight seers don't speak our language. They can't read the signs. They can see the streets, the buildings, see that the town is clean and people seem busy. But they don't really know what we are doing, what we are thinking, and what we are building. But now Rassler will understand.”

  “Okay, whatever, I royally note your concerns. Can we get on with it now? I think Myla has already covered your fee, or do you have more ominous warnings to make and more wizard-posing to do?”

  “As you wish, princess. We will give this Vatharian the knowledge!” Bedo made a dramatic gesture with his arms, as Bobby closed the tent and cleared a space on the carpet.

  They sat cross-legged on the carpet, and motioned to Rassler to join them. As soon as he did the two wizards grabbed Rassler's hands and quickly tied them to a table leg. When Rassler opened his mouth to protest, Bedo stuck a piece of cloth into his mouth.

  “This spell is called ‘Intensive Language Course.’ You are about to have three years of language lessons condensed into ten minutes. Brace yourself. And bite down on the cloth.”

  Bedo and Bobby reached over and grabbed their subject’s head in a vice grip. Their eyes glowed white. A great torrent of language started flowing into Rassler.

  These are the four grammatical genders. A table is masculine, while an unmarried woman is neuter. Chairs are masculine. Children are neuter. Frogs are feminine, unless it is a specifically masculine frog. Here is the list of the most common three thousand words, which you will now memorize, along with their gender and declension pattern, and whether the word is hard or soft. There are seven cases, and each case has eight different standard declensions, depending on gender and hardness. Here are the fifty-six standard patterns, followed by the twenty-seven most common irregular patterns.

  Rassler tried to keep up. Why four genders? Why was a house masculine? Rassler felt his brain was about to burst. Why did the location need a case in addition to the preposition, and why eight different patterns? What in the hells is ‘Dative?’ People can’t really figure all that out while speaking, right? They must be kidding with those consonants. Can lips even make that noise? Doesn’t it hurt your throat to say that?

  The four genders are: feminine, neuter, masculine active things, and masculine inactive things. Human nobles are considered masculine inactive things.

  Oh, that was just rude. Rassler wondered if he had offended the language in some way.

  Nouns are either soft or hard. “Noble” is a soft noun. It follows the third minor soft declension pattern, like “slime” or “cabbage.”

  “I demand that you change that. A noble should be considered a masculine active thing. Change that at once!”

  You can’t argue with a language. I don't care what you think.. I control how a whole nation thinks, so I care not for the opinion of a mere mortal. As punishment for your impertinence, you must now memorize the Genitive Plural forms of the soft adjectives!

  Rassler reeled as he was assaulted by the Genitive Plural. Even leaving out how rude the language was being to him, the intensive language course was the most unpleasant minutes of Rassler’s life to date. He began shaking, sweat dripping from him, his shirt drenched, as the language-learning process continued.

  The adjectives change form too, depending on the gender of the word they modify, and whether it is genitive or accusative.

  Who had thought up this hellish system? What sort of sadist had codified it? Why were they allowed to do this to innocent people? They taught this language to children?! How did the gods allow this?

  The definite articles have their own system of declensions, and there are five types of definite articles. You must also learn these eight indefinite articles, each of which behaves like an adjective and whose ending changes depending on which of the four genders the noun it modifies has, and its case. Here are the forms for the nominative plural!

  Tears ran down Rassler’s cheeks. His hand remained tied, but he tried to cover his ears with his arms to keep out the onslaught of indefinite articles.

  The cloth fell from his mouth, and he began muttering the future tenses of the three standard verb forms and the most common irregular verbs.

  “Make it stop,” he tried to scream, but he got the imperative case wrong, and nobody understood him. He was doomed to continue on to the completion of the course. He thrashed, attempting to escape, but the wizards held him firmly.

  Oh, trying to stop the learning process, are you? Just for that, you are going to get an extra lesson on possessive adjectives!

  Rassler opened his eyes, to see Shadow staring down at him, watching him shake in agony. Shadow tilted his head to see Rassler in agony from another angle.

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  Rassler tried again with the imperative case. “Kill… the… wizards,” Rassler managed to say to Shadow, this time getting the conjugation correct. Shadow looked over at the wizards, paused for a moment, and then let them continue.

  I previously presented the subjunctive present and past cases. Do not confuse it with the conditional tense, which has a separate set of endings that you will now commit to memory!

  Rassler saw Wyndy arrive back in the tent, now carrying a bowl of food. She munched as she stood next to Shadow, watching the human twisting under the linguistic torture, the two wizards holding him down having the time of their lives as they inflicted Intensive Language Course on his helpless Vatharian noble self. Rassler began to feel as if he really were a masculine inanimate noun.

  Wyndy said to Shadow, “Hmm.. If Rassler is writhing, he is on the conditional.”

  Shadow nodded solemnly. It looked like he did not approve of the conditional tense. Rassler agreed with the wolf.

  Right, now it is the time for pronouns. There are only eight base forms in the nominative case.

  “Well, that doesn’t sound so bad,” thought Rassler.

  But when you consider the declensions across the seven cases, and whether the pronoun follows a preposition or not, there are forty-two forms that you need to learn. For standard spoken usage.

  Rassler, lying on the carpet with his hands tied to a table leg, wished he had stayed in Vathary and face death, rather than endure learning High Goblin.

  And now we’ll finish up with words you’ll use to order food in an inn.

  Finally, the torrent of language slowed, until it was a mere vocabulary flashcard review.

  The two wizards removed their hands from Rassler’s head, looking quite pleased with themselves and what they had done. Their noble victim lay jabbering at their feet.

  “My lady, it is done,” said Bedo, as he stood and bowed to the princess.

  Rassler emerged disoriented from the ordeal. They started to untie his hands. Rassler grabbed Bedo's arm tightly, and asked, “By all the gods, but that was awful…” He laid down on the carpet, and rolled to his side, his head still pounding.

  He paused, and started to speak again, and this time the guttural sounds of High Goblin came out. The spell had worked. He faced the two wizards and spoke his first sentence in the new language. “Will speaking this language give me throat cancer?”

  “That really doesn't happen very often. You will be fine. Writing in the formal style will make your brain ache, though. Avoid it if at all possible,” Bobby replied.

  Bedo nodded. “Yes, to save your mind from a descent into madness, the course only covered the basics of High Goblin Formal Writing. I warn you: Do not go deeper! If you get to Academic Writing, turn back, or you will come to question the very purpose of language and become unintelligible to everyone around you!”

  Rassler made a mental note to never, ever even think of studying Academic Writing, as he slowly stood up and began to look around. The world looked the same but sounded completely different.

  Now he would know their secrets, and be able to fully discover the complex nature of the society and culture of the Kingdom of Pelsa. Perhaps the ordeal would reap a reward, and he could come to understand the values of the peoples of this land. He could use that to convince its leaders to help him retake his own land. Equally importantly, he could better woo the beautiful woman standing near him, who had hitherto been inexplicably showing little or no romantic interest in him. Perhaps if he were witty in his new language that would do the trick.

  There was a sound. Rassler could understand! Someone was calling out in High Goblin. It was coming from the next tent.

  “Grubs! Grubs in sauce! Very hot! Very tasty! But be careful, if you eat too fast, it will melt your tongue. Come get our grubs in sauce. Best grubs in Lagar’s Haven!”

  Rassler turned to the wizards. “Grubs?! They eat grubs here!”

  Wyndy quickly put the bowl from which she’d been eating under one of the wizard’s hats. “Yes, grubs. In a spicy sauce. The goblins like them. Just the goblins. And some of the orcs like them too. A few others, maybe, I don't know. We won’t make you try them though. I know a place with human food that we can go to for lunch. We’ll go there. And eat human food. Because that is what I like to eat.”

  Rassler legs remained wobbly. He sat down at the table and tried to calm his racing heart.

  He saw the paper that was on the table. It read, in High Goblin, “You too can do magic! Come study at the Cradel College of Magic!”

  “The two of you?! And this tent? You are recruiting?”

  “Look, we have to find more students somewhere. I mean, we can’t just send birds out to bring back random children, can we?” said Bedo.

  “No, of course not. That would be a terrible way of recruiting,” Rassler agreed.

  “Yes, and the yield of the accepting students would be very low and our ranking would go down!” added Bobby.

  “Wait, what? The wizard schools are ranked?”

  “We will not speak of such horror on this, a festive day!” Bedo and Bobby looked at the ground and closed their eyes for a moment.

  Then Bedo continued, “So, at the Equinox Festival, and later in the year at the Solstice Morning, the school sets up this booth, and a couple of the students come and teach the kids some basic tricks. Those that get it quickly, and show some power, we try to recruit.”

  “His father is Duke Cradel, so Bedo usually has to be one of the ‘volunteers’ at the stand. He convinced me to come this time too. He said it would be fun. We are in the same fraternity, so I thought I had to,” explained Bobby.

  “Oh, they have fraternal organizations here in Pelsa too? I was in one during my year in university. Omega Pi. Which is yours?” asked Rassler, as his senses continued to return to him.

  “We are in Phee Phi Pho Phum. I'm the First Speaker. It’s the best fraternity at the University of the Northern Lights,” replied Bobby as he raised the side panels of the recruiting booth.

  “There are only two fraternities at UNL,” said Wyndy. “The other one is mostly Engineers and they recently blew up their house, so, yes, it is ranked lower.”

  “What are these ‘Engineers’ and why do they blow things up?” asked Rassler.

  “For the first part of your question, I'll explain later, and to answer the second part of your question, well, we really just don't know,” said Wyndy as she put on her cloak and prepared to depart. “Well, thank you boys, and we’ll see you tomorrow at the dinner! Have fun!”

  Bobby had one last piece of advice for Rassler. “Try to speak and read a lot this month. Then you may retain much of the language. If you don’t practice, you will forget everything within three months and hardly be able to say good morning.”

  Rassler was still in something of a daze as Wyndy took his arm and escorted him down the street. The world looked newish as he gazed around the street, enjoying his new High Goblin reading skills.

  His eyes were drawn first to an oddly skinny giant wolf with pamphlets in his mouth. He stood under a banner that Rassler happily read, in High Goblin, “Great Wolf Running Club. Now open to all species. Come run with the wolves!” The wolf had one of his paws wrapped in a bandage and a headband holding back his ears. Rassler took one of the pamphlets to read.

  Slightly further along they passed a booth with a sign reading “Skin, Fur, Tooth and Claw Care!”

  The booth was centered around a bubbling pot of mud, with an older gray orc stirring the pot. She said to Rassler, in Common Vatharian, “It is sulfuric mud, with volcanic ash! Very good for both skin and claws!”

  Rassler, wanting to show off his new language skills, and wanting the orcs to understand he was an important noble, answered back in the most complicated High Goblin that he could manage. “Thank you, great madam of the orcs, for your offer of majestic generosity of the flowing bloods of earth.”

  Wyndy grimaced and tried to explain, “He is just starting to learn the language, he still hasn’t quite figured out the words to use. You know, lots of study of vocabulary lists!”

  She whispered to Rassler, “Simple words, just use simple words. Don't strain. Nobles don't really have their own way of speaking here.”

  But the orc mud-seller was very excited to hear a human speaking, or trying to speak, High Goblin., and perhaps had some sympathy for him from her own Modern Elvish classes in school. “Wowwwww! You speak High Goblin! Hey, everybody, this human speaks Goblin!”

  Passers-by began to stop, and a small crowd began to form.

  Rassler wasn't yet ready to speak like a commoner, so thought carefully about how to ask his question, and said. “What is the purpose of this petite stick with the fuzzy ending, miss vendor?”

  The crowd cheered the sentence in High Goblin spoken by Rassler. One of the young buggebears patted him on the head.

  “It is a ‘tooth brush.’”

  Rassler stared at her. What she had said made no sense. He wondered what had happened to his language skills. He feared he might end up less-than-completely impressive to the onlookers.

  There were a few murmurs in the crowd. “He doesn’t know what a tooth brush is!”

  A small goblin girl took her finger and rubbed it on her teeth, trying to show Rassler how it worked. “Mister, you need to keep your teeth clean. It is important. At least until your adult teeth come in.”

  The sales orc nodded. “You rub it on your teeth to clean them. And you use this cream.”

  The crowd continued to murmur. “Humans don’t use tooth brushes?,” then “Are they savages?” “Maybe this is why their teeth are so weak and dull…”

  The sales orc held up a small metal file and offered it to Rassler. “We also have tooth files, to help keep them sharp. Don't overuse them though.” She pointed to her own incisors, shiny white and very sharp.

  Wyndy started looking through the collection of tooth files of various sizes on the table. She quickly stopped when Rassler looked over.

  “Thank you, miss vendor ladyness, but I’m afraid I do not know how to use them. Or the tooth brushes. In Vathary, we use cloths to clean our teeth in the mornings.”

  There was a rumble of murmurs from the crowd, with a general consensus that teeth cloths weren't a great idea.

  The sales orc was still hoping to sell something to her now-favorite human. “Oh, but you must take this anti-Ethereal Tick cream! The ticks are out already! It is early this year. You must be careful or they will take all your magic!”

  Rassler looked over at Wyndy.

  “I'll explain later,” she said quietly in Vatharian. “They won't get you anyway unless you go into the deep forest. Annoying parasites, but they probably won't be interested in you.”

  Rassler looked around at the crowd, and did notice that the general state of their teeth was both very shiny white, and generally very sharp. They looked at him expectantly. He reached down and chose one of the smaller tooth brushes.

  A cheer went up from the crowd

  The sales orc was a very happy orc. “Oh, you can have that for free. Introductory sample. Tell all your human friends to come over here and get one. We can do a special line for humans, if you like it.”

  Wyndy and Rassler thanked the orc and departed to cheers from the crowd, many of whom lingered, picking out new tooth brushes of their own. Rassler waved his new tooth brush to the crowd as he departed.