Crow eagerly passed off the writing quill to Penelope when she said she would show him how to write his name. He was surprised by how excited he was to learn such a skill, since it had never interested him before. Now that he was actually giving it a try, he found that he was fascinated by the way the letters came together to make words that had real meanings and could be understood by other people in the kingdom. Of course, the peasants had their own written stories too, but theirs were always in the form of pictures drawn with charcoal, since they didn’t have any other means of recording anything. Writing like this was much different than what he had grown up with.

As Penelope demonstrated how to write his alias, the thief leaned a little closer to her with interest. When she finished, he blinked as he realized he recognized the shapes she used and nodded when she said his name was written on his wanted posters. “Oh yeah,” he mused. “I do remember seeing it… I guess I just never realized that’s what my name looked like.” He studied the symbols on the paper a little more closely, finding a strange sense of identity in understanding how his name was written.

The feeling only increased when Penelope went on to show him how to write his real name. His heartbeat quickened with excitement as the letters appeared on the paper, forming the name his mother had given him as a child. He listened absently as Penelope explained a little more to him about the characters in both of his names, though his gaze never moved from the sheet in front of her as he stared down at the ink. He was too caught up in his own thoughts to fully pay attention to what she was telling him.

It felt like a whole different world was opening up to him as he began to gain a faint comprehension of the words. All of the scrolling letters he’d seen in books before that’d had no meaning to him would soon reveal their secrets. His lip curved upward in an amused smile as he realized he finally understood why Simon had been trying to learn to read and write before. Written books were like foreign languages—When he’d learned the tongues of Gorm, Waithen, and Medora, he had no longer been confined to communicating in his native language, but when he learned how to read and write, he would no longer be restricted to the spoken word. It was an empowering feeling.

When Penelope passed the quill back to him, he took it from her without hesitation this time. Resting the blackened tip on the paper, he decided to write out his real name first, finding more of a desire to memorize that word, since it had more meaning to him than his alias did. His eyes flicked between the letters Penelope had written and the ones he was trying to copy down as he marked the paper with painstaking effort, wanting to improve his ability to write the symbols legibly. When he was done, he lowered his hand and looked down at his name, pleased with the result.

In the next moment, he suddenly turned his head to meet Penelope’s lips in a deep kiss, feeling a strong burst of affection for her for teaching him how to write his own name. He lingered for a while before he pulled back again with a grin. “This is a lot more useful than I was expecting,” he said, reaching out with his left hand to rest on her thigh beneath the table. “Thank you, love.”