Crow chuckled softly when Penelope kissed him on the head. He was glad that she was willing to help him write to his companions. Even though he felt like Hazel would be able to understand his letter for the most part if he wrote it by himself, it would be nice to compose something that the herbalist could read without much strain. To do that, he was going to need the knight’s help, since the best he could do at the moment was guess his way through each word and hope he was at least close to spelling them all correctly.

When Penelope commented that she was impressed with pace he’d been learning, Crow grinned at her proudly. “Languages have always come easily for me. Written language is just another form of it,” he explained, dipping his quill in the ink pot and swirling it once. “I think it would take me a lot longer to learn if I didn’t already know how to speak Missenar though. It helps that the words are already familiar to me. I just needed to learn what they look like on paper.”

He tapped the quill against the edge of the ink pot to let the excess drip off before he opened his journal and careful tore out the first page by the seam. “Now that I think about it, Naida told me that she and the rest of my siblings are quick learners too,” he mused, laying out the loose paper on the table in front of him. “It might just run in my father’s side of the family.” He had mixed feelings about that. On one hand, it was disappointing to know that his talent wasn’t unique, but on the other hand, he found that he enjoyed knowing that he shared the trait with his half-sisters and brother.

When Penelope said that Olivia would probably read his letter before delivering it to Alistair, Crow snorted. “Of course she would,” he muttered, looking down at the blank paper as he pondered what to write. While he disliked knowing that the female knight would invade his privacy like that, he didn’t think he had anything to say that he particularly wanted to keep a secret from her.

“Alright,” he nodded at Penelope’s offer and lifted his quill to the page, tapping the tip against the paper as he decided how to start the letter. As he thought about it, he blinked as he realized he didn’t know how to spell any of his companions’ names. All the words he had learned had come from Udolf’s tutoring and the book he had been reading, and of course, neither of those sources included the criminals’ names. He glanced at Penelope, wondering if he should ask her for help, but then decided against it. Instead, he solved the problem his own way. The feather quill scratched against the paper as he wrote:

	[i]To my friends.[/i]

He smiled to himself in satisfaction. Having read all three of those words in his book before, he felt confident that he’d spelled them correctly. However, before he went on, he paused. It felt strange to have a one-sided conversation, and he wasn’t quite sure what to say. He drummed his fingers on the table in thought. It made the most sense to just tell them about what had been going on in his life since he’d left them, so that was what he chose to do. He lowered his quill to the sheet again:

	[i]A lot has changed since I moved in to the castle.[/i]

He wavered before he added the period. Udolf had taught him about punctuation during his lesson that day, but he found most of it difficult to keep straight. He just hoped it would be clear enough for Hazel to read when she opened it later.

	[i]About a week ago I was given the title of[/i]

He paused again and turned to Penelope with a sheepish expression as he came to a problem that he couldn’t figure out on his own. “How do you spell, ‘viceroy’?”