Skallagrim was an alien like Aeshyr, sure, but he was also a sculpted marvel of power and vitality and, frankly, beauty. There truly was no way to deny Skallagrim’s beauty – he was fucking drenched in it, like river water running endlessly down his scales. Even the rough scar of his lost eye didn’t diminish the stark, almost arrogant appeal of his features.
In contrast, Aeshyr had looked like...
Like something mostly dead. Something that should have been relegated to the nightmares of folklore, like a vampire or a zombie or one of the shadowy ghouls of Tuonela, the Finnish land of the dead.
“OK...” I breathed out when Skallagrim didn’t elaborate. “Is he... is he still here?”
“No.”
Well, that was a bit of a relief. The dead-eyed Aeshyr was gone. But that still didn’t explain Skallagrim’s sudden weirdness around me.
“Then what is it? Why are you...” I couldn’t think of a way to easily express my current whirl of thoughts in English, so instead I flapped an impatient hand at him and settled on saying, “Why are you just over there looking at me like that?”
Skallagrim cleared his throat in his odd, dragon-like way. It was a harsh, husky sound that honestly seemed like it should have been accompanied by a puff of smoke out of his snout. Then he reached into his robe’s pocket and pulled out pieces of some kind of shiny, rainbow fabric.
“Put this in your ear.”
It was a fairly simple sentence, but there was no way I’d translated it correctly. I was about to ask him to repeat himself, or to explain, when he reached up and shoved some of the rainbow stuff inside his own ear. I gaped, then grimaced when I saw just how far he shoved it in there. His snout tensed, and then he gave the side of his head a solid wallop with the butt of his hand before finally crossing the room and closing the distance between us. He held out a second piece of the fabric.
“Put this in your ear.”
Alright, I guess I had translated that properly the first time.
I shook my head rapidly.
“No way. Why? And where the hell is the one you put in your ear?”
I cocked my head, staring suspiciously up at his ear. He’d shoved in a large enough scrap of the fabric that I should have been able to see the ends of it poking out, but I didn’t. It was like it had melted into his ear canal and disappeared.
Well that’s alarming.
“It will help us talk. Understand each other,” he replied. He said something else, a word that shared the same base as the verb to translate.
“You mean to tell me,” I said, “that a slip of fabric is... What? Some kind of alien translator?”
“Yes.”
That made about zero sense. A translator would have to be some sort of machine, wouldn’t it? Like a computer, with data and memory and a speaker to spit the translated words into your ear? It wouldn’t be some shiny, silky thing that was ethereally pretty but ultimately as limp-looking and useless as a doily.
But he’s already put one in his ear...
“Does it work already? Can you understand everything I’m saying better now?”
When he said yes, I didn’t believe him.
So I decided to test him. I tried to think of saying something with words I’d never used around him before. Vocab we would have had no reason to cover until now.
Snow.
We’d never once talked about snow. We knew each other’s words for air and sky and light, but not snow.
“We get a lot of snow in Finland.”
His eye glittered knowingly.
“Sounds cold,” he quipped back instantly.
I started, shocked, then frowned in denial. Maybe I had talked about snow once before after all...
“Vinland...” His snout struggled with the soft F sound. “This is your... Your...” He mimed shaping a sphere as if with invisible clay in the air.
“Not my world. It’s a country. It’s the place I was born on the planet I’ve come from.”
He seemed to absorb and understand that perfectly, which was jarring, to say the very least.
Switching gears, I said something else, this time in my third language of Swedish, which I was sure I’d never once spoken around him.
“Salmiakki is a type of Finnish candy. I hated it as a kid but now I love it.”
He practically smirked.
“Sounds good.”
I switched to Finnish without even realizing I’d done so. I didn’t even know what I was saying until my throat closed up with pain at the end of the sentence.
“My sister’s name was Elvi and I miss her every day.”
His look of smug triumph vanished. His head jerked back, and he looked so shocked and sad for me that I knew, I fucking knew, that he’d understood perfectly. There was no conceivable reason for him to be looking at me like that otherwise.
“Suvi...” He came closer, then stopped practically mid-stride when I crossed my arms over my chest and hunched away from him. He looked even more pained now, but he didn’t come any closer now. All he did was hold out his hand and say for the third time, “Put this in your ear.”
It wasn’t a harsh demand. But neither was it a request. What would he do if I refused?
What would I do? Go on fighting to catch every alien word, while he understood me with ease no matter what language I spoke?
And if this thing worked, it seemed like I’d be able to understand other languages too. Not that I was exposed to any other ones besides the Bohnebregg tongue, but still. For some far-off, distantly dreamed-of future where I was no longer trapped here, it could come in handy.
I’m just being practical, I told myself sternly. It’s not just because I hate conflict and he could crush me like a pine nut if he wanted to. I took the scrap of stuff from Skallagrim’s hand. My fingertips scraped across his palm, and at the contact Skallagrim’s arm spasmed, like I’d shocked him. I snapped my hand back, clutching the scrap, absurdly worried that I’d somehow burned him.
“Are you alright?” I asked, peering at him. Skallagrim flexed and loosened the fingers of his hand several times, then let it fall to his side, though his posture was anything but relaxed. When he answered, his voice sounded strained.
“There is much... Much to say. I need you to understand each word.”
His eye fell meaningfully to my closed fist.
Even though I’d already decided to put the thing in my ear and hope it didn’t short circuit some important bit of human biology in the process, I was suddenly afraid to. He looked too intense, some raw and unnamed emotion etching itself into the lines of his scaly face, and the instinct to hide from whatever he had to say was more clear and more ominous than any other I’d ever had in my life.
Elvi wouldn’t have hidden from whatever it was. She would have shoved the translator right in and then would have demanded an explanation for all the heaviness in the air. She’d never shied away from hard questions and even harder answers. As a child, I’d been hotly embarrassed by that sort of behaviour from her. She was never afraid of offending anyone – neighbours, our landlord, my teachers – and I was doubly afraid of it for the both of us. But as I got older, I’d admired her for it. She wasn’t rude, and she was an incredibly kind person, but she didn’t let the quietness of courtesy smooth over the ugliness of the problems that still existed underneath. She didn’t let things fester or go unsaid.
And neither would I.
I didn’t even pause to take a deep breath. I just lifted the delicate, iridescent silk and shoved it into my ear canal.