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The scroll had been spread out for an hour.
Percy had not made it past the third line.
This was not for lack of effort, he had tried with considerable sincerity, his brow furrowed, his sea green eyes moving across the symbols with the focused attention of someone attempting to read a language that was supposed to be natural to him yet had never been taught in the dark while someone else occasionally touched the candle. The characters held their place on the parchment with a steadiness that modern script had never quite managed for him, yet knowing the symbols were meant for him and knowing what to do with them were, as it turned out, entirely different things.
The lamp burned steadily on the low table between them, its flame upright and patient in a way that Percy secretly found condescending. Outside the tent, the camp of the Hunt had settled into its late afternoon quiet, the hunters dispersed across various tasks, the forest holding its watchful breath. Inside, the silence had a different quality entirely, the concentrated, slightly brittle silence of a lesson that was not going well.
Artemis sat beside him with a scroll of her own, auburn curls fell loose at her shoulders, catching the golden glow of the lamp, silver eyes moving across the letters with the fluid ease of someone reading their native language, which, Percy reflected, was precisely what it was. She had allowed him the dignity of the attempt before intervening as he struggled, a grace he had come to recognize and appreciate even when it made him feel as though the page were watching him with pity.
"Okay," he said, setting the scroll down with deliberateness, the kind that meant he was suppressing an instinct to do something less careful, "This character," he pointed with one finger to a symbol appearing twice within the same word, in two different forms, "I have seen it written two different ways in the same line. They seem related yet they are obviously not identical."
Artemis lowered her own scroll, and looked at what he was pointing at with composed attention, prepared for whatever the question might be, her silver eyes traced the letters around the symbol before she answered, "That is sigma, the same letter, the same sound, two written forms, the distinction is positional, when sigma appears within a word, it takes this shape," she leaned forward and indicated the first form on the parchment, "When it falls at the end of a word, it takes this one."
Percy looked at both forms, his brow drawing slightly together, "Same sound. Different shape. Depending solely on where in the word it lands."
"Precisely," she said, returning her attention to the parchment solemnly, she had expected the question to arrive at exactly that conclusion.
He was quiet for a moment, studying the two forms side by side as though committing them separately to memory, which was the correct approach, the shapes shared enough visual similarity to blur if treated as interchangeable and enough difference to cause genuine confusion when encountered in unfamiliar text.
"That is going to be a problem," he said, with the candid assessment of someone who had been reading for an hour and only now understood exactly what his eyes were supposed to do when moving quickly across a dense line.
"It becomes instinctive," she spoke softly, the corner of her lips curled to form a small smile, "Once the positional rule is memorized in the mind, the eye begins to read pattern before the character. You stop seeing different forms and start seeing one letter in two situations."
He looked at the scroll, found the sigma within the word, then traced forward to the end of the word and found the terminal form, his finger moving between them, memorizing the rule in the plain language his mind preferred, he said, half to himself, "Within. End."
"Yes," she said, watching him cement the distinction in place with the particular attention of someone noting which methods were actually taking hold.
The second character he pointed to was rounder, carrying a different weight on the page than the angular forms of sigma. He had initially taken its simplicity as a promising sign, it had not been a promising sign.
"And this one," he said, and turned to scroll towards her, "I have seen it behave three different ways in three consecutive words."
Artemis looked for a moment before she spoke, "Omega," the word arriving without preamble, the way she named things she had known for longer than the naming of them had required effort.
"I thought omega meant the end," he said, arching his eyebrows questioningly as he set the scroll down.
"It is also a letter," she said, with the measured patience of someone delivering a fact she understood was not, in this moment, particularly welcome.
He set the scroll down again, this time without the deliberateness, "Why would you use the same name for the end of something and a letter?"
"They are not the same name," she said with precision that was beginning, very faintly, to carry the quality of someone maintaining a position that was being tested, "One is the concept, one is the character. The distinction lies in how each is used."
Percy rubbed the back of his neck, and picked the scroll, "Right."
Outside, one of the hounds made a sound, low and brief, and the forest absorbed it. The lamp between them burned without comment.
Artemis watched him attempt the third line from the beginning, which he had now attempted fourteen times. His finger moved beneath the characters as he worked through them, lips forming sounds silently, the effort visible in the minute tension between his brows. Dark locks fell across his forehead as he leaned over the parchment, he reached the fifth character and stopped.
"Sigma," he spoke to himself, "Within the word."
"Yes," she said, her eyes drifting to the following character, already prepared to follow wherever the parchment led him.
"Yet it looks closer to the terminal form than I expected," he said, his finger resting on the character without lifting, as though keeping his place while his certainty aligned with what he saw.
She looked at the specific instance he meant, the hand of the writer had been slightly inconsistent in this section, the within word sigma rendered with a curve that leaned toward its terminal counterpart, "The hand that wrote this parchment was imprecise in this passage," she said, a genuine source of confusion that had nothing to do with his reading and everything to do with the manuscript, "That particular sigma is poorly formed. You are reading it correctly to question it."
He looked at her, something shifting in his expression, "So it is actually ambiguous."
"In this instance, yes," she said, her finger tracing the shape of the word on the parchment so he could see the position confirm what the principle had already told him, "You would resolve it by reading the position in the word. It falls within, so it is the within word form regardless of how the writer rendered it."
He studied it a moment, then nodded, something settling in his gaze, the satisfaction of a problem resolved by principle rather than memorization. He read the line. The sigma landed in the correct mental category, within word, and he moved past it without breaking his reading the way he had the previous fourteen attempts.
She tapped the table once, affirmatively, he looked at the tap, then at her, registering what it meant, "Start over, from the word before it."
He built into it this time rather than arriving cold, and the character landed correctly within the flow of the surrounding words, which was a different skill from producing it in isolation and one that mattered considerably more in practice.
They worked through the remainder of the first stanza with that methodology, she correcting vowel lengths with brief precision, tapping the table at the breaks without commentary, letting the taps do the work that explanation would have cluttered. He developed a habit of stopping before the longer syllables, just a half breath, which was not technically correct yet was keeping him closer to the rhythm than anything else had managed.
She did not mention it, she would address it once the rhythm itself was stable.
The lamp had burned noticeably lower by the time they reached the end of the first stanza, the light shifting from steady gold toward something amber and softer, the tent walls glowing brightly at the edges. Percy sat back slightly, rolling his shoulders with the movement of someone who had been holding tension in them without noticing.
"Read the whole stanza," she said, settling back slightly, presenting the stanza in full without interruption.
He looked at her, then at the parchment, then picked up the scroll and read.
It was not perfect, the eighth word broke the rhythm and he corrected it himself without prompting, backing toward the syllable with the half breath pause, then moving forward. The fourteenth word carried a vowel two shades too short, which flattened it slightly. The final line came through with the rhythm intact from beginning to end, the two sigma forms each landing in their correct categories without hesitation.
She was quiet when he finished, Percy set the scroll down and looked at her, she looked back at him with the calm silver gaze, then set her own scroll aside, and without particular ceremony, reached across and took his face in her hands.
He went still.
She kissed him, slow and deliberate, the kind of kiss that arrived with intention rather than impulse, her thumbs resting lightly at his jaw, her fingers warm against his face. It was not brief. A kiss that tasted of approval and something proud than approval beneath it, the private satisfaction of watching her precious lover work hard and find his way through.
When she drew back, her hands remained at his face for a moment, silver eyes close to his, her expression carrying that particular unguarded warmth she kept for the inside of the tent, for the hours when the Hunt was elsewhere and she did not need to be anything other than be herself.
"You worked hard," she said, simply, the words arriving without flourish, the way the tender things she said always arrived.
His cheeks had gone faintly bright, the sea green of his eyes soft in the lamplight, "I have a good teacher," he said, his voice quieter than usual, carrying the sincerity he reached for when something had genuinely moved him.
She held his gaze a moment longer, then lowered her hands and reached across to spread the scroll further, her fingers moving across the parchment with the practiced ease of long familiarity, flattening it against the table so both could see the section in the lamplight.
The second stanza was longer than the first, the lines denser, the characters pressed closer together in the hand of whoever had written it. Percy studied it for a moment, his sea green eyes tracing through the first line with an attention that had changed quality over the past hour, less broad, just specific.
"Sigma," he said, finding it immediately, "Terminal. End of the word."
"Correct," she said, moving her finger forward along the line without pause, already pointing him toward the following one.
He read the first line, the rhythm held through the fourth word before breaking at the fifth, a construction he had not encountered in the first stanza. She stopped him at the fifth word, read it aloud in isolation, then within the line, showing him how its weight distributed within the surrounding syllables.
"The accent shifts."
"In this construction, yes, the word is the same word you have seen, yet the form changes the accent position," she said, reading the line aloud once herself so he could hear where the weight fell before he attempted it again.
He tried the line again, building from the beginning, letting the first four words carry him into the fifth with momentum rather than approaching it as a separate problem. The fifth word landed with the accent in its correct position.
She moved her finger to the eighth word.
He read it.
It was correct.
They moved through the second stanza in that manner, word by word when the construction was difficult, line by line when the territory was familiar enough to sustain momentum. He made mistakes with a different quality than the ones in the first stanza, the mistakes of someone whose errors had become more specific rather than general, which was a form of progress she recognized because she knew him, knew the difference between confusion and adjustment in the set of his shoulders and the quality of his silence.
The lamp had burned quite low by the time they reached the final line of the second stanza. Percy read it aloud without prompting, the rhythm moving through it with a steadiness that had been entirely absent when they first began the lecture, each syllable finding its length, the sigmas resolving themselves by position without pause, within word and terminal each in their correct form.
He finished and set the scroll on the table.
The silence that followed was different from the silences that had preceded it throughout the evening, those had been the silences of effort pressing against difficulty. This one was simply the quiet of a thing completed, the particular stillness of a space that had been worked in and could now be rested in.
Artemis reached across and rolled the scroll closed, and set it aside.
Percy looked at where it lay for a moment, then at the lamp, his gaze carrying the particular look of someone who had been convinced, against their own doubts, that the thing was learnable. He reached forward and adjusted the lamp wick slightly the way he had learned, the flame steadied.
She picked her own scroll and opened it, resuming from the point she had left, the movement was quiet, the shift from teacher back to reader accomplished in a single gesture. Percy reached for the scroll, unrolled it to the second stanza, and read it from the beginning, softly, to himself, without being asked.
He read the second line.
Then the third.
She said nothing, her silver eyes on her own parchment, yet the corner of her mouth curled ever so faintly.
She turned a page.