Just Another Day

Shanku obeyed and began to cut the cloth with the scissors provided.

"Can you sew?" Sigrid asked.

"Sew, mend, crochet, knit, cook, clean," Shanku began naming off the things she had been expected to learn in days past to be a proper lady, and then decided to name off the things she had enjoyed learning, "Read, write, calculate, chart a ship course, fish..."

"Can you hunt?" Sigrid interrupted.

"Small game," Shanku shrugged.

"Fight?" Sigrid asked.

"Brawl. Bit wit a knife," Shanku said thoughtfully. Held me own fairly well in some of those.

"No formal fighting or group hunting?" Sigrid asked with surprise. "You'll be here longer than I thought."

"Fantastic!" Shanku exclaimed sarcastically as she began to hem what was to be the strap of her pinafore.

"What can you write?" Sigrid asked curiously.

"Bit o' the kurach language. Mostly man's languages. Arnthian, Mruhan, some Bhadarukian."

"What of Byrobhad?" Sigrid asked.

"Beerrrabhad?" Shanku asked slowly, trying to roll it right.

"The old language of our kind," Sigrid explained.

"Nah, not a bit," Shanku shook her head. "It was lost a long time ago."

"Well, if you know the new, it's not that hard to learn the old," Sigrid said as she dipped a cup into the water barrel.

"Do ya know how ta become human?" Shanku asked.

"It's taught, but not practiced," Sigrid said with mild disgust. "Besides, no kurach ever becomes fully human. There is always the wish to fly, run, hunt, and dig that can never be suppressed."