Stavanger Bay she brought the sugar and the mint

It was a mystery even to Szymon that he could manage the guttural wildspeech without qualm, but faltered the moment he attempted more intricate speech patterns. All the right pieces were there — pronunciation, comprehension, cohesive thought — but even when he visualized the words and took deep, measured breaths to steady himself, all that came out was a staccato jumble. Even without remembering how a mild childhood stutter had earned him a sound beating — whether due to frustration on the listener’s part or mere cruelty — it seemed his body remembered for him. “The hell are you trying to do?” it balked in the rare moments he had the temerity to give the whole talking thing another go. “Get us killed?” And the tension in his muscles would lock like hands around his throat, and he would succeed at the word or stand there gasping in failure.

The flurry of smaller paws caught his attention soundly. Doe was coming to him. Because she’d been looking for him. Because she wanted to see him. The thought whirled around in his head like the little witch doctor herself, circles and circles and circles and the occasional spinning leap, until he was dizzy with thinking it. When she erupted upon the scene — dancing around him as though there were tiny lobsters nipping at her paws and only by remaining airborne could she evade them — he pirouetted to watch her, the corners of his ink-lined lips pulling upward until the smile grew so wide it split his jaw in two. His tongue lolled joyously from his lips as he caught her words with eager ears — too fast and too many to register in the rising tide of his exhilaration, but he would remember as many as he could catch later when he was alone — and his golden eyes were thrown wide and filled with wonder as he regarded her.

She spun a quick circle and blinked almost forcibly. Plum whiskey? thought the youngest Cairn to himself with faint bewilderment before recognition and understanding flashed across his face. It must have been a Witch Doctor’s errand. He’d make whatever she wanted him to, provided he got to watch and listen to her this way.

It was at this point that an idea occurred to him.

Experimentally, he touched the tip of his tongue to the roof of his mouth and set it free to coax the first syllable of her name from his idiot body and turn her name into a song all its own. Mixing languages, wildspeech and common speech, he successfully tricked himself in a way that wouldn’t have worked if her name had been anything more than one pesky consonant and a vowel that could go on forever if he wished it. “Dooooooooooe,” he howled at her. It was possibly quite a rude gesture to howl directly in a Witch Doctor’s face, but he was so overjoyed at the accomplishment that he dropped his voice low, hitting the deepest note of his lowest register, then let it climb the octave until his bass timbre climbed through the baritone notes and stopped just shy of a bright tenor. Running out of breath, he let his voice slide back down the scale and closed his eyes, reaching for one of the question words that he practiced night after night, hoping he would not be thwarted.

He held onto the curiosity in her eyes as he drew breath so hard his body quaked with it. “W-W-W-Where t-t-to?”