Emberwood you're a dime, plus ninety-nine

Easy's face pinched for a moment at this revelation (even though she was sure she had known the meaning, somewhere in the back of her mind), and she hastened to explain before Bhediya thought she was disaparaging her mother tongue: "I just always had a crush on him, but he never thought of me that way. He loved Dawn."

But the expression was more embarrassment than it was wistfulness, and she was ready to move on as soon as a sister was mentioned. "Pihu," she repeated, her tail wagging. "You have a sister here?" An aunt, she wanted to say but didn't for the sake of maintaining the newfound ease of conversation. "I'd love to meet her. I don't know when I'll have time for whole lessons, but I'm grateful for any knowledge you two can impart." She'd once entertained the idea of asking Aditya to teach her, but languages just didn't seem like a gift their bloodline possessed.

But perhaps that wasn't true, if Bhediya was also her bloodline.

"Daddy used to say you must've chased your tail too much, and that's how come we came out this way," she shared, but was equally charmed by the idea that her coat pattern had a name the same as anyone else's. That there were a people among whom she would not look very strange at all. "What does it mean? Chitrit mahilaen." She tested the words and found them entirely too strange; but that might change with time.