Invitation
By Rey

8. The School

It is so, so, so hard to remain composed and silent when one is trapped in a hostile realm with a mad, mad, mad jötun without any means or person to succour me. The baffling surprises that keep ambushing me since then only make it worse.

Firstly, the jötun – Eðlenstr, or "Ýto Etta" as they insisted I call them – wanted me to return to my natural form. As if I had any other "natural" form! And then they turned into a huge, blue-skinned, red-eyed, silvery-marked brute which I'd firstly expected a jötun to look, and turned me into such a beast, as well! The process – the foreign seiðr that bound me at a very, very deep level that they drew out using a convenient ward sapper – was not pain-free, either.

And then, after a very uncomfortable night in which we shared the same bed-like structure to rest, followed by a wheedling interrogation that made me long for a real interrogation performed by bandits, this jötun had the gall to enroll me in some education system. "You need to occupy yourself while I send word to the Capital, and I need to perform my daily duties in the meantime, so this is the best for the both of us," was all they said while painting over some of the markings on my body and dressing me in a single short skirt with nothing underneath. My strenuous objections and arguments and questions lasted from that point till they picked me up and carried me all the way to the establishment, passing however many curious jötnar on the way, but they either deflected or outright ignored those valid concerns.

And here I am, seated on a cushion in a room together with jötnar of various sizes – and apparently, ages – and failing to sneak away, even once. What Eðlenstr said to the caretakers of this place – in a language I did not recognise, at that – must have been a warning for the latters to pay special attention on me trying to escape this bizarre nightmare.

Apparently, they have given some other instructions to the caretakers, too, because one of them has just piled a reader and a stack of data crystals on my lap, with the instruction to read everything and ask for help if I encounter any difficulty.

Well, at least this one is somewhat bearable. Knowledge is knowledge, after all, whatever it is and from whichever source it comes. I have been left alone, at that, tucked on a rather secluded corner.

The longer I am going through the first crystal on the stack – a bilingual children's primer, apparently for learning the vocalisation and script of the language that Allspeak failed to translate – however, the more distracted I become. New questions surface in my mind, but this time they are not about me or my being here.

For one, this book seems not customed for a specific child. And, from here, I can hear a few little children – who were fully naked, last I saw them, recently – sounding out segments of the very primer that I am slogging through, so this primer is actually a mass-produced, compulsory read for students. And it would mean that, here, in Jötunheim, literacy is compulsory.

For two, I spied a few older – or at least bigger – jötnar doing small acts of controlled seiðr under the close supervision of a tutor, before I set to with the primer, and I can even hear them debating about using seiðr to dig a tunnel versus doing it by hand, presently. So, apparently, here, seiðr is also a subject of open learning, whether compulsory or not.

And given the many jötnar of various sizes – and maybe walks of life, too, as I have just heard a jötun nearby, who is bigger than I am, grumbling about helping in the farm after school – learning here, education itself is compulsory for everyone, not only for young children, and not only for those of noble birth.

But what use is education for savages?

Not that the pupils and their tutors here can be truly categorised as "savages," I have to admit, even just to myself.

I am severely confused….