dunno
It’s odd how a talent can manifest itself when given the opportunity.
A woman who lived in the village, for example, discovered the hard way that her mother had run into one of the more unforgiving varieties of fairies in her younger years- the hard way being that an off-afternoon spent skimming idly through the Preacher’s dictionary and sounding out the word vacivity had resulted in a six-foot black snake falling from her mouth.
She’d nearly choked to the death on the poor thing before it had fully emerged, and panicked. She’d pulled the altar cloth to the floor in her struggle, and had swept the entire golden collection of icons clanging across the floor. The noise of the fall drew attention to her more than anything- she couldn’t manage a scream around the snake, who was fully as upset and bewildered as she was. The only witnesses were the Preacher and two of his young acolytes, both of whom had flattened themselves against the wall, white with terror, convinced utterly that this was some kind of demonic punishment for their having taken ha’ pennies from the collection box.
The Preacher, a devout man, who fancied himself a man of spiritual action, shouted scripture and upended the font of holy water over the poor girl, which did very little to alleviate her choking, or to calm down the snake, who thrashed all the harder. The only reason that the poor girl didn’t expire on the spot was because a passing gardener had flung down his pruning shears, determinedly shouldered the Preacher aside, and hauled the rest of the snake out of her throat with both hands.
The woman swore off any long words she didn’t know the meanings of after that. The unfortunate (and entirely blameless) blacksnake tried to retreat under the church porch, but was stopped at the last second by the gardener, who left nothing to chance, and who’d already gone and fetched an axe.
Of course, it was understandable that the issue had never come up before- the Preacher had most of the books in town, and the only scholars who might have known long words like vacivity or disingenuous* only stopped by every other spring or so, and usually stuck to teaching sums and basic history in exchange for bed and board. But Orlin’s family had owned and operated their stables since before he was born. He didn’t have the same excuse.
Orlin first became aware that he was seeing the ghosts of dead horses when he was eight years old.
* The other key-phrase for the spell that the belligerent fairy had programmed in. In her defense, the woman’s mother had lived next to her for fifteen years and hadn’t invited her to the christening, and had an obnoxious habit of letting her goats graze ove the property line . But never let it be said that the fairy lacked some compassion. Vacivity resulted in a six-foot blacksnake. Disengenuous resulted in a plump rat.