Hush

"I do not speak, by choice. I have given my voice to the silent letters. I will teach them faithfully."

Cur had thought about this for a day. She had consulted the other faculty. The faculty had agreed: the academy did, in fact, need a silent-letters teacher, and a teacher who did not speak might be ideal for the role.

Hush was given a small set of rooms attached to the academy's library. She was given a wooden writing-slate, a supply of chalk, and a stipend. She was given the roving teaching role — she would not have a permanent classroom; she would appear in other teachers' classrooms whenever a silent letter came up in the lesson.

That was twenty-seven years ago.

Hush has been the academy's silent-letters teacher ever since. She has never spoken a word, in twenty-seven years, in any lesson. She communicates entirely by writing. She is, by appearance, small, slight, and slightly translucent-looking — the academy's children find her slightly thrilling without being afraid of her. (The Greek-roots specialist Sophia has, on several occasions, compared Hush's classroom presence to that of the Compass Wraith in the GeometryForge academy; the comparison is, Sophia says, deeply complimentary.)

In her teaching, Hush works like this:

A child encounters a word with a silent letter. Most commonly this happens during one of the other teachers' lessons — Etyma is teaching Latin roots and the word psyche comes up; Sophia is teaching Greek roots and pneuma comes up; Birch is teaching Germanic roots and knee comes up. The other teacher pauses. The other teacher says, gently: "This is a job for Hush."

Hush appears. (She has a small alcove off the main academy hall where she waits; the other teachers send a young runner to fetch her.) She enters the classroom silently. She walks to the front. She picks up the chalk. She writes the word on the board.

Then she points at the silent letter.

She does not pronounce the word. She does not pronounce the silent letter. She just points. The silent letter sits on the board, unspoken. The children watch.

Hush then writes, beneath the word, a short note explaining why the letter is silent. The note is brief. Examples:

For knee: "Once we said k-nee. Old English had a real /k/ sound here. The /k/ went silent in the 1600s. The spelling did not change."

For pneumonia: "Greek word. Pn was a real sound in Greek. English speakers cannot easily pronounce /pn/. So we drop the /p/. The spelling honors the Greek origin."

For write: "Once we said w-rite. The /w/ went silent in early modern English. The spelling kept the w to mark the older pronunciation."

The notes are historical. They explain why a letter is silent rather than just that it is. Children find this satisfying. Children — Hush has noticed — like to know why.

Hush has been, over twenty-seven years, exceptionally consistent in her work. She has appeared in thousands of classrooms. She has written thousands of silent-letter explanations. She has never spoken.

Children sometimes ask her, after a few weeks of encountering her, why she does not speak. She writes, in her careful neat hand:

"I have given my voice to the silent letters. They cannot speak. So I do not speak with them. It is a small offering."