He had taken the language enchantment for Luganda on the last day of June, in the Edinburgh shop that had become familiar enough that the linguist knew his face and had his file ready before he sat down.
'Luganda,' the linguist said, reviewing the order. 'And Bulgarian, and Irish. Three in one session.'
'Spaced correctly,' Ron said. 'I know the rules.'
'You do,' the linguist agreed, with the quality of someone who had learned not to ask questions about this particular client. 'Luganda first, then. The others on the schedule you've specified.'
Luganda arrived the way they all arrived — overnight, the structure of it present in the morning like a room that had always been there, the grammar settled into the bones of his thinking. He lay in bed at the Burrow on the first of July and moved sentences through it in the specific way he tested new languages, checking the weight and the register.
It was a tonal language with a different relationship to time than English — the verb structure carried information that English distributed across multiple words, the sense of ongoing action more fluid and present. He liked it immediately. He made notes.
His father had arranged everything through the Ugandan Ministry, who had arranged it through the school. The portkey left from the Ministry atrium on the third of July at six in the morning. Arthur came to see him off.
'The contacts at the school,' his father said, for the third time. 'Professor Nalwanga is the deputy headmistress. She's expecting you. The Ministry has a liaison in Kampala — I've put his name in the folder.'
'I have it,' Ron said.
'And the inn —'
'Dad,' Ron said.
His father stopped.
'I'll be careful,' Ron said. 'I have money and I have Luganda and I have the contacts and I know what I'm going there for. I'll write when I arrive.'
Arthur looked at him for a moment with the expression he had been wearing more frequently this year — trying to reconcile the son he remembered with the person currently standing in front of him, and finding the reconciliation both easier and stranger than expected.
'You've grown up,' Arthur said. Not as a complaint. As an observation, delivered by someone who was proud and did not quite have the words for the full shape of it.
'Working on it,' Ron said.
Arthur put a hand on his shoulder briefly, and then the portkey activated, and the Ministry atrium dissolved.