Forsberger is the native language and the name of the people of the northern kingdom of Forsberg and its capital Oar. This language remained in common use after the kingdom became a province within the Lady's Empire during the consolidation wars.
Alongside the unrelated Jewel Cities dialect, Forsberger was spoken by select members of the Black Company to hold private conversations during their time in the southern continent in the Books of the South and in the first two Books of Glittering Stone.
Forsberger was the native tongue of:
- Flick and the rest of Darling's villager family (Darling herself was deaf-mute and communicated later in finger speech);
- the wizard Bomanz, his wife Jasmine, and their son Stancil;
- the Eternal Guard, including its leader Besand;
- and the Oar-based Resurrectionists led by the siblings Tokar, Glory, and Clete (and their innocent young sister Snoopy).
Black Company use of Forsberger[]
Despite his conversational use of the language, Croaker the Black Company Annalist confirmed positively that he did "not use Forsberger to record these Annals" in Port of Shadows (although that could have changed for subsequent Annals). The language was spoken by Whisper and her Imperial soldiers; in Shadows Linger, Croaker eavesdropped on Whisper briefly at the Barrowland.
At least 8 years later in The White Rose, Croaker practiced his Forsberger on wayside farmers south of Deal. Later, he conversed with the newly-awakened sorcerer Bomanz in this tongue, with Lady confirming that "Forsberger hasn’t changed" in the approximately 384 years since Bomanz had last been conscious. Later in The Silver Spike, Bomanz would learn that only one of the Torque brothers – a trio of former Black Company soldiers – could manage Forsberger so brokenly that it was useless to attempt it with him.
When Croaker met Willow Swan in Shadow Games, he communicated with him in Forsberger because Croaker's familiarity with Swan's mother tongue, Rosean, was poor. In Dreams of Steel, Lady unintentionally used the Forsberger word for "snowballing" in a conversation with Narayan Singh that was otherwise held in the Taglian language.
Later, in both Bleak Seasons and She Is the Darkness, Croaker and Murgen (and Willow Swan at least once) would use this language to defeat eavesdropping Taglians or Nyueng Bao listeners.
One-Eye was actually literate in the language, and scrawled it with chalk on slate to keep track of production targets for a vast amount of materiel for the Shadowmaster wars in Bleak Seasons:
“ | There was a big piece of slate in One-Eye’s office. Upon it, in Forsberger, were chalked what appeared to be production targets. Fifty thousand bottles. Three million arrows. Five hundred thousand javelins. Ten thousand cavalry lances. Ten thousand sabers. Eight thousand saddles. One hundred fifty thousand infantry short swords. | ” |