swiftness

[calescent]

Sarelle and the Ardelay twins go to their inn. They are greeted there the following day by Ekador apparently-Serlast, who says he'll be another two days settling up his affairs and then they can all go to Welce.

Ekador packs quite lightly for someone who's leaving the country on short notice and otherwise bears negligible personality resemblance to Loel. The carriage isn't particularly crowded as they make their way back to the port to find a boat leading back to Welce.

"There are three stops to make," Kiri tells him as they drive. "Although we'll land close to Chialto, I don't think that should be the first place we go. You'll have a much smoother go of taking over as uncontested prime if you can demonstrate at least minor magical power on demand - I don't think fielding questions of your legitimacy is anyone's idea of a good time and it would be better to have more than Sarelle's word to lean on. It doesn't help that anyone but her will mistake you for sweela. The Serlast estate is a couple of days by carriage from Chialto, there's a forest on the property, it's supposed to be special to the Serlasts, and going and having a walk around it might give you an idea of how to perform some minor visible magic."

"Might not. Loel figured out how to do magic without jumping into the Marisi River," shrugs Aleko.

"It might not. But it's worth a try if you don't have an epiphany before we get there," says Kiri. "Anyway, some of your cousins are living at the Serlast estate - off the top of my head, one of Valdin's children, his younger sister, and one of his grandsons, but I don't know how you're related to the family so I don't know who they are to you. You can kick them out if you want, but I recommend getting to know them and soliciting their help with the family business, and you have plenty of room to continue to board them. The Chialto house of the Serlasts was empty last I heard, but I'd be willing to bet you can re-hire Valdin's old servants if you want them, and you're entitled to maintain your own suite at the palace, too. You can divide your time between these places more or less however you please, although if you neglect the palace then the royal family may start issuing pointed invitations, and you might want to become acquainted with Prince Isten in particular, as he is heir to the throne and it's his succession you're necessary to ratify later."

"Isten's eleven," Aleko adds. "Coru, quiet."

"Questions?" Kiri inquires. "Do you want me to write any of that down, possibly in chart format?"

Comments

[pyrophyte]

"Indeed. But I don't think I'd be particularly upset if she fell into range and happened to catch a glimpse."

[liakoura]

"That's good then. She uses the notebooks for, like, emotional processing, and it's pretty much an entire notebook sacrificed to her emotional stability when she screws up and the person does mind."

[pyrophyte]

"...That is a lot of writing," he says, envisioning this. "Unless you are exaggerating."

[liakoura]

"Okay, maybe it was a whole notebook the first time it happened and we were eight and her handwriting was bigger, it's less now."

[pyrophyte]

"Aha. That sounds more reasonable."

[liakoura]

"I don't actually have that great a sense of how much writing she does about any given thing since it's all coded now. Frankly I think she's overreacting, like, the fact that Jayce peeked once could have just prompted her to buy a box with a lock, but, no, cryptography."

[pyrophyte]

"People do occasionally see her writing something. I did, earlier."

[liakoura]

"Yeah, but do you know what it was about?"

[pyrophyte]

"No. Because it was ciphered."

[liakoura]

"Hence my lack of sense of the thing. Unless you mean this is why a box with a lock wouldn't work in which case I'm pretty sure she'd be more careful about letting people see if she were not writing in made-up letters."

[pyrophyte]

"There is that," he acknowledges.

[liakoura]

"Sometimes I look over her shoulder. She's really fast with all the code, I think she's got to have rendered a lot of short common words as their own symbols because there's more than there should be appearing with spaces on both sides, and sometimes there's funny little diagrams. Also she kept normal punctuation, it's cute when there's a long string of exclamation marks."

[pyrophyte]

"...I think it might be best if I didn't hear any more about her cipher," he says.

[liakoura]

"How come?"

[pyrophyte]

"Did she not tell you about my memory?"

[liakoura]

"Oh, now I remember, she had a little jealous rant and then said she had to double-check all her old ruminations about not screwing with nonessential mind magic and see if any of them come up different now she knows that it's within human variation. But how does knowing about punctuation plus your memory equal anything bad?"

[pyrophyte]

"I can't lose information," he says. "And I have a good head for puzzles, especially ones related to language. No single trivial fact about punctuation or anything else is going to make the difference, but if I hear enough of them, I might solve the cipher without meaning to. I'd rather not risk it, as protective of her privacy as she is."

[liakoura]

"Huh. Okay. I've basically exhausted what I actually know about it anyway."

[pyrophyte]

"Well, that's helpful."

[liakoura]

"Jayce actually tried to break it once. When Kiri noticed she wrote up a page of stuff she didn't care about and handed it over to see if he could, because if he could she had to change it anyway."

[pyrophyte]

"I see. I wonder if she will do the same with me."

[liakoura]

"Well, you are not literally the person she invented the cipher for, so off the top of my head probably not."

[pyrophyte]

He smiles.

[liakoura]

"Jayce isn't generally a snoop or anything, incidentally, don't want to give that impression."

[pyrophyte]

"I see."