"...Relatively minor?"

"Well, I don't know really, I haven't looked into it, but it doesn't sound hard, not like living forever without turning into a rock or getting other people to understand one's cat."

"Is the cat thing really up there?"

"So, so up there," laughs Bella, "it's kind of ridiculous, it's so easy if it's your cat as to be barely a spell and so hard if it's not your cat - some people manage it for like a minute at a time, and then it fizzles."

"I know. I think it's something about the cats themselves interfering, but attempts at observing anything emanating from Cricket beyond witchcraft I deliberately channel through him have turned up zilch."

"Perhaps," says Sherlock, "it is precisely the cats themselves interfering."

"I don't think they're consciously obstructing the attempts. They have enough variance in personality that I don't think they could simply all be lying about wanting to help, and generally they don't object to being translated manually."

"Then perhaps it is in their nature, and does not emanate because it is not having an effect in the world beyond the cat?"

"But a great many visible effects don't have results beyond the thing they are on, so it would have to be special in at least one other way."

"I see. That is curious."

"It is! There could potentially be an entire class of effects similar to cats and cats are just the one witches have noticed due to the usefulness of having cats," shrugs Bella. "It's an interesting puzzle, but not a priority for me; I can translate Cricket as needed."

"And I suppose if you solve mortality you will have plenty of time for the rest."

"Yes, exactly! There's so much to do! I can barely stand to specialize even the tiny amount that I do. If I were immortal that would solve that problem, and replace it with the far lovelier problem of things to do appearing at a rate per year that would overwhelm anyone's ability to do that number of things in a year."

"...Things to do such as...?"

"Everything! I'm oriented around magic, myself, but there's other things to do in service of that - I know wee bits of Elvish so I can talk about the magic in a language designed to handle it; I've traveled, but only to look at magic things, not just to go places and have a look at them; I know how to craft some objects - like the specs and so on - but only so I can enchant them. And there are certainly other things people do besides magic! I bet some of them are even interesting! If I had a few more lifetimes to cram it into I could get more than serviceable at cooking, and learn how to speak Elvish properly and read books in it, and go see the Pendasi Sky-Islands which aren't even slightly magical but are reputed to be beautiful, and there's all kinds of social activism that needs doing, and stuff to be invented, and people to meet."

"Suddenly my life feels so much more boring," Tony remarks.

"What, don't you do things? You're a princess, I'm sure you get to do things - politics sounds fascinating, I'd probably move to one of those newfangled democracies and play with it if for some reason I couldn't be a magician," says Bella. "And even if that's not to your taste, you've been sent on a pretty open-ended quest, you could go just about anywhere and claim that you might find a husband while you were at it."

"If either of us liked politics, our mother would not be quite so desperate to marry at least one of us off to someone who did."

"If the quest doesn't pan out are you at risk of being set up with some more or less disagreeable neighbor prince?" inquires Bella.

"Why not?"

"Because if I have to marry somebody I don't actually like, I'll pull a Cimorene," says Tony, "and if Sherry does, she'll set him on fire."

"Cimorene was - hang on, not a historian - Cimorene was queen alongside King Mendanbar, right? Did she run away at some point from someone? That's reasonable. Setting him on fire sounds extreme. He might be nothing worse than spineless or otherwise not equipped to run away himself, after all."

"Cimorene got to King Mendanbar by running away from Linderwall, where her parents wanted to marry her to a disagreeable neighbouring prince, and being Kazul's princess for a while. Which is where the family friendship thing got started. I love Cimorene, she's my favourite ancestor."