"He has not! And I didn't expect he would though if I'd known that people from another world would be dropped on him then I'd expect he would. But if he came back from travelling early with two girls it would be because he'd gotten married or possibly because they needed assistance but then I would have been visited instead of invited to dinner. Pleasure to meet you. Maitimo."

"Imliss Zavari Lessnerai, pleased to meet you. In our culture the middle name is our primary family name because we're girls. And this is my sister Idaia, who just married your brother."

"Pleased to meet you."

"I am pleased to meet you both! I was invited to dinner," he says, "but see no dinner, but luckily I predicted this and brought some with me, anyone care to unload it?"

"Unload it from where?" Imliss asks, getting up.

"I brought a little cart, which I was going to wheel in but it foundered in the garden. Don't mention it to Father, he'll make me one with automatic steering correction and I'll feel like a toddler. Want to help me carry the dishes in? Do you have food preferences, I am not quite good enough at predicting things to guess what you'd like before I'd met you..."

"I've mostly been eating random plants since I got here, I'm sure whatever it is will be delicious just by virtue of being the kind of thing you need a kitchen to make. I will totally help carry dishes in."

"Stolen from the King's kitchens, all of it! There are eight courses but my family does not appreciate the concept of courses and we'll probably just put everything on the table at once and eat our favorites." He heads outside, where a cart has indeed foundered in the garden. "Welcome to Tirion and welcome to our family if you'd like to consider it such."

"Dunno how much you inferred from the fact that my sister married your brother instead of us asking for a way home but it's not like you've got any living competition for the title."

"My condolences. Is it a blessing or a source of frustration that in several hours of exhaustive questioning no one asked what happened?"

"I wouldn't call it a frustration. Whether or not it's a blessing depends on whether you all react as well as Tyelcormo when you hear the whole story."

"...I am unlikely to respond by marrying anyone. But if he thought we'd react badly he'd have told us privately what not to say, and he hasn't, and I think his trust in us is warranted."

"He didn't throw her down in the grass and take her then and there," she says, rolling her eyes. "He told her it was awful and offered her a hug. I don't...expect you to react badly. But I wouldn't have expected some of the things that did happen."

He hands her a tray of food and takes one. "Oh. I was going to suggest you can tell me while my arms are full of soup so that if I react badly I am very easily and plausible-deniably splashed with soup, but that constrains hugs. I am very sure I'll want to offer you a hug. I love my family and cannot imagine anything ever happening to them that would change that or make their loss hurt even a fraction less."

"Yeah. The very short version is that a lot of other people died too and the events leading up to the incident were partly my parents' fault. The longer version is that Dad made a mistake, and some other people reacted badly to that mistake, and then things escalated badly, and at the end it was decided to put all the blame on our parents and it became prohibitively uncomfortable for us to keep living there pretty quickly."

He does offer her a hug. It's a very tight hug for how careful he's being of her hair. "Oh no. Oh, no. I'm so sorry."

"We're coping," she sighs. "Granted that my sister is coping by marrying your brother, but I don't think that means she's going to fall out of love, or I would have stopped her."

"Thank you for that. I expect he'll understand if she wants a lot more time with you or to herself once she gets to a different place in coping.:

"I don't think she will. Want more time alone, anyway. Idaia's not really a loner by nature."

"I am eager to meet her. And you? What will you need?"

"...I'm...kind of nervous because our species seems to age faster than yours so I haven't had as much time to learn things as someone my equivalent age of your species but I want to learn everything and Tyelcormo says Tirion is the best place to do that--the first time Idaia saw him fire a bow she decided it was one of the most beautiful things she'd ever seen and asked to be taught and he said yes and asked if I wanted to learn too and I said that it was less that I wanted to learn archery in particular and more that I have a principle against turning down lessons in skills and he said he thought I would get along well with his family."

He claps his hands delightedly. "You will! And Tirion has a perpetual problem where the people who've been at something for centuries are so much better than everyone else that young people rather despair of reaching the tops of their fields, which we solve by inventing new fields, all the time. There's always more to study than we've noticed yet. I can get you excellent tutors or you can just sit in on debates in some subject until you have something to say, that's how lots of people start. And we have journals! Your world may have different sciences than ours so you could skim those to notice where we can learn from you."

"That actually came up! Did you see your brother's ring? Idaia made it using a technique she used to watch the local glassworker use for, like, beads and stuff, that apparently the glassblower whose workshop she borrowed had never seen before."

"It makes sense! Different supply constraints, different aesthetic senses, different techniques. I hope no one here thought our study of crafts was exhaustive."

"She was so pleased, too, she's not actually that great at glassworking or in fact any kind of making permanent things, she's awfully focused on dreamworking, but if you don't have flameworking at all then she's still the most skilled person here at that particular thing, and she wanted to give Tyelcormo a ring that was pretty in its own right instead of just because he outright stated he'd be happy with anything she gave him even if it was a twig."