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Kiri relishes the stream of information. It's not as sharp and clear as words, transmitted through the medium of heat and through a few feet of space, but it's fast and it's interesting and he doesn't mind.

"Most people put things in their kiertens at least temporarily sometimes," she points out. "It's just that the palace is so big I guess they never have anything that doesn't have somewhere else to go."
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The prince giggles. "It's not for putting things in, though, is it? It's for like exactly the opposite of that. If you're using it right you don't ever have any stuff in it at all except pretty things on the walls and maybe a fountain. That's what gets me, is that everybody's house is supposed to have a room just for not using, and then after that they think 'well, we could dump this extra cartload of flour in the corner' or 'if we want to get a ton of people in the same room and don't care that none of them are going to be able to sit down, we could do that here'. A kitchen is for making food and a dining room is for eating food and people's rooms are for living in and sitting rooms are for sitting, but a kierten is for not doing anything with."

If it were strictly up to him, he would rather show off the wealth of the royal family with lots of decorative crap - beautiful gardens, nice clothes, pretty statues, books, paintings - than with a big empty room that could probably fit four other entire houses in it if they were little enough.

But it is not, in fact, up to him.
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"Well, it'll probably be up to you one day," Kiri points out. "Kings can get away with doing unusual things like filling up kiertens. Unless it's your little brother. What's he like, does he have a personality yet?"

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"He doesn't talk much. Smiles at me sometimes, cries when he breaks things."

(The prince has a sense of knowing why it might be that little Isten would cry when he breaks things, but is not thinking directly about any specific reasons.)
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Kiri frowns, a little. She doesn't ask.

"Well, now you all add up to five, the king and two queens and two princes."
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"Yeah."

(He considers the thing about numbers more or less complete nonsense. But it's nonsense on a much smaller scale than kiertens, so it doesn't bother him particularly.)
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Kiri giggles. "I think the numbers are silly too. Or - well, I don't think they bring luck, anyway, but they're sort of tidy. But people do a lot of things to get good numbers that they wouldn't do just to be tidy."

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The prince laughs.

Tidiness is not a major internal drive of his. To put it mildly.
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Kiri giggles again. "I don't know what I expected a prince to be like but you aren't it."

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"A lot of people say that!" he says cheerfully. "Maybe I'm not a prince. Maybe I'm just dressed up as one for fun."

(No, he is in fact a prince.)
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Kiri laughs. "Your costume has a rip in it," she points out.

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"Does it?"

He stops walking and looks down at himself and twists to try to see the back of his pants and turns a full circle one way, and then another full circle the other way with the opposite twist, and then untwists and inspects the torn hem. Which he sort of knew where to find all along, but the elaborate search was more fun than merely remembering.
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Kiri laughs hard enough to trip again.

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The prince giggles. "Aww, are you okay?"

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"Yeah, I'm fine. I fall over all the time." Kiri gets up again.

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"Okay," he says, taking her at her word, and continues along the way to the kitchen. (They are passing through some decorative crap - a series of quite lovely tapestries on the walls - which he doesn't consider notable enough to stop for.)

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Kiri admires them, but doesn't see a need to stop either.

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Traipse traipse. Traipse traipse traipse.

Kitchen!

The prince pokes his head in and announces, "Cook's not here! Wanna see the gardens next, or the dining rooms, or what?"

(The two named options lie along equally convenient paths for seeing all the interesting parts of the palace without doubling back or looping. Anything else, and he'd have to figure something out.)
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"Gardens," pronounces Kiri.

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"All right!"

Gardens it is. The ones just outside the kitchen aren't very pretty, but the ones after that are nice if you like gardens. Which he does. So many pretty plants!
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"I'm glad I don't set things on fire by accident anymore," Kiri remarks, running her hand over some leaves.

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The prince's first reaction is that he would've liked to see that.

Which leads him to, "Do you do it on purpose?"
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"I light the hearth that way sometimes. I've been trying to see if I can cook eggs in their shells, now that I'm pretty sure it won't get out of control. But most things around me don't need to be on fire."

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"I guess."

He expects that if he were the Ardelay prime, he would disagree. He expects that he would find plenty of things that could be on fire without bothering him one bit. 'Himself' comes to mind as an obvious example.
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Kiri stops in her tracks, (stumbles, catches herself, and) frowns.

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