The twins' father is a hunti fellow who makes an odd match for his elay wife and an odder one for her overwhelmingly sweela family. He comes home from his excursion to bless his twins with flexibility, imagination, and contentment for his son in his left pocket. In his right pocket are two sweela virtues, intelligence and clarity - that's a clue as to her alignment, if not a guarantee - and power.
Not every prime is graced with that particular hunti blessing in their first batch, but it's certainly suggestive.
Kiribel is possibly the most obviously sweela child of all time. She reads, she holds intensely strong opinions and defends them with more firey passion than wooden stubbornness, she seems to entirely inhabit her own mind to the point of forgetting that she's in the middle of trying to walk. Her twin is less obvious, but by the time they're seven people are guessing he's torz, and he doesn't dispute it. Their little brother is elay like their mother.
It's Kiri people pay covert attention to, because when the old prime dies, the new one is called up. The prime makes plans to start teaching her things, maybe bringing her to court, when the girl is ten.
The prime dies when Kiri is eight.
It's the middle of the night when it happens, and Kiri wakes up thinking the brightness filtering through her eyes is sunshine. It is not; she has set her bed on fire.
The accidental arson doesn't take particularly long to get under control. It's the other, less obvious power of the Ardelays that gives Kiri real trouble.
If the previous prime had the gift of mind-reading, she never saw fit to mention it to anyone. Kiri tells everybody, and screams at her parents and her brothers not to get too close to her, and weeps, inconsolable, in her replaced bed. There is a range limit. She can have company. But if someone gets within a few feet of her -
"I can feel it," she explains to Aleko, her twin, who is a safe distance across the room. "It's in your - warmness. Just stay about that far away and it won't happen."
"You can try it," she says dubiously to Jayce, their little brother, when he suggests wearing a lot of coats and mittens to obscure the warmness. That he does this in the hottest part of Quinnahunti demonstrates his dedication to hugging his sister.
But it doesn't help unless his face is covered up too, to the point where he can't breathe, so that doesn't work.
Kiri does without brotherly hugs for a month until Jayce has another idea without such suffocating pitfalls, and then she waits until Jayce is asleep, and climbs in with him, where she'll pick up nothing but fragments of dreams and only until she nods off herself. (Aleko sleeps lightly, and will surely wake up if someone joins him after he's managed to fall asleep; and Kiri talks at night; but if she sleeps first and he wears earplugs they can arrange things that way and only have Aleko sneaking back to his own bed at three in the morning half the time.)
She imagines this will work until she is at least twelve, but has no idea what she will do once it's weird for her to snuggle up to her sleeping brothers.
By this time there has been a fair amount of rumbling from various political interests that the new prime, eight years old or not, should be meeting various people, ranging from the king and queens and princes to the other primes, and Kiri is all for it. As a sort of concession to her age there is no objection that her brothers and parents accompany her to the Ardelay property in Chialto that she has inherited. They can't hug her - not without letting slip any secret that may cross their minds, and not without her nearing nausea from guilt; if Great-Aunt Ardelay did this casual invasion of everyone she met then Kiri is glad she's dead - but they can support her, with enough space between them.
Renny, her mother, has the most experience of anyone in the immediate family with politics, even if she couldn't stand the stuff and ran off with a man of no significant family at her earliest convenience. She's the one who goes shopping for Kiri's pretty new dress in sweela coral-red and other wardrobe items suitable for a newly visible prime. (Kiri dreads trying to navigate a crowd and doesn't care what she wears anyway.) She's the one who goes with Kiri to the palace. She stays five feet back as they walk in.
The king has already been immunized against the various powers of primes, so there's that.
With the younger one, that isn't much of an issue, because he is just a year old and not yet permitted to wander out of his nursery unattended.
The king's firstborn is a different matter.
Whether or not he is permitted to wander the palace, there he is, easily recognizable by the circlet perched in his mane of fluffy brown hair. He traipses cheerfully toward Kiri and Renny. One of his shoes is partly unlaced, and his extremely fine blue silk tunic has a rip in the hem.
Kiri scrambles back when he approaches - into Renny's range, and then she falls down trying to reverse direction and go perpendicular. "Stay back, Pr-" She's ceased to make progress, and he hasn't stopped walking, which allows her to feel a flash of unpleasant anticipation about her finishing that phrase with his name. "- your highness. I don't know if Great-Aunt Elytte could but I read minds if people're too close."
Kiri actually doesn't understand how Aleko - having sworn up and down that they were twins and that made it fine at least for a little bit at a time - was able to sit next to her at breakfast that one day for fifteen minutes thinking about his variously flattering opinions of all their relatives, half-formed speculations about the meanings of suspect song lyrics, and plans to be a police officer like Karls upon growing up, only to find that the thought that pushed him into a panic about her scrutiny was the realization that he needed to relieve himself. Being confused about this does not make her feel any less guilty for having let him try it.
She shuffles one step closer to the prince, then two.
(This is not technically literally true—they will have to go through some of what he termed 'decorative crap', and past some of the rooms he is not supposed to enter, along the way—but the kitchen is closer than the dining rooms or nursery or any especially notable decorative crap, and is therefore the closest thing he would like to specifically show them. Which is the sense in which he meant it.)
He leads Kiri and her mother out of the boring room (that is what it's for, it is for wasting a lot of space, it's the stupidest thing he's ever heard and he considers the prevalence of kiertens strong evidence that all grown-ups are crazy) and down a hall.
"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."
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.
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.
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.)
"It..." She glances briefly over her shoulder at Renny, still following at the prescribed distance. "Doesn't work like how you were thinking," she decides to say. She holds up her hand and gloves it in flame. "I don't burn. It's just like sunshine. Or holding a cup of tea."
"You don't feel like you were on fire," he comments. "Weird. I can't decide if I'd like it or not."
On the one hand, being all covered in fire and not burning sounds snuggly (and would be an excellent way to deter unwanted physical contact). On the other hand, if he couldn't ever get burned—that just sounds terrible.
There are kinds of hurting that just sort of are, and might be okay or not-nice or kind-of-nice, depending. Old injuries with unhappy origins, and hurting when he'd rather not be distracted from what he's doing or for some other reason doesn't feel like it, are this kind.
Most other kinds are actively nice. If he caught on fire a little bit, he would expect it to be fun. When he fell down the stairs last month, he giggled the whole way even though (as he found out afterward) he'd cracked a rib.
When his father beats him it often hurts more than most other things do, but 'more' and 'worse' do not run on the same scale. Falling down the stairs hurt as much as some beatings, but it was still fun, and they weren't.
(Her hair catches fire when she's startled, down from initial incidents that involved more distant objects or her less resilient clothes. She promptly extinguishes it, as near-reflex by this point.)
The prince regards her curiously and waits to see if she will say anything. If he has permanently taken away her ability to talk, maybe he will go get her mother or something. Even though this line of thinking is almost entirely a joke, he still contemplates ways to simultaneously make sure that Kiri gets safely back to her family and whatever help she might receive from that quarter, and make sure that his father doesn't find out he had anything to do with it.
"- I just remembered. You've see me fall over all the time, right? It's always like that, I'm really clumsy. So I have little injuries a lot. My first year of school me and my twin had Renny teaching us because she's a teacher, but the year after that we had somebody else, and he asked me - and he asked Aleko in a separate room even and I didn't find out until later! - if our parents were hurting me and I told him no because they don't and he said that he wanted me to know that if anything like that did happen I could tell him and he'd do something about it. A teacher wouldn't do that if it was normal."
That clears his last doubt.
This is interesting news. He briefly entertains the notion of finding someone to tell and then telling them, but he isn't sure that this would lead to his father actually stopping, and - as he has been reminded several times since Isten's birth - his father now has a spare son, in case the first one needs replacing.
(What he means by this is something that feels very simple to him, but that he would have a lot of trouble explaining to anyone else if he tried. He calls himself 'okay', and he means that of all the many, many things that aren't okay in his life, none are preventing him from being happy, having fun, remaining himself, staying alive, or wanting to stay alive; he means that he has not decided that his situation is so intolerable he needs to change it at any cost.)
Renny comes and finds them still in the gardens shortly before dinner. "Hello again, your highness. Kiri, dear, you'll need to change into one of your formal things - don't make that face, I know it's tiresome but everyone's going to watch you and watch what you wear - in time for dinner."
And so they all troop up to the suite that belongs to the new Ardelay prime, and Kiri shows him what Renny bought for her to wear around the castle. "Dresses and dresses and dresses. And accessories. It's all stupidly expensive but at least we can use Ardelay money for it because that's important enough to do that, apparently."
He will be changing out of his torn shirt before dinner, or hearing about it from his father. (It's only a fleeting thought before he focuses his attention on evaluating Kiri's wardrobe for prettiness and suitability to various functions.)
She puts on the dress (it's pale frothy orange lace; she thinks Renny may have leaned too hard on sweela colors) and some hairclips and a bracelet. Her blessings stay where she always wears them.
"I'm just going to outgrow everything in this closet," she tells Renny.
"You aren't supposed to wear things too many times anyway," says Renny, who has already changed for dinner (white and lavender; only one of those is her own element's color). "So it doesn't matter much. I know it's silly, but you can give the clothes away after you're too big for them if you like."
The prince is there. He has changed his circlet for a slightly shinier circlet, and his tunic for an undamaged version, and put on rings that show his blessings - surprise and luck on the first two fingers of his right hand, imagination on the thumb.
"Hi," she says. She peers at his blessings. "Very coru. Are you? Coru?"
"I am very coru," he says, grinning. "So's my mom, which isn't a secret but it might as well be, almost everybody guesses elay." He nods up the table to the woman sitting on his father's right, wearing beauty, contentment, and health on a gold necklace. There is a strong family resemblance between mother and son. The other queen, sitting on the king's left, is wearing her blessings on a bracelet that isn't visible in such detail.
"I'm the most sweela sweela who ever sweelaed," Kiri says. "Well, that's what Aleko says. And I guess you already knew that since I'm the Ardelay prime. Aleko's torz and our little brother Jayce is elay like Renny, though not as obvious. And our father's hunti but people guess torz sometimes."
"To guess my mom right you have to know her either really well or not at all," he says. "She acts elay." (Flighty, oblivious, never quite connected to the world around her. Of the virtues of that element, she displays none that he's ever seen, except the one she's wearing. Beauty, yeah, she's got plenty of that. He hopes he grows up that pretty.)
"Well, Mom's coru and I'm coru, but I don't feel like Isten's going to turn out sweela," he says. (Because of two things, mainly - one, while Queen Risella is very definitely sweela, she also has very definitely zero interest in her child and he's not going to get any direct influence from that quarter. Two, Isten just doesn't come off that way. If he had to guess with this little to go on, he'd guess torz, or coru. But he doesn't think guessing with this little to go on is especially reliable.)
(There's - something - about the way in which he identifies with his element. He isn't thinking about it directly, so it's not very clear. But it's a thing that he sees as unusual about himself, and is proud of or satisfied with.)
It goes something like this: He is very coru. But he is very coru only because lots of things about coru are him and lots of things about him are coru. He hears people all the time talking about their own or others' elements like the element defines the person - as though someone who is elay but very practical, or hunti but sometimes indecisive, or sweela but shy, is not just imperfectly their element but imperfectly themselves. As though, unless they can be appropriately categorized into another element that fits a defined role - his mother's crown of elay, for example, that leads people to guess it for her all the time, or the palace cook's heart of sweela that puts art and fire into her work when to look at her you'd think torz through and through - any trait a person has that plain doesn't fit is something wrong and strange about that person.
To the prince, this is nonsense on the level of kiertens. People are themselves. The elements define obvious categories, but if someone doesn't fit those categories perfectly, that's just a fact of who they happen to be and it doesn't make the not-fitting parts of them any less theirs.
"Huh," says Kiri. "I'm not shy, but sometimes I'm - I guess the word for it is 'calculating' but I don't think that's a nice word for it - and even though that's a very think-y mind-y thing to be and it seems perfectly fitting to me it's not how some people think sweela people are supposed to be. We're supposed to be the most emotional."
Now that he's thought about the palace cook, it occurs to him that while at this point the food here is nothing remarkable to him, Kiri probably did not grow up on Beryn's cooking and is therefore about to be pleasantly surprised.
("Home" is still the little house in Swiftford where she grew up, even now that she has technically inherited both the Chialto house and the larger Ardelay manse farther upstream on the Swiftness River, and between those places and the palace she'll probably spend less than a quintile "home" in any given year.)
She makes use of his thoughts once or twice. She wants to get this right from the beginning; she's going to be prime for the rest of her life and is rather keenly aware that this means she's going to have to live with whatever reputation she begins to collect at the age of eight. However clever she considers herself, this is a handicap she wishes to work around.
He would really like to fix that. He would so much like to fix that. He would not like to fix that while they are supposed to be eating dinner, because he doesn't feel like inciting punishment today, but he would like to fix that at the earliest available opportunity. And then continue to fix it afterward. Hugs are good and he wants her to have lots.
And hug her. But she leaves that unsaid.
"Unless the other primes want to talk to me or something. Renny thinks they might leave me alone for a little while but not that long."
"Like - like not shoving everybody off the Marisi river flats when there are foreign visitors so they have nowhere to go and can't get at the river to drink from it. Like making sure there's well-run stores for famines and proper fire brigades and enough police in every town." (Karls sometimes complains about there not being enough police in their town.)
For example: If he ran away from home, he would probably spend some time on the river flats himself. That would be an obvious choice, if he ran away from home, at least for as long as it took him to get out of Chialto entirely. But that doesn't make spending time on the river flats a reason to run away from home. It's just something he would do, if that happened.
"That's not what I meant. I mean if you can't do something now, but there's something you would do with -" She stops and starts over. "I mean, power, the ability to do stuff, it's useful, and some people seem not to want it and sometimes that seems to be because they don't much want anything, and there's some power it'd be wrong to use - like what I have most of the time - and that would also be a reason, but -" She stops again, and this time does not start over. "Never mind."
His highest ambition is to become completely separated from his father, so that neither of them can affect the other one at all. He can get that by waiting for his father to die and thereby becoming king, or he can get it by running far enough away, or he can get it by dying. He hasn't picked one for sure yet. But the first option does not tempt him, coming as it does with the implicit necessity of staying in his father's power for the rest of his father's life, and most likely having to be called by his father's name - King Hector, ugh - for the rest of his own life after that. Any charms that the monarchy might have are washed right out by those glaring flaws.
Kiri is approached by the Frothen prime, an elderly torz fellow who walks with a cane. He says, "Hello, Kiribel."
And she says, "Hello, Alser."
"All of the primes will be meeting soon. Will you come with me?"
"Okay," agrees Kiri. "How long will it take?"
"Not long. We should be done before sunset," Alser assures her.
Kiri nods. "I'll find my way back to my rooms when we're done, Mother," she adds in Renny's direction, though she's plenty loud enough for the prince to hear too.
"I wish they hadn't surprised me, but I'm not going to complain if they want to do it again, though I didn't think to ask if it's every time the primes are all in Chialto or just when there's a new one. It's kind of - well, it's very something. Everything's really sharp now. Valdin says that lasts a few hours."
"Alser is nice. Very very somebody's-grandpa-kind-of-torz. Jerist wasn't paying attention to anything going on but I don't know if that's his personality or him being really old. I don't think Nerine and Valdin like each other but they both seem to like me fine."
Hug. "I didn't get a lot of details - I was asking Jerist about his because that one sort of worries me but he wasn't listening and then everybody wanted to do the thing. But I think I was right that Dochenzas can be empaths, but I'm not that worried anymore because Jerist obviously couldn't care less. Nerine was thinking something about knowing how everyone's related to everyone else. I was going to ask Valdin but then we did the thing."
"Well, it's not like Great-Aunt Elytte gave me lessons. I'm not even sure if she could read minds. Nerine said she thought she could tell when people were telling lies, but that's so much less than actual mindreading. If I start putting things in people's minds what if I do it wrong?"
"It could be terrible. I could accidentally put it in too hard or something. Or take something out and then you'd never be able to remember it. Or break something. Or maybe it's just not a good idea to have other people's memories in your head. I don't know."
The prince examines all her available clothes, and produces detailed opinions, some of which he even says out loud. He knows which things are good to wear at official events, and which are just okay, and which will make people look at her funny; he knows which events a particular thing might be better or worse for, and which things are better or worse for Kiri. And he usually, although not always, knows why.
"And I can't re-wear things too often?" sighs Kiri. "So far being prime is more about my outfits than it is about politics. I hope it's just because I'm eight. If it's still like this in five years I'm going to set something on fire. Probably nothing very important but still."
"How much you care about things - the more times you wear the same thing too close together, the worse you're insulting whoever or whatever you're wearing it for. And how much you know about things - if you wear something somewhere that's not right for it, it means you didn't know any better. If you wear things that are perfect all the time, then you look really smart. If you wear something new or different that's so great other people start copying you, you look like you're really something special, but that's mostly for grown-ups anyway, nobody's going to let a kid set fashion trends unless it's something absolutely amazing. If you wear things that aren't nice enough, you look like you can't afford better. If you wear things that are too nice you look like you're trying too hard - Queen Risella does it all the time. My mom's really good at this stuff," he adds as an aside. "She's always dressed right."
"No, I mean, anywhere I could buy clothes, it will be crowded enough that people will wander within five feet of me. I guess if I brought enough people you could all shoo them away. You and Renny and Aleko maybe. Are you allowed to go shopping with me if you want?"