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Quinnahunti ends, Quinnatorz elapses, the twins have their ninth birthday on the thirteenth of Quinnasweela, and Kiri has eventually seen bits of everything she will need to take or delegate charge of - the palace, key portions of Chialto, the Ardelay estate, and the various family business concerns (the national network of libraries being the primary thing, but the Ardelay family has been a major investor in museums as well, and Kiri has inherited partial concerns in things ranging from bakeries to stationery stores; eventually she will have to take a more active role in managing the finances, but they should be self-managing for the time being unless too many key people die.)
In Quinncoru, Kiri - with Aleko in tow this time in addition to Renny - makes a visit to the palace, and, since the king seems willing to ignore her and she doesn't really want his attention, and since there is not a full complement of primes around, has nothing much to do with herself but make a beeline for the prince. (Aleko goes exploring by himself.)
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calescent
"Ooh. Hah," he says, examining it. "Not that she talked to me about it. She just wants to get rid of us. Works out just fine, though."
calescent
"Yeah, it doesn't make a lot of practical difference why she's sending you as long as it'll stick."
"Mm."
It makes some amount of difference to the prince's life that Queen Risella is the sort of person who accepts invitations on his behalf without consulting him—but not a lot of difference, because there aren't that many occasions when she can actually exert influence over his life, and even fewer where she cares to. And in this particular case, she's doing him a favour by it. No doubt the king was much more receptive to whatever she said about it than he would have been to the letter alone.
It makes some amount of difference to the prince's life that Queen Risella is the sort of person who accepts invitations on his behalf without consulting him—but not a lot of difference, because there aren't that many occasions when she can actually exert influence over his life, and even fewer where she cares to. And in this particular case, she's doing him a favour by it. No doubt the king was much more receptive to whatever she said about it than he would have been to the letter alone.
calescent
"I meant in this case, not in general. In general it's pretty terrible."
He laughs. "Yeah," he says, and leans over to hug her, just because she is there and he feels like it.
calescent
Hugs. "When do you think you will be over your 'illness'?"
"Soon, probably. I could go now but it wouldn't be good for me. Maybe next week."
"Great." Hug! "I like you. You're nice. And huggable."
'Nice' here stands in for something much more complicated, or at least much - bigger. But he isn't thinking about the details; he knows what he means. It's that thing that she is.
'Nice' here stands in for something much more complicated, or at least much - bigger. But he isn't thinking about the details; he knows what he means. It's that thing that she is.
calescent
Hugs.
"Nice means something all complicated when you say it apparently."
"Nice means something all complicated when you say it apparently."
"Mm? It's not complicated," he says. Although now that he thinks about it, he supposes it sort of is. It's just that it all hangs together in a way that makes perfect sense for him, so he doesn't really have to pay attention to the complicatedness.
(Leaving aside the fact that 'nice' can mean a lot of things, and a lot of words can mean this thing, if they're the word that he says when he means it—)
The thing that he meant when he said that goes something like this: she is good to have around, someone he doesn't mind talking to, someone who doesn't want to hurt him, someone who sometimes does helpful things. Someone he likes and cares about, who gives him happy feelings.
(Leaving aside the fact that 'nice' can mean a lot of things, and a lot of words can mean this thing, if they're the word that he says when he means it—)
The thing that he meant when he said that goes something like this: she is good to have around, someone he doesn't mind talking to, someone who doesn't want to hurt him, someone who sometimes does helpful things. Someone he likes and cares about, who gives him happy feelings.
He giggles and hugs her some more.
calescent
"Are you going to have to bring your tutors, do you suppose? The house has the loveliest library of course, but I don't know if you'd be obliged to take them along anyway."
"I hope not," he snorts. He looks forward to seeing the library, but he'd rather do it without anyone pestering him to learn things from it.
calescent
"It's a really nice library. I'm glad we're the family with all the libraries, I'd be so bored if I had to run a million acres of farms like Alser."
He giggles. "Bored and well fed, though!"
calescent
"I guess! And he seems to like it all right, and I suppose he has people for it, the way I don't have to personally run any libraries unless I feel like it."
"Yeah. You could spend all your time in libraries anyway, I bet."
calescent
"I have lots of other things to do. But they are good places to be between things."
"What kinds of things?"
calescent
"I inherited a lot of stuff. It's got people looking after it, but I don't just want to ignore it. And I have my brothers to pay attention to and my mind to figure out and I have to be here sometimes and occasionally I still show up at school although it might make sense to just hire me a tutor, I could share with Aleko and maybe even Jayce - Renny and Karls won't hear of me doing only self-study, not before I'm at least twelve, so it'd have to be a tutor if it was to replace school - and I have a lot of stuff to learn about being prime so I have to do that too."
"How do you learn about the - prime parts of being prime, anyway?" he wonders. "I mean, it's not like the old prime can show you. Ever." And as previously discussed, it's not the kind of thing there are words for, so written records from previous generations wouldn't help much.
calescent
"Well, she could have shown me a little since I was predictable, only then she wanted to wait, and then she died. Alser said he's going to talk to his suspiciously prime-looking granddaughter more and earlier because of me," she adds. "But I experiment as much as I safely can and I talk to the other primes, about Great-Aunt Elytte and also about what primes-in-general-whichever-kind do."
"What do they do?" He only has the vaguest idea of what that is - he could've guessed that it falls to them to pick regents, for example, but he didn't actually know it as a fact until she said. They're the primes. They do things. He never concerned himself with the details before he met Kiri, and now he mostly only knows what he picks up from her.