The prince can be found in his rooms. It seems he is indisposed - no one she might ask for directions is clear on how - but not turning away visitors.

"Yeah, okay." She leans over to give him a careful hug. "I don't experience what I'm getting from other people, you don' have to worry about that."

"I've been okay. It's kind of overwhelming to have so many things that I inherited by being prime, but now I have notes on all of them and know who is looking after them in case I need to do something with any of it."

"Well, that's good," he says, smiling.

"What happened to you?" she asks.

"I'm okay," he says, smiling. Defined as: he is happier with this outcome than he would be if he'd stood back and let the blame fall on his little brother. And still that other thing, from when they first met - it's not so bad that he needs to be out of it no matter what.

"I guess it's good he has you to look out for him, it's just..." She shakes her head.

"It'd be better if I didn't have to," he says. "Yeah."

"Yeah."

Well, unless somebody assassinates the king, there's not much to be done about that.

"He hasn't declared an heir yet, has he. I wonder what happens if he needs one before he picks one."

"I think the primes get to pick the regent," says Kiri reassuringly.

"Well, I don't know if they'd be good at it, especially with Nerine and Valdin at each other's throats thinking daggers at each other all the time, but I can block attempts to install one of the queens."

"What's Nerine and Valdin's problem?"

"I don't know much of the history of it. They aren't like, 'grrr, I hate her for reasons I will think about in chronological order within five feet of Ardelay over there'. They're just always mad at each other."

He giggles.

"I don't think Lalindars and Serlasts have hated each other generally. It's just them in particular."

"Any reason you haven't asked?" he wonders. "I would."

"I haven't gotten either of them alone yet and don't want them to start fighting instead of answering me. I'd go visit one or the other but I'm concerned whichever I visited second would think I liked them less."

"I can try to check on him sometimes but I can't just follow him around, I don't think. And I have no idea what would happen if I tried to say I did something he did."

"Nothing good, probably," says the prince. Especially not if Kiri isn't a good enough liar to pull it off. He is an excellent liar, so he feels safe enough covering for Isten's mistakes. But someone outside the family—the king might decide to blame his child anyway. He's done that often enough when someone else made a mess and the prince just happened to be around.

"I suppose delaying doesn't do anything? If I was there and had some excuse not to want him carted off."

"Okay. Then - I don't know. Does he - his mother never pays attention and your father's busy all the time, does he have a decent nursemaid at least? I can have you all over to the Ardelay country house, you and him and whoever that is. And that'd be something for however long."

Hugs again.

Hugs! Highly enthusiastic hugs. This is a good idea that she has had.

"I mean the Chialto house too, only it's right there and it would be easier to call you back if he decided to," she says. "So, the country one."

"Yeah. It'll be perfect, if he lets us."

"Do you think he won't?"

"I dunno if he will. He might not." There have not been any comparable opportunities to set precedents.

"Well, I can do a whole formal inviting thing if that will help, I can ask Alser how."

"Yeah, probably a good idea." He hugs her again. She is so great.

Kiri smiles and hugs him back.

Hug hug hug hug yes hug good hug.

"Hi, Kiri!" he says. He's still in his room, but he has progressed from lying in bed to sitting in a comfy chair and reading.

"Hi!" She considers sitting on the arm of his chair, decides that this is hazardous, and instead hands him the letter and leans on the chair instead.

"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."

"Yeah, it doesn't make a lot of practical difference why she's sending you as long as it'll stick."

"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.

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."

"Okay. I can go the same time and show you the place."

He giggles and hugs her some more.

"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.

"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!"

"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."

"I have lots of other things to do. But they are good places to be between things."

"What kinds of things?"

"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.

"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.

"Well, besides the regent thing and advising the king which I've been avoiding doing because I don't want him to pay attention to me yet - when you're king, or Isten if it's Isten I guess, we'll all have to ratify you, or him, to make it so you're - oh, hm, if you're king one day I won't be able to read your mind anymore."

"Huh," he says. That sounds vaguely inconvenient. But not enough to push him out of neutrality on the subject of his possible future kingship.

"So there's that, I have to have an idea how to do that. And we can also be involved in foreign policy things. I've been thinking I should learn a foreign language. I don't know which I should start with, though, I don't know if I'm good enough at languages to pick up a lot of them so I should do the most important one first."

"I dunno anything about that," says the prince. He wants to learn about foreign countries someday in pursuit of eventual plans for running away from home, but it's not that urgent, so he hasn't done much.

"When I pick one you could work on it with me," she suggests.

He grins. "Sure!"

"We're pretty insular and can go years without hearing from anybody, but we interact the most with Soche-Tas," she says. "So I was thinking Soechin, but the language is harder than Berringese, I heard, and I'm also considering Malinquan."

"Well, if you're only going to learn one anyway, it's better to do a harder one that's more useful than an easier one that's less, right?"

"Unless everyone has the same idea, and there are six people at any given engagement who can translate Soechin and nobody who bothered with Malinquan."

"Nah," he says. "Because a bunch of people are going to go for the easier one anyway."

"I suppose. And I also suppose I can't be that bad at languages because I invented and committed to memory an entire cipher with a lot of made-up words in it when I was six."

He giggles.

"So Soechin to start, I guess. When you're better we can go to the house and there's plenty of books on it and one of my cousins will probably help if we need it."

"And then if your tutors want you to account for your time away you will have something to tell them."

"I think down the hall sounds nice," says the elder prince. Little Isten nods agreement.

"Okay. We're on the ground floor."

"No reason to give her lots of chances to fall down stairs if she doesn't have to."

The prince giggles. Isten looks at the ground. The prince crouches down and hugs him.

"I have never, ever drawn grace in my life. Once I sat drawing blessings out of the bin in the chapel until there were only three left and they were all grace. It didn't seem to want to give me the spiritualities or the contentments either but it was really, really not letting me draw any grace."

At that, Isten giggles. Quietly, but he does. His brother grins and hugs him again.

"I feel like drawing something now. We could find Jayce and all pick things for each other."

The twins' little brother is in the kierten of the west wing (there is a medium-sized kierten in each wing), dancing around in his socks. "This is the best floor for sliding," he asserts, demonstrating. "Hi, your highness and also your highness!"

"I'm Jayce," adds Jace. "Swan. Ardelay? One of those. Ardelay's fine."

"We're being Ardelay because of Kiri," says Aleko. "We can because Grandma was."

"Anyway, we were going to draw blessings, you should put on your shoes and come with."

Isten shuffles quietly sideways until he is sort of a little bit hiding behind his brother.

"Okay!" Jayce puts on his shoes. "I'm the best at drawing blessings for people. Mother thinks it's an elay thing. I should do everybody's except mine. Somebody else can do mine."

"What if more than one person besides you wants to draw some?" asks Kiri lightly, leading the way out of the west wing and down the path between it and the center wing.

"Maybe everybody should draw for everybody else!" suggests Jayce. "Then everybody gets lots of blessings and gets to do lots of drawing too."

"Sounds like fun!" says the elder and more talkative prince. He looks down at Isten. Isten looks up at him. He smiles.

They arrive at the chapel. Jayce traipses in first and starts drawing. He gives Kiri kindness, and Aleko loyalty, and Isten contentment, and the elder prince flexibility.

Twins toss theirs back into the bin, and Aleko goes next. He draws certainty for Kiri and hope for Jayce, then Isten gets contentment again and creativity for the other prince.

The elder prince lets Isten collect his contentments, and shows him the creativity symbol on his new coin - "This one's creativity" - but then tosses it and the previous draw's flexibility coin back in.

Kiri draws change for the elder prince, contentment again for Isten - "This one really likes you, huh?" - charm for Jayce and serenity for Aleko.

(Awww.)

"Those are good ones!" Jayce tells Isten encouragingly, tossing and catching his joy.

Isten smiles tentatively at him.

All the coins go back in the bin. Jayce ruffles Isten's hair.

"Synthesis is one of my favorites," Kiri says approvingly.

Isten ducks slightly when ruffled. His brother puts him down. He resumes clinging to his brother's hand, but smiles at Kiri.

"Come on, let's get you rooms. Do you want to share or have your own?" Kiri holds the door out of the chapel for everyone.

Isten says something quietly, which his brother amplifies and/or translates as, "Can we be next to each other?"

"Sure, easy." There is a back door to the middle wing. Kiri identifies for them her own room, Aleko's next to it, Jayce's across the hall, and two adjacent rooms next to Jayce's that they can take if they want. "I think this might be one of the room pairs with doors between them, is that good?" she asks.

Isten nods. The elder prince says, "Yeah."

"Okay, those can be yours then. I'll tell the head servant at dinner. I'm afraid the cook here isn't as good as the palace one," she adds. "But he's all right and," she adds specifically to the elder prince, "you can help if you want to cook."

"Ooh," he says. "Yeah, I think I will."

"And I can show you the library. Oh, and the fire room. There is an entire room up on the top floor that's fireproof, I practice in it."

"Sure!" says Jayce. "I have a good book of folk tales I'm reading and I can read them to him."

Isten smiles at Jayce. It is less small than most of his previous smiles.

"I have a window seat," adds Jayce. "We can sit in it, come on."

Isten lets go of his brother's hand and follows Jayce.

And Jayce sits him down on the window seat, and climbs in and sits so Isten can see the illustrations in the book, and picks up with the next story.

Aleko, meanwhile, hugs Kiri and then disappears into his room: "Gonna draw for a while."

"So, library," says Kiri, clapping her hands and heading down the hall. "Unless you want to go to the fire room first."

"Oooooooooooh," says the prince. He likes this library. This library looks like fun.

"You can read anything in it you want, but take one of those strips of carbon paper," she says, gesturing at a stack of such strips on a table near the entrance, "and write down what section you got it in, nice and hard so it comes out on both sides, and tuck one in the front of the book and one in the stack where you got it. Then even if you don't put it back yourself, it'll be easy to find the place it came from."

"Huh. Okay," he says. He wonders if most libraries do that sort of thing; he hasn't been to that many.

"Our publicly accessible libraries don't. They have permanent marks about where they're supposed to be inside of the books," says Kiri. "Just this one does, because it doesn't have a full time librarian, only a couple of the house servants who know how to navigate it, and me and cousins."

"Makes sense," he says. He is still gazing admiringly at all the books.

"We can find a good introductory book about Soechin," Kiri suggests, and she goes carefully down the stairs towards the foreign language section.

The prince traipses after her, looking at all the shelves they pass along the way.

The prince looks, too. (Although he is still half thinking about that book on pastry and how soon he would like to come back and borrow it.)

(Kiri giggles.) She finds a book, takes it off the shelf, peers at it, puts it back. Eventually she finds another one that looks more promising. She writes the section on a slip of carbon paper, tucks it into the book, and puts the other in the gap left by the book. "There."

"Ooh, lemme see," says the prince.

"Well, let's go sit down," laughs Kiri. "There's a little place with couches and tables, over this way -" And she leads him through the stacks to a nook that is exactly as described.

Couches! He sits on one. And holds out his hands for the book.

She hands it over and pulls out her notebook.

The prince starts reading. (It's the obvious way to share; of the two of them, Kiri likes writing things down more than he does and can read his mind.)

It works pretty well, although she does peer over his shoulder for more stable looks at the characters while she's getting the alphabet down.

"It's going to be hard to learn the accent this way I guess," says Kiri.

"Well, I'll be able to make more decisions about who they are than you can, probably."

"I think they will pay attention to what order and way I want to learn things if I can fire them."

"...If I can fire them and they aren't answerable very much to anyone else, except maybe my parents, who are not terrible."

The prince giggles. "Yeah."

Kiri puts her head on his shoulder, briefly, then picks it up and goes back to note-taking. She is making a chart about introductory sentence patterns.

The head-putting is nice. He glances at her chart, has a momentary reaction of 'yes of course she is making a chart', and then goes back to reading the book.

"Me neither," says the prince. "I like it!" Foreign languages are new and different and interesting! He wants to learn ten more.

"I think it takes years to learn even one," says Kiri.

He takes a moment to make the connection, and then he laughs. "I didn't expect them to. Maybe somebody else will." But he doubts it.

"I wonder if there's a word for just 'person' in another chapter or if Soechin doesn't have that any more than it has 'yes' or 'no'." She starts attempting to render her name into the alphabet, and then she does Aleko's and Jayce's as best she can, and then she starts writing sentences. I am shorter than Aleko. Jayce is shorter than me. "Do you want to pick a Soechin name? It said there was a list of some common ones in the back."

"Dunno," he says. He has the same complete indifference to Soechin names as to Welchin ones.

Kiri omits to name him at all, and picks out a couple names to write about fictional Soechin people: Nichi is pretty, and Sem is prettier. Sem is taller than that man. Nichi's shirt is white.

It doesn't take very long at all for the prince to be reading the sentences without having to translate them word by word. The repetitive structure helps.

"I think it's time for dinner," giggles the prince. He's hungry too, now that he thinks about it.

"All right." She puts the book, and this particular notebook which is now designated for Soechin practice, on the table, and leads him out through the maze of books, upstairs and to the dining room.

Aleko meets them en route.

Elsewhere, Jayce has noticed the time too. "Hey, you hungry?" he asks Isten.

"Yes," says Isten. Quietly. Isten is a quiet sort of boy.

"Let's go get some dinner, then," says Jayce, sliding out of the window seat.

"Okay!" says Isten. He hops down and follows Jayce, presumably toward dinner.

The elder prince giggles. Isten smiles too, a little.

After there is dinner in everybody, Kiri says, "Fire room could be next."

"Well, I definitely don't wanna miss that."

"D'you want to watch Kiri do things with fire or go read the rest of the stories with me?" asks Jayce.

"I want to read the rest of the stories with you, please," says Isten.

"Okay." Jayce leads him back to his room and picks up where they left off.

Meanwhile, Kiri is headed for the stairwell.

And the elder prince is bouncing along excitedly behind her.

"I dunno," says the prince. "Fire things."

"Did you get the thing where it looks like you have wings to work yet?" asks Aleko.

"Sort of -" And Kiri lifts her arms and closes her eyes, and there are huge fans of flame rising from her shoulders, not quite touching the fabric of her shirt. They ripple in the breeze from the window.

The prince stares in awe. "Pretty," he murmurs.

She lets them dissipate after a moment. "It's harder to do anything really fine-control like that. If I get enough I might be able to do woodburning without any tools, but mostly it's much easier to do big things."

"How big is big?" wonders the prince.

"Just large - swaths of fire. Like half this room. It's also easier to control it if it's close to me, though, so I can light up my hand or something and that's not hard - as long as I don't want it to do tiny details like leaving exactly my knuckles alone."

"If you can make there be fire can you also make there not be fire?" is his next question.

"Yes, I can put it out. It's harder but not that hard."

"Hmm," says the prince.

"I thought about being a one-person fire brigade but it would pretty much take too long for anyone to come find me," she adds. "If I ever run across a burning building I'll fix it but I don't have a good way to show up reliably."

"Mm," he says distractedly. "Yeah."

Kiri sidles closer, having a guess but not one she wants to say aloud in front of Aleko.

If her guess is that he is thinking about her setting him a little bit on fire, she is correct!

"No," she tells him. And then she adds, "I can also do stuff with warmness that isn't actually on fire. It's kind of funny that I can make things cold."

"Basically I can't get too warm - not warm enough to hurt me - so if I just draw the warmth out of a thing, it's cold, and I'm not particularly warmer." She stands back from both boys a bit and closes her eyes again, and then the room is chilly.

"Ooh," says the prince. "That's fun."

"It's more convenient than just having to open and close windows and change clothes all the time if it's too hot or too cold!"

"Yeah, I guess!"

"I want to see how big an area I can do, but I'm worried I'll hurt the plants if I do it outside. I might see if I can freeze a layer on top of a lake or something if I find a lake to play with and it's late enough in winter that it could have frozen, but it hasn't happened to yet."

"Do you have a lake in mind?" he wonders.

Kiri shakes her head. "Why, do you know a good one?"

"Nah. Just wondering."

"The plants all do whatever plants do in winter, too, you could try it on the lawn then," Aleko points out.

(The prince giggles.)

"They don't have to do it that suddenly. Water slows it down - if I freeze part of a glass of water it takes a little while for the rest of the glass to feel cold."

"And you care about not messing up the plants more than you care about seeing how much you can freeze at a time?" says the prince. "What about seeing how cold you can get things, have you tried that? How cold or how warm, I guess."

"I don't have a good way to measure how hot or cold a thing is. I can freeze and boil water," shrugs Kiri. "I can burn wood."

"Can you melt stone or metal?"

"That I haven't tried. I don't have any metal I don't want in its current shape and if I can melt stone I certainly need to do it someplace other than this entirely stone room which is intended to be safe for doing fire things in."

"Well, I'd think so, but there might be a limit. I'd be pretty nervous about going to stand in a volcano or whatever."

"I could lose a whole hand doing that if it turned out I couldn't."

The prince shrugs. "Well, yeah. And you care more about that than I do."

"Yes."

"Uh, who exactly would not care about losing an entire hand?"

"I'd care some," shrugs the prince. "But I'd still try it."

"Well, I'd rather find someplace where I could try it at a bit of a distance, and approach it slowly," snorts Kiri.

"Of course you would," he says, grinning.

"Yeah, I don't actually think I could get Valdin and Alser to put my hand back. I'm pretty sure they can't."

"...huh," he says thoughtfully. "I wonder if they could, though - I mean, if you got all the... body primes working together, if they could do things like that. Have they tried?"

"If they messed it up it might be worse than if they didn't try. If there's ever somebody dying and they're all there though maybe they should..."

"Or if there was somebody who wanted to see if they could get their lost parts back more than they cared if it killed them trying."

"Maybe. If you find one let me know. I'm not sure if Nerine would work with Valdin but I'm not sure you'd need her to rebuild something like a hand? Maybe you would, but maybe it would just fill up with blood by itself if Alser did it right..."

"It'd probably help to have the coru prime there. Otherwise, I dunno - flesh dies without blood, doesn't it? It might help to have you there... it'd kind of be the next best thing to if they could read each other's minds and make sure they were all working together right."

"Yeah. I wonder if Jerist would be useful for a hand. He'd be handy if you were doing a lung probably."

"I guess, yeah. Or if somebody drowned. Coru to get the water out and elay to get the air back in," he giggles.

"Yeah. I kind of wish there were more people who could do our stuff, and then there would be somebody who could put out a fire when a house went up, and people would have chances to try fixing hands or drowning people or whatever, but instead there's just - five of us, and we're not usually going to be where the best places to learn things and help people are."

"She was trying to figure out if she can sense hot things from far away, and then there could be signal flares telling her where to go if something needed done," Ko informs the prince. "But it's less than a quarter mile. Also why she can't be a one-kid fire brigade."

"More primes would be fun," muses the prince. "And handy."

"I think people would probably get up to things they shouldn't, though."

"If I wanted to do bad things it might be very hard to stop me before I got them done even if there were lots of primes around," concedes Kiri.

"Bad things like what?"

"Set things on fire. Melt rocks other people were touching. Freeze people solid. If I didn't want to be obvious I could just have not told anyone I read minds, and done that and hurt people with what I found out."

The prince giggles.

"You have a weird sense of humor."

"Yep!" he agrees.

"What about that is even funny?"

"Melting rocks," he says with a shrug.

Kiri shudders.

"Sorry," says the prince. Possibly wistfully.

"I'm kind of surprised you still have all your hands and stuff."

"I have more interesting things to do than set myself on fire," he shrugs. "Most of the time."

"But if I felt like setting you on fire - which I don't because can you imagine what would happen if you left the Ardelay house with fresh burn scars - then it would totally be a good use of your time."

"Yeah," he says cheerfully. "I mean, especially you because you could put it out, it'd be harder to do that part by myself."

"You could - no, I don't think I'd better give you ideas."

Aleko snorts.

"Awwwwwwww," he says. "Pretty please?"

"It's not even a complicated idea. I don't think you should set yourself on fire and I don't think I should help you."

"If it's an idea about how to set myself on fire safer then if you tell it to me I'll know it if I ever decide to," he says reasonably. "And I won't be any more going to set myself on fire someday than I already was."

Kiri scrutinizes his thoughts, and finally sighs and says, "Water's about as good at putting out the sort of medium-temperature fire you could get your hands on as I am. If you were standing in a bathtub or something you could just drop into the water. But you shouldn't do it."

He giggles. "That's good to know, anyway! And I won't do it while I'm here." He takes her point about coming back from the Ardelay house with new burn scars.

"Thank you."

He grins.