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Sarelle and the Ardelay twins go to their inn. They are greeted there the following day by Ekador apparently-Serlast, who says he'll be another two days settling up his affairs and then they can all go to Welce.
Ekador packs quite lightly for someone who's leaving the country on short notice and otherwise bears negligible personality resemblance to Loel. The carriage isn't particularly crowded as they make their way back to the port to find a boat leading back to Welce.
"There are three stops to make," Kiri tells him as they drive. "Although we'll land close to Chialto, I don't think that should be the first place we go. You'll have a much smoother go of taking over as uncontested prime if you can demonstrate at least minor magical power on demand - I don't think fielding questions of your legitimacy is anyone's idea of a good time and it would be better to have more than Sarelle's word to lean on. It doesn't help that anyone but her will mistake you for sweela. The Serlast estate is a couple of days by carriage from Chialto, there's a forest on the property, it's supposed to be special to the Serlasts, and going and having a walk around it might give you an idea of how to perform some minor visible magic."
"Might not. Loel figured out how to do magic without jumping into the Marisi River," shrugs Aleko.
"It might not. But it's worth a try if you don't have an epiphany before we get there," says Kiri. "Anyway, some of your cousins are living at the Serlast estate - off the top of my head, one of Valdin's children, his younger sister, and one of his grandsons, but I don't know how you're related to the family so I don't know who they are to you. You can kick them out if you want, but I recommend getting to know them and soliciting their help with the family business, and you have plenty of room to continue to board them. The Chialto house of the Serlasts was empty last I heard, but I'd be willing to bet you can re-hire Valdin's old servants if you want them, and you're entitled to maintain your own suite at the palace, too. You can divide your time between these places more or less however you please, although if you neglect the palace then the royal family may start issuing pointed invitations, and you might want to become acquainted with Prince Isten in particular, as he is heir to the throne and it's his succession you're necessary to ratify later."
"Isten's eleven," Aleko adds. "Coru, quiet."
"Questions?" Kiri inquires. "Do you want me to write any of that down, possibly in chart format?"
calescent
calescent
"By and large Welchin people can tell by looking. Imperfectly - you I'd guess sweela, Sarelle I'd guess hunti, people mistake our father for torz and he's hunti. But we can tell, and if people make mistakes they tend to be the same mistakes for a given person. You carry yourself in what comes off as a sweela sort of way."
pyrophyte
"Why? What is it about me that comes off that way? Or is this more magic, and therefore not subject to rational analysis?"
calescent
"It's hard to pin down details. The fact that we can't do it nearly as readily with foreigners suggests that it's either more and subtler magic or that there's just a tendency to obey general stereotypes in either an informative or a consistently misleading way. Which you've either managed to inherit or have coincidentally acquired; it's not like we never produce guesses about non-Welchin people."
pyrophyte
"I find it hard to imagine that I naturally conform to a stereotype of which I had never seen an example before this week. Magic seems the simpler explanation."
calescent
"Possible. It's not that magic completely defies rational analysis, you know, it's just that the samples are so small. The only magic you can keep trying all day long in arbitrary quantities if you like without taking risks with live subjects or a landscape are the random blessings."
pyrophyte
"I see. Tell me again about the random blessings," he says. "What is their function? What is their purpose?"
calescent
"You have a bin of coins - although it also works if you write them all down and cut them up, it doesn't have to be coins - with the symbols printed on them. You draw them and whatever you get is informative over the next unspecified time period, with birth blessings 'lasting' the longest. I find birth blessings' accuracy convincing, myself, but they're the sort of thing that people could wind up conforming to half on purpose, or concocting stories for even if they didn't fit. More striking is that if I sit in front of a full bin of blessings and pull out every single coin one by one, I will not touch a 'grace' until those are the only three left."
liakoura
"Also works if she makes me sit there for fifteen minutes doing it for her. Half the time you don't draw for yourself, and you get three strangers to do your kids' blessings."
pyrophyte
"And where did they come from? Why that specific list of forty-three blessings in six categories?"
calescent
"I'm not sure. I tried inventing other blessings, and obviously if I put slips of paper with them written down in a bowl, I could pick from them at random, but I didn't get any dramatic results - I couldn't think of anything that obviously ought to languish at the bottom of the bowl the way 'grace' does, for instance. Haven't picked up that experiment in awhile."
calescent
"I'd have to look them up. I have a list in a notebook, but didn't bring that one on this trip."
pyrophyte
"Ah," he says. "Hmm. I'd try to invent some on the spot, but I don't think I fully understand the categories. And I don't have any convenient flaws to test against."
liakoura
"I think one of 'em was 'vitality'," says Aleko vaguely. "She didn't put them in any categories, I don't know if that would've mattered. The extraordinary blessings work fine."
pyrophyte
"I would be inclined to balance the numbers, if it were my experiment. Eight to eight to eight to eight to eight to three. In case that ratio is somehow significant."
liakoura
"Yeah, numbers are kind of a thing but Kiri doesn't think they do anything in general. Threes and eights and fives too."
calescent
"I don't know if they interact with the functionality of blessings. I'm pretty sure they have nothing to do with how many children it is reasonable to have or anything."
pyrophyte
"Have you tried drawing from a deliberately incomplete set of blessings? Does it seem to function normally? I suppose your particular test involves going through them all regardless, but do you know if it matters how many there are to start?"
calescent
"I haven't tried an incomplete set. However, while the usual minimum to have a chapel is three of each kind, the big temples have huge bins, people sometimes walk off with their draws and leave tithes to mint more, there are 'ghost coins' that are so worn that you can't read what they used to be, and overall I'd be surprised if they were consistently evenly distributed, though they might always have at least one of everything."
calescent
"I'm not sure if there's a chapel on the Serlast property, but your Chialto house is a block from a temple," she says. "And one of the Ardelay holdings is a blessings mint, if you just want to order a quantity of them to mess with at home I can give you a discount if you'll write up your findings and let me put them in my libraries."