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?"
"On two occasions I had to threaten people with fire to convince them that Aleko and I were in fact not prostitutes of any kind."
"I didn't spend long enough there to have a dissertation on the subject, but there's a culture of - fetishization of youth. We were not the youngest people around to be solicited for our services while we traveled through Soche-Tas. The country has things to recommend it," she hastens to add. "The food is good, when we managed to make ourselves understood to inkeepers and so on the service economy was impressive - I'm just glad that I had the fire to threaten with."
"You mentioned that Loel understood his power without needing the Marisi River," he says. "Which seemed to imply that most coru primes are not so fortunate. And there is a Serlast forest where I might or might not find help with mine. But you set your bed on fire without any outside assistance whatsoever. Is there some known reason for these differences...? How did Loel get acquainted with his magic?"
"Some magic comes without any help. I was able to track him via weeks of rain, but he wasn't able to do anything conscious until he decided to see if inhaling the pond in his backyard would work just as well as diving into the Marisi. It did, but I can't say that it would have for any Lalindar prime, because these things are idiosyncratic. Ardelays and Dochenzas don't have any specific locations, but the Lalindars have the Marisi River, the Frothens have a particular meadow, and you have your forest. I suspect that if I hadn't been asleep when my great-aunt died, I would have had to enshroud myself in fire on purpose in order to find my magic fully accessible, but I think sleep-igniting my bed did the trick, thankfully. I'm not sure if Dochenzas tend to have awakening moments at all."
"And for the property values of the friend he left the house to on his way out. But if you haven't noticed any magic at all yet, my first guess is that you need the Serlast forest. My second guess, if that doesn't do anything, is that Sarelle was mistaken, though."
"I wouldn't say I haven't noticed any magic," he says. "Just that I'm not yet sure whether the things I've noticed are magic or not."
"Yeah, some of it's hard to describe. Another reason not much gets written down. I've invented a couple dozen words expressly to describe magic. I guess if I compile a book on the subject I'll have to open with a glossary."
"Vaguely, of necessity. I mean, the one I made up as a shorthand for 'the warmth that people emanate which manages somehow to serve as a medium of transmission for their thoughts but which can't be interrupted by conventional alterations to temperature, only by sufficiently full-coverage intervening objects or sufficient distance' is pretty straightforward, but I also have a few that I don't even know how I'd begin to define. They're the slightly better differentiated equivalent of 'you know, that one thing' only designed for notes to self and not for evoking anything in other people."
"So it would be a bit of a project. With any luck the rash of bad luck that has been afflicting primes in the past quintile will leave me alone."
"It would be any luck. If I had large quantities of luck, there would not have been such an issue in the first place, I would not have had to make two trips abroad in close succession, Auney would have merely broken bones again, and Patience wouldn't be preparing to bury and succeed her grandfather."
"Let's stop at the first temple we see and see if we can get you some luck, when we're home," suggests Aleko.