"Now I'm imagining you arguing with a horse. The Malinquan accent makes it funnier."

"'No, you may not have any more oats!'" intones Aleko in a fake Malinquan accent. "'But I shall die of deprivation without them!'" he replies to himself, dropping this accent in favor of a vaguely neighing effect on the vowels.

Ekador giggles.

"I see," he says. "And here I was thinking that since I now live in Welce it might be time to try to speak the language without obvious foreign influence. I had not accounted for the entertainment value."

"Well, you're completely understandable, and kicking the accent would probably be really hard," shrugs Aleko. "And it doesn't make you sound like a hick the way a hills accent or something would."

"How fortunate."

"Patience has a bit of a hills accent but she manages, possibly via magic, to not sound like a hick while she talks in it."

He laughs.

"Maybe it's because she's so happy all the time and the stereotype of hills people is that they are drab and lifeless? That might be it. She might not be happy when you meet her though on account of dying grandfather."

"Yes."

Meanwhile, in the carriage: "It'd seem like you and Tia are very little alike, except in the obvious visual sense."

"On innumerable levels," she agrees. "We are both very intelligent and that is just about where the similarities end."

"So she doesn't do your finding-stuff-out-even-pre-magic thing?"

"She does not. Or only in a very different context. Her specialty is the sort of thing the Dochenzas traditionally get up to - inventions, engineering, mechanical cleverness."

"Yeah, that sounds very little like - detective work. Or whatever you'd call it."

"'Detective work' is a reasonable term, if a little narrow."

"Narrow how?"

"I do not only find out the kinds of things that detective work is for."

"What else?"

"Not so much. Example?" suggests Kiri.

"Examples," she says, "would also be too narrow. I suppose I could put it like this... the same thing that I do with information I have already sought out, to solve problems or answer questions, I am also doing the rest of the time with whatever information I happen to come across about anything. I don't stop doing it except when I am thoroughly occupied with something else. And it is very hard to thoroughly occupy me."

"And this goes on even when there isn't something in particular you need to know, you're just - assembling data as it comes into your possession, in the background?"