The Ardelay twins loiter in the palace for a few days, then fall back to the Chialto house, in plenty of time to receive any prompt reply to the correspondence Kiri sent out when they arrived in the city.
Under the seal is a drop of blood that is still fresh, and only begins drying when the letter is opened. The inside of the envelope is also covered in a complex swirling pattern of thin red-brown lines, which are very likely to be blood that has been coaxed into soaking into the paper just so and then allowed to dry afterward.
Kiri,
Still working on watermarks, but I managed this. If the blood under the seal is fresh, nobody's messed with it.
I wouldn't mind meeting Ekador and Sarelle and Patience. They can bring assistants if they really want to. I'd rather you were there, but I can handle it if you're not.
I finished my moat! I love it to pieces. It is my favourite moat. Come by and admire it sometime, with or without extra visitors.
Loel
(And then, she promises Aleko, they can go home and stay there for a while.)
She writes Patience a letter, and then goes looking for Sarelle first.
"Hi!" she says cheerfully. "Who're you?"
"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."
"Hmm. Yes," she says. "About my immediate surroundings, if nothing else important is going on, and usually even if it is. That is part of why I told you that I would mind my own personal space, when we first met. It does not take very much extra effort to always be aware of exactly how far away from you I am."
"It sounds like it'd be necessary. Did you notice an expansion at all when you inherited? I did - I can barely remember what it was like before, but I have notes asserting that there was a jump in sensory space once it had constant input from all sources of warmth and especially nearby human beings."
"Yes," she says. "Although I haven't been thinking of it that way. I have more or less always, certainly for as long as I can clearly remember, had enough attention to distribute it among all available senses with enough left over to analyze as needed, all before touching on the sort of everyday mental activity most people seem to indulge in. That has remained true while the size of 'all available senses' has grown."
"I've never had opportunity to test if my space expands to fit extra more than a couple of people at a time if they crowd in around me," muses Kiri. "There's enough room for, say, Aleko and Jayce simultaneously without being too crowded; I don't know what would happen if I also added Loel and Patience, both of whom have also been known to allow it."
She reaches a hand toward Kiri, past the approximate perimeter of her range.
There is a lot going on in Sarelle Dochenza's mind.
The biggest and most complicated layer, but also the one that gets the least conscious focus, is situational awareness. Inside the closed carriage, her visual universe is limited to Kiri, the carriage's interior, and what she can see out the windows - but she pays attention to all of it. She is, as implied, constantly aware of the distance between herself and Kiri. She is listening to Ekador and Aleko, who are currently experiencing a lull in their conversation. She is listening to the horses, all of whom seem healthy and unimpaired - but she would notice if one missed a step. She can smell the elemental affiliations of everyone present, hunti strongly flavoured with sweela from Ekador and torz from Aleko and sweela from Kiri and her own elay with hints of sweela and overtones of hunti, each tied into a unique individual scent representing the person themselves. She can also smell faded traces of everyone who has passed along this road in the last few days. On a more mundane level, her nose tells her what kinds of soap everyone uses to wash themselves and their clothing, more things about the state and identity of the horses, what plants they are passing, the quality and origin of the dust on the road, and miscellaneous other details. A bird calls in the distance and she identifies its probable species. Through her magic she is aware of the patterns of local air movement, and sometimes absently tweaks the breezes to change which sounds and smells are coming to her more clearly than others.
After all that come the things on which she is consciously focused. She is watching Kiri to note exactly when Kiri reacts to the read, so she can update her estimate of Kiri's range, and to see what Kiri's reaction to the read is; she is ready to pull away if it seems prudent. She is curious about what will happen, and deliberately suspending any concrete guesses until Kiri offers her some information. Since so much of her attention is on Kiri in particular, the Kiri-related parts of her situational awareness are especially in focus, which raises her background awareness of several minor conclusions she has made during the trip based on immediately available data - speculations about where Kiri obtained this or that piece of clothing, theories about the possible origins of this small hole in the end of a sleeve or that scuff on the toe of a shoe.
"...Scuffed my shoe on a corner of a table leg," offers Kiri. "That's a lot to sort out but it's more just available than it is intrusive or even particularly distracting. I can get sort of a - summary - of the whole thing without it taking up that much more of my attention than I use on other people, but getting detail requires focusing, it's like you're a complicated moving painting. It might be harder to affect how much or little attention I'm focusing on you if you were closer, but this range would do if you wanted to communicate something to me, I can definitely spot at a glance the general outline of what your primary attention is on."
'Corner of a table leg' fits in the general category of explanations that Sarelle was favouring. She nods and files the information away, along with the knowledge of how far away her hand was when Kiri reacted to reading her. She is pleased that it's not overhwelming; this way seems more convenient for, as Kiri suggests, communicating things. (She is also pleased that she is noticeably different from most people; it's a direct confirmation of a theory that she could not previously have confirmed.)
"My sample size isn't huge. There's a bigger gap between you and anybody I've read before for long enough to register observations other than 'oh crap', than there is between any two of those people, but that's only about a dozen other subjects," cautions Kiri.
Sary is presently wondering whether there is still worthwhile information to be obtained from this experiment, since she does not care to hold her hand out like this indefinitely. She concludes that there doesn't seem to be, but waits to see if Kiri has any comment to make.
She produces a notebook and starts scribbling cipher in it. After a moment she pauses. "Ekador has a perfect visual memory and for this reason has been avoiding looking at even my ciphered writing - I don't think you're quite the same situation, but all the same should I avoid displaying it in your direction?"
The moat is very pretty. Loel contacted the people Kiri recommended, and the result is a deep, broad channel circling his estate, walled and floored in the same yellow stone as the house within and the mountain on which it all rests. The water in the channel is so clear that someone standing on the edge can look down through all fifteen feet of it and see the rippling patterns lightly etched into the stone blocks on the bottom. It is thirty feet across, and the single wooden bridge is twenty feet wide, anchored at either end by thick chains but left to float freely in the water. The whole thing could reasonably be called decorative... but that bridge looks like the kind of thing a coru prime might have designed to be swept away at need.
When they arrive, they will find Loel sitting at a little table in his garden, next to the path that leads from the bridge up to the house, playing with envelopes. Mercifully, there seems to be no blood involved this time.
She picks one up and inspects it. It seems to have been dyed a faint blue, shading lighter and darker in places according to no particular pattern. When she opens it, the slip of paper inside shows the same pattern, and is just slightly stuck to the inside of the envelope.
"Clever," she remarks.
"Wet," she reports. "Interesting."
He strolls up to Kiri and hugs her, thinking cheerful thoughts about how happy he is to see her and Aleko (lots) and be introduced to the other primes (not as lots, but still plenty).
"The thing where it's a big deal if somebody doesn't wear them. In Thiyec that's a weird thing to care that much about. I mean, imagine moving from here to someplace where people react to, I don't know... to somebody walking around without shoes on, the way people here would react to somebody walking around naked. It takes some adjusting. I have to remind myself that if somebody comes up the road and sees me not wearing enough by local standards, they're gonna be upset."
"I'm the only one who inherited unusually young - late teens, early twenties is the normal age to pick up a primacy. Jerist lasted longer than most and Auney could have been prime for another fifty years if it weren't for the ill-fated flying experiments, Nerine and Valdin both should have had at least a couple more decades in them apiece but had to tear each other apart. Alser's largely a coincidence. We're clustering because the deaths clustered - my age is mostly happenstance as far as that goes."