"Are you suggesting I come up with ways to cheat the commitment mechanisms heads of state apparently secretly use sometimes, or just pointing out that I can't trust other people with them?"

"I'm pointing out that they are not foolproof, and this has implications for whether you should use them or rely on them."

"Consider me appropriately warned. I don't even know exactly how the thing works. What's on your reading list?"

"Raney recommended me some historical fiction and I have a collection of short biographies of familiars who distinguished themselves without being footnotes to their binders."

"Oooh. Know any familiars who should help run the country? Antir considers the extent of her obligations to be swatting me in the face when I deserve it, and Cricket doesn't seem the type."

"He's really not. Raney's caiman isn't either. The woodchuck across the street from me is very competent but at bookkeeping, not at anything more grandiose than that."

"Perhaps I should get to know my relatives' familiars better. Or ask my father, who can already talk to a lot of them."

"Familiars are like a quarter of the population and they get almost completely ignored except as accessories to their binders, and the language barrier makes it so hard to fix, and I don't understand why they can't pick up Marlese by exposure the way humans can..."

"Shall we drag Dad out of his rooms again, he had all kinds of hypotheses about that..."

"If you think he'd appreciate it, I suppose, although it seems likely to flirt with the 'so about Cricket's language' question..."

"I think he'd appreciate it and it'd be good for him, but yes, there's that risk. Suppose we could keep Cricket away until the wedding."

"I was pretty much planning on that anyway, I don't have a good explanation for how he acts around you and 'oh he hates everyone' won't explain how disproportionate it is."

"And the rumor mill'd reach fascinating conclusions - not the right one, but nothing I like...want to go interrupt whoever brings him lunch?"

"Sure."

So they interrupt the servants and bring in Fannar's lunch and he sets aside his work and raises an eyebrow at them. "Yes?"

"Mitros says you have theories about why familiars don't pick up human or each other's languages by exposure, which would be relevant information to any attempt to integrate them better into society."

"Yes," he says. "So people vary in language-learning, individually over their lifetime and between individuals, but familiars aren't just at the unusually-bad end of that. They just lack a lot of capacities we have. You can do tests of retention of new vocabulary and retention of new syntax, and I have -" he shuffles through his desk. "Eventually I want a syntax-learning spell - language learning's ridiculously big - and I think that'd solve some problems. Here you go.  Tests of language learning in humans and familiars."

"Ooh, thanks!"

"I wondered if idiolects are structurally different from Marlese in some way that could explain things, but they aren't, typically, and familiars can't be taught other idiolects with particular ease either."

"I've noticed that, it's very strange. Typically? What about atypically?"

"I know twelve fluently," he says, "and twenty well enough to draw conclusions from, and they're almost all from one family so even if there are persistent tendencies I could comment on that might just suggest that there are inherited commonalities, though there aren't any particular striking ones - speaking of which, you have got to teach me yours..."

"I'm afraid I really can't recommend talking to my cat. He's not a very nice cat."

"I don't learn peoples' languages because I want to talk to people," he says exasperatedly. "You might have noticed I barely talk to people anyway. I want to learn the languages because they're beautiful and we don't really understand them."

"I also have a habit of using a written version for private notes, so I'd rather not teach it, or at least I'd need longer to think about it."

"Alright," he sighs. "Well, here's a table of similarities between the ones I speak - subject-noun-adjective ordering, agglutinative or inflective or other - I really want to get some from people not born in Marlese-speaking territory, too -"