"Can't just slip him something to sign with a meal?"

"Last time I tried bringing things to him he said he didn't want to sign things we hadn't discussed and I said he wouldn't discuss them and he said it was a waste of his time and I wholeheartedly agreed and said that then he shouldn't be King. He said 'It's all yours, Mitros'. Which is lovely. Or, well, would be."

"Why's it so hard to rearrange things to allow single people to inherit, it's not like you're short on heirs presumptive..."

"I know! Ruler picks an heir when they ascend to the throne and is obliged to keep an heir listed officially, fair enough. But marriage? Perhaps I'll change it, but I have to have it in the first place." Antir flutters down from the ceiling and ruffles his hair on the landing. Right, he probably should vent less in public. "Sorry, this is hardly the time or place."

"That wasn't my objection," Antir says privately.

"Oh? What was your objection?"

"You can't ask a girl out after complaining to her at length about how inconvenienced you are by requiring a wife!"

"Should I be asking Iobel out."

"Well, yes."

"When did I put you in charge?"

"I can tell you when you should have done. A decade ago."

He tosses his head so his hair nearly dislodges her from his shoulder. "Her complaint, it transpires, is not that this isn't the time and place but that I should have asked you to join me over lunch sometime before disclosing my dreadfully vested interest."

"...I think I like this way around better, actually, easier to disentangle."

"I shall keep that in mind. Lunch sometime? I know some nice places on your end of town if Cricket'll resent holding down your shop on his own all day."

"He'd better not, he knows where his chicken viscera come from, but my end of town's still convenient if I'm not passing up something unforgettable a boatride away..."

"Nothing comes to mind, and I'd like to see your shop. Fourthday?"

"Sure. The shop's right up next to Rosewater canal, sixteenth dock."

He smiles. "I'll find you!"

"I'll look forward to it!"

And he talks to everyone at the party who should be talked to and leaves satisfied if very distracted and goes home to look up everything that can be found about Iobel Swan.

Iobel Maryah Swan is in fact the daughter of a police officer and a schoolteacher who divorced when she was a baby. Her school records (she got in on her mother's career, not for the usual class background) indicate that the fractured family is on fine terms; most of her absences that last longer than a day are marked as being for a visit to her father out in South Fork. (The ones shorter than a day are to go see a healer because she's broken her arm/wrenched her ankle/etcetera.) According to her taxation records she was a teacher's assistant - not for her mother, for someone teaching higher grades - for two years, reporting almost all of her income as savings, and then she established her shop, which is right where she says it is in downtown Emavan, and moved into the apartment above it, alone. She has several publications in spellbinding journals and books, mostly healing spell variants (she won a small award for one that works on head injuries).

And her long-term ambitions are teleportation and immortality, the latter of which she's happy to share notes on if they could possibly help, and unless he's very much misreading her she wants to be Queen.

He has intensely mixed feelings, but the one that wins out is that he's gotten very lucky. 

She's in her shop on Fourthday, scribbling on spellchart paper behind the counter.

He comes in and beams at her - exactly the way he smiles at everybody, but she might not know that - and then turns around to look at what's on sale. "Hello, Iobel. This is a nice place. Very impressive."

"Thanks!"

There's the boxes that hold more than they should - and variants on the same hex, including a water pitcher, icebox, and wardrobe model - and the clocks she mentioned and a couple kitchen implements and lights and an image-copier and other more commonplace hexes. There's books. She puts Cricket on the counter and murmurs to him in idiolect, then comes around herself. She is not quite as dressed up as she was for her great-aunt's party; she only has one outfit that nice - but she does look a little more polished than she probably does by default.

"You look lovely. Thanks for watching the shop for us, Cricket. Has he come up with an insulting epithet yet?"

"He actually hasn't decided what he doesn't like about you yet, but he is confident there will be something."

Cricket licks his paw unconcernedly.

Mitros has a guess. He does not offer it. He compliments her work and walks her over to a nice place a few blocks from here with Lathalind-inspired food - "I really liked it there!" and asks how she found the rest of the party.

"It's more fun when I can dance! I don't get invited to a lot of those things - I'm only distantly related - I think the last one I went to I was, what, thirteen, I wound up in the library accidentally dumping her Red Century literature collection on my head and then sitting there slightly battered reading about provincial intrigue."

He laughs. "I can dance fine and that sounds like a tempting evening. When I was about the same age I was fascinated by those stories, I could always think of more effective ways to be evil than anyone in history and I made up my mind not to acquaint myself with any real civil wars less I be irrepressibly tempted to mail in suggestions."

"Oh no!" giggles Iobel. "I've tended to assume that for one reason or another my clever ideas, evil or not, wouldn't work - there was some constraint elided over in the history books, say, or they tried it and it just didn't pan out like I was imagining and in fact it was so unimpressive that no one wrote the attempt down because not everyone can be an obsessive notetaker - and do not think I would be tempted to assist quite like that unless the morality of the affair was more one-sided than usual by a long shot."

"When i was nineteen I took on a role organizing famine relief in an area that had actually seen a war, and it thoroughly drove out any temptation to tamper. Save to put a stop to that kind of nightmare as quickly as possible. Sometimes obvious things that would work really aren't tried, though, incentives not to try anything that'd get you titled The Grandiose Idiot in history books or by peoples' cats."