"That is exactly the sort of thing Cricket might call somebody - where were you?"

"Farlas. We weren't as helpful as I'd have liked, I know a lot more now. Infrastructure was a challenge."

"The supply line must have been brutal even if you weren't actually harassed by the opposing side, wow."

"They stopped boats with food sometimes and requisitioned it. I would barely even have begrudged them it - both sides were starving - except I had to watch people die when the boats came in empty. We now have nice detailed famine relief plans for every nation we could conceivably get food to if disaster strikes, and I pop around the budget like a vulture sneaking away funding for it. The plans will fall apart on first contact, of course, but I think they're still worth having."

"Tempted to say you should've put fishermen on the boats and reloaded the cargo holds after they were cleaned out, don't know how well that would've worked in practice."

"It would have worked for communities on the coast, at least; we couldn't have gotten fish very far inland. We could encourage people to move to the coast if that's where the food is but displaced populations during a famine complicate everything else, there's more disease and more violence and food distribution becomes more complicated. My father replicated the familiar fountain, as you probably know, and one of his long-term projects is something like that for people, so we can land with some spellbinders and at least stop the death." 

"Yes, I knew how he did that, I got to cross it off my list - people are conceptually harder because they don't have a guaranteed healthy state to refer back to, though, can't just say 'cause this entity to be as it was when it was bound'."

"Yep. Though if you could do just that then you could at least help spellbinders and maybe more people'd be spellbinders, being reset to childhood would be annoying but one imagines over time the culture'd adapt to stop assuming child-looking people demand supervision and can't do trustworthy work."

"Actually A Child Me would have exploited that so much."

"Lots of people will, and I think all for the good. I was lucky to have my father. He had a very unhappy childhood and so was very determined to give us a lot of independence in ours."

"My parents are lovely people but they do have a tendency to do the Default Parent Thing whenever it's not made extremely clear to them exactly why they should do something else. They do use different templates of default, so I got some wiggle room that way, and some by getting good at explaining why they should do things."

"Do you want kids someday?"

"I don't have a really strong opinion on that either way qua itself, it'll depend on what kind of life I find myself in when the question's more immediate."

Nods. "My father was about seven himself when he decided he wanted seven. I have no idea what it'd be like to be that sure."

"I think Raney - my mother - would have wanted more, she loves kids, but she finds the actual logistics of minding people outside an institutional setting where other people fill the snack cupboard and pay the bills difficult even with her familiar helping, and she never remarried anyway."

Mitros' father disapproves of divorce. Luckily he's holed up in his room not paying any attention to anything and may not even attend the wedding if there is one. He changes the topic to what it's like to run a spellbinding shop and earnestly questions her for the rest of the meal.

It is not especially interesting, but she's willing to tell him about how she found hexmakers who don't want to touch retail and fills out her stock with their stuff - she can only make one hex a day herself - and about how people kept buying so many clocks and she keeps raising the price and they still keep flying off the shelves, and about what phrases Cricket needed in order to mind the till.

It is especially interesting! He is baffled that people want clocks so much, do they do something beyond the obvious?

"They're just clocks! They keep time, they set alarms. I think I'm the only person in town who sells hex clocks but they're not that much better than the mechanical sort."

"Well, you know, now I have to buy one and see what all the fuss is about."

"You can certainly do that," she laughs. "But I promise I'm not withholding some amazing clock secret. Maybe that's why they sell, everyone thinks I must be."

"I might in fact make that problem worse, if it is one. My apologies in advance."

"I can just raise the price again."

"Oh, dear. How much is a clock going to cost me? I do not in fact command the wealth of the nation, yet, you know."

"Non-royalty can and do buy them! It's six hundred, eight fifty if you want one of the ones with the prettier casing and fancy chime because that I outsource."