He relaxes slightly, then gets upset again. "I want to have more than five more spells by the time I'm fourteen!"

"Well, I didn't practice very much before I was fourteen!" she says. "It's pretty rare to start seriously doing magic that early."

"I bet here everyone will want to."

"Perhaps."

"Teach me Prestidigitation."

"I already did," she says. "If you want me to go over it again you will have to say please."

"I just need the scroll to say it from, then, but I don't remember it - I tried first thing this morning -"

"Why don't you want to say please? It's a perfectly nice word."

"Because it feels like saying I'm - in your hands, or existing by your leave, and have to be grateful enough or I don't get to keep doing it."

"I'm not asking you to say, 'please let me exist'. That would be horrible. You don't have to ask anybody to let you exist, or if you do something's gone very wrong. Saying please here acknowledges that I don't actually have to do the thing you want me to do, and you hope I will find a reason to do it of my own accord. It's sort of the opposite of 'do it because I'm scary'."

"I'm not scary."

"I was pretty scared of you the first day I was here. I'm not scared of you now, but that's because I have been reassured that I don't actually have to do whatever you say, and that means that you should say please."

"You should do whatever I say."

"Why?"

"My father's the King."

"So?"

"So it means that he has to settle all the hard disagreements and spend most of his time mediating things and advising people and figuring out how to make the most of Valinor and keep everyone safe while letting people do things as much as he can and he doesn't get to spend any time being a father and in exchange for that people help him be good at it by doing what he says, when he says something, and they're supposed to do what I say too."

"Nothing about that sentence explains why it extends to you, though. It explains why there's a particular reason to spend time with you above and beyond how charming you occasionally are, because it's picking up his slack, but not why people should do whatever you say."

"I'm supposed to help with the being in charge of things, once I'm bigger."

"Okay. Once you're doing that, there will be a pretty good reason for people to do what you say. But I don't think you need practice not saying please, or even that being in the habit of saying please would make you worse at helping if you did pick it up."

"Please show me the scroll for Prestidigitation."

"All right." And she pats him on the shoulder and goes and gets it and walks him through its contents again.

He spends the next hour delightedly making colors dance and the floor get sandy so he can dance in it barefoot and then clean again.

He can now summon sand, color it, and draw in it, and he's making elaborate paintings.