"Oh well. There's not - learnable magic, exactly, at home. You can learn to recognize magic plants - if it doesn't look like something that normally grows in a place, it's probably magic, and tasting it will tell you what it does - but that's not the same thing."

"Huh. Tasting strange plants at home usually just gets you sick. Unless you're in the Nevernever, in which case it might turn you into a toad. I'm pretty good at avoiding toadwort, though."

"Well, if you're wrong and you mistake a poisonous plant for a magic one it will make you sick, but you don't have to taste them very much, and you can learn all you like about what plants ought to be there normally first."

"Ah." Ari sits and enjoys his coffee. It's very good coffee. He likes this bar, even though there's nobody to fight.

"The person who was keeping me found and sold magic plants for a living and taught me what could be taught without my leaving the tower. It turned out no one else knew about the tasting thing, even though there were magic plants in the garden at the palace."

"Oh, I thought that'd be common knowledge or something. So you learned magic from your- Gothel. I guess that's... another similarity. Fun."

"Well, but yours wasn't evil. Anyway, she was reading my diary, she knew what I'd find suspicious, if she wouldn't teach me I would have wanted to know why."

"Well, it's still a bit uncomfortable to learn of the many and varied ways in which my mother was like your evil kidnapper witch-lady."

"Sorry. I can stop talking about Gothel if you'd rather?"

"No, it's alright, I'm just being touchy. I guess you were enthusiastic about the magic, then? Enough that it would have been suspicious of your m- Gothel not to teach you, at least."

"Well, I couldn't go find any plants myself, but I could come up with creative ways to use the ones she brought back. And it was something to do. She made very sure I never ran out of things to do to the point where I might go looking for them."

"I'm starting to think that keeping a magical child locked in a tower is more difficult than just raising one like a normal person. Or like a nomadic faerie, though I think that's easier than most ways."

"Well, I was the princess, and my hair is highly recognizable, so she couldn't keep me among other people. She could have left the country, but she'd have had to get very far away before there was no chance I'd be recognized and brought home, or just outright kidnapped again."

"Oh, yeah, I'm sure she had her reasons, but- just seems like a lot of trouble. Much rather just raise any children I somehow end up with as perfectly ordinary Canadian wizards. Easier that way."

"Canadia is your country?"

He laughs. "It's Canada, I pronounced it the same way when I first arrived there. Nice place, very polite people. Usually cold, which is a taste of home. How about you? Where do you reign over in Magic Plant World?"

"The country's called Corona, but my parents are still alive and I'm very much behind in general education so I'm not in charge of anything yet."

"Ah, general education, the bane of us hermit-children. When I arrived in Vancouver I could tell you the proper form of address for anything from a shelleycobb to the royal triumvirate together, but I punched a taxi in the face because I thought it was going to eat me. Taxis," he adds belatedly, "being large metal carriages that move very fast with people inside of them for complicated reasons that I don't really understand." He grins. "I won the fight."

"Carriages in Canada have faces?"

"Nah, just the general front area. Faces are an abstract concept. Anyway, I punched it and it broke and my natively Canadian friend Sally was very embarrassed on my behalf."

"Most of the things I'm having to learn are more social. I had enough books to learn about - carriages and the like. My friend helps, with the telepathy moss."

"Social stuff is hard! It's still kind of weird to talk to people without an underlying context of social hierarchy, I can only guess how weird it is to talk to people who aren't the one and only person you had ever met. And friends are good for helping like that! What's your friend like, apparently he helped you out a window?"

"He was being chased in the forest where the tower is, and he climbed up because he figured a doorless tower couldn't be inhabited and it would be a safe place to rest, but I was there. And he was too tired to climb back down right away. I gave him a muffin and then made him leave and promise not to tell anyone where I was, because I was scared - Gothel was out at the time - and he climbed most of the way but then he fell and -" Skip skip - "couldn't leave right then, and then he had the idea that I might be the lost princess, so I climbed my hair down and went with him to the capital."

"Aw, adventures! And that's how you learned about your illustrious parentage, I guess."

"Yes. And my more recognizable name. Everybody except my friend and my parents and the ones of the palace staff I've introduced myself to already knows me as Claribel."