"Thank you. Come on, then, Rabiah -"

"Yes your grace." She follows him, baby in one arm.

It's cool inside the dome. The houses are all expensive and pretty. People kneel for them, but don't particularly gawk; probably the princes are not a rare sight here.

"Where are we going?"

"I live in the palace. They should be able to arrange a room for you and for the baby. It seems like you might need a little time - to process everything that happened -"

"Wouldn't hurt. ... Then what?"

"Honestly I am still figuring that out. Usually I pick women more systematically and make sure they like me and so on. It just - seemed like such a pointlessly tragic situation. And it wouldn't have happened if you hadn't been singing so beautifully."

"I got to go to one of your concerts one time for my fifteenth birthday."

"When was that? What did I sing?"

She remembers the tunes of her favorites. Hums the instrumental intro and chimes in with the lyric line after the first two bars.

Oh, that's lovely, they can sing it together.

Yeah!!! They can!!! That's awesome!!!

He seems delighted about it too! And they can go into the palace and to his rooms, which are shaped like a concert hall and rather stuffed with instruments, and he can teach her another melody line for that song, and apparently forget entirely that he said she might need some time to rest or something.

That's okay, she has also totally forgotten! She has her arms full of baby but looks longingly at the instruments.

He can summon someone and ask them to hold the baby so he can show her the instruments.

She is slightly nervous about handing over her baby. She will watch the person for a minute to see if they are going to leave with the baby.

But then INSTRUMENTS! She has played the lyre before but that's it.

He has a lyre and a harp and a dulcimer and a citole and a glockenspiel and a clarinet and a flute and a pipe organ and a rebab and a couple things he's working on that don't have a name.

"You invent your own? Wowwwww."

"Sometimes an instrument just doesn't have quite the range you want, or quite the sound, and you can just figure out what it's missing and try a different variant."

She plucks a string. "Oooh - do you carve them yourself -"

"Some of them aren't physically possible and I have them conjured but some of them, yes."

"Ooooh, which?"

See this whole line of variant citoles, some of them physically possible to make and some of them not, they all sound different.

"Oooh, this one is my favorite."