"...divination?"

"Mmhmm! Same as the bracelet."

She looks at the bracelet some more.

"...okay. Good to know. What's it do?"

"Makes you better at reading people during negotiations. And at lie detection, also only during formal negotiations, when you shake hands. You want to try it on?"

" - can I?"

"Course." He slips it off. 

She slips it on. It's too big, obviously, but she still gets the magic. She thinks.

"...I'm not sure I actually know how people do formal negotiations."

"Me neither," he says, in an exaggerated whisper. "But we could try -" he takes her hand. "That bracelet is worth five thousand gold, but I'd pay six for it, since you're family."

"...I am pretty sure you're lying? But it doesn't feel magic."

"Huh. I guess it's probably hard to get me with unfriendly magic, these days - I haven't asked anyone to check."

"That makes sense. Clerics're supposed to be good at throwing stuff off."

"And rangers too, though I don't know if that means people who are both are twice as good. I guess I could ask Abadar. The rest of Abadar."

"I guess so. He's gotta know lotsa stuff."

(She gets to work on eating.)

He eats too. "He knows most everything but half of it's useless. I guess probably not useless to someone who was good at people stuff. But knowing what letters the Chelish nobles write each other doesn't help me figure out whether they're backing down, there's all kindsa - cultural nuance for that."

"...well, you have some Chelish people for that specific thing, right? Although I guess maybe I dunno anything about cultural nuances within the Chelish nobility either."

"More than me, probably. But I'm not gonna drag you into all this. If that wasn't already obvious. I remember being a kid in this palace. You're gonna stay well out of it and run away, eventually."

"I see."

She eats her pasta.

"Korva's helping me. Not with Cheliax stuff, we've been mostly working on Qadira lately, but we'll get there."

"Okay. That's good, then."

"Yeah. Do you need anything -"

"Not really? I guess it'd be good to be able to, like, leave and go to bookstores, and stuff, see if they had anything better about magic. 'Cause there's a lot of theory to read up on, still, and it's kinda hard to know whether you want a book without flipping through it first."

"Been through the library here already?"

"S'mostly in Osirian. Which I'm gonna learn. Just, I don't wanna wait."

"Yeah. We haven't tracked down what remains of that cult yet - we'll get to it, just, it's been a busy couple of weeks - but with guards and anti-scrying, sure. Eighty gold a month, you may not spend it on slaves."

"Thank you."