:Hopefully we'll hear eventually:

Wordless acknowledgement. Amshalan seems to be deep in thought about something.

:...I am honestly also tempted by the Queen plan: she sends eventually. :You'd be a damned good Queen - I mean, I might be biased here, but I still think I'm right. I don't have the faintest idea how we'd bring it up with them, though: 

:I should probably not try to jump into it till I can give it serious thought without lifebond problems distracting me and even then yeah, I don't know how to propose it, let alone work around appropriate paranoia about proximity to the Heartstone. It'd be so fun though:

:Do you have any guesses at how long it'll be before, er, he starts seeming - attractive - to you, and the lifebond forms fully?: 

:Uh, if I were inclined to let it happen organically probably at least another two or three years unless he has a heck of a growth spurt but as long as I'm going to be messing around with his biology to get an approximation of his old face back anyway I can probably speed that up, which feels very weird but he is of course actually two thousand and not fourteen, so:

:Right, I don't think it should feel that weird, at this point. He - sort of didn't seem two thousand in practice, at first, when he barely had any of his memories, but he seems a lot more like his old self now, he just needed six months to get up to speed: 

:Notes help a lot even when you haven't been murdered and moreso when you have, I guess:

:Makes sense: 

More news trickles in from Haven over the next couple of weeks, which turn to months. The Council's near-term worries seem to have been soothed; it's quite possible this is in part because Queen Karis is reported to be pregnant, and various Council members are muttering that she sure took her time about it but at least she's working on an heir now. (It's sort of unclear that this helps Valdemar's immediate situation, since Karis' child will be the presumptive heir to Karse and also there's no way to know whether an unborn child is even going to end up Chosen - and also, unbeknownst to the Council but known to the Heraldic Circle and Leareth's diplomants, Randi is unlikely to live until the child is old enough to take the throne - but nonetheless people feel reassured about something.)

There's still unease and whispers and it's sort of unclear what's prompting them, aside from 'generic politicking', but it seems like the situation will keep for a bit. 

Then Belrun will mostly do mad science. She starts trying to shove Gifts into monkeys.

It is not immediately apparent how to do this! It's not like an existing limb or organ that can be enlarged or shrunk or moved around; monkey brains just do not have the same functionality. And it's not really something that can be taken off a different subject and grafted on wholesale, given that the 'different subject' would be a human who presumably wants their brain and Gifts intact. 

Leareth's books don't offer much help here; this work has been done in the past, but he's never tried to create a fully sentient race and give them humanlike Gifts as opposed to some form of native animal magic.

He suggests they take a step back and spend some time just studying Gifts - in particular, the various developmental stages of Gifts might be helpful. Some of his mage-scholars in the north have children. Some of those children have potential Gifts that show up to the usual mage-sight check but aren't yet doing anything, and probably their brains already look different from control children without any potential Gifts. And of course there are plenty of adults with all sorts of different Gifts, and they can find volunteers with Mindspeech, Healing, and Fetching who are willing to demonstrate while Belrun watches their brains very closely with Healing-Sight and Leareth provides mage-sight to sense their Gift-channels. 

She'd like those Changesquirrels he mentioned if some can be obtained to study.

Some of Leareth's foreign spies were previously dispatched on a rather unusual mission to locate some Pelagirs border-land in the north where they can find said squirrels. If now is a good time, they'll ask for extra mages so they can have a go at capturing some specimens without being hunted themselves by a pack of bloodthirsty squirrels with Fetching. 

A week later, there are six Changesquirrels in separate, Fetching-proofed cages being carried into her lab. They're bigger than normal squirrels, their canines are a lot larger, and their eyes, larger and more forward-facing than usual for squirrels, glow ominously in dim light. (This isn't magic, it's just a reflective surface behind their eyes that normal cats and dogs have, though squirrels usually don't.) Their cages are large enough that they can Fetch themselves about inside, though they do that less furiously once they've had a day to get used to the lab. 

She is occupied at first with training them to hold still and to, when necessary, take their knockout drugs, since she can't insist with Fetching. Then she mostly observationally studies them.

They are more annoying to train than her mice but get there eventually. When observed with the various kinds of Sight: they have Gift-channels! Which are smaller and odd-shaped compared to a human Fetchers' channels, they seem to be more specifically purposed, but nonetheless recognizable. Their brains have a section where the life-energies she can perceive hum faster when they're Fetching themselves. 

Huh. She will spend a lot of time just staring at that before trying to do anything, trying to work out in her head how she'd make them full sized, how she'd graft them into a new brain.

Enlarging particular bits of brains is doable, if somewhat more complicated than enlarging limbs; she needs to use the same flavour of Healing-energy that let the adult sparrowmice learn to fly without giving them brain cancer, but targeted to the particular area only, and of course the skull needs to have room for it to grow. 

She will grab a rose-pink mouse and put it in a warded cage preemptively and try to make it a Fetcher.

Is she going to steal a brain graft from a squirrel subject, or try to grow it in independently? The latter is maybe possible in theory but it'll be very complicated. 

She's going to start with the latter.

She can map out the brain regions in question, and figure out where the Gift bit would go and what it'd be linked to. The starting point for getting working Gift-channels is that even mice already have a (very small and faint) presence in the same not-quite-physical-space that human Mindspeakers are accessing; it's why Animal Mindspeech works at all. Leareth can lend her an Animal Mindspeaker to locate it, since neither of their Thoughtsensing is attuned right to pick it up. 

Growing it in is definitely the slower method, here. She needs to figure out, to a very fine level of detail, exactly what structures she's trying to copy, which involves going in very close with her Sight on the squirrels while Leareth acts as a scribes and draws out the network of connections in the squirrel brain. And then she needs to push the mouse brain into first growing some new neurons that aren't purposed for anything special yet (Leareth can help enlarge the skull a bit so there's room), and then coax them into copying exactly the same structure. 

It takes several months of very fiddly work, but eventually there is a rose-pink mouse Fetching itself at random around its cage. It seems very baffled by this turn of events. 

Fine detail is her specialty! She is so pleased with herself.

Leareth is really proud of her! 

He is also going through a rapid growth spurt; it's about time. He is now solidly into 'awkward teenage' phase. 

"There's probably enough total you at this point that if I nudge it around a bit so you look like you did when we met I'll be..." She waves a hand. "Capable of prerequisite opinions."