Stef draws himself up to his full, not-very-impressive height. (He's several years older than Jisa, but thanks to early childhood malnutrition, he's barely taller than her.) 

"We were not!" 

"You were! You were hiding in the stairs!" 

"Hey - hey can we, er, go somewhere else to have this argument - please -?" 

Jisa allows herself to be hustled away, along the path least likely to give the important visitors a view of them. 

"- You were! ...Also you're Bards? Why are you wearing page uniforms instead– ooooooh are you in disguise that's so clever -" 

"What? No we're no–"

Stef cuts himself off mid-sentence. "...How would you know, anyway? You've never even met us." 

"I'm not stupid! I can see it, it's right there." 

Why is this happening. 

"Stef - Stef, please, we just need to get back to our room." 

"All right, fine, but she owes us an explanation." He turns back to Jisa. "Are you a mage? ...You can't be, you're way too little." 

"That's not true! Actually my Uncle Van's best friends eeeever who live in k'Treva Vale have a son and he was a mage when he was seven." 

Stef's mind shuffles very rapidly through a year's worth of absorbed gossip. 

"...Oh. You're Jisa! The King's bastard!" 

Jisa scowls at him. "That's a rude word and you're a rude person." 

Well. That just means he's right. 

Stef smiles brightly at her. "Wow! You're...a Mindhealer, right? That's what I heard. Is that how you could tell what Gift I have?" 

Jisa spends a few seconds staring at him, blinking owlishly - 

- and then settles on smiling brightly. "You're clever!" 

Medren rolls his eyes at this. 

Stef smiles back. "So - were you spying? Did you learn anything?" 

"...I don't know. They're - weird." 

"The visitors are? Weird how?" 

"Their minds had walls! Big tall walls, like - like they don't want any friends. Usually that makes people sad. They didn't seem sad though." 

Probably that would make sense to another Mindhealer. It doesn't make much sense to Stef. 

"Right. Did you overhear anything they were talking about?" 

"I tried but they had weird shields. ...Not shields. Something else. I couldn't read them." 

Medren stops dead in his tracks. (They're out of sight of the diplomatic guest wing, now, halfway back to Bardic. He's in less of a hurry.) 

"...Were you reading their minds? That's - not right." 

"I mean that's what Melody would say but Melody would be a really bad spy." 

Medren opens and closes his mouth a few times. 

"You can't be mad at me for spying, you were doing it too!"