"It's a Dynast's honor to lead her allies, no matter how temporary, to greater power."

Blossom snickers.

"Do they make you memorize that in your schools?"

"We had a discussion group."

"That must have been a riot."

"It occasionally grew heated," she acknowledges. Sometimes literally.

"Arguments about the relative size of your... family trees?"

"Not in that group - the Cloister didn't approve of that sort of talk in classrooms, and I was too busy to sit around gossiping outside of class."

"Holy shit, you were serious? You went to school and had actual indoctrination sessions?"

"Not indoctrination."

"'Dynasts are better, blah blah, climb to power on the backs of your underlings, blah blah blah'. That's indoctrination, princess."

"And not what the Cloister teaches."

"What is it that they do teach, then?"

"Wisdom," she begins, "And mastery of yourself. How to recognize what you believe, and what others want you to believe. The laws of the Realm and of the major Threshold states, and some examples of unusual systems we might encounter. How one crafts a law, how the political process works. Languages and cultures of Creation, and their current beliefs. History and natural science - more than is normal for a Dynast education. Oration. Literature, poetry, art."

"Wow," Blossom says. "That definitely explains some things about why you are the way you are."

"And what did you learn?"

"Swashbuckling, knavery. How to hoist a sail and pull an oar. How to tell an honest dockmaster from a bent one, and the best ways to charm the former into the latter. How to read the sea and clear a deck, discipline a sailor and commend a marine. And, lest we forget," she grins, "how to rescue a damsel in distress."

Small, reluctant smile. "We each learned skills useful for the lives we were leading, then."

"Funny how things work out sometimes."

"Though it remains to be seen which skills are most useful here."

"Well, if all else fails, I'm sure you can lull them into a stupor with a blisteringly dull recitation of exactly who fucked who going up the past seven hundred and sixty years of all the various side branches of your family tree."

"Tragically," she says, tone immensely dry, "I doubt I'd succeed. That wasn't my interest. Though I suppose you can list your pirate ancestors to the thirtieth generation, with how much you care about people's ancestries to the seeming exclusion of all else...?"

"Ha! No. Mother was born of the sea, and that's all she'll tell me."

"That's an impressive level of bastardry. Was your father a storm?"

"I would not put it past the woman."

"She normally has good taste?"