"Thank you."

Instead of spinach, she tries eating sesame seeds. Black ones. Her hair goes brown, a little uncanny but only if you pay a weird amount of attention to the exact shade of her hair; while it's changing she makes a fashion statement of hair scarves.

When she is not eating sesame seeds (and, eventually, she adds in dark figs), or doing various household tasks she is set to, she plays. She makes little villages out of leaves and twigs and dirt and hops little pebble people around in them, sometimes puzzling over their imaginary problems for quite a while before allowing time to proceed in her imaginary world.

Feris sometimes has free time. It sometimes overlaps with hers.

One day he asks about her current pebble village.

"A trader came to town and he could solve a lot of their problems if they bought his stuff, but they don't know whether to trust him and it matters what order he talks to them in. I'm trying to figure out if there is an order that would work and then I will figure out if he could know that."

His expression brightens. He squats down where he can see her village and isn't towering over her.

"Why does it matter what order he talks to them in?"

So she introduces him to all the pebble people: this one will be suspicious of him because of his accent, that one will be all in favor of him right away but is out of favor with these folks and they'd take up an opposing position just to be contrary, this person especially needs the stuff he's trading but will act abrasive about it to avoid seeming desperate and if this other person happens to be watching she'll assume it's the trader's fault, so the ideal would be if he started over here and let word spread like so, except that doesn't net him the goodwill of the local broker-type who's his principal local competition and could win big here but only if the trader presents his offerings in a friendly way which he won't do if he's first had to navigate an argument over here, etcetera.

"I'm the queen," she explains. "So I can change most things about this village but I can't just make people be nice or not argue because that would make them not peopley."

He listens raptly through the explanation and then at the end asks, "Would making them not be people be less fun, or just less useful practice?"

"I want to be a queen not a shepherd!"

Feris finds this very endearing and smiles accordingly.

"I guess pretending to be a shepherd could be fun if I knew how to make rocks move like sheep and I could pretend I had a sheepdog and make them do complicated stuff but I don't know how they work so I'd just be making it up and people at least the thing I'm making up is a whole story and not just a lie about sheep."

"I'm sure at some point you’ll have a chance to see some sheep."

"I wouldn't just have to see them I'd have to study them."

"Reasonable. Do you think you've studied people much?"

"No, but at least I am one. I'm not a sheep."

"Neither are you a traveling merchant."

"But I could become one and I could not become a sheep."

"I suppose so. You could become a slave, but that’s different and of course you wouldn’t even for research."

"Yeah, I don't want to do that! This town doesn't have any."

"Just as well, really."

Nod nod. "I don't think I've ever met one unless it was before I got amnesia."

"Incidentally, it’s 'I don’t think I’ve ever met one.'" There’s a distinction in Sesati. Because the way Zizu said it is for people.

"I think maybe I spoke a different dialect before the amnesia. That just means that they can't decide what to do, right? Because of being enslaved?"

"Right."

She reconjugates her sentence appropriately. "Somebody should try un-enslaving one to see what happens."

Feris laughs delightedly. "When you’re older maybe you can buy one to experiment on but in general we wouldn’t want them to be people."

"They could try unenslaving a baby one that didn't do anything bad."