"That is true," says Sherlock.

Bella sits. "So. Thoughts on that?"

"Have you consulted Tony?"

"About parenting? If I have a kid with her it'll be later - I guess she'd be awfully involved with ours, though."

"If you have a kid with me, you will be married to Tony by the time the child is old enough to speak. There are going to be three parents in this family if there are any."

At the forge.

"Hallo," says Bella. "I have a version of the spell that I think will work and it is therefore time to talk parenting."

"...Crap," says Tony, "yeah, that's a logical conclusion, isn't it."

"Yeah, I wasn't thinking of it before I had the spell worked out either, but now I have it and I'm going to marry Sherlock in Umber and it'll probably work, so, yeah. You wanna come have a sit-down or would another time be better?"

"Eh, I wasn't getting anywhere anyway," she says, shrugging.

"She's gonna be a her?"

"Yeah, I think - Kanim agrees - that there's no way to produce a boy, under the circumstances. Not without borrowing some other contributor's, erm, material."

"Okay, sure," says Tony. "Anybody got a name? I don't."

"I don't have one in mind, no." Bella taps her chin thoughtfully.

"Carinna?"

"That's pretty. Is it from somewhere?"

"A not particularly interesting poet."

"Whose primary virtue is having a pretty name?"

"Yes."

"I like it. Carinna. Princess Carinna," pronounces Bella carefully. "Carinna, don't eat that bug, Carinna, come say hi to Grandma, Carinna, it's time for your piano lesson - yeah, it works."

"Well, there's one small problem solved," says Sherlock.

"All right. So - I don't know, what other problems are there?"

"I have no idea."

"I'm assuming - tutors? In various subjects? Rather than some kind of traditional school like I went to."

"Yes."

"So there's that. Um." Bella scratches her head. "I'm not thinking of any other obvious decision-making that can be made in advance but I'm concerned that this is me overlooking things that are in fact decisions as though options that aren't what I'd go with were not options at all."

"Can you think of any examples?"

"Any room close enough for me to hear it should be fine."

"Okay. You going to breastfeed?"

She shrugs. "I don't see a reason not to."

"...How many kids do we want, eventually?"

"At least one that survives to adulthood," Sherlock says dryly.

"I mean - the more of them there are the less pressure is on any individual one to like politics, get married, produce children of their own," says Bella. "You two were having issues with the husband quest thing, after all. But of course there are also reasons not to have half a dozen even if that would still only involve going through childbirth twice apiece."

Tony snorts. "How about one each?"

"One each sounds workable to me," Bella says. "Unless of course Sherlock tells us it's disastrous and we must never try it after her turn."

"I find that unlikely."

"People do routinely go through the process more than once on a volunteer basis," agrees Bella. "Okay. So probably three. Their own rooms near enough Sherlock to be heard. Standard princessly tutoring, no unusual dietary arrangements, what am I forgetting - there should probably be some consistent reaction from us if they misbehave, I guess, so they don't just go to whoever the softy is." She glances at Tony. She bets Tony would be the softy.

"Who, me?"

"Maybe," says Bella.

"And yet, we cannot predict ahead of time precisely in what ways our future children might annoy us and agree on the appropriate course of action for each one."

"No, of course not. But, general principles. I wasn't a defiant kid, but I wasn't perfectly behaved either. Ranata usually took away privileges, Charlie usually sat me down in disappointed silence and grounded me," she supplies. "...I think I'm pretty much just against spanking across the board."

"Yes," says Sherlock.

"We, uh... didn't get a whole lot of parenting. Dad ignored us until I got big enough to work on stuff with him, and then he'd just kick me out of the workroom for a while if I broke something or forgot a safety rule. Probably not the best example to follow."

"What about your mother?"

"If she found out we were doing something she didn't want, she'd sit us down and explain why it was a bad idea."

"...That seems like a generally decent principle, no?"

"Yes."

"All right then, we default to that, for anything serious we call in all of us and agree on something unless it's an emergency in which case best judgment in the moment?" says Bella.

"Agreed."

Tony nods.

"Do you suppose your mother is going to have a lot of strong opinions on how we bring up Carinna, speaking of her parenting techniques?"

"I'm not sure," says Sherlock.

"We should probably ask her, then, since that's going to be more of a pressing issue than anything my parents may think given living arrangements."

"I don't think she'll butt in unless we do something bad," says Tony.

"Well, that's fair, we should not do any bad things," says Bella.

Sherlock nods.

"We have a while to think of anything else, I guess. I could be wrong about this version of the spell working, and even if I'm right we'll have till the wedding plus nine months and then Carinna will spend a while being nonverbal."

"True," says Sherlock.