After the aquarium jaunt with Ranata, it's a little more than a month before they visit the clan again.
Over the coming months, she does her very best to be a little prodigy. She studies hard at magic, and seems to pick up dagger skills almost effortlessly. She still goes off away with Kas - on a trip to three different amusement parks, where she discovers that rollercoasters are more fun than cake - but the lost time doesn't seem to slow her down much. Her seventh birthday comes and goes; she celebrates by baking a cake and sharing it with Charlie and Ranata and Kas and Shura and anyone else who wants some, and then she goes off away again.
This time, they wander across Canada. Now that Helen is a little older, Kas is letting her be by herself more, as long as he's nearby; he takes hotel rooms near libraries so she can go down the block and have lots of books to keep her company, or sits in the outside sections of restaurants while she plays in the park across the street.
He is not there.
She frowns at the empty tables.
"Not exactly," says Helen. "I know where I am, I just don't know where my daddy is." (She has learned that the 'mommy' and 'spinach' parts are best left out when talking to strange grown-ups, because they get terribly confused and it's a bother to untangle them.)
"Maybe," she says. "Can you find him? He should be close by. Maybe I should look in the bathroom first."
"He wasn't there," she reports. "And I asked somebody to look in the men's room for me and he wasn't there either. I guess he's lost. How are you going to find him? Will you use magic?"
"I know lots of magic too!" she says. "But I don't know any daddy-finding spells. Will you teach me one? Or are there runes and things in all the ones there are? I don't know runes yet."
"It's nice to meet you!" she says. "Where are you going to do the spell to find my daddy?"
"I hope he's not worried," she says when she finishes it, most of the way through the flight.