In Quinncoru, Kiri - with Aleko in tow this time in addition to Renny - makes a visit to the palace, and, since the king seems willing to ignore her and she doesn't really want his attention, and since there is not a full complement of primes around, has nothing much to do with herself but make a beeline for the prince. (Aleko goes exploring by himself.)
"I feel kind of awful," he says, cheerfully. "It's much nicer with you here, though. Since it looks like you don't get hurt when I'm hurt, can I have a hug?" Which will predictably make him hurt more, but will make him feel better, and it won't be bad-hurting anyway.
Isten is small and curious and sometimes he breaks things, or makes messes. When he does, and his older brother is there, the prince usually contrives to make people think he did it. This habit has made his father hate him even more than he used to, but it's also kept Isten out of harm's way, at least some of the time.
In this particular case, Queen Risella actually deigned to visit her child, and Isten tripped on the trailing loop of a string of pearls she was wearing. The prince was close enough to have (barely) plausibly done it, so he pretended he had - on purpose, because the lie wouldn't have held up if he'd claimed to have done it by accident, not with the two-year-old sprawling on the floor next to the broken string, surrounded by falling pearls. Isten's mother went to her husband in a rage and demanded something be done about this. And the prince received an emphatic lesson in respect and princely conduct. Sufficiently emphatic that two days later, he is still choosing to spend most of his time in bed rather than try to move too much.
He has no idea who that regent would be; no obvious candidates present themselves. Certainly it would be a mistake to nominate one of the current queens. The ten-year-old prince feels that he could do a better job than either if his father dropped dead that very minute.
He knows one prime out of five, and he trusts her to at least want to install a regent who would be good at their job... but that doesn't guarantee she'd be able to spot all the problems a candidate might have. It would help if she consulted him, he supposes. But then there are the other four primes, who may or may not be inclined to listen to a couple of children.
"Nothing good, probably," says the prince. Especially not if Kiri isn't a good enough liar to pull it off. He is an excellent liar, so he feels safe enough covering for Isten's mistakes. But someone outside the family—the king might decide to blame his child anyway. He's done that often enough when someone else made a mess and the prince just happened to be around.
"Okay. Then - I don't know. Does he - his mother never pays attention and your father's busy all the time, does he have a decent nursemaid at least? I can have you all over to the Ardelay country house, you and him and whoever that is. And that'd be something for however long."
(She's not even sure if the king has bothered to learn what the Ardelay prime looks like, or, alternatively, why there is a nine-year-old girl in his palace sometimes, and she doesn't particularly want to draw unnecessary attention; and Alser said it didn't have to go directly to the king.)
The letter invites - in suitably curlicued language - both princes to the Ardelay estate for an indefinite visit, whether Kiri happens to be in residence there or not at any given time; they may come and go as they please and be welcome. There's a similar letter on its way to the house to notify relevant cousins who have been living there, and the head of the household staff, about this standing invitation, so they'll know to have rooms ready for the princes and the nursemaid and to let them in even if Kiri isn't there to give instructions.
She's not sure whether to expect a verbal reply from the king over dinner, or a letter brought to her room and given to her or Aleko or Renny, or for the king to ignore what Alser describes as protocol and to neglect to respond to her or her people at all, but she won't particularly mind if she hears an answer one way or the other from the prince.
It expresses the princes' grateful acceptance of her invitation, and informs her that they will be visiting as soon as Prince Hector has recovered from his unfortunate illness.
It makes some amount of difference to the prince's life that Queen Risella is the sort of person who accepts invitations on his behalf without consulting him—but not a lot of difference, because there aren't that many occasions when she can actually exert influence over his life, and even fewer where she cares to. And in this particular case, she's doing him a favour by it. No doubt the king was much more receptive to whatever she said about it than he would have been to the letter alone.
(Leaving aside the fact that 'nice' can mean a lot of things, and a lot of words can mean this thing, if they're the word that he says when he means it—)
The thing that he meant when he said that goes something like this: she is good to have around, someone he doesn't mind talking to, someone who doesn't want to hurt him, someone who sometimes does helpful things. Someone he likes and cares about, who gives him happy feelings.
"I inherited a lot of stuff. It's got people looking after it, but I don't just want to ignore it. And I have my brothers to pay attention to and my mind to figure out and I have to be here sometimes and occasionally I still show up at school although it might make sense to just hire me a tutor, I could share with Aleko and maybe even Jayce - Renny and Karls won't hear of me doing only self-study, not before I'm at least twelve, so it'd have to be a tutor if it was to replace school - and I have a lot of stuff to learn about being prime so I have to do that too."
"Well, she could have shown me a little since I was predictable, only then she wanted to wait, and then she died. Alser said he's going to talk to his suspiciously prime-looking granddaughter more and earlier because of me," she adds. "But I experiment as much as I safely can and I talk to the other primes, about Great-Aunt Elytte and also about what primes-in-general-whichever-kind do."
"What do they do?" He only has the vaguest idea of what that is - he could've guessed that it falls to them to pick regents, for example, but he didn't actually know it as a fact until she said. They're the primes. They do things. He never concerned himself with the details before he met Kiri, and now he mostly only knows what he picks up from her.
"Well, besides the regent thing and advising the king which I've been avoiding doing because I don't want him to pay attention to me yet - when you're king, or Isten if it's Isten I guess, we'll all have to ratify you, or him, to make it so you're - oh, hm, if you're king one day I won't be able to read your mind anymore."
"So there's that, I have to have an idea how to do that. And we can also be involved in foreign policy things. I've been thinking I should learn a foreign language. I don't know which I should start with, though, I don't know if I'm good enough at languages to pick up a lot of them so I should do the most important one first."
Some time later, when the prince is recovered from his... "illness"? They're going with "illness"? - the Ardelay contingent, two princes and a nursemaid in tow, heads out to the Ardelay country house.
It's big - she can accommodate a hundred guests at a moment's notice, ostensibly, although some of them might have to share rooms and the east wing would have to be summarily aired out. Most of the time only a few Ardelay cousins live here, and Kiri is allowing them to continue, as there's plenty of space and there's no reason to breed ill will by booting them. They also help look after the place.
There's a surrounding lawn, with appropriately sweela-associated plants in little plots here and there, which if examined from a vantage point on the roof turn out to be each sweela blessing drawn in foliage. The house itself is three-branched like the symbol for sweela itself, complete with a greenhouse, a little chapel with its own bin of blessings coins, and a gazebo at the point of each wing to serve as the symbol's dots. Kiri thinks it's kind of overdoing the theme, but whatever.
The carriage containing her, her twin, her mother, her friend, his brother, and the nursemaid lets them off at the convergence of the wings and she leads them into the central, north-pointing one. "The library is here," she says. "And some of the guest rooms, and the rooms where we stay when we're here. You can be down from the hall from us if you like."
"I have never, ever drawn grace in my life. Once I sat drawing blessings out of the bin in the chapel until there were only three left and they were all grace. It didn't seem to want to give me the spiritualities or the contentments either but it was really, really not letting me draw any grace."
They arrive at the chapel. Jayce traipses in first and starts drawing. He gives Kiri kindness, and Aleko loyalty, and Isten contentment, and the elder prince flexibility.
Twins toss theirs back into the bin, and Aleko goes next. He draws certainty for Kiri and hope for Jayce, then Isten gets contentment again and creativity for the other prince.
"My turn to draw, I guess," he says.
For Kiri, honesty; for Aleko, talent; for Jayce, grace.
And last, he pulls out a coin and hands it to Isten - "Love," he explains with a smile.
Isten hugs all his coins and smiles back.
"I bet you can keep one if you really want," murmurs his brother. "But if not, I'll remember them for you."
"Okay," Isten says quietly.
His brother lifts him up so he can more easily access the bin. He puts all his blessings back in. The elder prince gives them a stir for him. Isten reaches in with a look of concentration.
First he draws joy, and holds it out to Jayce. Then patience, for Aleko. Then synthesis, for Kiri.
Then love, for his brother.
"Sure, easy." There is a back door to the middle wing. Kiri identifies for them her own room, Aleko's next to it, Jayce's across the hall, and two adjacent rooms next to Jayce's that they can take if they want. "I think this might be one of the room pairs with doors between them, is that good?" she asks.
"You can read anything in it you want, but take one of those strips of carbon paper," she says, gesturing at a stack of such strips on a table near the entrance, "and write down what section you got it in, nice and hard so it comes out on both sides, and tuck one in the front of the book and one in the stack where you got it. Then even if you don't put it back yourself, it'll be easy to find the place it came from."
"Our publicly accessible libraries don't. They have permanent marks about where they're supposed to be inside of the books," says Kiri. "Just this one does, because it doesn't have a full time librarian, only a couple of the house servants who know how to navigate it, and me and cousins."
And then there are books about Soechin, which can be distinguished by the preponderance of Soechin characters on their spines. Kiri sets about looking for something for beginners.
(Kiri giggles.) She finds a book, takes it off the shelf, peers at it, puts it back. Eventually she finds another one that looks more promising. She writes the section on a slip of carbon paper, tucks it into the book, and puts the other in the gap left by the book. "There."
"Huh," says Kiri. "It never occurred to me that there might be entire languages that didn't have 'yes' and 'no'."
Kiri points at the list for the last set of choices: "Aw, they don't have a word for you either."
"I wonder if there's a word for just 'person' in another chapter or if Soechin doesn't have that any more than it has 'yes' or 'no'." She starts attempting to render her name into the alphabet, and then she does Aleko's and Jayce's as best she can, and then she starts writing sentences. I am shorter than Aleko. Jayce is shorter than me. "Do you want to pick a Soechin name? It said there was a list of some common ones in the back."
"Next chapter?" she asks, when she's exhausted these exercises. Then her stomach grumbles. "...Or it might be time for dinner."
"What do you wanna see me do?" she asks.
"Just large - swaths of fire. Like half this room. It's also easier to control it if it's close to me, though, so I can light up my hand or something and that's not hard - as long as I don't want it to do tiny details like leaving exactly my knuckles alone."
"I want to see how big an area I can do, but I'm worried I'll hurt the plants if I do it outside. I might see if I can freeze a layer on top of a lake or something if I find a lake to play with and it's late enough in winter that it could have frozen, but it hasn't happened to yet."
"Yeah. I kind of wish there were more people who could do our stuff, and then there would be somebody who could put out a fire when a house went up, and people would have chances to try fixing hands or drowning people or whatever, but instead there's just - five of us, and we're not usually going to be where the best places to learn things and help people are."
"She was trying to figure out if she can sense hot things from far away, and then there could be signal flares telling her where to go if something needed done," Ko informs the prince. "But it's less than a quarter mile. Also why she can't be a one-kid fire brigade."
Kiri scrutinizes his thoughts, and finally sighs and says, "Water's about as good at putting out the sort of medium-temperature fire you could get your hands on as I am. If you were standing in a bathtub or something you could just drop into the water. But you shouldn't do it."