Patience is a bouncy, happy sort of person. She bounces, happily, out of the carriage, well ahead of her cane-tapping grandfather, and looks for somebody to introduce herself to.

Perhaps she would care to peruse the available selection of princes! There's two, and they are sitting side by side on a little bench out front of the house, sharing a book which the elder is reading to the younger.

"Hi!" she says. "I'm Patience Frothen. You must be Prince Hector and Prince Isten? I think. Am I right?"

"Whatcha reading?" she asks, plopping down next to him.

"Are they any good?"

"Yeah!" says the elder prince. "I like 'em a lot. So does Isten." He ruffles his little brother's hair.

"I'm probably supposed to introduce myself to Ardelay," it occurs to Patience to mention. "Since this is her house. Do you know where she is?"

"Nope," says the elder prince. "But I could help you look!"

"Yeah, I'm worried I'd get lost in here. I'm at Grandfather's house all the time and I can still get turned around sometimes and I've never been here before at all."

Patience follows he-who-she-knows-only-as-Hector. "Can he read already?" she asks as they head inside.

"Little bit," says the prince. "He follows along when people read to him, I dunno how much he does on his own."

"He's cute. He's what, two?"

"Yep! He is both two and cute," says the prince, grinning.

Patience laughs. "I'm almost ten and think you are also ten or almost ten."

"I am ten," says the prince. "How almost are you almost?"

"Half a quintile."

Kiri can be found in the stacks, looking for the best Soechin-Welchin dictionary.

"Hi, Kiri!" says the prince. "I brought you a Frothen!"

"Which Fr- oh, you must be Patience. Hi!"

"That's me! It's nice to meet you, since you are why I am here and everything. I didn't even know when we started that Hector and Isten were going to be here, Grandpa told me that you'd made a standing invitation but I didn't expect to overlap."

Kiri glances at the prince when Patience says "Hector".

He makes a little bit of a face and shrugs a little bit of a shrug.

"Anyway. Patience, did your grandfather warn you about getting too near me?"

"Well, he told me about it, and I probably won't braid your hair, but I'm not going to freak out about little bits here and there," shrugs Patience.

The prince giggles. "Braiding people's hair sounds fun, though! Hey Kiri, can I braid your hair sometime?"

"Sure," laughs Kiri. "You can do that."

"Great," beams the prince. He skips over to Kiri and hugs her.

As long as he's there she has a look at what she thinks of Patience calling him "Hector".

He does not like it, but it happens a lot anyway and will continue happening regardless of how much he doesn't like it; Kiri's family is an exception to a general habit of not correcting people in case word gets around to his father - the consequences of which would probably be worse than people calling him Hector a lot.

Kiri elects not to bring it up aloud in front of Patience, who she does not know well enough to know of where that loyalty coin in her hairclip points.

Anyway, he's mostly not focused on it right now; mostly he is focused on hugs. Hug hug hugs.

Plenty of hugs, yes.

Awwwww.

On a whim, he bounces over to Patience and asks, "Do you want hugs too?"

"Sure!"

So he hugs her.

Patience turns out to be highly huggable.

That is excellent. He is so pleased. Hug hugs!

Kiri goes around them to head out of the library to greet the current torz prime.

"This library is really great," says the prince, still hugging Patience. "Me and Kiri are learning Soechin from it and it's fun."

"Learning Soechin is fun? How do you make it fun?"

"By just liking it, I think," he says after some consideration. "And by not having teachers because teachers are boring."

"Oh, I guess that would probably help, wouldn't it."

"Yeah! I sit and read books and Kiri reads my mind and she takes notes and then we make sentences at each other. It's fun."

"Well, that's one way to use the power of the primes," giggles Patience. "Grandfather would probably think it's frivolous but he also said it doesn't really turn off so why shouldn't she be frivolous with it."

"And it's not like she's going to run out of primeness," he says. "So she can be frivolous even with stuff she does on purpose, if she wants."

"Right! To tell you the truth I'm not as sure as Grandfather is that I'll be the next Frothen one," Patience confides. "But I might as well go around meeting the people I'll have to know if I am."

"Why aren't you sure?"

"Well, you can't be sure, sure. It could be some really distant cousin, or maybe somebody we don't even know is related because of a scandalous secret affair who is more torz-y than I am. My dad drew power for me when I was born, sure, but maybe that means I am going to be an ambassador or that I will have seventeen children and boss them all around or that I'm going to run the navy, I don't know."

The prince giggles. "Seventeen children? Wow."

"I dunno, I just made up the number. I'm not wearing fertility in my hair. It'd be sort of embarrassing if I was! I guess some people must get it as a random blessing but it must be awfully strange."

"It wouldn't have to mean a lot of children even if you were, I guess," he says thoughtfully. "Like it could just mean that you're going to be, I dunno, a really good gardener. But probably people will think you're going to have a lot of children and I bet it wouldn't be nice growing up like that, especially if you didn't want to."

"Yeah. Or it could be extra metaphorical, maybe it means a fertile imagination - although I suppose then you'd just get imagination, wouldn't you - but at any rate there are other things it could mean and everybody always thinks the 'seventeen children' meaning first. I'm not categorically opposed to having large numbers of children although seventeen might be kind of pushing it? It is not my life ambition though. I'm glad that wasn't what Dad pulled."

"I don't know if I'm going to want to have kids," the prince says thoughtfully. "I guess it'll be important to do it if I'm king."

"Probably, yeah. Got to keep having royalty or... something... happens. I'm not actually sure what happens, do you know?"

"Well, probably they can find somebody somewhere who's related enough to royalty to be king or queen if there's nobody better around, and then they'd have to do it. I don't know what would happen if the country just ran out of anyone who was even a little tiny bit royal. Maybe the primes would pick a new king or queen to start over with."

"I guess. I wonder how they'd pick."

"Whoever they thought would be good at it, I hope," he says with a smile.

"Yeah, but how do you know whether somebody is going to be good at royaling? Are you going to be good at royaling?"

"Dunno," he says, shrugging. "I probably would. But I might not even do it; Father might decide he likes Isten better."

Patience nods. "Do you want him to?"

He shrugs. "I don't really care."

"I have sort of mixed feelings about maybe being prime one day. Like on the one hand, it might be cool? On the other hand there might be a lot of things involved I don't want to do? On the third hand also my grandfather would have to die?"

"Grandparents do that anyway," the prince observes.

"They do, that's true."

"I never met any of mine. Is it nice having a grandpa?"

"I like him! And my other grandpa too for that matter."

"That's nice," he says, smiling. "Except for the part where he's gonna die, I guess."

"Yeah, except that. He doesn't seem to mind that much talking about how I'll probably be prime next, considering."

He shrugs. "Probably he's had time to get used to it."

"Yeah. But I haven't! I'm only almost ten! I guess I'll probably get used to it sooner or later."

"Probably," he agrees. "I got used to the idea of being king already."

"King Hector the Second. Do you suppose you have to bother adding the 'the Second' all the time outside formal situations?"

He makes a face. "Ugh. I dunno."

"It'd be pretty cumbersome."

"And I don't like my name anyway," he admits. "Being a 'the Second' of it wouldn't be any better."

"How come you don't like it?"

He shrugs. "I just don't."

"Do you have a nickname or something or do you just sort of - go around not liking your name that everybody calls you?"

"The second one," he says, smiling wryly.

"That sounds super annoying!"

"It kinda is!" he says. "Kiri knows, and she just calls me 'your highness' or doesn't call me anything, but I don't tell most people because I bet my father wouldn't like it if I went around telling the whole kingdom I hate his name."

"Yeah, I bet that wouldn't go over so well. Well, I can call you 'your highness' too if you want if there isn't anything you like more."

"There isn't really," he says, shrugging. "I don't care about names much except for not liking the one. That'd be nice of you."

"Okay, then I will."

Spontaneously, he hugs her again.

Hugs!

Hug hug hugs. The prince likes hugs. He likes them soooo much.

It seems like Patience also likes hugs!

That is excellent. They shall have many hugs.

So they shall!

When the Frothens have settled in and Kiri is no longer socially obliged to be constantly available to and solicitous of them, she goes a-wandering down a hall on the second floor that leads to the pantry. (There is a dumbwaiter allowing coordination of the pantry with the kitchen.) She wants to see if they still have that apple jam so as to inform her meal requests when next she issues them.

There is a small blue corner of a small blue sleeve just barely poking out from behind the urn on one side. Whoever is back there must also be quite small, to fit into that amount of space.

"Did something happen to you?"

"It's a big house," says Kiri. "I used to get lost in here all the time."

"The palace is big too," he says, scooting a little farther around the urn. "I got lost there."

(Kiri shuffles back a couple inches.) "The palace is even bigger, yeah. Do you want help finding where you were trying to go?"

"Is what okay?"

"That I'm lost," he says. "Is it okay? You're not angry?"

"Sure," says Kiri, shuffling back a bit more, almost falling, catching herself, and standing up.

After a moment of looking at her doubtfully, Isten also stands up.

"If you get lost in here, it's a good idea to go down stairs," says Kiri. "Unless you see a lot of books. The library's in the basement." She shows him to the nearest stairwell.

"Thank you," says Isten.

"You're welcome." At the bottom of the stairs she turns left, and shows him all the way to the door of his room. "Here you go."

"Thank you," he says again, and produces a tiny little smile.

Kiri smiles back.

His smile brightens a little, and then he disappears into his room.

"Who wants to draw blessings!?" cries Jayce loudly in the hall off which the Ardelay kids and the princes have their rooms. Patience has already been collected and is at his elbow, smiling.

"Cool. Aleko and Kiri are off doing some kinda twin thing," says Jayce vaguely. "But who needs them? Let's go!" And he leads the way off to the chapel.

The elder prince bounces along in his wake, trailing a somewhat more sedate Isten.

Jayce holds the door for everybody.

And Patience goes in first. "Are we each doing for one other person or are we feeling greedy for blessings today?"

"I think it's more fun when everybody draws for everybody," says the elder prince.

"Sure," says Patience, and she draws for him first: joy. Jayce gets a swiftness, and Isten gets a contentment.

Jayce starts rummaging. He gives Patience a beauty, Isten a contentment - "I've never seen a blessing like somebody this much before!" - and the elder prince a kindness.

"You must be one heck of a content kid."

Patience stacks all her coins on top of each other, kisses them, and tosses them back in the bin.

Jayce returns his too. "I wonder how long one has to stir around before you can't read it anymore and it turns into a ghost coin. Ages, probably."

"Yeah," says the elder prince, dropping his luck coin back in the bin. "Unless it's made of something softer, I guess. If you made blessing coins out of gold I bet it wouldn't take that long to ghost 'em. And it matters how busy the temple is, too."

"Some of the temples have gold ones." Jayce stirs his hand through the chapel's supply. "I think these are copper. They look like copper."

"Yeah," the prince agrees. "I dunno for sure, but they look like it."

"So you both got luck, did I understand right?" Patience asks the princes.

"Yeah," the elder prince confirms, glancing down at his hands - no, he's not wearing the rings today. "Mine's surprise, luck, imagination; his are luck, resilience, resolve."

"Would've expected at least one contentment in there. Maybe three," teases Jayce.

Jayce isn't wearing his blessings today either. "I'm hope, love, and synthesis," he volunteers.

Patience touches each clip in her hair in turn. "Power, and loyalty, and flexibility."

"Thank you," says Isten. His brother ruffles his hair.

Isten dares to claim a hug of his very own on her way out.

Aaaawww.