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qualifications
Iobel and not!Elves
Permalink Mark Unread

He likes to think he wants power for good reasons like to fix the canals and solidify decent trade policies and fund magical research in a more transparent and predictable way, but sometimes he worries that he just wants power so he won't feel trapped like this. He feels desperately trapped. The King is dying and his heir hasn't shown up to court in two years - working on a new spell, of course, and it'll be a brilliant spell, but unless it lets Mitros impersonate him at state dinners it won't suffice to make up for zero interest in attending them.

"It's all yours," his father says wearily whenever Mitros raises this.

All Mitros's. As soon as he gets married. The law's two hundred years old and his father thinks it's ridiculous and yet there it stands.

Plenty of those have been political marriages but all of the participants have been at least willing to feign sincere interest in making children together. 

Fix the canals and solidify decent trade policies and fund magical research and transparency and predictability and pretend to be straight until your hold on power is secure enough.

They talk about it for a couple months. Then there's an ambassadorial dispute that escalates far past the point where it should have and spells are thrown. And Mitros's father is trying to learn a spellchart and the guards have been told to bodily stop anyone who interrupts him at his work.

He makes up his mind.

 

 

Finankar, for all he likes to complain that Mitros can read him like a book, can do nearly the same thing, so when he comes in he stops short at the door and raises an eyebrow and Mitros is unsure whether he should be grateful that he didn't even have to say anything. 

Then Finankar kisses him and he wonders if somehow he read him wrong. He turns away. "Need to tell you something."

"Yeah. But once you say it I am going to leave so first shut the fuck up."

"You're not going to change my mind."

"Figured. I can't - stop you from trying. I am not going to help you betray whoever you're trying with. Want to say goodbye."

So he returns the kiss and then deepens it and when Finankar glares at him challengingly he removes their clothes.

 

He waits to say it until much later that evening, when it's been quiet a while and they're lying there holding on too tightly. "I don't see how I have a choice."

"Yeah."

"It is not that I want the crown more than I love you."

"Oh, Mitros. Of course it is."

"If I thought there was an equally qualified King or that my father was even a marginally qualified King I wouldn't do it. The country not having good leadership isn't something that could weigh too little if I loved you too much. And I've been miserable ever since I made the decision and I'd be delighted if you came up with another solution and I'm sorry -"

Finankar starts getting dressed. 

"Once she and I have talked about it, if she turns out to be reasonable about that kind of thing -"

"You'll what, come win me back?"

"Do I have leave to try?"

"It will take a lot of winning."

He smiles weakly. "I'm very winning."

"Who's the lucky girl?"

 

"Don't know."

Permalink Mark Unread

She can dance now! That's as good a reason as any to trot out to her great-aunt's party, for all that it's hours in boats and Cricket complains about how much water there is in the canals the entire way ("would you prefer to walk, kitty?" "no, of course not"). The snacks are delicious. A cousin whose name Iobel just manages to call to mind teaches her a dance and she wades into the crowd with a spring in her step.

Permalink Mark Unread

He's been moping for a month - no, drawing up selection criteria for a month - but it's actually not at all on his mind when he sees her; what is on his mind is that he doesn't know her name and he knows everyone's names, usually, at things like these. 

So he makes as much of a beeline as one can make at these things, which is not very much of it.

Permalink Mark Unread

"...hello, have we met?" she says, when it's obvious from the receiving end that he's headed in her direction.

Permalink Mark Unread

"We haven't! I got it into my head to correct that. Mitros."

Permalink Mark Unread

- oh, that's one of the ridiculous number of princes, she really should have recognized him but there are so many. "Iobel. Pleased to meet you."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Likewise!" He gestures vaguely at the air above him. "Antir's flying around up there, I am not even sure where, but she can hear us and will refuse to help me remember your name if I neglect to mention hers."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Cricket," she points, he's winding around her feet, "can hear us too but will probably refer to you exclusively by impolite epithet whether I introduce him or not because he's very rude."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oooh, what's my impolite epithet? Among family it's 'politician', and I think across the sea it's 'mind-speller' which I promise I do not have and would abhor it's just that everyone else gets tired of tax negotiations much sooner than I do."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you want me to ask him to come up with one on the spot? He may not have one in mind this quickly."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Can I have a dance? Perhaps that'll give him some time."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sure! I couldn't dance until just recently, I had two left feet both of which belonged to poorly coordinated people who hated each other, but I finally fixed it. This does mean the only dance I know is the reel, though."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, congratulations. That would explain why I haven't seen you around these before. We can do the reel, or I can do a bad job of teaching you something else if you'd like an expanded repertoire."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, you tell me, does this song work for a reel?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well enough!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Reel it is then." She holds out her hand.

Permalink Mark Unread

He takes it. He is a good dancer and also has the advantage that people clear space for him.

Permalink Mark Unread

Cricket stops being underfoot when she dances. She steps very nimbly but doesn't consistently remember all the bits to the dance; she gets better at that as the song proceeds. "So do you spellbind much or have your familiar for other reasons?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Other reasons, mostly, we get along splendidly and I loathe forgetting things and forgetting how to speak to someone -" He shudders. "I'd spellbind more if I thought I could make any progress on improved recall or working memory, I want both rather dearly. But if that were easily done someone would have found it a long time ago. You must be quite good if you invented something for dancing with two hostile left feet." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"It took some doing, but I'm a professional."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh? Somewhere I've heard of?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Probably not. I do live in the capital and publish spellcharts but mostly I just run a little shop and as far as I'm aware it has never been frequented by royalty."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You might not notice, there are far too many of us. I suggested a royal initiative to dye everyone's hair the color of mine so new diplomats and new housekeepers and so forth stood a chance of knowing. It went over poorly. Your own shop? What sort of specialty?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Miscellaneous hexes and books of spells. My bestseller's a box that holds more than it ought to and needs a password to open. I also sell a surprising number of clocks."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Research projects in the works, or are those secret?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Nothing secret. In addition to more tractable projects I've got long-term hopes of teleportation and immortality."

Permalink Mark Unread

" - oooh. I don't suppose there are any resources that could speed either of those along? I've been trying to detangle funding for magical research and immortality is the obvious best possible thing to throw it at."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not going to turn you down, but I'm not currently funding-bottlenecked. - Unless you want to get someone to translate Obscurities and Condensations into Marlatian for me."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Can do! And I'm not in fact handing out money to pretty girls I meet at galas, I've been trying to reform the system we use for that kind of thing so people have a better sense of whether their projects will get funded. But immortality work by someone with an impressive professional record is the sort of thing we'd fund."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, what's the new process going to be like? My parents both complain about the current one all the time."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Instead of distributing a fixed pot, which sometimes means we run out of money before the end of the year and sometimes means we're extraordinarily generous in the last month of it, we'll have a standard for project effectiveness and fund everything that can demonstrate it. The considerations are probably going to be track record and capabilities of the people working on it, benefits if they're successful, other sources of funding and reasons it wouldn't wisely be commercialized, so forth, but the important thing is that whatever they are they'll be published and public. So people don't wonder if it's even worth applying if they haven't the connections. What are your parents' complaints?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"My father's a police officer in a little town and he only inconsistently manages to get anything to distribute as performance bonuses, and my mother's a teacher and wants more scholarship money in the system."

Permalink Mark Unread

He nods. "I should be able to get my father excited about scholarships. One would think."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Would one? I don't know him personally, obviously..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"He's taking the King's decline by locking himself in his room and doing nothing but spell design, which would be admirable loyalty to his father's wellbeing except there's a country to run and there's only so much I can do without formal authority. In general education's something he's passionate about, though, education and more people spellbinding and languages and things in that vein. You'd probably get along, he skips all pleasantries and spends most of his time picking peoples' heads on their idiolect and on spell details but he does it very warmly."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I would not advise anyone to learn my idiolect. All it would let them do that they couldn't otherwise would be understand my cat and invade my privacy, neither of which are to be encouraged."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Maybe more royals need to understand the insults your cat's levelling at them, it might be humbling or something. I am sure he wouldn't want to invade your privacy. You write notes in it?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, I'm very writing-oriented so I invented it an alphabet, which even Cricket hasn't bothered with, so now I can pretty easily write private notes-to-self."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I expect his inclination to not be disrespectful of someone's space would win out over his inclination to see if he can understand an idiolect just by reading lots of content in its private alphabet but just in case, don't go tell him all about it. Not that you could. Locked in his room." He sighs. "It'll be worth it if he somehow comes out of there with immortality but I don't think even he can pull that off, not fast enough."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If he wants what I've got so far - but probably none of it's on whatever tack he's been cramming for already -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'll pass a note in with his next meal, asking, but it's probably not, no." He sighs. "Thank you anyway."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You're welcome. If he can get it done faster than I can that matters, I'm happy to help."

Permalink Mark Unread

He's watching her like his thoughts are very far away. "Yes, it does. We should have put out a call for projects or something, but I think we were all being foolish, acting like the King'd live forever."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm sorry your family's going through this. He's been a very good king."

Permalink Mark Unread

He nods fervently. "And barring a miracle we at least have enough people to scrounge up another good one."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Everybody's saying it'll have to be Ruafar if your father doesn't just... uh, benignly neglect things from under a crown."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Problem is that Ruafar's my father in miniature and equally likely to benignly neglect things from under a crown. I should have gotten married years ago."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Is this a 'the one who got away' story or are you just under the impression you can schedule it like a haircut, because if you can I've been deeply misled."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I did not make any time for romance in my life and have no idea if, had I done so, it would have led me anywhere. If I try now the selection effects will be quite interesting - not that it'd bother me if a girl very dearly desired to become Queen - that'd be hypocritical, when I very much want to be King, but there are better and worse reasons."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Roll out an application with the new funding allocation process if you're going to be all unromantic about it," snorts Iobel.

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's the other thing! I do not want to be unromantic about it, I want to work on a project with someone and find that I cannot stop thinking about her and also as a bonus she'll make a splendid Queen. I am starting to realize that this is naive, and I will feel very silly if the country sits through five decades of benign neglect because I was waiting both for a fairy tale and a competent administrator - not that the two shouldn't be rather strongly correlated, competence and ambition are so attractive in people...but anyway I haven't resorted to taking applications yet. And I can't roll out the new funding process while we're transitioning Kings."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Can't just slip him something to sign with a meal?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Last time I tried bringing things to him he said he didn't want to sign things we hadn't discussed and I said he wouldn't discuss them and he said it was a waste of his time and I wholeheartedly agreed and said that then he shouldn't be King. He said 'It's all yours, Mitros'. Which is lovely. Or, well, would be."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Why's it so hard to rearrange things to allow single people to inherit, it's not like you're short on heirs presumptive..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I know! Ruler picks an heir when they ascend to the throne and is obliged to keep an heir listed officially, fair enough. But marriage? Perhaps I'll change it, but I have to have it in the first place." Antir flutters down from the ceiling and ruffles his hair on the landing. Right, he probably should vent less in public. "Sorry, this is hardly the time or place."

"That wasn't my objection," Antir says privately.

"Oh? What was your objection?"

"You can't ask a girl out after complaining to her at length about how inconvenienced you are by requiring a wife!"

"Should I be asking Iobel out."

"Well, yes."

"When did I put you in charge?"

"I can tell you when you should have done. A decade ago."

He tosses his head so his hair nearly dislodges her from his shoulder. "Her complaint, it transpires, is not that this isn't the time and place but that I should have asked you to join me over lunch sometime before disclosing my dreadfully vested interest."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I think I like this way around better, actually, easier to disentangle."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I shall keep that in mind. Lunch sometime? I know some nice places on your end of town if Cricket'll resent holding down your shop on his own all day."

Permalink Mark Unread

"He'd better not, he knows where his chicken viscera come from, but my end of town's still convenient if I'm not passing up something unforgettable a boatride away..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Nothing comes to mind, and I'd like to see your shop. Fourthday?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sure. The shop's right up next to Rosewater canal, sixteenth dock."

Permalink Mark Unread

He smiles. "I'll find you!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'll look forward to it!"

Permalink Mark Unread

And he talks to everyone at the party who should be talked to and leaves satisfied if very distracted and goes home to look up everything that can be found about Iobel Swan.

Permalink Mark Unread

Iobel Maryah Swan is in fact the daughter of a police officer and a schoolteacher who divorced when she was a baby. Her school records (she got in on her mother's career, not for the usual class background) indicate that the fractured family is on fine terms; most of her absences that last longer than a day are marked as being for a visit to her father out in South Fork. (The ones shorter than a day are to go see a healer because she's broken her arm/wrenched her ankle/etcetera.) According to her taxation records she was a teacher's assistant - not for her mother, for someone teaching higher grades - for two years, reporting almost all of her income as savings, and then she established her shop, which is right where she says it is in downtown Emavan, and moved into the apartment above it, alone. She has several publications in spellbinding journals and books, mostly healing spell variants (she won a small award for one that works on head injuries).

Permalink Mark Unread

And her long-term ambitions are teleportation and immortality, the latter of which she's happy to share notes on if they could possibly help, and unless he's very much misreading her she wants to be Queen.

He has intensely mixed feelings, but the one that wins out is that he's gotten very lucky. 

Permalink Mark Unread

She's in her shop on Fourthday, scribbling on spellchart paper behind the counter.

Permalink Mark Unread

He comes in and beams at her - exactly the way he smiles at everybody, but she might not know that - and then turns around to look at what's on sale. "Hello, Iobel. This is a nice place. Very impressive."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thanks!"

There's the boxes that hold more than they should - and variants on the same hex, including a water pitcher, icebox, and wardrobe model - and the clocks she mentioned and a couple kitchen implements and lights and an image-copier and other more commonplace hexes. There's books. She puts Cricket on the counter and murmurs to him in idiolect, then comes around herself. She is not quite as dressed up as she was for her great-aunt's party; she only has one outfit that nice - but she does look a little more polished than she probably does by default.

Permalink Mark Unread

"You look lovely. Thanks for watching the shop for us, Cricket. Has he come up with an insulting epithet yet?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"He actually hasn't decided what he doesn't like about you yet, but he is confident there will be something."

Permalink Mark Unread

Cricket licks his paw unconcernedly.

Permalink Mark Unread

Mitros has a guess. He does not offer it. He compliments her work and walks her over to a nice place a few blocks from here with Lathalind-inspired food - "I really liked it there!" and asks how she found the rest of the party.

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's more fun when I can dance! I don't get invited to a lot of those things - I'm only distantly related - I think the last one I went to I was, what, thirteen, I wound up in the library accidentally dumping her Red Century literature collection on my head and then sitting there slightly battered reading about provincial intrigue."

Permalink Mark Unread

He laughs. "I can dance fine and that sounds like a tempting evening. When I was about the same age I was fascinated by those stories, I could always think of more effective ways to be evil than anyone in history and I made up my mind not to acquaint myself with any real civil wars less I be irrepressibly tempted to mail in suggestions."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh no!" giggles Iobel. "I've tended to assume that for one reason or another my clever ideas, evil or not, wouldn't work - there was some constraint elided over in the history books, say, or they tried it and it just didn't pan out like I was imagining and in fact it was so unimpressive that no one wrote the attempt down because not everyone can be an obsessive notetaker - and do not think I would be tempted to assist quite like that unless the morality of the affair was more one-sided than usual by a long shot."

Permalink Mark Unread

"When i was nineteen I took on a role organizing famine relief in an area that had actually seen a war, and it thoroughly drove out any temptation to tamper. Save to put a stop to that kind of nightmare as quickly as possible. Sometimes obvious things that would work really aren't tried, though, incentives not to try anything that'd get you titled The Grandiose Idiot in history books or by peoples' cats."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That is exactly the sort of thing Cricket might call somebody - where were you?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Farlas. We weren't as helpful as I'd have liked, I know a lot more now. Infrastructure was a challenge."

Permalink Mark Unread

"The supply line must have been brutal even if you weren't actually harassed by the opposing side, wow."

Permalink Mark Unread

"They stopped boats with food sometimes and requisitioned it. I would barely even have begrudged them it - both sides were starving - except I had to watch people die when the boats came in empty. We now have nice detailed famine relief plans for every nation we could conceivably get food to if disaster strikes, and I pop around the budget like a vulture sneaking away funding for it. The plans will fall apart on first contact, of course, but I think they're still worth having."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Tempted to say you should've put fishermen on the boats and reloaded the cargo holds after they were cleaned out, don't know how well that would've worked in practice."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It would have worked for communities on the coast, at least; we couldn't have gotten fish very far inland. We could encourage people to move to the coast if that's where the food is but displaced populations during a famine complicate everything else, there's more disease and more violence and food distribution becomes more complicated. My father replicated the familiar fountain, as you probably know, and one of his long-term projects is something like that for people, so we can land with some spellbinders and at least stop the death." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, I knew how he did that, I got to cross it off my list - people are conceptually harder because they don't have a guaranteed healthy state to refer back to, though, can't just say 'cause this entity to be as it was when it was bound'."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yep. Though if you could do just that then you could at least help spellbinders and maybe more people'd be spellbinders, being reset to childhood would be annoying but one imagines over time the culture'd adapt to stop assuming child-looking people demand supervision and can't do trustworthy work."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Actually A Child Me would have exploited that so much."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Lots of people will, and I think all for the good. I was lucky to have my father. He had a very unhappy childhood and so was very determined to give us a lot of independence in ours."

Permalink Mark Unread

"My parents are lovely people but they do have a tendency to do the Default Parent Thing whenever it's not made extremely clear to them exactly why they should do something else. They do use different templates of default, so I got some wiggle room that way, and some by getting good at explaining why they should do things."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you want kids someday?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't have a really strong opinion on that either way qua itself, it'll depend on what kind of life I find myself in when the question's more immediate."

Permalink Mark Unread

Nods. "My father was about seven himself when he decided he wanted seven. I have no idea what it'd be like to be that sure."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think Raney - my mother - would have wanted more, she loves kids, but she finds the actual logistics of minding people outside an institutional setting where other people fill the snack cupboard and pay the bills difficult even with her familiar helping, and she never remarried anyway."

Permalink Mark Unread

Mitros' father disapproves of divorce. Luckily he's holed up in his room not paying any attention to anything and may not even attend the wedding if there is one. He changes the topic to what it's like to run a spellbinding shop and earnestly questions her for the rest of the meal.

Permalink Mark Unread

It is not especially interesting, but she's willing to tell him about how she found hexmakers who don't want to touch retail and fills out her stock with their stuff - she can only make one hex a day herself - and about how people kept buying so many clocks and she keeps raising the price and they still keep flying off the shelves, and about what phrases Cricket needed in order to mind the till.

Permalink Mark Unread

It is especially interesting! He is baffled that people want clocks so much, do they do something beyond the obvious?

Permalink Mark Unread

"They're just clocks! They keep time, they set alarms. I think I'm the only person in town who sells hex clocks but they're not that much better than the mechanical sort."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, you know, now I have to buy one and see what all the fuss is about."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You can certainly do that," she laughs. "But I promise I'm not withholding some amazing clock secret. Maybe that's why they sell, everyone thinks I must be."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I might in fact make that problem worse, if it is one. My apologies in advance."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can just raise the price again."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, dear. How much is a clock going to cost me? I do not in fact command the wealth of the nation, yet, you know."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Non-royalty can and do buy them! It's six hundred, eight fifty if you want one of the ones with the prettier casing and fancy chime because that I outsource."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I am delighted at the thought of a pretty casing and fancy chime but think I'd rather have a clock that's wholly your work."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, the hex part is either way, but I'm not gonna tell you which kind to get."

Permalink Mark Unread

"No? But isn't that the essential skill of shopkeeping, talking people into the more expensive product? I suppose you have Cricket behind the till and he doesn't really seem the type for it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"He's really not. I consider myself a spellbinder first and a retailer only incidentally. Besides, I don't keep very much of the markup for the fancy clocks, that goes to the artist uptown who assembles them."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I am trying to imagine him saying 'can I convince you to take a look at our premium version' and it's rather failing to compute. It's impressive that you can manage a shop like that and partnerships with other spellbinders and artists only incidentally, though."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You may be overestimating how complicated retail is? I don't have that many customers and if I did I'd have to raise my prices until they went away, I can only make one hex a day on my own and everybody who sells through me has the same limit. I spend most of my time hanging out behind the counter charting."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That sounds pretty nice, actually. Especially if you're charting things ambitious enough to not feel stifled."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's pretty great!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...could I tempt you away from it? Potentially? If we happen to find we like each other?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I suspect you could."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Famine relief has comparatively little to recommend it on the comfort and quiet charting time front."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think it is legal to have multiple interests, or is that something you haven't been able to get legislated yet for benign neglect reasons?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"That would hardly even count as benign. And it would affect my father; things that do that go away immediately."

Permalink Mark Unread

"So there you go, I can want to invent immortality and also want fewer people to have starved before I got around to it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If I sounded in doubt of it I have miscommunicated very badly. You have more interesting projects than almost anyone I've spoken with, and I speak to people all the time and lots of them have a lot of leverage to do interesting projects with."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thanks."

Permalink Mark Unread

He pays for their meal. "Shall we walk down along the water?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sounds lovely."

Permalink Mark Unread

So they do, and he tells a story about the time his youngest two brothers got it into their heads to go visit a neighboring country with whom negotiations had stalled and "I don't actually know what they were planning to do, either stage a peasant revolt or just send their familiars around the palace to dispense advice - they were six, it was not the best developed plan" - and they set off in a canal boat with a live turtle for companionship or maybe to eat along the way.

Permalink Mark Unread

"How far did they get?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Out to open waters! My mother was in a tearing worry, we raced around asking who had something for tracking, and it all kept pointing straight out to sea...luckily the current was a bit much for them..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"They washed up somewhere?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yep! And decided to sleep under the boat and try again in the morning, they're stubborn kids, but by then we'd found them. My father hadn't acted at all stressed while they were missing but he sat them both down for a month of lectures about currents and drowning statistics and boat engineering and its difficulties. They haven't done anything life-endangering since."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Must have been some lecture series."

Permalink Mark Unread

"My father's full attention is a bit scary, most people don't want to spend a month under it. At least they had the two of them."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Scary how?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"He thinks fast, and assumes you are thinking just as fast, and once he can see which thought someone's pointing at he'll extrapolate to their conclusions and challenge them on those, and he has very high expectations and likes very few people."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That does sound intimidating."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You two will get along, I'm more confident of it than when I asserted it at the party. But I shall endeavor no matter who has the crown to keep him well away from anything requiring of tact or caution."

Permalink Mark Unread

"So he can give a month of lectures encouraging caution but doesn't practice it himself?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not at all! The King says his first son is skilled and his second son wise, and that seems true enough, though if the second one were as wise as the first one is skilled I'd be endeavoring to pass the crown to him."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Rumor has it this would be truly staggering amounts of wisdom," agrees Iobel.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Instead I think he's been allotted about the average, and mostly looks good by comparison. Clever but unwise describes most of my family."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Only most of it?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Makariel's not particularly unwise. Telars is dreadful - you may tell him I said so, he knows how much I love him. Nistar's probably even worse, Ruafar's my father all over again. The twins have not done anything like trying to paddle an ocean since they were six; that's something."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And you?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I wouldn't call wisdom a particular strength of mine, but people are a strength of mine, and one can compensate for the shortcoming with people more easily than one can compensate for it with a giant wolfhound or with spellbinding or with an obsessive knowledge of economics."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If I had to pick one skill for a monarch to have delegation would have to be it, on the general principle of 'what do you mean one skill'. Although I wouldn't want to discount economics."

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"Nistar'd tell me that economics is basically the study of the most efficient method of delegation known to human societies. Luckily there is no more a law about only having one skill than a law about only having one interest."

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"I like that way of phrasing it a lot."

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"Me too. It's satisfying to feel awe towards something big and yet comprehensible and usable for human good like that. It's almost like the feeling when a spell clicks.

He would make a good king. And even has a girlfriend, but she's foreign and speaks just enough Marlese that she could laugh in his face when he showed her the royal wedding vows."

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"Oh, are they that bad?"

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"'Man do you swear to protect, cherish, and guide Woman as your wife in sacred ordained marriage? Woman, do you swear to heed, adore, and support Man as your husband, in sacred ordained marriage?' If it's not a royal wedding one can be a bit more flexible, but I think that monstrosity might have poisoned the well of matrimony permanently for Nistar and Riavka."

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"Oh wow. They can't just elope and do a ceremony from her country and then present themselves as sufficiently married?"

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"Her country doesn't do interreligious marriages."

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"Inconvenient."

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"Isn't it! I suppose they could shop around for somewhere that'd marry them but they also don't want the crown very much. Nistar's a bit of a misanthrope. Likes people in general, not often fond of any specific ones."

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"I wouldn't call myself a misanthrope but the followup description fits..."

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"The difference might be in how well you can work with people for whom you harbor no fondness. He tends to call them, to their face, tedious sinkholes of value and productivity."

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"Oh dear. I don't do that. I just quietly fail to find most people interesting and feel no need to follow up on that verbally."

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"I am relieved to hear it! Whatever advantages my brother's approach has for knowing where one stands with him, they're rather outweighed by, well, everything. Your cat reminds me a lot of Nistar, actually, temperament-wise."

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"Cricket's funny - he likes me, he likes me very much, he even admires me for all the actual good qualities I have and not just because I feed him and pet him, but simultaneously he does not have any of these qualities and wouldn't want them."

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"Nistar has some good qualities you have, like caring a lot about people in the abstract and being frustrated by needless suffering and thinking strategically when it's in a domain where he's good at that, but the ones he doesn't have he wouldn't want."

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"And the qualities I'd want I just arranged to cultivate."

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"I can't say I've ever thought much in terms of cultivating qualities. Options, yes, definitely. Capacities. Resources."

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"I do qualities! But it's not as useful as it sounds because it only works if I want the quality and unlike Cricket I am most prone to admiring qualities that I identify with, or else I go 'that's nice but it's incompatible with this other thing I'm doing'."

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"So if I identified myself as deficient in wisdom, I'd find a friend with more of it and I'd trust him to point out to me where I might be erring. If I did it your way, and decided to cultivate the quality, how?"

Since, you know, the friend's not in the mood to be consulted. He'd actually left the country on a trip. Without warning. Mitros didn't get a chance to say goodbye.

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"I've never actually gotten anybody else to pick up my method and I don't know if it's because it only works for me or because it doesn't sound appealing to most people, but I have this very systematic habit of writing down everything I think at the first opportunity - this is why I like having a writing system for my idiolect - and then I can look at it as something outside myself, apply some of the same objectivity I'd use thinking about another person or - or a character in a book, whose thoughts you often get better perspective on than another real person's - and I trace back whatever bit of mental pattern I don't like and find where it starts to go wrong, and once that's come clear I can replace it as long as I'm quite sure of what I'm replacing it with."

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"Huh. Well, I don't have the problem that it sounds unappealing, so we'll see whether it's even learnable at all. I should like to also be the wisest of the house of Finos, sounds useful."

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"I don't advise thinking about it in comparative terms for this purpose."

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"Because I'll stop short of the potential of the technique, or replace things with the wrong priorities?"

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"Neither - I think it'd be distracting. Thoughts go by very fast, you have to write quick and indexing my results to what I imagine other people's would be like has never helped me."

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"That might be a difference between us. Other people are my reference point for absolutely everything."

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"That sounds... uncomfortable."

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"Unlike you and Nistar I find practically all of them interesting and I like thinking about them and I can call up a lot of understanding very automatically. It would be limiting if it turned out that, I don't know. I needed to do something where there just weren't any people who could do it, but on any scale short of that it's very comfortable."

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"Fair enough. You may need to adapt the notebooking idea."

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"I shall start with the standard version and see if it gets me anywhere. That's good experimental procedure."

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"Good luck with it."

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"Thanks. Should I let you get back to work?"

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"I'm not in a hurry, but if you are by all means get back to hammering out funding allocation stuff for swift implementation as soon as someone who will sign it is wearing the correct hat."

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"And acquiring some notebooks. But the funding allocation work is already practically bursting to be implemented, it'll be just as likely to find a patron with the sacred hat if I return to it in an hour. Do you know a good place in the area for dessert?"

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"I do! There's a little place with fudge cakes over the bridge and up a block and tucked back with stairs up to it, it's hard to find if you don't know it -" She shows him the way. "Cricket found it one day."

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It is a tiny shop and they're standing quite close and he puts an arm around her. They are fantastic fudge cakes. "Tell Cricket I am very very grateful."

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"I will! He can't taste sweets himself and thinks it's hilarious that humans like them." Eee arm.

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"Amars has a cat familiar, should I try to find some food as delicious to cats as these are to us and then bring Cricket a present?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Are you trying to angle to get onto the shortlist of people he actually likes? Because that's not a bad way to do it."

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"Getting liked by someone who doesn't like most people is somehow all the more flattering."

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"I admit it amuses me immensely to be at the top of Cricket's list."

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"Who else makes the grade?"

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"He's okay with my parents - prefers Kalars to Raney though and it's significantly on my behalf in both cases - and has an odd mutually unintelligible sort-of-friendship with the woodchuck familiar across the street from my store and he has not yet found a reason to dislike the florist down the block."

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"I shall have to go meet the florist down the block and see what common traits put us in such illustrious company."

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"It's impressive in the florist's case because he and Cricket have interacted more than twice."

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"Well, I won't count too highly on his continued regard." He takes a napkin. "You have a bit of fudge on your lip. May I?

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She snorts and takes the napkin out of his hand and does it herself.

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He smiles distantly again. "Thank you for the lovely lunch and walk. The plans for funding are unlikely to leap off my desk if I'm too long in returning to it, but it's hard to say what will have leaped on, and it's a long boat back. Can I walk you home?"

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"I'd like that."

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It's not very far. Long enough for a story about how Telars and his cousin Iriss terrorized the palace after she came up with an invisibility spell - "I slept with ball bearings on the floor for a month" but not long enough for the story to leave them lingering outside her front door. "Cricket," he says, "the fudge cakes are delightful and we would never have found them without you."

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Iobel translates this for Cricket, and he purrs, with a suspicious, grudging look in Mitros's direction.

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He looks satisfied with this. "I delight in your company, Iobel. Later."

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"Later!"

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He goes home. It's a long boat ride. He acquires notebooks. He doesn't have an alphabet for his idiolect and Antir's not around to talk things over with so he stares at the wall a while.

She'll be a good Queen and he can probably have her.

That's great news.

He's been doing a lot of appreciating the wallpaper in this room for the last month but he can probably notice some more things to appreciate about it.

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Iobel tells her notebook and her cat different things about her date with the prince (!) and writes her parents and sells an icebox and two books and pays her rent and closes up shop and goes upstairs and giggles to herself.

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And a day later she gets a very prettily calligraphed letter:

Iobel,

There's a art exhibition in the palace gardens and Makariel's singing afterwards. Would you care to be my date for the evening?

- Mitros, Prince of Marlas, etc etc etc 

P.S. I've been trying notebooking!

P.P.S. I think I have an adequate analogous food for Cricket if he cares to come.

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Iobel is so glad she went to her great-aunt's shindig. She writes back that she and Cricket would be delighted to come, when should she arrive what's the dress code?

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The event is informal. If she comes by at six they can see the gardens before they get crowded. 

You should tell Cricket that familiars are supposed to wear starched bow ties, it's a royal tradition. (It is not a royal tradition. Please do tell him the truth before he settles to loathing me after all.) 

- Mitros, when I was four I told my father I wanted to be called Lord of the Waters and he didn't indulge me but everyone else did, Prince of Marlatia, etc etc etc.

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We'll be there and I doubt I could get him to wear a bow tie even with the promise of kitty candy.

She shows up in smart-casual with Cricket on her shoulder, unbowtied, at six.

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Antir, entertained, consented to wear one if it was made of something edible for birds and Mitros was pleasantly surprised to find that he could in fact get a request like that granted on short notice.

"Iobel! You're lovely! Have you been to one of my brother's concerts? They're really something."

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"I haven't! I take it I've been missing out but at least I'll correct that soon."

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"I keep telling him he should work out amplification with sufficient fidelity and sing for the whole city. He is very picky about amplification, though. I take it there's some difference which I don't have the musical ear to appreciate. I cannot possibly show you the whole of the gardens but if you tell me your favorite flowers I can definitely take you to those."

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"Dahlias. Is there anything so obscure that you wouldn't have it in here somewhere?"

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"I could hardly answer definitively but Nistar's of a completionist bent and if he were made aware of an absence we'd be sending off to acquire it. Except things that can't be wheedled or bespelled to grow here, I suppose."

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"And I'm not likely to have heard of anything that difficult to come by."

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"Well, I'd be a little surprised if you claimed one of that sort as your favorite."

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"I could have gone sailing around the world as a child and been pining ever since for some rarity on some island, you don't know!"

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"And then I would have been wrong, and much abashed, and had an excuse to invite you back here once we'd gone and acquired your favorite flower for you off the distant seas."

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"Are you going to run low on excuses? Do you need them?"

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"No, and no, but I do not have many as good as 'I have acquired your favorite flower off a distant island for you'." Antir is eating her bowtie.

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Iobel giggles at Antir. "It'd be very impressive. Alas, dahlias are lovely but commonplace and I cannot be particularly bowled over by their presence."

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"I shan't lose too much sleep over it since you'll be bowled over by Makarial later." He takes her hands. "Dahlias are this way."

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And she follows him that way, occasionally succumbing to the urge to giggle, looking between him and the garden. Cricket trots along, making the occasional remark that she sees no need to answer.

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Dahlias! "They are pretty," he says delightedly, and picks a few, and starts braiding them together. "We can have matching hairpieces if I still remember how to do this."

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"You had a flower-chain habit in your youth?" she inquires.

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"I had six younger brothers and help-by-now-I-think-it's-twenty-three cousins, and am the eldest of all of them and got stuck watching them whenever our household staff would give me a look like they were about to break down crying. It was good practice for wrangling diplomats, in hindsight. I am good at every conceivable craft that can be used to occupy a gaggle of four-to-eight year olds."

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"Awwwwwww. Sorry, I don't know off the top of my head how many cousins you have."

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"What? That's an outrage. I think I shall implement compulsory national education so everyone can read and write and draw a complete House of Finos family tree by age 10. What's the point of power if you can't even expect arbitrary people to keep track of how ridiculously many of you there are?"

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"Hey, I was educated and I still don't know how many cousins you have! It's a lot of them and it's not a stable number!"

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He has two dahlia hairpieces. "I cannot do this too often or the gardener will give me a wounded glance. But here you go."

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She plops it onto her head. Cricket makes a remark and she chatters back to him in idiolect and says, "He thinks I'm ridiculous."

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"I think she looks stunning," Mitros says to Cricket, "and if you're jealous I'll make you one too. Dahlias suit her hair better than yours, though."

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"Bah," says Cricket intelligibly, when this is translated for him.

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"I also have the kitty treat for you. After exhaustive testing my brother Amars' familiar decided it was as good as humans could be expected to do on this sort of thing."

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And when that is translated Cricket sniffs the air and says, "Yes?"

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And a kitty treat is produced from his bag.

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Nom.

"...Good," he eventually pronounces, "may pet me."

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"I am very flattered," Mitros says gravely, and leans down to pet him.

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Cricket is very soft. He purrs.

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Iobel giggles.

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He contentedly pets Cricket. What a soft cat. 

Antir circles around Iobel. "If you hold out a hand she'll probably land," he says.

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So Iobel holds out a hand.

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And she lands. And walks up her arm to her shoulder and nuzzles her head. Though she also says to Mitros, "I think you're taking this a little far, dear."

He doesn't acknowledge that.

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Iobel glances at Mitros in case a translation will be forthcoming, but doesn't ask. "She has an unusually tasteful name as familiars go, has it always been the same?"

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"Yes, but I was influenced in picking it - my father speaks all of our idiolects, he finds them really exciting and wants to understand how they come about and collects them like other people collect spells or books or something. Antir means 'far-seeing'."

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"All of them? That must have taken him forever."

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"About six weeks each, actually, it's incredible."

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"Wow. None of you wanted to keep them to yourselves?"

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"I mean, there've definitely been moments since when I've wished for it, but on the other hand it's not like he objects if she hops up and whispers in my ear, and he loves languages so much he practically glows while we explain them to him. I was eager to be old enough I could teach it usefully."

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"Awww."

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"The list of people my father likes is only any longer than Cricket's because his children are on there, but I bet you two will get along."

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"Is he going to be around tonight?"

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"Not unless someone drags him. He gets really obsessive with his projects. Ruafar said at one point that he doesn't see Father surfacing while the King's still alive unless there's a wedding or a grandchild.

Mind, the King will not live much longer."

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"I assume you've already had better healers than me look him over."

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"It's just old age. He's eighty, at some point there's not much spells can do."

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"Yet."

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"Thus my father's relentlessness. Nothing like having the means to save everyone, ever, and having no way at all to fit it in your head."

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Nod.

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"I worry a little about the state he'll be in if the King dies." He straightens up and holds out his arm for Antir; she flies back to him.

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Nod.

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"Concert?"

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"Of course."

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It is an excellent concert. Makarial's voice carries wonderfully without any amplification.

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Marvelous. Iobel is no musician but he's marvelous even to the untrained ear.

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Afterwards Mitros goes on stage to hug and congratulate his brother and introduce Iobel.

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...is she supposed to go on stage? Is that what's happening?

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Not, like, while the crowd is still gathered around paying close attention! The audience is dispersing and there are ten or so people on stage at this point, though mostly royals.

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...okay, that's less nervewracking. She will go if it seems like she is supposed to go.

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"Please do meet my brother," Mitros says, "he feeds off compliments on his singing and is by far the easiest to please of anyone I've ever met."

"That didn't sound much like a compliment," Makarial says. 

"It brought tears to my eyes," Mitros says. "I spent the whole time enraptured by your voice except when I was distracted by trying to think how to get you to compose a song for me."

"You need one?"

"I shall tell you later."

"Anyway," Makarial says, "nice to meet you, Iobel, I was worried that my brother'd get to thirty without ever kissing anyone."

Antir caws angrily. Mitros makes an exasperated noise.

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"...um. Nice to meet you too. You've got a stunning voice and I regret not having previously finagled an invitation to hear it."

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He grins. Mitros glares at him again and then introduces Iobel to Amars, who is present with his cat and does not say anything offensive at all, and then he will offer her a hand back down off the stage.

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Down she hops. (Cricket investigates the other cat from an impolite distance until she departs the stage.) "You're going to need a song specially composed?"

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"If I did, he'd be the person to compose it. He writes all his own music, you know."

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"Wow. Literally all of it? He will never adhere to a request for 'A Night On Green River'?"

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"No, no, he'll sing requests. But tonight's work was his own. I think he likes the composition as much as the performing."

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"It was all spectacular. Thank you for inviting me."

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"Thank you for coming." Antir is chittering at him; he doesn't translate. "Can I walk you to the boats?"

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"Sure."

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So they walk back through the gardens. He takes her hand again.

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She grins. "I'm so glad I went to that party."

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"Me too! I considered skipping it to mope over our silly outdated laws. All things considered that would have been one of the stupider things I've done."

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"I might be too introverted to have been easily found some other way!"

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"I cannot promise it'd have gotten into my head to have a magic clock."

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"You forgot to actually take one the other day."

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"That is not quite as good an excuse to see you again as the hypothetical extraordinarily rare flower but it's certainly a sufficient one. Firstday?"

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"I'll expect you."

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"I shall look forward to seeing you. Good night."

 

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"Good night."

Cricket asks a question and she murmurs back and squeezes Mitros's hand and hops into a boat.

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He could probably kiss her. He's not even sure that it'd be unpleasant, there can't be that much difference.

He watches her go.

There are only two ways not to make a complete hash of this and one is to pretend forever and the other is to tell her pretty soon. "I'm gay and actually only want you for cover and the crown" will send her running. But he's good at people. Once he knows her well enough he'll know what to say.

"You're not usually this stupid," Antir says. "It's the breakup. You'd delegated too much of your smart decision making. You got used to having more people than me to talk you down from bad ideas."

"Thank you for the commentary."

"Welcome," she says complacently.

 

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Iobel has her stock of clocks all in place as usual on Firstday.

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He stops by with another kitty treat for Cricket and a pot of dahlias - "spelled to not require any maintenance, supposedly, though apparently they still do a little better with water. I have decided that I needn't decide which clock I want and can have both; one for my rooms and one for my office."

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"Well, I'm not going to stop you," Iobel says, and she wraps up one of each variety of clock in paper and puts the dahlias on the corner of the counter. "Thank you, these are lovely."

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"Can I whisk you away for lunch again? We have admittedly nearly exhausted my knowledge of nice lunch places in this district."

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"I know one," she volunteers. "It's downscale but they have the very best potatoes."

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"Perfect."

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So off to a little hole in the wall with fish four ways and eggs five ways and potatoes eight ways, and everything is delicious in a greasy sort of way, especially Potatoes The Seventh Way.

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He will take her recommendations. The proprietor recognizes him and looks a bit alarmed.

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Poor proprietor. Iobel's having Fish The Fourth Way, An Egg The First Way, and Potatoes The Seventh Way, but suggests that if Mitros gets Potatoes The Second Way instead they could split half and half.

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He'll do that, then. He will have his arm around her while they wait for food. He won't stop smiling.

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It's nice. So's the food.

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She has great taste in food. He asks how her week's been.

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She has had a minimally eventful week, but she did manage to squish down a branch of the immortality spell that she was assuming would have to be enormous!

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Ooooh! How?

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So she smugly expounds as long as it seems to interest him.

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Which it does; he knows enough about spellbinding to follow and smug expounding is a trait he is very fond of. He encourages her in it.

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She can smugly expound on the whole spell if he likes! What a lovely symbiosis.

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Eventually they should probably head out and walk while expounding, the proprietor'll get more nervous if they hang out in his tine restaurant all afternoon. He leaves a ridiculous tip and a note complimenting the dishes - 'or they will think I gave them a lot of money because I have it to throw around, rather than because I had delicious potatoes and fish and eggs' - and then she can keep right on talking.

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"Do you often specifically ask what people think of tips or are you speculating?" she wonders.

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"I do a lot of listening to how people talk about my family but I've never given someone a tip and asked what they think of it, that seems like it'd put them on the spot inappropriately. People have expressed in my hearing that they lose respect when we overpay for things because how could you run the country without understanding the value of am ammar."

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"I suppose it's not non-information about how you'd handle the national budget but it's certainly very little."

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"To be fair people have rather little to go off if they can't get the time off work or don't have the background knowledge to come up and sit in on budget talks, and honestly lots of important decisions are made behind closed doors. So why not size us up for general frugality or character?"

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"Because they presumably pay taxes and that's much more information."

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"Not about what kind of King I'd be!"

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"All right, not about you in particular, but about how the budget's currently being handled, which presumably includes your spending money allotment!"

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"True. We really do get more than we need. I give most of my spending money to public works at the end of the year, and I like it when people find out about it but making a royal proclamation'd seem a bit self-aggrandizing."

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"You could probably fold it into an announcement about a funding drive of some kind to tone that down."

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"I like the way you think."

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"Good!"

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"Are there other hidden wondrous dessert places?"

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"That is the most hidden and wondrous of them all," she says, "but there is a confectioner's very open about its existence and they do good divinity, if you're not in a fudge cake mood."

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"Yes, let's try that."

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So she shows him to the confectioner's - it is indeed very obvious, with brightly colored candy in the windows and CANDY in large letters above that - and they get divinity and it's lovely.

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"Should I let you get back to work on immortality? When I am ninety I will surely regret distracting you from it if it's yet unfinished."

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"I'm not sure how many condensation insights I can have in one week, but goodness knows I wouldn't want you regretful at ninety."

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"I am totally certain I'll be regretful at ninety - I do a lot, I make a lot of mistakes - but if we're still alive we can then go about setting right whatever it is I have regrets about."

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Man being courted by a charming prince who casually remarks about events in many decades using the word "we" is pretty great, all the fairy tales were right. "I consider becoming immortal a very important time management skill."

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He laughs. They've reached her shop. At this point it would be odder not to so he pauses at the door and raises his hand to her chin. "Iobel -"

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"Mitros."

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He kisses her. It is not, really, all that different, except he has to be restrained because even if he wanted to it definitely would not be going any farther. She has political sense and will get along with his father and will be easy to delegate things to and will have useful suggestions and he will be King.

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Eee! Kissing.

She doesn't push for it to go any longer or any deeper, there's no hurry, but her eyes are all shiny when she looks up at him afterwards -

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Fuck.

 

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"...So when do you think you'll have another excuse concocted?"

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"Um." he says. "Um, um. I - can we go inside?"

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"Sure." Into the shop with them.

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He takes a couple minutes. Does he know her well enough yet to figure out how to say it - "I think I may have accidentally made a huge mess of this," he says, "and I am really really regretting it and will probably fill up several notebooks trying to sort out where the actual error to point to is, if Antir doesn't give me an earful - and I will be tremendously sad and it will be a grievous loss to the country if you justifiably decide you want nothing to do with me."

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"Huh?"

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"I'm gay. I thought I could just find someone I really got along with who'd be really good at ruling the country and you will be good at ruling the country beyond my wildest dreams but -"

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"Like I said. You would be entirely warranted in deciding never to speak to me again and I would really miss you and totally deserve it and Marlatia will never even know what she missed - well, if you invent immortality, she'll figure it out when you end up ruling her anyway -"

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"Why did you kiss me."

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"I was hoping it would just magically work because if it were even remotely conceivable for me to get one fucking exception -"

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"So you kissed me in case you could just get away without ever mentioning this -?"

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"[What did he do?]"

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"[Not now, kitty.]"

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"And be happily married to the best, most interesting, most capable person that I have ever met, out of hundreds of thousands? Yes! Of course I wanted that!"

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"And not tell me, you weren't going to tell me -"

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"I would have told you 'funny story, before we met I thought I was gay but then I fell in love with you and realized I wasn't'."

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"Great," she mutters, "but turns out you are, kissing's not magic, I could've told you that and I'd never even kissed anybody -"

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"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

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"You just - what, really really want to be king -?"

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"Yes! My father will do a bad job and people will die and they nearly already did when there was a stupid mess I couldn't defuse in time and people dying is not acceptable when I could just -"

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"Just find some girl you could put up with and let her think -"

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"That I was just really bad in bed," he says, burying his head in his hands. "I guess."

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"Really well thought out and not vaguely sociopathic at all well done."

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"Do you want me to leave?"

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"I - I need to think, I -"

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"[What did he DO!?]"

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"[I said not n- ugh, he's gay he just wanted to find a wife so he could be king, that's what -]"

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Cricket yowls at the top of his lungs in indignation and he starts yelling at Mitros in mostly idiolect interspersed liberally with Marlese swearing.

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He squeezes his eyes shut and sits there.

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Cricket can yell a lot. He knows most of the swear words that there are and the portmanteaus he's making with them are probably really inventive if you know his idiolect.

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Eventually Iobel gets him to shush so she can get a word in. "I apologize for him," she mutters. "I need to think, where are you on this whole business now besides 'miserable or a really good actor again'."

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He winces. "I continue thinking I'll be really sad if I never get to see you again and Marlatia could not possibly do better for a Queen but it'd be reasonable of you to go 'too bad'."

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"So you still want to marry me and - what, have boyfriends on the side, what about me, what about the succession if your brothers can't sit on the throne because they're not married except the one who you didn't want to just let it fall to him -"

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"We could have kids, we could invent a spell, you could have someone on the side and I will acknowledge the children...if it's a condition of making this work I do not need to have a boyfriend, I thought about it and decided I'd rather be King..."

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"Okay. I need to think. Give me a week."

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"Okay. I'm sorry." 

 

He leaves.

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And Iobel thinks. And her cat rants, constantly, loudly, every epithet for Mitros more colorful than the last.

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He takes the boats home. Antir lands on his shoulder. "Did you tell her?"

"Yeah."

"Disaster?"

 

"Too soon to say but definitely could have been done better."

"You are so incompetent on your own it's a shame you couldn't fall in love with the girl because she'd keep you straight."

"I suppose definitionally -"

"That's not what I meant and you know it. You toyed with someone and hurt her -"

"I know."

"And you think it's okay because it's salvageable."

"It's not okay. It might not be a disaster. I do feel awful about it."

"Good."

"No, feeling awful doesn't really make things better -"

She swats him with a wing. He does not particularly protest.

 

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(Iobel goes for a walk, because this no longer takes her life into her hands every time she gets near unguardrailed canal access and Cricket can only shut up about Mitros for long if he's minding the till -)

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He goes home and decides he hates the wallpaper and has someone in to fix it and Antir will you fly to Finankar and -

"No."

"Please?"

"Nope."

"I didn't even tell you what I wanted you to say!"

"I fucked up like you could totally have predicted I would; fix it for me and reassure me that I am unconditionally lovable?"

"Please?"

"Nope."

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(Iobel does not write to her parents, because heaven help her she might marry him anyway and it would not do for there to be a paper trail about the details without discussing that, if she's going to do it she's going to do it properly -)

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He lies on his bed and stares at the ceiling.

He doesn't ask.

After a few hours Antir says "fine" and flies off.

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(She minds the store. She ignores Cricket. She writes.)

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Lot of work. He writes. He notebooks. 'vaguely sociopathic', she'd said. He has a lot to write about that.

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(A week is too much time and not enough all at once. She accumulates a list of things to ask when he comes back, if he comes back, and then maybe she'll need another week.)

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Six days later Finankar comes back. "Hey," he says, and Mitros startles.

"Hi."

"Do you want me to talk to the poor girl?"

"I don't know. Probably not. I'm supposed to talk to her tomorrow and maybe if that goes badly -"

"Did she slap you?"

"No."

"Can I?"

"No."'

Finankar sighs and leans against the wall and shakes his head. "What's her name."

"Iobel. Iobel Swan."

"You sound kind of like you've got it bad."

"I do! But it doesn't translate to wanting to fuck her!"

"Just wanting to, what, put her in power and pretend her kids are yours?"

"Why did I even ask you to come back."

"You wanted me to come back? Antir showed up to ask if she could join me for my vacation, indefinitely, because you were unsalvageable."

"Why'd you come back?"

"We commiserated over you for a couple of hours and then agreed you really can't make it on your own."

"Finankar -"

"Does she even know I exist?"

"No?"

"The poor, poor girl, Mitros."

"I didn't do it on purpose and I'm sorry!!!"

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(Cricket subsides to intermittent growling.)

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And he goes and visits her store.

"Hi."

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"Hello, what can I help you with today?"

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"Hi. I wanted to talk with you, is this a good time?"

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"...sorry, have we met?"

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"No, we haven't. I have been vacationing-slash-diplomacying in Lathalind and Antir flew up to me a couple of days ago and asked if she could join me, permanently, because Mitros was - I think her word was 'unsalvageable' - and then she explained herself and I came back here, ascertained what he'd been up to, and. Um. Thought I would stop by. He hasn't told anyone and won't tell anyone and I promise this isn't the talk of the town or anything, nor will it be, if there's anything Mitros is good at it's discretion."

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"Oh, I wasn't worried about it, he's got more reason to want it quiet than I do."

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He nods fervently.

"Antir's opinion, interspersed with a lot of insults I couldn't even quite catch, is that you'd be a fantastic Queen and perhaps could keep Mitros in the dungeons or something."

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...Iobel snorts. "That'd amuse my familiar no end."

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"Sounds like your familiar has some basis."

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"Upset on my behalf. Been ranting all week."

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He nods. Glances around, spies Cricket, addresses him. "For the record, Beanpole always found that calling for Mitros' evisceration didn't get me nearly as angry at him as she'd have liked and was sometimes counterproductive."

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"Cricket doesn't have very much Marlese."

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"Well, you can tell him yourself if you ever want him to tone it down." He shakes his head. "He is planning to visit tomorrow but I can tell him not to."

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"I did tell him to give me a week."

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"Okay. Would you like to know what he's been up to?"

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"Sure."

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"He has demanded that the palace staff replace all the wallpaper in his office and then spent most of his time lying in bed staring at the ceiling or writing in notebooks, he's filled three."

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"...Wow, I've only done two and a half."

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"You might have better handwriting?"

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"Maybe. Or more condensed shorthand. Now the question is are these notebooks about how guilty he is or about how to finagle me into enabling him."

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"Probably both, because Mitros. At least one notebook is on the topic of the phrase 'vaguely sociopathic' but I don't know what it says.

I asked him your name and he said 'Iobel. Iobel Swan.' in the most absurd voice and I said 'it sounds like you're desperately lovestruck' and he said he was, but in the wrong way. I think he feels overwhelmingly awful. I also think he feels awful at least a little bit because feeling awful helps him get what he wants."

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"I mean, of all the qualities I have that I could feel used for my suitability as a queen is probably my favorite option..."

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He nods.

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"...I'm sort of guessing you're his ex or something?"

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"Yes."

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"Did he literally dump you to take up with me or is it less awful than that?"

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"I dumped him I think months before he met you because he'd decided that he wanted to get married and be a King. I think he'd have broken it off once he thought it all through but I did not feel like giving him the time to figure that out."

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"Well, that's less awful. I haven't decided whether I want to be queen badly enough or not yet but I did decide that if the answer is I do I wouldn't mind if he had a boyfriend."

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"Interesting. He asked me when we broke up if, if it worked out that way, we could ever get back together."

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"What'd you say?"

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"He actually asked permission to try. I said it would have to be one hell of a try." 

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"Well, he's very appealing when he wants to be. Not that I wasn't helping him along because, you know, why wouldn't a charming prince notice I was wonderful and want to make me queen and why would I not smooth that out with my considerable powers of self-editing."

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"He is, isn't he. In what directions were you self-editing?"

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"Oh, it wasn't even very much, just insult to injury."

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"He is by all accounts - and not accounts particularly biased towards him - right that you'd make a good Queen."

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"Who else's accounts are there?"

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"Every word out of Antir's mouth that wasn't annoyance with him was anecdotes about you. And you're handling this astonishingly well and in a way that speaks to handling a diplomatic crisis similarly well. Even better, maybe, because the betrayals you see coming and they're less personal, on that playing field."

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"Well. Thank you."

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"Let me know if you need anything."

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"How would I hypothetically go about taking you up on that?"

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"Finankar. So I live at the palace too, when I'm not taking extended diplomatic vacations. We are technically only half first cousins," he adds hastily, "which is like second cousins. I do not think you're likely to end up needing 'royalty who aren't Mitros' specifically, he's not like that, but if you needed that. Or had more questions."

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"Or needed to mutter about him behind his back to someone more fairminded than my cat and with whom I share a language."

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"That too!"

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"Cricket has very few virtues and none of them are fairmindedness. - What do you think I should do?"

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"Part of that depends on how tolerable you'd find having to keep an actual intimate relationship secret. But if you're willing to put up with that for the crown I'd tell him how he should have gone about it, what he'd better do the next time in his life he finds it convenient to lie to people so he can more easily charm them into doing what he wants, how seriously worrying about his leadership that tendency is - and then, I don't know, what are some actual political concessions you want, do you want a voice and vote on the budget committee? Run Foreign Affairs? He'll be so happy you're going along you could get 'most formal power for a Queen-by-marriage in history' just by having your ducks lined up."

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"Ooh. I don't know about Foreign Affairs, I might want Education."

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He nods. "There you go. One thing I will say for Mitros is that he at least uses people in ways that make them stronger."

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"I've definitely got a 'how seriously worrying' benchmark, I was considering staging elaborate sabotage..."

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"That would be interesting but he's got more resources than you and will probably get at least moderately scary if he thinks you're getting people hurt. By leaving the crown in incompetent hands or whatever."

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"No, I was going to try to intervene on the royal wedding vows that put off the one of his brothers with the girlfriend and the girlfriend in question."

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"Oh, good, that's a much better idea. Wait, who has a girlfriend? Telars has hit on me and Makariel's too self-absorbed and likes sleeping around too much and the twins are still kids..."

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"Nistar? I didn't get the impression this was privileged information."

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"Oh! It's not. Nistar hates people a bit too much to rule them, I think. Though it'd be the cleverest way of getting Mitros back ever."

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"Thanks."

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"The clocks on his walls are your work? They're really nicely done."

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"Yeah, they are, thank you. I sell a surprising number of clocks."

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"Can I get a box that's bigger on the inside?"

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"Sure, take your pick, that's what they're there for."

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He buys a box that's bigger on the inside. He pays for it. He smiles at her. "Do feel free to write, or stop by."

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"Thanks. I appreciate you coming by."

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"I am glad of it. Good luck with everything."

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"Thank you."

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And he leaves. His polecat scampers after him.

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Iobel does some more notebooking and is downright serene the next day.

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He comes by right after lunch. "Iobel," he says.

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"Hello. This might be a prolonged conversation. Would you like to come up while I have Cricket mind the store so he doesn't constantly interrupt?"

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Cricket says something that sounds suitably vicious in his idiolect.

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"....sure," he says.

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So Iobel murmurs to Cricket and gets a growly yet compliant reply and shows Mitros up the stairs to her apartment and sits him down.

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He sits.

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"So I assume you are aware that this was really fucked up."

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"Yes. I'm really really sorry."

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"Do you think you can avoid this class of mistake going forward or is it just a fact about the universe that occasionally Mitros will callously use whoever's convenient to get what he wants?"

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"I am sure it's not a fact about the universe."

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"That is not as detailed an answer as I was hoping for."

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"The thing that you are describing as callously using people to get what I want feels internally like having goals that are screamingly important and not enough understanding of the people around me to get which of them I can trust with something of screaming importance and trying to understand them well enough to answer that and realizing halfway through that I'm hurting people and still not seeing how to tell who will care about the thing of screaming importance. I think having a circle of competent people I trust might make the problem go away entirely. If it doesn't, curing death would do it because then nothing would be screamingly important. I am sure there are other avenues but they're not as straightforward as 'realize you are using people, stop'."

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"I'm not sure you thought very hard about alternatives. You could have presented yourself as looking for, say, advisers, instead of dropping hints about wanting a wife, and only brought up that notion later on, more aboveboard and when you knew me better; you could have confessed at literally any point before kissing me and it would have been much less violently upsetting and I do not think I was making myself hard to know..."

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"Okay, yes, I should have done that. I'm sorry. I'm really really sorry. I didn't realize that a kiss was kind of way past the 'explain' point until the minute I did it and then I knew right away I'd made a really awful mistake there.

Though looking for advisors adds the problem of getting, you know, happily attached ones or ones who wouldn't want to be Queen or ones who have more important priorities than advising a prince who's not in power and not going to be on initiatives he doesn't have a plan to pass."

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"Would've got me fine, just as your actual implementation did, and it would avoid the failure mode 'mark decides you might be too much of a sociopath and considers elaborate plots to enthrone Nistar instead'. Which I did consider but decided against."

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"Oooh, how were you going to pull that off?"

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"...I didn't have a very detailed approach, I've barely met him and never met his girlfriend," she says, "it would probably have involved trying to find a more liberal priest or something, and at any rate that seems like a distraction from the topic."

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"I apologize. 

I can at minimum avoid manipulating you by just telling you whenever I get to the 'I'm hurting people towards this goal but the goal still seems important and I'm stuck' stage where I tend to plunge ahead."

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"That'd be nice."

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"I promise to do that," he says earnestly.

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"Good. Now... Queen consort is a soft-power position, and it gets less soft-powerful if the underlying relationship is fictitious, as well as less appealing for other reasons."

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He nods. "So you want to be in charge of something formally."

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"It'd sweeten the deal."

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"You might have to establish a track record of competence to the relevant people, first, though that can be before the wedding if you don't trust me  and shouldn't take too long and depends on what exactly you want."

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"Frontrunner is the department of education but not by very much, I'd consider suggestions."

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"That sounds reasonable to me and you'd be good at it and it matters and I think I could pull it as title-awarded-with-marriage instead of you having to trust me to see to it after we're in power - not that I can afford to annoy you the minute after my coronation anyway, but this way seems cleaner."

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"And admits of fewer clever attempts to evade annoyance without producing results. Just in case."

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"I want you in power, I'm actually not surrounded by so many people with a gift for it that I can afford to give them vague advisory roles."

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"All right. ...So now that we're not pretending the answer is 'decorous amounts of lustful' how do you actually feel about me, what would the social dynamic here look like."

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"I like you. I think you have good priorities and good judgment. I'd like to be able to talk political problems over with you over dinner. I'd like to be able to trust each other. I'd like you to tell me when you think I'm making a mistake and I will try to tell you enough you'll notice. If we decide to raise children I would like to raise them together, whoever's they are. I want to support your ambitions and help acquire you the resources to realize them. I think we'd be good partners on projects that were immediately demanding of lots of logistics and I think you'd make the average wisdom in the family go up by a substantial margin. Someday I want to rule the world together though if we get immortality then if you don't want me to have boyfriends we'll have to renegotiate some things."

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"I concluded that it would be very silly of me to marry a gay guy and then insist that he not have any boyfriends."

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"Okay. I can do utmost discretion with boyfriends or I can tell you all about them, whatever makes you more comfortable. How about you? What do you want?"

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"Well, I don't have an ex to go re-seduce lined up - I like him, by the way, he's very sensible - and foresee disaster if anyone decides to stir things up and finds a way to identify my kids as not technically royalty, so some spell development is in order but I too might want a boyfriend at some point."

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"He is very sensible, isn't he?" He smiles fondly. "I expected you would and have no problems with that. I am a little nervous about having our children be a test case of a new spell but it probably is the way to go. Unless you happen to like someone else in the family, I do have six brothers and twenty-three cousins."

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"Most of whom I have not yet met and who will probably not be trying to appeal to someone they think is taken, but we'll see. I could always publish the spell under a pen name or something so as to avoid being the first test case."

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"That seems like a good precaution, if it turns out to be learnable without a lot of shortcuts specific to you or anything."

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"Should be."

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"Were those all your questions?"

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She flips through her notebook - "How secret is this? My parents' last word on the subject is me cooing about how I met you at Raney's aunt's party and thought you liked me, I have not updated them but Raney in particular lives in town and expects more frequent information -"

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"I don't have a good sense of how much it would derail things for it to be known - the last time it came up, it would have been completely disqualifying, but that was a hundred fifty years ago, and it's certainly not like all royal marriages are love matches...my preference would be to be securely in power before we let it be an open secret but if you trust your mother's discretion - there is already one familiar who's going to be spitting at me at the wedding -"

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"I can probably get Cricket to behave himself for the duration of the event. My mother's discretion is... not great, it might suffice but it might not."

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"...then I would prefer not to risk it, if that's all right."

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"She's going to want to meet you."

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"Unless you'd actively prefer I not do that I can be the most devoted fiance ever in public." 

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"Of this I have no doubt; I'm just wondering if there's a way to pull it off without actually lying to her."

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"I met Iobel at the party, I very much enjoyed her company, we've spent time together the last few weeks, we've decided to get married..."

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"Fair enough."

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"We can be restrained from public displays of affection and people will assume it's by temperament."

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"Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Not like there's any public track record to contradict it. How serious were you about me maybe taking up with one of your relatives? I can imagine going unrecognized long enough somewhere else to gauge interest, but..."

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"It occurred to me mostly as a solution if the spell happened to be too complicated and you didn't want to chance anyone questioning their claim. I haven't the faintest idea if you'd like any. Royals do have affairs, so somehow secrecy must be achievable, but on the other hand you probably don't want someone who approaches you knowing who you are and not the arrangement. Or if you're willing to wait a few years by then I expect we'll have little to lose from everything becoming known."

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"Not in any particular hurry, although if we do the devoted-spouse thing in public and a few years go by people will start thinking one of us is tragically sterile."

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"How long do you think the spell could take you?

...I am also pretty sure I could manage, my concern there is more that it's be unpleasant for you..."

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"Couple weeks maybe unless it's unexpectedly hard, and - let's not go there until I've had a little longer than a week to detangle myself."

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"If it's a couple weeks then there's no cause to at all.

When do you want to announce an engagement?"

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"Mm, not immediately or anything but there's plenty of excuse to be a little hurried - I think the sum of the announcement delay and the engagement period itself should at least approach a year but don't have a strong opinion about the ratio."

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"Ask in three months, set up a wedding for seven after that?"

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"Sure."

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He manages to restrain himself from looking delighted, that wouldn't be very helpful. 

"How would you like to be proposed to?"

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"Is this something we have to orchestrate publicly?"

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"No; if you'd rather we can just say it happened. People will want a story, though."

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"Well, I'll come up with something, or you can," she says, "I didn't have a strong opinion on how I wanted to be proposed to even when I thought it was going to be real."

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"I'm so sorry."

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"I could've gotten over it more thoroughly and then I wouldn't be constantly checking the impulse to snipe at you about it but like I said I have to want the qualities I'm cultivating and I don't want to be - emotionally invulnerable, it'd - I'll probably stop doing that eventually."

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"I want you in my life even if you don't expect to get over it or stop making pointed comments about it."

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"Thanks."

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"Is that everything?"

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She pages through her notebook - "We should probably continue going on conspicuous outings now and then during the leadup."

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"Yes. I can keep inviting you to things at the palace and coming down here in the day sometimes."

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"And if my life presents me with something I could reasonably bring a date to I'll let you know."

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He nods.

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"That's everything I had lined up to mention. Do you have anything to talk about?"

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"I am sorry I hurt you and will be more careful. I am very glad you want to do this."

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"Well, you know. Go looking for queens and you might find someone who wants the job."

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He shakes his head. "The hard part isn't finding someone who wants the job, it's finding someone who can do it well."

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"Yes, I know."

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"I am very fortunate. Our nation's very fortunate. 

Please do let me know if anything else comes to mind."

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"Will do."

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And he stands up and looks at her a bit sadly and turns to go back downstairs.

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Where he is treated to hissing and presumable invective from Cricket. It has Iobel's name in it.

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"Yeah," he says to Cricket. "I know."

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Hissssss.

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And he leaves.

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Cricket continues to despise Mitros and make this conspicuous every time he visits. Iobel does not bring him to the palace.

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But Iobel visits the palace frequently! Another dance, a dinner in the palace gardens, a welcoming event for a diplomatic envoy from Farlas. When the latter has dissolved into mingling and chatting in the gardens Mitros says to her that he thinks he can drag his father out - "he was intrigued by the possibility of talking immortality with you" - and leaves her by the dahlias.

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So she waits; she doesn't have her whole chart with her but she's got the skeleton of the outline copied onto the last page for reference in case she has some inconveniently timed insight.

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He's a while in coming back; people wander by. There's a tiny new royal, maybe two years old, running around with a badger she keeps clinging to to stay on her feet. Finankar waves at her. 

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"Hi there."

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"How've you been?"

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"I'm all right. Yourself?"

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"It would have been a little difficult to wheel around and go right back on vacation, but I handed off all my responsibilities for six months, so I'm actually a touch at loose ends. Any projects you could use a second pair of eyes on?"

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"I dunno, are you a spellbinder or do you have your familiar for other reasons?"

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"Spellbinder. Did I ever tell you what I do here? I coordinate training and recruitment for the guard, and its much smaller spellbinder division. Most of what I have are ways to stop fights and so forth and my occasional flight of fancy project is, well, flight."

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"I have a flight spell but it has an appalling charge to duration ratio."

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"I can bounce very high, for almost an hour. It's fun but terribly undignified and not really what I was looking for. Someday I shall give it another go from a diifferent angle."

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"Mine really flies! For a couple minutes! You can have a look at it if you want, maybe you'll think of a way to change it so it gets different results."

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"I'd love to. Couple minutes of flight, what's the charge?"

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"Half an hour."

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He shakes his head. "Ouch. Yeah, I'd love to take a look at it."

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"I'll bring it next time I'm by."

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"Everything going okay?"

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"Yeah. Not, you know, fairytale-y, but okay."

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"I'm really glad. It'd be better for everyone, including him, if fairytale-y wasn't something he can almost pull off."

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"...what do you mean?"

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"I mean, normal people don't have 'be whoever gets me what I want' on the table quite so accessibly and would find it hard to do and so would notice sooner we were doing something wrong."

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"Ah. Well, he has promised to behave himself better in the future."

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"I assumed as much, because you seem to have a good head on your shoulders and he knew he'd messed up and you knew why."

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"Your advice was helpful too."

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"Thank you. I've known him a while. And congratulations - he's starting to hint to people that he's thinking about proposing."

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"Yeah, that's coming in a few weeks. Need to either decide how to stage it or how to tell everybody it happened; I'm leaning the first because then I don't have to lie to my parents."

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He nods. "Do you know what you want to be able to truthfully tell them?"

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"Not in enough detail to hand him a choreography. Suggestions?"

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"I think the questions people peppered my younger brother with were - did you expect it, what did he say, where were you, what were you wearing, was there anyone present, when's the wedding..."

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"Well, the engagement is slated to be seven months long, although it's possible I should pretend not to have that information."

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"No, that seems like a thing reasonably settled on immediately after the proposal. What's the plan if the King doesn't live that long?"

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"Hasn't come up, actually, I suppose either 'abruptly move up the timeline' or 'let your uncle hold the crown for a bit' are options."

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"I suppose a couple months wouldn't do any harm. I think the King'll live, he's not on his deathbed. But at that age there are few guarantees."

 

And then Mitros and his father round a corner. "Nice to see you, Iobel," he says quickly, and leaves.

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"Bye," Iobel says. And, "Hi Mitros - your highness -"

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"My son says immortality's been a long-term ambition of yours," he says. "Have you gotten anywhere?"

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"As is so often the case I have something that would probably work if it could fit in my head. I'm making condensation progress in fits and starts."

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"Same. May I see it?"

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"I didn't bring the whole chart today but I've got the outline and I remember a lot of the sub-branches -" She shows him the page.

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He studies it intently for about thirty seconds, then has dozens of questions.

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Which she is happy to answer for him.

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"We'll get there," he says after a while. "But not fast enough - this minute wouldn't be fast enough -"

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"I know. I'm trying to aim for a sustainable pace over breakneck because it just takes so long but I never know for sure that if I go do something else I wouldn't have managed it that minute..."

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"Yes. Or if I stop to build something for working memory, maybe that's worth it because immortality's not sufficiently compressible or maybe I am just wasting time while people die. If you send me your spellchart I'll see if there are any sections you have shorter than mine."

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"I'll send a copy up first thing when I get home today."

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"Thank you. Have a nice whatever the occasion is."

Mitros ruefully watches him go. "Thanks."

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"You're welcome."

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"My mother used to be able to snap him out of it but they are now separated."

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"I don't think that made it into the press."

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A thin smile. "It did not."

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"Is there anything else I should know about it...?"

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"I mean, don't ask them about each other, or if there are more little princes on the way - she's too old anyway, it wouldn't exactly come up - but you don't have to step especially carefully, he just ignores all conversation that's not about technical work these days."

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"Okay."

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"I told him not to bother you about your language. I probably only delayed him in doing so."

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"Uh, if he learns to talk to Cricket and then makes the mistake of actually doing it..."

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"That's why I asked him not to bother you about it."

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"I'll try to put him off if he asks."

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"I don't think he'd think of it as reason not to pass me the crown. But yeah, might be safer to wait until then."

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"...that would be an extremely petty reason not to pass you the crown."

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"You thought it was very close to disqualifying, and he is a bit hair-trigger about marriage, after what happened with his mother. That I'm gay wouldn't bother him."

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"Oh, I thought you meant if I won't teach him my idiolect."

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"No, no, I mean the content of what Cricket will say to him."

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"Yeah, that'd be another matter."

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"I have been assuming that there's no way at all I can set that one right with him, but if it'd merely be absurdly difficult I am happy to try."

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"I don't actually know, you're the first person to get to the point of him liking you as opposed to just not-disliking-yet and then lose it."

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A rueful smile. "Perhaps when he comes to live here. Want to circle back around for desserts?"

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"Sure." Mmm, palatial desserts.

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He'll put his arm around her, sometimes, but lightly, or tuck a strand of hair behind her ear and smile at her, but only in public. They share two desserts. 

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Arm-putting and hair-tucking are fine. And by the time they get to the part where they have a wedding she is pretty sure she'll be able to weather a kiss without breaking stride.

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He proposes. In private, but for real, so she won't have anything to lie about. He has the good sense not to try to make it a fairytale proposal, though it's a very nice one. He has a spell for it that makes flower petals rain down on them. 

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Well, the flower petals are very cute.

She accepts.

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They are envied and copied and the city streets start to get rather strewn with flower petals. The King gets a little better. Mitros manages to get some of his preferred proposals through. Iobel gets an appointment to run Education with the titles her marriage will grant her. 

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Lovely. She snoops around the department as it stands to compile ideas. She wants Marlese classes for familiars and a way for them to enroll in other schools if they want, and spellbinder education scholarships with a promise to work for certain public services when they qualify...

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Mitros can introduce her to people, and tell her what they care about and which angles for pushing these ideas might work on them, but he mostly limits himself to advice. "You're the person they're going to have to know they answer to."

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"I appreciate the pointers anyway."

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And wedding planning. Technically it could just be a short private ceremony with a priest and some witnesses, but it'll give them a tremendous popularity boost and Mitros is inclined to milk it. A thousand attendees, two days of events.

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Two days? What are they going to do to fill two entire days?

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Dinner party, morning ceremony, afternoon reception, lots of dancing, and a day off for everyone to nurse hangovers, probably. 

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"Is anybody going to care if I don't drink? Because I don't."

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"I am sure they won't. If you're concerned you can carry around a glass of something. We will in any event not be expected to be spending the day after our wedding nursing hangovers."

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"Of course not. We'll have to tuck away somewhere and catch up on our reading."

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"I have a stack of things I've been neglecting in favor of all these dates and all this politicking."

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"Oh? Anything good?"

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"I'm not sure - do you read A Common Conceptual Language, the third edition just came out and I got rather a lot out of the first two, there's a few new military histories Finankar recommended me, there's a spell or two that I should be able to pick up with a little study and that I'd like to have as King.."

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"I haven't read it but I've had it recommended to me, I suppose this should tip the balance into actually picking it up - what spells?"

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"The King apparently has something like communicative telepathy! Annoyingly long charge but good duration. All it does is let you send people comments and requests during meetings, you can't even hear any acknowledgment back from them, but it still makes you look rather omnipotent, to say "I'll have someone bring that in" and then have someone rush in with it. There's also a - I don't know if it's a secret, but it's taken very gravely - a spell that lets you make binding promises. In case we ever need to end or prevent a war or something by promising not to attack some nervous neighbor if they don't start it."

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"They'd have to believe you were casting the version of the spell you said you were."

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"I think the idea is that both sides charge it together? I suppose if you managed to find something else with exactly the same charge time..."

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"Or if they just think you might have good enough timing to start charging something else for the rest of the duration when they blink."

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"Are you suggesting I come up with ways to cheat the commitment mechanisms heads of state apparently secretly use sometimes, or just pointing out that I can't trust other people with them?"

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"I'm pointing out that they are not foolproof, and this has implications for whether you should use them or rely on them."

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"Consider me appropriately warned. I don't even know exactly how the thing works. What's on your reading list?"

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"Raney recommended me some historical fiction and I have a collection of short biographies of familiars who distinguished themselves without being footnotes to their binders."

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"Oooh. Know any familiars who should help run the country? Antir considers the extent of her obligations to be swatting me in the face when I deserve it, and Cricket doesn't seem the type."

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"He's really not. Raney's caiman isn't either. The woodchuck across the street from me is very competent but at bookkeeping, not at anything more grandiose than that."

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"Perhaps I should get to know my relatives' familiars better. Or ask my father, who can already talk to a lot of them."

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"Familiars are like a quarter of the population and they get almost completely ignored except as accessories to their binders, and the language barrier makes it so hard to fix, and I don't understand why they can't pick up Marlese by exposure the way humans can..."

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"Shall we drag Dad out of his rooms again, he had all kinds of hypotheses about that..."

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"If you think he'd appreciate it, I suppose, although it seems likely to flirt with the 'so about Cricket's language' question..."

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"I think he'd appreciate it and it'd be good for him, but yes, there's that risk. Suppose we could keep Cricket away until the wedding."

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"I was pretty much planning on that anyway, I don't have a good explanation for how he acts around you and 'oh he hates everyone' won't explain how disproportionate it is."

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"And the rumor mill'd reach fascinating conclusions - not the right one, but nothing I like...want to go interrupt whoever brings him lunch?"

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"Sure."

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So they interrupt the servants and bring in Fannar's lunch and he sets aside his work and raises an eyebrow at them. "Yes?"

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"Mitros says you have theories about why familiars don't pick up human or each other's languages by exposure, which would be relevant information to any attempt to integrate them better into society."

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"Yes," he says. "So people vary in language-learning, individually over their lifetime and between individuals, but familiars aren't just at the unusually-bad end of that. They just lack a lot of capacities we have. You can do tests of retention of new vocabulary and retention of new syntax, and I have -" he shuffles through his desk. "Eventually I want a syntax-learning spell - language learning's ridiculously big - and I think that'd solve some problems. Here you go.  Tests of language learning in humans and familiars."

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"Ooh, thanks!"

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"I wondered if idiolects are structurally different from Marlese in some way that could explain things, but they aren't, typically, and familiars can't be taught other idiolects with particular ease either."

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"I've noticed that, it's very strange. Typically? What about atypically?"

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"I know twelve fluently," he says, "and twenty well enough to draw conclusions from, and they're almost all from one family so even if there are persistent tendencies I could comment on that might just suggest that there are inherited commonalities, though there aren't any particular striking ones - speaking of which, you have got to teach me yours..."

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"I'm afraid I really can't recommend talking to my cat. He's not a very nice cat."

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"I don't learn peoples' languages because I want to talk to people," he says exasperatedly. "You might have noticed I barely talk to people anyway. I want to learn the languages because they're beautiful and we don't really understand them."

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"I also have a habit of using a written version for private notes, so I'd rather not teach it, or at least I'd need longer to think about it."

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"Alright," he sighs. "Well, here's a table of similarities between the ones I speak - subject-noun-adjective ordering, agglutinative or inflective or other - I really want to get some from people not born in Marlese-speaking territory, too -"

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"Isn't Nistar's girlfriend foreign?"

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"The stupid, dogmatic, superstitious fairytale her parents believe in frowns on spellbinding because you might use your familiar to do work on the sabbath."

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"...ah."

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"Don't worry," he says, "she thinks as poorly of it as I do."

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"It seems weird that a substantial culture could comprehensively forbid binding one's familiar. What if somebody's spirit animal joins the religion and promises not to work on the sabbath? Why haven't they just been outcompeted - not even over the sabbath per se but just over the use of magic -?"

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"I mean, they're a minority in her homeland. And you would think, but I think if anything they've recently gotten stricter. I don't know procedures for converts, they may not have any, it's a pretty insular religion. Have you met her? You two'd get along, you both at least have good taste..."

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"Only in passing," Iobel says, "perhaps I should cultivate more of an acquaintance."

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"Sensible girl. No desire to settle down, but that's sensible too, really, they try to throw a crown at you."

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"Oh no. The horror."

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"You want it? Of course you would, Mitros does."

Mitros is sitting amusedly across the room, stroking Antir and watching them.

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"Of course," Iobel agrees. "I think I'd be good at it."

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He waves an impatient hand. "Probably."

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She giggles.

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"I tend to think most people who'd be good at the job must have more interesting things to do with their life than avoid offending boring people. Mitros at least isn't good at anything else, but you are, so you're wasted on it."

 

Antir has a comment about that, but neither Mitros nor Fannar translate it.

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"I like having a variety of things to do with my time. I think it'd be an upgrade from retail."

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"That I'll grant," he says. "When you find the people intolerable I'd be happy to work with you on spell research or something else valuable."

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"Sounds like fun, if you think our charting styles dovetail well enough."

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"Well enough it'll save us time at least occasionally," he says. 

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"Lovely. I'd like that."

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"I'll send someone down with the rest of my familiar and language notes, I don't have them on me."

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"Thanks."

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He has already turned back to his spellchart, but he grunts in acknowledgment. Mitros gets to his feet, shaking his head.

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Iobel follows her fiancé out.

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Antir says something else as soon as the door closes. Mitros shakes his head, gently. "Any of that look like it might be helpful to you/"

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"Quite possibly. ...Is he like that about you all the time?"

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"Yep. We work together quite well but there are a few subjects on which he just cannot seem to resist getting in a comment wherever he can."

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"Why?"

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"Because he desperately needs to believe that the skills I have are neither learnable nor worth having or he'd be crippled with self-loathing over his inability to learn them. His wife left him and his father's slowly dying and he's not in a good place to confront his deficits as a person, so he just keeps deepening them.

 

The frustrating thing is that he has people skills, just intermittently. When he's in the mood to try."

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"What puts him in the mood?"

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"One of us needing it. I will more or less ignore him when he says I may as well rule the country since it's not like I'm good at anything else. If I needed him to be there he would."

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"I'm almost curious now what him learning to understand Cricket would do to this dynamic, but not enough to teach him."

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"After we're in power, maybe."

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"At least that long."

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"What're you afraid will happen?"

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"Well, the odds aren't good Cricket would get along with your father, either, and I can only take him anywhere because people can't understand him."

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"I could actually see the two of them hitting it off fine, if my father wasn't inclined to defend me, and why would he be?"

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"It's possible, but it really is more likely Cricket would find something not to like. He might not like someone learning his language to begin with, actually, I never asked."

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"I might be biased in Cricket's favor because he really seemed to have very reasonable standards for liking people around me."

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"He doesn't like my landlord because he suspects him of cooking fish and not sharing. He didn't like any of the kids I taught when I was a teaching assistant for reasons up to and including use of purple ink in assignments, bad taste in hairstyles, not dating who he thought they'd be cute with, and bringing water bottles to class."

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He snorts. "Okay. Does he dislike Finankar? What's his reason?"

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"...Thought he should have stuck around to warn me."

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He laughs. 

 

"I wish he had. I'm sorry."

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"Well - it shook out okay."

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"Can I kiss you at our wedding?"

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"Yeah."

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"Have you had a chance to look at spell options for children? It can wait for after the wedding but if we want to secretly release it and make sure healthy children are born to people who use it, probably not much after."

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"There doesn't seem to be anything extant for the use case published already, but I have half an outline."

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He nods. "Let me know if you want me to take a look at it. Not that I'm especially likely to be of assistance, but you can't ask the people who'd no doubt be much better..."

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"When I've got a draft you can look it over," she nods.

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It's an uneventful few months. He sends her letters in elaborately calligraphed envelopes with wedding planning details and Education information and studies his father forgot. The envelopes have her name painstakingly embellished; the letters don't bother. 

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Well, you never know who might look at the envelope.

She's still mostly working on immortality but when she task-switches she makes progress on the spell for conception and sends him a draft when she has one.

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He has few suggestions, but they're at least useful ones. It's time she pick out a dress.

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Oh god a dress she doesn't know anything about dresses her mother picked out everything she has nicer than her usual intentionally unremarkable mix-and-match can she delegate the dress.

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She can delegate the dress! She can so delegate the dress! There are people in the palace delighted to do the dress for her. And her makeup and hair, she should come to the palace a week in advance to try a few different styles and see what suits.

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Sure, she can sit and be fussed over.

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They are at least spectacularly good at their jobs. She looks amazing.

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Lovely. She may twirl a little. Twirl~

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They're glad she's so excited! It's her special day; she should be!

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Yep. Looking stunning and wearing a tiara at the end of it: very special. ...She doesn't express this part out loud.

Raney would like to meet Mitros before the wedding.

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Mitros would like to meet Raney! If Iobel doesn't mind. He promises he won't lie.

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Iobel doesn't mind. Would he like to come to Raney's house for dinner?

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Sounds lovely!

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Raney lives in a rowhouse not far from the school where she works, and since Iobel moved out has been sharing with a co-worker to save on living expenses, and the coworker clears out so Raney can offer her daughter and the prince dinner, which is cooked to a standard of approximate competence and includes Iobel's favorite rolls.

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He is delighted to meet her and thinks the dinner's lovely and can see where Iobel got her stunning good looks from and is all around everything one could hope for from a prince who's marrying one's daughter.

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Raney is delighted! And her familiar Nimmen, who sings, is apparently a great admirer of Makariel and wants his autograph, if Mitros can arrange that.

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He can! At the wedding, if not sooner; will Nimmen sing for them tonight?

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Nimmen would be delighted. After she has dispatched her dinner with the promised appalling table manners she obliges the audience with rather pretty crooning, mostly wordless.

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The audience is appreciative! Mitros would like to pull Iobel into his lap and gaze adoringly at her.

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He may do that.

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He gazes very adoringly.

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Iobel closes her eyes so she doesn't overtax her acting skills or her attempt to need them.

Eventually Nimmen is done singing for now.

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He thanks Raney again for dinner and Nimmen for the concert and offers to walk Iobel home.

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Iobel would be happy to be walked home. (Raney thinks they're adorable.)

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"Your mom's great," he says. "How're you doing?"

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"I'm fine, why do you ask?"

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"People find weddings stressful, people find deception stressful...it occurred to me you might be wishing you'd held out for someone who could make this real..."

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"I admit this is not the life story I would have written myself, but in reality I have limited materials, you know? And presumably you'd rather have not had to get married to take the throne in the first place if you'd been able to arrange that."

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"Well, no, but I did all my mourning for the life I'd wanted in the months before I met you. And I am pretty happy with what I got."

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"I would definitely have held out if you didn't like me."

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"I like you. I would give you all of this properly, if I could."

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"Do not secretly invent a spell to turn yourself straight, that would be horrifying."

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"Bi? Though I imagine it's been tried, I doubt it's straightforward and there's no way to safely test it."

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"...I mean, I suppose if you really wanted to, but mind-affecting magic in general creeps me out so you would have to be very firm that you wanted to."

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"It creeps me out too. If it had a safe track record of not doing anything else I'd be tempted. I am not planning to hack one together in secret. Also, you know, it's not something I'd really want widely available in the current climate, lots of people would be coerced into taking it."

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"Yep. Which would make testing it in the manner planned for the other spell difficult. I think things are getting better but not in the time frame that would matter."

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He nods. "If we don't have death sorted by the time the children are grown let's make sure the laws are changed, at least."

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"Some of the laws in question should really go regardless."

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"Oh, I have a list seven pages long of things that go on day one. The succession's not a priority there, though."

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"I need to see this list!"

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"I'm surprised I didn't think to show it to you already. Next time you're at the palace, or would you care to come back with me tonight? It's less than a week to the wedding, I don't think we'd raise eyebrows..."

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"Tonight works."

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So they take the boats back to the palace and he digs out of his dresser seven pages of things that go the minute they have the power and he reads them out. 

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Iobel quibbles on a few details and has a page's worth of more suggestions, mostly about the areas she's been studying up on for project reasons - familiars and education - which he overlooked.

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He grins at her. He adds them. "There are probably more things we're missing because they aren't projects of either of us."

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"Probably. We could conduct a poll."

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He adds that to the list, too. 

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She giggles.

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Iobel being happy makes him feel even more guilty than Iobel making pointed comments. He doesn't share this. He tucks the list back somewhere safe. "Want me to find you a guest room?"

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"Yeah, I don't want to wait hours for the night boat."

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"I meant as opposed to staying here, there's more space than I know what to do with. We've got three dozen guest rooms, they're color-coded or something." He stands up and opens the door.

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"I talk in my sleep," she says. "If we ever want an excuse for not co-rooming."

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"Oooh! Good to know."

The guest room is color-coded pastel green, and very pretty. No one's looking so he gives her a goodnight hug.

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Hug!

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Gosh, he'd be so good at courting Iobel if it were possible. He'd be the best at it. He shakes his head and walks back to bed.

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"G'night."

She falls asleep and mumbles to herself among pastel green decor.

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And a few days later they get married. There are a thousand guests. The decorations are extravagant. The people are back to do Iobel's hair and makeup and outfit.

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She will be very pliable for them and look utterly stunning.

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She does look utterly stunning! Half the room falls in love the minute they catch sight of her. Mitros thinks amusedly that people will think he chose for looks. The wedding vows are outdated and misogynistic. "I do so swear," he says anyway.

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"I so swear," she says likewise.

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And he kisses his wife. Finkanar, in the second row, looks very patiently happy for them and not at all like he wants to burst into giggles.

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Cricket looks like he wants to torture a rodent to death over this travesty, but this is pretty normal for Cricket and nobody cares. He has been coached not to yell or hiss, at least.

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After the ceremony there is a reception which the bride and groom are not particularly expected to attend. 

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Catching up on their reading it is.

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They have a lot to catch up on. It's a pleasant evening and nice to have the next day off. 

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Without a hangover, even!

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Look at them, ignoring the varieties of alcohol placed out next to the bed. "I am actually vaguely uncomfortable with that," Mitros says at one point, frowning at it. "If people are sufficiently nervous that that seems like a good idea they should probably just wait..."

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"Maybe if they think they'll be nervous the first time and fine after that?"

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"Probably. I think you'd like this chapter of A Common Symbology but you can skim the first three as mostly a waste of space and it's not making me optimistic about the rest of them."

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"I'll keep that in mind, although I always feel a little weird about skipping parts of books."

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"Nistar's like that. When he was a kid he wouldn't put them down, either, even if he wasn't getting anything out of them, then someone told him about the sunk cost fallacy and he snapped right out of the habit."

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"Yeah, I'll put them down, but skipping the first chapters..."

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"What kind of monster have you married?" He's grinning. "Hard to say if the fourth makes the first three worth it. I'll read the rest and let you know."

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"The kind of monster who reviews books for me, apparently."

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"I try."

 

And a while later, "so my ex-boyfriend gave me permission to try to win him back if my future wife was all right with that. I would very much like to; he's very pretty. He is usually the person I go to for 'how do I repair this relationship I damaged' but under the circumstances probably no."

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"...I mean, it would be hilarious if you asked him that and he answered you, but, probably no. Is his prettiness really the operative characteristic here, did I get the better end of the deal on things that cause you to be interested in people?"

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"He is eminently sensible and brilliant and fair-minded and generous and forgiving and funny and principled and good for me as a person, but it seemed rude to sound excessively lovey-dovey about my ex to my wife on our honeymoon."

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"Anyway, I'm fine if you want to try to get him back, although I cannot promise to have his expertise on how to do it either as a general skill or as specific insight into him individually."

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"Thank you. I don't have much expertise either. If I muck it up with him as much as I did with you he shall leave, and I've never had anyone else - he seduced me, the first time."

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"Awwww."

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"Were you imagining I had a lot of exes? Makarial was not quite right when he said I was on track to be thirty without kissing anyone but I certainly wasn't going to kiss anyone who wasn't a deeply spectacular and remarkable human being."

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"Oh, I didn't know how many you had, but I was mostly awwwing at him being the initiating party."

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"He didn't even know I was gay, I don't think! We were best friends, and apparently he'd been flirting with me for a while but I, being oblivious, had not noticed, and he was intensely entertained by this and escalated. He had to escalate a lot. Every single test of his new flying spell ended with him falling down on top of me - and then he would not get up - before it occurred to me what he was doing and then I didn't say anything because I was curious how hard he was going to try."

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"Of course you were," snorts Iobel.

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"Wouldn't you have been? Anyway, we were swimming in the hot springs and our clothes got stolen by a polecat that he swore up and down definitely wasn't his polecat and I thought 'why not' so I said 'you know, I am in love with you too' and he was so adorably speechless."

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Iobel bursts into giggles. "I would've been curious but I probably would have discharged my curiosity by asking instead of experimentally!"

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"I'm not sure he had a point at which he'd give up defined in advance, it was more 'for as long as this makes me happy and doesn't bother him'. We certainly wouldn't have gotten such a satisfying conclusion out of it."

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"He wouldn't have had to have something defined, he could have just told entertaining hypotheticals," suggests Iobel.

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"That would have worked. And then I would have had him several months sooner. See, I should go to you for relationship advice."

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"You have done," she points out. "Although I admit I am not sure what to tell you about the situation going forward."

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"I know what not to do! I should not go 'yes okay the plan was as badly-considered as you thought but it totally worked you have to admit Iobel is going to be great'."

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Iobel giggles. "No, probably not. You could thank him for not cracking up at the wedding?"

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"And for coming back when Antir asked. Would I have been able to fix things if he hadn't?"

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"Maybe. You were very gratifyingly abashed. But he helped."

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"And I can't do gratifyingly abashed now for him because I have no regrets. 

 

 

Hmmm."

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"What, none? Sure, you like the result, but the process was precarious."

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"I regret wronging you. I do not regret talking over with him what I was going to do and then deciding to be a King. And that is when he broke up with me, sensibly enough, but before I'd done anything to apologize for! Maybe that's why. He did not want to break up with me after I'd done things to apologize for and he knew I would."

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"I'm not sure forming an intention to do something you'd need to apologize for is itself unworthy of apology."

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"...I think I have enough to work with. Thank you. Do you suppose I should go climb through his window right now or wait a few days?"

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"Climb through his window?"

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"I have a spell for glass but not stone!"

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"What if he isn't expecting you to climb through his window?"

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"Why wouldn't he expect that?"

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"Well, you hadn't decided to do it a minute ago, so I don't see why he ought to be sitting up in expectation instead of nursing his hangover, or do they not last this long?"

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"He doesn't really drink."

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"Well, he might still not be expecting you."

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"I shall knock first. But I bet he's expecting me."

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"I do hope he hasn't been kept up every night expecting, pacing back and forth, pining. Or did you only have permission to try to win him back after actually marrying me and not during the engagement? So that he'd think it would be now in particular?"

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"No, as soon as you were okay with it was the criterion, but I've been very busy and also not known what to do. I am sure he's been spending his evenings spellcharting and if he's in a mood at me maybe spellcharting something meant to give sons of Fannar the wisdom of a typical person."

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"Ew, mind-affecting magic."

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"Didn't mean it literally. Not even sure it's possible, and if it can be done it wouldn't be with spells. If he did produce something that made me wiser, though, depending what mechanically it did I think I'd take it. I want better recall and working memory so badly."

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"Okay, I would take those unless they had nasty side effects, I'll grant."

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He starts charging walking-through-windows. "Not really up his alley, anyway. My father might get there someday."

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"And if he can cast it on other people then it can bootstrap from there."

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"Yes, exactly. He has a vision of getting perfect recall through that process, and then - anything we can imagine." 

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"That'd be so great."

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"I know! Care to be empress of the world while we figure out what the stars are and if there's anything there worth being empress of?"

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"I'm sure you can guess."

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The spell's ready. He makes himself able to walk through glass. He gives his wife a hug. He leaps through the window.

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She chuckles to herself and goes back to her book.

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When he walks through the other window he goes flying across the room and, when he lands, finds he cannot keep his feet and collapses onto the floor.

"New security measure," Finankar says, in Mitros' idiolect, which he speaks with a funny accent but otherwise proficiently. "I sent you a memo about it. It has an oddly long duration, several hours."

He stops trying to stand up. "It's not on my window."

"You hadn't responded to the memo."

"Do you want to talk to me?"

"I am stuck talking to you or carrying you back to your honeymoon suite and trying to explain ourselves in the hallways."

"I could be quiet."

"No, no," Finankar says, putting his pen down, "please do talk."

"I spent this evening telling Iobel how I fell in love with you. I made a flippant remark that you were pretty and she objected to my criteria for partners so then I had to defend myself."

"I think you do too little prioritizing that you find a partner pretty, honestly."

"I apologize. I drove myself headfirst into a predictable mess and wronged people along the way and I am not sure if you were trying to protect me from wronging you also but I am grateful for it."

"I am fascinated by the convolutions that lead you to the conclusion I broke up with you to protect you from wronging me instead of to protect me from being wronged by you."

"...yeah, that's fair."

"Are you trying to demonstrate your maturity because I'll appreciate it but it's not going to be sufficient."

"I was originally planning to try to win you back but the more I told Iobel the more I realized how hopeless it was. You find me likable enough and being likable at you won't change it. You know that I love you and protestations of love won't change it. And I don't want to have you because you save me from myself."

"You have Iobel for that."

"I am working on not using people for that."

"And in the meantime you are using someone else for it."

"...yeah, that's fair."

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(Iobel is oblivious to this conversation but she would find it adorable were she not.)

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He puts his spellchart down, and sighs, and picks up Mitros and puts him in a chair. "You're going to be a King, hmm?"

"Yes. Please don't say 'as far as I know the King can do as he pleases', I will get appropriately flustered but it's not really where I want this conversation to go. You were very calm and very civil and very patient and so I might have missed it. Did I hurt you?"

"Yes."

"Very badly?"

"Yes."

"Are there things I could have done to not do that?"

"I actually don't think so."

"Okay," he says. "Next step after King is emperor of the world and I can't think why that'd involve choosing between you and power."

Finankar buries his head in his hands and mutters something in his idiolect which Mitros will understand just as well but will understand he's not supposed to respond to. 

"If it does," Mitros says, "and I know that this time you'll leave for good, I think I'll keep in mind that I am not actually half as competent as I like to flatter myself without you."

"You are not going to get particularly anywhere with praises for my instrumental usefulness in acquiring power, either."

"No?"

"I spent a while trying to be competent for you and I don't regret it but I regret that it was for you."

"Do I have too much of a hold on you?"

"Probably."

"Is there a way to fix that?"

"You should probably not conduct intimate conversations the way you conduct treaty negotiations, it's not decision fatigue and a signature you're trying to elicit in the other person."

"...yeah, that's fair."

"Oh, for fucks fucking sake, Mitros -"

"Do you want me to stop being reasonable?"

"I am really not sure! Maybe I do!"

"I love you! I am adrift and only occasionally miserable but always at least a tiny bit miserable, and I cannot imagine that ever going away! I love you and I want you back and I can't talk my way into it or win my way into it and I hate feeling helpless almost as much as I hate the thought that you'll give it a try for old times' sake and not want me anymore. If I am emperor of the world and do not have you I will be good at my job but so desperately lonely in it. Life without you isn't. Please let me fix it. I don't care what you want me to do."

Finankar raises an eyebrow.

Mitros stops talking. "...what?"

"If I gave you an opening like that do you know what you would do with that?"

"Test whether you meant it by suggesting lots of awful things and then in actual practice end up kissing your nose and giving you silly compliments all night," he says instantly.

"Right. Well, that's not me."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Be worth my trust."

He swallows. "...okay."

"Be a damn good King."

"I am going to be."

"And do whatever the hell you want with me."

"Okay," he whispers, and with an opening like that he will in fact spend a good part of the night kissing his nose and giving him silly compliments, though not the whole night because it has, in fact, been a year.

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(Iobel goes to sleep at a reasonable hour. If anybody asks, the trouble is she mutters random words all night.)

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In the morning her cheerful husband meets her for breakfast with chocolate crepes that have something of an excess of chocolate.

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Mmm, chocolate. "G'morning."

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"How're you?"

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"Pretty good, although I should probably think of a better response to 'and how was your wedding night, huh' than 'restful, thank you'."

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He snorts. "Might go badly with anyone noticing I look exhausted."

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"Crossed my mind."

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"I can keep you up at night if you're going to be bad at lying about whether I did. I have lots more book reviews to offer."

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"Oh, I can probably manage a convincingly coy giggle."

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"Thank you for everything."

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"You're welcome. I assume climbing through his window went well? Was he in fact expecting you?"

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"Yes, in the sense he had the window spelled to throw intruders against the opposite wall and then leave them unable to keep their feet under them."

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"Burglary! It's foolproof!"

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"He barely even pretended that it was spelled that way to prevent burglary! He wanted me lying in a heap at his feet so there I was and we had a very productive conversation. I have very nearly committed it to memory, would you like to hear it."

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"Sure, if it's not private or anything."

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So he tells her the conversation as best as he can remember it. He remembers it pretty vividly.

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"...that's. Mostly adorable," says Iobel.

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"Mostly?"

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"I'm not sure I'm getting all of the subtext but I am not sure all of the subtext was adorable. But it was definitely mostly adorable."

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"Okay, fair enough.

 

I should probably get back to work."

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"Enjoy."

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"You too."