Bella tries to get out of the letter-named-rooms building to go ask Emily for directions, but that's not a stairwell after all, and there's someone shouting at her not to come in and she flinches back and clonks her elbow on the door and boots or no boots she's down and she -
- is falling -
"It's not 'no reason', but it is harder to control. It's often useful for people to like you even if you don't care directly about that, though, people who don't like you can make your life difficult."
"He can't be planning to keep you in the palace all the time even when you're grown up?"
"Well, maybe when I'm less terrified of your father I can try to give him parenting advice but I'm not sure I'm very credible as a source on that. I suppose it's already been - is it in fact obvious that if he's concerned for your safety if you go out the obvious thing to do is send you with a bodyguard or is that just. Not obvious here."
"Somebody to go with you and protect you if something threatens you. I mean, nothing would happen here, but that doesn't seem to help, so maybe having company who could deal with it if something did happen could help?"
"So it'd have to be somebody who could stop you from doing that, I guess, or you'd have to not run off because then you wouldn't get to go out again."
"It has occurred to me that I may be the single scariest non-deity on the island even though at home I couldn't even get an exception to stop carrying around a knife I barely know how to use - and scariness is an important bodyguard qualification - and I can't think of a good reason you shouldn't go look at a thing unless you have to jump off a cliff to see it or something."
"No, I'm not going to sneak you out if your father says no. This is Valinor and I don't think you actually need a bodyguard to be safe; it just might help him feel comfortable."
"He might. Why do you think he'd do that? Maybe there's ways around all his reasons and maybe he's reasonable enough for that to matter."
"Please don't swear anything, that seems like such a bad idea," Bella says. "I can detect people from a ways off, you'd have to run really fast to get lost from me."