"Later like this evening or later like when somebody wants to marry me?"

Feris interrupts to enthusiastically offer to explain. Mile makes a despairing face and presses the heels of her hands into her forehead.

"Okay, you explain then," she says to Feris.

"So what she doesn't want to say is that they'll want to have sex with you, for which marriage is only a prerequisite, and they'll be mad at you for not having sex with them, but only if you grow up to be pretty enough that they really want to."

Mile sighs.

"Oh. I don't know if I'll be pretty. Let alone pretty enough that people would want to have sex with me without even liking me enough to not want to hurt me!"

"Actually - "

"Thank you, Feris, for explaining as much of that as is appropriate at her age, and demonstrating restraint and good sense."

Feris rolls his eyes.

"I don't know my age."

"You're too smart to be two and too small to be five."

"Maybe I'm two and the smartest person in the world. Or I'm five and the smallest."

"Only one person can be the smallest or the smartest and there are lots of people."

"I suppose if I were the second-smallest you might still think I was too small to be five. But really I don't know."

"We'll have a better idea in ten years."

"Why?"

"Because twelve and fifteen are very different and they'll be very different in the same way even if you're very small."

"Huh. I don't know what you mean but I don't know a lot of things."

Feris sighs. "I don't know what it's like for a girl to grow up or I'd tell you."

"Is it very different?"

"Very," says Mile, cutting Feris off, "and of course you’ll need to know all about that before you marry, which won’t be for quite a few years."

"I don't want to get married."

"And I sincerely hope you don't change your mind this decade," says Mile. Feris laughs.

"I guess I'll keep that in mind if I am thinking about whether to change my mind, then!"

So they do decide to keep her. She's old enough it makes sense to let her pick her own name and not old enough that it's so urgent they can't wait for her to learn a little more history and have a better sense of what kinds of names there are and what kinds of people have had them. (Mile will take point on introducing her to a variety of mythic and historical women, or men with unisex names. Relu who ruled a country. Rie who invented spinning. Zizu the sage. There's no need to pick something that's just okay if a few days will introduce her to something she really likes.) They can make lentil soup without salting it for her; Mile doesn't insist that she eat anything she doesn't want but Mile insists that she take at least the smallest possible bite of everything and put it in her mouth before pronouncing it non-food on the grounds that it is literally impossible to say whether anything is food just by looking at it. She's a little young for chores, really, but she can do some tidying, right? And given that she can read so well, it seems fine if she studies some of their books and gets more oriented that way. Strange, but fine.

Feris likes her. Actually the whole family likes her, but Feris especially does.

She decides to call herself Zizu after the sage. She develops a protocol of holding tiny bits of animal product between her teeth and then dropping it back on her plate. She doesn't eat much. She likes reading, and can do some tidying but she does trip and drop things; she's better at spinning once she's gotten the hang of that.

Mile speculates that she’s small for her age because she doesn’t eat enough, and opines that it would be embarrassing to the household for Zizu to keep eating poorly now that she’s one of them.

"I'm not hungry though."