But Lira is also a touch capricious, now that she’s no longer isolated and angry. She constantly shifts her interests, exploring something, growing quite fascinated by it, then dropping it completely, bored. Art, music, dancing. Her latest is cooking, and she’s still in the very interested stage of that, but I have no faith in her not dropping it entirely next week. I don’t particularly care – to a degree I even encourage her to try out as many things as possible – and the only stricture I place on her is that she has to complete her set school work, and participate in family activities. But I’m hoping to teach her to be aware that if she behaves that way with people she could really hurt them. Perhaps I’m being unjust – she’s remained very firmly Ys' compatriot – and she was lonely long enough to not want to hurt people. But she sometimes doesn’t think things through, and I don’t know if she is going to be able to handle the immense interest she is starting to inspire half so well as Maze.
Ys is perfectly aware of social consequences, for all she picks and chooses who to bestow her compassion upon. She clocked Del and Lore ogling Lira just as readily as we did, and was very scornful of them as a result. Scorn is still Ys' default reaction to most things, but that’s a cover for a wider range of responses. Just looking at her reading access list tells me so much about Ys that I start feeling guilty for something which I do think is parently-appropriate. I made sure she’s aware I can look, anyway, and I think she decided it was okay.
Currently she mainly reads great heaps of history and sciences – lower high school level for the most part, dipping into more advanced books when she wants to pursue an explanation of something. She’s already more than equal to handling anything her age level at school can throw at her and well beyond. Ys is so intelligent I’m surprised she didn’t work out how to read just by looking at an alphabet, and her only weakness is that the classes are always starting on areas which she’s never studied at all and she has to do catch-up before handling the current work.
But she also gets through huge galloping realms of fiction – she allows herself a novel a day, slotted between school reading, extra reading on the subjects on her courses, and a thorough review of the newspapers and interface sites she has bookmarked (all the kids, even Sen, are incapable of not checking to see what people are saying about them each day). Her fiction interests range all over the place – she especially loves Earth fantasy stories and is forcing me to both keep conjuring up new books to read to her, and also to write up a proper translation dictionary of Taren to English. Dinner every day involves me adding a mandatory three words to the dictionary while we eat, and then answering Ys' cross-examination of the fine detail of their definitions. Kaoren says it’s very useful, and is keeping up with the lessons as well (Lira, Rye and Sen to a lesser extent), but none of them can rival Ys, who simply doesn’t forget anything she doesn’t want to. She wanted ten words a day, but that would have made dinner very long.
But along with history and science she has an absolute soft spot for teen romances and schoolgirl chum stories about close knit groups of friends overcoming spite and pettiness. Being brilliant doesn’t stop Ys from being human, and she wants acceptance and romance every bit as much as I did at her age. The influx of Taren students at the talent school is helping her get past the way she was raised (though making clear the education hurdles she’ll have to overcome to catch up), but she’s never going to forget being three against the world, and she doesn’t trust unknown Nurans at all.
The visits to Isten Notra are fantastic at cheering her up and giving her an outlet, but I think she’s starting to realise that finding a boy her own age who even comes close to her intellectually is going to be a challenge. Sometimes I see her looking at Lira – luminous skin, masses of waving hair, thick sooty eyelashes, gorgeous features and the beginnings of curves – and it’s obvious she’s running a comparison with her thin figure and inclined-to-be-short hair. I think in a few years Ys' looks will settle into a not-unattractive whole, but I know it would have been hard for me to have Lira as a sister! Fortunately Ys doesn’t seem inclined to resent Lira for it – Lira’s far too important to her.
If Ys ever lets her guard down she might find that more people are drawn to her than she expects. For the moment I think she has a crush on Shon (who scored brownie points both by being great with Rye, and by being related to Isten Notra, and pretty damn intelligent on his own account). She pretends to find him boring, of course, but Isten Notra is not the only reason she’s so careful about her appearance when she goes on her monthly visits.
I’m such a softie about Ys. I went to one of the few custom clothes-makers in Pandora a couple of weeks ago to talk wedding dresses (to make projections of what I mean by wedding dresses and to try and design one which doesn’t look completely out of place) and my primary preoccupation was that I needed flower girl dresses that were both girly and yet suited Ys. Ys won’t wear girly clothes because she thinks she doesn’t suit them, so my secret mission is to find something which looks so good on her she can’t help but want to wear it. Fortunately the dress-maker seemed to properly understand what I wanted, and to take the request seriously[12].
That’s about all the planning I’ve managed for my wedding. Maze and Alay’s baby will be born just before it. I did agonise for quite some time over whether to postpone getting married until I can try to bring Mum here, but Kaoren had to struggle to hide how much he hated that idea, and I think Sen would be too upset.
Other than First Squad romances, it’s been a quiet month, the highlight being Kaoren’s and then Sen’s birthday (I had a winged fairy princess dress made for her, which she would wear for every moment of every day if she were allowed to). Kaoren thinks we’re over the first bad stage of her Sights development, and we’ve been having more unbroken nights, and Siame is being very useful and encouraging and giving Sen confidence that things will get better[13].
Siame spends most of her time being fascinated by snow, and has been making very white paintings – and naturally all the kids find snowball fights and building snowmen and discovering icicles to be amazing and new and fun. Only a light snow layer at the moment – the heavy snowstorms haven’t started yet – and first weekend after it starts to snow properly we’re going to go across to Siriath and have another epic snowball fight, but this time with children and random family members involved. We’re going to make a yearly tradition of it.
Rye’s rather mournful for the effect of Winter on his garden, but was handily distracted into documenting the Winter habits of all the animals he’s discovered in Summer. And is practicing faithfully for snowball throwing.
12
Of course, being able to say she designed Caszandra’s wedding outfits gives her plenty of incentive to take me seriously – I have to admit I find this fame useful at times.
13
Siame is getting along very well with everyone but me. Me she still tries to have as little to do with as possible, and we’re letting it go at that for the moment.