“What are they for?”

“They aren’t exactly for anything. Well, status symbols, if you’re in a witch village, but they aren’t much practical use. Don’t you have anything just for fun?”

Garden and chickens for food and potion ingredients, telescope for stargazing and divination, a self-operating spinning wheel and loom to make my own robes and have something to trade to those mundanes who didn’t do anything that gave me leave to extort them, nothing really for fun. “No.”

“Poor Orawne. Who taught you, anyway?”

“She died. Dueling, five years ago. I wouldn’t have called her fun. I had a decent enough childhood, anyway.”

“Took you when you were a baby?”

“I was two, actually, and she bought me outright. Story was that my mother was in a bind when my father died.”

“And your mundane mother named you ‘Orawne’, did she?”

“I presume not, but I can’t remember what it was instead. I like my name. I wouldn’t want to be called Millicent.”

“I like my name too,” said Millicent tartly.

“Much good may it do you. While you’re looking for a way to let the moon have her back one day maybe I’ll look for a way to make her familiar able earn its keep, shall I?”

“Lest she grow up complaining ‘Orawne doesn’t understand the point of my dearest bestest friend!’, yes, by all means, work out a spell to teach cats to read or serve as divinatory focuses or whatever it is you’d have one do.”

“You think Vercari’s going to grow up calling me ‘Orawne’, do you?”

“As opposed to?”

“Mother.”

Millicent blinked at me.

“There are two of us,” she pointed out.

“We are in my house, and the stars will have her before you give her that magic rattle -”

“So I suppose,” Millicent interrupted, “that I’ll be Mummy or something like that, and that should be clear enough when she’s screaming for one or the other across the garden.”

“Oh. All right.”

“Hear that, Vercari dear, Mother says I’m Mummy and she can have the stiff formal name,” cooed Millicent.

I snorted.

Millicent finished painting egg onto the last circle of dough and put the biscuits in the oven.

I was stitching together a little dress for Vercari, so that Millicent could more easily keep up with the laundry and because it was a break from making straw things to burn. Millicent poked her head into the sewing room.

“What are you going to start teaching her, when she’s four or what have you?”

“Constellations. She’ll have to learn to read, too. Potionmaking has to wait for good motor control.”

“But what do you do with the constellations?”

“Learn to interpret them. Much easier to make enchanted objects if you know when to do it, though actually artificing will have to come later, again.”

“Oh! The spinning wheel and loom are working by themselves?”

“Of course they are. You didn’t think I was operating them myself all day long, did you?”

“I did,” admitted Millicent. “I was very impressed.”