“. . . and, and it’s hard to be a parent when you’re over three hundred, anyway, and I’m three hundred and sixty! When your own childhood was that long ago, it’s easy to forget how it was. It’s easy to take for granted that your values are obvious, to forget that you need to communicate them . . .”

Dobroc’s emotional history checked out. {Sane, stable, and respectable.} Fift’s context advisory agent commented. {A thoroughly acceptable contact.} Fift, looking at the transactions with an apprentice banker-historian’s eye, thought Dobroc looked maybe a little . . . intense? But ze opened the message.

{Most admired Fift,} it began. {Let me repeat my ardent wishes for your family’s continued success and thriving in these current difficulties. I would cherish the opportunity to speak to you sometime in person. Have you, by any chance, studied the lyrical seventh subsection of the fourth responsum to the tenth additional corpus?}

“Father Squell,” Fift said, “if we’re just talking about a few days, or even a week or two, I can—”

“Fift! You are in more danger than you think. It’s dangerous to . . . to go astray. You are a child.” Squell’s throat tightened, and tears glistened in vir eyes. “A precious child. Who you are in the world matters—the Balance matters! I know it isn’t always easy to follow the path that’s been chosen for you. Do you think it’s easy to be a Vail?” A tear broke through the welling dam at the corner of one of vir eyes and crept its way down vir cheek. “I have three Staid younger siblings, Fift. Do you think it didn’t seem magical and mysterious and wholly unfair that they were allowed to sit and think for hours, to pass spoons and read and talk about the . . .”—vir voice roughened, softened, an exhalation like a whisper—“. . . the Conversation?”

{If I could, most esteemed Fift,} Dobroc’s message went on, {I would give you a Singing Fruit like the one Abador gave Minth in that passage.}

“That they were allowed all that rest, and taken so seriously by the adults, not just cuffed and wrestled with and told to go play? They were engaged in something so important, so entrancing, a vast, rich world of learning and culture. Of course I felt excluded from it—”

(Vvonda stiffened, and Shria and Bluey and Stogma looked up, following vir gaze.)

“—I used to listen at the crack of the wall when they had their lessons . . .”

(Hrotrun dropped from a slipthread, doublebodied. With vem were five other Vails, nine bodies in all.)

{How foolish of me}, Dobroc had sent, {to write this to you at all! Yet I cannot seem to get it . . . you . . . out of my mind.}