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In fact, it seemed as though it could have gone much worse. There was never any possibility of a tense environment when Wisp Darnell was around, who had suffered extreme jealousy in fits at the start, and then whose heart had melted at Irelia's awful story and therefore simply treated her as another member of the family; Beatrix had some fairly strict rules, most of them involving where meals were and how much fruit the girls should imbibe daily, but Irelia was absorbed entirely into the daily routine. Beatrix seemed resigned, and then friendly, and then had segued straight into a diluted down mother routine. She was a much different mother than she was a teacher. She was still sarcastic, but if Irelia had feared that all meals would be done in stony silence like a test on fractions, it was far from the truth. Wisp and Jace seemed to take home life as one long debate. About retarded things.

She was fixed up in Jace's room, a bed on the opposite side, and after careful notation of girls and the things girls needed (ie privacy, especially when those girls were Irelia and Jace) Bea had shifted large portions of her study out and surrepticiously prepped it to have Irelia move into it. The Darnells had accepted her wholesale, and accepted her in a way that seemed as though she was there for the long term. Jace was happy, healing and smug about the whole ordeal now, rather than disquieted.

Sure, Beatrix made Irelia eat carrots. It could have been worse.

"Just wait," said her best friend darkly. "Just wait until she gives you the ultimatum that in school you have to learn one friggin' instrument and one language." (Never mind Jace loved the guitar and Spanish.)

"And," said Wisp, sitting on Jace's bed and swinging her legs, "DDR doesn't count as a sport, because I asked her! What's up with that, right? Ser-i-ous-ly!"

Of course, she also had to absorb Wisp as a little sister. This apparently meant having her nails painted lots of colours. And being sketched constantly.

Wisp and Jace gave each other a Look before reciting in nearly perfect sync:

"'I will not let you squander any aptitude you may have for the arts, languages or physical education!'"

"I don't even know what squander is," said the blonde girl meditatively, and she leant forward to play a little with Irelia's curls: she had agreed that she would not go into them with dye, her own personal colouring magic or otherwise, but she couldn't help sometimes but sift her fingers through the springy dark mass quickly and sit back. "It sounds a little eechy."

Her big sister rolled her eyes; she was sitting on the floor, leaning against the bed as well, and she had her beloved guitar in her hands. Every so often she'd strum a chord, just to hear it. "M.B.'s crazy about that kind of thing," she said, "you know, she did like a bazillion damn clubs in school if you believe her. She went to a snooty private school. St. Agatha's For Dull, Hardworking Girls or wherever."

"Like a sport," Wisp supplied, "and I chose soccer and it's fun, seriously. Jace picked like. Ninja kung fu -- "

"Tae kwon do, dipstick," said Jace.

" -- I had gymnastics on my list but Mom said I wouldn't be devoted enough," she chattered helpfully, "or, like, stringent enough, or something. Whatevs, I said! Bring on the soccer! And then I picked the flute but the flute was the WORST. EVER. What would you pick, Iree?" (She always pronounced this 'i-ree'.)

Her best friend was already laughing, one hand stilling the guitar strings as she sniggered out loud. "You're TOTALLY right," she said, "Latin? Latin? Latin's like, the only language besides double-dutch that nobody speaks. What the hell. Latin. Latin and piano and TAI CHI. M.B. is going to be like 'Fiiiinnally, a girl after my OWN RETARDED HEART.'"

"You have to get up really early to do Tai Chi," said Wisp doubtfully, who had seen people doing it in parks and was under the impression Tai Chi was only available to people between the hours of 6 AM and 8 AM.

"Yep," said Jace, who reached over to steal one of her crackers and pop it in her mouth. Again, Beatrix provided them only with healthy food (her idea of a fun snack was apple slices and ricotta) but she provided them with as much as they wanted, as Wisp and Jace were at the age where they were always hungry. "I'm a guitar hero."

She proved this by launching straight into a guitar piece; she really was good, though with all the bragging she did she'd have to be, and Wisp listened appreciatively for a while before she swung her legs on the bed. "Well, you should write them down," she told Irelia, "and you can give them to Mom, and she'll be all 'Oh Iree you are so mature and excellent, OMG.'"

"Come in," came the voice on the other side; when Irelia came through, she said, "Push aside the books and sit down, Irelia," just as though the girl was just Jace or Wisp. (Then again, Jace would have sat on the books just to piss her mother off.)

Thwomp, who quite liked the sheep girl and had taken a shine to her, rolled up and down on one of Irelia's horns until Beatrix made an impatient noise deep in her throat. "You're being ridiculous," she told her familiar. "She's already been here a handful of days already. -- Sorry. Do you have a tic-tac or something in your pocket? He gets overly affectionate if you've got sugar candy on you."

When Irelia gave her the sheet of paper, Thwomp immediately whizzed over behind his mistress' shoulder so that he could help her read it with her fingers. The smooth blonde eyebrows raised behind the bandage; the Darnell matriarch looked amused.

"Ah," she said. "You're ahead of schedule. I'd planned on asking you about that, actually." She pressed the piece of paper down. "I expect out of you what I expect out of the other girls, and that's making the most of your education. One sport, one instrument, one language. Interesting choices. Not quite like Jacoba's. She put down 'car driving' as her sport."

Her new psuedomother started taking her heavy knot of blonde hair down as she 'looked' at the piece of paper, considering it again. "Latin," she eventually said decidedly, "and I warn you, there's no immediate practical use, though the payoff is immense if you want to go into the Romance languages. No hieroglyphs, not until tertiary study, though if you want to at that point I would be more than glad to find you a program. Don't call them that around any true egyptologist worth their salt; tà hieroglyphiká grámmata, that's the correct usage. Do you know -- " and Beatrix looked quite animated -- "between us, Jack and I can do a good fist of cursive hieroglyphs, hieratic and demiotic -- really, there's far too many variations -- at one point we were tomb-hunting near Hierakonpolis. Looking for mummies, God only knows. Are you really interested in Egypt, Irelia?"

Beatrix smiled. It was not just a maternal smile, or the smile she'd give to those rare prodigies who did well in her maths class: it was a genuine peer-to-peer smile, one academic to another. Jace and Wisp would have died in jealousy (or maybe not, because Beatrix was an N-ranked NERD, and Irelia was Nerd In Training).

"A great deal," she said. "No mummies -- none of the archetypical shambling ones, anyway, though we found some fascinating embalmed noblemen -- but we did come into contact with a djinn. It was a gift to the priest-prophet -- at the time, the Horus of Nekhen cult set up camp there -- and had lived there for quite a while, since 2686 BC, in fact. It's still being excavated, actually, it's a fascinating site. But you don't want to hear about Jack's and my adventures in Egypt, do you? Jace always yawns and talks about slipping into a coma."

(Poor Bea. She sounded quite hopeful.)

"Well, we'll talk about hieroglypics later," she added decidedly. "Piano sounds fine, so long as you promise that I won't want to pitch it out of the window after three thousand piano scales in the wrong key. I think you should take gymnastics right now to build up your flexibility, and then move to tai chi when you're older. The only reason I'd say no tai chi or yoga now is because it might harm your muscle growth."

She hesitated. Thwomp was happily chewing on Nerds.

"Are you happy here, Irelia?"