[b]Dolce![/b]

It’s deeply unfair. Incredibly unfair, even! How could you ambush Redana like this, Dolce? She’s here to get scolded! After all, what she did was [i]very[/i] bad. And when you are very bad, Redana, there have to be consequences! Especially for this, something so much worse than anything she’s done before. Especially now, when there’s no Bella here to get punished behind her back, and all the weight of her actions is supposed to fall on her.

And you just [i]forgive[/i] her?

No wonder you reduce her to blubbering as she squeezes your fur and buries her face into your floof. No wonder she shakes and lets her body tremble like the waves crashing against the hull of this dark, forbidding ship. And no wonder her heart flutters like a bird freed from a cage.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I couldn’t save her,” she says. “I could have killed you,” she says. “I’m sorry,” she says, over and over, until the gentle pats and brushies allow her to subside into sniffles and hiccups. “Thank you,” she says, and means it. Means it so, so hard.

Thank you for being, always and ever, kind.

***

[b]Vasilly![/b]

“Bella was filming the whole thing!” Redana says, a [i]little[/i] quieter. Not by much. “She had this camera that she was using to record her journey, and she started out so happy and hopeful, but by the time she got to Ridenki she was, well, you know how she was better than maybe I do! But you were interrupted by that horrible thing, and then she left you without helping? The Bella we… [i]I[/i] left behind on Tellus never would have left something unfinished like that, because she was a good kitten! She never would have left something half-done!”

Redana’s face goes firm with determination. “When we save her from those assassins,” she says, with unshakable conviction, “I [i]will[/i] convince her to apologize to you! I promise, Vasilly! And you can even tie her up if you let me untie her after! That’s fair, isn’t it?”

***

[b]Alexa![/b]

It’s the doodles that really have the heart. Redana’s actual letters are a bit banal, after the first few: hopes that you’re doing all right, updates on the engine room and how secure it is and, wow, is it true that your arms were living light by the end? (She is [i]so[/i] sorry you don’t have arms any more, but also, you could probably kill her with your thighs, right? Oh, the things she’s heard from the Coherents about how they feel concerning your thighs!) Hope you get well soon, I’ll send Iskarot with some arm designs, but maybe we should wait to install them to cut on the risk of strangling people (like me) if the blindfold doesn’t work? (Also, how are you supposed to kill yourself without arms? You could try running into a wall, but the wall would break before you could, you know? I suppose you could— but here she breaks off, scribbles out what she wrote so hard the pen leaves a gash in the paper.)

But she starts doodling on the letters, too: Hermetic seals drawn from memory in a lazy moment, more and more abstract wings, Possible Arm Designs? that are increasingly implausible (from tentacles to swords to things that look like broken birdcages). Your face, from memory; hers, from a mirror; half of a sketch of a familiar maid, left unfinished. Starbursts, Poseidon’s mandalas, meditative tools for the worship of the Worldshaker. Flowers from her garden back in Tellus.

She’s always been busy, our princess, throwing herself into tasks on the [i]Plousios.[/i] It’s possible that you find out things about her you never would have through your infrequent conversations: how steady her hands can be, how you can tell where she’s set it down and come back hours later based on how her handwriting changes, how she thinks she’s stupid when she can’t immediately come up with perfect solutions like her mother, the genius, the god.

(She slips [i]that[/i] into one letter as if she’s forgotten you were not present for that revelation. Redana, daughter of Hermes. Perhaps just accepting what the Hermetics say about her and her mother, but something about the way she wrote it…)