Redana’s laughter is innocent, guileless, even now. It’s a laugh bursting through a smile— but not Apollo’s smile. The difference might be that Apollo’s smile is satisfaction at the beauty of the world, but Redana’s smile is an almost baffled joy at how the world can be so beautiful as to have fussy, gleeful, irreplaceable Praetors in it. It is a loud smile that tastes of sunlight, and her laughter is like, perhaps, a bough of golden bells being shaken.

“Of course! Please, Bella, help me!” How many times had that been said between them? Often. How many times had it been said in that light, joking tone? Perhaps never. “I need, um… they’re part of a shrine to Uncle Poseidon! Just imagine! Sharks in priestess outfits, carefully guarding a shrine to Polychromatikí, even as more crowd up around its foot, a whole herd of sharks. A flock of sharks? A swimming of sharks!”

She swings the sharks in her arms back and forth, and ducks her head down to give one a little kiss. “There! Now they’re all mine! Thank you, Bella!”

It really is a shame that she wouldn’t think to blackmail her Praetor, isn’t it? Imagine all the concessions she could win by threatening to reveal such a secret to Vasilly! Truly, she’s in desperate need of a spymaster to help her leverage her secrets appropriately. She’s hardly acting like the future Empress of humanity should.

And is that such a bad thing?

Look at her as she squeezes sharks to her sides, balances a shark on her head, starts looking for some more bags to carry— “Oh, Bella! Look! A thousand tickets for a chest!”

It’s the same size as the one that was on the [i]Anemoi.[/i] Not that Redana ever saw it. Maybe she’ll never know about the chest that was assigned for her down in the depths of the ship, after what happened on Baradissar. A box for shutting a girl inside and then sitting on. No room for her to stretch her limbs, no way for her clever eye to see out, no hope of escape from her extremely thorough confinement.

“And if we get some straps, the kings can ride on top! And— oh, look, Bella, Bella, it’s got [i]wheels![/i] Little wheels! Right there! And there’s a [i]button![/i] Bella, we have to know what the button does! We’ll go mad if we don’t ever find out what it does, I [i]know[/i] we will! But… how are all of us going to get a thousand more tickets?”

(By all of us, she is including the sharks. As if they’re going to pipe up with an idea for how a princess and her maid, or a praetor and her pet, or two girls who might get up to some embarrassing business behind a tent later, might just be able to win a thousand tickets with their help.)

And she looks to Bella, because Bella always, [i]always[/i] has a clever idea, or asks a question that makes you realize what you need to do. There’s nobody like Bella for helping her through thoughts, not in all the worlds.