In fact, as she grew up, Princess Katerina’s mory beca a topic of near legend in Wistover.
It didn’t matter what you taught her, or what she was trying to learn, one ti was enough. If she read a complex magical theory text, she could recite it back to you, and usually grasped the concepts imdiately. Magitech design? Even more intuitive than her father. However, there were so things that many wished the young Princess really would forget.
Debts and promises for one.
If you promised her paynt for a task, or a favour to be repaid later, she never once forgot. She could even tell you the ti and date that the promise was given without referring to the journal she kept with intricate notes of her daily life, as narrated by a young dragonkin with a clearly nonhuman view of how the world worked.
Her room was filled with trinkets and jewels that she had been paid in exchange for the items that she regularly made for others, even before she started her ti at the Duskblade Sect’s Academy at age five.
That was much earlier than the others, but she had already gone through all the knowledge in the Library, and Amie was getting sick of her constant demands for more magical training.
The Doppelgänger was chosen as the dragonkin’s favourite source of information on magic because the Royal Guards were too good at finding reasons not to answer her. They kept claiming that they were working, and had to pay attention to hidden threats. In their words, attacks never ca when you were aware of the danger.
She couldn’t find an argunt for that logic. But if Amie and Dominic were in the sa room, she was doing her job, and there was no good reason for her not to answer Katerina’s questions.
If she had to go sowhere, she would co back to him.
So, if she just waited around her dad all day long, she was bound to encounter people who could tell her all the things that she desperately wanted to know.
That was actually a relief to Alexis.
As much as she loved her daughter, Katerina was an exhausting person to be around. The tendency to speak constantly that had started the mont she learned how simply never faded.
But worse, she had learned to use her wings just after her fourth birthday.
Now, when she was confronted with the prospect of tasks she didn’t want to do, she would simply jump out a window or off a balcony and hide sowhere else. If you didn’t manage to actually ask her, she could pretend that she didn’t know you wanted her to do sothing.
The only ones who could defeat this tactic were Dominic and Dave.
Dominic would actually jump out the window after her and play with her before bringing her back inside, while Dave would call on his brothers to wait for her outside the window. Katerina would laugh as the Trolls caught her, not bothered by the fact that she had lost her ga.
When she saw the Trolls below her, she just happily spread her wings and jumped down into their arms.
Now, she had just turned five years old, and it was ti to introduce her to the world.
The King’s birthday was next week, and that was the perfect opportunity to take the young Princess for her first public event. Alexis had been working with her on the basics of Royal Decorum for months.
She knew, Alexis knew that she did. The problem was that she didn’t care.
Hopefully, Katerina would behave herself while she was there. But Alexis had very little faith that the Princess would. Her powers had given her a bit of a god complex, and she had far too little respect for authorities that weren’t Dominic or Dave.
Even her own mother seed to be more of a competitor for her father’s attention than anything else in the little girl’s mind.
As long as she didn’t try to take him away, it was fine.
If she did, Katerina would not be happy with her. Alexis was doing her best to make a proper Princess out of her only daughter, but every year it seed like more of a lost cause. She would be an excellent Archmage, and possibly a lovely Duchess.
But a proper and demure Princess? Alexis doubted that she could even fake it.
Actually, that wasn’t a bad idea. Instead of trying to teach her the rules she had to follow, she could turn it into a ga, the public face that she put on for the Nobles, and the way that she was with her friends and ntors at the Academy.
She was already a level five mage, with a prodigious versatility, and her power was still growing smoothly.
Alexis knew that would make her a top choice for the other High Nobles who had sons in search of a marriage alliance once they grew up. So, she fully expected to be approached at least three or four tis during the birthday party by other Dukes and Earls’ families.
"Alright, do you get the concept? You have to behave the expected way, or they will think that you’re not able to behave, like you’re dumb or too much of a brat to be in charge of anything," she tried explaining to her daughter.
"Oh! Like how Amie pretends to be the cute and innocent sidekick to dad, but she’s actually killed like a thousand people?"
"Who told you that?"
"The mages at the Academy. They think that she’s scary, and I managed to trick them out of all the stories about Miss Amie one day. I think that I would be good at that if I could transform like she does.
She’s getting better at doing other sizes too. Those new potions that the Trolls are making are really helping now that they’ve got better ingredients."
Alexis sighed. Of course, her daughter would have so level of hero worship for the mage who pretended to be a teen girl in order to honey trap perverts. Katerina struggled with the concept of the value of human life.
She understood that goats were valuable.
She understood that useful people were valuable.
However, the concept of a baseline value to people who weren’t friendly or useful had sohow managed to escape her moral compass.
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