Free Gratuitous Epilogue : Touchstone Extras by Andrea Höst Page B

making clear the education hurdles she'll have to overcome
to catch up), but she's never going to forget being 'three against
the world', and she doesn't trust unknown Nurans at all.
    The visits to Isten
Notra are fantastic at cheering her up and giving her an outlet,
but I think she's starting to realise that finding a boy her own
age who even comes close to her intellectually is going to be a
challenge. Sometimes I see her looking at Lira – luminous skin,
masses of waving hair, thick sooty eyelashes, gorgeous features and
the beginnings of curves – and it's obvious she's running a
comparison with her thin figure and inclined-to-be-short hair. I
think in a few years Ys' looks will settle into a not-unattractive
whole, but I know it would have been hard for me to have Lira as a
sister! Fortunately Ys doesn't seem inclined to resent Lira for it
– Lira's far too important to her.
    If Ys ever lets her
guard down she might find that more people are drawn to her than
she expects. For the moment I think she has a crush on Shon (who
scored brownie points both by being great with Rye, and by being
related to Isten Notra, and pretty damn intelligent on his own
account). She pretends to find him boring, of course, but Isten
Notra is not the only reason she's so careful about her appearance
when she goes on her monthly visits.
    I'm such a softie about
Ys. I went to one of the few custom clothes-makers in Pandora a
couple of weeks ago to talk wedding dresses (to make projections of
what I mean by wedding dresses and to try and design one which
doesn't look completely out of place) and my primary preoccupation
was that I needed flower girl dresses that were both girly and yet
suited Ys. Ys won't wear girly clothes because she thinks she
doesn't suit them, so my secret mission is to find something which
looks so good on her she can't help but want to wear it.
Fortunately the dress-maker seemed to properly understand what I
wanted, and to take the request seriously. [Of course, being able
to say she designed Caszandra's wedding outfits gives her plenty of
incentive to take me seriously – I have to admit I find this fame
useful at times.]
    That's about all the
planning I've managed for my wedding. Maze and Alay's baby will be
born just before it. I did agonise for quite some time over whether
to postpone getting married until I can try to bring Mum here, but
Kaoren had to struggle to hide how much he hated that idea, and I
think Sen would be too upset.
    Other than First Squad
romances, it's been a quiet month, the highlight being Kaoren's and
then Sen's birthday (I had a winged fairy princess dress made for
her, which she would wear for every moment of every day if she were
allowed to). Kaoren thinks we're over the first bad stage of her
Sights development, and we've been having more unbroken nights, and
Siame is being very useful and encouraging and giving Sen
confidence that things will get better. [Siame is getting along
very well with everyone but me. Me she still tries to have as
little to do with as possible, and we're letting it go at that for
the moment.]
    Siame spends most of
her time being fascinated by snow, and has been making very white
paintings – and naturally all the kids find snowball fights and
building snowmen and discovering icicles to be amazing and new and
fun. Only a light snow layer at the moment – the heavy snowstorms
haven't started yet – and first weekend after it starts to snow
properly we're going to go across to Siriath and have another epic
snowball fight, but this time with children and random family
members involved. We're going to make a yearly tradition of
it.
    Rye's rather mournful
for the effect of Winter on his garden, but was handily distracted
into documenting the Winter habits of all the animals he's
discovered in Summer. And is practicing faithfully for snowball
throwing.
    Lira's twelfth birthday
is in two weeks and I'm really stuck on what to get her. It would
be easy to buy her a