"Well, she likes animals more than people, really," Marcello said. "I offered to introduce her to Omauduan, but she says wolves are evil."

"What?" Now Niabheara looked a little offended. "Where has this child been? What has that idiot hob been telling her? For pity's sake. I can understand why it might convince her not to miss her own mother, but some of this stuff is just maddening."

"I don't know!" Marcello answered. "She won't eat food that touches, and she won't eat meat because the animals might have had families. He taught her about the difference between types of fauns, and all kinds of weird long words, but...there are a lot of holes in her normal education."

"To be fair, I went through a stage where I wouldn't eat food that touched because I thought it tasted funny," she said. "But I was five."

"I think five year olds go through plenty of odd phases. She won't eat a cheese sandwich, but she will eat bread baked with cheese in it." Marcello sounded utterly amused by this.

Niabheara flung up her hands. "Paugh. So she's a child. I mean, she is basically still a child. She didn't grow up; she just got bigger."

"I'm not sure," Marcello said. "She...there are a lot of things about her that are very childlike, but there are other ways that she seems grown up. But I think in terms of what we can expect her to know or understand? Yes, still six."

Niabheara flopped back in her chair, blissfully unaware that it had only recently been vacated by Sera. "She's going to be like Pepita. It's only taught her what it wanted her to know."

"Except that Pepita is sweet and compliant, and Dareen is not," Marcello replied, a little irritably, as he took his own chair again. "At least not to us."

"She has no real reason to comply with us. We can't just let her run wild." Niabheara huffed and slouched down in her seat. "And I seriously doubt she's going to do well with staying in bed until she apologized, which is what Meg used to do to us."