A few years ago, Kiri's parents had taken her along to an art gallery. Lots of strangely-dressed people had stood in little groups and stared at even stranger paintings, installations and sculptures. The art had made no sense at all to her - most of it had appeared to be random dashes of paint on white canvas. Or bent bits of metal.
It seemed to her, however, that one of the picture in that art gallery could have depicted the scene in front of her eyes. A young boy calmly correcting spelling mistakes another person had etched into a blackened stone wall? That sounded about right.

"Lannes," she said to Nancy (how glad Kiri was she was there now) with forced calm, "is, as you can see, correcting spelling mistakes on the wall. I'm, er, not sure why he's doing that, though." She turned and glared at the boy. It didn't help that they were practically the same height - her glare was rather ineffective. "Why are you doing that, Lannes?"