If Ariadne was being perfectly honest with herself--and she lied so much that she often felt like she had to be--there was little that pleased her so much as having something in common with another person. Probably because it so often wasn't the case. She was forever the outsider, the pretender, the misfit. So the notion of both of them being from places that no one knew actually kind of appealed to her.

Enough to make her smile, anyway.

"Oh, in Valeria?" She shrugged. "I was serving an apprenticeship to the court translator," she said. "Who also happens to be my aunt, although I promise you that isn't why I was given the appointment."

It more had to do with the fact that she was Alastrian. And that pretending to learn languages was an excellent excuse for when she had to leave the kingdom suddenly, to do work for the resistance.