"I should hope not. We've only just met, and the age difference is a confounding factor even if I am an adult for my species, it would be such a terrible idea."

"So. Walk outside?"

"Sure."

There's a beautiful view of the mountains. "Is there an upper limit on how much it's wise to practice in a day?" he asks her.

"Leave time for things like eating and meditation, and take a break if it hurts enough to make it hard to think around."

"All right." A bigger rock, then. He probably shouldn't even do that much, because his other job here is to be assessing whether she's an enemy spy, but if she's not then this is going to be extremely valuable.

If she's an enemy spy, she's one who's very good at pretending how to be an otherworldy human woman who has no idea how to delineate private and public thoughts.

"It's probably a good idea to learn how to augment your body, even if you need to get strong enough that you mostly wouldn't be using magic as sparingly as people back home do."

"Sure. How do I do that?"

"You push on your muscles to move faster or lift harder or what have you, or your eyes to see farther, or your nerves to accumulate muscle memory faster, stuff like that." She thinks about what it felt like to push herself to run faster yesterday.

He looks around, lifts a rock that must weigh several hundred pounds. Sends a feeling. "Like this?"

"Yes, that's right! The hard part is pushing just hard enough, so you don't accidentally break something or fling yourself forward and crash into the ground because you were putting too much oomph into something."

"Hmmm." He tries tossing it into the air and catching it. He tries it again, but this time it crumbles between his hands when he catches it again. "I think I see what you mean."

"We have padded practice rooms and healers on standby to practice this stuff at the University. I don't know if padding is feasible here but I'm a fairly competent healer."

"Healing is a form of magic?"

"I mean, your body heals itself naturally over time, but magic does it faster and better."

"Is it limited to things that would heal anyway?"

"No, that's why it's better."

"Could you regrow a limb? Can you manage traumatic brain injuries? Can you heal Men of those diseases they all get?"

"It would take a long time and be fairly unpleasant until I had finished, but I could regrow a limb. Anything to do with brains should really be done by Sympathy, but it can be done. Curing diseases is trivial."

Enough playing around, then. He has to determine whether she's real and, if so, get her to Dor Lómin. "Men die of disease a lot. Half of them don't make it to adulthood. It's a great grief to us and we have absolutely no idea how to stop it."

"I--I don't know if I'm enough to cover a whole population--how many are there? I can teach some of them while I'm there, too, that'll help, I'm sure any mother whose child was dying would endure the pain to fix them if they couldn't just take them to a mage or a hedgewitch--"

"I didn't mean to overwhelm you. Yes, we can set up avenues for you to teach them magic. Some of them are even literate, we've been trying not to pressure them about it but it's strategically really useful. Isn't disease spread person-to-person? So if it's stopped, it stops, no need to heal every person...and I can teach my people, if the mortals turn out to be ill-suited to it..."

"Most disease is spread person-to-person but not all and the ones that do keep changing so they're all but impossible to stamp out completely--people don't die of sickness where I'm from under normal circumstances but we do still get sick. I can probably improve the situation, though, you're right about that."

"Great," he says. "In that case I really need to be sure that you're not an Enemy spy, because we found you in Enemy territory and your story is implausible and the Enemy has the capabilities to try something like this. Can you think of anything that'll help me decide that?"

"...It hadn't really occurred to me that that would be a concern before. It probably should have. Um--I don't know, are there any qualities spies of the Enemy lack that I could demonstrate? Something he's philosophically opposed to that they wouldn't do that I could that isn't terrible, like spitting on a picture of him? I'm not sure I'm familiar enough with the situation to have helpful advice."