Isabella is very absorbed in what she's doing, but Pathalan's help isn't really needed. He swoops over and lands right on the tiger's back, taking care not to dig in with his talons. "Hullo again," he says.

"She's working on one of her side projects," says Path. "She's very absorbed in it."

"I can tell," says Kas, amused. "Is it magic stuff?"

"Not ritual magic," says Path. "Alethiometers. They're interesting."

"What's an alethiometer?"

"Truth-tellers. They answer questions."

"...What kinds of questions?"

"Any," says Path, and he flies back to Isabella to whisper to her.

"Like the goddesses all have a lot of portfolio items, the thirty-six alethiometer symbols have layers of meanings," Isabella says. "Supposedly the hands of it spin a certain number of times to tell you which. And you use them to ask the questions, too. It can take ages to decipher an answer, even if it's short, and there's not much grammar to it, either," says Isabella. "I've memorized the first ten of each from that introductory fun-facts site I copied them from, and now I want something more comprehensive to study."

"Why, do you have one of these?"

She snorts. "No. There were only six made. Two are lost, nobody has a clue where they went, they may have been destroyed. One was definitely destroyed. The Louvre has one. Oxford University has one. And the U.N. has one."

"And nobody's figured out how to make more?"

"Nope," says Isabella, peering at the dictionary.

"Fellow named Pavel Khunrath." She settles on a dictionary. Her phone is already hooked up by USB to the computer to charge it; she downloads it thereto. "In Prague a long time ago."

"Why d'you like 'em so much?"

"People who have them could be doing anything. The alethiometers don't just do facts, you don't just get to ask them if this Picasso is authentic is or whether Iraq has nuclear weapons. You could ask one how to solve global poverty. You could ask it how to generate clean energy. You could ask it how to do anything. And they're not, because everyone who has one has pettier concerns to worry about that take up their whole concentration, and the readers they hire are - you know that none of the alethiometers in known location are even in use twenty-four hours a day? They don't hire enough readers to keep them in efficent use! Oxford have one guy with a Classics education and a copy of Khunrath's dictionary and one grad student to help him, there's a waiting list to get them to ask it questions, the philosophers ask it what is color and they get a vague answer and then instead of arguing about what color is they argue about what the answer means, or what truth means, so no progress is made. The physicists are barely better, they say is string theory true, and of course none of these symbols just means yes or no, the alethiometer answers in complete sentences that they can argue about forever. If they asked it how they could empirically test string theory that would at least make sense. It's idiotic."

"So what, you're gonna steal one?" he asks, smiling.

"Well, I was thinking I'd look for the lost ones," Isabella says. And then she twists around in her chair and looks at Kas assessingly. "To start," she adds.

"You could steal one just long enough to ask it where the other two are and then put it back," he suggests. "If you wanna be nice about it."

"My plan involved using magic to find a lost one," Isabella says. "If that doesn't work I'll try getting official permission to use Oxford's. Possibly by enrolling there."

"Well, sure," he teases, "if you wanna be boring."

"Witches used to be able to get away with murder. That's no longer true, and I don't think stealing a nearly-unique object from any entity with a lot of security and lawyers would be a good idea."

"Of course I will," she says, tucking her phone into her purse-knapsack-thing. "How long are you going to be in Rockland?"

"No idea," he says cheerfully.

"Okay. Were you going to take me to some manner of place? Metis doesn't expect me back any particular time this evening as long as I'm home in time for renewing the firepit spells."

"Which is when?"

"A little before dusk. There's some setup I'm supposed to do for her, and then we're performing the ritual during the exact minute the sun crosses the horizon."

"No strip clubs tonight, then," he says. "Unless you go back out afterward."

"Well, after we have the firepit fixed it's my job to cook dinner. That's about half of why Metis tolerates an apprentice, so she doesn't have to cook. She can but she doesn't like it."

Kas laughs.

"Does Rockland even have a strip club?"

"You live here, you tell me!" he says, grinning.

"I don't know," she laughs. "Why would I know that? I don't go to them. I don't even know where the grocery store is because we have a deal to get everything delivered."

"That's weird, don't you ever just wander around?" he says. "Whatever, I'll find one. I'll find a good one."

"When I wander around I do it well above street level," Isabella says pointedly.

He laughs. "You miss all the good stuff that way!"

Isabella gets up and picks up her cloud-pine. "I suppose I can see how you'd think that, since you can't feel starlight and moonlight," she says loftily.

"...What're they like?" he asks, his interest caught.

She heads out of the library, Path hitching a ride on the tiger-Petaal. "Like... well, they're different. I think if I wanted to approximate the sensations during daylight hours, for the moon I'd... hang up a lot of strips of silk with the highest possible thread count from the ceiling, and then fly through them. The flying part is important, even if you're not far off the ground. Maybe it'd be okay on a boat too, but the rhythm of walking is just all wrong for enjoying the moon. It'd be okay for the stars, though. Those are more like... snow. Being snowed on is a little bit like the feel of starlight. But only in the very, very coldest weather, when there's no wind. And these are bad approximations anyway, and I know cold is different for you."

"Cold is different," he agrees. "Does snow melt on you?"

"Of course it does. I'm perfectly warm," she says, patting his cheek. "It just doesn't bother me. It can't hurt me."

Surprised, he grins and leans into her hand.

She permits this for as long as seems reasonable for warmth-inspection, then drops her arm. Path flutters to her shoulder as they exit the library and whispers to her. "I don't think anyone's ever asked me what the stars and the moon feel like before," muses Isabella.

"Why not?" he wonders.

"I don't know. Because the people who don't know yet, won't ever? Even little witches who can't fly yet or go away from their daemons or cast a verse charm can feel it."

"I wish I could," says Kas. "I already don't know what it's like to have fur or feathers or echolocate or see ultraviolet or breathe water."

"Your soul knows those things," Bell says, gesturing at Petaal. "He - she? - I can't tell these things by looking in arbitrary species like Path can and sometimes he's not with me, what should I default to? - is part of you. So part of you knows it."

"I can't tell him, though," says Petaal. "Call me whatever you want. You can pick one and stick to it if that makes your life easier." She flicks her tail, tapping it against Kas's legs; he puts his hand on the top of her head. "I wonder if I could be a witch," she muses.

"Daemons sometimes help with rituals," Isabella says. "If I were going to do a ritual that had to do with Kas then it might involve you in some way. But that's probably not what you meant."

"I mean the way I'm a human sometimes," she says, laughing a little. "And a bear once. I've never tried witch, though."

"Oh. Interesting question," says Isabella. "I don't know. I've never heard of a daemon quite like you."

"There's daemons who settle human," says Kas. "Never heard of one settling witch, though."

"Never heard of one settling panserbjorne, either. But then, we don't know what governs it. People don't wind up with dinosaurs as daemons, and those were ordinary animals. Passenger pigeons can still happen even since their extinction, though."

"I was a velociraptor once," volunteers Petaal. "Jurassic Park-style."

Isabella grins. "Was it fun?"

"It was awesome," she proclaims.

"I was more of a fantasy creatures sort myself," says Path, "when I could change. Small dragons of various designs especially. After I gave up trying to settle as a firefly I wanted to be one of those, but it does seem to have to be a bird, not just anything that flies."

"Why do you have to?" wonders Petaal. "What makes you be something you don't want to be?"

"We didn't feel like a witch," Path says. "Until I found this sort of owl and began to be it. Being a witch was more important than being a dragon or a firefly."

"I've been lots of things, but we never feel any different because of it," says Petaal. "I'm going to try being a witch. When we're not in the middle of the street." She giggles. "Maybe you'll turn into a bird," she says, bumping her shoulder against Kas's leg.

"That would be bizarre," comments Isabella. "Bears' souls are their armor. If they made the same metal into a sculpture instead they probably wouldn't feel very bearish, would they? I think it's the same with witches and birds."

"I tried to be armour once, but it didn't work," says Petaal. "And Tina said it creeped her out when I was a bear, and I didn't want to do it again, so I didn't."

"Tina? And I wouldn't expect you could be armor. It's not an organism."

"Augustine," says Kas. "My best friend, in Quebec. She's a bear."

"I'm not exploring Rockland right now, I'm talking to you," he says reasonably.

"Yes, I know," she laughs. "But you were going to find and evaluate establishments." She sits in a drift of snow near the library door. "I don't know how long it will take you to do that and you didn't say how long you have to remain in this town."

"I'm gonna be here until I leave," he says. Petaal flops onto the ground and Kas sits next to her, snugggled up just behind her shoulder. "I don't get it, what's the rush?"

"No particular rush. I just expect humans to arrive places with - train tickets and itineraries and hotel bookings. Where are you staying?"

Kas laughs. "Dunno yet."

"...did you get un-broke enough to afford a hotel?" Isabella says.

He snorts. "Depends on the hotel."

"Do you want me to ask Metis if you can crash at hers? We don't keep the house particularly warm, but I can run to the Westfords' and bless their apple tree or something and borrow their space heater. We did that when my dad came to visit."

Kas blinks at her, surprised. "Yeah, sure! That's real sweet of you," he says.

"Okay. You probably want to look for a hotel you can afford anyway, in case Metis says no. There's my dad, and then there's random boy I met in Québec City."

He laughs. "Yeah, no shit."

"I might as well ask her now, though. You can come along in case she wants to meet you before deciding." Isabella gets up from the snowdrift. Path bats at the clinging not-yet-melted snow on her silks with his wings until she's only a little damp, and she sits on her cloud-pine. "She's kind of formal. Call her Metis Imestha, and it can't hurt if you call me by full name when she's listening, too - second name is Amariah, if you forgot it. Don't talk to her daemon personally, he doesn't like it unless they're at least a mile apart and even then he runs way fewer messages than the average witch daemon - have Petaal say anything you need to communicate to him. She's pretty likely to ask you point-blank if you plan to steal or vandalize anything, and, I mean, the obvious answer is no, but if you do actually wind up doing those things she's liable to curse you and also pretty likely to hold me responsible for you and kick me out of my apprenticeship, which I would resent."

"Thanks." Isabella thinks. "Yeah, some divination circles won't be thrown off by the human's presence, just tell her you've got no separation distance to speak of and you can spend six to ten hours together in a divination circle being asked to turn into things."

"You can also watch me bless-the-apple-tree-or-whatever for the space heater, if you want," Isabella says, floating along at a reasonable walking speed through the streets. "I don't know any clan-secret type magic that I'd have to be hidey about."

"Sounds like fun," says Kas.

"It is. I like magic. I can show you stuff even if Metis says we can't put you in the attic, if you like. Heck, I could put you in a divination circle and take readings on Petaal if you somehow manage not to capture Metis's interest, but I think you will. If she weren't thoroughly fascinated by magic I wouldn't have asked for her as my teacher."

Kas giggles. Petaal bumps her nose against his leg.

"Nope," says Kas.

"I'm bored of tigers anyway," Petaal rumbles, and turns into a tiny hummingbird who immediately darts into Kas's hood. Her wings tickle his cheek on the way; he giggles.

"Want to watch me bless a tree?"

"Path?" Isabella says, and Pathalan flies around the house to relay that information while Isabella shuts the door. She sits on her cloud-pine again and begins drifting towards the house with the space heater. Pathalan catches up presently.

Petaal remains tucked into Kas's hood as Kas follows.

"Lots!"

"Do you need to make it up," he inquires, "or could you use one you already had?"

"That's cute," Kas declares.

"Healing apple trees? The poem?" guesses Isabella, heading back for the house to trade the remaining honey back for the space heater.

"Both. And the way the tree moved," he says.

"It feels better now," says Isabella contently. She rings the doorbell again, hands over the honey, and accepts the space heater without exchanging any further words about either. The space heater has a handle. She hangs it from the edge of her cloud-pine and starts the flight home a little farther off the ground than before.

"That's adorable," says Kas. As they leave the house, Petaal changes into an ermine.

"Any other magic you want to see? Metis does much, much more careful and complicated symbology than I can do - at least from memory - and she'll be working on her circle for a while."

Kas claps his hands. "Aww, that's pretty!"

When the snow settles, it's in a ring-shaped heap around Isabella. "It's actually for drawing accurate circles to symbolize on, but it's perfectly usable on its own for decorative reasons," she agrees.

Petaal leaps down out of Kas's hood and scampers around the perimeter of the snow-ring, then climbs up his leg and disappears under his coat.

"Now that's cute," says Isabella.

"I know," says a smug voice from Kas's tummy region.

Isabella resumes forward progress. "I'm better with verse magic than anything else, and because it works so much better when specific, I don't have a huge repertoire of spells that I can pull out on a whim. I'm more effective with a goal."

"'Do something fun' is a pretty good goal," Kas opines.

"Sure, but it's not the right kind. I don't touch mind-affecting spells, so 'fun' isn't an effect I'm going to produce directly in the world by invoking a goddess or sacrificing a rabbit or drizzling honey onto the snow."

"So think of something fun, and then do that?"

"I'm not accustomed to inventing things to do quite like that. Magic in general is fun. When I have downtime I fly or I read or I study alethiometer symbols and that's fun, too."

"What's flying like?" wonders Kas.

Bell scoots forward on her pine. "Can you avoid falling off?" she asks.

"...Sure I can," he says, beaming, and climbs on behind her. (Petaal turns into a bee hummingbird.)

The cloud-pine doesn't so much dip under the added weight. Unencumbered by the need to accommodate a walking conversational partner, Isabella takes them up over building-level and speeds up quite a bit. They reach Metis's house presently, and Metis (dressed in her silks, now) can be seen in the backyard, writing runes on a spot cleared of snow in some manner of powder.

"If you want me to do anything fancy I'm going to want to land and tuck some bayleaves into your collar and come up with a verse," Isabella says, starting wide lazy circuits around the house.

"Why bayleaves?" he asks, grinning hugely. "I would love to go fancy flying with you, this is awesome."

"Bayleaves are a protection herb and I know we have some," she says. "So if you fall off you won't break your neck. Even with those I don't think I'd dare go upside down at all with a human passenger unless I sat you in a circle of herbed runes and came up with a long poem. But I can go faster and vary my altitude more with the quick and easy version." She glides to a stop outside the backdoor, says a polite, "Hello, Teacher," and ducks inside for the bayleaves.

Kas beams. Petaal turns tiger again and stands on her hind legs to hug him.

"Nope!" he agrees, laughing and snuggling his cheek into Petaal's fur. "I showed her a good place to eat and she bought me lunch and we talked for a while, and she mentioned where she lived, so when I felt like leaving Quebec again I came here."

"Sure," says Petaal, and she re-ermines and climbs into Kas's coat.

Isabella reaches into Kas's hood and tucks six bayleaves into places where they look liable to stay put, and murmurs: "Leaves of bay, there you stay, keeping falling harms at bay." When she places the last leaf and utters the last syllable, she withdraws her hand and says, "Oddly enough, making puns can help."

"That's awesome," says Kas. His re-ermine re-emerges out the end of a sleeve, climbs up to observe the leaves, and then becomes a teeny hummingbird again.

"I fucking love roller-coasters," says Kas, and he perches behind her.

Kas clings to the cloud-pine and laughs and laughs.

"You can see why this is my default entertainment," Isabella calls over the wind.

"Hell yeah!" he agrees. "Can I hug you when we land, or would that be weird?"

"That's fine," says Isabella carelessly, finishing her climb to an altitude at which she still expects him to be able to breathe and plummeting. She rises again at the bottom of the dive hard enough to press them both into the cloud-pine with the force of the direction change.

Kas cackles.

After half an hour of continuous, half-sane flight, Isabella lands near Metis's circle and dismounts.

Kas steps carefully into the circle. Petaal zooms out of his hood and becomes a maned lioness to lounge on the ground in the middle; Kas sits down and leans against her, burying his hands in her nice warm mane.

"Dunno," Petaal says thoughtfully. She does the bee hummingbird again, then a glass-winged butterfly, then a goldfinch, then a tiny bat, then (landing in Kas's collar) a teeny tiny shrew.

"Largest?" says Metis, not quibbling over the definition of size.

Petaal hops out of Kas's hood and cycles through more forms. Tiger; maned lioness again, then a male lion; horse; grizzly bear.

Petaal stays a grizzly bear, just for fun. Male, then female, then male, then female again.

"Sure," says Petaal, and does that.

"Please attempt to hold species constant and change sex," says Metis.

With a tiny lizardy shrug, Petaal does that, too.

"Nope!" says Petaal. "But I bet they're not supposed to have boys."

Petaal takes it and, since she does not currently have any danger zones up top, wraps it around her waist.

"Nah, it's no different," says Petaal. "I never really got why most daemons don't do it."

"We can't, or at least some of us can't. I tried once," Pathalan volunteers from where he's sitting near the edge of the circle. "I even tried the lizard. Couldn't be one at all, just the nearby species."

"That's so weird," says Petaal. "It's just being a different shape."

"Nope!" says Petaal. "Didn't think of it, until we met her," with a nod to Isabella. "But I like it, I'm gonna do it lots."

"May I see the sex change within witch form a few more times, and then human form to compare?" says Metis levelly.

"Mmhmm," says Kas. "Did you guys learn anything interesting?"

"Some. I don't have as much practice looking at divinations as Teacher does but I certainly got more today. I wonder if it's anything like reading an alethiometer. Although our symbols are a lot more numerous and transparent to the reader."

"Well, what kind of stuff did they tell you?"

Kas grins. "That's awesome."

"It totally is!" he says happily. "Can you talk about the other thing again now?"

"Oh, right. So there was practically a paragraph of symbols about gender, and we don't have enough symbols that it could be terribly clear either. It reported on the physical stuff, especially when Petaal was switching, but it was confused about the non-physical part. Do you know what's up with that?"

"Uh, I don't remember exactly. I would have taken notes but Metis disapproves of that during spells, she thinks they distract from the pure energies of magic. Something like... and these are just the English names of the symbols, not their deep and accurate contents especially when I say 'parenthesis' - "masculine feminine parenthesis false choice parenthesis parenthesis yes no parenthesis sometimes masculine sometimes feminine always set-apart-specified-thing" - like that." Isabella finishes setting up the rotisserie and runs indoors to grab another turkey. She cuts the package open, tucks her dagger away again, and spears it on the spinning-rod-part. "Set-apart-specified-thing, by the way - that symbol just refers back to whatever the spell is about, in this case you and Petaal."

Kas laughs. "So our gender is 'always us'? Sounds about right."

"Okay," laughs Isabella, "but can you tell me anything about what that means besides the tautology that the set-apart-specified-thing is reliably the set-apart-specified-thing?"

"Not really," Kas says cheerfully. "But if you wanna do finding-stuff-out magic at me about gender and then quiz me about what the hell it's trying to tell you, that might be fun."

"Maybe." Isabella wills the firepit on and starts turning the turkey over it while it burns a complete absence of fuel. "I'm afraid it's not going to be able to get any more precise than that. Spells have a very small vocabulary."

"'False choice' sounds about right, too," he adds.

"So, are you just fundamentally unclear on why people being men or women is even a thing?" laughs Isabella.

"...A little?" he says. "I mean, I can tell it is a thing. People have genders. They're all different, but a lot of them are a lot like each other. Mine's just extra weird. But I'm extra weird, so that's not huge news."

"Huh. So you wouldn't say unequivocally that, say, me and Metis share a gender."

He shrugs. "There's a sense you do, and a sense you probably don't."

"Well, yeah," he says. "That's how you're the same. But I bet you don't both feel exactly the same way about it, and that's how you're different."

"Huh. I'd ask Metis if she and I could look at each other in the circle and see what we get on that score, but I don't think it has enough fine detail to tell us anything but 'yep, female, witches'."

"Another thing to ask the alethiometer about when you find one," he suggests.

"That has fewer symbols," Isabella laughs. "It can turn it into an arbitrary number of meanings, but it's still not natural language. It's worth a try, though, sure."

"Well, ask it about your gender and hers and see if it spits the same answer back twice."

"That'd work. It does answer in complete sentences -insofar as symbolic meanings with no grammar form sentences." Turn, turn, turn, won't do to cook only half the bird.

Kas grins.

At length, bird is ready, and Isabella carves and serves and pours everyone a dish of the leftover vinegar and sage to dip their bites in.

Om nom nommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.