"Not free but it's pretty easy to pick up in the same course of study."

"Okay, so, learn healing and putting out my eardrums if I need to though I should hope that earbuds with belayed orders should cover most useful cases."

"Only if you have someone whispering in your ear at the time."

"Which I'd very much want to have in any situation where I'd expect I might need to put out my eardrums."

"The point is if you know sorcery for it you can react even if you aren't otherwise prepped."

"Oh, right, exactly, and also why I want to learn healing myself instead of only relying on you."

"Yep."

"Anything else about as useful as that I ought to learn, too?"

"That's probably the highest-leverage single thing."

"Then yeah, unless we have some interesting insight on sorcery that makes it all much easier to do or something, that sounds like as good a milestone as any to reach before implementing whatever plan we might come up with to deal with the Queen."

"If we have something by then. We only get to try this once, I don't think we'll have affordances to fuck up like we did with Thorn."

"Yes, which is why I'm wondering whether I should—wait until then, work on sorcery nonstop and then try to think of something, or do both at the same time, or only work on it after we have something."

"What would you do with yourself if you only worked on sorcery after we had a Queenscourt plan?"

"Presumably work on the plan?"

"If you can work on just one thing that long when it's not a state of dire emergency I guess that works."

"Well, the most critical part is I think information-gathering, about what I can in fact get my hands on with smart use of money and lots of time, about what the Queen can in fact do, but you do have a point that it might be—tiring."

"...do you not already have lots of information on what you can do with the smart use of money?"

"More or less? I did know offhand what kind of stuff we'd be able to use to infiltrate Thorn's court, but if we find that Queenscourt requires anything more specific I might need to figure more things out. Or, like, maybe it'll turn out we'll need more people involved so I'd need to hire them and somehow make sure of their trustworthiness and stuff, and I'd need to figure out how to do that."

Nod.

"And maybe it'll turn out that the best way to do that is create a mortal settlement here and wait a hundred years, I dunno. Honestly the first step of a plan that occurs to me is trying to either kidnap someone or infiltrate her court pretending to be a clueless mortal."

"There is definitely no way to seem like a clueless mortal near the Queen without being fed."

"Yeah, but an invisible earbud and belayed orders plus the fact that I'm a cooperative vassal would help with that."

"I think we have to assume she is smarter than Thorn and better at orders."

"Yeah, probably, but she's also less sadistic so obeying her orders for a few seconds before they can be rescinded or belayed shouldn't be that bad."

"She will notice if there is a discontinuity in your obedience."