Nod.

"Can I look at your spellbook?  I was trying to practice last - while you were asleep - but I don't know if I was doing it wrong."

"Yeah, sure." She pulls it out for him.

"Thanks."  ....Yeah, he definitely got a few things wrong.  The stemmed glass goes right into the mushroomy thing as part of the inversion; you don't have to hold it in a different shape while you do the wrap-around and invert the nubbins.  The braid goes the opposite direction, with the strands getting added under instead of over.  And now that he looks at it more, he doesn't think he was imagining the scaffold-hooking in the right way; he asks Belmarniss for clarification.

"That's one of the things that sometimes varies a little person to person. You can work on it and I can watch with Detect Magic to see if you're getting any wisps of magic at all?"

"After I sleep.  - Is there any reason not to just practice the ideas a bunch of times?  More than could ever actually work?"

"How do you mean?"

"You said that whenever I practice I might wreck my chance for it to actually work, until I sleep again.  But since I can't feel anything anyway, is there any reason to stop trying?  Even when it definitely won't work."

"If the thing you are trying to do is memorization, no, you can keep going after that, as long as you're not going to misremember it and train yourself wrong. Once you have it memorized I wouldn't think there'd be much point."

Oh.  Well, he'll just do better from now on.  "...What stops it from working once you have it memorized?  Pulling on it too hard even if you're doing all the right things in the right order?"

"Three things - not being able to manipulate enough magical energy or not being able to do it finely enough, and losing hold of the magical energy even once you've got it folded up right. Just because you can memorize all the steps in a dance doesn't mean you can do it right every time. Right now what you need to be doing is sort of going, hey, tiny wisps of magical energy that are barely even there, I might conceivably have something coherent to do with you, I am trying to make space on my magical shelf for you, can you stay put while I do that. And then you're gonna do something incoherent because you haven't accumulated enough for a cantrip and it'll fall apart, or something incoherent because you have enough energy and you fold it wrong, and the only way you get a refill is when you sleep. Once you've got it folded up right, which probably won't happen till you've developed some ability to feel it, then you're going to try to cast it and do that wrong and it'll burst apart, and once you've cast it you have to learn to catch it back onto your scaffold, and then you have to get good at that to the point where you won't fail even under pressure."

This is so interesting.  "So could I... would it work to also try and memorize the cleaning one before I have enough energy?  Or does the magic only want there to be one coherent thing at a time?  This early, I mean."

"...it's not standard but I guess I don't know why it would be anti-helpful if you're not going to confuse yourself."

Well.  "I should probably practice this one a lot more first."

"If it seems really hard it might just be that evocations are not for you but if it seems, like, about as hard as you'd expect, yeah."

"I think it's about what I expect."

"Anything else you need from me?"

"I don't think so."

Scrivening time.

Okay so if he's not carrying rocks, then he doesn't have to sleep in this slot.  He's still pretty tired, but he'll go out to the kitchen to get some reading in before he gets too tired to really concentrate.  Once the current light runs out.

Yin isn't there but Via is, working on some embroidery by the coal-light.

That's fine.

He does get tired not too far into the book, and creeps his way along the wall and back into Belmarniss's hammock.

Hopefully the chanting doesn't keep him up.

Hopefully his muttering doesn't interrupt her chanting!

Not at all. When she's ready to go to bed she kicks him out of the hammock though.