He grins at her. "I'll go see about that bath," he says, and vanishes again.

He sure does that a lot, doesn't he.

Well, she can just investigate her room while he's away. She does that. She has some water, too, while she's at it.

It's a very nice room. Isfain is apparently a talented interior decorator, in addition to a decent singer and a frighteningly powerful wizard. One wonders what unexpected skill he'll turn out to have next.

After about ten minutes, there's a strange noise from behind a tapestry hanging on the wall, and around the edges of the tapestry she can see the stone wall rippling like water and a wooden door appearing as though floating to the surface. The door opens, the tapestry vanishes, and Isfain steps through.

"There, all set," he says, theatrically dusting off his hands. "Do you need help with the bath or should I leave you to it?"

... Wait, what? Was that room already there, or did he just casually change the layout of his house? Forget the bath, she must investigate the architecture.

Did you rearrange your house just for a bath? I wouldn't have minded going down the hall for it.

"Well, I didn't have a fox-sized bathroom," he says reasonably. "So if I had to make one anyway, I thought I might as well put it here."

The bathroom is small and cozy and has a fox-sized bath with what are probably magical fixtures, and pleasantly bland soaps, and soft fluffy towels stored at fox-reachable heights. The decor and the towels match the theme of her bedroom.

It's a very pretty room, and everything, but:

But what had been there before?

"...hmm? Oh," he says. "Nothing at all. If you left the room and went around to where the other side of that wall is, there wouldn't be a fox bathroom there. I think it's a linen closet but I might be misremembering the layout. I didn't replace anything to make the room, I just - made an extra bit of space and attached it here."

She stares at him like he's grown a second head.

"I can try to explain the magical theory if you like, but most people don't get any less confused after I tell them how it works."

Try me, she invites.

"Well, all right."

He sits down on the floor.

"Vanishing is probably the world's most neglected magical discipline; wizards look down on it because you don't need four years of study to get any good at it, and hardly anyone else knows how it works. But I like it. It's useful. And one of the first things you learn how to do with vanishing is - I suppose you could call it 'folding space'."

He pulls a small wooden hoop out of thin air, big enough for Aysilvetea to step through. Then he pulls another, identical hoop out of thin air. Then he puts the two hoops together, and spins them around to show her what they look like from all angles - just a perfectly ordinary pair of wooden hoops held together so they behave like one.

Then he pulls them apart, and turns them both so that what was the outward-facing side of each is now facing toward the fox. And... it's like he turned them into a pair of linked magical portals: when you look into one, you see out of the other. It's a little unsettling. Especially with how he did it so casually. Powerful magic is supposed to be more difficult than that.

"So that's how you make a door that leads to somewhere other than the other side of the wall it's in. With me so far?"

She plods over to sit next to him, watching the hoops thoughtfully. She nods.

He taps one of the hoops to break the connection between them, then taps it again to vanish it, leaving him with only the first hoop; then he vanishes that too.

"And then you can also fold space in a different way, so that instead of making two places behave like they're the same place, you're making one place behave like it's bigger or smaller than it really is. The simplest trick is a box that's bigger on the inside."

He pulls a shallow wooden box out of thin air, opening the large square lid to show her that it's only a few inches deep; then he closes it, and runs his finger along the diagonal of the lid in an oddly precise movement, and opens it again, and now instead of being a few inches deep it's big enough for Aysilvetea to sit inside. The box doesn't seem to mind that in order to have that much space inside it, it would have to extend down into the floor. He picks it up and knocks on the bottom to demonstrate that it hasn't changed shape, then sticks his hand in to demonstrate that it really does have more space inside it than it used to.

After thoughtfully looking at the box, she hops back over to her letters and says, Are the gestures required?

He laughs. "Caught that, did you? Yes, they are. The way you do vanishing magic is by - thinking of what you want to do in a certain way, and linking it to a gesture or motion you intend to make, and then completing the gesture exactly as planned. The more difficult the magic you're trying to do, the more precisely you have to plan and execute the gesture. Which is why I think all wizards who are serious about the craft should learn sleight of hand, and probably also some acrobatics, but for some reason they consider that sort of thing beneath them. Even more so than alchemy, which I also think all serious wizards should learn."

Why's that? she wonders, ears twitching curiously.

"Because I don't think it's a coincidence that the seven alchemic metals are exactly the same as the seven metals of magical amplification. There's all sorts of interesting correspondences that alchemists have known about for centuries that wizards either don't believe in or don't think are important. Did you know true healing magic is easier on the full moon? Because the moon is the celestial guardian of silver, which is the amplification metal for healing. Oh, but I shouldn't start talking about healing magic or we'll be here all week."

Aysilvetea lets out a little vulpine giggle.

I did know that. She looks faintly amused. Though I didn't know why. You can talk while I bathe? This is fascinating.

He laughs. "Sure. The celestial guardians affect all the other elements too - life magic is easier under the sun, air magic under the Quiet Star, earth magic under the Crown Star and so on. But the difference is mostly subtle enough that you wouldn't notice it unless you were looking for it, so I can forgive them for not paying attention. What I find inexcusably silly is the way everyone uses life magic for healing, even though healing magic is better at it, which they'll give all kinds of excuses for but I'm pretty sure traces back to the fact that gold is a more prestigious metal than silver, which it owes to the alchemical hierarchy. It's ridiculous!"

She sets about figuring out how the bath works and how she can get it running. It's clear she's still listening to him, though, because she lets out another little giggle.

"Magic makes so much more sense when you look at the elements through the lens of alchemic correspondences. Light and life are the elements of the sun, linked to gold, sunstone, citrine, and the colour yellow. Water and healing are the elements of the moon, linked to silver, moonstone, sapphire, and the colour blue. Lightning and mind are the elements of the Dawn Star, linked to copper, garnet, topaz, and the colour orange. Last I heard, wizards hadn't even figured out that garnet was the other amplification gemstone for lightning! Fire and ice are the elements of the Blood Star, linked to iron, carnelian, ruby, and the colour red; earth and poison are the elements of the Crown Star, linked to tin, jade, emerald, and the colour green; shadow and death are the elements of the Dark Star, linked to lead, obsidian, onyx, and the colour black; and air and song are the elements of the Quiet Star, linked to mercury, pearl, diamond, and the colour white. By the way, d'you remember when I said that giving a fox the mind of a person would require an obscure branch of necromancy? That's because what we call necromancy is actually just the use of the elements death and mind. They go together like that because most of what you can do with both of them is horrible, so they have a bad reputation and are mostly only studied by people who intend to do horrible things, which contributes further to the reputation, and around it goes."

She's going to want to make a chart of this later, isn't she. Of course she is. It's a pity she doesn't have any opposable thumbs, otherwise she might be tempted to do that now. It's also a pity that her father never got the chance to talk to Isfain; she expects they would have gotten along like a house on fire. At least while discussing alchemy, anyway.

Oh no, she made herself sad. Luckily, she's figured out how to make there be water, which is quite distracting enough to keep her from being randomly sad. There's even a way to fiddle with the temperature, which she figures out through experimentation. Soon enough, she hops into the little fox-sized tub to soak and listen to his lecture.

"Please complain if I start to bore you, by the way. Anyway, so that's why I think anyone who's serious about magic should learn alchemy. And sleight of hand. And music - song is a tragically underused element. Probably most reasonable people would stop there, but I'm not a very reasonable person, so I also learned knitting and weaving and sewing and pottery and stonecarving and really any other interesting-looking craft I can get my hands on. I start to get restless if I go a few months without learning a new skill. Most of it turns out to be useful for something - magic can't ever conjure something from nothing, even the things I can pull out of thin air in arbitrary quantities have to come from somewhere to start with, so the more things I know how to make, the more things I can have. Stonecarving was almost pure self-indulgence, though, I can use magic to reshape stone however I like, I just wanted to find out how it works when you can't do that."

She isn't bored. This is still pretty fascinating, and also kind of adorable. She giggles, again.

"Anything I learn how to do with my hands makes me a little better at vanishing, though, so it wasn't completely useless."