"It takes effort. It takes time but not much time. You can usually tell if it worked, if you want to make something indestructible you can try hitting it, if you want to make something hot you can touch it and see if it's hot."

Does time vary based on any factors? Ah, so you don't get feedback as a direct sense, you have to check?

"It depends on how complicated it is, you don't want to go too fast and make mistakes. I... don't think I could be wrong about whether I'd used magic."

Iri almost says something to that but doesn't.

She is curious what Iri didn't say but won't likely distress xer by asking.

Make mistakes?

Conveniently he gets to hear her actual words and know what she means.

"If I need some cloth to fold but not tear and I forget and make it stiff that's a mistake. If I don't know that it needs to be able to fold that's also a mistake. If I'm sloppy about what I'm aiming at I could ward the wrong thing and that would be a mistake."

Like if he wanted to ward a belt buckle and instead thought of the whole belt, for instance?

"Yeah, like that. It's particularly hard to get command magic right because you're not just up against an object, you're up against a person who'll try to find any way to defy you."

That makes sense. In her world one runs into that kind of looking for loopholes vs trying to shore up against loopholes in some forms of rules and contracts, though of course there's no command magic involved.

Yup that sounds like contracts.

Iri is very interested in that topic and very quiet.

Unfortunately as noted neither discerning-sense nor other talents she has allow mind-reading.

And meanwhile - she got distracted by very interesting topics, but she is also very interested in feedback about how she did with respect to the going-out? 

"No one died! It went fine. It's when you start talking to people that things might go wrong. That doesn't have to happen for a while yet, as long as I can buy food. ...Which I can't if you don't get back to work."

Aspects of her innate psychology, apparently noticing themselves outside the scope of accustomed circumstances in which she is used to enforcing their behavior, think he has no business giving her oblique orders like that and she should do something about it. She continues to not consider them useful to the situation.

Well, she'd like to start trying as soon as it's feasible, or preparing to try if there's something that could and should be done for that first; it's clearly something she needs to get to being able to do.

But yes, work is important. 

Tide tables.

Valanda goes out again. Iri stays behind.

"Can I help?" Iri asks.

Well, she was going to start looking for a chance to talk to Iri without Valanda around.

"What with?"

and,

"Can I help you? Are you all right? Can you tell me what commands you're under?"

Why is Iri suddenly terrified? Who knows! Iri's sure not saying!

"...I just thought you might want help with your work... but I don't know much about it... I'm not mad at you."

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to suddenly scare you. It's fine. I don't think you're angry at me and I'm not angry at you either.

I want to help you if there's ways I can do that, and I don't know enough about your situation. But it certainly makes sense if you don't trust me or feel like telling me about it."

"Do you trust anyone?"

Depends on what the word's used to mean? She trusts some people different amounts of conditionally/with different sorts of some-things-and-not-others. They're all back in her world though. 

"I think I want that. I want to partly trust people. It seems... better that way."

Major aspect of trust, she thinks, is knowing what you can expect of people. So she can trust a particular friend of hers to not decide to betray her for personal gain, but not to not do some stupid things. 

"Thank you."

Iri considers saying something else but then doesn't. Iri looks out the window instead.

"May I ask where you're from?" (If questions continue to be terrifying she'll stop asking them, but she'd like to make some attempts before doing so.)

"I used to live in the woods near here. With my... siblings. Where are you from?"

Close to the Imperial capital, originally. Then a variety of places. Siblings?

"We're thwilit."

She'll have seen thwilit on the not-a-TV depicted as groups that act as one. The law treats the colony as the basic unit of thwilit that can be responsible for its actions. The laws dealing with thwilit acting alone exist but are clearly an afterthought.