"I don't know what foreigners call us. The village is Ninpai, we'd answer to the Tiger Emperor..."

....there are plenty of places on the Material Plane ruled by an Emperor. Local quirks could have introduced the 'tiger' title. Or maybe the emperor is actually a tiger. She would probably have remembered that from her education if it was an important empire. "Okay. Well, thank you for hosting me. How safe are the roads to - the places you mentioned -"

"You might get bandits, especially looking foreign. Might be wild animals or strangers, might be bad weather -"

"Not this time of year."

"All the way to Amilu? You don't know what it's like that far away."

"How far is it?"

"A couple weeks, if you don't want to kill your horse."

"Does anyone here make the trip there regularly?"

"To Amilu? No. Yarisong, sure, some people go every year."

"Can I pay for company to Yarisong? And in Yarisong pay for company to Amilu?"

"Maybe -"

"Going at a horse's pace?"

"Sure, ask one of the Bizou boys -"

"With whose horse, their father can't spare -"

"He's got an ox, hasn't he?"

"I don't know..."

"Well, worth asking. What are you paying for it?"

"No idea what you'll be able to buy in Yarisong, anyway."

"If it's safe enough to do magic here I can do minor healing, protection from poison, plant growth..." more than that but those are all low-level enough they shouldn't be startling -

They look disproportionately impressed, actually. "All that! By yourself, or is it stored up in things, like your necklace -"

"Necklace doesn't work."

"Necklace does something, doesn't it? Just doesn't do all of the thing, I suppose -"

"It'll still register as magic but the only enchantment on it is Message and that's not working - do people here not do magic alone?"

"No one does magic here."

"My great-aunt was magic! She never came back from Yarisong after she found out."

"I think you need a lot of people to do magic but I don't know hardly anything."

"Great-auntie wrote a letter once but Grandfather got into an argument with the civil servants' office and we don't know what it said, a goat ate it before someone else could try to get it read."

" - huh. Where I'm from it's safe to do magic on your own but it might not be, here. I maybe shouldn't risk it. Is there anything non-magic I can do to pay for an escort to Yarisong -"

"Guess you don't want to sell Old Sao your pendant..."

"Ask the Bizou women, maybe they've got chores for you to do - can you make noodles?"

" - I haven't done it before. Probably. I'd rather not sell the pendant, but I might have something else, would that silver pay for the escort?"

"More than."

How about this ring of resistance to lightning. It's pretty. It has gems inset and they're all cracked through and the cracks have been filled in with silver.

That is very pretty and Old Sao will give her a smaller pile of silver for it (smaller because the gems are flawed, however nicely that's been addressed).

"They're all like that, because it's resistance to lightning, see, it's like complaining that frost ones are cold to the touch."

"If I try to tell someone that's what this ring does they're not going to believe me, child."

" - and the nearest person who can do Detect Magic is in Yarisong, right. I can zap you while you're wearing it if you want but it's resistance, it's not immunity."

"No thank you, child. People don't often get hit by lightning, anyway."

It's presumably still enough silver to hire her escort. "Fine. Deal. Who's the people with a horse who might be interested in accompanying me -"

Those people are over there and can offer her a selection of teenage boys to ride with her to Yarisong.