"I'm not very good at needlework and embroidery, and she does those so seeing them makes Ata sad. Polishing gemstones gets boring."

"Remind me how long you have to sit."

"Through audiences. They're not really very long. It's just hard because I'm bad at stuff."

"All right, I changed my mind about which safe spell is next. I had better not go in the palace because your mother might spot me; can you bring out the scroll from the safe pile titled 'Prestidigitation', from my room?"

He's off at once.

He's so cute.

He's back almost immediately, too, with the scroll. "I didn't even read the dangerous ones," he says.

"Good," she says, "I am very proud of you, I bet that was hard. So what this spell does is, while it's running, it lets you do all kinds of silly little things. It isn't very strong or fast or complicated, but you can control it with your will. And it lasts for a whole hour."

"What kinds of silly little things??"

"It can move things - only about as well as I can move things with telekinesis, which isn't much - and change their colors, and conjure flimsy objects that aren't good for any practical purpose, and it can clean things or dinge them up again, and it can do gentle temperature effects and change the flavors of things, and most of this stuff disappears after the hour's up although cleaned things stay cleaned and moved things don't go back where they were."

"How long is an hour in terms of Trees, do you know?"

"I don't know. I think a full treecycle is close to a day and there are twenty-four hours in a day. The sound illusion spell lasts six seconds for people who aren't better than me at wizardry and sixty seconds is a minute and sixty minutes is an hour."

He nods as if processing these numbers in his head for a while. "That would probably be long enough to convince Ata that I can sit still and can leave the palace without running off. Though you should also ask him about a bodyguard."

"Do you think it will work better if I mention it before, or after you sit playing with a prestidigitation for an hour?"

"Probably after because he'll be pleased with me. He's pleased anyway. My mother is here."

"Yes, I know she is."

"She's almost all better except she's like me and as bad at pretending as I am and she's pretending to be happy to see me, she isn't really happy."

"I'm - I'm going to try to think of something that works better."

"This is good. Ata's happy."

"That's definitely an improvement."

He's fiddling with the scroll. "I probably have to sleep before I do more magic but I really hate sleeping. I was hoping writing would count as quiet enough but I don't think it does."

"Yeah, it's not really about being quiet or even still, it's about not doing anything effortful."

"Being quiet and still are way more effortful than writing."

"I guess effortful's not the thing either. Restful. I assume you're pretty quiet and still when you're sleeping, however little you do it, and the closer you're behaving to as-though-you're-sleeping the better."

"Can I discover a way to do magic without running out of energy like that?"