"I'm seven," says the little girl. "And I'm not frightened at all. Where is Elcenia? Is it a city or a country or a planet or something else?"

"Elcenia is a world," says the elder woman. "What's your name? I'm Kerah and this is Terali."

"I'm Matilda," she says. "It's nice to meet you both. Why did you bring me here?"

"We're looking for more worlds with interesting things in them," says Kerah. "Sort of like going exploring, except we can do it from right here. What sort of world are you from?"

"I don't know what I'm comparing it to," she points out. "What sort of world are you from? Yours seems to have a lot of magic."

"It does," agrees Terali. "We're both wizards, for instance. Is there only a little magic in your world?"

"A lot of people think there isn't any at all. That's how little there is."

"Huh. But you know of some?"

"What's sorcery? Is it a kind of magic you have in this world? Is it different from wizardry?"

"Sorcery is different from wizardry," says Kerah. "Sorcerers are born, wizards are educated. Sorcerers can move things around without touching them. You probably aren't exactly a sorcerer, but if all magic in your world is moving things without touching them it's similar practically."

"It might not be. I haven't been doing it for very long; I'm not sure yet," she says. "What can wizards do, besides bring people from different worlds?"

"Oh, lots of things. You're under a translation spell right now so you can understand us when we speak Ertydon. The ceiling is wizard magic, too." The ceiling is gently glowing with white light.

"That's neat!" she says, beaming. "Could I learn to be a wizard?"

"Probably not. We've found that people from other worlds don't have channeling capacities, and we know that if we went to your world we wouldn't be able to cast any spells there," says Terali.

"Aww," she sighs. "Is there any magic in your world I could learn?"

"You might be able to learn witchcraft," says Kerah. "I'm not sure, but there's no obvious reason why not."

"What does witchcraft do?"

"Witches make potions. Things for headaches, shampoo, it depends on the witch."

"We have shampoo in my world but it is not magical," says Matilda.

"Neither of us know very much about witchcraft," says Kerah.

"Oh, well. Why are you looking for interesting worlds? Do you want to learn magic from them? That would make sense."

"That's exactly what we're doing," nods Terali.

"Well," says Matilda, "I'm not sure if I can teach you magic from my world... I don't know very much about it yet."

"We can get other people, if we know who to try to get," says Kerah. "How do you learn it?"

"I don't think getting anyone else would help," she says. "I'm not sure yet how people start being able to do magic, but I'm the first one I know about."

"Oh, that's very interesting," muses Terali. "Not necessarily useful, but interesting."

"Useful for what?" wonders Matilda.

"It's not something we could learn," Kerah explains, "or teach anyone else."

"Well," says Matilda, "I could ask Miss Honey if I can come to your world to take witchcraft lessons, and if she says yes and you find me witchcraft lessons then when I figure out how people start having magic I'll tell you."

"She's my adoptive mother since last year, and she's in charge of the school I go to."

"Then she'd definitely be one of the people we'd have to ask. Is she going to be upset that you've vanished from wherever you were?" asks Terali.

"Not immediately, she wasn't in the room or anything, but she will if she looks for me and can't find me at all. Can you come home with me to talk to her?"

"That's not part of our exploration protocol, but we can send you home with a letter and then summon the letter," suggests Kerah.

"Okay."

Kerah gets some paper (it's square) and a stick of graphite (it doesn't leave any smears on her hands). "What's your language called, Matilda?" she asks, turning a few pages in a nearby book.

"English. Why?"

"I think an hour would definitely be enough."

"How long is an hour?" asks Terali.

"Well, an hour is sixty minutes and a minute is sixty seconds, but I don't have a clock with me..."

Terali casts a spell; now there are numbers in midair. "The fastest-moving number is splits, then ticks. Is a second close to one of those amounts of time?"

Matilda peers at the numbers. "It looks like a split is about the same thing as a second."

"Okay! Where will you put the letter?"

It will take a couple minutes before the letter lands in her lap.

The letters have been coming and going fast enough now that Jenny feels confident in replying: We will be ready half an hour after you sent this letter. I'd like to come too.

"Okay, I guess," says Matilda.

"Are you a human?" asks Kerah.

"Yes."

"Can your magic do anything besides move things around?"

"No," says Matilda, with a smile that agrees that these questions are indeed silly.

And, with a very gracefully done surreptitious chalk-smudging with one foot, Terali leans across the circle and offers Matilda her hand. "There's another circle set up in another room - there wasn't room for two here - and it's made so that you can show us how to summon your mother," she says.

"Okay," Matilda says agreeably. She takes Terali's hand.

"Okay," says Matilda. She puts her hand in the circle and concentrates on Miss Honey.

"Yes," says Miss Honey.

"Do you have any magical abilities?"

"No," says Miss Honey.

"Do you have any intentions of hurting anyone or anything while you're here?"

"No," says Miss Honey, with a questioning glance at Matilda. Matilda shrugs.

Terali is again fairly surreptitious about the chalk-smudging. She incorporates it into a polite bow. "There's a witch in the office down the hall."

"Let's go meet the witch, then," says Miss Honey, stepping forward to take Matilda's hand.

Kerah and Terali lead them down the hall. There is a large room that says Raha Torail-sa, Witch on the door and inside contains cauldrons and a whole lot of assorted plants and substances in various glass containers and baskets. The witch is about forty, also red-haired but with a scarf keeping her hair up and out of her face, and wearing a much simpler outfit than the wizards, with an apron covering most of it. "Hello! You must be Matilda and - Jennifer Honey? Am I pronouncing those right?"

"It sounds like it might be fun," says Matilda. "Oh, but we should probably do the clocks thing first." She digs a watch out of a pocket of her dress. "Can someone cast the spell that tells time, please?"

Terali does that.

"There are five splits to a tick, twenty-five ticks to a degree, twenty-five degrees to an angle, and twenty-five angles to a day," says Terali.

"Sixty seconds to a minute, sixty minutes to an hour, twenty-four hours to a day," says Matilda. "So your days are a smidge shorter than ours, they're, let me see, twenty-one hours forty-two minutes and five seconds. Okay. That's probably not too bad."

"You're very good at mental arithmetic," observes Raha.

"I like numbers."

"They come up a little in witchcraft - measuring things, mostly - but it's not very elaborate math," says Raha. "I'm trying to think of what the fastest way to see if you can do witchcraft would be. Maybe something like elixir base - it's not the first thing we usually learn, but that's because we try to start with good work habits and learning what all the ingredients are first, and if you can't do the magic that would only waste your time." Raha starts collecting various bottles of things.

Matilda peers interestedly at the bottles of things!

"This is just pure water," says Raha. "And this is pef tan, which is a flavor enhancer, because people do have to drink their elixirs. And this is lemon peel, and this is grass salt. It doesn't actually matter what kind of salt you use, but I use grass salt because of a religious dietary law. Four ingredients."

Matilda nods solemnly.

"A small batch of elixir base is one measure of water and one pinch of everything else," says Raha, and she gets a little bowl. "It doesn't even need to be heated. But if I don't do any magic to it -" She scoops some water into the bowl and takes a pinch of each of the other three things and stirs them around. Nothing happens. "They just float there. The salt dissolves, but not particularly fast." She sets that bowl aside and dips up a new measure of water. "Witchcraft means waking up the ingredients so that they'll behave. In the case of elixir base, we want them to behave two ways - we want the lemon peel and pef tan to dissolve along with the salt, and the whole thing to thicken. I don't cast any spells, so there's nothing much to look at, but -" She stirs, pinching salt into the water. It just about vanishes on contact; the viscosity goes up. She adds pef tan and lemon peel; they do the same thing. Now she has a bowl of something about the consistency of maple syrup, just barely yellow-green, nothing floating on it at all. "See?"

"Magic!" says Matilda. "But how do you do it?"

"That's the part that's hard to explain! Most of it is just paying attention. Here." She gets a third bowl. "Dip up a measure of water for yourself - it works best if you're doing all the moving around of the ingredients."

"Okay." She dips up a measure of water. "I wonder if it would be better or worse if I did any of my magic to it. I think probably it's simpler if I don't."

"Probably," agrees Raha. "I guess you could use it to stir, sorcerers can do that and it doesn't interfere, but we're trying to find out if you can make elixir base the usual way. Stir the water around and note how thin it is. You can taste a little if you think it might help -" She gets a spoon. "It needs to be thicker so you can add other things to it later and make elixirs. If you stir it a little slower, as though it were resisting you, you can imagine how it will be when it's all done, like I showed you - and then pinch in the salt and stir even slower..."

"There you go! Now, just the same with the lemon peel and pef tan."

"Very nicely done! So you can learn to be a witch. We will have to go back and teach you all the ingredients and lab procedures, of course," says Raha. "But the magic clearly works just fine for you."

"Hooray!"

Raha laughs. "So we should schedule your lessons. I can rearrange things within my work day, which is first-and-naught to tenth-and-same, if that would make it more convenient."

"Well, what time is it now?"

Terali's time spell is still up. She reads it. "Right now it's sixth-and-four."

"Okay," says Matilda. "May I have a pencil and paper, please?"

This being Raha's office, Raha finds her a graphite stick and some paper.

Raha looks it over. "Yes, this looks fine."

"So that's a schedule up until the end of Sutaahel. I'll get you an ingredients reference and a basic recipe book for next time," says Raha.

"Thank you!"

"What do lights and mages do? And what's a dragon? 'Dragon' in English is a word for an imaginary creature."

"Well, the imaginary kind of dragon is also a winged firebreathing reptile, so I guess it makes sense why the translation spell would do that," says Matilda. "Dragons sound neat! I'd like to meet one if you can find one who wants to teach me your language!"

Matilda giggles.

Kerah comes back with a book. "I can check you for a channeling capacity, but you shouldn't expect me to find anything," she says.

"Okay."

"That's okay," she says. "I'm going to have lots of fun learning witchcraft."

"Okay," says Matilda. "Bye, everybody."

"Bye!" says Raha, and they are sent home.

The next day, Matilda is ready to be summoned at the appropriate time, with a notebook and pencil of her very own in case she has to take notes on things. Learning! Yay!

And she is summoned, and this time there isn't even any chalk-smudging before Terali leads her down the hall to the witch's office. There is another woman there. "Matilda, this is Lesirra. She's an anthropologist. Do you mind if she sits in on your lesson?"

"Sure, she can do that! It's nice to meet you, Lesirra!"

"Someone writes them, and then someone with nice handwriting and an illustrator make a clearly legible version with pictures, and then they're copied over with wizard magic as many times as necessary," Raha says.

"That's interesting! Publishing in my world works differently, we don't use magic, but I'm not sure exactly how we do it instead," says Matilda.

"It seems like it would probably take a lot longer without magic involved," remarks Raha.

"Well, I don't know how long it takes you, but I know we can make a lot of copies of a book in not very much time at all," says Matilda. "And the writing looks different, because it wasn't handwritten by a person."

"There are machines for it. I think they're called printing presses."

"Huh! They must be pretty complicated machines."

"They are! If Lesirra is this excited about them, maybe I can find a book about how they work and bring that," says Matilda.

"I would love to see more or less any books from your world you'd like to bring me," says Lesirra earnestly.

So many ingredients! "They didn't have one in the store but I've also ordered a book of quizzes on this, so we can make sure you've got the principles down without risking things blowing up in real potion tests," says Raha.

"That's a good idea! Do potions blow up if you do them wrong?"

"Some of them can. You've already learned about two ingredients that will blow up if you put them together without the right stabilizers; can you figure out which from what you remember?"

She ponders this for about a tick, and then comes up with the right answer.

Raha congratulates her and moves on. So many ingredients.

Matilda is very smart and has an excellent memory. She is going to learn all about the many ingredients.

Raha seems generally impressed with her, though she makes no specific comments on Matilda's speed (beyond remarking that usually people who want to be witches start sometime between the ages of ten and eighteen).

"I'm learning a lot of things earlier or faster than most people," says Matilda. "Because I like learning things more than most people and I'm better at it than most people."

"Well, that makes perfect sense to me," says Raha. "Do you go to an accelerated school when school's in session?"

"I go to an ordinary school, but I get lots of extra books and things and I can skip ahead when I want."

"Do they not have accelerated schools?" wonders Raha.

"I'm not sure. What's an accelerated school?"

"Well, around here, if you were in a public school and learned a lot faster than the other students your age, they'd put you in one that went through the curriculum a lot faster and got to more advanced topics. My niece goes to one of those."

"That sounds like fun! I don't think we have anything exactly like that. But I don't mind going to Miss Honey's school instead."

"Oh, she's a teacher?"

"Yes! She's a teacher and her aunt used to run the school but then her aunt left so now she runs it instead."

"Is it usual for families to run schools? Will it be yours when you grow up?"

"I think sometimes it works that way, but it might not have if Miss Honey wasn't a teacher at the school already. I don't think I'm going to be a teacher when I grow up, but I'm not sure yet. I have lots of time to decide."

Raha nods. More ingredients ensue. "They think they'll have a dragon available to teach you Ertydon tomorrow or the next day."

"Ooh!"

"So then you'll want to look over your schedule again and see where you want to fit in those lessons, atlhough I'm not sure the dragon they find will have as flexible a schedule as me."

"We'll see when I meet them, I guess."

And: ingredients, until Terali comes to make sure they're done and unsummon Matilda home.

"You're welcome!" says Raha. And she is back home again.

"Hi! It's nice to meet you! What sorts of times can you give me language lessons?"

Fena takes the notes on this and then convinces Terali to teleport her to school, and Terali agrees, disappears with Fena, and comes back alone. Matilda is then free to continue studying witchcraft while the anthropologist supervises.

Witchcraft! Yay!

"I think you will probably do fine," says Matilda. "Tell me about Ertydon!"

"There's a few countries that speak it, I guess you want Linnipese Ertydon since this is Linnip and you're talking to Linnipese people. Uh... okay, hello is rai."

"Okay." She writes this down. "Let's see, what's the alphabet like?"

"Oh, yeah, duh, sorry." Fena writes out the alphabet, and names all the letters, and produces their nearest English equivalents.

Matilda extracts more words from her, along with their spellings. Then sentences. It is a very productive lesson.

Fena seems pretty okay with being steered around by Matilda's opinions on what's next.

And Matilda is perfectly fine with learning languages from someone who has no idea how to teach them! Everyone wins.

Lessons continue. Raha is generally more impressed with Matilda's progress than Fena is (Fena turns out to be well over a century old and very vague on the concept of having to learn a language; she notes that the other girls at her school seem to have more trouble than this when they're studying Leraal or Vansalese or Munine or Kida, but seems to chalk it up entirely to smaller humans being better at language acquisition.) Raha gets through all the ingredients featured in the introductory recipe book, quizzes Matilda on them, and then lets her start working on the potions in the book. They're very assorted. She could make soap or confectioner's glaze or a headache cure or sunscreen or plant food or glue that will only set in the presence of a second potion and then bond permanently.

"You look very pleased about something," comments Terali, after she's been translation-spelled.

"I did witchcraft on Earth! Well, not exactly," she says. "It didn't work quite the same way. But it was definitely magic! Now I want to test if I can do the same thing here! I hope it doesn't mess up learning real witchcraft, but it's still really exciting!"

"Didn't it not work on Earth before?" blinks Terali, escorting Matilda to Raha's lab.

"It didn't! Potions always worked at home, but making them never did! But then this morning I decided to try something again, and it worked! Except when I do it on Earth it feels more like when I do what you call sorcery. So I think it's my magic, or Earth's magic, I'm really not sure how distinct those things are yet. I think my magic learned how to do witchcraft."

"Your magic can learn how to do things!" exclaims Terali. "That's amazing. I've never heard of anything like it. Do you think it could learn to do more things?"

"Probably! I want to learn more magic now!"

"Well, that certainly seems like it's worth a try, doesn't it? Do you know yet whether you'll be able to share your magic with anybody else?"

She shakes her head. "I have one friend who learned to fly after I made her fly around, but so far nobody else can do anything, and she's not the only person I flew around. And she can't move things that aren't herself."

"Did you make her fly around differently in any way?" asks Terali. "Or more? Or was she maybe different somehow to start with?"

"It wasn't any more and I don't think it was very differently. I think either she was different to start with, or it's because she's my best friend. If it's just about how good a friend somebody is, though, Miss Honey should be able to do some magic and she can't..."

"Has she been flown around?" asks Terali.

"Yeah!"

"Hmm. Well, I was going to save this for a surprise, but over the last few weeks Kerah and I have been working on a wizard spell called an analysis that we think ought to be able to look right at your magic and see what it's doing. We'll probably have a first version ready to try in a couple of days, and maybe then we can get some answers."

"That's so cool! How does it work? I want to hear all about it!"

"Analyses are pretty advanced wizardry. If you can teach your magic to do any simple wizard spell we can get into the curriculum and work up to complicated stuff, how about?" chuckles Terali. "But I can cast the analysis on you when it's ready, if you like, and you can look at your own magic with it."

"That sounds like fun!"

"Mm-hm! And as long as I've gone and got you all excited about analyses I can look up one for witchcraft and you can look at that while you work."

"That will be really nice and really useful, I bet, because I have to check now whether I'm doing real witchcraft or the witchcraft my magic learned that might not be the same at all."

"Hi, Raha! We need to be extra careful today because I think my magic learned how to do witchcraft and I don't know what happens if my magic and Elcenia's magic are doing it at the same time," she explains. "I think I'm mostly going to try to only do the Elcenian kind, but I also want to try my magic's kind some to see how they're different."

"Your magic learned how to do witchcraft?" asks Raha, furrowing her brow.

"Yeah! Witchcraft didn't work at all on Earth before, but I got it to work there this morning, except that doing it felt like doing my own magic and not like doing real witchcraft."

"Huh! How strange. I wonder if it learned the whole thing or just the parts you know?" asks Raha. "We could find out. I could give you a recipe with ingredients you haven't learned yet to try at home and not tell you what it does."

"Ooh," says Matilda, lighting up. "Yeah! More than one, to really make sure, I think."

"All right. I'll fix that up while you're working on your vitamin potion, how about?"

And Raha finds some advanced but basically safe recipes with exotic ingredients, and copies them over without too many hints about what they are supposed to make.

Matilda double-checks that all of the ingredients are things she has heard of or expects to be available on Earth. (Her vitamin potion is coming along beautifully. She is an excellent student.)

Some of the ingredients are not things she has on Earth. Raha packs up little jars of those for her.

Raha investigates! Are they respectively a painkiller, something that clears smoke out of a roomful of air when misted, and a purple hair dye? (She has a mouse to test the first and last on.)

"They did! That's very interesting."

"It is!" agrees Matilda.

"Elixirs are not supposed to glow," say Raha dubiously. "Well, most of them."

"I wonder what's wrong with it? Is there a good way to test?"

"Well, we could make an elixir with it and feed it to a mouse, I suppose."

"Poor mouse..."

"It is a little sad, isn't it? But we get our mice from a store that also sells them to be fed to snakes. I think testing elixirs is a nobler occupation," says Raha.

"Well, okay. That makes sense. Okay then."

So (to control for the possibility of introducing more of Matilda's magic into the potion) Raha turns the glowing elixir base into a pep elixir, and fetches a mouse, and feeds the mouse a mouse-sized dose.

The mouse becomes very pepped. Not dangerously so, but in a way that noticeably exceeds the strength of the dose.

"Huh. It seems to have made the elixir stronger. Either that or this is a very peppy mouse. We'll keep an eye on it to see if there are any side effects."

"That's interesting! And it makes a kind of sense, as a side effect of sort of doing the same magic twice on something. I have no explanation for the glow, though. The glow was weird."

"Yes... but the base had the extra magic, not the pep part," says Raha. "I wonder why it made the final potion's effect stronger instead of doing something else?"

"I'm not sure. I wonder if it just... couldn't think of anything better to do? But I'm not sure my magic actually works that way... I'm not sure what sort of a way to work that is."

"Magic here usually doesn't think for itself," muses Raha.

"Mine can learn things. Maybe it sort of knew what things witchcraft does, and making the pep potion stronger was the first thing it could do that was like something witchcraft does and hadn't already been done by real witchcraft?"

"Maybe. I'm trying to think of a potion that is very precisely dosed - it doesn't matter very much for a pep potion, but some things would be worse if they were stronger."

"I have no idea if my magic can learn which things it's appropriate to strengthen," says Matilda. "But now I want to find out!"

"All I'm coming up with are medicines, and those would be a little hard to test on mice when we only have healthy ones."

"Well, there's time to think about it," says Matilda. "I don't think it's very important to find out in a hurry, since I can still do regular witchcraft without any of my magic in it."

"That's true. I'll think about it," agrees Raha.

"This is exciting!" beams Matilda.

"It is!" agrees Raha. "We'll have to think of more experiments and find out how it works."

"It's going to be so much fun!"

And eventually Matilda is sent home. As usual, all wizard spells on her break.

"That was fast! You only had it on for about an angle!" says Terali. "Is it learning to learn faster?"

"I don't know! Maybe! It's exciting! And I think it's been learning to see itself better since then; I can already tell more things about when Lavender is flying or someone's making potions. I brought some batches of elixir base made on Earth for me and Raha to test."

"Well then, let's get you to Raha." And here is Raha, in her lab as always. She turns one of the units of elixir into more pep potion and feeds it to a mouse.

"Looks like," says Raha, peering at the peppy but not manic mouse.

"Okay. What real witchcraft am I learning today, then?"

Raha laughs and presents her with a recipe for a skin cream, although first she has to explain the witchy properties of coconut and issue safety warnings about coconut's interactions with other things.

Raha finds another recipe that features coconut. This one is a sobering potion.

Raha gets Terali; Terali casts some analyses on herself. "Witch potion," she confirms. "None of your own magic. Matilda, do you want to name your magic, or maybe see if Fena can come up with a word for it?"

"I can't think of very good names for it except, I don't know, 'Earth magic', and that's weirdly ambiguous in English... Fena can try naming it, maybe she'll have something better."

"Dragons are pretty good at coming up with words for things," says Terali.

"Dragons are neat!"

"Fena says that English doesn't have a word for it yet besides generically 'magic', but that Draconic has been calling what you do 'ialdae'," says Terali.

"That's pretty!"

"I thought so too!"

"What? Oh my goodness," says Terali. "All right, out you get, I'll get Kerah and she'll do it so we can use the same circle." Terali runs off to find Kerah.

Matilda stands next to the circle and frets.

Terali brings Kerah. Kerah summons Miss Honey.

"We could just summon whoever this is into a warded circle, and help deal with her," Kerah points out.

Matilda hesitates, but then she shakes her head. "I don't want her knowing about Elcenia. She has magic too, she kidnapped Miss Honey with it. I'll have to deal with her myself."

"Matilda, you're seven," says Terali. "I'm sure we can deal with her, especially if you tell us what she can do."

Kerah looks at Terali. Terali shakes her head. "I didn't unsummon her!"

"Matilda's magic can learn things," Miss Honey points out quietly.

"Is there still an active summon -?" wonders Terali; Kerah casts an analysis to check whether Terali still has one in progress.

There is not still an active summon.

"I could summon her again," says Terali, when this result turns up. "But she might just leave again. Isn't there any way to get her to let us help?" she asks Miss Honey.

"I don't think so," says Miss Honey. "She is extremely independent. And it might be... a bad idea to interrupt her while she's in the middle of dealing with Miss Trunchbull." She shivers slightly when she adds, "I agree with her that bringing Miss Trunchbull here would not be a good idea."

"You want us to leave your seven-year-old daughter to fight someone who managed to kidnap you with the use of ialdae?" says Kerah.

"I think she'll be just fine," says Miss Honey. "She did perfectly well last time."

"Last time?" says Terali.

"When she originally discovered her magic, and no one else knew it existed, she used it to trick my aunt into running away. My aunt was... a very unpleasant person who treated the children at the school badly, but I couldn't do anything about her. Matilda could. Matilda did. And now my aunt has some magic of her own, but Matilda is much better at it."

Terali frowns. "Even if she's capable of it, seven years olds in combat situations doesn't sit well - we don't send mages her age in dangerous situations even fully activated -"

"I understand," says Miss Honey. "But this isn't a matter of sending her anywhere. She went on her own. I know better than to try to stop her, that's all."

"And you don't think she should be interrupted, and you don't want us to summon your aunt?" confirms Kerah.

"That's right."

The wizards look extremely dubious, but they sit and wait.

The wizards wisely hang back and wait before asking technical questions. Eventually Terali says, "Do you want a glass of water?"

"Yes, that would be good, thank you," sniffles Matilda.

There's a waterspout in the office, and paper cups. Terali gets Matilda some water.

The wizards look at the cup, and each other, and Terali just says, "You're welcome."

Slightly before the time when Matilda would be summoned for her next lesson, she appears in the room where she is usually summoned.

"It seems more convenient this way," says Matilda. "Miss Trunchbull taught my magic to do a lot of new things and I don't like most of them, but I like that I learned how to move between worlds."

"Do you have any idea how she taught the ialdae to do those things?"

"I think so," she says. "I think she caught magic like Lavender, but Lavender couldn't teach it anything new, and Miss Trunchbull couldn't teach it nearly as well as I can but she could still teach it some. I think whether or not someone catches ialdae, and whether or not they can teach it new things if they do, has to do with something about them. But I don't know what exactly."

"Maybe we could make an analysis to tell. Or you could teach your magic one. It wouldn't be especially useful with only Lavender and you to look at, but it might give us a clue."

"I've been trying to teach my magic one, but I can't tell very well whether it's worked or not, because of only being able to look at me and Lavender."

"Well - hm. How many people have you ever used magic on?"

"Lavender and Miss Trunchbull and most of the kids from my class last year and Miss Honey and I think that's it. I could try it on more people and see if they pick it up too."

"We can find you some people from here who'd like to have it, definitely. But why I asked was that your class in school probably isn't very unusual in how many people in it can catch ialdae. So if you looked at lots of people with an analysis - possibly only people from your world, depending on how it turns out to work - then you'd expect one or two people to be potential catchers per classful. How big are your classes?"

"There were twenty-six people in it, including me and Lavender."

"So out of a total of twenty-eight people three so far have ialdae, but you might be different because you were first, so about one in every thirteen or fourteen - maybe more, if some people are just slow catchers."

"That sounds about right," says Matilda. "We'd need to look at lots more people to be sure, though. Do you have lots of people to look at? And are the people who want ialdae all people it would be good to give ialdae to? I don't want to have to deal with another magic Trunchbull. One was enough."

"They'd all come very highly recommended," Terali assures her. "I don't think we'll have any trouble finding volunteers. Some people would really like to do magic but they don't have high enough channeling capacities to be wizards and they weren't born with any other kinds."

"Okay," she says. "If you find me lots of people to look at to see if they can catch ialdae, I'll look at them. And if you find me people who want to do magic and some of them can catch ialdae, I'll... see."

"We'll get word out and have them here in a lesson or two."

"Okay, I'll go look at them."

Terali leads her down the hall and down a flight of stairs and into a large room with a bunch of chairs containing women, all variously red-haired and between the ages of sixteen and forty-five.

Terali blinks. "What? No, there are boys."

"Oh. It's just I've never seen one," she explains. "And now I've seen a lot of people from Elcenia."

"I don't think you've mentioned any boys from Earth, either," Terali points out. "We got these volunteers from a girls' school, some teachers and some students. If you want to meet Elcenian boys I could bring my son to work tomorrow."

"I've mentioned some, I just didn't mention that they were boys. But there are boys in my class. I guess it doesn't matter too much. Are these just people for me to look at and see if they can catch ialdae or not, or do they all want to be ialdic too?"

"If you can get any of these people to catch ialdae they'd be very pleased about it."

"None of them has a criminal record or any worrying notes on their school history," Terali says. "I haven't met them all myself, but they've all been recommended by people who do know them."

"Okay." She addresses the crowd. "Do you mind if I levitate you all?"

"Go for it!" calls one of the sixteen-year-olds. There is general tittering and no objection.

So she levitates them all. Chairs included.

This is entertainingly novel for a few ticks, but most of them have brought books and go back to reading.

"Who?" asks Terali.

Matilda points, and causes a little sparkling blue light to hover over the girl's head.

Matilda giggles. "I guess I can put you down now," she says, and she does that. "I don't know which parts of ialdae you've picked up... I think you might have some of the ability to teach it things, though."

"How do I... do... anything, with it?" asks Annei, getting out of her chair and pocketing her book.

"I think the first thing you should try is probably levitating yourself, but I can't really explain how very well. When I started using magic I had to concentrate very very hard on what I wanted to do with it, but now it's much easier and I hardly think about it at all."

"Okay," says Matilda. "And I'd like to meet a light, please. I want to see if I can teach healing to ialdae."

"I'm a light," call two different people in the crowd of would-be ialdae users.

"Can you show me your magic?"

Both of them cup their hands and get little balls of sparks, one robin's-egg blue, one dark purple.

"Hmm," says Matilda, peering thoughtfully at them. "Okay. Thank you."

"I definitely want to teach it to heal, then. I'm not sure if I have, yet. I'm not sure what's a good way to test it."

"I have a headache, if seeing it in action would help," suggests somebody, and Robin's Egg Blue Light heals that person's headache.

"Thank you, that might have helped too. But what should I test ialdae healing on? I already know I can make sparkly lights that don't do anything except sparkle."

Matilda levitates herself higher than everyone else so she can see the scraped elbow person more clearly, and she concentrates slightly, and a pale blue sparkling light lands on the person's head and her elbow ceases to be scraped.

"Oh, do lights not work at range? Well, I guess ialdae learned it differently. But it still works! Hooray!"

"I could, I don't know, prick my finger," says Purple Light, "and we could check if it works on lights?"

"Okay," says Matilda.

Purple Light unpins a pin from her hat and pricks her finger.

Matilda makes blue sparks over Purple Light's head. Purple Light's finger is unpricked.

There is scattered and then more enthusiastic applause.

Matilda giggles happily.

"So I can learn to do that?" asks Annei.

"I think so! I don't know exactly how to teach you, but I hope I can do it."