And Promise can just do it the long way for now, right?

Right. Also, even if you have abridgements of many of the steps of a ritual, it's strongly recommended that you do it completely the long way at least the first time you do it.

So, painstakingly, carefully, she changes the color of her dress, green to red.

The silence ward is potentially very very useful.

The silence ward is incredibly complicated. If you do it just as a ritual it can take up to a week to do. But you can abridge things indefinitely if you work at it enough--these steps are all abridged as gestures and these gesture sequences are abridged as words and these word sequences are abridged as another gesture. Most magicians are limited by their ability to create and remember distinct abridgements. If she works very very hard and is good at remembering things, she could eventually cast a silence ward by clenching her jaw.

...and how long is Little Bird willing to hand-feed her leaflet visitor?

Little Bird is outraged by the fact that Thorn exists. Besides, it's not that onerous a chore. She can do it while studying.

Promise shows him her notes on magic and explains Jawbreaker's didactic habits.

"Hmm. It may be for the best for him to stay on, at least in an advisory role. My own library of spells and shortcuts is far superior, but I am not an experienced teacher."

"All right. I self-taught sorcery from books, but that meant no one but me was spending time on it."

"In my experience self-teaching is adequate; a proficient instructor is invaluable. Of course, many instructors are sufficiently incompetent as to give one the opposite impression."

"Finding teachers in Fairyland would have been too dangerous."

"Given the information my sister has relayed to me concerning the state of affairs in that place I cannot disagree. However, you may as well avail yourself of the resource while it is available."

"I agree."

"Jacenty" proves to be a somewhat better teacher than he had predicted. He gives her advice on memorization techniques and striking a good balance on how precisely to define a shortcut--too precise and it becomes difficult to remember, imprecise enough and it cuts down on the total number available. "I do not suffer fools patiently," he explains one evening, "but you are not a fool. Now, let's see if we can't train a bit more precision into that sequence."

Promise attends with perfect focus to the sequence in question.

It's a good sequence! At this rate she may be able to finish condensing the silence ward before the month is out. (It is not the same month she started in. It is still impressive.)

"I think this is a great idea in theory but there is only so much planet and I wouldn't bet there's an inch of land that no one's grown anything, so you'd want to do the branches thing, definitely. And, uh, our population is kind of growing, so even if you pick somewhere uninhabited it might not stay that way."

"I could live somewhere very otherwise inhospitable," Promise says.

"...Well, there's Antarctica. It's too cold for humans to live there permanently, although there are a couple of research stations."

"I was thinking maybe high up a mountain." She has been reading some of Little Bird's books in between practicing ritual magic. "So it wouldn't be so inconvenient to visit. But if humans are as acquisitive as all that maybe I should just gate to the farthest place I've ever heard of and live there and gate here when I want magic lessons."