"Oh no. I'm so sorry. I can put you somewhere else? If that would help?"

"Putting me somewhere else might help, but I don't know how big the civil war is. I just saw plumes of smoke from the city and two groups fighting. One of them turned on me after they won. Can sorcery make you invisible? I think if I'm invisible and inaudible and hide my harmonic signature I can move around safely. I want to go back and - try to help."

"Sorcery can do invisibility, yes. I haven't actually learned how yet but I could probably figure it out in flat harmonics."

"I'd want to be more specific than 'make peace'. Much more. But I object to death at least as much as I do to relatively humane vassalization, so if you can get me to suitable targets and I have enough information to know what I need to tell them to do and this turns out to be a remotely reasonable way of addressing the root of the problem, I'll help."

"Of course more information is needed. I just wanted to float the idea and get it out of the way if you were absolutely positively never going to do it. I also want to be sure you don't intend to abuse having heads of state under orders - but you warning me when I first arrived covers that nicely. Can sorcery do healing or will I have to bandage myself and suck it up? Flat harmonics right here, and you can expand the area if necessary."

"Sorcery can do healing and I know how. Is there anything more complicated than what I can see?"

"Nah, just some scrapes and burning."

Promise has a look at the injuries, and fixes them, one by one.

"Thanks. Ugh. I want to try to learn sorcererous invisibility. If it makes me unnoticable enough, I'm gonna make a scouting run, try to see if Link and Morn are alright. Those are their trade names, not their real names, by the way."

"Good. When we've found someplace to plant my tree I'll get to work reverse-engineering invisibility so I can tell you how to do it."

"So for now, close the gate and keep looking? Alright, let's go." Steel picks up the stuff.

It lasts that long. Promise may live in her next home for thousands or tens of thousands of years and wants it to be the right place and to know what she's putting it near.

"Can you not move again once I find my friends and try to deal with what is likely to be hundreds or thousands of people dying in my world?"

"Once I plant my branch it will need to grow a while before I can take another cutting and expect that to work. It needs to be good enough for at least a few years, and I don't want to leave a clear trail with a lot of abandoned trees if someone decides to see why I wanted to suddenly move."

"I'm dangerously low on food and I refuse to eat anything local. Very soon you are going have to continue your search alone, carrying all your things, while I try to figure out gates and then survive in the middle of a war."

"If we haven't found something better by tomorrow we can go back to the place that had too many preexisting trees and clear some away."

"Thank you. I can do rapid forestry if you want to thin the rest of the forest out. I experimented a bit back home, and it turns out bluestream and basic sorcery combined are highly effective at physical tasks."

"The problem is only partly that there are too many trees, it's also that they'll keep trying to grow back and it will be annoying to cultivate my own plants and I have less information than I did where I started about what's edible in the uncultivated wilderness. But it's the best we've seen so far."

She nods, and levitates the stuff, and follows when Promise lifts off.