Amat tells her. It's a lot, to a ten year old who might not have a super great grasp of how much money things cost yet.

Yup, that's a lot. Maybe she can get some other job and save up for a broom and then get a courier job. And speaking of potential jobs . . .

"How do I find out what my special magic is? I don't know anything about it yet."

"It's very difficult to deliberately find out what your special magic is - there are so many things it could be. It usually happens by accident sooner or later. A few months at most. I suppose you could try to do some of the more common things. If you can, you've succeeded. If you can't, it'll rule some things out."

"Okay. What are the common things?"

"Some witches can cook with magic and make food that's magically tasty and filling! Some witches can fly really well. There's geases - some witches can make people keep promises, make it so that can't break the promise. Improved senses are common, special attacks are common, lightning is a thing..."

"Wow! I don't think I can fly especially well, and I've helped Mama and Papa with the cooking and haven't seen anything different, but I could try senses and attack a tree or something. I don't think there are any promises I want to make someone keep."

"Well, that's up to you of course. I'd recommend not worrying about finding your special magic until it's been a few months. I've never heard of someone going half a year without figuring it out."

"Okay. I'll keep an eye out for it." It'll be just like playing pretend witch except for how she'll definitely succeed sooner or later.

What does Amat want to do now? Margaretta hopes it's more navigation lessons.

More navigation lessons are acceptable. How would she like to be the navigator on a jaunt to the town up the coast a ways?

Absolutely! She has never been to the town up the coast and would love to see it! She gets the map pointed the right way, and counts off the distance with the little scale thing she forgets the name of, and determines roughly how long they'll have to fly in exactly which direction and what they should see when they're nearly there, and is there anything she's forgotten before they take off?

"You'd think about weather and schedules and what to do if you run into trouble along the way too, normally, but for a short and unofficial trip like this it should be fine!"

Off they go! Amat chats about famous past witches with Margaretta.

She also subtly deliberately goes off course fifteen minutes into the flight.

Ooh, famous past witches!

About ten minutes after Amat goes off course: "I think I read the map wrong, this doesn't look like what I thought we'd be over."

Amat smiles and dramatically checks her compass. "Oh dear, it seems my heading is fifteen instead of five. Do you think you can get us un-lost, Miss Navigator?"

"We could go at minus five for as long as we went at fifteen? But I don't know how long that was. Maybe just go at minus five until what we see matches the map again?"

"Three hundred and fifty five, dear, remember how the compass is numbered."

She banks left.

"Direct corrections are good enough over land usually, but if we were over the ocean we wouldn't have any landmarks to look for and we'd have to estimate where we actually are on the map, and correct from that."

"Okay. And we'd do that by trying to figure out how long we'd been off course?" Carefully watching the ground below for landmarks, trying to either figure out where they are now or notice when they get back on their original line.

"Yes. If you're on a tricky journey you want to take compass readings every few minutes. Keeping time is hard, though. Handheld clocks are at least as expensive as brooms, and they're not even very accurate!"

Well, there's that old road off to the left instead of the right, it makes a distinctive sharp bend ahead.

She points out the road on the map and in the territory. "It looks like we should be able to get back on our original heading soon."

"Yep! Good work."

They get back on track - Amat starts talking about famous witches again. For example, there's this one doctor-witch who discovered a lot of interesting things by travelling distant lands and wrote a book about it when she came back to Europa.

Wow! Healing people and discovering things: both awesome.

"Yes, she's very famous. Doctor Emilliane Marsal."

"Emilianne Marsal," she repeats so she'll remember. "We'll be able to see the town soon, I think."

"Ah, yes, you can see - there, where the trees are a bit lower? The world is curved ever so slightly. You see further the higher up you are, you can see their church tower from here."

"Oh, yes, there it is!"

They get to the town a couple of minutes later. Amat lands on the road going in and gets much less staring than she did in Margaretta's village. "If you want to look around now is a good time. You get to visit all sorts of places as a courier, you know."