"Would they believe it?"

"Why would I lie? I'm a king."

Asher snorts.

He laughs.

"Wow. Okay. But they won't—think you're wrong, or something? I guess if they think you're wrong about it the first time I can just keep doing more things."

"It's kind of a hard thing to be mistaken about."

"Well, all right. So what do I fix? Asher, any diseases you especially care about getting rid of?"

"Not off the top of my head. --We could use it to give people who lynch people a heart attack."

"I'm not sure I approve of that."

"People who what? —Anyway I haven't done anything that lasts before, I'm not sure I want the first one to be giving people heart attacks in case it's harder somehow and I fuck it up."

"When black people in Louisiana get uppity we get murdered. It's called lynching. --If I fucked as many white girls in Louisiana as I do here, I'd be dead."

"...I really don't like that," he says, frowning. "I really don't like that. —Ben, what can I do about that that you won't disapprove of?"

"Help publicize cases so that I can get more traction on making it a federal crime so my government can prosecute people for it?"

"That doesn't really sound like something I could use magic for. Well, I guess I could save somebody from actually getting murdered, but then people would probably be less upset about it..."

"I like trying to make them have heart attacks."

"How do I tell the magic which people to give heart attacks to, though? And how do I fix it afterward if I mess it up the first time? —And it might make Ben sad and I don't wanna make Ben sad."

"You can think 'I want everyone who lynches people to have a heart attack' and I think that should work, true love magic is... friendly? It doesn't do things you don't want it to do."

"I don't really—I can't get that... specific? exact? when I'm doing the thing with my feelings. Maybe I could do it if I practiced more. But I could definitely imagine trying to do that and instead doing something else because it got away from me while I was making myself have magic amounts of love. If I'm going to do magic, at least for now, it has to be something I understand really, really well, or something where it doesn't matter very much if I do something that's sort of like what I was going for but isn't exactly the same. 'Give a bunch of people heart attacks' seems like the kind of thing where getting it right matters a lot."

"Also, it would make me sad."

"Also it would make Ben sad and I don't wanna make Ben sad." He smiles at Ben.

"If you try doing generally good things like curing diseases, that'll make you more popular and make it easier to make progress on bigotry. --I wonder if there's a magical solution to the Isle."

"What problems do they have that magic could solve?"

"For one thing, we keep sending them garbage instead of food or supplies."

"I... don't think you'd need magic to stop doing that...???"

"Politics. It's really unpopular to say that we should send evil people food and medicine."

"Wow. So, what, I give them stuff secretly by magic instead? I'm not great at secrets."