She roasts turkey legs and broccoli crowns. "You said your name was 'Sadde'?"

"Yeah, and Luca," he repeats, gesturing in the falcon's direction.

"Yes, but Luca sounds like a pretty normal name to me. Where are you from, is it a New Zealand name I don't know about because I've never been to New Zealand?"

"No, no. We're from Italy" or an equivalent location "but my mother made my name up. Never got around to asking her why while she was still alive."

"Oh - I'm sorry."

He shrugs. "Thanks, but I'm fine."

"It's been many years."

"Okay. What-all were you thinking you'd do with your alethiometer?"

"Well, maybe I'm not as over it as I said it was. I want to get my mother's killer to justice."

"But we still need to learn to read it."

"They make dictionaries. They're not great, though. Please don't stab the wrong guy because you assumed cherub-alpha-and-omega-beehive meant Mortimer Q. Snodgrass of Cherry Tree Lane."

Sadde laughs. "I'll be careful. I hear alethiometers tend to be more opaque than that."

"How about you?"

"Spell development!"

"...oooh, that does sound useful. Is it particularly amenable to factual discoveries?"

"What do you mean?"

"Like, the alethiometer answers objective questions about objective facts, right, are there some of those that would make spell development better or easier or more efficient or whatever?"

"...'will this work?'"

"Oh, there's a trial-and-error aspect to it, got it."

"Little stuff I can usually be confident of on the first try, especially pure verse, but potions development is a mess, and there could be stuff so complicated witches will not stumble on it."

"Well the stuff that's that complicated would probably need more than 'will this work'."

"'Stumble on it'?"

"Yeah, I'm optimistic that I can learn to read it well enough to get better than indications that I'm already on the right track. Uh, there might be some exotic herb we've never cultivated that does stuff that we wouldn't naturally think of or realize what it does, something like that?"

"Specific herbs do specific things within spells?"

"...yes?"