"Then how did you come into existence?"

"In a tree."

"That sounds convenient." This language doesn't have some words he finds himself needing but he can just decide on a symbol for them and use it, it's great.

"It was cozy."

"Do you even need courts, then, if lots of people haven't any debts to start - I guess you'd still have lots of reason to want protection -"

"There are courts but plenty of people aren't in them."

"That makes sense!"

"Anyway, magic. I have notebooks in my room."

"Cool."

"Magic," he says when they get to his office, which is absolutely stuffed with books and also has some sketchboards draped with cloth and some molding clay and sheafs and sheafs of paper, "is about assembling nothing into something. That makes it different than all of the sciences, which only work on various kinds of something. You can only do magic when you're slow because the way the universe behaves is more consistent for slow things than for fast things, and in particular the way nothing behaves is vastly more consistent for slow things than for fast things, and so it's impossible to make any progress when you're fast.

Almost everything you can make with magic can be made in a lot of different ways; courts have their own traditions, and don't share much. I only know one approach other than my own, but I know that all magic only works when slow and that no school is that dramatically faster than any other and that some tradtions got more useful when we invented writing and some did not and that some are more sensitive than others to temperature and light conditions.

There are a few ways to get something out of nothing. One is spinning it, which involves a motion sort of like this -" he demonstrates. "And it requires paying close attention to where the nothing you want to start spinning is, which is a habit I can't teach you because you can't feel nothing at all, when you're fast. Another is sort of - cooling and solidifying it, the way dew attaches to flowers, and that one is also a habit I can't teach you while you're fast but you hold your hand very still and pay attention to the way the nothing is moving and coax it to go slower and slower until it's solid. Another is letting it crystallize. It can crystallize glowing, or hot, or cold, or unfriendly to the touch, or slowing or quickening or iron-friendly or another dozen ways that are harder to describe and not very useful. It can also crystallize paired; that's two crystals that will always have the same properties, from there forward; if you heat one the other heats, and if you cool one the other cools, and so on. To crystallize nothing you need to pay very close attention to where and how it's flowing as it comes to you. I have some diagrams here, and people practice with water, sometimes. Once you have very good intuitions about how it flows, you can usually get the kind you want.

Crystals can do things, related to their attributes. Slowing crystals are used to slow people down; they occur naturally, though they're awfully rare. Hot ones heat things near them, and cold ones cool things near them, and unfriendly ones can make cages with walls that hurt to touch. Quickening ones can heal any injury so long as it would heal, since all they do is speed that up. No one I know of has figured out an arrangement of quickening crystals that speeds your mind up instead of just speeds up the healing of an injury, and if anyone's figured out how to use them to make an artificial fairy circle they've kept that very secret. Most of the other kinds don't have known uses."

This is fascinating. "Where's all the nothing located? I have no reason to believe that people where I'm from are running any faster than humans but nobody to my knowledge has been able to, uh, find any nothing, to do this stuff with."

"As far as I know nothing is everywhere."

"Do the mortals use it?"

"No. I don't know if it's impossible for them or if they just don't know how."

"Was it hard to discover, do you know?"

"It has been independently discovered many times but I don't know that anyone has ever independently discovered it in less than a season and people who claim to be the youngest ever to have independently worked it out are usually at least a few winters old, and mortals live a very long time but accounting for how slow they are they live much less than a season."

"Huh. Lots of my people are very, very old though."

"Then possibly your sort of person can't do it, or the place you're from doesn't have nothing everywhere."

"Is there a way to notice the absence of nothing besides by trying to spin it or whatever?"

"Not that I know of. There are some ways objects behave differently fast compared to slow, but there are a lot of them and they don't seem to all be tied to nothing."

"Are slowing crystals the only ones that appear naturally?"

"Only ones I've heard of, but that might be because you couldn't keep it secret - we had to get the first slowing crystals somewhere. If someone has a source for some other kind of crystal they could just pretend they produce it normally."

"There's no other way to slow down besides a crystal?"

"Some people think captured mortals would slow down eventually if not entangled with anyone but I don't know of this ever having happened. I don't know any stories of fairies slowing down some other way, and courts without any slowing crystals don't do magic or have children, as far as I know."