Alistair allows the conversation to fall into silence as they walk away from the city.  After about an hour of walking, the road they are on branches in two, one about the size of the road as it has been so far, and one more of a path, but clearly still a public road, with a faded sign marking them both.  
"So, do you have any preference which way we go? I'm inclined to take the narrower road, but it's less likely to have inns along it and we're more likely to need to stay in someone's barn."

"Narrower works for me. Fewer people to deal with while I'm getting used to this world."

So they take the narrower road.  There are more forests and less farms then there were before.  After about an hour of walking, Alistair mindlessly gets an apple from, apparently, thin air, and begins to munch on it.

"How did you make that appear?"

Fuck, he didn't even think about it, he could have hidden that if he'd thought about it at all.
"Uh.  I. Pulled it out of my." It's probably a bad idea to mislead her further, she's gonna figure it out eventually now.  "Mage dimension."

"Mage dimension?"

"Mage's get mage energy from a separate dimension and use it to do magic.  Stuff can also be put in it and pulled out." She's got to have figured it out by now, but he really doesn't want to actually say the words 'I'm a mage' until he has to.

"Can anyone use mage energy, or only mages?"

"Only mages.  That's what makes you a mage." Yeah she's totally figured it out. Fuck.  Now he's got to figure out how to explain that he's an illegal mage.

"So chances of me figuring it out are pretty low?"

She's not going to make a fuss about it! He should probably mention the illegal mage thing anyway so she doesn't accidentally turn him in, though.

"I mean, I didn't have it until I got dropped on this world, I could help you feel out if you have one now? Also, the mage council swoops up all the mage kids and it's super illegal to do types of magic other than what they teach, and impossible to learn the magic they teach from anyone not with the mage council." 

"Of course they're trying to keep power centered in their own hands."

"How do I tell if I have mage energy?"

"Try putting something into a mage dimension? That's the first thing I did with magic, and I didn't mean to and it isn't technically magic anyway, but just hold something in your hand and want to put it away, or hide it."

She flips a small knife into her hand, focusing on wanting to hide it away.

She feels the knife move in a direction she was not previously aware of existing.  It vanishes, but now that she is aware of the direction it went in, she can feel the connection, and could probably pull it back out.

Huh.

She tries that.

She gets the knife! She gets something else too.  Something that feels almost like a gust of wind and static electricity mixed together.  It swirls around her hand and her knife and then away, in Alistairs direction.

Alistair feels the mage energy hit him and grabs onto it, attaches it to a nearby plant.

"Awesome! Be more careful when pulling things out of your mage dimension in the future, you got some mage energy with it, and ambient mage energy can fuck things up."

"How do I control it, then?"

"For just pulling things out, make sure you concentrate more on the item and not on the connection to the mage dimension.  When actually pulling out mage energy, have an idea of what you want to do ahead of time, and as you pull it out try and tell it to do that thing, so that you direct it before you lose control of it- grabbing control of it once you've already lost it is harder than controlling it in the first place."

She nods, and tries to repeat the trick, this time only wanting the knife itself...

The knife appears in her hand! There is no sensation like wind and static this time.

Good.

Can she put the knife away even when she's not touching it?

Where does she put it to try this?

On the ground.