The Haighlei Empire is a large one, a league of six subcomponent nations, stretching all the way down the far western coast (on the other side of the Pelagirs, apparently) to the southern end of the continent, mostly separated from inland by a steep range of mountains. They're a major naval power, trading with the rest of the continent mostly via Acabarrin in the far south. 

They're incredibly averse to change. Their society is rigidly governed by protocols and, relative to the rest of the world, has barely changed over millennia. This seems to be something their gods encourage. One of their traditions is the Eclipse Ceremony; approximately every twenty years, at a solar eclipse, is the only time any changes to their civilization can be voted through.

Their culture also has stronger control and regulation over Gifts than anywhere else in the known world. All children above age six are tested regularly for mage-gift, and those found to be Gifted - it sounds like they have a way to determine which Gifts will awaken versus remain in potential when children are still quite young - are taken away from their families to be trained as priests. Any judged not to have the virtue and temperament required for the priesthood have their Gifts burned out and are sent home in disgrace. Mind-Gifts are even more controlled; their use is banned entirely except for some variant of Truth Spell. 

That sounds . . . well, really unpleasant, honestly. Regulating Gifts so they can't be used to harm people makes sense, but there's such a thing as going too far, and never changing their culture or their technology is just bizzare. And he can't even tell himself that presumably it works for them or they would have stopped, because their gods don't want them to. Even if the gods are encouraging them to be unchanging because they think it's the best way to be, various other gods seem to disagree on disagree on that.

Abras returns the books and thanks the priest, and asks while he's here if they have a copy of Seldasen on ethics.

They do! 

Then he's going to read that too! He doesn't quite believe it's possible to get an explanation of ethics as clear and complete as his other treatise on tactics, but even something vaguely close would be pretty great.

Seldasen on ethics gives a number of intriguing examples of ethical dilemmas, often in the vein of 'is it worth sacrificing one person to save many' or 'is it worth behaving in an unvirtuous way if the virtue, for example honesty, would directly cause harm.' 

Seldasen tends to present both sides of every argument, fairly neutrally, though sometimes it's obvious what his personal position is. He's in favour of honesty and other virtues as valuable norms, legible to the citizens of Valdemar who need to put their trust in Heralds, but he's not fanatic about it and recognizes that there are tradeoffs. 

It's good when he can tell what Seldasen's position is, because the alternative is not being able to tell. Though Seldasen does also seem to be genuinely uncertain, sometimes, but remarkably clear even then. It's very useful that he talks about the ways things are different for Heralds, how what one Herald does can have consequences for all of them and how this can change what the right thing to do is. Which is terrifying, of course, because it raises the stakes, but having it pointed out with examples of how to react to it helps.

The next time they're all having dinner together in Savil's suite, Savil's student Sandra (Lissandra, but she started shortening it on her second day in Haven) asks if Abras would like to do alchemy with her sometime. 

Shy little smile. "I'd like that, if you wouldn't mind teaching me."

Sandra bounces a bit. "I think it'd be really neat! There are some bits you can do with magic and you'd be so helpful for it, you're way stronger than I am." She seems matter-of-fact about it and not especially jealous, maybe because she's never faced the issues Abras does with control. 

"That does sound neat." Abras is a little envious of Sandra's total lack of control problems but mostly in a way where he admires her skills. He can drop by her workroom whenever they're both available.

Sandra's workroom is kind of a disaster, her notes and materials are splayed out across every surface, but she seems to have no trouble finding things. "Neat! All right, what do you want to study? I've been trying to figure out how fire works." 

"Fire sounds interesting, assuming you don't want a lot of it. By how it works do you mean things like whether different things burn at different temperatures and why water makes fires go out and things like that?"

"And what happens to the wood, too. It doesn't all go into smoke plus ashes, I made a cheesecloth filter to trap all the smoke and weighed it after and both put together were a lot less than the original piece of wood." 

"Oh, that's a good question. Maybe some of it got through the cheesecloth? But also the the flames and the heat have to come from somewhere . . . I wonder what happens if you suck all the heat out of a fire with a weather-barrier. Could you get a heatless fire?"

"I think it just puts the fire out, no? Savil mentioned once she uses that trick to put out fires without it costing her too much in mage-energy." 

"That's useful. So what were you thinking of trying next?"

"I thought maybe if I put the fire in something airtight, like a big glass tank, then none of the smoke will get out? and that'll let me weigh the entire thing afterward and see if some of it just went away and turned into heat, or if it's all there but some of the smoke can get out through cheesecloth." 

"Good idea." He looks around the room for a big glass tank.

"I don't already have one but I can melt down this glass thingy from my last experiment and make it into a tank - oh, do you know the trick for using mage-energies to do glasswork?" 

"I've heard you can do it but I haven't tried."

"Why don't I do it and you can watch. I do this a lot because it's cheaper than buying more glasswork." 

She gets started on melting down her weird complicated glass apparatus. 

Abras watches intently with both eyes and mage-sight.

Sandra feeds mage-energy, in some carefully controlled way, into the structure of the glass, softening it just enough that she can nudge it using a mage-barrier to shape it over. 

(It looks like it could maybe be done even more neatly with Fetching.) 

"That's very neat," he says, after she's done so he doesn't distract her in the middle. "I wonder if having Fetching will make it easier."

"Maybe! I keep forgetting you have so many Gifts, it's kind of ridiculous."