"Very good!" 

The other students are showing up for the day now and he gives her some challenges to try with it before going off to check the others' progress and give a (much more basic) lesson and then assign more practice, which he has down as a very efficient process, and then he goes back and asks if she can describe the thing she's doing differently now from before. 

"I think before I was paying attention to how I wanted it to look but not to how I wanted it to - be distributed? Something like that, anyway, it's got to be able to flow, right, it can't be bunched up -"

"Yes, yes, exactly–" And he starts on a much more detailed and animated explanation, and then casts Detect Magic to watch her play around with it. 

She is experimenting with whether she can partially color things and whether she can color them colors that don't exist and whether she can color them without looking at them and whether it helps with coloring them without looking at them if she's holding them.

He is also so curious to find out the answers to the questions! 

When the spell duration ends, he tries to explain how to grab back the energy from a cantrip as you cast it, and then gives her some meditation exercises to do for a bit until her reserves will be back enough to try Detect Magic and watching the other children's (clumsy) castings and his own work. 

She seems to like these less than magic but she does them patiently for a couple of hours until she can cast Detect Magic and watch them do magic (she fails to grab the energy back, so she can only watch for a little bit, to her great frustration.)

...Honestly the exercises are genuinely a lot less interesting than magic, so he gets it. He promises that with more practice, she'll get the hang of recouping her energy and get more reserves, and that the mind-exercises will help with that. She can look at some of his theoretical notes from when he was trying to invent new first-level spells, if she wants?

She would like that! 

He lets her look in silence while he does some of his own work, waits to see if she'll ask questions or make comments. 

She has so many questions! Why is he doing it like that, why can't she do that, what would go wrong if she tried, does it look the same to everybody or is this way of seeing it specific to her?

Of course she has so many questions! He's doing it like this because he has very good intuitions for magic, it's an innate talent of his, he thinks most wizards never get it - most wizards probably don't try inventing their own spells at all, it's a lot more work even for him, and the wizards who do spell development need to do most of it by trial and error and then checking with math.

Maybe she'll be able to develop of a sense of it too someday, though? He's not sure anyone has tried to teach magic the way he does it before, using lots of Silent Images to convey how he sees it - except it's not quite seeing, it's more like feeling out the structure of it, and maybe if you teach people that way - especially clever people like her - they can eventually start to build the model of it in their heads too. He bets she'll be able to do it at least a little. 

Well of course she will, if he can.

Then he'll try to teach her! She's the only student where he doesn't hold back at all and will explain as long as she'll sit still for it. Within a month she's more than earning her keep, since he can assign her to tutor the other students (this is presumably not her favourite part of the whole activity but still.) 

They're earning a comfortable income, now. He can afford to copy first-level spells on a whim, and even his third-level spells don't take a lot of scrimping and saving. What he really wants next is the headband that will make him smarter - not by as much as the spell, but it lasts all the time. He has the skill to build one himself with only weeks of extra research time, now, so it's just the two thousand gold worth of materials. (An unimaginable fortune, just a few years ago. See, he says to Parmida, I told you it'd change.) 

He encourages Parmida to try a second-level spell out of his book, every so often, since she may not notice on her own when she's strong enough. He teaches Saba and the other students more cantrips. None of them have advanced quite yet to first-level spells but they might be close. 

The next year passes. 

Nefreti figures out first-level spells and is tolerant enough of having to teach the other students, who mostly do not get first level spells, but that makes sense - in most magic schools it can take years of training for students to master first-level spells. Parmida gets second-level, eventually, though she finds them exhausting to cast and can't usually prepare any other spells on the same day. She hires a cook and a maid and puts up tapestries and gets a nicer icon for the shrine and some nice dresses and seems very happy. Sometimes she kisses him. 

The forces of one side of the Chelish civil war get sick of besieging Ostenso (held by another side), burn it to the ground. The distant northern province of Varisia declares independence. Someone assassinates a dozen top clergy of Iomedae's. Someone at one of Parmida's dinner events casually refers to the "Sodden Lands", which is apparently what people are calling the place that used to be Lirgen and Yamasa.

He can save up enough money for his headband.

He likes teaching. It's not - anything near the scale of what he used to be able to do, but it's concrete and present and undeniably making the world better, the people in it stronger. He thinks a lot about pedagogy, how to figure out what each student is bottlenecked on and point them at practicing that specifically. Most of his students are nowhere near as brilliant as Nefreti or as remarkably diligent as Saba but they're decent kids and he likes figuring out how to make magic exciting and rewarding for them, so that they'll eagerly push themselves to their limits. He acquires or invents a lot of weird and interesting cantrips, they're not too expensive to put in his spellbook and it means he can give the children more to practice on even when they're just starting out. 

...He still tries to speculate and make predictions on political events, but it hurts. Maybe more than it did before, when they were surviving one day at a time on the edge of starvation. It hurts to know that they're spending gold on servants and clothing when cities are dying, even though it's not like he could do anything more if they weren't. 

It's good to see Parmida happy, though. He encourages her to prepare a second-level spell at least once a week, even if it comes at the cost of her other spells, he promises it'll get easier with practice. 

He buys the materials for his headband and spends weeks making it and - there's not a lot of joy, when he puts it on, it feels like too little too late never enough to recoup what he's lost, but it's progress and there's quiet satisfaction in that. 

More students attain a wobbly mastery of first level spells. Nefreti invents her own; they're mostly useless, or less useful variants of existing spells, but to her immense satisfaction they do not explode at all. She works relentlessly on efficiency increases until she can cast five a day, though she doesn't have the peak capacity for second level yet. She conspires with Parmida to sell her services outside of class time and spends all of her money on ink and on paper she fills with charts and pictures and notes. She tells Aroden that her ambition is to understand what magic really looks like, and then maybe there'll be some way of using it that's entirely different from what wizards are doing. She brings him books on magic theory from a temple of Nethys she sweet-talked her way into and they go through them, argue about what the books are right or wrong on.

Parmida thinks they should throw a big ceremony graduating the students each to an apprentice when they master a first-level spell, it's good advertisement and children like milestones and titles. She also thinks with a bigger house they could host those ceremonies, recruit richer peoples' children, increase tuition. She charts out the math and shows him. They'll want more servants to keep up a bigger house but labor is very cheap. They could have two classrooms of students, she and Nefreti can teach the beginners while he can teach advanced classes, which there's about to be a need for. 

She also thinks they should have a baby. She doesn't bring it up much but it's in her thoughts most of the time when he reads them. They're at last in a place where the cost of a nursery and wet nurse is negligible and Saba's coming up on nine - probably, he doesn't know his birthday - and she's twenty-seven, it's not all that much longer before she'll be too old. 

Aroden's mind is on things beyond their house and family most of the time - on the shapes of magic he's slowly understanding better, on civil wars, on gods - but he looks at her math and agrees. Ceremonies are important to children and anything that will give them more motivation to put in the hours of hard practice they need to progress seems worthwhile. He starts looking at bigger houses, though as usual he'll give her the final say.

He's delighted with Nefreti's work and with their conversations and her books. As soon as she gets strong enough for second-level spells, he tells her, he's going to give her Fox's Cunning, since it's been so helpful to him with spell research. He can lend her his headband sometimes, for short periods, though he's quickly getting used to depending on it and he feels so frustratingly slow and stupid without it now.

(It's infuriating that even when he can hold in his mind little bits of the true way magic works, the way gods could use it, he can't use it that way himself; he doesn't have the right appendages, he can barely perceive or touch the forces he's harnessing, he's still limited to the stupid arbitrary scaffoldings. Though he is now at the point where he can see at a glance, when copying a spell from another wizard, where the most glaring inefficiencies are, and make those changes even before he inks it into his own spellbook.) 

...Having a baby is honestly sort of terrifying. And the prospect of - marital relations - which they still haven't explored, though their kisses and petting are more involved than at the start. It's silly to keep ignoring it, though, so eventually he sits down with Parmida. 

"So. Are we going to have a child? We should decide that properly." 

" - we probably should decide it. I think we should have a baby. I know you're very focused on your studies but men don't usually have anything to do with very young children anyway. You might like him the way some people like cats, or you might not, and I wouldn't expect it to matter very much. But - babies are good. They're the one thing we can only have in this life, the one thing that cannot be put off until Axis, the one thing that you will never ever get as long as the universe lasts if you don't have it when you're forty. And I bet Saba'd like being a big brother."

Nod. “It will make you very happy, if we do?”

"Yes, it would."

It seems like a very significant decision, to be responsible for another human life for the next couple of decades, and so he thinks about it. But not for very long. He's done most of his thinking already, in bits and pieces over the last few years. 

"All right. We will have a baby. ...Are you feeling ready for the - marital relations - part?" 

"I am not sure I am thinking about it the way a Chelish woman would. Probably I'm not. But I do want it."

Possibly she's readier for it than he is. But his body does know bits and pieces of what to do. He hopes, anyway. 

They can try it that night if she wants? 

Sure! If they have Charm Person up then they'll have telepathy which seems like a good thing to have, when you're trying to figure this out. Everyone does manage to figure it out somehow and most of them haven't even been married before.

Everyone manages to figure it out but it sounds like a lot of people end up at something that the wives hate and he doesn't want that at all. Telepathy is useful. He will try things that his body remembers and she can tell him what's good and what isn't.