That's great but it's going to require some back and forth with Ismat about what the kinds are and which kind she should get. Which is the opposite of a hardship because magical metallurgy is so cool.

Sure, Ismat can give her an introductory spellsilver overview.

Margaret is having so much fun. She takes some notes about potentially stacking effects from both magic systems on the same artifact, then goes back to Bar and gets set up with a necklace containing the same kind of spellsilver as Ismat's original, in the same shape and attached similarly to the rest of it.

Anything else before she tries the test? If she gets it wrong she'll need to retrace the whole diagram before she can try again.

Ismat inspects the necklace. "I wouldn't bet it'd work as-is," she says, "though I could probably get it there in an hour or two, but your enchantment's faster."

"It's faster if I get it right on the first try. Doing something new often takes multiple attempts, but then once I've got it I can make them as fast as I can draw the diagrams. It's pretty neat how we have such different sets of constraints."

"Hour or two is a lot faster than starting from scratch, usually it takes me at least four hours for even the simplest pieces."

"Huh. I guess theoretically I could parallelize by paying someone to do tracing while I do design and incantations, if not for the secrecy. Anyway, might as well find out if I need to go back to the drawing board for this one." She lays the diagram out on the floor and gets the correct necklace in each hand and starts speaking in what Ismat won't be able to notice is French.

Ismat supervises thoughtfully without interrupting her.

And momentarily there is no visible result whatsoever, which Margaret is very happy about!

"That probably worked! I can't be sure until you try it, but I didn't have to suppress any explosions and that usually means at least a partial success. She hands over both necklaces.

Ismat's been keeping track of which one is her original; she pockets that one and puts on the new one. She concentrates a bit and the pendant itself lifts up from her chest. "Looks to me like it worked!"

"Awesome! So my magic can interact with your magic at least if it has something to copy. I bet we can get all sorts of cool applications out of that if we ever get out of this bar."

"It doesn't save on materials but on the high end there's a lot of labor cost, even for me and other nonwizards. Can you teach me?"

Margaret bites her lip. "Theoretically, yes, but once you know the risks you might not want it. I can't teach the thing that lets me block the side effects when something doesn't work on the first try, so if you got a line wrong in a diagram or made one mistake in the initial math or didn't specify something precisely enough in an incantation or stumbled over a word you'd get anything from a cloud of ash to a big explosion to being turned into a different species."

"Well, can you make an item that does that for me instead?"

"That sounds extremely hard to specify and might not even be possible without turning you into my world's form of shapeshifter, but on the other hand it would be world-changing if it worked. So far working on immortality and resurrection first has seemed like a better bet, but maybe multiple worlds changes the calculus in favor of metamagic."

"We have resurrection! It wants diamonds, which we understood to be finite in supply, but maybe Bar can sell us as many as we can pay for! Immortality sometimes somebody pulls it off but they don't tell everybody else how."

"Oh, wow--that changes so much. I have money but not 'huge pile of diamonds' money but if we could resurrect people that would make spell development a lot less dangerous. And maybe we could resurrect dead experts who could do the suppression thing and learn their lost knowledge! But that's got weird political risks because there was a war and enough knowledge got lost that I don't know the names of any experts who definitely wouldn't start it up again." Also she wants Bella's mom back first of everything, which risks making the politics worse, but she's going to hold out hope that she can figure out how to have it both ways.

"You need a body. And it's harder - needs a higher-circle caster, higher-circle spell - if they've been dead longer."

"Ah. I don't know where anyone is buried, but when we get out of here I might be able to find out." Also she doesn't know if Bella's mom even is buried as opposed to cremated and the best-case scenario still sounds gross. "Maybe the best thing to do here and now is for me to teach you the spells I know work, if you're okay with the risk of doing the copying wrong or mispronouncing a word. It's safer than trying to design new ones."

"I think with a ninth circle spell you can skip the body. Uh, pronouncing a word wrong in what language?"

"Any language that isn't your native language, which is going to make teaching you in here very tricky. Casting in your native language puts too much power into the spell with generally horrible consequences. No, I don't know why; if it was designed the designers did a bad job."

"I speak Osirian and Taldane. Learned Taldane as a kid though, can I still use it?"

"Did you learn it the same way learned Osirian, or in school? But I should be standing by the first time you cast something anyway."

"I learned Osirian at home and Taldane by stealing my brother's homework and talking to neighbor kids."

"You'll probably be fine, then. So the first thing to go over is runes and their meanings, I think. Bar, can I borrow a copy of--" she names the rune dictionary she learned from and wishes she could even get to just the garage she was came in here from.