"Do sorcerers have an ability to sense other people's magic when it is being done near them?" 

"Not if it's... I don't know, on the other side of a wall? I'd notice if there were a light in front of me and I didn't put it there."

"But you see only the light itself, not the fact that magic is happening directly?" 

"Right."

"Hmm. Well, we have another kind of sense that is specifically for magic. I think your tear must have showed up to it, that is what the wards detected. Your orders from Thorn did not show up as magic but they were visible to my Mindhealing Sight, which is a different kind of Sight - like Thoughtsensing, which is blocked right now by your talisman, but it shows only the structure of minds and not any of the content." 

"...the structure?"

"I am not looking anymore since there is no reason to, but - sort of like this." She gets a piece of paper and sketches the outline of what her Sight sees. "Unless I am trying to get details, which I was not, it is mostly just an overall shape. And then your orders looked like this." She draws an approximation of the not-set-commands on top. It's kind of a terrible drawing, Nayoki is not artistically talented. 

"Hm."

"Most Gifts on our world come with Sight. Healing-Sight shows the insides of bodies, for example, and Empathy reads emotions - neither of us here has that one. Farsight is a Gift that lets you see things far away, although this can also be done by a mage, with a spell called scrying. Fetching moves objects, we are not sure if it has Sight..."

She goes through the full list of known Velgarth Gifts. 

"I don't want anyone doing Empathy or Mindhealing or the singing one to me either."

"Good to know, thank you. Does your world's sorcery include any powers like those ones, or no?" 

"Mental sorcery is possible but very obscure."

Nod. "Do you have other questions about our magic? I am still trying to figure out which things are possible with sorcery but not here - I am not sure what transmutation does...?" 

"It turns a substance into another substance."

"Like turning sand into glass by heating it, or more general than that?" 

"I don't heat things up but I can do sand to glass. I've mostly worked in metal before."

"I am still not sure if that means changing the shape of the metal or purifying metal from ore - both of which our magic can do - or if you can, for example, turn metal into glass, which our magic cannot do." 

"I can't do metal into glass, just metal into metal. Like iron into gold or whatever."

"Our magic cannot turn one metal into another metal either. That is quite remarkable." 

"If you say so."

Nayoki nods, thoughtful. "Anyway. Are there precautions that mortals can take to operate safely in Fairyland?" 

"I wouldn't tend to recommend it. Why?"

"Well, when one is trying to solve very complicated problems in a world with limited resources, and it turns out there is another world out there, the obvious next question is whether it has resources that would help with our world's problems." This is almost word-for-word what Leareth said to her before leaving. "It - changes a great many things, if there are other worlds at all. The person who I work for thinks it calls for a full re-evaluation of what is possible and what strategies are available to him." 

"I suppose it's very interesting that there is here, wherever here is, when I wasn't expecting it, likewise. You have a complicated problem?"

"Many of them, really. It would be his decision whether to tell you more details, I think, but that is why he was especially interested in learning more about you, despite the initial alarm. He is elsewhere right now since he was not sure if you were dangerous and what your intentions here are."