"Yep. Uh, you might want to have Sunspring come by and rescind all my orders in case I got sneakily gotten, though I did not." She shuts the gate.

Sunspring is on site and can come down and do this!

"Thanks. Sorry, I should have thought of that before I left, if I'd been caught by anyone remotely clever they wouldn't have let me suggest it after."

"One of us should have thought of it too, probably. Anyway, I am glad it was successful. Do you need any help setting up the garden?" 

"No, but people can watch if they want."

Several people are interested in watching her grow a fairy garden! 

Then they can watch her circle her tree, marking out plots with lights, warming the plots with sorcery, and pressing seeds into the ground once it's nice and melty in there, and forcing each in turn to sprout. She has enough different kinds that she doesn't get farther than that on any of them.

They are suitably impressed and curiously watch her process with various Othersenses. Someone asks what the various kinds of plants are. 

Some of them she doesn't have names for, just tasted while she was out and about, but some of them do - goldberry, sawleaf, bowlmelon, soft pepper, hotherb.

Someone takes notes on the plant-names, more for fun than because they expect it to become relevant. Leaf and Sapphire are interested in sampling all of them once they're grown enough to have whatever the edible parts are. 

Some of the plants are actually for making fiber with but she can make samplers of everything else no problem.

Does she still want supper brought to her for today? 

"Yes please."

Most of Leareth's staff need to drag themselves away and go do their actual jobs, but Sapphire comes up again with supper at the appropriate time. "Wow!" she breathes. "This is going to be so beautiful once you're done. Will the plants survive the cold even if you have to travel for a bit or something?" 

"If I'm away very long the climate spells might wear off but they don't need me to touch them up every day or anything."

"That's convenient! Our magic rarely lasts that long unless there's an artifact it can run off." 

"Why's that?"

"You know, I'm not really sure! Since I'm not a mage myself. I think spells run out of power? And artifacts have more room to put power but they'll still run out eventually. Compulsions last a lot longer though - not even sure why that is." 

"...I don't think sorcery uses 'power' like that."

"Huh! What does it even come from, then?" 

"Sorcery alters the harmonic conditions of a place or thing so that it does something different."

"Er, what are 'harmonic conditions'?" 

"Harmonics are invisible features of everywhere - except maybe the other mortal world, where sorcery doesn't work. You can think of it sort of like how everywhere has an altitude, except harmonics varies in three dimensions rather than describing a third along two, and harmonics varies along more than one axis."

"Ooh. Has Leareth thought to ask about this yet? I think he would be very interested." 

"He hasn't."