He doesn't really, but also she's an adult, and better at magic than him, and she doesn't seem hostile yet but she might decide to hurt him if he makes her mad and he'd better not. 

He shows her a mage-light and a tiny bit of fire, and the other kind of barrier he figured out that blocks other magic instead of thrown pebbles, and he shows her how he can nudge the cattle from here instead of having to run over and chase them. It's a lot of magic at once and he's panting a bit by the time he's done; over by the watering-hole there are plants growing in the shallows and some floaty trickles of magic he can sop up when he gets tired, but here there's almost nothing.

(Except when people die, then there's so much, he noticed that last summer when the boy from the other clan tried to kill him with a spear and Ma'ar got him with a lightning-bolt first.) 

"Ah hah," she says with some satisfaction that might be related to having read his mind about that. "Okay. I think I know what world we are on. It is...not a great world to be on. I'm sorry. If you're - someone I know - then there's an Urtho somewhere and we can find him, maybe, but if the gods guess who we are they might kill us...damn it, Nefreti -"

No kidding it's not a great world. He's not blind. 

He doesn't know what she's on about with the rest, so he just looks at her with the same carefully neutral look as before. 

Tomorrow she can try a Sending to Urtho but she can't try that today and she'll sound like a crazy person. Maybe he'll recognize the unfamiliar magic and want to check it out even if she's a crazy person. "Okay," she says tiredly. "Um. Do you need a hug?"

He gives her an even more nonplussed look and takes a half-step back. 

Fair enough. She looks around, though there's not much to look at. 

"In the world I'm from," she says, "that woman, Nefreti, is a person I know reasonably well. She is very powerful and very eccentric. She does whatever she wants, but she doesn't do things for no reason. If she brought me here to you, it is because you are important, and possibly because you are...the child of someone I know well, who might also be from this world."

"M'not the child of anyone important. And you wouldn't've known them. My parents. They'd have said if they knew you. And they're dead anyway." Scuff scuff scuff at the dead grass. "I'd remember if I'd met you." 

She doesn't want to explain the real thing she thinks is going on because she is really unclear on how much information the local gods have and can learn. Approximately the only thing she knows about them is that two thousand years from now they will go to fairly extraordinary lengths to murder Leareth, if they guess who he is. Maybe they don't even have that hobby yet! Maybe they can't learn anything from human conversations on this plane anyway, she's pretty sure her gods largely can't. 

"You haven't met me," she agrees, tiredly. "It is possible Nefreti had some entirely different reason for bringing me here than the one I thought of immediately. But - I want to help you if I can, because I believe she had some reason. So if there is anything you want me to do, you can tell me."

Ma'ar is fairly sure that that isn't how people having reasons for things works, but he looks her in the eye anyway. It might be a terrible idea, but staying here another drought year is also a terrible idea, magic won't stop him from starving, and at least he has some observations accumulated that she's not the sort who hurts people for no reason at all. So he just won't give her a reason. 

"Can I go with you?" he says. "And - can you teach me magic?"

"Yes. Of course. I don't - know where I'm going, yet - do you know of where the nearest city is -"

"That way. Kanrata." Ma'ar points west. He's never been. Sometimes the adult men took cattle there to sell, in good years, but it's been a long time since the last good year. "It's far though. Forty miles."

He says it as though this is an almost-unimaginable distance, though in fact he's been planning since the winter how he could make it there on his own. 

"We'll leave in the morning. Is there food we can take with us. I can pay for it with - coins from faraway, or with magic water that lasts only a day but it's good if you drink it sooner than that or water crops or animals with it, or with healing."

He stares at her. "You can do that? ...You can do healing too...?" 

He's thinking that why couldn't she have come in winter, if she was going to come at all, why couldn't she have been here when Mother was alive - but of course nothing works like that and it's not like she was planning this to fix things, it's not like anyone he knows is ever planning that, and so he's not even really upset so much as quietly resigned. 

"If you can make water for the herd then I don't got to take them to the watering-hole," he adds, trying to sound more nonchalant than he feels; the watering-hole is nice enough to sit by, but it's a long walk, especially the walk back, and he hasn't eaten today. "Maybe you can buy food. Can you heal old wounds too or do they have to be fresh." Two of the elders have bad legs, from old injuries in raids, they'd barter food if someone could fix that. 

"They can be old wounds." And she knows people who can raise the dead but she can't say that until she knows more about the gods and what they kill people for - possibly even forming the intention is dangerous - "Where do you want water for the herd? That and healing are magic from the gods, you won't be able to learn it until you're really powerful, but you'll get there."

"We can take them back to camp." He gets to work turning the herd around. They're confused, and resistant; they know where the water is. "- Uh, maybe can you give them water here, they're thirsty, they don't want to go back. I could dig you a hole if you need that." 

"I can dig us a hole with magic, it'll just take a little while." She makes an unseen servant and sets it to it. "You aren't getting enough to eat to be digging  - maybe I can melt down one of my hairpins and make you a magic ring so you're not hungry -"

Both halves of that are baffling. Ma'ar sits down, though, and squints at her. "You can do that with magic? How does it work?" It doesn't feel like it should work but he has no good explanation for why, just a vague sense of 'where does it come from.' " I have to eat food to have magic, if I don't have food for days I can't anymore, is it like that except turned backward?" 

"Unseen Servant creates a shapeless force that acts as I direct it to. It will repeat its last instructions, so I can tell it to dig and then stop paying attention. There is a magic artifact that I can make that will make you not need food and still always feel full. It's - bad for kids in lots of ways when they don't eat so I want to fix that as soon as possible. For most possible reasons why you might be important it's better that you be well fed. I have such a ring myself -" she shows it - "but you mustn't take mine, or tell anyone I have it; it won't work for you and if I have to fight anyone for it people will almost definitely get hurt."

He shrinks back a little, involuntarily, and then catches himself and goes very still. His internal monologue is a loop of don't show weakness stay calm. "I won't tell anyone." 

"I have several reasons not to hurt you," she says, mostly tonelessly. "I think you are important and I don't know for what yet, and you might be very important such that I will be very motivated to protect you. If you tried to take my ring or hit me or something I would not be the first one to use magic about it. I am worried about, once we get into the city, people seeing I have powerful magic things and wanting them; I will try to disguise them, but you'll know the truth, so you can help me by not telling people."

He watches her, confused but also relieved, though he's still very tense. "I'm not a threat to you," he says, matching her flat tone. "You're an adult and you have stronger magic and know how to use it. I don't want to not be hungry badly enough to try taking your ring, that would be stupid, and it would be even stupider to tell someone else about it."

He chews his lip for a moment, hesitating. "I - don't know what you mean about why I might be very important." Ma'ar strongly dislikes not knowing things. It's not safe. Knowing things isn't sufficient to be safe, of course, but at least it's better to know one way or another if you are, and be prepared -

- and sometimes there are cleverer things you can do, to be better than safe, he mostly doesn't know what yet because there aren't many options around here, but he's fairly sure they exist and he's burningly curious about the woman and her powerful magic and what she thinks is special about him of all people. 

"I know a man who was once a boy very much like you, and now he is a king. I think maybe Nefreti introduced me to you because you are so like him." But she might have had some completely different reason because Nefreti is incredibly frustrating. 

Ma'ar blinks at her. He's less doubtful of it than he might be; at least, he's no more dubious than he already was about her entire story. He knows there's a king, somewhere very far away in a bigger city, and obviously he would try to be a king if he could, and - it's a very long way from here to there, he doesn't know the how, but he has magic and he knows that he's cleverer than most people and, more than anything, he is absolutely not going to die here in the dusty plains along with Mother and Father and his baby sister-who-wasn't, who was never even a person with a name. And if he were a king, somehow, or even just a very powerful mage, he could come back. And - fix it, somehow, he doesn't know the how for that either, but he would make it so the livestock never got sick and the watering-hole was always full and clean. No one's done it yet, so it must be very hard, but part of the problem is that the people who are strong enough to do it are far away and they don't care. And he cares.

He chews on that for a minute in silence. Imagining whether he could, really, become a king. 

"How would Nefreti know what I'm like?" he asks Carissa eventually, because maybe it's silly to daydream about a pretend future inspired by the words of someone who's just guessing. 

"She is a priest of Nethys, the god of magic, who knows everything and sees everything, so she knows and sees an awful lot."

He's never heard of a god called Nethys but it sounds incredible. "How do you become a priest of Nethys so you can know and see all those things?"