And then they can retreat to their loft. She didn't prepare the rare spell Masterwork Transformation today, because it takes an hour to cast and there are not a lot of occasions when you want to burn precious spellsilver not even making a weapon magical but just making it of good make. But she left a couple of spell slots open, and she prepares it now, and then takes a hairpin out and prickles it with magic until it stops working for its current purpose (Glibness, which would be nice to have but seems less urgent than having Nondetection or for emergencies Slaying.)

"Can you hand me whichever of those daggers is in the best shape, I'm going to make a magic weapon for you."

He stares at her, confused, but he compares his daggers and hands her the one with fewer dents. 

"Thank you. Please don't touch the hatpin while I'm working, it gets very hot."

And she builds the elaborate scaffold for this spell - it's obnoxiously elaborate, as it's emulating an actual forge, and suspends the dagger and the hairpin floating in the middle and puts up insulation and safety layers and failsafes and fire precautions around them and builds up the concept for what she wants - a nice dagger, steel with a good grip and a very sharp blade, the metal pure enough and well-forged enough that she can lay a spell on it afterwards. And then she plays out the heat, hotter hotter hotter spellsilver takes a lot of heat to melt and steel takes even more.

She doesn't look up until she's done an hour later. The hairpin is hanging there limply, half a hairpin; the dagger looks very deadly. 

Ma'ar is so impressed! He's been watching the entire time with his untrained mage-sight, and as soon as it's clear that she's done and can be interrupted, he peppers her with questions about what was this part and what was that part, he could see a lot of the structure she was building up even if he had little idea of how to interpret it. He asks eagerly if he can touch the dagger now. 

"Yes. But it's not a magic dagger yet, it's just a nice dagger now which means I can lay a spell on it without the spell breaking because the weapon's metal isn't sufficiently uniform."

"Oh - why does the spell need the metal to be uniform?" He takes the dagger, tests the blade on one of his hairs and then on a trailing thread from his wrap, looks awed at how easily it slices through. 

"To make it a magic dagger, I will need to use more spellsilver. I will build another scaffold and I will imbue the dagger with the spellsilver without disrupting its existing shape and structure, bit by bit. if the dagger is badly made and not uniform throughout, then at some point that will fail, and it might ruin some of my materials, which would be very upsetting since it'll be hard to get more, here. When I'm done the spellsilver will be a lesser metal and the dagger will be magic, which will help it cut better and also will mean it can do damage through many kinds of shields. You can learn weapon crafting eventually but it is an advanced skill, I had six years of school before I picked it up."

Ma'ar nods. It looked very complicated and difficult. He offers her back the dagger and sits on his heels, watching. 

"This will take me a third of a day but at some points I'll be able to talk or take breaks," she says, and starts. For this one the dagger and the hairpin do not need to float. She is magically transferring something about the hairpin to the dagger, over and over, quick and efficient, and then sometimes she pauses that. "What makes spellsilver special is that it can have magic reserves, like people can. I am giving that property of the spellsilver to the dagger, and then I have to wait until the magic is balanced to keep going."

"Ooh." He nods along. "Where does spellsilver come from and why can it have magic reserves - it's not alive, right?" 

"It's not alive. There is some in the earth, mixed in to other things, and it can be extracted by processing ores. Some people have theories of why it can have reserves but we don't know for sure. One theory I am familiar with is that it's not aliveness per se that makes things have magic reserves, but some other thing about what's going on at a very small level, which is mostly only going on in alive things but is also going on in spellsilvers. I don't think anyone in your world discovered this but they might have down in Urtho's country."

"Who's Urtho? You said his name before too." 

"I could be wrong about this but I suspect that in a rich country that is not this one there is a powerful mage named Urtho who teaches mage students. I want to find him. I think you will benefit from his instruction." 

He stiffens very slightly, though his voice is calm. "And then are you going to leave and go back to your world?" 

"I don't know how to leave and go back to my world. Urtho might be able to help with that but I don't know if he can and I am also not decided on whether to trust him with it... and also it's at least a tiny bit possible that I can't get back to my world, for one reason or another. Either way I will not leave you. I think you will learn a lot from Urtho but he should not be your only instructor, if you are going to grow up to fight the gods for their dead people."

Ma'ar isn't sure whether he believes her, and either way it should be fine if she leaves, as long as she brings him to some other powerful mage who he can learn things from.

He doesn't want her to go, though, and so it's a relief when she says that she won't, even though he's unsure whether to trust her about it. She pulled him out of the river and she's making him a magic dagger and she says she wants to help him grow up and fight the horrible god - and words are easy, of course, and the things she's actually done that aren't just words are much smaller. But still. 

He relaxes a little, nods and keeps watching her. 

She will be at it until very late into the night. She can make a dagger magic faster than most other people but it is still eight hours of work, and she didn't start until after dinnertime.

Ma'ar tries really hard to stay awake for it, but unlike Carissa he doesn't have a Ring of Sustenance, and is also thirteen and has a full stomach for the first time in months. He yawns, and eventually stretches out on his stomach with his chin propped on his hands to watch her, and his blinks get longer and longer and then he's asleep.

It's the first time he's ever slept in a place that wasn't one of the clan tents, but the mysterious powerful wizard lady is very good at magic and she wants him around, and so even if he doesn't trust her very much, he feels surprisingly safe. 

Carissa feels terrible when she's finally done and has a magic dagger. Probably this is because she rode a horse hard for most of the day and Fireballed herself trusting her shield-amulet to handle it (which it did) and because even if a Ring of Sustenance doesn't let you starve she usually doesn't go a whole day eating and drinking virtually nothing. She makes herself a little water in a cup, and drinks it, and feels a tiny bit better. She lies down next to Ma'ar and continues to feel terrible, which is annoying, usually wizards get insomnia trained out of them young, and thinks about how she might die here and no one would ever know what happened and Ma'ar would accidentally destroy the world in a couple of decades, how maybe this in fact happened, thousands of years ago, Leareth doesn't remember his first life, except that doesn't really make sense. 

She has been leaning towards not doing things that seem big and hard to take back but maybe she should warn Ma'ar in the morning that Urtho has superweapons. That alone might be enough, even if she gets stabbed on the road tomorrow by a god.

It probably wasn't a god. There was plenty of reason for it that wasn't a god.

She misses Leareth. He's right here except actually it will be a lot better for her sanity to think of them as two completely different people and she misses him. 

She feels sick.

Eventually she sleeps.

Ma'ar wakes up a little before Carissa, this time, since she went to sleep so late. He carefully extracts himself and sits up, rubbing his eyes and wincing; he's not accustomed to riding either and his entire body hurts, though not as badly as the time he got caught and beaten by some of the other clan's men before he managed to fireball them enough to startle them into running away. 

He stares covetously at the magic dagger, but waits for the wizard lady to wake up so he can ask her if it's safe for him to touch. 

She wakes up not that much later. Makes a face, makes herself some water to drink. 

He waits until it's clear that she's more awake. "Is the dagger all done? ...Also, what's your name." He hasn't been brave enough to ask, so far, but he's feeling bolder today, having successfully made it an entire day out of his camp and still being alive - even if it took her help, that's sort of the point, right? And it's at least a little informative that she didn't abandon him as soon as she found the bigger town. 

"Carissa. I should go by something else here, though. The dagger is all done and you can touch it - it's very very sharp, though."

He nods, and takes the dagger with great care, turning it from side to side and testing it on another stray thread, before checking if the battered leather sheath that the pot-metal dagger used to be in still fits. 

It does. Carissa starts preparing spells. The same as yesterday; yesterday was horrible and she hopes today goes better but she mostly had the right spells for it.