- and then a woman drops out of nowhere in a blaze of light and magic, crushed flat and bleeding very badly- 

- and then suddenly not crushed and not bleeding, though her clothes are still soaked in blood, and rolling to her feet to squint at him. "Oh, hello," she says. "I was imagining a bigger one, really. I'm no good with children - do you have parents? If you don't like them that doesn't count -"

Who is she. She doesn't look like she's from here at all; he knows everyone in his clan, of course, but she doesn't look like she's from a neighbouring clan either. Which makes it very confusing that she speaks the clan tongue, really. 

"No," he says. "Who are you?" 

"I am Nefreti Clepati." She is magicking the blood off her clothes, and has also made a moving illusion of her reflection with which to adjust her hair. "I don't think you're going to help me at all yet, hmmm. You should be in school. I was a wizard by the time I was your age."

How does she know he's a mage. Maybe she can just tell by looking at him. She's so good at magic, he doesn't know how she's doing that at all. And maybe she should be scary but even if he were scared it'd be no good to go around showing it, and somehow he isn't, anyway. 

"Oh. Aren't any schools here." 

"Huh. Can't take you home, you'll die - can't take you there, I'm not allowed to be around twice - which is very unfair, you know, other people are allowed to be around twice and they don't explode into themselves destroying everything miles around - oh, I know what I can do." And she raises a Gate on the air and tugs somebody through it. 

" - Nefreti? You scared me - where is this -"

"This boy needs a teacher! And possibly a mother! It's very important. I have to go, you know, places to be, things to do -"

And she disappears.

" - couldn't you have -" She sighs at the empty air. Raises her hands and casts a spell of her own, speaking in an unfamiliar language. 

"Nefreti kidnapped me. There is a kid here she says needs a teacher and a mother? Maybe it's a you. Please come right away I have no idea where we are."

She doesn't get a response, which makes the whole situation about eighty percent more distressing. 

Back to the kid. "Who are you, where are we."

This is so weird. Whoever this is looks a bit more like she could be from around here, but still not really, and what language is she speaking, and - she was doing magic but it didn't look like any magic he could imagine working. 

He scuffs his bare feet in the dead grass. Glances back at the cattle to make sure they haven't run off; they haven't. "Ma'ar. Clan lands." 

"- do you happen to have a word for the planet."

Blank stare.

This woman is starting to be a little bit scary and it looks like she's better at magic than him; he doesn't inch away, that would be showing weakness, but he does plant his feet more carefully in the dust. 

She tries a Sending again. There's some failure chance between planes that's not indicative of anything wrong, just, occasionally Sendings fail across planes, everyone knows that. But she's not really expecting it to work, because -

- because he'd have noticed when she went missing and he'd be here already, if they weren't very far away. 

She tries it anyway. Same message.

No answer.

She lets her hands fall to her side. 

"Okay. Clan ...lands. Is there someone whose permission I need to be here?"

Does she not know where she is? ...Maybe not, it seems like the other woman who had incredibly powerful magic might've grabbed her here through some sort of portal-spell, that he thought should be possible although he couldn't figure out how to do it yet on his own.

Shrug. "Only if you want the watering-hole or our pasture. Stupid to go wandering if you don't got weapons though." 

"Ah huh." She doesn't visibly have them. "Are you, um," she doesn't know how to ask this, actually. She doesn't think Leareth mentioned his very first name. There are reasons not to have anyone know it, spells that can use it against you - though Urtho must know it - 

"Can you tell me what you know about magic?"

He is so suspicious. "Why d'you want to know." 

"There are - different worlds. I am not from this world, unless Nefreti did something clever with the Gate and the Sending failing is unrelated, but probably I am not from this world. In different worlds, magic works in different ways. If you tell me how it works here, I will have a guess what world you are in, and maybe if we're very lucky it'll be one I have heard of and there'll be someone we can go to for help."

That sounds very implausible, but if it's real then it's the most interesting thing ever to happen to him. Actually, even if she's lying about that part, it's still the most interesting thing ever to happen to him - there was a portal, he didn't imagine that, there was a woman who healed herself from being squished flat, this woman is using magic to talk to someone - try to talk to someone? - somewhere else, except it's not working... 

"I can see magic," he says. "When you did that..." He tries to describe what the thing that she seems to be calling a Sending looked and felt like to his magic sense. "I can make lights. Or start a fire without a flint-and-steel. Or make a wall like this. Or I can pick things up." He shows her, floating a pebble into the air with shaky mental hands and then bouncing it off a clumsy but strong barrier. 

He carefully isn't telling her most of the best uses of magic as a weapon. Just in case she wants to hurt him. She isn't looking at him or moving like someone who wants to hurt him, but you can never know for sure. 

"Are you the only person who can do that or can lots of people do that?"

"There are other people. Other kinds too. Don't know any though." 

"Have you been able to do magic since you were born or did it start just a couple of years ago?"

"- Couple years ago. What do you want." 

"To figure out what magic system you have. Do you want to do a little magic so I can see it?"

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?" 

"He chooses people, if their hearts match His own, and you might have to be from the world I'm from, not from this world, though if any god could choose priests of His here too it'd be Nethys. But it took her a hundred years, I think, to see as many things as she sees now, and she doesn't see some other things that normal people see, like that it is rude to kidnap me, so it has disadvantages. The man who is a king -" and she suspects she's right about this, now, based on the little boy's thoughts, though maybe she's reading too much into them, "picked a different god to be a priest of, the god of wealth and trade and cooperation."

He makes a face. "That doesn't seem like the sort of thing that there's a god of. Or he's not very good at being a god. At least here. Maybe you just meant in your world, are people very rich there?"

He has only the faintest idea of what it means to be rich, aside from 'having lots of cattle and grain and good tents.' Rich people have shoes too, he thinks. He's never met anyone who owned shoes, it seems kind of pointless because it's not like feet don't work just fine, but apparently people in the city wear them. 

"He's in my world, yeah. The gods can only do some of the things they'd like to do, and I'm not sure Abadar - the god of wealth - can even sense places that don't have any wealth, but - yes, my world is much wealthier than at least this part of yours. When people are rich they build...houses, and they buy fancy clothes and magic items that make their lives nice, and they hire guards and servants, and they buy slaves in some parts of the world where that's allowed, and they build schools for all the children so all the smart ones can be wizards."

He tries to make a picture of that in his head. It's a nice picture, overall. He's vaguely aware of slaves as a concept, some people from another clan to the east got taken once by bandits and someone said it might be to sell them as slaves in the south. "Does the place where the man you know is king have slaves." 

"No. Well, foreigners don't have to give theirs up when they visit but we don't have them bought or sold, and all the people who were slaves before the war got freed."

"There was a war? Why?" Ma'ar also has only a hazy notion of 'war' construed on a broader scale than cattle raids; he knows that entire countries with kings go to war with each other sometimes, there are stories about it, but his mental image is still a confused blend of herders with knives and sticks and his best guess of what swords look like, he hasn't ever seen a real one. 

"Uh, kings command armies, tens of thousands of people, Cheliax can field a hundred thousand if we really have to, and they fight when they want each other's territory, mostly - countries claim territory, do cattle herders do that?"

"Yes, this is our range, clan Kiyam - my other name is Kiyamvir, because my clan is Kiyam and my father was Vir. To go to Kanrata we need to pass through clan Yakan's range and they'll try to kill us if they see us. That's why I haven't gone yet." 

"My horses will be faster," she says, unconcerned. "Well, just like how I imagine clans fight over territory, countries fight over it. The man who is King now had an army and he did not like how the ruler of Cheliax was running her country, so he conquered it, with some allies, and now it is his. He did it by having his army use magic to send the other army off where it couldn't fight, and by using magic to command the minds of his enemies so they'd surrender to him." She is watching him intently.

She's trying to gauge his reaction to some part of that, Ma'ar thinks, and he doesn't know what she wants. "That's...clever?" he says, a bit uncertainly. "I mean, if it worked, it must've been clever. And then he didn't have to have his army kill the whole other army first. What did he do with them after, did he just put them so far away it'd take them years to get back and they might not bother...?" 

"He put them in another world. He let the ones who'd be loyal to him return afterwards."

Ma'ar considers asking how he knew which ones would be loyal, but probably you can just find that out with magic, somehow, when you're very powerful. He can't use magic to command people's minds, it would be way more feasible to get past the other clan's range to the city if he could, but he's not surprised it's possible.

"And then he freed the slaves - was that one of the the things the last ruler did that he didn't like, having a lot of slaves?" 

"I don't think he would've fought a war just over that but it wasn't how he preferred it. He freed the slaves and he told people to follow different gods, mostly, because we used to follow Asmodeus, the ruler of Hell, and we'd go to Hell when we died and Hell is a lake of fire where you burn until the unworthy bits of you are burned out."

"So he told us we couldn't worship Asmodeus anymore and we switched to other gods who are nicer to their dead people."

There are a thousand questions he suddenly wants to ask and it's hard to make them line up in order. "Can the nicer gods fight Asmodeus and take his dead people back." 

"They're not strong enough. Maybe someday."

He takes a deep breath. Rubs a hand over his face, shakily. "And I guess maybe they think, it's his dead people, he can do stupid horrible things like put them in a lake of fire– I don't think that would even work, people aren't - like that - you can't, you can't make them stronger by - burning things - it would burn the good parts and, and there'd just be stupid pointless ashes..." Ma'ar is very visibly upset about this, though he's trying to hide it. 

"It's - complicated - but definitely some of the other afterlives use lots more of the people they take, and that's better. I think some of the nicer gods would fight Asmodeus if they had a way to win, but he's very powerful, one of the oldest gods, and helps with protecting the world against even worse things, so it's very complicated.

Do you want a hug? I know you're a kid, I'm not going to notice only if you let me hug you."

Whether he wants a hug is such a weird question, how can he tell if he wants a hug.

Someone this woman knows is a king, because he thought another country was bad, and wanted to fix it. And she thinks that Ma'ar might be like him... 

He takes another deep breath. "I - want you to teach me magic. And - show me where your world is. So that when I grow up and I'm strong enough, I can - help the other gods find a way to do that and take his dead people, because–" 'it's not fair' is stupid, that isn't what anything is made of, "because I don't want him to have dead people if he uses them for that." 

" - yeah. Yeah, I think that's why Nefreti wanted me to look after you. So you can do that."

Ma'ar looks levelly at her. 

He's thinking that he doesn't really believe her or trust her and he's very confused, but - it almost doesn't matter, right, because she's powerful and rich and she knows a king from another world, who if she's telling the truth is very clever, and so what's he going to do, not go with her, not leap at his best chance to get off the plains and learn magic and become strong enough that if something is horrible he can change it. And in a way it makes things very simple and easy to keep track of, that she's so much better at magic than him, because obviously trying to knock her out and take her things, or steal them off her when she's asleep, isn't going to work.

And he may not especially believe any of the words she's saying about why, but she does want him, for some reason - maybe she collects children she can teach magic so they can serve her, and she can tell that he's clever? - and it seems like the use she wants him for involves answering his questions and making him stronger, so that's fine. If later she's less nice and hurts him, then he can decide at that point how much is worth taking before he decides to run away, but hopefully by then he would be in a big city, and have more ideas about where to run to. Right now he has no other ideas. Just this one. 

"All right," he says. 

She makes water for his cows. Her Detect Thoughts expires and she doesn't recast it; she knows how he thinks, because she thought like that, for a very long time.

"Do people in this world go somewhere when they die?" he asks her eventually, scratching a circle into a patch of bare dirt with his finger. 

"Your gods put their souls into new bodies but they don't keep any memories."

"That's stupid, why not? Do they - not know how? But they're gods." He seems mildly offended. "That definitely wouldn't help them get the good bits that're useful to them." 

He's very impressed by her making water from nowhere, though he keeps his expression convincingly nonchalant; he watches with his magic-sense while trying not to be obvious about it, is she making a portal from somewhere else and stealing someone else's watering-hole...it doesn't seem like it but he can't really tell.

The cows are unimpressed. They placidly crowd around the hole full of water and lap it up, not caring that it's quickly turning very muddy. 

"I think among other things they don't know how. It took our most powerful god to set up afterlives in our world, and there were things about our world that made it easier, like that none of our gods particularly benefitted from not having afterlives. Some of yours are using this system, so it'll be harder to get them to change it."

He looks thoughtful, staring into the distance, wriggling to scratch a spot on his back. It's not immediately obvious to him what to do about this. 

It took him thousands of years to figure out what to do about this. She wants to ask him to show her more magic but she needs to feed him first. "Can we go to your village now?"

"This way."

He scrambles up and starts prodding the cows away from the remaining mud at the bottom of their tiny watering-hole, to head back. It doesn't take a lot of magic, just very tiny lightning-bolts, enough to zap and startle them about the same amount as whacking them with a stick would, it's less effort than all the running around would be. He doesn't even bother bringing a stick anymore. 

The cows prefer being stationary over moving, but they know where 'home' is, and that it has better grass, and they start moving. Ma'ar trots after them, glancing back at Carissa. 

She follows. She worries. Probably they should go to Urtho. They can get an estimate in the city of how far it is and decide whether to try to make it on Phantom Steeds or to get his attention with a Sending. The gods haven't interfered with him so far and as long as they firmly just intend to get Ma'ar magic lessons maybe it'll stay that way. She has her wedding present shield bracelet, to convince Urtho that she knew the other him. It's not proof but it's suggestive. But of course this has to be, what, thirty years before the war, she doesn't know much what he's like - or whether his forming the intention to study other worlds would be very noisy in Foresight -

- Leareth's going to be in a panic, and the fact he hasn't found her yet despite that suggests that something strange is going on...

- presumably Nefreti cannot pull people back in time, that'd be a ridiculous thing for Nefreti to be able to do...

It's about an hour walk back to the camp, at the pace the cows are willing to maintain. The sun passes the zenith; it's hot, and windy, and sometimes the dust blows into their eyes. Ma'ar's clothing consists of a sort of skirt made of skins, and a threadbare cloth scarf or wrap which he had tied into a sort of shirt, but pulls up over his head when the sun is at its hottest.

The 'camp' is a cluster of canvas tents, pitched near an area where the grass is a little lusher than elsewhere. There are a few dozen people around, mostly old men, women and children; the able-bodied adult men seem to be elsewhere right now. There's a firepit, not currently lit, and some dried dung stacked next to it for future fuel. The women are sitting together, sharing the job of mending a collapsed sheet of canvas that's presumably another tent. A toddler runs up, begs for a breast, is denied it and cries. 

One of the woman, grey-haired with weathered skin, gets up and heads over to them. Her hand rests on the hilt of a sheathed knife knotted to her tunic belt, but her expression isn't really hostile, just wary. "Who're you." 

She doesn't prepare Endure Elements because Cheliax is temperate this time of year, and she's not really dressed for any serious travel. She is not going to complain about this to tiny starving orphan Leareth, obviously. She walks, and makes herself a little water to drink occasionally.

"My name is Carissa. I am a mage and a healer; I am passing through this area. I will leave in the morning, but I will pay you in magic for food and shelter tonight."

"I'm going with her," Ma'ar says, chin raised. "So I can learn magic." 

That earns him a look, both weary and exasperated, confused, and perhaps a little affectionate and proud. "I see. What sort of magic you got." 

"I can make water. I can mend broken things. I can make sewing or spinning or grinding do itself."

"Really." The woman sounds neither impressed nor disbelieving; she sounds like someone who's heard a lot of claims and no longer particularly tries to evaluate them until she sees it for herself. She turns, gestures at the collapsed tent-fabric on the ground. "Can you mend that." 

She sits down and starts doing that. It's not one of the instantaneous spells, it'll be a few minutes. 

The older woman just nods, as though grudgingly admitting that she's satisfied; some of the younger women, and the children, gather around, oohing and aahing.

They line up more work for her. Every empty waterskin and earthenware pot in the camp is rustled up to fill with water. People bring her a broken clay bowl, a snapped tent-pole, a steel knife - presumably traded from elsewhere, it definitely wasn't made here - with the blade broken off from the wooden handle. 

Sure, she can do all of those with cantrips. (She could see if anyone can understand cantrips in one night of study, with her headband to help, and then they could do it themselves from there without the headband - but that doesn't get them water, and she could tear a page out of her spellbook but she doesn't actually have a spare spellbook for them, and probably if she's going to do something as disruptive and with as much of a Foresight footprint as teaching arcane magic in this world she should do it for a better reason than feeling sorry for the first people she met -

- on the other hand, baby Leareth is smart, maybe some of them are really smart too, it runs in the blood -

She checks, with Detect Thoughts, in between Mendings.

The old woman is pretty smart, maybe not quite as smart as Ma'ar will be when he's fully grown, but definitely enough that in Cheliax she would've been able to master a lot further than just cantrips. The others are spread in between that and average; the children younger than seven are less smart, many of them look like their development in early childhood might've been hit by a famine, Ma'ar must've been lucky that his toddlerhood years were good ones. 

Ma'ar watches all of her magic intently, eyes boring into her as though by staring hard enough maybe it'll all start to make sense. 

Probably even tiny kid Leareth can keep a secret. 

Probably she's going to do lots of things approximately as Foresight-footprinted as teaching one random herder cantrips and if it's enough to make the gods hate her she'll be dead sooner or later anyway. 

But she should get Ma'ar to Urtho first.

She doesn't offer to teach them cantrips.

"May I trade you for food for our journey?"

It's late afternoon at this point, the sun slanting golden across the camp. The younger women are in a very jovial mood; they have so much water, no one will need to carry any back from the watering-hole and risk running into a raiding-party from the adjacent clans that use it too for days, and they've just caught up on months worth of mending work.

They bring her tough dried meat, and somewhat gunky cheese wrapped in leather, and they get out an earthenware jug of what turns out to be some sort of alcoholic fermented-milk drink. It's clearly something reserved for celebrations and they pour her a cup as though this is a great honour; they're so excited about it, and even offer Ma'ar a little bit (he makes a face at the taste and quickly hides it.) 

Some of the women, especially the older one, shade their eyes and stare out at the horizon, a little concerned but not very. There's no sign of returning men. 

Ma'ar is quiet and thoughtful, and shoos away the younger children when they try to play with him. He doesn't seem inclined to emotional goodbyes with any of his people, and they don't seek him out for this either. 

She can use Prestidigitation to make food taste however she likes and this doesn't solve it making her sick but she'll try to drink as little as she can politely get away with, and save all the food for the road.

"Can you read?" she asks Ma'ar, once there's a quiet moment.

He looks blankly at her. 

"It is possible to assign symbols to all of the sounds people make when they speak, and then make records of speech that way. I want to teach you how to do it but it'll have to wait until we're in a city."

He looks fascinated, stares at her for a moment, nods. 

The sun sets. They don't bother lighting the firepit; it's a warm summer night, and breezy, the smoke would blow all over.

The older woman, somewhat apologetically, offers Carissa a spot in a tent with her, Ma'ar, another woman, and her toddler. They sleep on a rolled-out skin, without blankets, all piled together. 

She probably won't get much sleep. Luckily she doesn't need much sleep. Maybe this will afford her the opportunity to give Ma'ar a hug at least.

Ma'ar does not seek out a hug with her; he takes the very edge of the skin, curls up against the tent wall, but he lets Carissa crawl in next to him and it's very crowded, and once he's asleep, which doesn't take long - he's done a lot of magic today and he's tired - he relaxes and uncurls a little. 

She holds him. He's little and he's - going to grow up into Leareth, hopefully without most of his world getting destroyed in the process, hopefully with them getting found, soon so it's irrelevant. 

But if they don't get found - they can prevent the Cataclysm, maybe just by convincing Urtho that it could have happened, and - and maybe she can figure out immortality in some better way than Ma'ar's, before she's old. It wouldn't have to be the end of the world. It just feels like it would be.

She sleeps for significantly longer than she usually does these days and is still up long before anyone else. She prepares spells for their escape to the nearest town. She tries to pray. There's no one there. This is - also not very surprising, but she spends a while staring miserably into the pre-dawn sky about it anyway.

The toddler wakes up first, and shortly later wakes everyone else by crying. Ma'ar holds very still for a bit, then sits up. Looks at Carissa, as though to reassure himself that she's real. 

The old woman rubs her eyes. "You're going, then." Her dark eyes flick to Ma'ar, shadowed in the dim light seeping through the tent-flap. "Boy, you - don't be stupid." It's the closest thing she gives to a goodbye, and she doesn't touch him, just tugs the tent-flap open for them and waits. 

Her eyes follow them, though, as they walk away. 

She taps Ma'ar and gives him Mage Armor and Protection from Arrows. "Do you know how to ride a horse?"

He can tell that she's doing something with magic; his eyes get big, and he examines himself, clearly making uses of some sense other than his eyes.

"I can figure it out." He's heard of horses, at least. 

"All right." And she makes two ghostly horses, a little larger than normal ones, almost entirely mist at the hooves and almost entirely solid at the saddle, which looks to be of ordinary leather. "They can go very fast, fast enough it'd kill a person to fall off them, so we're going to go slower than that unless the neighboring clan bothers us, all right? But if they do, we're going to go fast, and you're going to hold on very tightly." Arguably she should give him some of her protective artifacts but it seems much less likely Leareth'll eventually be able to design a search spell that finds this world if she's dead. 

"All right," he says, very seriously, and he holds on. Stiffly at first, but he watches her, and it takes only a few minutes before his riding posture is more natural. 

The plains stretch out ahead of them, flat and dusty. There's maybe a dust plume off in the distance but it's hard to tell from here if it represents the other clan. 

She's not spectacularly good at horseback riding either but she's done it before and knows the principle, and phantom horses don't spook like real ones. She watches him, and wishes that Nefreti Clepati were less like this, and wishes she'd asked Leareth more questions about when the gods started trying to kill him, and hopes Ma'ar is right about the direction to the city.

A Phantom Steed by a caster of her level is untiring and can travel almost a mile a minute, but they're not pushing the horses nearly that hard. Still, it shouldn't take all day to reach the city.

The other clan doesn't bother them, and after an hour or so the land starts to change, flat dry grass shifting to scrubby heather and small trees. Eventually they bump up against a river, which has a dirt track running beside it; they catch up to a farmer walking alongside his donkey, which has some baskets slung on either side of a sort of carrier on its back with various vegetables in them, scrawny green beans and peas and blotchy tomatoes and bunched carrots still with dirt on them.   

Ma'ar is staring around at everything, awed. 

"Let's take a lunch break."

The concepts of 'lunch' and 'break' both seem to be surprising ones to him, but he nods and figures out how to slide down from the phantom steed's saddle without needing Carissa's help. 

And she hands him all of the food she bartered his people for. "You probably want to stay standing or you'll be very sore and it'll make it unpleasant to get back on the horse."

He also seems surprised at the quantity of food! He eats it, though, and stays standing for that, still looking in amazement at the river. He's never seen so much water in one place before. 

And now that they're getting close to the city she casts Disguise Self. Aims to look like the older woman in Ma'ar's village. They're still going to be riding in on a phantom steed but it's not doing her any favors to look rich on top of looking powerful. "We can keep going, if you're ready."

He nods, and hauls himself back into the saddle, cheating a bit with magic, he seems to know how to shape it into a rope of force which he can loop over the pommel of the saddle and grab onto. 

They pass some more signs of habitation. A fishing-raft on the river; a cultivated field on the opposite side, half-visible between the screen of trees; a hut built on the other side of the path from the river, with a somewhat sad-looking vegetable garden, the leaves of the tomato plant blighted and spotty; another family, also with a donkey carrying some sacks. The river here is clearly riding lower in its banks than usual, leaving stretches of exposed mud and wilted plants, but the middle is still deep, and then they reach a point where it's narrower and faster, the banks rocky rather than sandy and mud. The path is very narrow here, winding next to an apple orchard and some blackberry bushes. 

- and then, with no warning, half a dozen men armed with daggers explode out of the bushes and swarm them. They go for Ma'ar first, he's a horse-body-length behind her now because the path is too skinny for them to ride side by side; he screams and kicks and flails as two of the men seize his leg and drag him bodily out of the saddle. 

- well, fuck. If she catches Ma'ar in a fireball he'll die because he's a commoner - she should've given him her artifacts just so she'd feel freer to use lethal force -

- she tugs them up to full power and casts a Fireball centered a bit in front of her so he's hopefully out of the radius and then everything around her is intensely aflame which is satisfying but means she can't see, for a second, until she can get off the horse and to the edge of the fiery explosion -

She gets three of the men and now they're very on fire and screaming although not for very long! One of the others was about to catch up with her horse and he tumbles back, yelling in shock. 

Ma'ar is out of the radius, although the heat of it still scorches his face and singes his eyebrows a bit, and he's still shrieking but mostly because two men much much bigger than him are trying to get him in a chokehold - one of them smashes him over the head with a wooden club and is baffled when this does absolutely nothing to stop him from kicking and biting and clawing for their eyes - 

- and he manages to twist his head around so he can sink his teeth as hard as he can into his captor's forearm, which gets another startled yelp and the man lets go of him and he lashes out as hard as he can with feet and elbows - 

This gets him dropped. Over the edge of the steep rocky bank. He lands hard and approximately on his head although the Mage Armor means that this mostly just knocks the breath out of him; he rolls, tumbles, and splashes into the fast-moving water. 

Carissa was going to try to take the other ones alive but this is more urgent so she casts Fly on herself and races through the air towards Ma'ar, fumbling for a Pearl of Power to recall Fly as she does.

Ma'ar has never seen water deeper than the watering-hole, which even in spring only comes to his waist, in his entire life. He has no idea how to swim and he's flailing wildly, trying to get his face to the surface, and also slamming into and bouncing off some rocks, which also don't really hurt him but are very distracting to his attempts to think of magic that'll help, and knock the breath out of him a moment after he manages to actually get some air. 

She reaches him and tries to tug him up out of the water and casts Fly on him, too, while she does that, she's not totally sure how it'll work but it seems like it ought to make it easier to pull him straight into the air -

He's at this point too panicked and disoriented to even realize that she's cast a spell on him, but it does seem to make it easier to haul him out of the water. He splutters, coughing up a lungful of water, and instinctively wriggles and kicks at her until he recognizes her, at which point he instead starts trying to grab onto and cling to her. 

Hughughughug floating ten feet above the water - "I need you to stay here flying," she says after only a few seconds. "Just fly over some nice patch of grass, not too high, and you'll float to the ground when the spell ends, if I'm not back by then. I'm going to go stop the bandits from getting away. I need to know whether they went after us by coincidence or whether anyone" any god "told them to do it."

He's still coughing and wheezing and trying to catch his breath, and it takes him a few moments to parse the words, but eventually he nods and forces himself to let go of her. One limb at a time, and it's clearly taking an incredible effort of will, but he hangs onto her clothes with one hand and notices that he's still floating, and then lets go of her and zooms away. 

The remaining three men, perhaps seeing the path of wisdom here, have abandoned any attempt to steal the horses - which they've at this point noticed are half made of mist anyway - and are fleeing as fast as they can into the orchard. 

Admonishing Ray is meant to do nonlethal damage but it assumes you're fighting the sort of people you run into in Golarion, not random commoners. She tries Sleep, first.

They have very little in the way of spell resistance and they go down. 

Which one is the scrawniest and would be easiest to lift.

The youngest-looking of the men is maybe nineteen, with a scruffy straggly half-beard, and is still taller than her but probably doesn't weigh much more. He has a dagger on a belt and is wearing a pack of some kind. 

She lands, takes his dagger, pats him down for any other weapons.

He's got a knife in his boot but that's all. (His boots are also very worn, with a hole in the sole, and his leather tunic is ripped in the side and very poorly repaired.) 

Uh huh. Lawless and poor, and Leareth had wanted to fix it, and then the Cataclysm -

She floats in the air a few feet above him and then wakes him with a mage-hand slap in the face. 

He startles awake with a muffled squawk, scrambles up on hands and knees, reaches for his dagger and then his boot and then looks around wildly. 

"Here. Why did you attack us."

He twists around and his eyes go saucer-wide. "I - I..." He seems to be trying to answer but is panicking too much to manage it. 

Well, she'll also read his mind in case he's managing to think it. "I want to know if someone sent you or if you did it of your own initiative."

"...What are you?" he says out loud.

He's thinking that he can't make sense of her question and why she cares so much whether someone sent him, which obviously no one did, who would send them, it's not like they work for the King's court or like the King's tax-patrols would stoop so low as to steal people's horses, they're not the most trustworthy people but they're not that level. They'd been waiting for someone to go by on the path with farm goods for market, something better than vegetables, because they're hungry and out of meat and got caught and kicked out of the local noble's (warlord's) forest where they'd been hunting game before.

And then a harmless-looking old woman and kid came by with real horses, and didn't have no weapons on them, which was weird and maybe he should've suspected it was a trap but they had horses, he'd been thinking how much silver they could get for a horse in the city, and he hadn't been at all surprised when Gatch hissed for them to attack, get the kid's horse first. Who is this woman, what's she doing here, he had no inkling she was a mage - he thought mages dressed fancy, that they didn't just look like old peasant women who for some reason owned a horse, and the horses weren't even real, up close it was obvious they were magicked somehow out of river-fog - he feels very stupid and scared and he's wet himself and absolutely expects he's about to die... 

Soon to be the Queen of Cheliax, not that she's planning to tell anyone that. A cleric of Iomedae, but what does that even mean, here. A fourth-circle wizard wearing things that are extraordinarily valuable even back home and beyond value, here. "I'm not going to kill you," she says. "If you do it again I might. Go get out of here and I'll wake the other ones up and send them after you in a few minutes."

He stays frozen for a moment (he's considering asking for his weapons back, but that's very stupid and he doesn't) - he gets up and flees into the orchard. 

She is not giving his weapons back. Honestly it is arguably quite stupid to not kill bandits who do not have many realistic alternatives to being bandits and will presumably keep at it and kill people who are not bandits but - it is also arguably quite stupid not to kill spies in your palace. 

She checks the other two surviving men for weapons.

They've got daggers too. Cheap low-quality pot metal, already kind of dulled. One of them also has a little knife hidden in his sleeve. 

And food? Spare clothes? Anything she and Ma'ar could use?

Their packs contain some loaves of hard travel-bread, and a waterskin containing some sort of wine, and rolled-up coarse woollen blankets, and a coil of rope, and a couple of candles packed with a flint-and-steel. 

She is going to steal their packs and then fly back to where she left Ma'ar.

He's managed to fly himself to the other side of the river and is hovering in midair at head-height, above a field of barley, curled into a ball and with a clumsy shield of mage-energies around him, shaking. 

"Hey. We should head back to the horses and then land, the spell's going to run out soon."

It takes him a moment to respond, but he uncurls and makes eye contact, and then drops his shield and holds out his hand to grasp for hers. 

She guides him back over to the horses and then they can land and sit by the side of the road and she can hug him until he objects to this.

He seems much more in favour of hugs now, possibly because his clothes are drenched and even in the warm summer he's shivering a little, the river-water was cold. He buries his face in her shirt, where if he sniffles a bit it's plausibly because he got water in his nose, and slowly his breathing slows to normal and he stops shaking.

"What did you do to them," he says, muffled because he hasn't unhidden his face at all yet. 

"Three of them died in the Fireball. The other three I let run off into those fields, though I took their weapons and two of their packs."

"Oh." He's confused why she didn't kill them too, but he supposes it's not like they're a threat to her even with their weapons, and maybe she just doesn't like killing people. Father didn't, though he never really said so out loud, you could just tell by his face. This is probably why Father died, really. "If you got their weapons can I have one." 

"Yes." She hands him a pack and the sad little daggers. "I'll make you a better one, once we're in a city."

He unknots his wet scarf-thing and shakes it out and reties it around the daggers and then over his shoulder. He opens the pack and looks in it, lights up when he sees the bread, he's not even hungry right now because they just stopped for lunch and he's not sure if he's ever had food that was his, that he could eat right now if he wanted to, but he's not hungry. He almost eats it anyway just because it might somehow disappear, but holds back. 

"Are we keeping going to the city now." 

"When you're ready. Do you - have any Gifts other than mage-gift, do you know, can you hear peoples' thoughts or anything..."

"- Is that different magic? I do sometimes - I did - but I haven't - it stopped working–"

It was never something that worked very well, it would be too loud and distracting or else vague and indistinct and as though he couldn't make it focus, but sometimes he could imagine pulling his wrap over his head and making it softer. And then when his mother died - was dying, it took a long time - it was working too much and he couldn't make it stop and it hurt and she was so scared and sad and he wasn't allowed to go in... And he remembers trying to curl up smaller and smaller until everything went away, and since then he hasn't heard any thoughts.

It doesn't matter, anyway, everyone here he's known all his life and none of their thoughts would ever be surprising, and after Mother died he told Chief he wouldn't go on raids anymore, which of course made everyone think he was a coward, but - he's going to leave, and come back stronger and fix things, but he can't do that if he gets himself stupidly killed. Father died on a raid. It's not like the thoughts-part was really good for that either, it's not like it's news to him that the boys from other clans want to kill him. 

"You can use it to look for minds waiting in ambush," she says. "You don't even have to pay particular attention to what they're thinking, but if you can sense that there are minds there, you can warn me, and prepare for a fight."

He nods seriously, shoulders his pack and starts hauling himself up onto his ghostly horse. "I'll try. Can you not do that kind of magic?" 

"I don't have that kind, no. I can read minds but with a spell prepared in advance I can only cast a couple of times per day. You will be able to learn how to do it all the time, and pay as much attention as you want to and not more." And not read her, she has an amulet against it. 

He nods, and as they ride he tries very hard to make that part of himself uncurl, pretends that he's still wearing his wrap over his head but the fabric is thin and he can see light through it. When they next pass a family trudging along the path, he feels them just before they come into sight around a corner, and is jubilant about it. 

A mile later they're approaching the city itself. This is first noticeable because the river smells, like maybe they dump sewage or garbage in it. Then the path twists away from the river and becomes a wider, dusty lane, then branches off to what looks like an open-air market. Further off there are buildings, one-storey, thatched roofs, weathered grey wood. The streets also smell and there are flies. It's not much of a city, really, it can't have more than a few thousand people in it, but just the market still has more people - and more food - than Ma'ar has ever seen in one place in his entire life, and he gawks at it. And grips the hilt of one of his new daggers, tense in the saddle. 

"Let's get off the horses here," she says to him once they can see the city.

He gets down. Hangs very close to her. 

It's a pretty long walk from once you can see the city to where you're in it. When Disguise Self is close to wearing off she renews it. When they enter the market she casts Detect Thoughts.

No one is paying them much mind, now that they're horseless; they look local, and poor. Most of the thoughts are very mundane ones. This woman is worrying about her husband's gimp leg, the younger woman selling tomatoes at the stall over is fretting about whether they can afford medicine if her daughter's fever gets worse. The girl with her, who looks like her sister, is pregnant, she feels very nauseated and resentful of the heat and dust and that the stall next to them has fish which are supposedly fresh but she sure can smell them. She's wondering if it'll be a boy - she hopes so and is imagining a little boy - and if so whether he'll take after her husband, who has dreaaaamy hazel eyes.

The old man standing behind them has a dagger and is watching everyone for weapons, usually bandits aren't bold enough to come right into the market and try to steal their coppers - at most they'll filch a tomato or two from the basket while their friend distracts the stallkeepers - but it's been a bad couple years here and there are more bandits than before, young men who lost their farms, or whose families kicked them out because they couldn't feed them.

This young man with his sweetheart is thinking about going to the big city. He doesn't consider this town, Kanrata, to be a a city; he's thinking of somewhere called Anrod, which he's heard has real roads with real cobbles, and carriages on them, and most importantly it has the College of Chirurgeons. He's apprenticed to the herbalist but he wants to learn real medicine. 

Sure, she'll talk to him. "Excuse me, do you know how to get to Anrod from here."

He startles, stares at her. Thinks that she doesn't look at all like someone who'd want to go to the big city. "Yes. Why?" His girlfriend is thinking that the kid is cute though he looks underfed, and then daydreaming about fat babies, when she's married to a chirurgeon and they have a big house in the real city. 

"We want to go there. We have horses. Is there a road? How far is it?"

He doesn't really believe she has horses, surely her kid wouldn't be that skinny if she were rich enough for that, but he'll go along with it, it's not like it costs him anything. "Sure. You keep going past town," he points, "follow the river until the Three Mills, in thirty miles or so, then there should be an official road that turns east and you follow that. I think from there it's another forty, fifty miles but I haven't seen a map, I just heard it's a two day ride." 

"Thank you. And is there an inn in this town?"

"Not really, but if you need a place to sleep, Ma Okar rents out the loft above the tavern to visitors. Over there, you want the building with the awning on it. Where're you from, anyway?" 

"Kiyam clan lands. Thank you."

He nods. "Well, good luck with your travels." 

"Thank you." And she can go see about renting out the loft over the tavern, and buying dinner at the tavern while they're at it.

Ma Okar is an older woman with frizzy hair pulled back in a bun and muscled brown forearms. Do they have money, she charges ten coppers for the loft and will throw in dinner with that, but if they don't have money she'll let them have it in exchange for cleaning the place for her in the morning, mopping the floor and such, she's made that bargain with travellers before and thinks it's a fair one. (The floor does not look like it's been mopped anytime recently.) 

They don't have money but they can mop before they go.

Ma'ar seems very impressed with Carissa's skill at finding them somewhere to sleep indoors - he's never slept anywhere more indoors than a tent and is wondering what it's like. He's also impressed with the inn food, though by Carissa's standards it's fairly terrible, pease-porridge with vegetables thrown in, no meat and no spices, only some local herbs for flavouring. It comes with thick slices of bread, and even a tiny smear of butter on them. Ma'ar wolfs his down and then slightly regrets it, it's more food than he usually eats in a sitting and now he has a stomachache.

They both get cider to go with it, which has been stored for a while and is fizzy and mildly alcoholic, not enough to noticeably affect Carissa but Ma'ar is small. It's sweet enough that he doesn't mind the taste and gulps it down, thirsty from the day of traveling in the heat. After which point he's burping for the next five minutes and also mildly tipsy. 

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. 

Ma'ar watches her, captivated by the entire process. Watching her casting spells was already amazing enough; the way that she makes them, folding together so much complicated structure, and then just - tucks them away for later - is incredibly beautiful. And not how his own magic looks to him at all. He tries a little bit, drawing out a wisp of magic from his reserves and imitating her as she works, but he can't go nearly fast enough and he doesn't have the fine control to make it match and the entire thing just seems to come out very differently. 

He asks her about it, after, how she learned to do it like that. 

"Where I am from they check all the children to see how smart they are and the smart ones get trained to be wizards. I'm not Gifted like you, so the only way I can cast spells is this way, the slow way. Since you're Gifted you are mostly going to want to practice with your Gifts, not practice the thing I do, which requires expensive resources to get good at, but once we're in Urtho's city and I have a sense of how scarce ink is going to be I'll make you up your own spellbook if you want."

Nod. "We should go clean now, so we can leave for the city." 

"Yes." It shouldn't take long, since she can summon an Unseen Servant to help and also use Prestidigitation.

They don't get to find out if Ma Okar would be impressed because she doesn't pay attention to any of it; she sits in the back room, working on her book of accounts, and occasionally pokes her head out to make sure they haven't run off with all her crockery or something. She seems to be one of the only people in town who can read or write, judging by the fact that two different people arrive with letters or bills-of-receipt for her to read for them, and she takes down a reply for the letter recipient. 

Ma'ar is moving more energetically this morning after two solid meals yesterday, though he didn't even think to ask whether there was breakfast, he's a bit hungry but he can save his travel-bread for once he's really hungry. 

She will ask about breakfast once the place is shockingly clean; it wasn't included but maybe they'll win some points for the shocking cleanliness.

Ma Okar does seem very pleased about her sparkling-clean tavern, even the ceiling above the fireplace de-sooted, and she gives them some day-old bread with soft cheese, apologizing that the baker doesn't have any fresh today, and cups of the same cider. 

Ma'ar gives his a suspicious look and then drinks it more carefully, and does not get tipsy. He keeps patting the hilt of his new magic dagger and feeling very reassured by it. 

And then they can walk on out of town along the river in the direction she was advised yesterday, and she can make them horses, and they can head out on their horses.

Ma'ar sticks very close to her, this time; the path is still pounded-down dirt but it's consistently wide enough for them to ride abreast. The land is similar, fields and scrub and the occasional orchard or cottage with a little garden. The river broadens and slows again, and there are women fishing in the shallows with nets, gowns rucked up around their waists, talking and laughing. 

Ma'ar watches everything, and is too focused on keeping his Thoughtsensing open enough to feel any attackers coming for conversation. 

They pass another couple of smaller villages, and then, if they're keeping around the same pace as yesterday, they'll reach what's obviously the Three Mills midway through the afternoon. There's a sawmill and a grain-mill and some other sort of mill, it's hard to tell from here. 

"Let's take a late lunch break here."

Ma'ar nods and slips down from the saddle, stiffly; he's still very sore. He points at the mills. "What are those?" 

"Mills? The water spins a wheel and then you can use that for work." She is also very sore, and doesn't actually feel any better than when she woke up, which is annoying; she really really wishes she could still do healing. She eats some of her bread, in case it helps, but if anything it seems to make things worse.

Ma'ar notices that she's quiet, and doesn't bother her with more questions, though once he's done carefully portioning out his bread, he runs out a bit in the field to get a better angle to see one of the mill-wheels, and stares fiercely at a while, moving his hands vaguely in the air as he tries to understand what it's doing and how it's cutting wood, he can't see the actual cutting part from here but some workers are carrying away planks of it. He didn't even know you could do that to wood; he's barely seen trees in his life. 

Awwwwwwww.

Ma'ar considers asking one of the mill-workers about it, but is too shy of strangers; before meeting Carissa and then Ma Okar, he had never in his life had a positive interaction with a stranger. He does find a stick and scratch a picture of it in the road-dirt and then stare at it intently. He's a little reluctant to be pulled away, but he does also want to reach the big city, and eventually this man called Urtho who's apparently a powerful mage. 

"- Are you all right?" he asks Carissa. She wasn't this quiet yesterday, and she's minimizing her movements the way people do when they're hurt or sick. 

"I have a couple of hypotheses and none of them are delightful but they're not an emergency." Probably. "In the city I might see a doctor and figure out which one is right."

He nods, a bit worriedly, and falls silent again.

The road does indeed peel off at a right angle from the river's current path, past all three mills; it's still not properly paved, but it's gravel rather than the kind of dirt that would turn straight to mud in the rain. There are cultivated fields on either side, though once they're further from the river the half-ripened crops aren't looking to be in great shape. Some farms have livestock. They pass small towns at more frequent intervals, every few miles; at one of them a swarm of half-wild turkeys tries to mob them, startling Ma'ar into wrenching his dagger from its sheath, but are frightened off by the Phantom Steeds. And by Ma'ar's instinctive levinbolt. He's small but he already has fast reflexes. 

They should stop at another small town before dusk, to buy dinner and see about a place to stay the night.

The town they reach shortly before dusk does have an actual inn, with a sign over the front; it also has a handful of shops on its single main street, and an awning over its farmers' market. The innkeeper, a man who isn't plump right now but gives the impression of having been at one point, is willing to trade them a shared room and supper in the taproom for cleaning help in the morning. Supper is equally boring, and still leaves Ma'ar looking utterly delighted at his luck. 

There are more travellers on the road here, and their shared room has two beds, narrow, but with actual straw-stuffed mattresses strung over ropes on wooden bedframes. The other is shared by middle-aged couple, both of whom snore. 

She works on making the dagger better. She can melt it down, later, if she needs the spellsilver for something else. The next improvement will take longer but that's all the more reason to start it right away.

Ma'ar, again, tries to stay awake and watch, but it's been another long day of unaccustomed riding, and he's yawning and drooping and the bed is so comfortable. He's never slept in a bed before. He falls asleep tangled in his wool blanket from the stolen pack. 

Carissa puts in eight hours on making his dagger nicer, and then spends what feels like forever cataloguing all of the possible explanations for feeling terrible, from 'I've just been riding horses too much' to 'I'm sick' to 'I'm pregnant' to 'Nefreti neglected to mention that this plane slowly drains power from you until you crumble into dust' to 'a parasitic worm has laid its eggs inside me and is sucking my blood for nourishment', and eventually sleeps. 

The beds are narrow and also sag in the middle when occupied, and she wakes up with Ma'ar snuggled closely against her, still fast asleep, his blanket kicked off and on the floor. 

Awwwwww. 

She prepares spells.

Ma'ar blinks awake once there's magic moving near him, and rolls over to watch again. He's somehow even more sore today and not in any hurry to move, although once Carissa gets up he does as well, uncomplaining. 

"Sorry," she says apologetically. "When we get to the city we can take a couple of days to rest even if it's not Urtho's city." 

For now, though, they should negotiate breakfast and get back on the road.

He nods. He isn't complaining at all. 

Breakfast is successfully negotiated in exchange for a very satisfactory job cleaning. It's oatmeal porridge, even with a bit of honey; Ma'ar makes such a wide-eyed face at his first ever experience of sweetened food. 

By a few hours into their ride, the road is getting seriously crowded; there are actual wagons, pulled by mules and oxen, and even a proper carriage with an awning and a well-dressed family inside. There are more people around to see them, but their horses stand out a lot less, and no one gives them a second look. 

Ma'ar rides very close to Carissa. He blinks at the carriage and asks Carissa what it is. 

"The wheels - the round bits underneath it - are attached to an axel, and when the front is pulled the wheels roll, and the people inside have a pleasanter ride than they'd have sitting on a horse. I could make one but it's more obviously magic than the horse is."

He nods, thoughtfully, and cranes his neck to watch the carriage's wheels turn until they're too far ahead of it; it's keeping to a very sedate pace. 

It's clear that they're approaching a city long before the city is actually visible. The air is noticeably murky and smells vaguely of cookfires. There are fewer fields and more cottages and bigger houses, including some nice-enough fenced estates with gardens. Flower gardens, rather than vegetable ones. Ma'ar is amazed and kind of baffled by this. 

And eventually they come to a wall, where a guard dressed in a red uniform is letting people through a gate one group at a time. The wall is only about a man's-height high; Ma'ar stands up in the stirrups of his saddle to try to peer over it, and then nearly falls and sits down sheepishly. 

She disguises herself with a spell again, and has them dismount from their conspicuous magic horses so they can walk in as a boring couple of local poor people. 

The guard looks bored. "State your business." 

"He's a mage and I want to get him mage training."

This is clearly a much less boring answer! The guard looks startled, then beetles his brows. "Oh really? Prove it." 

Ma'ar looks uncertainly at Carissa, unsure if he should demonstrate a shield or something. 

"Can you do a bit of magic for the guard?"

He floats a pebble up into the air, then shyly does a mage-light in the palm of his hand and holds it up. 

"Oh, all right, go on past." He shoos them through the gate.

The city is packed and smelly and there's garbage and sewage in the gutters on either side of the road, though the road is really cobbled, and some of the buildings are stone rather than wood. There's laundry strung above their heads. People are yelling things to each other between the windows of the second-storey apartments above them. 

Ma'ar flinches at the noise and crowd, shoulders going up around his ears. He doesn't at all like having this many people so close to him, and he shrinks up against Carissa. 

She is feeling paranoid of pickpockets and also incredibly miserable about the smell; she holds Ma'ar's hand tightly. "I want to look for the nice part of the city where the rich people live."

Ma'ar has no idea how to help with that, so he just hangs onto her and nods, his other hand gripping his magic dagger firmly. 

The street is crowded but the people on it are mostly moving along steadily, and once they're to the first crossroads, they can if they want peel off down an alley, which doesn't smell any better and isn't necessarily at lower risk for pickpockets but is less trafficked. 

Sure. Probably the rich people part of the city will be upriver? She can head in what vaguely seems like the right direction, at least.

The city is big enough to have clear neighbourhoods. Unfortunately they pass through the tanners' district while finding their way to another road that heads upriver rather than crosswise to it; it smells much worse, but then they're upwind of it. There's another mill, and then another street of shops, somewhat nicer than the area they first saw, and then a big open market square with a stone fountain in the middle; the fountain was maybe nice at one point but it's covered in pigeon droppings. 

And on the other side of the square is a nicer neighbourhood! The streets are, if not clean, at least cleaner, and the houses are bigger, with slate roofs rather than thatch, and separated by flowerbeds, and the people going about their are dressed better and more of them are riding horses. 

They're not currently looking like wealthy people, and they do get odd looks from the first person they pass, a gardener watering flowers, and then someone who must be a guard for one of the houses tries to chase them off with a stick, maybe assuming that they're thieves. 

Yes, they should wait until her Disguise Self wears off and then disguise Ma'ar, but she's going to try to find somewhere to linger until then where the smell is tolerable.

They can find another smaller square that has a good breeze off the river and mostly doesn't smell; it has a bench under a little decorative archway where they can sit and be left alone. 

Oh good. How is Ma'ar doing?

He's tired and sore and overwhelmed by the number of people and things and the strangeness; he's sitting on the bench with his arms wrapped around his folded knees, eyes fixed ahead, his head snapping around every time someone comes down one of the streets into the square. 

She wants to say something reassuring but she doesn't know if everything will be okay. "I want to be moderately truthful here and say that I'm a powerful mage from faraway, I was testing a new kind of Gate, and I ended up here instead of where I wanted to go," she says. "I am hoping that they will be able to tell us how to get where we want to go, and if it's too hard I will Sending Urtho and ask him to come pick us up."

Ma'ar nods. He has no additional contributions here. 

"If instead something bad happens, I'll teleport us away, so you want to be holding onto my hand."

Nod. 

And once they're ready to go he will do that. 

She dresses him like she'd dress her own child, in Cheliax; they're going to look foreign and it's easier to do disguises when you know the look you have in mind very well. 

She heads back into the nice part of town, holding his hand, trying to look impatient but not at all out of her depth.

They get fewer odd or concerned looks, this time, though some people's eyes do follow them curiously. After following the cobbled road past all the nicer houses, they come out to a row of higher-end shops; a few even have actual glass windows, with displays, clothing and gowns and shoes. Nice copper pots and pans. Weapons. There's an apothecary with fragrant herbs hanging from the lintel.

The street barely smells at all; a servant is busy scooping up the dung just dropped by someone's horse. 

She stops at the weapons shop. "Do you sell magic weapons here?"

That gets her such a blank look! "No, ma'am?" 

This is not very surprising. She sighs anyway, a bit exaggeratedly. "I guess there's probably not much market, here... hmm, this is very good work." It is just all right.

It gets her a rote smile and an offer to come in and see the rest of the wares that aren't for display to 'just anyone'. 

She'd love to, but maybe later, she just arrived here and needs to arrange lodging for the night first, do they recommend anywhere?

They can recommend her the nicest inn in town! Down that way, it's called the Pig's Ear. 

And is there a healer they'd recommend, she's been having these bouts of dizziness.

They seem a bit confused by the term 'healer', but would recommend Lady Bet at the apothecary, she's knowledgeable. 

She thanks them and heads out. 

"Were you reading their mind?" she asks Ma'ar quietly once they've gone down the street. 

"- Maybe a bit." 

"Did they notice anything that seemed suspicious or implausible?"

"They were confused. About your questions. But they thought you looked very fancy so maybe you were educated." 

"What confused them?"

"The magic weapons. They hadn't heard of that. And - when you asked about a healer they were confused and wondered if you meant...I don't know the word..." he gestures vaguely in the air, "an old woman from the country who delivers babies and has herbs in jars but hasn't studied anything? And then they thought you couldn't mean that, because you were dressed nice, you must've meant a doctor with an education." 

"Do they not know of - magic healers, with a Gift for it -"

"I don't know! Didn't seem to be what they were thinking of. Is that a different kind of magic from my kind too?" 

"Yeah, there's a bunch of Gifts. Mage-gift is the most flexible, and then your Thoughtsensing is different, and there's Healing and Mindhealing and Empathy and Bardic and Fetching and Farseeing and Animal Mindspeech and Firestarting. At least that's the classification system the people I know used and I think they were pretty knowledgeable about your world's magic. I guess maybe in this...place they don't know that yet. Healers need specialized training to be useful...I guess I could go to an old woman from the countryside who does herbs. She'd at least know if I was pregnant."

He is suddenly giving her such an upset look! "Are you maybe pregnant?" 

Oh no tiny child has trauma around that specific thing. "It is a possible explanation for why I have been feeling sick. If it's not safe to have a baby in this world, though, I will Polymorph myself into a boy, and that would make me not be pregnant." She doesn't want to do that, really, but she can't abandon tiny baby Leareth and also she can't possibly convince him that's her prioritization here - "I plan to live forever. I am not going to take any chances with my safety."

"What, you can turn yourself into a boy?" He's thoroughly distracted, staring at her. "Would you be stuck a boy forever then, or could you do it back?" 

"I would turn back in a couple of minutes. But I would not be pregnant when I turned back. That is what spellcasters where I'm from do so they only carry a baby when they want to."

"Oh. That's - convenient, I guess. If it's a bad year for it." He wishes women from his clan knew how to do that. It sounds like complicated hard magic, though. 

"Or if you just don't want children, some people don't." Hug. "There are also herbs people who aren't spellcasters take but they're not perfectly reliable. I don't think anyone's invented a perfect solution that's not magic and is always safe and always works, not yet, but someday they will."

He leans into the hug. 

"How are you going to live forever?" he says into her chest. "I think I probably have to live a long time if I want to get powerful enough and have a good enough plan to fight any gods. And also dying is bad and people shouldn't." 

"I don't have it figured out yet but some powerful wizards have done it so I know it's possible. Magic can be used to extend your life, so you have more time to work on it. The man I know who is a King had lots of different methods, so he'd have a backup if one of them failed. It is possible to make a not-awake clone of yourself with magic, and arrange for your soul to wake up there if you die. I'm not powerful enough to do it yet but it can be done. You'd also want to make sure your method of immortality was very hard for anyone or any god to tamper with."

"Mmm." He tugs away from her hug, his expression distant, deep in thought. "- Will you be sad?" he says after a moment. "If you have to turn into a boy so you're not pregnant anymore." 

"I would be sad about the situation being one where I had to do that instead of one where I was at home with my husband and we could be excited for the baby together. I will be sad if I do that, never get home and therefore never get to raise any kids except you. I think it'd be better if the world had the baby in it so I'd be sad to be losing those worlds. But none of it is worth dying about, so if they haven't invented healing anywhere I'm not going to risk it."

He nods. "If you're right that Urtho knows all about magic, though, then he would know if it's invented anywhere. If you can find him and talk to him. Is this his city?" 

"I don't think so. I will ask after him at the next place I go. Probably that should be the inn."

Ma'ar nods, and after a moment's hesitation, reaches to take her hand again. 

And they can go to the inn. "How much for a room?"

"One silver a night. Are you visiting the city?" 

"Yes. I'm not sure for how long. My coin purse was pickpocketed, and I'm a day ahead of my staff, but you can have one of the rings as collateral if you have a satisfactory safe to keep it in." She waves her hand carelessly. It has the magical ring as well as her nonmagical wedding jewelry.

That gets her an awed stare; however rich the rich people are in this city, the inn isn't used to seeing that much jewelry on one person. "All - all right, ma'am." The servant curtsies to her, suddenly blushing. "I'll - go ask - just wait there one moment..." She runs off. 

An older, more composed woman in a matching servants' uniform comes out a minute later, gives Carissa and Ma'ar an appraising look. She looks better fed than anyone in the previous towns they passed through, and not as stressed. 

"Welcome to the Pig's Ear," she says, smiling but not curtsying. "And to Anrod, our capital - have you ever been before? Anyway, I daresay we can accept one of your rings as collateral. I'm sorry to hear you were pickpocketed, the thieves have been awful this year - were you hurt at all?" 

"I haven't been here before, I'm from Cheliax, it's a long story. I wasn't injured." She offers the nonmagical ring. "My wedding ring, so do take care not to lose it."

"Oh, yes, yes, of course, ma'am."

The matron has never heard of Cheliax, but isn't that surprised, she's never been out of the city and the rich lady's clothes look exotic, she doesn't even recognize the fabrics. She's curious how Carissa ended up a day ahead of her staff, but not actively suspicious, and is holding back from asking out of politeness. The jewelry is spectacular, she's never seen any like it, either in style or quantity. And she understands better now why Malia was so spooked, she thought the poor girl was just being simple again, but this lady is kind of scary. Very composed, doesn't carry herself like most noblewomen here. She - looks like someone who's used to traveling alone, somehow, which is rare. Her son is sweet but looks thin, maybe he's sickly. 

"I'll just take care of locking this up safely for you, then. Malia! Do show the lady to her room." 

The nervous young girl is back a moment later, bobbing her head. "Follow me, ma'am." 

"Thank you. And I hate to ask, but could I have twelve silver for incidental expenses today and tomorrow? I really assure you the ring'll cover it."

The matron blinks, but still seems caught up enough by Carissa's visible absurd wealth that she doesn't think to question it. "Er, yes, of course. I'll be over as soon as we can arrange that." She's thinking frantically that they should clean the formal dining room for the lady's supper, it hasn't been used since the midwinter festival, and she should send the kitchen-maid to pick some fresh flowers for decorations, and - what other conveniences are very wealthy ladies used to, she'll have to ask around...

Carissa and Ma'ar are shown to a room, or rather suite; it has a sitting-room with a loveseat and armchair and a carved end-table, a bedroom with a four-poster bed, and a separate washing-up room with a slightly warped polished mirror on the wall. There are fine muslin curtains on the window, which is still oiled paper rather than glass, but lets through the light well enough. There's a rug on the floor and wallpaper, and the furniture is old but reasonably well-made. 

Ma'ar is trying not to gawk, because he's supposed to be pretending to be rich and of course if he were really he'd have seen nice rooms before, but he's amazed. 

"Thank you, dear," she says with satisfaction. "I'll have a bath - oh, I can do it myself, I'm a mage."

The maid seems to want to fuss, but is shooed away without too much effort, at which point Ma'ar stops trying to hide his awe. Though he's looking dubiously at the tub, he can't tell what it's for. 

"What's a bath?" he asks her. 

"You fill it with hot water and then you soak in the hot water to get clean!" She is being very careful with the water cantrip, because she suspects if she loses the little scrap of divine energy that powers it she'll never get it back; she fills up the tub, and then uses Prestidigitation to heat it. "Rich people have baths as often as they want, every day even, and so they are always very clean."

This seems like a ridiculous waste of water to him, but maybe rich people can - make rivers? Or something. He's still giving the water a very suspicious look. "Does it hurt?" 

"No, it's not that hot, just cozy resting temperature. You can stick your hand in and tell me if I got the temperature right."

He very tentatively dips his pinky in, then the rest of his hand. Looks surprised. "It's nice." 

"If you want to get in I can go into the other room. - people usually don't bathe in front of each other."

"Huh. Why not?" He's a little bit nervous at how deep the water looks, but it's probably fine, it's not deeper than the watering-hole it just feels like it because the tub is narrower and rectangular. 

"In societies where people are rich enough to have multiple rooms in their houses, people are not usually naked in front of people of the other sex, except young children or when there's a good reason. If you don't particularly care about it I don't particularly care about it" except that if he developed a crush on her it would be the most awkward state of affairs in the ENTIRE UNIVERSE "but if you are comfortable trying being alone it's a good time to try it, when we have multiple rooms, and you can call if you need me."

This seems very weird to him but he nods gamely. "All right. I can try." He looks warily at the tub. "What do I...do. Once I'm in. Do I just sit in it?" 

"Usually there are - oils, and soaps and things." She looks to see if there are any around. "I can ask the staff for them."

There's a cake of soap in a dish by the smaller washbasin, and a folded towel next to it. There don't appear to be any oils. 

Well, that is probably complication enough for Ma'ar's first bath ever. 

He's aware of the existence of soap since yesterday, someone was washing dishes with it at the inn. 

Once Carissa leaves he takes off his clothes, and unties the dagger so he can put it right next to the bath in reaching distance while he very cautiously lowers himself in. It feels a lot hotter to the rest of his body than to his hands, and he squeaks and pauses a few times, but once he's all the way in it's - lovely, actually. Though it's making him feel very relaxed and sleepy, and he has to remember to pick up the soap and rub it with his wet hands and then wash himself like a dish. Which still seems ridiculous, but the dirt does come off. He didn't even know that was dirt, actually, he thought it was just his skin. Eventually he's even brave enough to dunk his head a bit and try to get the dirt out of his hair. 

Carissa meanwhile flops in the fancy bed and falls asleep, which doesn't usually happen to her.

She dreams that Leareth is there. She explains that she is in Velgarth, and he is very afraid, though he shows it only a little bit, and then she says that she met a Kiyamvir Ma'ar, is that him, is that what he was called, and then Leareth says, no, he was called Urtho, and then the gods drop rocks from the sky crushing both of them. It's a spectacularly unproductive dream and she wakes up thinking 'what an idiot, I had a chance to talk to him and didn't even ask what to do if I'm pregnant', and then wakes up the rest of the way and just feels - tired.

She Prestidigitates her clothes clean and looks in the mirror and worries.

Ma'ar spends a while once he's clean half-drowsing in the bath, staring vaguely at the water which is now sort of appallingly brown. 

Eventually, once he's almost nodded off a couple of times, he decides that he should probably - get out of the bath. Or something. Probably Carissa wants a turn, and if he's still tired he can sleep on the bed, it's right there and he won't drown if he falls asleep on it. 

He grasps the sides and manages to haul himself up and get his feet over the edge, it's very slippery, and he stands up - 

- and squawks and goes down on his bottom on the tile floor. 

She rushes in a second later. "Are you okay?"

He's sprawled confusedly on the floor, blinking and rubbing his forehead, not entirely sure how he got there. "I - don't feel good. Dizzy." 

Aaaaah how do you get an entire country with no healers she still has a handful of divine spells she hasn't used but those are all she's ever going to have -

"Did you hit your head? Let's get you out of the bathroom- you can lean on me -"

"I don't think so..." Standing up again feels even worse but he hangs onto Carissa, getting her clothes damp, and shuffles out. "Want to lie down - I feel too hot..." 

She hugs him. Looks wildly around for the nearest container where she could make some water for him.

There's a vase on a shelf, and some porcelain cups or jars up on a windowsill that are maybe intended to be decorative. 

If they can hold water they'll do. "Drink something."

"Mmkay." Ma'ar drinks a bit of water, and finds that he's very thirsty, even though he's just been in water so that seems weird. He gulps the rest. "...More?" 

Yes absolutely.

He drinks the second cup of water nearly as fast, and then flops on her.

"I - think I feel better. That was scary." He didn't mean to say that out loud, and wouldn't normally, but he's still slightly dazed. 

"Yeah." Hug. "I'm sorry."

He's very drowsy again, and leans into the hug - remembers that his dagger isn't here, mumbles something to Carissa about it, but he's too sleepy to move even for that. For the first time in days he's relaxed and his muscles aren't hurting everywhere and it's peaceful and quiet in the room, which has walls and a door, and also Carissa, who's a lot more dangerous than his dagger - she made it for him...

She snuggles him and doesn't say anything. Probably the kid could stand to sleep more than he has been.

Within five minutes he's soundly asleep on her; he seems more relaxed than he did on the first night, in the tent. 

Well. She has several problems she needs to solve, here and now, but that in particular just seems - good.

She opens the door to see if she can get a servant to drain the bath, she wants clean water for the new one. Maybe they'll have surfaced her spending money in the meantime, though she doesn't intend to ask about it again.

She gets the young girl again, who can do that for her ladyship, yes ma'am! Also the matron will be by soon, and was asking what time she would like them to take their supper tonight, is sunset all right or does she prefer earlier, and if she finding everything here all right, if the sheets aren't soft enough they can look for better ones. (She heard once that really rich people sleep on silk sheets, which seems absurd but who knows.) 

Sunset will do, and she has no complaints, she's well aware she didn't call ahead. Her son's feeling a little unwell, is there a recommended doctor?

"- I don't know, ma'am, but Matron will, I'll tell her to come now and then I'll fix the bath for you?"

The girl runs off again, and comes back with the older woman in tow, who politely offers Carissa a little leather coin-purse. "Your spending-money, ma'am. And if you need someone to run errands for you since your staff aren't here yet, we can send the kitchen-boy? Oh, and Malia says your son isn't well, I'm sorry to hear that. We can send for someone from the College of Chirurgeons, Master Dobs was the best but he retired and moved south with his lady, so I'd just send one of our boys over and ask who they recommend." 

"I'd be very grateful." She toys with the wedding jewelry, absentmindedly. "And perhaps you could join me and tell me a little bit more about the city? I haven't been here before, and I will confess being robbed in broad daylight did very little to help me orient. I didn't expect my errand here to be difficult."

The matron seems slightly taken aback to be asked, but flattered too, her cheeks turn a little pink. "Why, of course. I can have some tea brought over for you as well. Just let me take care of sending someone over to the College."

"Thank you."

The servant-girl drains the bath through a spigot in the bottom; it takes her multiple trips hauling buckets and chucking them out the window into the back gutter; at one point a voice swears loudly back up at her through the open window. 

The matron comes back, trailed by another young woman in a bonnet carrying a tea-tray, and confirms having sent a runner over to the College of Chirurgeons. The tea set is old and definitely not as nice as anything in the palace in Cheliax, but it's fine; the tea itself tastes different, more astringent even with milk; there's a cake of sticky brown sugar and a spoon to go with it as well, and hard little biscuits on a platter.

"So," the matron says over her own cup, "what sorts of things did you want to know?" 

"I'm here looking for my nephew. He's Allereth's age -" a head-jerk indoors. "My sister's son. They moved here four years ago. He's mage-gifted, he was getting little sparks and lights even then. I'm taking my son to study with Urtho and I wanted him to get the chance, too. But - that's all I have to go off. My sister and I were estranged, her name is Aptsya but she was going by something easier for the locals to pronounce, I don't know her husband's name, just that he -" vague hand-wave - "worked a trade. Our parents were horrified. Where do mage children study, here? What would my nephew's education be like, is he even going to want to come with me? Do you have any guesses where they might be living, if they're, you know, used to nice things but spending down their money..."

She shows no recognition at the name 'Urtho', and frowns a little at the other names, nods along sympathetically at the right parts of the story. "Oh, hmm, let me think. To be honest," she leans in closer, and seems a bit embarrassed, "I don't think any of the good schooling for mages is here in Predain. I'm not sure what that looks like in - Cheliax, that was where you said you were from? Anyway. You want to be a learned doctor, sure, our College is the best in the known world, but we don't have great academies of magic or anything. I hear Tantara down south has some, don't know much more than that, though. Here I think it's apprenticeships, usually, or the King's Guard or his Majesty's Court. Pays well, to be a mage for His Majesty, but they're," and again she makes a face, "they're - not nice men, if you get my drift, I must say I hope your nephew didn't. My cousin's girl was a mage, though, went off to apprentice to some wizard in the countryside. If you like I can go to her house tonight and ask who, and where?" 

"I would appreciate it. And honestly, that's what I'd heard, about the magic education in Predain, it's why I want to find my nephew and take him south with me, but I didn't want to assume I'd heard right. Tell me more about the College of Chirurgeons, though? Nothing to do with my mission exactly but I never knew Predain was known for it, that's not something we have in Cheliax at all."

The matron doesn't actually know that much about the College but is nonetheless delighted to talk about what everyone sees as their capital's main attraction. The College is revolutionizing the art of medicine! Instead of herb-women with no training, they have the best texts in the world, and their surgeon-scholars contribute new treatises every year. They (and again she blushes and look embarrassed) cut up cadavers - it's supposed to be a great honour, when one dies in their public charity hospital, to have one's body used to further the art. So they know the human anatomy very well and seek to understand the root of all diseases, and they have alchemists hard at work on inventing new potions and remedies. She isn't herself learned so can't say much, only that Master Dobs was oh so learned and clever, with his big black medical bag and his reference-book, and when her eldest daughter had a, well, you know, female problem, after giving birth, he sewed it right back up and she healed fine. 

Well, if you don't have magic healing it's probably the next best thing. She tries to act terribly impressed. 

On a more unpleasant topic, the robbers on the road - she was menaced by some even before the occasion where she was pickpocketed - she knows she's a magnet for them, even with the jewelry concealed, but still, is that - normal? Is it an unusually terrible year?

The matron winces and again looks very embarrassed. "Drought two years in a row, ma'am, lots of shiftless young men with nowhere to go and the King's men won't take them. To be honest I pity their souls. Don't reckon they know better. It's always been reckless to travel without hiding your valuables or bringing a guard, of course, the King's men can't keep the peace outside the city and - well, even inside it, sometimes you're better off not calling for them. But - yes, I don't think it was quite so bad five years ago."

Tragic. Maybe if they got some mages they could do more about the weather, though it's not her specialty. Tantara, with the good schools, is...south of here? How far?

She's not sure. It takes a week to get a message down to the border by fast horse, though partly that's because the road isn't very good, and then Tantara itself is big and she doesn't know where the mage-schools are, but probably in the big cities further south than that. 

This seems like everything Carissa could hope to learn on the questions of most interest to her so she occupies the rest of tea asking the woman about the history of the inn, and how long she's run it, and what her children are up to.

The matron is still confused why such a fine lady wants to talk to her, but it's rather flattering, and she's happy to talk about those subjects. 

While they're finishing up tea, the doctor from the College arrives and introduces himself as Master Laites. He's tall, a bit stooped, with greying hair pulled back in a knot; he's wearing a dark robe and carries a leather satchel. 

Carissa's son is sleeping right now and she'd rather not wake him before he's ready but in the meantime she's so curious about doctors, they don't have them in Cheliax at all. What does a medical education involve? What sorts of things are herbalists and midwives and so on terribly wrong about?

He seems taken aback to be asked, but decides not to take offence; instead he sits down and starts explaining how they study the anatomy and physiology of humans, what changes when people are sick versus healthy, and so they're coming to understand what causes illnesses, or prevents injuries from healing well. 

A few minutes into this, Ma'ar wakes up, and pokes his head out, wrapped in the coverlet off the bed since he's still not wearing his clothes. (He didn't especially want to put them back on, now that his body is clean they seem disgusting in comparison.) 

This is a doctor, recommended by the lady at the inn. Reportedly Predain has the best college of physicians in the world, she's learning all about medicine. They don't really have it in Cheliax but maybe they should start; it seems like the kind of thing the King would be interested in funding. 

Ma'ar isn't that pleased by the introduction of another stranger to their nice quiet rooms, and he's confused why Carissa would bother getting a doctor all this way, it's not like he's seriously sick and he feels all right now, just tired. But he obediently accepts Master Laites' directions to go sit down on the bed and be examined. 

Master Laites does a thorough physical examination, which Ma'ar holds still for even though he haaaaaates having the strange person he doesn't know at all touching him, and in weird un-comforting ways, peering at his scalp and the whites of his eyes, palpating his neck and his wrists and ankles, examining his fingernails closely and tapping his chest to listen to the sound, it's all very odd.

Master Laites then sits and thinks for a while before turning to Carissa. "How long has he been sickly?" 

"Not very long, just since we got here." Probably lying to the doctor will interfere with his ability to give a useful diagnosis, but she can hardly tell him the truth.

"Huh. Is he particular about food, or does your family follow one of the temples with dietary rules...?" 

"At home we don't eat anything from animals."

"And the rest of you are healthy?" 

"I've been feeling unwell this week but I don't think it's related. Maybe it is."

He looks thoughtfully at her, then turns back to Ma'ar and asks him about any stomach symptoms (Ma'ar confesses to having a stomachache before after eating) and then asks his some distressingly detailed questions about his pooping habits. 

Finally he turns back to Carissa. "I suspect your difficulty is unrelated, though I could examine you as well. Your son appears to me to have an excess of lymph and a deficit of blood in his body; you see how his nailbeds and gums are paler than mine, look? And yours are quite normal. Many people are perfectly healthy on a diet of plants, but not everyone, and right now your son needs foods that will restore the blood. Eggs, meat, fish. He should eat lightly of breads and grains, and fruits, since those restore lymph, which is the opposite of what he needs." 

Master Laites frowns. "And then of course, there is the question of why he was healthy before and is sickly now, when you are well. You have been traveling, and eating and drinking at inns? Certain areas may have a miasma of disease, in the air or in the water or in the soil itself, and he may have picked up some sort of - vermin, that saps his strength from the inside. Stomachaches are suggestive of that. I can prescribe a remedy for it." 

They would appreciate it. And could he examine her as well, while he was here?

He does, though with more discretion for the physical aspect, patting her through her clothes rather than asking her to disrobe. He asks her about her symptoms, and when they began - and then, unsurprisingly, clears his throat delicately and asks when she had her last monthlies and - he can see her wedding jewelry - when did she last have, well, marital relationships with her husband. 

This part of the conversation goes completely over Ma'ar's head (this is mostly because he has no idea that 'marital relations' is a euphemism for anything pregnancy-related), and he's quiet and politely bored. 

Huh, she would've assumed that nomadic herders had less in the way of privacy norms, there. Of course, his parents have been dead a while. 

She can confirm that she and her husband share a bed frequently (and also a magic-restricting extraplanar operations building in the divine domain of Abadar, but she does not tell him that) and the timing lines up and that was one of her guesses.

He nods, satisfied. "It is too early to be certain, but for a woman of your position it is the obvious guess, and I see no indications of a more serious disease that might be causing those symptoms; my second guess would be that you are unused to so much travel. For either case I would recommend taking some time to rest." 

He proceeds to give her some surprisingly detailed dietary advice about what the College of Chirurgeons thinks that pregnant women ought to eat versus not eat, and then some practical advice, that she can pick up a ginger-root at the apothecary and cut thin slices of it to chew, it should help with the sickness, and he encourages frequent light meals rather than large well-spaced ones. 

Huh! She'll try it. And then she'll thank him and pay him out of her new pocket money and usher him out with an excuse about subsequent appointments because poor Ma'ar.

The doctor thanks her, and leaves them a note to take to the apothecary, to pick up a remedy that will cure her son of any 'vermin' he might have picked up while traveling. 

"I don't like him," Ma'ar says quietly once he's well away and out of Thoughtsensing range. "I guess he seems clever, but - he kept poking me." 

"I'm sorry," she says. "I meant to explain to you what I hoped to get out of that and ask if it was all right with you before he arrived. I can explain now, if you'd like, but it was less important than you feeling safe here and I think you are owed an apology for being put on the spot like that. He was very pokey."

"You were - worried something was very wrong with me, and you wanted someone who's studied healing to check? Except they don't have anyone with magic healing so he had to poke." 

"I was a little bit worried about that, because I feel very helpless here - I have a bit of magic healing but only a bit and when I use it I'll never get more, so I wanted to know if you were bleeding in your head or anything that'd mean I should use it now and not later - and I wanted someone to look at me, because I was a little worried I'd caught some disease when I arrived here, somehow - but also I was just very curious whether their doctors are very good. We don't need it for injury, in Cheliax, but we don't have anything for disease, and disease kills lots of people - Velgarth has more but they're still limited by who has Gifts --and if they really had a good way of studying medicine and the body without Gifts then that'd be really important to know about, for the project of saving everybody, and I was excited about that. I don't know if I've really learned very much about that. He does seem to know some things."

"He probably has books that he didn't show you. You could steal them?"

"I try not to steal things. But maybe."

"Huh, why not?" He shrugs. "It'd be stupid for me to try, I'd get caught, but I figure you have enough magic not to."