"Mmm. Anyway, I'm glad you'll be able to talk to your dad soon. I'm sure he'll be happy about it." 

"He will be, I told him in my last letter we'd get to it soon."

Ma'ar smiles. "How's the gryphon book draft coming?" 

"Really good! I'm a couple weeks out from a finished first draft, I think, and then it'll be a lot of downtime while I wait for Urtho's revisions."

"Nice. And then you'll have more free time for a bit to study, I guess. Are you taking the longer break before the next session?"

They're about to be a year into their training, and were mildly encouraged to take a month or two off, or do one of the more self-paced curriculum classes. 

"Yeah, I'm going to visit my dad again and see if the book counts like a self-study and see if I can perfect the lie detection thing, it's really hard."

"Oh! That seems really useful to have, the lie detection I mean." 

"It'll be handy! I need a lot more practice though."

"That makes sense. I really wish I could learn how to do it!"

"You might be able to? I think the trick is supposed to work for any Mind-Gift and you're a Mindspeaker. D'you want me to ask Lionwind if he'll teach you?"

"Sure!"

So she can pass on this question!

Lionwind seems dubious. "I - confess I do not have the first idea how to teach it to someone with a different Mind-Gift. I could write to my old teacher and see if she has any advice?" 

"You're a Mindspeaker too, even if you aren't a very strong one? You don't know how to do it that way?"

"No! Mindspeech is not at all the same kind of Othersense. I...suppose I could play around with it - that being said, I think whatever was taught among the Haighlei took years to learn with other Mind-Gifts." 

"Then how did they learn to get Mindhealers doing it, do they have lots more of us and it's complicated to figure out how to do it with a new Gift?"

"I know very little about this! My guess is that it arose because they ban almost all uses of Mind-Gifts period, and...perhaps do not actually know how to distinguish the different kinds of Gifts at all?" 

"- how could they possibly not know? They start out not very controlled - you'd have one person seeing Mindhealer metaphors and one person accidentally mindreading and one person making everybody around them giggly or sad or something -"

"I think those being obviously distinct depends on our - ontology of what Gifts are? I have read about places that do not distinguish Gifts from each other at all, and call all of it 'magic' and simply think that different people have different strengths at 'magic'." Shrug. "I am really very far from being an expert on this, though, I am just remembering things my teacher said to me decades ago." 

"Huh. That's so peculiar - I wonder if we're making some kind of mistake like that, only I've never heard of - some thing that only a hedge-wizard can do that an Adept can't which might mean it was a separate Gift with overlap, or anything..."

"I think I have heard rumours of such things? But nothing easily verified - which might not be surprising, a Gift that is not identified and trained in a standard manner will end up looking much more variable between people." 

"Yeah, that makes sense. The thing Urtho did to check me for Gifts and potential, does that admit of false diagnosis?"

"I would expect Urtho to be very good at it, but I have heard of Gifts being misdiagnosed that way when the testing was done by a less experienced mage." 

"Huh. Maybe there are - hiding Gifts somewhere - but I don't immediately see how to find out, oh well. Anyway, I'm sure Ma'ar would be glad if you'd figure out how to teach him to lie-detect."

"I will write to my teacher, then. And see what I can figure out by trying it myself."