It's generally the custom, yes. They bring her one; it's sort of like a short cotton nightgown with drawers to go underneath, and she can borrow a fluffy towel to dry off after. 

Over at the pool, Lacie is already paddling back and forth. "This is great! I can't believe we got a pool, I didn't even know you could make them in buildings like this -"

She lowers herself in. "Leareth is very powerful, isn't he. Does he like showing off in general or only for confusing otherworldly visitors."

"...I think mostly the showing off is for confusing otherworldly visitors, although he definitely dazzled me enough when I was being recruited for his organization, and he'd do that more for, oh, the one mage in the world who's best at inventing artifacts or what have you, if he wants them here. And you're even more one-of-a-kind than that, right?" 

"Not where I'm from, but here, I guess so."

"...Yeah. I'm sorry, this must be a lot to get dragged into - I don't know the whole story but some mysterious god of magic and their possibly-insane powerful priest were involved?" 

The water is a very pleasant temperature, cool on her skin at first but just right after one lap back and forth. 

"Yeah." Carissa is doing a lot less thinking today. Probably that's what she should've been doing all along. "I don't know much more than that either. I think Leareth would really like to know what Nethys wants but in my world it's well known that trying to figure out Nethys drives you mad."

"Great." Lacie rolls her eyes. "Some completely new and exciting way for a god to annoy Leareth - be impossible to understand without going insane." 

She doesn't think about this in much detail either other than to try to remember it. "Have all of the local ones annoyed him?"

"I guess some are mostly neutral on that axis, by dint of not - doing things, so far as anyone can tell, or only doing things that no one with big goals in the world cares about. I don't know what the deal is with Kernos of the Northern Lights, but Leareth isn't too worried about His main territory being - not that terribly far away from here." She pauses midsentence, as though swapping out that phrase for something else. 

She is presumably not allowed to know where she is. "Mmm. We have some gods who don't seem to really care about any human-scale things. In Tian Xia there is a rat who ascended by accident. Cares about rat things."

"- What? Goodness! How did that - I did not know I needed to know this but I'm now desperately curious how a rat accidentally ascends to godhood!" 

"Unfortunately I don't know much about it either. I mean, I know that there was a fight among the gods, and it left - people call it a god's corpse but it's just a kind of magical residue - and contact with those can cause ascension, and the rat ate it.

Usually the process of trying to ascend kills you, and I don't know what the rat managed that most powerful casters can't. But," shrug.

"Mmm." Lacie falls silent for a bit, just enjoying the water. "Heard you got your spellsilver sorted out?" 

"Mmhmm. Should be done in a couple of days."

"That's good." Lacie doesn't seem to be able to think of anything else to say. 

Carissa's going to be pretty mediocre company until she's more confident she's thinking the right things though she is optimistic about getting there. They can swim awhile.

Lacie lets her be and occasionally makes some small talk about her nieces and nephews in [unspecified city in Velgarth]. 

Leareth's staff mostly let her be while she's working on her enchanted dagger, though the next night Lacie does ask if she wants to join them in the dining hall rather than eating in her room. 

Yes, she'd love to. (Or at least it's informative and she doesn't actually like or feel safe while hiding in her room not interacting with people.)

Then she's welcome to join them for breakfast and dinner! The staff don't treat her any differently compared to before; they're mostly caught up in their own conversations, but they're friendly enough and sometimes curious.

She gets a note that whenever she's done with her magic item, Leareth wants to meet along with some of his other people who're interested in learning the basics of her magic. 

She should probably get herself together, by then, in that case.

She attends breakfast and dinner and tries to make friends. She suspects it'd also be a good idea to find a hookup, for the unsupervised conversation and the reason to care if she's alive and the opportunities to impress her by telling her things that aren't secret but that no one's mentioned yet, but she's still feeling stupidly prickly so she doesn't do that yet, just scouts candidates without saying anything. 

She spends most of the day working on the magic item and the rest of it trying to feel less scared. She is pretty sure it's not helpful at all, so she just needs to find some frame that makes things not feel tremendously important and high stakes. Leareth still hasn't had her punished and at this point probably isn't going to bother, presumably because he is satisfied that she won't be defiant again. He wants her to - do more for him - but not things she's at all equipped to do -

- well, if he told her to dig ditches she'd be digging ditches, and telling her to figure out how you ought to design a god isn't objectively more unreasonable than that. Though mostly her answer is that she would make herself smarter. ...maybe that's an acceptable answer. Retrain into wondrous items and make myself a headband. It has the advantage that if he lets her do it she gets a headband (!). Maybe that entire genre is safe. If he told her to dig ditches she'd be digging ditches with an Unseen Servant. 

She's not sure the line of thought exactly holds together but it's soothing. 

As promised on the fourth day the dagger is complete. It's got the base enchantment to be wielded more easily and to do more damage, you have to lay other enchantments atop that, and then once you've attuned to it you can teleport it to your hand from up to 100 feet away. 

She lets someone know that it's done and she can present it and teach her magic now.

Leareth arrives. He actually smiles at her, when he asks if he can look at the dagger, and then he spends a long time presumably examining it with his equivalent of Detect Magic and looking almost awed. 

He brings a woman with him, this time, about Carissa's age or a little older and with incredibly dark, nearly true-black skin and fuzzy short-cropped hair that, despite her youth, is a salt-and-pepper mix of mostly silver. 

She introduces herself as Nayoki and starts peppering Carissa with questions about how the process of learning arcane magic works. 

Carissa can explain how learning arcane magic works. They're going to start on cantrips, the easiest kinds of spells. She'll need to make up a spellbook for everyone who wants to learn. Once you get used to the magic manipulations involved in drawing, stabilizing, and casting spells, you can try harder spells; normally new wizards don't have the channeling capacity for that yet, but Velgarth mages might start out with an advantage there (which is a terrifying thought but she's not going to try to slow down their progress at not needing her, there's no safe way to do it). Over time you can get good at more powerful spells. You need third-circle spells to pick up arms and armor enchanting, but most people learn wondrous items enchanting first, and those can be learned at second circle. (Carissa didn't learn it, because by the time when her class was scheduled she was already almost third and decided to go straight into arms and armor, which had a better stipend and more travel opportunities.)

No one can naturally through deliberate practice acquire the channeling capacity to get past third circle. However, use of magic in emergencies under time pressure - mostly combat, but people also get it from espionage - can get you past third circle. To, in principle, ninth, though that's very rare and the overwhelming majority of people who want to get that good die instead. In Golarion most wizards either stop at third and run a magic item shop or serve as guards to rich people or something like that, or they become adventurers, which translates loosely as mercenaries but more positively connotated, and go for fifth. Most wizards who adventure stop at fifth because that's where you get Teleport and Permanency and that's enough for you to be rich for as long as you live, and it's harder to level past that.

Leareth is still captivated by her dagger, but Nayoki says he's definitely going to want to learn cantrips even if it doesn't make sense for him to dedicate a lot of time to learning more, given his many other responsibilities. And they've got a roster of interested people, including a couple of the Healers who don't have mage-gift even in potential and are very excited at a way they could maybe learn magic anyway, even if it's more limited than being born a Velgarth mage. What does she need for spellbooks? Does it need to be her personally who makes them or can she make a demo one and then Nayoki can delegate for someone else to copy more? 

In principle they can be copied by anyone but she can tell which parts have to be copied precisely and which don't and the diagrams are really complicated and in four colors of ink. (She shows her own spellbook.)