"...I am not happy but being unhappy does not impair me significantly."

Nod.

Slight shrug.

Sitting in boat with face.

Drawing plants.

His tactical notes are starting to go in circles. He goes back to trying to refine his mental defenses to definitely cover orders.

Eventually Promise puts her drawings in her tree and then makes it generate and pinch off a box, with which she flies off. She comes back with some seeds in the box. She plants them and starts growing them.

The design work is not going so well that it can't be interrupted. He floats slightly closer in his stone canoe.

"Do you want any help with that? I think making plants grow quickly would be a fairly straightforward application of my magic."

"Faster than I'm doing it?"

"Potentially, yes. I've never done it before so I don't know for sure."

...She puts up a grid of those lights over a plant. "Try it a little and I'll see if it does anything to the harmonics?"

He gets out of his boat and goes over to the plant and touches it. It sprouts vigorously. The effect on the harmonics is negligible, no more than if the plant had decided to start growing like that all by itself for inscrutable plant reasons.

"Cool," she says.

"How grown would you like them? And what is harmonics?"

"Till it flowers. Harmonics are a feature of places which affects sorcery; the lights are for checking them."

He grows the plant some more. It flowers. He moves on to the next one.

"What can sorcery do besides grow plants and make light?"

"Healing. Temperature. Purify water, candy dewdrops, turn people into animals, the opposite of healing, fire, transmutation."

He nods thoughtfully and continues to grow plants.

Promise grows plants too since she can do more than one at a time. "Sorcery doesn't work in the mortal world but I don't know about other ones."

"It has an interesting set of capabilities but I can't see how any of them are immediately useful to me."

"Turning fairies into animals is a standard incapacitation since we can't die, and sorcery and some kind magic doesn't work for transformed people."

He nods. He grows another plant.

"No idea if it would work on the Wood mage."

"I would be inclined to suspect it wouldn't prevent her from using her magic even if the transformation was successful, and not inclined to rely on it even if I expected it to."

"Orders work everywhere but it's not a great idea to try to keep a powerful hostile vassal unless that's one's specialty."

"I am not inclined to try to keep her."