He laughs.

"If you did have to rebuild the spell from scratch for some reason what would you change?"

"Assuming I could juggle the hurricane successfully? There's hundreds of things I could make more efficient - not that I need the extra power, but who knows, I might find a use for it someday - and if I was rebuilding it all from scratch anyway, I think I could change the way it keeps my girls so it just made them immortal and turned all their pain to power and didn't wreck their minds eventually. That would be nice."

"Yeah, I wasn't suggesting you actually try it, I was just curious."

"It's a rush, working with that kind of power. But it's very hard to control."

"I'd say 'I can imagine' but actually I have no idea."

He laughs.

"Well, have you ever done magic?"

"A bit."

"Well -"

He holds up his hand and makes a tiny flame dance above his fingertip. It burns steadily, hopping from finger to finger as he turns his hand. Not nearly as impressive as anything else he's ever done with magic, but still pretty impressive by ordinary standards; you need a lot of mental discipline to play these kinds of tricks, and the flame moves smoothly, never stuttering or freezing even though he hardly seems to be paying it any attention at all.

"Ordinary magic feels like... holding a cup of water," he says thoughtfully. "It's very... controlled, very safe, very tame, and there isn't very much of it." The flame goes out. "The magic of pain isn't like that. You break someone's arm, and pick up the pain like you'd pick up your own power to light a candle with, and it's like wrestling a river. Active, wild, dangerous. And that's the absolute tamest it gets. What I've built up over the years is much, much more than that."

"Oh, good, I'd been worried that it was the kind of thing that didn't show gains until you were abducting a lot of different people to torture, but this sounds like I could learn to get things done using a knife, my leg, some water from the healing fountain and a surface easy to clean of blood."

He laughs. "Depends how badly you're willing to hurt yourself, I guess. And how well you can concentrate while you're at it."

"How bad is it if I fuck up?"

"Depends what you're trying to do and how you fuck it up exactly," he says. "If you just pick up the power and then drop it, it goes off in your face like fireworks. If you're trying to do something in particular, and you slip, you might get part of what you were trying to do and then have the rest of it explode. And while it's obviously possible to do complex permanent spells with pain magic, fucking those up will only sometimes blow up in your face right away; there's all kinds of subtle mistakes you can make where if you leave it lying around a while you'll come back and find the magic went weird while you weren't looking - a lamp gone from making light to making cold, a self-inking pen pouring floods of ink all over everything, a floating lamp that wobbles so badly it crashes into the wall and sets fire to the curtains."

"I've never been near fireworks up close; is that the kind of thing liable not to leave me in a condition where I could drink healing fountain water under my own power?"

"It might, if you're unlucky enough."

"Is there anything in particular I could do to avoid being that unlucky?"

Shrug.

"Well, if you let me teach you, you'd have someone around to heal you if you couldn't do it yourself. Failing that... try to work on as small a scale as you can until you get the hang of it? But trying to work with too little power makes it much easier to drop it by accident, if you're right on the edge where if you had any less it wouldn't work at all. And even with the bare minimum, if you fumble it the wrong way you can end up blind and on fire. Happened to me a few times when I was first learning."

"Noted. I am...interested in being taught, but in context that's pretty much the same category of thing as consensual torture and should therefore wait."

"Yeah, I thought you might say that."

"I would offer you a prize for guessing if you weren't, you know, the Lord of the Howling Mountain, and I weren't a girl who had come here with nothing but the clothes on my back."

He giggles.

"There's not much I lack for, it's true," he says. "Although I don't think that means you have nothing to offer me."

"I think the things I have to offer are mostly the kind of thing I would much rather give you because I wanted to than because you made a good guess."

"That's fair."

"So, important question: the flight thing, is that in the 'requires abductions' category, or in the 'plausible with knives and hammers and supervision until I'm confident I'm not going to drop anything' category?"

"You could ride the wind without abducting anyone, but you'd have to get very good at handling power before I'd expect you not to fall out of the sky. Unless you built it as a permanent spell, which takes time and power and delicate work."