She shrugs. "Oh, just about everything - mathematics, natural science, chemistry, architecture, philosophy, history, calligraphy, poetry, literature, languages, music, religious studies, off the top of my head. It's an enormous school, as large as a small town."

"This world is weird but really great."

"Definitely."

"Yeah. It has its own problems, but I wouldn't trade it for anywhere."

Grin.

"What's the next port like?"

"Small place, though larger than the waystop I picked you up at. Think 'small fishing village'. I've got a few things to trade them, but mostly we'll be resting. If you need proper supplies beyond various dried lake creatures, you'll be wanting Cloudshear, the stop after. We're about two days out from the village, rest a day there, then four days to Cloudshear."

"Four days in the ley?"

"Yeah, it's a bit of a long jump for this ship, but the waystops aren't well spaced there."

"How often do accidents happen in these trips?"

"I've never been navigator or captain on a major one - when I was first starting, we had a few bumps on docking occasionally, the equivalent of knocking something over with your horse, but it's been a while since I had even a small accident. Potentially deadly accidents are rare on small jumps, especially if you avoid stormier lines. Still, ships do go missing, or come limping in with damage. I'm not sure about exact statistics, though I know small jumps are safer than sea travel or even land travel, some areas."

"Go missing and never return?"

"Presumably, they got caught in a bad enough storm or strayed out of lane and sank. It's more common with research and exploration ships, almost never happens on the leys we'll be taking."

He nods. "This whole—place—is completely out of anything I have any intuitions for."

"Same. I can - sort of compare ley-ships to the ships from my world, but not well."

"That's common, I suspect. You can always tell the first-gens by how they're - adapted, I suppose you'd say. Many of those pushing hardest for a way to leave the realm for others are first-gen."

"First-gen? As in, imported from other worlds?"

"Oh, sorry - yes, it's short for first generation. People who weren't born on a ley-island. Nobody's quite sure how many there are, but it seems to scale slightly with the populations of the world's this realm draws from. They're a small part of the wider population, though."

"Which is how many?"

"I'm not sure. Bajilda, Madeza, and Frisland all have populations in the tens of millions. There's a couple other large nations, though those are the biggest. There are eight known continent-sized ley-islands, and all are populated. There's at least thousands of small, independent villages and towns like the one we're approaching, and hundreds of city states like Cloudshear."

"And how long has it—been around? I mean, how long's this place's history?"

"Nobody knows. Bajilda has records dating back seven hundred years, and there were already well established communities when the founders arrived. There's ruins of civilizations older than any records. Some spirits have been able to give lower limits, though they're not very trustworthy - there's a desert spirit near Elgadhzi that claims to be thousands of years old, and that the world was much the same when she was born. There's scholars that think this realm's been around as long as the source worlds have had life."

"Thousands of years old doesn't sound that implausible, though, my world has that much history."

"A few have claimed significantly longer, but, yes, she's generally believed, even on less verifiable details."

"Like what?"