"I don't have statistics."

"Fair enough. How long did you take?"

"Couple years."

"—wow. Okay."

"I wasn't in a hurry so I lingered a bit over some of the exercises."

He nods. "So... when I'm done, will I be able to contact you again? Or would you rather—not?"

"You can if you like."

He smiles.

"Is gating taught in this book?"

"No, that's not introductory at all."

"Oh. How will I find you, then?"

"You could just pick a time, again."

"Mmm yeah, okay. How 'bout a year from now, in case I'm a prodigy and more relevantly metamancy turns out to help after all?"

"Okay."

Smile. "Good luck regrowing your tree."

"I'm going to do it with magic, not luck."

He giggles. "Have fun regrowing your tree?"

"I will."

He lets go of the harmonics of the gate that leads to Promise's old tree and throws a small rock through to make it disappear.

Sigh.

"Hm?"

"- it'd be really useful to be able to gate anywhere in Fairyland but I am at something of an ebb in my ambitions right now."

"—you kinda do deserve some time to decompress. But for what it's worth, you're welcome in my world, I could find you a place to stay or you could stay with me, and I could get you food, and all that. ...what ambitions, if I may ask?"

"- I don't want to have to rely on you for any sorcery I want to do. Uh, it's sufficiently unprecedented that with your magic on top of it it'd probably - riskily with a lot of strategic thinking required - allow taking courts that are otherwise well protected."

"I can get you artefacts that keep the harmonics flat, and then you'd only need to recharge them periodically—and by periodically I mean once every few months, or once a year—and it needn't be me who recharges it, there are enchanters who sell this as a service. Is taking courts the ambition?"

"If you got the Queen you could pretty much fix Fairyland as fast as you could integrate fairies."