"Bright consulted Timothy and Cam for help on humans. And he's not even in this dimension right now. You really really don't need to worry about it."

"I like Cir, I think he's clever."

"Yes, he's great."

"Exactly how did the ultra naive version of Maitimo not get the memo on buying people. Half the city-states on my world have figured that out by now."

"Did you get an overview on Godspring yet?"

"No."

"Do you want one or do you just want reassurance that if the kid wanted a daeva bodyguard/translator and an education he would have that and if he wanted to go home to his family he would have that and everything is fine?"

"I'm trying to follow the plot, and apparently it involves Bright buying a boyfriend, what do I need to make that make sense."

"Godspring has magic fountains. Being dunked in them before age five gives you magic abilities. They're named after the colors of the waters of the godspring, and there are different ones in different places but the ones in Cefax give you gold, red, blue, green, white. The magic abilities come with drawbacks. Whitemages are healers, but their immune system and ability to heal their own injuries gets worse and worse over time and they can die of a cold. Greenmages can suppress addictions, implant compulsions, alter preferences - there aren't any in Milliways and none will be allowed in Milliways, don't worry - and they lose their own instincts when they use their magic, they don't get hungry or cold and eventually they stop breathing. Goldmages can stop time or travel back in it, but doing it takes years off their lives. Bluemages can do remote viewing or pastviewing, and with excessive use they lose theory of mind. 

Redmages do - when they touch people they understand those people, very deeply and with magic intensity, and with very few exceptions they fall in love with them, and the more people they touch the worse their memories and capacity to form new memories gets.

Mages are all adopted from orphanages at age five, screened for being smart and healthy so they'll last longer, and then raised in these places called temple-guilds to be put to intensive use starting in their mid-teens. They're scheduled to do magic until it gets to the point where more magic would kill them - or make them impossible to take care of - and then they retire to be taken care of in the temple-guild and mind the next generation. Main use of redmages is sex, obviously, I don't think Bright realized. 

So Bright is visiting a temple-guild and trying to get a feel for whether we can buy out everyone's contracts or whether that'll just increase demand, how badly they'd take it if we break their godsprings, how disruptive it'd be to daevafy everyone, that kind of thing. And a redmage kid who is fifteen and a few weeks from his first thirty appointments, which will basically wipe out all his own memories, decides this is his ticket out and grabs him.

It's - touching a redmage is being bathed in magic certainty that someone understands you perfectly and loves you for it, it's fairly overwhelming. The kid asks Bright to buy out the rest of his appointments and keep him exclusively, which he agrees to immediately, and he pays the temple-guild off and takes the kid home and offers repeatedly to send him away but the kid hasn't taken him up on it."

"Okay."

"Mingling when you just say the short version people'll think something bad is going on."

"Temple-guilds are very bad."

"Mmhm."

"Cir doesn't want to meet me because if you're a redmage you don't want to be around people who might do something unpredictable and small children might. But we talk and he's happy. He is trying to convince his redmage sister to leave too but she doesn't want to because she likes one of the people she's supposed to touch soon."

"What?"

"This is all very detailed."

"I'm getting pretty good at reading and I read the whole trade deal!"

"Congratulations."

"There are gonna be forty more of them, Godspring has a lot of countries and Bright is visiting all of them."

"And I should not expect him to purchase additional boyfriends."

"Cefax is the only place where the godsprings give you redmages."

"Though there is probably a risk of Elves becoming known in human societies as very easily persuaded to throw around a great deal of money and magic if you come up to them with a sufficiently desperate plight."

"Sitting on a street corner feeding stray cats for a few decades."

"Hmm?"