"Goddess go with you, then."

In the end what decides Carissa is the university in Almas. She slips away to check it out at the end of a full day of factory touring and demonstrations - she's not going to get her spells back in the morning, but that's the price of having only a few days to make an important life-altering decision - and she walks the lecture hall and the dormitories and it's - much better. The student discussions are lively and fervent and interesting and the students are either smarter or less afraid, or both, and don't mind it if someone else benefits from what they're saying, and the spells preventing unwanted people from getting in are very good but there are none at all preventing anyone from getting out, and there's magic everywhere, the magic of people who are learning magic and have a lot of free time, silly pointless absurd spell-hangings and chalkboards full of theoretical magic diagrams…

If you'd asked her whether Good universities are better than Cheliax's Evil ones any time since the Iomedaens conquered Cheliax she would of course have told you that Good universities are better, but she is very very surprised to realize that the university in Almas is better. It hurts a little bit like watching Corentyn burn hurt. It is obviously a reason to study here and she feels vaguely sick at the thought of studying here. 

She goes to the university library and reads books about spellcraft until all of her stupid mortal feelings are gone and replaced by a burning desire to stay in this library until she's beaten everything it knows out of it. 

And she goes to meet Alfirin's "wife" to go flying on Oathday.

"You must be Carissa Sevar," says Iomedae cheerfully. "I'm Freedom. Ready to go flying?"

"Yes," says Carissa, smiling back. She did her hair nicer today, and picked a prettier outfit.

She's going to be cold. Well, she's a wizard, probably she'd just rather solve the cold with magic than with clothing. Iomedae helps her up onto the airplane and instructs her in not touching anything and not distracting the pilot and, in the event of a crash, how to Feather Fall cleanly out of the top of the plane instead of ending up tangled in it. Then she explains several hundred miscellaneous other things about airplanes. How many different airframes Earth tested, including a bunch of stupid ones, and how if you're flying at really high altitudes you actually want a different wing shape than you want at low altitudes where the air is thicker and how a cleverly designed plane can be suited to both, and what they'll need to master to fly that high - jet engines, much improved metallurgy -

She catches herself in the middle of a digression about the Comet midair disintegrations. "But of course we should actually get in the air."

Carissa likes these people. …though Freedom claims to be Chelish and is the least Chelish person Carissa has ever met, even if she looks the part. "I'm ready," she confirms. She'll ask about the 'you are not a Chelish person' thing when they're back on the ground. 

Iomedae waves goodbye to her wife, and they're off. 

"What's Alfirin like?" Carissa asks once they've landed. It seemed ill-advised to have fraught conversations in the air and also it turned out to be far far too loud. 

Iomedae beams at her. "She's the smartest person I have ever met, and she's very stubborn, and has endless energy, and she's worried sick right now about making sure all of this invention makes the world better and not worse. I think you'll get on very well."

So she's not jealous! That's good. "I am going to stay here. I'd - rather make Cheliax rich than Andoran, but - I think this is the best place to figure out how to make magic items by machine."

"I want to make Cheliax rich too. It's just - we're doing all these things that it is very complicated to make sure have good effects rather than bad ones, and a lot of it's out of our hands but in a free country more of the things that are out of our hands will be good. And Cheliax will be a free country, too, but - right now it's under occupation, which is different."

Carissa isn't sure what to say to that. "The Reclamation liberated Cheliax."

"Yes," says Iomedae fervently. "But - there's still a lot to do, and you can do a lot of it with radio, and you can do a lot of it with occupying soldiers, and that leaves an awful awful lot that you can't do with either and that still has to get done…we'll figure it out. I do not mean to abandon Cheliax. I'm from there, too."

What a perfect opening. "You don't act like it."

"No, I suppose I don't. I've been away for a while….for centuries."

"Oh." From - old Cheliax, from Cheliax before it was Asmodean. It hurts the way the university hurt. "Have you been back?"

"I visited Westcrown. I - haven't gone to the place where I grew up. It'd be - very different. I don't think I want to see it. Probably I'll go someday. Where're you from?"

"Corentyn."

"Were you in the city during the war?"

"Yes. I made it out, during the fighting…the people I knew mostly didn't."

"...I'm so sorry."

This is infuriating for some reason. Probably because of a personal deficit within Carissa. 

"The liberation of Cheliax was noble and good and I am glad of it."