"I'm okay." Hugs are restorative. "If you hadn't stopped him so quickly I was trying to collect myself enough to see if there were any affected Legionnaires around to un-touch."

"Yeah, good plan. I saw at least one, but I don't know if she was affected or not, I was a little busy during the relevant time." Hug.

Hug.

Much hug.

But eventually she lets him go so he can talk to his brother.

Off he goes to do politics.

And Annie loiters in Cairidin's workshop with a book.

"Ah, Annie," says Caridin. "I have thought about it and as far as I understand your limitations, I believe you could learn runecrafting without much trouble, although weapon enchantment would be more difficult. Still, you could make conveniences like your frost amulet, and lamps. Stalas has been telling me about lamps."

"That would be great! ...Did they not have lamps yet when you left?"

"The advance that allowed light runes to glow bright enough for this purpose was recent. In my time they were little more than an obscure toy."

"What was the advance?"

"A shift in classification, and a new crafting technique. The pure elemental runes - flame, frost, lightning, and now light - all benefit from a process that requires fewer steps but greater precision than the previous standard."

"What are the steps for runing a thing? Is it usually about like what you did to make my amulet?"

"Your amulet is a slight modification of a basic runestone. Enchanted armour without the armour, in a way. The process for creating an ordinary frost rune is very similar."

"I want to try modifying light runes to see if I can get plants to grow underground with them, but I won't be able to actually see the light."

"Will that matter?"

"It'll mean I'll need help confirming my results."

"It would seem that what matters in this scenario is not what you or I see, but what the plants see; is it not so?"

"Yes, but if the rune doesn't work at all there's no point in putting a potato under it."

"True. Well, I imagine it will not be so very inconvenient to ask, 'does this glow?', of every new design."

"Yeah. Is there a simpler practice project I should try before I get experimental?"

"If you were my apprentice, I would have you make one flawless example of each pure elemental rune before I turned you loose to pursue such a project. And you might benefit from learning to craft all the other known runes as well."

Annie has paper on her; she pulls it out and starts writing runes. "These don't have an alphabetical order so I don't know if I missed any," she says, when she can't think of more.

"What's silverite?" asks Annie, writing out those five.