"I don't mind waiting," shrugs Veron.

"Yes," he says, smiling adoringly at Saskia, "you can absolutely read in my library. If you feel like wandering around, you can do that too, but please stay out of the northwest wing; it belongs to my daughter."

"i will probably just stay in the library, but thank you."

"... If you'll be busy for a while, is it all right if I check on your other guests? With you and with them, I would rather not scare anyone."

"Fine by me. Not sure how they'll feel about it."

"Anything any of them are twitchy about? I imagine they wouldn't appreciate the weaponry."

"They probably wouldn't," he agrees. "But I'm not well-placed to tell what they'd be afraid of from someone other than me."

"Fair enough. I'll try to be as nonthreatening as possible."

"Good luck."

"Thanks. They all in the village at the lake we passed by?"

"Unless somebody's gone for a walk, yeah."

Nod.

"If there's nothing else, then I'll go do that?"

"Sure."

He waves, then walks off to find an exit so he can talk to some torture victims.

Saskia waves back, then looks at Serik curiously.

"how does it work to build your spells?"

"I'm not sure how usefully I can answer that without knowing anything about what I'm comparing it to," he says. "I'd offer to teach you how to do it, but I don't know if you'll want to learn - you'll probably mess up a lot at first, everybody does, and when you mess up with this magic the power tends to come out as heat and light. I set myself on fire a few times before I got the hang of it."

"oh. no, i don't think i'd like to learn it if that's what happens when you mess up. i'll stick with - you don't have a word for it, i'm going to use wizardry? i like being a wizard."

"What's being a wizard like?"

She considers.

"scholarly. it's very... i need to keep a lot of things in my head at once. it's hard but i like it."

"Huh. Sounds interesting," he says. "Well, you can watch me build this spell if you like, but it's not going to look like much, I'm just going to sit down and close my eyes for a while."

He goes to sit down in one of the chairs in the lounge in the middle of the bottom floor of the library.

Saskia watches for a little while, then goes off to read.

Veron has found an exit, has put away all of his weaponry into his bag of holding, and is walking towards the lakeside village. He's still not entirely sure what he's going to say, but he trusts that he'll figure that out when he gets there.

Most of the cute little cottages give the impression of being empty, or at least of containing someone who wishes you didn't know she was there.

But at the very end of the row, past the last house, there's a girl sitting on the lakeshore staring out at the water. She looks about twenty, and is definitely strikingly pretty.

He has ever met strikingly pretty people before, and the circumstances sort of makes it affect him even less than usual.

When he wants to, he can walk with absolute silence. Actually, he sort of defaults to that, now. Usually it's useful, but in this case he thinks it wouldn't be appreciated. Instead he makes an active effort to keep his footsteps audible, so she can hear him walking.

She looks up when she hears him, and regards him with a mildly puzzled expression.