I don't know if it explains any questions you've had for the last week. Everything else would count as true.

It does; it would for example allow you to travel fast enough to come here and back. 

The door opens and someone else steps in. His eyebrows are raised. I told you my objections to that explanation, Maitimo.

You did, Maitimo says peaceably. Will you please trust me and drop this and sing something plausibly useful for heat? Loudly? 

While not watching? I don't know how much Maitimo told you, but there's an information hazard.

He mentioned. He turns around and looks at the wall. And starts to sing.

He has a stunningly beautiful voice. 

You're amazing. I know you probably get that a lot, but.

A pellet of liquid water floats out of Amber's pocket. The elemental inside moves into larger volumes of borrowed water, which strings itself out and starts weaving symbols centered on the fires. The diagrams get tighter, evaporating quickly when they get too close until more heat elementals get acquired and made to keep them cool. Most of the fire elementals here don't need to be very tightly bound; they're doing more of exactly what they're best at, not being forced to obey a practitioner's every will.

This repeats a few times. But it doesn't need to repeat exactly once per elemental, and the forges need heat not smoke or flame or all the other varieties of fire spirit. Some of the more powerful ones can get sealed into objects for later without being too obvious about it.

Amber doesn't say much out loud; Macalaure would hear even if no one else does, and Maitimo doesn't know the details of what she's doing. But identifying a place to heat and a target temperature doesn't give anything away.

Maitimo watches her placidly. Macalaure keeps singing to the door. 

I think that's everything useful. Macalaure, thank you for helping with the cover story.

Sure. Are you planning to use this to hurt us? Could you, if you wanted to?

No and yes.

If it helps, you do have leverage over me and Maitimo has more. It's not as if the situation is entirely one-sided.

I don't want the power to hurt you. I want our cousins unaware you can, ideally, but it may be too late for that. 

They definitely know I can.
They also know I won't use this against you on their say-so alone, and that I'd support worse allies than you when our common Enemy is capitalized.

And they presumably have whatever leverage against you Maitimo does, only moreso. 

Take care.

I will. Hasn't been enough so far, but I will. Thank you.

Thank you. That'll be tremendously useful. It sounds like there are very good reasons not to tell my father about you but I can also guarantee you there are obvious-to-him avenues to leverage your capabilities which no one else will think of. I'd appreciate it if you'd think about whether there's a way to make it safe. 

I doubt it. There are a lot of reasons and some are more indelible than others. But I definitely don't refuse to think about it.

If you die, the danger of sharing your capabilities with people falls entirely on me?

The karma problem, yes.

My father is a very good and astonishingly capable person. The danger is the karma thing. 

Yes. One of the ways to reap good karma is to announce that you'll do some difficult thing and then succeed; is it true that he'd be hard to warn off this? Because that risk is sort of set up to be not worth it.

He'll decide not to be a practitioner. I wouldn't be one even if you told me how, it's obviously something where I'd be better off having ten people under me who I trust doing that while I make decisions with less regard for karma. He would be a bad practitioner but a valuable person to be informed about what's going on.

That lowers the stakes, at least.

We've already rather pledged ourselves to a path incompatible with your magic. 

That pledge is two or three of the reasons I was wary of letting even this much slip, to be honest.

I am not a reckless person; I am one who sometimes thinks my soul a reasonable thing to stake in trades. I'm not going to put my people in danger.

I don't have much choice other than to trust you with this, but I have been trying to trust as few people as possible.

Don't try to stake your karma along with your soul, if a chance comes up. Even if I'm already dead it's just a bad idea. When it comes back to bite you it will affect more than just you.