I decide to amuse myself by testing whether they’re using magic to improve ride quality like I think they are.

I start casting—

I have a better idea.

“Hey, gonna practice my magic,” I tell Agnes and Heather. Agnes nods and I get a “Go ahead” from Heather.

Then I start casting.

Once Find Spellcraft is up, I start pointing it at stuff to see what’s magical. Mas and Chase show up, obviously, a pair of dots maintaining position ahead of us. There’s another dot between them, perhaps a strengthening or cushioning effect on the yoke?

Note to self: Improve Find Spellcraft so I can see the shapes of magical spells rather than a single point.

I sweep Find Spellcraft down the length of the wagon. Stephanos is doing something, which I’m not too surprised by. Liv is as well, which is more interesting. Looking at something really hard? Oh, she’s probably taking a shift on spotting duty. When I reach the wheels I find more dots! Not exactly one or two per wheel, there are more on the front and right wheels. The front spells are probably brakes. The right wheels are, what, stability, a way to load the cart more easily, a way to hop the curb to get off the road if necessary? Either way, theory… not quite proven, but that’s pretty strong evidence. I’m happy, so I dismiss the spell.

Now, back to practicing Shield for—

“Tactics discussion,” Stephanos says, carefully stepping over benches to join us in our back rows. “Everyone listening?” He pauses to wait for everyone to pay attention, which I use to close my grimoire while I’m not looking at it. “I’ll go fast. We’ll be passing through the Calfort vicinity, part of the Bascroft Forest, the Fordlams vicinity, the foothills of the Leoswell Range, the Stonehill Forest, and finally the Stonehill vicinity. Lines of sight are short throughout, especially in the Bascroft Forest, where some regions are only trimmed back every few hundred days.”

Seems like the worst situation in which to be low on people with spotting skills, honestly.

“Our caravans are large enough to scare off most beasts when moving,” he continues confidently. “However, we still have some trouble occasionally, as I hear your friend noticed. The most common offenders are Gifted large cat analogues,” he warns. “Do not go into Bascroft Forest alone, and do not leave your back unguarded.” He looks around, making serious eye contact with everyone.

I’m sufficiently scared, yes. That’s a problem even with large cats on Earth. I believe that it’s traditional in some areas to wear headgear with faces painted on the back of the head to make tigers think that you don’t have your back turned to them. A tiger with a Gift could be a nightmare.

“Good,” Stephanos says. “Large birds are the other major threat. There’s been trouble the last few hundreds with a new Gifted hawk species that likes to do hit-and-runs, so keep an eye on the sky while we’re in the Leoswells. Our first priority is to get everyone home safely,” Stephanos continues. “We can always build more wagons and grow more food. Our second priority is to get this food to Stonehill. If we’re attacked by something big, defend Chase and Mas until they can line up a run on it, and if that doesn’t work we cut and run. A constant stream of short whistles means there’s a fight, a single constant whistle means run.” He looks around at our group. “Any questions?”

Heather starts with a softball. “How persistent and durable are the hawks?”

“Not particularly durable,” Stephanos answers. “just fast and quiet. Twenty foot wingspan. Shoot them and they fall out of the air. You just have to see them first.”

That means that we shouldn’t have much trouble with them, not with Liv and Bob around.

“Has there been any banditry recently?”

“No.”

Heather sits back, looking satisfied.

“I saw at least one spellcaster with area-of-effect capability,” Liv says. “What tactical signals do you use to avoid friendly fire?”

I see what you did there, Liv, because I saw the spellcaster you’re talking about too and they were definitely using fire.

“Mostly Paula just shouts,” Stephanos says, wincing. “We just try to avoid being between her and her target, or on the target’s far side.”

Okay, so, don’t be collinear with the firebender and her target.

Bob goes next. “What’s yer policy on loot?”

Of course he asks about where he’s going to get his next hit of magic cultivator drugs.

“If it can be split evenly, we split it evenly. If it can’t be split, we throw dice for it.”

“We?” Bob quirks a skeptical eyebrow.

“Participants in the fight as measured by my System. I use the Enchanted Riddle.”

I look to Heather to see what her reaction is, since that means nothing to me and I figure she knows all the details about every random Gift in the Republic.

Heather’s face tells me nothing. Which is probably not a good sign, since I think she’d let herself seem happy but would suppress a negative reaction.

I need to get an encyclopedia of Gifts to crunch through. Maybe Heather has one that I could borrow!

I raise a hand. “Will we be traveling after nightfall?” I hope that my question even makes sense, with this place’s weird sun and time.

“Not unless we’re delayed substantially on our way to Fordlams.” He doesn’t look like he’s too confused or annoyed by the question, which I’ll call a success.

I have no further questions. It looks like nobody else does either, so Stephanos heads back to the front of the passenger cabin and leaves us to return to what we were doing.

Let’s see. What was I doing? Uh, to-do list, learning Shield for One! Yes.

Wait, no, bad idea. I don’t yet know if it produces wind resistance or if it’s kinematically coupled to me or what I’m sitting on. So if the shield goes up wrong it could pull the entire cart off course like a giant sail or parachute. So I’m not going to be practicing Shield for One right now.

Okay, what else can I practice? I should probably get Make Ready up and running so my whole shield setup is solved when I learn Shield for One. That’s probably the smart thing to do. But Make Ready is metamagic, so what do I use it to modify? I could cast Find Spellcraft to entirely isolate Make Ready, but I think I have it to the point where I can reliably cast it from memory so casting it more won’t buy me much. I could choose Belighten just because it’s simple and won’t mess up my attempt to learn Make Ready. Or I could learn, hm. I could learn Message? If it worked more like the D&D version I’d say it’s a necessity, but given that it doesn’t look to have any recipient-finding functionality it’s less useful than just shouting loud enough for Liv to hear.

I think that I’ll stick with Belighten. Still useful, but not too many new things at once.

I bend down to hide the grimoire between my feet, where the wind can’t blow the pages around. I flip through it to find Make Ready. Then I cast the first of many iterations of Read Mana, followed by the beginning gestures for Make Ready.

It’s… surprising how quickly learning magic has become boring. I hope I get better at learning these gestures sooner rather than later. Or maybe I could sink my teeth into something research-y. I’d even welcome a chance to start using some of these spells!

Well. Except for the part where that would mean getting in fights, which, bleh.

About five minutes later, barely two attempts in, Stephanos starts blowing his whistle loudly. Not wildly, but louder than I’ve yet heard it. I look up and see us approaching a small town, about the size of Caulfield. We blow through it only a bit below full speed. I feel like I could stick my hand out the side of the wagon and touch the buildings rushing past me. I don’t, obviously. This open passenger compartment is kind of scary, to be honest.

It takes only a few seconds to travel the length of the town, Stephanos blowing his whistle the whole time. I’m pretty sure I see someone looking at us out an upper-story window, but otherwise the town seems deserted.

Then we’re clear and on our way toward the next town.

I return to my spellcasting.

The next whistle call signals a hill instead of a town, and I hear it being repeated back along the wagon train behind us. It’s loud, enough to leave my ears ringing, a situation that only gets worse when Chase and Mas start chanting again and lean into the harness. The ride doesn’t change in any way that I can notice, not the way our surroundings shook when we left Calfort, but our wagon still takes on some undefinable sense of weight. I find myself gripping the seat in front of me with white knuckles, like I’m riding a roller coaster or sitting in a car being driven by the kind of person that can’t resist showing off their fancy car. We hit the hill at full speed and cruise straight up, going fast enough that I sink into my seat as we curve upward. The wagon creaks and rattles under the acceleration. We lose speed toward the top of the hill, but when we crest it we’re still going fast enough that my stomach rises and I frantically hold myself into my seat.

I said I’d been on roller coasters, not that I liked them.

Stephanos blows another whistle call as we start on our way down. I hear a martial yell behind us as the next team of carters hits the hill, then a near-repeat of Stephanos’s call. I suppose that’s a sufficiently complex operation that everyone has to signal that they’ve made it so we don’t leave anyone behind!

I try to settle my racing heart and go back to my spellcasting.

The next interesting event is that I get Belighten to work. Not Make Ready, of course, but it makes sense that if that one fails and you attempt to cast another spell anyway, the second spell goes off as it would have if you’d done it normally. It’s not all that interesting, of course. Belighten is literally just a flashlight. In fact, it’s not even that. It doesn’t have any of the fancy control circuitry that my other spells have had, so it doesn’t even follow my finger. It’s literally just a light bulb. It does follow me, but only in the same way that Read Mana does, locked to the coordinate frame that follows my origin.

The cooler part is what Belighten reveals about the interactions of the sparkles. Specifically, this spell is simple enough that I can see its high-level organization. There are four mana sources, in two categories. Three of the sources, after some occasional interactions with each other, eventually feed sparkles of mana into loops that accumulate dense whirlpools of those colored chips. The last source fires its stream through those whirlpools, looping around so it can go through the second whirlpool two or three times at different angles, and then exits the front of the spell where it goes about six inches and then explodes into light.

I can really see why the grimoire classifies mana by type, now, but I’m also not sure that it’s right about that classification. To me, this smells like assembly programming. That little loop-de-loop that the main stream does to use the second whirlpool multiple times, that screams “data segment” to me, the way a really dangerously hand-tuned bit of machine code might save a constant that can be used multiple times in different ways to save program space. Like, if you can write your code to use the number 137 twice instead of 120 and 17 once each, you’ve saved a whole address of memory and potentially a whole fetch-data-from-memory operation, which can be incredibly important when going out to a stick of RAM takes as much time as executing a thousand CPU instructions.

At some point I’m going to have to sit down and trace every single mana flow in every one of these spells to figure out exactly how these interactions change the mana that’s involved in those interactions. That’s going to be a horrible nightmare and I really hope that it turns out that there’s some underlying system that the grimoire missed when it was building its ludicrously oversized table of aspects.

Maybe half an hour after that, I hear Liv muttering something. In response, Stephanos starts blowing on the whistle again, loud enough that I cover my ears. This time it’s not a single signal, or even a single call—it sounds like an entire song. He pauses after a few measures, and I hesitantly take my hands off my ears in time to hear a similar reply drifting toward us from ahead. I strain my eyes and realize there’s another caravan in the distance, just cresting a hill and starting to come down the slope towards us. It’s at least a mile away, so their wagons, as big as they are, are still just dots in the distance.

Stephanos whistles another reply, and then switches to a short, sharp sequence that’s repeated back down the line. We begin slowing immediately, quickly coasting toward what I realize is a pull-out not far ahead of us. It’s noticeably less refined than the road, but it’s still a long, flat expanse of stone where our wagons can move aside.

I’m curious about how this all works, to say the least. I don’t think I’d seen turnouts at any previous hills, but I also haven’t been paying that much attention. The extra-loud call when we started going up the hill would have been to warn anyone on the far side of the crest, then. And I suppose the song-like call that Stephanos blew was him negotiating with his counterpart in the other convoy for the right of way?

We pull over and come to a halt. Various whistle calls go up and down our line multiple times during that process. The other convoy approaches rapidly, and when it reaches us I see that it’s going substantially faster, easily highway speed. The wagons still have containers but they’re visibly lighter, and the combination of higher speeds and lighter loads mean that the wagons are audibly rattling as they blast past us.

One of their lead carters shouts something at us that I can’t catch because they’re going too fast. Imagine standing on the shoulder of the highway and trying to hear someone yelling out the window of a passing car! Our carters, of course, understand him perfectly, as demonstrated by Mas’s shouted imprecations and Chase’s laughter.

We take a short break. Everyone gets water, I cadge a bit of excellently peppery jerky off Bob, and we set off again to the tune of Stephanos’s whistle and our carters’ chanting. I return to my magic.

The framework for Make Ready is fascinating. The big thing is that it’s pulled way in close to me and extends off to the side, rather than being right in front of me like other spells. That’s obviously so that it doesn’t overlap with the spell it’ll be affecting. It also has a large shield in front of it, an angled wall of red mana that deflects incoming sparkles and redirects them upward. Probably so that under-construction spells don’t interfere with Make Ready? Most spells seem to have half-finished stages where they spray unfinished mana everywhere, and I bet that’d cause trouble if it got into another spell’s matrix.

Huh, there’s an idea. After finishing that attempt, I cast Find Spellcraft. It works exactly like I’d expected. But this time, I add something of my own design to it, after I’ve laid down the entire formation but before I start creating mana sources. I repeat some of the gestures from Make Ready out at the full extension of my arms, adding an angled barrier in front of Find Spellcraft. Then I poke Find Spellcraft and start it running.

It works exactly like I’d expected. The big angled barrier attaches itself to my finger just like the rest of the matrix. And the spell’s cone is folded over, reflected over a diagonal plane where it hits the angled barrier I’d placed.

It’s not perfect by any means. I couldn’t get very good global flatness, so the rightward-facing cone is noticeably distorted. The angle isn’t anywhere near ninety degrees. It’s crude, useless, and ugly.

But it worked, and between my analysis of Belighten and my first successful modification to an existing spell, I’m starting to feel like I’m getting this whole magic thing.

Agnes whacks me on the shoulder, grinning, in what I think was supposed to be a cool supportive way. I’m not sure if it counts as dudebro if you’re a girl and wearing real functional plate armor, but that’s a bit of what it feels like. I’m mostly just glad she didn’t activate her holy powers to pat me on the back so hard my arm fell off.

Heather, on the other hand…

“Whitney?”

“Yeessssss, Heather?”

“Should we be concerned?”

“Nooooooo, no, not at all! Why do you ask?”

“You’re giggling like the kind of wizard we usually have to haul away.”

“Oh, no, no, this is like a normal Tuesday on a new project for me. Trust me, I’m a perfectly sane mad wizard.”