Milread and Noemi were both listening as Severin, who insisted that I sit across from him, spoke to me. They must have thought it was just as interesting as I did.

“Magic is ze application of mana towards a specific task. Mana, in its natural state, will reflect ze environment it is in and zat environment will in turn reflect ze mana zat suffuses it. Ze great Ostri Desert has six sand-aspect dungeons wizin it zat keep ze climate inhospitably warm and dry. Ze Deepwoods we are in is home to a dungeon zat releases marsh-aspect mana.”

“So dungeons give off mana that matches the environment?” I asked. “There are fire dungeons near volcanos and such?”

Severin made a wibbly-wobbly gesture. “Yes and no. Zis is a chicken and egg problem. You are familiar wiz ze analogy?” at my nod he continued. “Ze world produces all mana. Dungeons conduct zis mana to ze surface, like wells. Somewhere along zat path, the mana begins to resemble the environment. Some dungeons don’t match zeir location’s ambient mana at first glance. Which is usually because mana always has two aspects. Zere is ze physical and ze metaphysical, but one of zese doesn’t matter when casting somezing as infantile as fireball. It is enough zat you are aware zat mana has aspects zat are needed to cast a spell. Ze more complex parts you can learn at anozer time.”

I shifted on the spot, eager to get to the more hands-on part of the lesson, but also curious to learn more. In the end it came down to Severin’s preference, if he wanted to get to the practical parts I was okay with that. “I’m ready,” I said.

“Calm down,” he said. “We will get zrough ze basic zeory first. Mana aspects are important, it indicates how mana will behave. Ze same spell construct zat you use for fireball can be used for a windball, or pureball spell wiz only slight tweaks to ze structure. If you want to cast an actual fireball, zen you need to take your natural mana and shift its aspect to zat of fire. Or you could do ze same to ze mana in ze air around us.”

“I could conjure fireballs from nothing? Without touching my own mana... pool thing?” That sounded like it had a lot of very useful applications. Machine-gunning fireballs at my foes was a big ‘yes’ on the list of things I wanted to be able to do. As long as those foes were very mean and evil and okay to hurt and had already rejected all offers of friendship, of course. Maybe if I found them in the act of eating a baby or something.

“Yes. When you’re a level forty archmagus you can do whatever you like with the mana in ze air around you,” Severin said.

Noemi snorted a laugh. It didn’t hold her mood up for long, but she did laugh.

“So, to re-explain as I am sure I will have to do many times. Mana has what we call aspects, mirrors of certain parts of nature. Fire-aspect mana is wild and ferocious. Water is tepid and calm and flows rather zan breaking. Earth is firm and tough. Zere are hundreds of aspects. Some people like to tie zem to a wheel of colours to see which aspect is near which ozer.”

“Like... fire is red, water is blue?” I asked.

“Yes, exactly. Zose people are idiots. Mana doesn’t care about colours or any such zing. Some aspects are bizarre. If you meet someone wiz insect aspect mana, run.”

“O-kay?” I said. “So what kind of mana do I have? And how do I burn things with it?”

Milread turned around on the bench to face me. “You’re not burning anything on my wagon, right?”

I shook my head violently from side to side until she looked back towards the road.

No fireballs on the wooden wagon. Noted.

“Give me your hand,” Severin said.

“What?” I asked.

“Your hand.” He gestured with his. “Put it in mine.”

I placed my hand in his. He had calloused fingers that were at once wet and rough as they wrapped around my much smaller hands. “Like this?” I said and it was absolutely not a squeak. I was a bun of the world. I had held hands with boys (my dad counted!) before. This was nothing.

“Push mana towards your hands. You know how to do zis, yes?” he asked.

“Like when casting a skill? Yeah, I can do that.” I pushed some mana towards my hands until my fingers tingled.

“More,” he said, his mouth set in a big froggy scowl.

I pushed some more until my whole hand was tingly, as if I had sat on them for a few minutes and they had gone to sleep, but with less loss of sensation and a lot more magic. It felt as if my hand wanted to do something, and do it right now.

“You use cleaning magic a lot?” he asked. At my nod, he went on. “It shows. You have cleaning aspect mana.”

“Is that... good? Special? Rare and really awesome?” I asked as he let go of my hands and I took them back. I let the mana I had accumulated go as a burst of cleaning magic into the floor of the wagon that left it nice and shiny.

He made a dismissive noise. “It’s not uncommon. Usually for ze serving staff. Cleaning aspect is close to holy, light and water aspects. Casting your fireballs will be tricky.”

“Aww,” I said. “So, how do I do it anyway?” I wasn’t going to quit at the first setback!

“Fire aspect mana is needed first and foremost. Fire mana tends to consume a lot, and grow rapidly. It moves quickly and burns hot. Take your mana and make it do zose zings. Zere are no indicators for whezer or not you have it right. Get it close and it should work for ze spell. As I said, fireball is a beginner spell, it is very forgiving if your mana control is lacking.”

I focused on a hand, then looked up. “I have no idea how to do any of that.”

Severin rubbed at the spot where his nose would be were he a human. “Look,” he said. He brought his hand between us, then let me watch as a shimmering haze formed around it. It became more solid, then started to look a bit like gelatin that was wet and see-through. “Mud aspect. My mana’s natural state. And now, fire.” The shimmering mana stuff twisted and warped and was soon shivering a whole lot, then it started to wiggle as if in a heat haze, the edges flickering like tongues of fire.

“Awesome,” I said as I stared at the nearly transparent flames. “So, I do that with my mana and then I get fireballs?” I asked.

“You do zis wiz your mana,” he said before wiggling his hand as if to dry it, the mana fading away in moments. “And zen I teach you ze way to twist your mana into ze spell.”

“Cool!” I said.

What followed was an hour of the wagon bumping along and moving at a decent clip through the forests while I stared at my hand and scowled fiercely at it. At some point I even upgraded the scowl to a full-blown pout but that didn’t help much.

The skies, already dark and grey, opened up and let loose a torrent of rain that came down on us like a tipped-over bucket. Milread said some very unkind words to the sky as she pulled out a poncho from her pack and covered her arms so that her feathery arms wouldn’t get wet. The grenoil with us didn’t seem to care much about the rain.

I didn’t mind it much myself, it was a warmer rain, a bit like taking a lukewarm shower, and the passage under some trees broke apart the raindrops in a neat way. I still took out my own poncho and settled it on my shoulders with the hood up and my hat atop it. In the end the rain was only a mild inconvenience, and one that came in handy when my hands started glowing. “Oh, look, look!” I said as I waved my hand at Severin.

The grenoil snorted. “Ze first step and it only took you an hour. I should have asked to be paid whezer you learned ze spell or not.”

I laughed and stared at my glowing hand. My mana wasn’t as muddy as Severin’s. Instead it kind of flowed out like water and had an incandescence to it. “Praise the sun,” I muttered under my breath.

“Guys, we have trouble,” Milread said.

I snapped to attention, the glow in my hand poofing away along with a couple of points of mana as I looked around the woods and tried to spot the trouble. Fortunately, the trouble was easy to find. Unfortunately, it was all around us.

Pretty glowing lights bobbed out of the gloomy woods, most concentrated before the wagon but some flitting along the forests to our sides or daring to cross the ditches alongside the road to zip behind us.

“Pixies,” Milread growled. She stood up on her bench and reached for her sword. I saw Noemi do the same and Severin’s wand appeared in his hand. “Severin, you can do barrier magic?”

“I can.”

“Good. Get the cart some cover from their lightning attacks. In this rain they’ll be a nightmare to deal with. Noemi, rearguard. I’ll focus on the bigger groups.” Milread pulled off the hood of her poncho and made a growling noise deep in her throat as her long black-brown hair began to be plastered across her face.

“You’re going to kill them?” I asked as I tracked the glowing motes.

“They’re pests,” Milread said. “They won’t leave us alone and there’s no outrunning them, not in this weather. One pothole and we’ll be in a ditch when they come to pick us off. It’s best to make a stand. They’ll break before we do, don’t worry.”

“We could negotiate? Try talking to them?” I asked.

Milread snorted.

I opened my pack and rummaged around in a hurry. I found what I was looking for and stood up, hands tight around the last full jar of honey I had. I could do something here. I could stop my new friends from killing the pixies. I knew I could do it.

I looked at the determined cast to Milread’s face and the resigned look on Noemi’s. Both of them moved off the seat of the wagon, Milread patting Missy’s sides as the horse shifted at the sight of so many moving lights.

That’s when I jumped forwards and landed a dozen feet ahead of the wagon, my feet splattering into a muddy puddle halfway between my new friends and the biggest group of pixies.

“No! You idiot, get back here!” Milread cried. “I swear Juliette’s going to charge me double if you die.”

I flung my arm behind me, gesturing her back but keeping my eyes focused on the milling pixies. “No!” I said. “Stay back. Just, please? Trust me? I know what I’m doing.” I licked my lips and whispered. “I hope.”

The pixie swarm broke up into a grid wall, each pixie keeping about half a meter’s space between themselves and the next pixie until they formed a Christmas-light barrier in the air before us. Simple, but effective.

I put on my most cheerful smile as I greeted them. “Hello pixies. My name is Broccoli Bunch, and I want to be your friend.” I looked around, searching for their leader until I found the biggest in the lot. She, because there was a definite feminine cast to her features, was glowing a bright green and wore an intricate dress made of knotted leaves and vines over her tiny figure.

The leader pixie zoomed forwards towards me with a big scowl on her face. Her tiny arm slashed the air and a line of fire whipped out to slash into the ground a step ahead of where I was.

I stopped and stared wide-eyed at the glowing green ball. “H-hey now, that was uncalled for,” I said as I raised a hand before me to ward off the spray of mud. I made sure to keep my voice soft and gentle, as if I was dealing with a dangerous animal, which I suppose I might have been. “We don’t want trouble. We don’t want to hurt any of you.”

“Get back here, Broccoli!” Milread yelled. “You can’t negotiate with pests.” A glance over my shoulder revealed that she was bouncing on her feet, ready to charge over to me. She had a pair of swords out, steel flashing in the rain.

The pixie’s eyes narrowed and I could see the warmth radiating off of her. Milread was really making this complicated. “I’m sorry about my friend. She’s... ah, not from around here? Anyway...” I brought my prize forwards and displayed it to all the pixies. “You guys like honey, right?” I shook the jar a little.

I was suddenly the focus of a whole lot of attention but the mean green pixie shook her head.

“You... don’t?” I asked. Just to be sure, I slowly popped the lid opened and stuck a finger into the warm gooey stuff, then pulled it out. A long sticky line dribbled to the ground before I put my finger in my mouth. “Mmm, you really sure?” I said, mouth all sticky.

“Broccoli, what are you doing?” Milread hissed.

“I’m making friends,” I said with as much cheer in my voice as I could manage. It hid the slight tremble well.

This was dangerous. Probably not as dangerous as fighting the pixies off, but this put me right in the middle of the pack where I would be the first to go. I didn’t hold any delusions about surviving against thirty angry pixies flinging spells at me all at once.

“So... how would you guys like to share this entire jar of honey?” I asked. “In exchange, you let us go without trouble. It’s too wet for fighting anyway.”

I saw a few nods, but the lead pixie huffed and gestured at me with a burning hand. It was a violent back-and-forth motion, as if stabbing someone, then she pointed at me and then the jar.

“You want to just take it?” I asked.

She nodded. A cruel little smiled played out across her lips.

“But then I might drop it. And then no one would get the honey.” I let go of the jar for a moment, then caught it again.

There were lots of dismayed squeaks and chirps at that.

“How about I give you this jar right now?” I said. “And then you can all decide on whether or not we can go?”

The pixies started bickering and chirping at each other, most congregating in a big huddle as they abandoned their formation. The leader was apparently very much against the idea, but a lot of the other pixies really wanted my jar of honey.

“By the way,” I said, cutting off some of the chatter. “We’re really sorry to have disturbed you. We didn’t mean to trespass into your territory, but we need to get out of the rain and the place we’re going to is down this road. If we knew it was your home I think we would have found some other path.”

The pixies chirped and some danced around the others until finally a decision was made and the green pixie leader, wearing a pout that was impressive only because of how resigned it made her look, approached and signed at me a few times, then towards the jar and finally down the road.

I grinned, my shoulders relaxing. “Here you go!” I said as I carefully placed the jar on the ground between us and took three long steps back. “It was a pleasure doing business with you!”

A flight of pixies zoomed in and snatched it off the ground before rushing off into the forest. There were squeaks and chirps as the formation broke up to follow them.

The green pixie remained for a long time, looking at me with narrowed eyes while a few of her companions milled around behind her. “Bleek,” she said to me before darting off after her friends.

“You,” Milread said from right behind me, her words almost drowned out by the splash of rainfall. “Are an idiot. A brave idiot, but an idiot all the same.”

I grinned at her. “I won’t deny it,” I said.