For the next two moons, Den and Floridiana stayed with the Lady of the Photinia Tree. Originally, the mage only planned to camp for one moon in any given location, but their magical power was developing so slowly that she extended their stay to gather more data.

Den had no objections. The Lady’s territory extended out from her tree trunk only so far as her root system reached, but that was more than enough space for two tents and a campfire. Their living conditions were by no means comfortable, but at least they were relatively safe.

As safe as you could get in the Wilds, anyway.

The day after the ambush, King Haplor sent a second troop of rock macaque demons to test the Lady’s borders. Once more, she raised her flower shields to deflect their acorns and, when they got too close, sprayed them with foul-smelling pollen that knocked them out. They retreated once more, leaving their injured behind for scavengers.

Den was starting to understand how that wild boar had gotten so gods-cursed big.

Over the next couple weeks, they endured several more of these probing attacks from King Haplor, interspersed with a few from the Lady’s other neighbor, a sambar deer demon with vicious, steel-tipped antlers.

“How can you stand living like this?” Den asked the Lady after she’d finally driven off the deer demon with a hailstorm of berries.

She looked pale, as she always did, but he thought she might be a little more transparent. It was harder than usual to make her out where she sat enthroned among her leaves. When she spoke, her voice was as faint as a midsummer breeze.

“Not all spirits have legs with which to flee danger, or wings with which to seek a different home, dragonet.”

Well, it wasn’t as if he had wings either. Although he could fly, buoyed by the water in the air. When there was enough water in the air. Dragons and deserts didn’t mix.

And anyway, he hadn’t been fleeing danger, precisely, when he first met her. Dragons didn’t flee. They just made – what would Sati call it? – strategic retreats. It had been a strategic retreat from certain death.

And he’d never wanted a different home. Not really. Not even when he gawked at King Yulus’ Black Sand Creek Water Court and fantasized about rising in the rankings of dragon kings. If it had been up to him, he would never have left his beautiful, precious pond to travel halfway (okay, a third of the way…uh, maybe more like a quarter?) across Serica so he could camp in a smelly tent under a smelly tree alongside a smelly mage, surrounded on all sides by smelly demons.

Den knew he should make allowances for the Lady’s exhaustion after she’d just fought off a demon, but he was grumpy and homesick and offended and maybe, just maybe, the tiniest bit embarrassed. “Haven’t you ever considered getting somebody to dig up your tree and replant it somewhere better?”

She just leveled that cool stare at him.

From the large rock she was using as a campstool, Floridiana mumbled without looking up from her notebook, “It would be difficult to transplant a tree this big…. You’d run the risk of damaging the roots too much when you dig them up, and the tree may wither and die….”

The Lady’s face remained calm – forcedly so. Den winced at his own clumsiness and waited for a reproof, but she didn’t speak again, and Floridiana’s pen never stopped scratching across the page.

Every day after lunch, Den and Floridiana had been repeating the measurements they had taken that first day in the Wilds. She would bore holes in the ground right on the Lady’s borders, and he would grow and shrink so she could calculate the percentage by which he’d increased his length. The notebook she used to record all the numbers had several pages in the back that were covered in a fine grid of evenly-spaced lines, which she explained was called “graph paper.” She was using it to make two plots: one of the depth of the hole she could bore, and one of the percentage by which Den could increase his length, over time.

“Any change?” The question came from the Lady, who seemed to want to change the topic as much as Den did.

Floridiana was chewing on the inside of her cheeks. She laid her brush across the scattering of dots on a plot, trying to convince herself that the handle was angling up. “It’s too early to see a significant increase in our abilities…. Presumably they develop at a slow rate, requiring me to collect more data before I can give you a definitive answer, my lady.”

In Den’s opinion, that was a very mage-like way of saying, “No.”

“Maybe the natural philosophers were wrong,” he suggested. “Maybe there’s no such thing as a ‘magitom.’ Or if there is, maybe their concentration isn’t higher in the Wilds.”

He peered at the two plots, unsure whether he should be hoping for the line through the dots to be going up with time, or staying flat. If the latter, maybe Floridiana would give up eventually and they could go home.

No, wait – who was he kidding? She liked danger. She liked rough living. She’d leaped at the chance to escape civilization.

If the former, perhaps he could convince her to stay here for the next several moons, instead of traveling deeper into the Wilds where the magitom concentration was unknown.

But then again, if her magical power started to grow dramatically, she might very well swear fealty to the Lady and live here for the foreseeable future, leaving him to struggle home on his own.

There were no good options here. He was stuck.

In any event, after two moons under the photinia tree, Floridiana detected enough of an upward slope on the plots that she announced it was time to seek a different location. This time, she’d learned her lesson. Instead of trusting the map in A Mage’s Guide to Serica, she asked the Lady for recommendations.

With no change in expression to indicate how she felt about either the question or the pair’s impending departure, the Lady mentioned the fief of the Lady of the Evergreen Azalea. “Give this to her when you meet. She will know you come from me.” And a sprig of scarlet berries drifted down into Floridiana’s palms.

She tucked it into her tunic, the two of them packed up their gear and prostrated themselves in thanks, and then they set off deeper into the Wilds.

Back at Honeysuckle Croft:

It was Boot who tracked Floridiana and Den’s progress across the Golden Plains and let Master Gravitas know when they entered the Wilds. The carpenter hadn’t rejoined Operation: Kill Lord Silurus, but he had consented to help with the school. Probably because all those classrooms meant a very large order of desks and chairs.

“So far, so good,” he reported at that week’s taskforce meeting. “Den and Floridiana went into the Wilds two weeks ago, came out, and went back in with all their gear. They haven’t come back out since. Musta found the spot they were looking for.”

“Oh good!” cheered Bobo. “I’m ssso glad everything’s going well for them!”

“Unless they haven’t come back out again because they got eaten,” muttered Master Rattus.

I didn’t know what Master Gravitas had said to him, but the rat spirit was back too, albeit on the same terms as the cat. Personally, I thought that Master Rattus was helping in anticipation of all the crumbs that the students would drop. He was probably plotting an expansion into the school walls.

Anyway, before his negativity could infect the meeting, I intervened. Since there’s nothing we can do about their experiment, we should proceed with our plans for the school. Stripey? What do you have for us?

The whistling duck demon reported, “I spoke to Anasius yesterday. He presented our proposal to the Baron, who has approved building a school on the common wastelands.” Here Stripey stopped, but not as if he were done talking.

But? I prompted.

“But he wants us to pay for the construction ourselves.” (Barony-wide fundraising drive, here we come.) “And we need to show him the blueprints before we start building so he can approve them.” (Okay, fine, that was sort of reasonable.) “And he will send inspectors at each stage to make sure that we’re following all the proper rules and regulations for buildings in the barony.” (What regulations?!) “And there will be a final inspection once the building is finished, before any students are allowed inside.”

And there will be an official fee and an unofficial bribe for each of those steps, I inserted acidly.

Oh, I remembered how building projects in the Empire had operated. I just didn’t like it as much when I was on the paying end.

Correction: I didn’t like it at all.

“Yes. In addition, all supplies, from the wood to the clay to the straw to the furniture, must be purchased from officially-licensed purveyors.” Stripey bobbed his neck at Master Gravitas, who smiled his cat smile.

I smiled too. Hey – I was a generous being. I had no objections to my allies enriching themselves off construction projects. It incentivized them to stay allies.

“Finally – and this is more a question for Floridiana when she returns – the Baron wants to see the proposed curriculum for each subject and grade level so he can determine whether it suits the needs and morality of the barony.”

That is wise.

I could have kicked myself for not putting it in the proposal myself. Of course we didn’t want to train the children in skills that the baron deemed worthless or, worse, instill in them a different morality from their parents’. Could you imagine the fights that would cause? My goal here was to improve everyone’s lives – not whip up intergenerational conflict.

“But the school will teach the three R’s, right?” Mistress Jek double-checked. “The Baron is okay with the kids learning the three R’s?”

“Well, he wants to see the rest of the curriculum before he makes any final decisions, but he didn’t have any objections to their learning the basics.”

Okay. Good. We’re going to have to wait for Floridiana to return before we can develop the curriculum. For now, we’ll build the schoolhouse. Masters Gravitas and Jek?

Master Jek tensed at getting called on in public, but he answered, “I’ve been talkin’ to the neighbors. They say they can help build the school, same as how they help when houses burn down.”

That meant we had a construction workforce, free of charge. Good. So now we just need to buy parchment and ink so we can draw up blueprints for the baron.

Unfortunately, stationery supplies in modern Serica were expensive, and of course the taskforce had no funds of its own, but in the end, Stripey lent us the money at three percent interest. We’d pay him back from the students’ school fees later.

But getting the official seal stamp on our blueprints took infuriatingly long. Ten-classroom building: rejected for having too large an architectural footprint. Six-classroom building: rejected for being structurally unsound. Four-classroom building: rejected for having an unlucky number of classrooms. Two-classroom building: rejected for being an eyesore. Every time a design was rejected, we had to scrape the ink off the parchment and draw a new one. It was a waste of ink, and I started worrying that we were going to wear a hole in the parchment and have to buy another sheet.

It took me much longer than it should have to realize that what we were supposed to do from the start was hire the baron’s scholar to draw blueprints. That required another loan from the duck demons, but there was no way around it.

Once the schematic was approved, there was the building permit to pay for, and then, at each stage of construction, an inspection fee and bribe. After the plot of wasteland was cleared, after the wooden frame went up, after the wattle and daub was mixed, after the walls were plastered, after the plaster dried, after the roof was thatched….

Meanwhile, Master Gravitas was hard at work carving desks and chairs. There was so much work that he finally took on Cailus as an apprentice, meaning that the boy moved out of Honeysuckle Croft and into Master Gravitas’ spare bedroom. There was much wailing from Taila, and a droopy, depressed adjustment period for the rest of the family, but now his future was assured. More good karma for all of us!

At last, eight moons later, after the scholar had tapped and measured and hemmed and hawed and pocketed his bribe for the final time, we were done. The baron announced that he would honor the community’s efforts by paying a visit to the schoolhouse in person.

A ceremony! That was something I knew how to organize!