Early the next morning, before true dawn, Faye and Gavan left the Steading behind in truth. Faye kept running the events of the previous night through her mind but could not see another way through them. She tried to push it away, but her traitorous thoughts would not let it go.

“Is it like that everywhere?” she asked.

Gavan did not ask what she meant. She assumed he would know what she meant and was proven right a moment later.

“No. But hard times call for hard measures.”

Faye just hummed in response. She found it hard to believe that or justify the thought process that led to it.

“It’s not like that where you’re from?” he asked.

Faye tried to shake her head but could not. “There are some places that would judge that harshly… yes. Not my home, though.”

Gavan looked at her, then nodded. “It’s the same with me. There are more resources in the cities, and it is less common there. Not that it would never happen…”

Faye held up a hand. “Can we not talk about it? I already feel like I’ll be having nightmares for weeks.”

Gavan nodded. “Why don’t we start on the basics of other magics, instead?” he asked.

“I’m not sure I’ll be the most attentive student right now,” she replied, “but I’m up for trying.”

They set themselves a good pace back to the road, joining it fairly quickly. Setting a better pace now they had a true path, they whiled away the early morning hours with talk of mana, spells, and healing. Gavan was a decent teacher, Faye thought. He was thorough. Tended to linger overmuch on certain aspects of a topic he thought were fascinating, but it was not as boring as Faye had worried when she was told that learning magic the long way was a years-long endeavour.

“… allowing us to remove the pain but knit fewer things back together. On the other hand, we could quickly patch someone up, but forego the pain removal. You don’t get many chances to perform that version of the spell before people stop coming to you for help.”

They had walked for miles. The road followed the gentle slopes of the plains with ease. The plains grasses looked half-dead, but even so it was a captivating sight, so see almost nothing but grass for miles around. In the far west, the mountains sat on the horizon, and here and there, clumps of trees could generously be called woodland.

It was peaceful.

So why could she not forget about the so-called trial? Everyone else seemed to be fine with it.

Maybe that was the problem.

“You’re not listening, are you?”

Faye snapped back to reality and blushed. “I’m sorry, Gavan, I was miles away.”

Gavan shook his head with a bemused smile. “That’s alright.”

They lapsed into thoughtful silence for the next couple of hours, until Gavan called a halt at a flat section of land that had been cleared of grass.

“Regular stopping spot. Dry, level, and if we’re lucky someone’s left firewood for us.”

Sure enough, buried in a shallow hole close to the road were a small pile of wrapped logs. Gavan dug them out whilst Faye surveilled the area.

Stomping through the grass, which came to above her hips, Faye took some deep breaths and a moment to herself.

They just killed him. He’d lived there for years. Begged them not to.

Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes.

How is that different from what I did to the Primalists?

She could not see a difference. The Primalists had attacked them. Both back at the Bann Steading and Lóthaven itself, they were the aggressors. Even back home, defending yourself was seen as valid. Adan, similarly, had been the aggressor.

He had decided to poison his fellow Steaders.

His anguished reasoning made some kind of sick sense to him. Faye could not countenance what he had done though. Unfortunately for Adan, when he had confessed his actions there was one person, above all others, that had thought his actions despicable.

The Steader had barely said a word the entire time of Adan’s trial. She listened without moving. Then, when Adan had stopped speaking and the vote was tallied, Einnua delivered the execution blow herself.

Faye had been close enough to see the tears as they fell from the Steader’s eyes. But the woman miraculously held them back enough that no one else seemed to have noticed. She had disappeared into her private chambers immediately after.

Shaking herself, Faye brought her attention forcibly back to the present.

There were no signs of animals or monsters nearby, though she thought she could see some mana signatures closer to a copse of trees in the distance. As long as whatever they were stayed away, she did not mind leaving them to their life in the wilderness.

Gavan had started a fire and had a pot over it, already bubbling away.

“Road stew, again,” he said, cheerfully.

Faye said, “Yum,” about as sarcastically as she could manage. Gavan cracked a smile, at which she grinned.

Whilst Gavan was sorting their food, Faye sat down and faced the fire, cross-legged. She stared at the flames for a few moments, taking deep breaths in and out.

With each flicker of fire, Faye imagined throwing one of her problems into the base of the flames and watched them burn up and disappear. The repetition of the task was what was important.

When her mind was calm, she concentrated on the source of mana in her inner reservoir. As usual, when she imagined it, the image of a fiery orb — almost like the sun — flashed into her thoughts. The orb was relatively calm, though there were agitations on the surface of the sphere that threw out plumes of mana that seemed to represent her less-than-calm morning.

She concentrated on each one and slowly got them lower and lower, until the surface of the orb only moved millimetres at a time.

Once it was ready, Faye brought a small portion of the mana away from the rest. It was important for her to have as calm a source as she could, Gavan had instructed, because if she tried with tumultuous mana, there was every chance that she would lose control of the mana the moment she tried to control it.

But this part of the meditation task she felt okay with. It was not the first time she had tried it, though it was the first in what felt like a long time.

Soon, there was a pea-sized ball of mana that rested alongside the source of Faye’s power. Focusing on the pea portion alone, she considered the task she wanted to set it to.

Unlike when using a system-recognised spell, unstructured mana casting was more akin to what the wizards of stories on earth were capable of; anything the mind could conjure.

Of course, the bigger the effect, the more concentration and skill was needed. Not to mention practice.

Faye’s thoughts strayed too close to famous wizards and her favourite fantasy stories, and with a small spike of panic she pulled her thoughts back to the tiny orb of mana, lest it disappear.

The pea-sized drop was morphing and twisting, but a minute or two of concentrated thought brought it back under control. When it had stopped its efforts to dissipate into nothing, Faye tried the most basic step — infusing the mana with intent.

Healing. Restoration. Curing.

Focusing on the tiny mana source, Faye attempted to fix her intentions firmly in her mind. Once she was relatively sure of herself, she brought the spark of mana into the world.

It was invisible to the naked eye, so with the barest flicker of a thought she turned [Mana Sense] on. With that filter turned on, she was able to see the spark of mana. Like most mana, it took on a different shape and form in the real world compared to how she imagined it in her source.

In the world, it was almost like a light source. The movement and manipulation of its shape did not occur in the real world but that did not stop the mana from behaving the same way.

Unfortunately, without the guidance of the system, when Faye tried to turn that spark into something healing and restorative all she ended up with was a tiny spark of flame that stung when she pressed it against her arm.

“Dammit,” she cursed.

“You are doing well,” Gavan said.

“Doesn’t feel like I am,” she replied.

Gavan shrugged. “It’s not like I know anything about magic, after all.”

She let out a humourless laugh. “Alright, I acknowledge you know what you’re talking about. But that doesn’t stop me feeling like a failure for not getting it by now.”

“I did not expect you to.”

Faye grumbled at that. She had expected to, though.

All through their meal, which tasted much better than she had pretended it would, she thought about her mana, manipulating it, and the skills she had.

“Does [Spellcasting] help with this kind of thing at all?” she asked.

Gavan was licking his spoon and paused to think for a moment, with the spoon still in his mouth. Soon enough, he shook his head.

“Not really.”

“Does any skill?”

He looked at her with narrowed eyes. “Yes. Why do you ask?”

“Because if I get a skill for this, won’t it use up a skill point?”

Gavan nodded. “Most likely, as most magic classes would have this as a class skill.”

She grimaced. “Well, I’m not sure I want it, then. I only have one skill point right now.”

“You will get more.”

“How many more? I thought they were limited.”

Gavan pointed the spoon at the sky. “The sky is above our heads. We can see it, stretching from horizon to mountain. It is a limit. But yet, we cannot touch it. The same is true for our skill points. You do not have to worry.”

Faye looked up at the sky. It was overcast, a dreary grey that was as familiar to her as breathing.

“Where I come from, you can get in vehicles that soar through the sky, or that blast you up and over it, into outer space.”

Gavan looked at her without expression for a moment, then stuck the spoon back in his mouth and murmured around it. “Well, good thing we’re not in your world right now.”

She barked out a laugh. Faye’s first impressions of this man was that he was a recluse who loved books and studying more than being with his companions. But over time it had become clear to her that it was more that Gavan was extremely uncomfortable around people that he was not sure of yet. That had obviously been her, at first. He was thawing.

“You can’t pretend that there are no people that can fly with magic,” she said, in response.

Gavan shrugged. “Loads. But they don’t live here, or in Nóremest. The mana required for that kind of feat can only be found in denser parts of the world.”

“Like where?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” he replied, “I’ve never been there.”

She eyed him. “There’s no way that you, Gavan, have not looked up more information about a place that has denser mana than this.”

He grinned. “I know why you might think that, but really, other than a few random accounts, I have not studied them. It was more important to follow the path I can see, than plan for a path that I may never set foot upon.”

She scowled. “Are you speaking like that on purpose?”

“Yes.”

“Arse,” she said, laughing. “Well, fine, I can appreciate not looking too far ahead. Back home, we’d say ‘you have to learn to walk before you can run’, or some variation.”

“‘People that run on the path to greatness often falter. It is best to walk, one step at a time’,” Gavan said, with the air of someone quoting an ancient proverb.

Faye nodded. “Speaking of one step at a time,” she said whilst pushing herself to her feet, “we have to improve your physical attributes somehow. Let’s do an hour’s workout.”

Gavan let out a massive sigh. “This, again?”

“Yes, up and at ‘em!”

The temperature dropped rapidly in the afternoon. Soon, they were pulling their cloaks around their shoulders and pulling up their hoods. With the difficulty in talking with their hoods pulled around their faces, they lapsed once more into silence.

This time, Faye wished that they were able to converse without freezing their noses off. She could not stop thinking about their part in Adan’s execution.

She had thought that bringing him to the Steader would be a precursor to him being jailed. Perhaps Gerrec would have escorted him to Lóthaven to face punishment there? It’s not as if they would be unable to use him as a warm body. There was a lot of work to do, still.

Instead, the Steading had carried out its own justice with barely any time to think about it.

And Faye had been the one to bring him there.

She knew that the others thought her views odd, at least. Gerrec had told her she was being naive, which had made her blood boil. She almost threw a punch at the earth mage but had stopped herself at the last moment. Starting a fight with someone in the middle of all those people after they had just executed someone had seemed like a monumentally stupid decision.

Instead, she had told him goodbye and walked out of the Steading.

She spent the next mile or so considering whether the mage would have stayed with the Steaders or if he would have moved on to the town.

Maybe he did just leave, to go back home.

And suddenly, a pang of homesickness hit Faye in the gut, hard, and she surreptitiously moved her hood a little so that Gavan would not be able to see the tear marks that were running silently down her cheeks as they carried on walking the lonely road to the city.