"Hi!" says Stormy, bending to get a better look at the mechanism of spinning. "That looks complicated."

"Yep. Fun, though," he says. "Careful of the spinny parts, they're going pretty fast."

"I won't touch." She lifts a hand to her hair to make sure none of it is straying in a way that could insinuate it into the fibers. "Is all thread made like this?"

"Mostly! Some of it's made with a smaller and more portable spinny thing called a drop spindle. But I like the wheels better. And it's all spinning, any which way."

"Why does spinning it work, do you know? Why doesn't it unspin or just pull apart anyway?"

"Mmm... I can feel why, I'm not sure I can explain why," he says. "There's times when it unspins, and you can unspin some thread yourself just by taking a little bit and rolling it the wrong way until it gives up. But once it's spun, all the little bits of fluff grab onto each other that way, so unless they're the ones right on the end, they can't come apart because their neighbour fluffs are holding onto them in the twirled-up shape. And even the ones right on the ends get used to it. But that's why thread frays at the ends and not in the middle unless something catches on them and breaks some. Does that make sense?"

"Kind of. They'd have to - cooperate to unspin all at once, they can't do it by themselves, and they aren't cooperating things, so they don't. Are you doing magic or just regular spinning right now?"

"I'm not especially doing magic. I still don't know if it's magic when I just spin or cook and don't do anything special with it."

"I guess I don't necessarily know if I'm technically doing magic when I - I don't know, breathe."

"Maybe you are," he says. "That would be weird."

"It would be really weird! They'd probably want me to spend literally all of my time in a magic circle thing, or something."

"I don't think so. I don't need a magic circle when I spin."

"Okay, maybe not. Which is good. I am supposed to have one every time I go up to be the sky for a while and that's going to be kind of annoying all by itself."

"What's it like being the sky?"

"It's... big. And all warm and cold at the same time and it's like I imagine it would be like if I could dance."

"You can't dance?"

"Nah, I fall over. I can't run or climb things either. Sometimes I don't even do great with walking, but most of the time I can manage that."

"That sounds hard. But you get to be the sky, that's nice."

"It is nice! Do you have anything like that, do you get to be thread or anything?"

"Not exactly. Sort of, I guess. I like making things. It feels nice. I think that might be sort of the same kind of thing."

"Maybe. I don't necessarily have to do anything to the sky to go up to it, though."

"I think that part's different because both of mine are craft magics. Almost all my magic is doing things to things somehow or other."

"That makes sense. What do you make with the thread magic besides... thread?"

"Thread's kind of the first piece, but anything else you can spin or weave or braid or things like that is all part of the same magic too. Dedicate Finch is teaching me how to knit, that's fun."

"I mean more like - did you make anything you're wearing right now or whatever."

"Nothing I'm wearing right now, but I did make some of my clothes. That's fun too."

"What sorta magic are you going to be able to eventually do with it? Is it more about making the things faster and better at being fabric, or will they do other things on top of being fabric?"

"I can make things faster with magic, but it's not always better to do it that way. It's only good for when you really need things done fast. And some of it's making things better at being fabric, but some of it's making things better at doing other stuff. Like I'm learning how to make clothes that don't hardly get dirty, but I'm also learning how to make bandages that make people heal faster and ward off disease."

"Oooh, magic bandages, that sounds useful. I want to do useful things, but apparently the weather is terribly complicated and I shouldn't just make sure it rains regularly where I am."

"I guess that makes sense," says Mercy. "Because the sky is the same sky everywhere, so if you pull on part of it then other parts might go out of shape? Is that why?"

"Sort of. I can't just make water start existing, so if I want rain I have to find the water it's made of from somewhere, and they might have wanted it. So I want to learn enough and get enough range that I can tow clouds over floods to places where there are droughts."

"Yeah." He nods. "That does make sense. Good luck."

"Thanks!"

He smiles. He has a very happy smile.

"Before Mathilde gets me a big stack of books about the sky and before I have worked out how to make tiny weather for the tiny trees, what's there to do around here?" wonders Stormy.

"Well, if you like to cook you can help me and if you like to clean you can help Rahi and if you like plants you can help Rook and if you like languages you can learn some from me or Rook or Sedge. And you can talk to people. And there's books. Elyth and Rahi each have a bunch and they share if you ask nice, and you can get more from other places if you ask the adults."

"I can cook a little bit, enough to make sure Charlie doesn't burn things, but I don't know if I'd be much help to you. What languages do you know?"

"I speak Tradertalk and I'm learning Namornese from Sedge and Rook speaks about a million things and he teaches me bits and pieces sometimes. And I can curse in way more languages than I can speak properly, and sometimes I teach that stuff to Rook because he doesn't always know it all."

"Are you a Trader?" wonders Stormy. "Or do you just know the language?"

"I was born one," he says. "But then I ran away. So I can cook the food and I can speak the language but what I am is just - me."

"Oh."

He shrugs slightly. The spinning wheel continues to spin, slurping up fluff from his lap and turning it into thread.

"Do you not like talking about that?"

"As much as we've said is okay, but if you ask me a lot more about it I'll get sad."

"Okay." Stormy writes this down.

"Whatcha doing?" he asks, since he has to keep his eyes on his fluff as much as possible and her notebook is out of his line of sight that way.

"Making a note of that so I don't forget and accidentally make you sad."

"Aww, that's nice. Thanks."

"You're welcome," giggles Stormy.

He grins at his fluff.

"Is it hard to learn to do that for people who aren't thread mages, do you know?"

"I don't know. It was pretty easy for me, but that might be because I'm a thread mage. I've never been not a thread mage so I could check."

"Maybe your teacher knows. But she's probably a thread mage too, I guess, so maybe she'd only know if she's taught people who weren't."

"She probably has. There aren't that many thread mages. More than most other kinds of ambient magic, but still not so many that she could go her whole life only teaching spinning to people who have magic with it, I don't think."

"I think I should probably sometimes learn some things that aren't magic and weather or I will get really tired of them," explains Stormy, "so I'm trying to decide what things."

"I think spinning is fun but I don't know if you will think spinning is fun. You could try it, though, I bet Finch would let you sit in on my lessons and help you if you got stuck. So would Maple if you wanted, but the Hub kitchen's really busy most of the time, I don't know if you'd like that or not. Some people can't handle it for long. I like it fine. And you could ask Niva if she has anything to teach you. Me and her did some braiding wire one time, it was fun. And Sedge could tell you all about rocks, and I already told you he's teaching me Namornese... you could learn things from Rahi but I don't know if I can really say what things. She knows all kinds of different bits of stuff, I don't know where she gets it all. And I'm not sure about Elyth because I haven't known her as long, but there might be stuff you could learn from her too."

"When there's a lot of people running around I'm more likely to fall over, and sometimes it gets too stuffy, but that doesn't necessarily rule out busy places, it just means I have to know more about them first. What's braided wire for?"

"Making jewelry. That's what we used it for, anyway. I think Niva can do magic with it too, but I don't know what kind."

"I guess I should ask her sometime."

"Guess so!"

"Oh. Okay, I guess I'll talk to her later."

"Yes," she says, smiling slightly.

"And you are reading." Stormy turns to leave her be.

"I have temporarily stopped," she says.

"Do you want to talk? It's kind of hard to tell."

"Yes," she says. "I do and it is."

Stormy sits down. "What're you reading?" she asks.

"What things made him interesting?"

"Before he inherited his title, and for some time afterward, he was a renowned pirate-chaser. Once he had settled in properly he had an amazingly sharp mind for resolving disputes and setting effective policies. And he disinherited all of his sons in favour of his great-niece because he expected her to be a better ruler than any of them. I think I would have liked him if I had met him."

"Were his sons mad?" wonders Stormy.

"Yes. But he dealt with their grumbling and it was all resolved peacefully, except for one assassination attempt."

"That's a pretty big 'except'. Were they trying to assassinate the duke or his niece?"

"The plot did not get far enough for them to conclusively tell. Sandrilene's theory, with which I find myself agreeing, is that they were both targets."

"Sandrilene was a mage, too, right?"

"Yes. A thread mage, educated at Winding Circle. I intend to read her biography next. Would you like to borrow this one when I am finished?"

"Sure."

She smiles.

"Mercy says you read a lot. Is it mostly biographies or all different stuff?"

"All different. I like books. They - stay still."

"What does that mean?"

"It means... they don't move, or make sounds, or change. When I read a book, the book is not doing anything. It is always exactly the same book, unless someone touched it and left a nick or a fold or a smear. Just a sequence of words waiting patiently for me to take them all in. They're very restful that way."

"Huh. I never thought about it that way."

"I don't think very many people do."

"I like books because I can read them as fast as I want and skip around in them if I feel like it. Sometimes teachers get impatient if I don't want to learn things in the order they have in mind. It's also easier to take notes out of books and I like having notes because that way I don't forget things but I don't have to go re-read things in their original book either, I can get them already-thought-about in my notes."

"Oh," she says. "I think I would like rereading things in the original book more than rereading notes I made about them. Even if my notes were very good, they wouldn't be exactly the same as the book, and if they were then it would be pointless to have them as long as the book was still available."

"The notes are what I have in my head after I read the book," explains Stormy. "If I re-read them it's mostly like re-reading - not exactly, because if I do re-read I get slightly different things, but it's much faster. They're the understanding and not the presentation."

"If I reread something it would be because I wanted to remember what it was," she says. "With all of its details just so. If I want to remember how I understood something, I remember it, and if I forget the understanding then I want to reread the thing itself and understand it again. Because otherwise I might miss something."

"That seems like it would take longer. It might get better understanding done but I don't know if it's worth it all the time."

"Having all the details just so is important to me even for things that are not themselves very important," she says.

"How come?"

"If I did not know everything just so, then... I might miss something, or make a mistake about something. And that would be bad."

"Why?"

"Because then I wouldn't have things right."

"What do you need them so exactly right for?"

"To know things. To be sure about them. It's not for anything, really. It's for itself."

"That sounds like a lot of work to keep on top of though."

"I guess that would be kind of necessary. Can people help you with it or would that just be like the thing with the notes?"

"It would mostly just be like the thing with the notes. Sometimes it helps, though. Mercy doesn't remember details as well as I do but sometimes he understands things I don't. Niva is very unobservant and absent-minded but she remembers things well enough when prompted."

"And I mostly take notes so I guess I'm not going to be very helpful."

"Maybe not," she agrees. "That is okay."

"She didn't say, and I don't know enough to guess. If it isn't before dinner, I will go get her, because sometimes she gets excited and forgets about food, and sometimes she is so excited that she distracts other people from remembering for her."

Stormy giggles. "Excited about - lessons, or other stuff?"

"Usually about something she is trying to make, often with magic. Sometimes about other things she is learning or doing."

Stormy nods. "What time is dinner usually?"

"Around sundown. It varies, because Mercy doesn't stick to exact schedules very well. But we always make sure to collect everyone unless we know they are eating somewhere else."

"Okay, cool."

"He brought in fresh basil today and he has not used it yet, so I predict it will feature," she adds.

"Where does he get groceries? Does he just get things from the Hub or are there separate shopping trips?"

"Some things from the Hub and some things from Rook's garden."

"I think I want a list of the things that are in the garden," decides Stormy. "I don't know what it will be for but I would like it. Are they labeled or do I have to ask?"

"They are not labeled. If you ask Rook he will list all the things for you."

"He is in the garden," she says.

"Are you just guessing?"

She shakes her head. "I can hear him there."

Stormy cocks her head and listens.

"I can hear leaves maybe? But it could just be the wind, or somebody else besides Rook," she says.

"That is the sound of Rook being in the garden. If he was not there, it would sound a little different."

Stormy considers this. "You must have much better ears than me if you can really do that," she says.

"I seem to have much better ears than most people."

"Magic-better?" wonders Stormy.

"I don't know if it's magic. I don't know if it is even my ears. I think part of it is that I pay attention differently," she says. "And remember the details just so."

"You could tell if it's your ears by covering your ears," suggests Stormy.

"I mean I don't know if it is that I hear things better," she says. "Or if I hear things the same but notice them differently."

"Oh. I guess that you could check by having somebody make a noise the same way at a bunch of different distances and see if you could still tell when they were doing it from farther away than somebody else?"

"That might work," she says. "It would need to be somewhere that was very quiet otherwise."

"Yeah. I don't know where would be good."

"I don't know if there is anywhere big enough and quiet enough to work."

"Maybe not."

"And it still might look the same whether I am hearing better or paying better attention. Oh, he's gone inside now."

"How are you talking to me and listening to tiny things like that all at once?"

"I don't know. It sort of confuses me that other people can't."

"I guess I pay attention to a lot of different things when I'm up being the sky," muses Stormy. "But that's different."

"Is it? What is the difference?"

"Well, for one thing I stop paying attention to my body. And it's like I am the sky while I'm doing it so it's more like noticing I'm - hungry and tired at the same time, than like listening to two different sounds, because it's all happening in the sky I'm being."

"Oh," she says. "I don't think that's the same as what I do."

"Yeah, probably not."

She nods.

Stormy gets up. "I'll go see if you heard right."

"You too!" says Stormy, smiling, and then she goes down the stairs.

Rook is chatting with Mercy in some non-Imperial language!

Mercy has ceased his spinning, although he still has the wheel in front of him. It appears he is out of fluff.

Well, Stormy doesn't want to interrupt, so she will sort of loiter.

"Hi, Stormy!"

"Oh, hello," says Rook, peering at her.

"Hi! I decided I want to know what all the plants that are in the garden are and Rahi says they aren't labeled so I should ask you."

"You can certainly ask me!" he says. "Come out to the garden and I'll show you everything. I'd forget something if I tried to tell you off the top of my head."

"Okay," says Stormy, notebook at the ready. "I'm not interrupting?"

"Nothing urgent." He says something short to Mercy that is, in context, probably 'bye', and leads Stormy out into the garden where he commences introducing her to plants. There are many of them. He can spell the more obscure ones if she wants.

She wants. She writes them all down and makes marks next to them indicating if they are fruits or vegetables or herbs or other things.

There are a few that are mostly decorative, but by far the majority of the plants can be turned into food or other useful things. Rook will tell her a bit about their uses if she doesn't already know and is curious. Many of them can be used for magic things! Although principally by plant mages.

She is curious in an overview sort of sense but does not require a full lesson on a form of magic she cannot practice.

Then she can have overviews!

Some time later, Niva comes back from wherever she was. She still smells like hot metal, which is an indication of what she might have been doing. She flops tiredly into a chair at the kitchen table.

"Hi, Niva. Mercy said I should ask you what braided wire's good for."

"Not that much," she says. "But the spell that wards off pirates from Winding Circle is a wire net with bits of mirror, buried outside the walls. When the mages bring the spells up, anyone who walks over them falls over dreaming. I don't know how to build that spell, but Spruce had me help repair a little bit of it once. I bet you could put spells in braided wire the way there's spells in that net, but I don't know how yet."

"That's an interesting spell. Who does magic with mirrors?"

"Well, mirrors are made of metal or metal and glass, so somebody who has magic with either of those, I guess. Or academic mages. I think they use mirrors a lot."

Stormy nods. "I'm trying to think of what it might be interesting to pick up in between all the learning about the sky and how to do magic with it, because if I don't do anything else at all I will get sick of it possibly. Any ideas?"

"You probably don't wanna come to the forges with me. Sometimes I talk about mathematics with Elyth, but you probably don't wanna do that either... I dunno!" she says. "It's hard to think of things. Mostly I just learn stuff about my magic and whatever else I happen to pick up hanging out with people who're learning different things."

"Why don't I want to come to the forges?"

"It's hard work and it's kind of uncomfortable and it's a little dangerous. I think it's the sort of thing you don't do unless you really love it. I really love it, and Spruce really loves it, and she says she's met people without smith-magic who really loved it too and I believe her... but I still don't think you'd like it. I mean, I could be wrong. But that's what I think."

"Why do you really love it, then?"

"I just do. It's fun. I like making stuff, and I have magic with it. And I get to play with cool things. Did you know they're discovering a new metal? Nobody's sure what to call it yet. You need a smith-mage to get it out of the ore, so it's really rare. Spruce has been teaching me all about it. It's as strong as steel but half as heavy, and it's so finicky about how you work it. But it likes me," she says smugly. "All metal likes me."

"Metal can like people?"

"Yeah! I mean, not the way people like people. But different kinds have different personalities. Gold's really friendly, it likes practically everybody. Iron plays favourites. Copper takes a while to get to know you sometimes, but it likes most people after that. And this new stuff is finicky, like I said."

"Can one amount of copper get to know you for all the other copper that there is or do projects in copper start out hard and then get easy every time?"

"Sort of in between those. I think it has to do with where it was mined. I get along fine with Gold Ridge copper, but we got some in once from a different mine and it seemed like it didn't know me as well."

"Huh. That's funny. What does it do differently when it likes you?"

"I dunno, it's just... friendlier. It feels different. And it's easier to work with, I just don't know if I can say any specific ways."

"What makes the picky ones like people or not?"

"If any of them ever didn't like me, maybe I'd know!"

Stormy giggles.

Niva grins.

"So I probably don't want to go to the forge. But braiding wire that's already wire probably doesn't take being in the forge, if stuff like that comes up and I'm bored."

"Yeah."

"What did you work on today?"

"The new stuff, mostly."

"What's it going to be good for?"

"Well, most things you can do with steel, I guess. But if nobody comes up with a way to get it out of rocks that doesn't need magic, it's going to be so rare that anything made with it will be mind-bogglingly expensive. So, anything you can do with steel where it's really, really important that it won't corrode or that it's very light."

"How do you normally get metals out of rocks and why doesn't that work on this one?"

"Heat and charcoal, for most everything else. When you do that with this stuff, you get something weird - it kind of eats the charcoal and turns into something that's not even a metal at all."

"But it doesn't corrode? Can you like - dissolve the rock around it maybe?"

"I guess somebody could try it. For all I know it might eat whatever you use to dissolve the rock, too."

"Yeah, I guess. And if it's so expensive when you get it out they probably don't want to experiment on the rocks that have it very much?"

"Yeah. Doing it with magic at least works, unless you really mess something up."

"Is it more complicated than just sort of - magically slurping the metal out?"

"Yeah. It's all smith-mage stuff, I dunno if I could even explain it. You have to coax it, and kind of sit your magic on it to make sure it doesn't do anything funny, and it has to be hot but not too hot. It's hard."

"Yeah, that sounds like really finicky stuff."

"And then it's still finicky after you get it out as a metal, but at least it's easier to do things with it."

"Does it really not have even a placeholder name yet?"

"Thinking of names is hard, and then after people think of names they argue about them. Some people want to call it godsmetal, but Spruce says just because we took this long to find it and it's awfully persnickety, that doesn't mean it's divine. So she just calls it 'new metal'. But then other people say they don't want to stick everyone with calling it new metal in a hundred years when it's not that new anymore, and it doesn't sound fancy enough."

"Well, how did other metals get named?"

"Long enough ago that they just have names now and nobody's needed to worry about it in thousands of years. Except nickel, but that's a contraction of a phrase that means 'fake copper' in... I forget, I think it was a language spoken in some little corner of an Imperial-speaking country but I can't remember if it was Capchen or somewhere else and I don't remember what the language is called. Or if it still exists. So I guess we could name the new stuff after a metal that already exists, 'magic steel' or something. But I feel like that would get confusing."

"Yeah. Maybe you could name it magic steel in a dead language?"

"Maybe. I'll ask Spruce if anyone's thought of that. Unless I forget. I'll probably forget."

"That's why I write things down, so I don't forget them."

"I forget to check if I've written down anything I should remember the same way I forget to remember if there's anything I should remember. I gave up writing stuff down, it never helps."

"Huh."

"Anyway. Maybe Rahi will show up and remind me there's something I want to talk to Spruce about. She does stuff like that."

"She could hear that Rook was in the garden - him in particular - and that he came back inside from upstairs."

"Yeah, that's Rahi."

"She's not sure if it's her ears being better or just paying better attention."

"I think it's probably both."

"Yeah, maybe, but there's no good way to test for sure, you'd need a bigger quieter space than there is anywhere."

"Yeah, something like that."

"Maybe on the ocean on a very calm day, but that would be a lot of trouble to go to just to find out something like that."

"Yeah. And ships make all kinds of noise, anyway. They creak and stuff."

"Is that very loud? I've never been on one."

"It's not really loud, but it's noise. I think it might be quieter in a really big field with only quiet kinds of bugs and birds, if you could find one of those."

"I don't know where one of those is. Oh well."

Niva shrugs.