"It's been many years."

"Okay. What-all were you thinking you'd do with your alethiometer?"

"Well, maybe I'm not as over it as I said it was. I want to get my mother's killer to justice."

"But we still need to learn to read it."

"They make dictionaries. They're not great, though. Please don't stab the wrong guy because you assumed cherub-alpha-and-omega-beehive meant Mortimer Q. Snodgrass of Cherry Tree Lane."

Sadde laughs. "I'll be careful. I hear alethiometers tend to be more opaque than that."

"How about you?"

"Spell development!"

"...oooh, that does sound useful. Is it particularly amenable to factual discoveries?"

"What do you mean?"

"Like, the alethiometer answers objective questions about objective facts, right, are there some of those that would make spell development better or easier or more efficient or whatever?"

"...'will this work?'"

"Oh, there's a trial-and-error aspect to it, got it."

"Little stuff I can usually be confident of on the first try, especially pure verse, but potions development is a mess, and there could be stuff so complicated witches will not stumble on it."

"Well the stuff that's that complicated would probably need more than 'will this work'."

"'Stumble on it'?"

"Yeah, I'm optimistic that I can learn to read it well enough to get better than indications that I'm already on the right track. Uh, there might be some exotic herb we've never cultivated that does stuff that we wouldn't naturally think of or realize what it does, something like that?"

"Specific herbs do specific things within spells?"

"...yes?"

"It's just hard to picture what-all the specific moving parts of an alethiometer-finding spell would be. Moving...? Truth device.......?"

"...that was a runes spell. You saw all the sugar, right? Sugar is not an herb."

"Do runes work differently? Does it have to be sugar?"

"I hope you realise that no matter how much magic you learn you will not actually be able to use it."

"Sure, sure, but still."

"In this case it worked best for it to be sugar. Runes work differently from herbs though they both share the 'combining stuff that has individual meanings into a whole' aspect."