Awwwwww. 

She prepares spells.

Ma'ar blinks awake once there's magic moving near him, and rolls over to watch again. He's somehow even more sore today and not in any hurry to move, although once Carissa gets up he does as well, uncomplaining. 

"Sorry," she says apologetically. "When we get to the city we can take a couple of days to rest even if it's not Urtho's city." 

For now, though, they should negotiate breakfast and get back on the road.

He nods. He isn't complaining at all. 

Breakfast is successfully negotiated in exchange for a very satisfactory job cleaning. It's oatmeal porridge, even with a bit of honey; Ma'ar makes such a wide-eyed face at his first ever experience of sweetened food. 

By a few hours into their ride, the road is getting seriously crowded; there are actual wagons, pulled by mules and oxen, and even a proper carriage with an awning and a well-dressed family inside. There are more people around to see them, but their horses stand out a lot less, and no one gives them a second look. 

Ma'ar rides very close to Carissa. He blinks at the carriage and asks Carissa what it is. 

"The wheels - the round bits underneath it - are attached to an axel, and when the front is pulled the wheels roll, and the people inside have a pleasanter ride than they'd have sitting on a horse. I could make one but it's more obviously magic than the horse is."

He nods, thoughtfully, and cranes his neck to watch the carriage's wheels turn until they're too far ahead of it; it's keeping to a very sedate pace. 

It's clear that they're approaching a city long before the city is actually visible. The air is noticeably murky and smells vaguely of cookfires. There are fewer fields and more cottages and bigger houses, including some nice-enough fenced estates with gardens. Flower gardens, rather than vegetable ones. Ma'ar is amazed and kind of baffled by this. 

And eventually they come to a wall, where a guard dressed in a red uniform is letting people through a gate one group at a time. The wall is only about a man's-height high; Ma'ar stands up in the stirrups of his saddle to try to peer over it, and then nearly falls and sits down sheepishly. 

She disguises herself with a spell again, and has them dismount from their conspicuous magic horses so they can walk in as a boring couple of local poor people. 

The guard looks bored. "State your business." 

"He's a mage and I want to get him mage training."

This is clearly a much less boring answer! The guard looks startled, then beetles his brows. "Oh really? Prove it." 

Ma'ar looks uncertainly at Carissa, unsure if he should demonstrate a shield or something. 

"Can you do a bit of magic for the guard?"

He floats a pebble up into the air, then shyly does a mage-light in the palm of his hand and holds it up. 

"Oh, all right, go on past." He shoos them through the gate.

The city is packed and smelly and there's garbage and sewage in the gutters on either side of the road, though the road is really cobbled, and some of the buildings are stone rather than wood. There's laundry strung above their heads. People are yelling things to each other between the windows of the second-storey apartments above them. 

Ma'ar flinches at the noise and crowd, shoulders going up around his ears. He doesn't at all like having this many people so close to him, and he shrinks up against Carissa. 

She is feeling paranoid of pickpockets and also incredibly miserable about the smell; she holds Ma'ar's hand tightly. "I want to look for the nice part of the city where the rich people live."

Ma'ar has no idea how to help with that, so he just hangs onto her and nods, his other hand gripping his magic dagger firmly. 

The street is crowded but the people on it are mostly moving along steadily, and once they're to the first crossroads, they can if they want peel off down an alley, which doesn't smell any better and isn't necessarily at lower risk for pickpockets but is less trafficked. 

Sure. Probably the rich people part of the city will be upriver? She can head in what vaguely seems like the right direction, at least.

The city is big enough to have clear neighbourhoods. Unfortunately they pass through the tanners' district while finding their way to another road that heads upriver rather than crosswise to it; it smells much worse, but then they're upwind of it. There's another mill, and then another street of shops, somewhat nicer than the area they first saw, and then a big open market square with a stone fountain in the middle; the fountain was maybe nice at one point but it's covered in pigeon droppings. 

And on the other side of the square is a nicer neighbourhood! The streets are, if not clean, at least cleaner, and the houses are bigger, with slate roofs rather than thatch, and separated by flowerbeds, and the people going about their are dressed better and more of them are riding horses. 

They're not currently looking like wealthy people, and they do get odd looks from the first person they pass, a gardener watering flowers, and then someone who must be a guard for one of the houses tries to chase them off with a stick, maybe assuming that they're thieves. 

Yes, they should wait until her Disguise Self wears off and then disguise Ma'ar, but she's going to try to find somewhere to linger until then where the smell is tolerable.

They can find another smaller square that has a good breeze off the river and mostly doesn't smell; it has a bench under a little decorative archway where they can sit and be left alone. 

Oh good. How is Ma'ar doing?

He's tired and sore and overwhelmed by the number of people and things and the strangeness; he's sitting on the bench with his arms wrapped around his folded knees, eyes fixed ahead, his head snapping around every time someone comes down one of the streets into the square. 

She wants to say something reassuring but she doesn't know if everything will be okay. "I want to be moderately truthful here and say that I'm a powerful mage from faraway, I was testing a new kind of Gate, and I ended up here instead of where I wanted to go," she says. "I am hoping that they will be able to tell us how to get where we want to go, and if it's too hard I will Sending Urtho and ask him to come pick us up."

Ma'ar nods. He has no additional contributions here.