The next morning Stari's older siblings burst into the cart, eager to meet their new sister and kept out by their father for far too long. Mazilia, at six whole years of age, is deemed sensible enough to hold the tiny thing. Her eyes are wide, but she keeps steady as Napthali guides her hands and positions Stari's head in her arms. Patrin, only three, stares at her, seemingly overcome with awe ("It's a baby! A real, real baby!"). Leenda beams with pride, and grabs Patrin to squish his little cheeks ("That's right, a real, real baby!").

And the caravan travels onwards. They stop in Wartle, and Napthali trades some beads for a small doll, which Stari will keep firmly in her mouth for many years. As Stari grows, she learns sewing and spinning and cooking from her mother, or from Mazilia, and Napthali teaches Patrin to fire a bow, and a sling, and to wield a knife. Stari is not particularly nimble with her fingers, but she is studious, and she is quick to learn. And when the caravans stop in a town, or meets another convoy on the road, and Leenda pulls out her needles and quiets her expression, Stari watches enraptured. The tattoos her mother inks are the most beautiful thing in the world. (Leenda, for her part, is overjoyed to have a child that shows any interest in her work.)

When they're not working, the three children play. Patrin is a boisterous boy, giggling and shrieking as Mazilia chases him around the convoy, past the barking dogs and startling the horses. Stari pumps her legs chasing after them, and is never too far behind (Mazilia is watching, letting her keep up).

Stari is six when she first learns of Hell, from a Chelish man in Abken calling at Mazilia. They ran, obviously, but Stari asked what it meant when they explained to Leenda, demanding to know in that way children do.

Leenda's face scrunches, and she calls out, "Napthali, your turn, explain Hell to your daughter."

Napthali looks up from his game of cards with some of the other men, and throws in his hand (to the grumbling of the other players). Walking over, he kneels before Stari and Mazilia. "You know how when people die, they go to Heaven*? Well, if people are bad, they don't go there, they go Below** instead. Hell is part of the Below, and people who go there are hurt, all the time. It's a very bad place, and Desna and all the friendly gods want to rescue the people trapped there."

(* A Varisian word for the-good-afterlives-and-axis; A literal translation might be "The Good Places".)

(** Again, read as "The Bad Places".)

Leenda looks like she might be regretting handing this off to her husband. Stari's eyes are wide as saucers, bottom eye-lids shimmering. "All the time??"

Napthali opens his arms and pulls Stari in, thumping to the ground and wrapping her a hug in his lap as she starts to cry. "I'm sorry that this is the world, glimmer."

"Is it— is it lots? Do they get to go to Heaven* after?"

He sighs, and squeezes her. "It's lots, and... they haven't yet. Maybe someday, but not yet."

She cries for the rest of the day. On and off, set off by stubbing her toe, or seeing a dead bug, or hearing her grandma cough. When she cries the tears pour hot down her face, snot dripping on whomever she's limpetted onto. In the breaks she seems drained of life, quiet and exhausted and miserable. She pokes at her dinner, only finishing it after a great deal of prompting.

It's the dead of night. Mazilia is coming back from the bushes when she spots Stari, curled up in her cloak next to the low glow of the banked fire. The only other people awake are a couple spotters, to wake the men should danger come. Mazilia sighs softly, and sits down next to Stari in the dirt. "Hey."

Stari nods. Her face is puffed, risen like dough around her eyes.

Mazi grabs her sister around the shoulder. Softly but firmly, she says, "It's terrible, but it's not new. The world's the same as it was yesterday, and crying about it isn't helping anyone."

Stari gives a little sob-hiccup at that, but nods. "...What does help?"

She snorts, and ruffles Stari's hair as she thinks that over. This girl. "Same kinds of things as always, I suppose. Live Good, so you can help in Heaven*. Help people, and help them live Good."

She frowns. "That doesn't help very much?"

"Well, you are only little."

(Mutinous Expression)

"Ha. It's alright, we all are. We... have time to be bigger later. And saving one person from Hell helps them very, very much."

"I guess. I— why'd he say that? I know men are angry if you don't give them what they want, but—"

Mazi's expression is one of extreme distaste. "They're from Cheliax. And Cheliax started worshipping Hell, and everyone there goes to Hell when they die."

Stari looks extremely horrified by this!

"And if you're a young, drunk Chelish man, whose grandparents came here before that happened; if you want to seem scary, because Hell is scary, and powerful, because Cheliax is powerful, you might say 'Burn in Hell'."

"I don't like it. I'll get him to say sorry."

"Please wait a few years before trying that."

"...Okay. Thanks, Mazi." Stari gives her another hug, then lies back down and wraps herself tighter in her cloak. Mazilia gives her a pat on the head, and curls up on the ground with her.

She is ten when she loses her spoon before lunch, and has to go to the caravan to get a new one, her parents disappointedly explain. She growls in annoyance, sits down with her bowl, and pulls a crude little spoon from nowhere at all. Leenda blinks. Napthali stares, mouth slightly open. Stari shovels stew into her face with a mutinous expression. She is caught rather by surprise when her mother shrieks in delight, picking her up and spinning in circles. Napthali laughs and congratulates her, while Stari stares in confusion at the creatures that have possessed her parents. It is only once they explain, that she starts cackling gleefully.

Stari had already been learning inking from her Leenda. Now, it's redoubled with a new purpose. Three months later they meet on the road with another convoy of Varisians, and finally this one contains an old and wizened sorcerer, his skin a tapestry of intricate lines and curves. He agrees to take Stari for half a year, when these two convoys will meet at the Spring celebrations in Kaer Maga.

She cries a couple tears when she hugs everyone goodbye. Patrin is devastated. He promises to be way bigger and stronger when she gets back, and she hugs him extra tightly.

And for six months she learns from Oseri. He teaches her all the little tricks of Prestidigitation that he knows, and explains to her all the spells he has, and those he has heard of. He points to his tattoos, and explains which ones match up with which spell he has. Some of them came in on their own. Some of them, he learned from other sorcerers and had inked to bring that spell to him (these are the tattoos where it worked, these are the ones where it didn't). Others, he had spells show up with no tattoo and not matching any tattoos he'd had inked (these ones he found patterns for afterwards, these spells he has yet to find matching tattoos for). He shows her the tattoo of the hare across his shoulder, and smiles as it comes alive. Stari coos softly at it, and after it flattens into a pancake in the dirt (and Oseri nods at her when she looks up at him hesitantly), she sets about stroking it along the back.

It was clear even as a small child that Stari liked people, and they liked her; she played with all the other children in her convoy, she got along well with all the adults. To Oseri it is becoming clear that she is good at people. Dimiti's father dies in a goblin raid on the caravan, and no-one else can figure out why he lets her near when she brings him soup, after scaring off his mother and brother. She listens to what he says, and whispers some words of her own, and the next morning he's— not good, but better. When you need help, she notices, and lends one, or nudges someone your way. When Sultano and Kaven's argument was starting to get heated her quiet comment to their daughter was exactly placed to get them to look her way, and cool off. She is certainly better at people than Oseri is; he makes sure to teach her all he knows of the higher-circle spells, it seems likely she'll need them.

By far her favourite spell of his is Water Walk, and whenever he has a slot free she begs him for it, laughing and playing chase with the other children atop the Yondabakari. (Communal, though she has not yet learned how the Chelish wizards name spells.)

At first she contributes to the convoy much as she did to her family's; helping with cooking, spinning, repairing clothes, and all the other little chores of keeping a life running. Once she picks up Ray of Frost (the first tattoo she inked into her own skin, brought her second spell!), and once she's practiced enough Oseri is confident she'll be able to use it in a fight, he tells her that she's allowed to.

And four months into her mentorship with Oseri, hiding behind a wagon and shooting round the corner, she kills her first goblin (it had a bow, it was taut, it was aimed at Zujenia—). Oseri holds her as she cries, afterwards, tears thick and fast. (Though better than she was when he found her after the fighting ended, crouched on the ground and shivering hard, her rapid breathing sounding like whistling, almost. He's... not sure what to make of that.)

Each town they stop in brings a new round of people to meet, names and faces to learn, friends to make and laugh with. Her mother always warned her off from spending too much time with the townsfolk, but Oseri encourages it, and she's so happy to finally get to play with kids she's been seeing for years but never spoke with. She spends a whole day in Sandpoint fishing with the local kids (prestidigitated lures might not be as good but, get this: they're free! This is a compelling point to many of her compatriots), and another enamoured by the glass-blowing, peppering the workers with questions. (The first workers chased her off for being a 'sticky-finger moth', but the second were really nice!)

Her favourite stop of the trip is Magnimar. It's so big, and there's so many people. She's been here before, obviously, but she never wandered far from Lowcleft's Varisian camp; it would've made mother nervous. Now, she can catch up with friends (there's lots more half-Varisians in Magnimar, and her mother never stopped her making friends with them), and get to know all of their friends as they roam the city together. Her and Eliza both get nauseous when the group sneaks a look at the Matador's Lodge, and are none too upset when a bouncer notices them, sending the small pack of children screaming and laughing as they escape into the streets.

They wander on, through Lowcleft and Dockway, and Stari gets more nervous as the city gets seedier, but she's not a coward, and everyone else keeps on going so she will too. And when the boys start telling stories about the ghost of the Gecko (a piling of the Irespan, great bridge to nowhere, covered in carvings of you'll-never-guess-what-lizard), and daring each other to go touch it, she joins in, even though she knows the Irespan is Evil. (The ghost doesn't bind her soul in servitude forever like the masters of long ago, but the nightmares sure aren't pleasant.)

They huddle closer together on the walk back to Lowcleft, eyes darting to follow movements in the shadows (Eliza's holding onto the edge of her scarf with one hand, and the elbow of Stari's shirt with one hand; she's sooo nervous, but Stari can't think of a way to fix it till they get back to the camp). Apparently their timidity was the wrong kind of signal; a very drunk man with a very long knife steps out of a doorway in front of them and grins at them. One of the boys whimpers. He takes a step closer and Stari panics and suddenly the ground under him is a slippery mess, the man goes down and the knife goes flying and the children sprint for home. (Well, she thinks she sees someone grab the knife, but apart from that guy.)

When they're back near the camp and people are splitting off to find their evening meal Stari can drag Eliza into a corner to give the girl her needed hugs. ("Yeah, that was really scary. No, I was definitely scared too, it's not just you, didn't you see me frozen like a hare? But we all got out safe, we don't need to go back there, and that guy's not gonna try and find us.")

(She tells Oseri the good news about Grease; two for two on getting spells she was aiming for!)

Magnimar is also the first place she sees a Varisian with a spellbook. Wide-eyed, she asks the man why he's using a spellbook instead of tattoos.

"...Because I'm a wizard?" He says with a soft snort.

"Yeah! I thought that was a Chelish sorcerer, but you don't look very Chelish." Her expression is unbearably earnest.

"Listen, kid, I need to focus on this laundry."

"Oh, I can help with the laundry! I'm still practicing but I've got cleaning down."

He looks at her more closely, sighs, then nods with a small smile. "Sure, fair trade. Most wizards here are Chelish, but anyone can be one; sorcerers are born with magic, but all it takes to be a wizard is to really, properly, know how the magic works..."

She manages to get a solid half hour of info out of him, as they make their way through the baskets of dirty clothes, and dirty sheets. She smiles and waves at the women dropping it off and picking it up, and they tease the man for "finding an apprentice so much more polite than the master!" (Stari snickers, and the wizard gives them a rude gesture.)

So. It's not just people who are born with it and people blessed by the gods; normal people can get magic too! And it stands to reason that if a normal person can get some magic by learning lots about how magic works, then she can get even more because she already has some to start with.

She doesn't see the wizard (Manel, and his favourite flavour to prestidigitate is lemon, which is weird, but as long as he likes it) again before Oseri's convoy is back on the road. When she chatters excitedly to Oseri about everything Manel told her he seems... indulgent, but not particularly interested. She huffs a bit about it, when she's in private, but while she grasped enough of what Manel said to know it's interesting and worth learning more about, she did not understand it well enough that her explaining it is getting Oseri excited. Only one way to fix it!

Everywhere they stop, she tries to find more wizards and trade them for more tidbits of how the Chelish think about magic. And she learns a decent amount ("They do something that's like sums? But more? And that gets them magic somehow!"), but she is still only ten. There is only so much you can do at ten, with two cantrips and a first circle spell (She thinks the Varisian for cantrip is better, 'endless-spell' and easier to say besides, but "first circle" is much cooler than "smallest". ...She doesn't know what either is in sign, she should ask Oseri). She desperately wants to look at one of their spellbooks and see how similar their drawings are to her tattoos, but none of them were at all interested in trading that for anything she had to offer. ;-;

Her long, long six months of learning from Oseri is brought to a close by their arrival at Kaer Maga for the Spring celebrations. The same as she does every time she reaches this point in a journey, Stari rushes ahead of the convoy, heads to the biggest hill near the caravan route, and stops to take in the sights. The cliff towering over her, hundreds of times her height, takes her breath away every time she sees it. The Yondabakari tumbling over edge, roaring like a great dragon and crashing into the stones below, has always made her wish she could fly, soar over the edge and plunge towards the water and then pull out of her dive at the last minute— and now she's really magic! She'll be able to do that one day! She does a giddy little dance on her hill at the thought, and the creepy statues in the cliff don't bring down her mood even a little bit today. (A memory of her mother's voice, "And each year more faces crumble and fall, and someday every trace of the Old Slavers will be sand and dust...")

After a half hour of taking in the view she makes her way back to the convoy. Oseri nods at her return, and then it's just a long and tiring climb up through the tunnels before they reach the city. The city has swelled tremendously from the people here for the festival, and the trade; but just like Stari's family convoy, Oseri's has space reserved inside the walls, and they head there first. Some of the caravans and mules will be relocated later, but that's not relevant for Stari, because— She grins broadly and sprints towards two familiar-looking children playing knucklebones next to the convoy's camp marker. "Patrin, Mazi!"

They look up from their competition, Patrin grinning back at her, Mazilia with a more reserved smile. Patrin lets out a small "oof" as Stari rams into him, but wraps her in a hug quickly.

"When'd you get so tall, Patrin! It's not fair if you're both bigger than me!"

"Really, that's your own fault for not growing the whole six months— ow, no need to hit me for telling the truth!" His voice is much deeper than she remembers. He's so blazingly happy to see her. She hugs him tightly, and if she sheds some tears no one comments on it.

Mazilia idly shakes the bones as she watches, her smile creasing the corners of her eyes. "Was your learning all that you wished for?"

Stari nods vehemently, and starts unloading everything she learnt and saw onto them. She's still going when the three head over to Oseri to thank him and tell him they're heading back to their parents (Stari gives him a big hug, and promises to help him with anything he needs while they're all still in Kaer Maga), and still going when they reach home.

She hugs Leenda and Napthali. Leenda grins as she squishes Stari's cheeks; Napthali watches fondly with a couple tears in his eyes. The family moves in a clump towards the camp kitchen to help with the evening meal, soaking in the feeling of all being together again, everything right in the world. Stari excitedly points out each of her new tattoos to Leenda, explaining what spell each one is for and which are for spells she has, rather than hopes-to-acquire ("—And Oseri said he's heard of one for moving tattoos between people, which would be so cool, I really hope I get that one, but he doesn't know the tattoo for it—"); Leenda nods along, smiling and giving suggestions, praising Stari on her inkwork. She's slightly disappointed when Stari says she'll need to learn more from Oseri again at some point, to figure out her own familiar tattoo. Stari moves on, eagerly guessing what foods they'll have for the arrival day dinner which she hasn't gotten since separating. Well, guess I won't bring the familiar up again for a bit.