TWO HUNDRED SEVENTY-SIX: What are you like?

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“Do you understand how wonderful this is to me? How much everything you said yesterday means?”

That had been Stuart’s question this morning, and it echoed in Alden’s own head now as they explored the siblinghold’s supply library together. Soft golden light shone around them, and massive tree roots pierced through the ceiling. There were endless aisles of shelving, cabinetry, barrels, stacks, and racks. All filled with magical tools and ingredients.

The huge storeroom looked the same as the last time he’d visited, but the way he felt about being here was different. Before, he’d been an admirer passing through. Now, he was being encouraged to touch, take, and ask whatever questions he wanted.

Though his most common question so far was simply, “What’s that?” And the answer was almost always that it was something that could be used to encourage reality to bend to a wizard’s authority in some specific way.

They’d been down here for more than an hour, and Alden was still so overhyped that he hardly recognized himself. He was struggling to act like he thought he should.

I’m mature. I’m organized. I’m here to learn and find things I might need for my future. I’m here with a person who I plan to fight beside one day. One day soon. Demons coming up soon, Alden. Within the year, it sounds like. That should be a sobering thought. You can’t just stay stupidly happy forever.

He felt himself light up at the sight of a collection of crystal cubes on top of a pile of boxes. The cubes were clacking together as they slid around, slowly rearranging themselves in their stack. “What’s that?”

“It’s a study device for people who want to learn how to cause random motion with their spells or enchantments,” Stuart said, stopping in front of it.

His fingers rubbed the small gray bell he wore around his neck. It was silent no matter how much he touched it, but he’d done something to it that would make it ring if the elevator approached this floor. A warning for them to stop being obvious about Alden being a wizard. They were also wearing the same rings Stuart had carried with him on the Here-to-There that would obscure their conversation from anyone else.

“I don’t understand it very well.” Stuart watched the clacking cubes. “But do you want to try it? The principles behind it are interesting.”

“No. That’s all right.”

Alden beamed at the offer anyway. His stupid happiness was too powerful to resist.

It wasn’t only that he was wandering around looking at magic toys in a treasure cave. Yes, Stuart kept handing him things that must have been worth the price of mansions on Earth, and that was wild. But it was the way Stuart did it that was the best part.

He acted like he genuinely thought Alden might be able to find a worthy use for any of it. Like it would be fine if Alden said he wanted to spend a while trying to learn from a study device that even Stuart didn’t understand.

Of course Stuart wasn’t the kind of person who’d ever ridicule him for being the equivalent of a wizard kindergartner with inferior vocal cords and a different type of brain. But being treated like a peer, when it came to this, made Alden realize he hadn’t been expecting very much respect. Certainly not this amount of it.

He’d hoped Stuart would help him learn more spells. And that he’d explain how to improve on the ones Alden already knew. He’d hoped Stuart would be excited with him about what he could do.

But he hadn’t dared to hope that Stuart would take what he could do as seriously as he himself did. So far, though, the only person pointing out Alden’s inadequacies as a wizard had been Alden. And he’d had to stop because the few slightly self-diminishing comments he’d made had bounced off Stuart like they’d hit a wall.

“Don’t give me anything too expensive,” had been met with, “What a foolish thing to say about your education.”

“I’m not sure I’ll be good at this kind of thing,” had received, “You’ll be more sure after you try it.”

And, “I’d like to understand the basics better, but it’s probably a waste of time for someone in my position,” had gotten him, “You aim for a position at my side on the path of highest onus.”

Alden took that to mean that it was an insult to either knighthood, Stuart, or both for him to not understand why the spells he was casting worked. That suited him fine. More than fine. It was what he’d wanted, he’d just…expected something more pragmatic, and frankly less, than them both moving forward with the assumption that he would be learning to be a proper wizard regardless of how far behind he was.

Stuart had followed up those words about Alden’s position with the gift of an ingredient pouch. It was a handleless rectangular bag that looked and felt like it was made of damp black leaves. It was about the same size as the sleeve that held his laptop, but unlike his laptop sleeve, he could stick objects as large as baseballs in it without there being any noticeable lump.

Which made him positive it was too expensive. For the old him, who said foolish things about his education. The new him accepted it graciously.

The pouch had more than a dozen things hidden in its waterproof, odor-free, self-sealing pockets. And now Stuart was leading him slowly toward a shoulder-high cabinet that looked like an extra wide library card catalog.

The organizational system down here in the supply library was ninety percent mysterious to Alden, but the ten percent of it he did understand was that ingredients with similar properties were often stored together. They’d gotten most of the items in his new pouch from cabinets that looked similar to this one. They’d almost all had different things sitting on top of them that were loosely related to what they held inside. This cabinet supported several cylinders full of goo that reminded Alden of lava lamps, though Stuart said they were a kind of timer.

The Artonan opened one of the square drawers in the middle, and it made the hiss sound that Alden had come to associate with organic ingredients that were being preserved by the cabinets. Stuart slipped on a glove he’d gotten from a different drawer and reached in to remove a fuzzy brown bud slightly smaller than Alden’s palm.

“This is the pod of a wild nyip plant. They only produce one of these every half century. It’s easy enough to keep them alive in greenhouses, but they’re a species that hasn’t thrived in their natural habitat for more than a thousand years, so the pods of wild ones are harder to acquire. The spells and potions that benefit from nyip pod as an ingredient utilize it because ancient wizards associated it with…do you want to guess?”

Alden wanted to guess fertility or death because it seemed like every ingredient that had been explained to him so far had at some point been associated with one or both of those.

But Stuart was helping him build a collection of training ingredients that he would use to practice sensing what different spell-relevant properties felt like. And he’d already been given a fruit that was used in aphrodisiacs and a worm that was supposed to feel like decomposition. So whatever Stuart thought he’d be able to sense from this one must be something else.

He glanced up at the goo timers. Seed pods every fifty years.

“Something to do with time?”

His teacher stayed silent, nodding like he expected more.

“…long periods of time? Waiting for things to happen?”

“Yes!” Stuart said cheerfully. “Patience.”

“Patience?” Alden leaned a little closer to the pod, trying not to breathe on it. “I’m supposed to be able to sense that it has patient qualities? As if that’s an element? Like Life, Ground, Sky…Patience?”

“It’s not the same level of elemental alignment as those. You’ll be able to tell if something’s associated with Life or Ground after a minimal amount of practice, once you actually try.” Stuart had seemed confused that Alden didn’t already know how to do that. “What you’ll be learning by sensing this are more nuanced qualities of Life. If you feel this and then feel the worm…they’re both Life. But they feel very different. You’ll be able to tell after a short while.”

Will I really?

“I’ve wanted to know if things were closely aligned with Ground before or not. For my trait. I’ve never put any effort into sensing it for some reason.”

“Thegund and your <<self-protection>> through <<quiescence>> may have made doing it less natural than it should be. Cultivating sensitivity in a corrupted environment wouldn’t be anyone’s first inclination.”

Alden wondered if he should be taking notes. He didn’t feel like he needed to. His brain seemed to be soaking up all this information like it was water for a dry sponge.

“And all wizards can do this?” he asked, just to confirm it for himself one more time. He didn’t want to get his hopes up too high and then find out that he lacked the knack for it.

“To greater and lesser degrees,” said Stuart. He looked down at the pod on his gloved hand. “Not everyone can tell a seed pod from a dead worm, but I don’t think it’s impossible for you.”

“How do you know?”

“During our practice, you noticed one time that I was preparing to greet you before I actually did.”

“On the learning cushions?” Alden thought about it. They’d exchanged quite a few authority greetings. “I don’t think so.”

“You did.” Stuart smiled at him. “I’m extremely sensitive, and I was paying very close attention to you. You were also paying close attention to me, so it’s not shocking that you’d notice. But some wizards wouldn’t have. It’s possible that you only noticed I was preparing to do something and you got got excited because you assumed I was about to show you a new greeting, but that’s still sensitive enough, I think, to detect the most prominent qualities of everything I’m giving you to train yourself with.”

“I really don’t remember that.”

“It happened fast, and it didn’t occur to me that I should slow down and make you aware of the difference between me preparing to approach your spot and me actually doing so. I’ll show you next time.” Stuart took a bottle from his pocket, dropped the pod in, and closed the lid. When he opened it a second later, the pod emerged looking like it was covered in a protective layer of cobweb.

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Alden knew this routine, and he accepted it, tucking it into the ingredient pouch.

“Do you want more of them?” Stuart asked, as he had with every single ingredient, no matter how rare.

“I appreciate the offer,” Alden said. “But I’ve got to ask if you really think there’s any chance I might find a use for one of these other than in my sensitivity training kit.”

Stuart shut the drawer. “Maybe the concept of patience holds a special appeal for you, and you wish to contemplate a pod in a destructive fashion. Or you want to try to create a version of your memory of light spell that lasts for longer by <<priming>> the environment with one of these first.”

“I can do that?”

“Yes. I doubt you’d benefit from it much. You’d have to study to identify an appropriate priming spell, then you’d have to learn that spell, and by the time you did, you’d be strong enough to maintain the light spell for longer anyway. But if you want to practice those techniques so that you can understand them, you should. You…”

Alden was having a quick fantasy about filling his bedroom with nyip pods just so that he could use his flashlight spell for as long as he wanted, so it took him a second to notice that Stuart had trailed off.