"Are you sure that this is what your father wants me to do?"

  "Yes. You might think that it is simple but it would take me an hour to remove one of the paving stones and I couldn't do two in a day." Gerolf kicked at the paving stones. "They were one of the things that kept us from more than a small garden's worth of vegetables. If we could make even some small farms that would make us need to import less food."

  "Fair enough. But I'll want to take Tarn and some others to help."

  The kitchen was moderately busy but the soldier-chef was willing to let Carina go for some 'training', and one of the others who, on hearing that they were to prepare farmland, begged to join on bended knee. He cheered like a child given a huge bag of candy, explained a little when Carina explained that he wished to grow tea once the settlement was properly established.

  Arno, as he was called, even had four saplings that were potted in the courtyard, waiting for the moment that he would get the land to plant it in. He was dissatisfied that we would be planting a small mix of vegetables and rye that the Patriarch had stored for the eventual use.

  Nikalia looked like she's just rolled out of her hammock when Taramo retrieved her but as she agreed to join and wanted to be involved it was necessary that she leave immediately. She took Mask with her to do her hair from her back, and he gave a large picnic basket to Nikalia to take with her.

  Iron also joined them, which led to a few extra guards joining 'just in case something happened', which Nikalia accepted with some tired grumbling.

  The dragon slayer's plaza was an optimal place to start planting so they went there. A tenth of the paving stones were already removed and if the water works could be started, or just this one line, then they could be irrigated with minimal effort.

  Mask and Iron started clearing the blast zone of debris so they could start tilling and sowing while Taramo got the four students together to start, or improve, their path on the way to magic.

  "The traditional method of beginning mage education is to meditate until one can perceive the flows of mana and be able to influence them. It is an excellent method suggested by most mage guilds." Carina had a downcast look, having not succeeded in it, and Tarn got a thousand yard stare. Millenia hasn't changed that.

  "It is useful if the teacher is flooded with students and wants to take fees with few actually succeeding. It does help with dedication by ensuring all mages have excellent focus, but instead I'll use a method that gets used by private instructors. I will be casting a spell on each of you. I'll ask each of you to close your right eye."

  Nikalia was exempt since she was already skilled, but to the others was cast a spell that made their left eye perceive magic.

  "Your colour vision will be less while this sense is active but tell me what you see."

  "The paving stones glow." Carina noted.

  "There's huge lines in the sky." Arno was looking at the sky, shading his eye from the sun.

  "You have a spell active." Tarn was looking at the spiderwork of wards that danced around Taramo.

  Taramo then explained.

  "It is normal for higher level mages to have contingency spells active. They are dangerous if you don't account for them interfering with each other so it should be avoided until you have the skills to hold ten spells active and a proper fear of ward layering."

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  "Up in the sky there are ley lines, where the flows of mana coalesce. Along the lines or at their intersections make good places to use spells that you don't have to recharge at least every week. Many ley line intersections have some settlement except in extremely vacant areas, where a wizard will probably show up.

  "Now the paving stones are where we will begin your training. Each stone has a ward that connects it to a network to keep it in place and minimize the wear on them. You will have to bypass that and remove the stone. There's also a ward that will set off a warning to someplace so they can replace the stone if it was damaged or removed, but I'll remove those since they are very bright when activated."

  He was pulling the security wards off the stones around this while he was explaining, and Nikalia had assisted with some. Then he got the simplest mana interface spell and did the equivalent of placing it in the hands of the three novices.

  "Find the spell in a stone and isolate it from the rest, then destroy the spell. You should be able to pick the stone up after it is finished so pull it out and let me or Iron take it away."

  Nikalia immediately yanked three of the stones out, tossing them to the far end of the plaza. The rest had a difficult time learning. Even using the basic spell was difficult for them, like learning to use your hands for the first time with a pair of pliers in them. A security ward on them made sure they couldn't harm themselves or others and their difficulty in learning made Taramo rethink his previous idea to streamline the basic wards since Arno got very close to lobotomizing himself had the wards not been in place.

  Tarn managed to take the first stone out and an added difficulty that they seemed to have was focus to keep their one eye closed while they worked.

  "You can open your other eye," Taramo warned "but it won't match up with what you see. It can make it difficult to comprehend the spellwork."

  For a bit they hade it more difficult but Tarn was able to get a second stone out before Carina managed her first. Arno was having difficulties, probably since he was here firstly to grow plants, but he was making some progress. Trimming a hedge with a pocketknife type of progress but he was improving.

  After an hour's work and six total stones removed, right after Arno managed to get his first, Taramo called for a break. He'd gotten some chairs from a tavern with a sign depicting a boar on fire and a low table for Nikalia. Including her they had managed to get half the paving stones out so Taramo finished the job in the ten minutes that they rested.

  The land was then prepared and the seeds sown while Taramo prepared the next exercise.

  "Here's some basic wands. If they heat up while you use them throw them away from people. I should be able to stop them from blowing up but there's no reason to risk it too much. We will learn to activate them."

  "How do we activate it?" Carina asked while the others were looking for something on the wands that would help.

  "There's no indirect activation method. Nothing you say will make them activate so you need to do it directly."

  It took five minutes of effort before Taramo gave them mana-sight so they could see their attempts and exactly where they were supposed to aim.

  Carina got it first while she was holding it pointed at her eye so she didn't see the result. A large blotch of purple had darkened her skin and hair. She started to despair when Nikalia shared her pocket mirror but Taramo explained that it was only an illusion and they would remove it at the end of the practice.

  "We'll be doing some mock-combat. We will all stay in the area around the Burning Boar tavern and play for ten minutes. Whoever has the most of their colour on everyone else wins."

  It took another fifteen minutes for everyone to use the wands three times, enough that they should be able to get it during 'battle'. Then the butterflies and Spot set themselves at the boundaries of the area and they went to battle.

  There was a tiny amount of feedback from the wands, just enough that they knew that they were hit. Despite that Nikalia managed to get the first win by climbing the side of the building when no-one was looking and hit someone then duck into a window on the fourth floor. By the time someone would get to the fourth floor she would be either down to a lower floor or waiting on the fourth once the previous strategy was discovered.

  Only Taramo managed to get Nikalia more than once, though he tried more to give everyone a fair chance.

  "Yeah, right. You're just mad that you lost." Nikalia gloated.

  In the next game her abdomen was covered with three separate smiley faces, each of which needed at least five blasts of the wand. She didn't win a single round after that.