Kaitlyn made bread that night. She wished she had some butter, but even just using the last of the fat from the pheasants, she made a passable loaf. It was late when she pulled it out of the pot which she had used as an improvised oven and she decided one of her projects during the winter would be to build an outdoor oven.

She woke the next morning and magically created an awl to work on her buttons. She soon had four buttons, which was enough to test her plan. She put two on each side of the hips and buttoned them up. It worked perfectly. She stood in her chemise and new pants. She grinned.

She continued during her meditation sessions to explore the tool spell, but now she wove different implements. She was seeing how the spell was incredibly diverse. She immediately began using it to stir the stew while she worked on other things, or carving a button while she planned a spot in the garden to build an oven.

She had decided to make a shirt with buttons down the front, so she began working on the buttons while she gardened. She did the cutting and sewing in the evening by the light of her flame spell.

Fapallo continued to bring meat to Kaitlyn regularly. When she mentioned wanting something with more fat, he took the challenge and brought her back a wild pig. She found a salt rock with help from Javorora to use the salt to flavor her own food. This also allowed her to preserve most of the pork meat.

It had been almost two months, it was beginning to be cool in the mornings when she had a surprise. She was working in the garden and decided to get a few more final lavender bushels before there was a freeze. As she started cutting she stopped and took a step back. For a long moment, she didn’t believe what she had found.

The lavender grew right against the house, climbing the side near the back door. Kaitlyn grunted as she looked at the door. She called Fapallo, “Fapallo, can you come back here and look at something?”

Fapallo climbed off the roof and came over with a whistle she now understood as, “What do you want or need?”

“Look over here,” Kaitlyn pointed to the back of the house.

Fapallo looked and squawked a little, seeing what Kaitlyn had seen. She didn’t understand what that noise might mean, but she suspected it might be inappropriate. She nodded and said, “That second door wasn’t here before, was it?”

Fapallo shook his head and growled slightly. Kaitlyn shook her head and said, “It isn’t very big, I’m afraid to open it up.”

As she cut away the excess of lavender to expose a new, second door next to her backdoor she glared. Could Fapallo, Javorora, and herself all have missed this hidden behind the branches? Or was there some more magic going on that she didn’t understand? She finished pulling away the weeds blocking it.

She opened the door and burst out laughing. It was a latrine. It was a wonderful sight and she said, “Definitely nothing too dangerous in there. And thank the gods, I was not looking forward to figuring out what do when the ground froze. I just wish one of us had noticed this door sooner.”

Kaitlyn used her new latrine with a certain amount of glee. It had been so many months since she had been able to sit while she relieved herself. When she stepped out, Fapallo was on the roof again, his wings half-spread in the last rays of sunshine. He whistled as she went to the front to wash her hands in the well.

“We need to keep working on my language skills,” Kaitlyn said, “I didn’t understand whether that was even a question or a statement. Can we start doing that in the evenings?”

Fapallo nodded from the roof’s ridge. Kaitlyn waved and went inside to begin making supper. Tonight she was mixing ground grains, carrots, herbs, and rabbit. She had stripped the meat from the rabbit’s bones so she could grind the bones with her magical mortar. Apparently ground bones were a common ingredient in potions and even sometimes spellwork. She had two different potions she wanted to try to make, one as an antidote for certain kinds of poisons and the other a hair beautification oil and both called for powdered bones.

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She was busy much of the fall gathering vegetables and storing them. Using her spell for small tools she was able to craft several crates to hold the vegetables and she filled the little hut as best she could. Even when Master Garthis arrived, Kaitlyn focused on her gathering.

Kaitlyn remained in the garden, digging and harvesting while her master spoke to her. Even during her lessons, she kept working to prepare for the colder months ahead of her.

He taught her two new spells, one which allowed her to tie her flame spell into an object which could hold magic. Different objects could hold the magic differently. Some rocks were very good at holding the flame spell. When buried in the ground, the rock held the heat of the spell without the light.

The best rock was one which was a pale, tan rock. There weren’t a lot of them, but they were the strongest in two ways. The first was that the rocks got hotter than the other kinds of rocks. The heat also spread further from these rocks. Master Garthis called the rocks “tuff” and said there were reasons it was so effective. He couldn’t explain what that reason was, only that he knew it existed.

Master Garthis also did a poor job when he tried to explain why the heating spell worked. He apologized when she explained that she had spent the summer digging out rocks in an otherwise well maintained garden. She sighed as she began the process of putting the rocks back in the ground. She was able to space them out more carefully, spreading out the kinds of rocks which were better at exuding the heat where she wanted.

Fapallo guessed the witch had just added rocks randomly when she needed them, but Kaitlyn was able to organize the placement since she was starting over. It helped her feel a little better that she was doing the work over to think she was making it better. She did end up with a remaining pile of rocks she would be able to use as she expanded her garden.

The second spell he taught her allowed her to feed her magic into the plants themselves to guide the plants to grow in the direction she chose. This allowed her to guide the growth of the plants, including their roots, branches, and buds. She used this to encourage the squash plants to grow in specific directions rather than in random locations which might prevent other plants from growing.

This second spell was difficult. The shape was the most complicated because the core of the spell had to be modified depending on what Kaitlyn wanted to accomplish. The flame spell was always exactly the same all the time. The tool spell always started the same and only got adjusted once the core of the spell was formed. This spell had to be built slightly differently every time.

This is where Kaitlyn learned one of the next dangers of magic. Spells going awry. The first time Kaitlyn tried to build the spell, she thought she had the shape right. As she began feed magic into the spell she suddenly gasped as it felt like the mana was being drained from her. Master Garthis jumped up and grabbed her hand and instantly the spell snapped, her mana cut off.

She looked up at her master and he nodded, “It’s alright. This was bound to happen with this spell. I forgot you always use internal mana. I’ll need to teach you some bounds with your own mana before you practice this spell again.”

“Bounds?” Kaitlyn said.

“Creating some safeties within yourself to make sure you don’t do that again,” he said.

“What… how did I do that?”

“Sometimes when you build the spell you might place a hole,” Master Garthis said, “this hole will act like a hole in a pot, dragging all the mana out of the spell as you try to feed it.”

“Why couldn’t I just stop feeding it?” Kaitlyn asked.

“Pressure,” he said, “there was pressure from that hole which actually pulled at your mana. You could have stopped it, but this is part of why I am here to teach you. I also realized I hadn’t warned you. By the time you figured out what was happening on your own, you might have been in much worse shape.”

“Now,” he master sat back down, “Go into your own mana, we’re going to work on setting up some blocks within yourself so if this happens again you know exactly what to do.”

This was not a simple lesson, but it was an important one. Especially as Kaitlyn worked more with the plant-growing magic. She did learn within a day or so that growing a plant with magic came with draw-backs. Forcing rapid growth made the plant weaker and unless she also forced the root system to grow, the new growth quickly set to rotting on the limbs of the plant. Even focusing on both roots and limbs, forcing rapid growth on a plant clearly strained them and caused them to have poor flavor or even to die off. The spell was most effective long-term in guiding a plant to grow in a specific direction.