“Yeah,” Alfred said, smiling as she brushed her fingers against his chest again. “Yeah, exactly. The first one is sort of just about you, because it’s — a lot of the times it’s a childhood nickname or something,” he explained. “But the rest are all about… how you fit into things. What you do for other people. So like, with these ones about magic. Most people get this middle one, helper, because there’s a lot of, uhm, collaborative magic,” he explained, with a shrug. It was decidedly un-English, but that was how most people in the tribe experienced magic; participating in dances and chants. Magic as a ritual, rather than as a spell. Actually trying to understand and build the spells — the student marker — wasn’t a given, and spoke to how much time he’d spent with the old woman who represented the magical authority of the tribe. And, of course, he could do plenty of things with wandless magic, like the fire, but the only one that had earned him a new band was healer.

“But having these in this order is… well, I spent a whole year basically just doing that,” he explained. “And that’s not usual. Mostly the people who actually study magic in the tribe are all women,” he admitted, with a slight flush. “But it’s like — that was my path in. And after I learned their magic, I learned how to hunt with them, and —” he brushed his hand over the fighter band but again did not say more about it. “And that’s when I got the tattoos. That’s when I really felt like I was part of it all. Like I’d earned it,” he explained. “And that’s when I started teaching them things. And exploring again,” he added, almost as an afterthought, with a slightly sentimental smile.