“Now one of those Change-Circles south of us, in the Barony of Lepodal, brought in a tree with a trunk big enough to drive a wagon through it. Well, it would have, except it didn’t bring the whole tree. It brought a crescent-shaped bite of the tree. And that was so fantastic that Baron Lepodal got a cabinetmaker to make as many tables out of that tree trunk as he could. People competed to buy them. They’re scattered all over the Empire, family heirlooms. And I happened to be in the same manor as one of them a few years ago, and while no one was looking, I thought, ‘Jonaton, old sport, it might be handy to have a splinter of that thing some day, because you never know.’”

“You never know what, exactly?” Kordas asked.

“That’s what I’m getting to!” Jonaton shouted impatiently. “So I made sure no one was around, and I got down on the floor under the table, and I carved off a little sliver from the underside. I made sure to get it from the trunk, because I wasn’t sure what the legs were made of. And I put it in a box, and put it in my collection, and then never thought about it.” Jonaton waved backhandedly at the overstuffed shelves and stands that could start a museum all on their own.

Becoming a mage of high quality meant suffering through a long list of pain- and senses-shocking experiences just to learn the craft. An exploratory mage, well, they were rare, and every one known was recorded as eccentric. Kordas knew that it changed some mages beyond reasoning, but Kordas knew that one trait about Jonaton was that he compulsively acquired things. As vices go, it wasn’t the worst possible—but just the same, Kordas knew it was probably best that he never officially learned where Jonaton’s collections originated, or there would be no small sum of reparations money going out of the Duchy.

“How you keep track of all that—stuff—” Hakkon began.

Jonaton ignored the jibe. “Until last night! When I realized, that tree must have come from the West! Far to the West, way beyond where the Empire’s borders are, because otherwise someone would have found it and made matching tables and made a fortune! So last night I gathered up all my spare energy crystals and that sliver and decided to see if I could punch through to where that tree is—or was, anyway. And I did it! I did it!”

“So . . . you saw where the tree used to stand?” Kordas asked hesitantly. Jonaton used a lot of eccentric language, and he wasn’t quite sure just what “punched through” meant.