Harry says root, a word Matt has seen here and there in books, and coming out of Harry's mouth, he finds he likes it. It feels right. Very world tree, very here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud. His lips quirk mordantly when Harry refers to sex magic as a good root to draw from around here. Matt, too, sees the manor as something of an infernal honeytrap: dionaea muscipula, flexing hectic and slippery petals to get them dancing.

(He's not ashamed of sex magic, he'd say. Just hesitant about how other people will react, trained by a decade of secrecy. If he dug a little deeper, he might have more feelings to unpack about it, about magic in general.)

"I like sympathetic magic a lot," he says now, brightening. "I mean, in some ways it feels like the magic to me, in the sense of ... so many of the spell configurations I make are conceived as like, metaphors for the world and the effect I want to have."

It does jive with his style. The embodied world, the up close and personal. But Matt's curious about the other specialty Harry's named. His eyebrows arch, as he stretches one leg to nudge Harry's calf playfully with his bare foot.

"You end up in a lot of combat?"