This gives Martel a moment's pause, and he considers Henry. "None whatsoever; here for the lighting, they're no more independently mystical than the lightswitch that inspired them. It's a different mechanism, powered through myself and my little goddess, but made to behave in a similar way. These are all keyed to respond to an archaic Elenic dialect that I chose."

The second pause is a more natural one, where he runs out of words briefly and stops where the stopping is good while he decides how to go on. "Teaching you what I do would be very different. The first part is fluency in Styric - one has to be able to think in that language - and it's a ridiculous language. Beautiful, but a bloody nuisance. A proficient enough student in the language and the secrets themselves could passably master it in a decade or so."

Martel ... was better than that, always, immediately, but he's not talking about himself or rightly Henry, either, he's talking about the average student. Not all Pandions are created equal; there are knights who can barely make Aphrael hear them at all. (Kalten's really bad at it. For the record.)

"And it is, in the end, a very intimate relationship with a deity. For political reasons we're not ought to discuss that, but those haven't applied to me for a long time."