The second chapter even more than the first seems to me to move fast. It's not supposed to be entirely clear why the council makes such a significant decision so abruptly. It's supposed to become more comprehensible over the next three or four chapters, as it becomes more clear who these people all are and what they do. A problem in writing this story, though, is that I've done some thinking ahead right to the end, and so there may be a lot of things that I already have in mind in these early chapters, but that I have never explained to the reader. It may be that some things are more unclear than they're supposed to be.

Or it may be that things have just moved too fast, and it doesn't make sense, and oh darn. I know quite a few stories about how some precocious youth gradually attains recognition and power. I thought it would be interesting to cut through a lot of that, and boost my precocious youth to power and recognition practically right at the beginning. Of the characters she meets in the rest of the story, the ones that don't care about her rank will mostly just be freaked that she's a scary Morandau witch right out of their legends. A big part of my motivation for this story is that I'm sick of stupidity as a plot device, so I plan for almost every character to be sharp enough to register her as a big blip on their radar.

I have no idea whether it is possible to make anthills explode by scattering sweetened combustible crumbs for the ants to pick up. My fallback position is that these may not really be ants, but some alien life form that is much happier about harvesting gunpowder grains dipped in syrup. It really is true that linseed oil can spontaneously combust, though it's oxidation, not evaporation, that causes the reaction. This was my mistake, and I should fix it, because Anastasia knows better. Oxidation is one of her things, and the more exothermic the better. Linseed oil might well not really ignite in a space as confined as an anthill. It might run out of oxygen first. Maybe this wasn't actually linseed oil, though, but some other substance.

The remembered episode about the ants came to me from nowhere in a rather late revision of this chapter. I like it because it's cool and creative, but bizarre and disturbing, in a way that makes Anastasia seem rather alarming. She's supposed to be. Nothing sweet about her.