Where It All Goes Down
The Valley / The Empire / Faheel's Island
This setting's got it all—deserts, valleys, cities, towns, rivers, and, lots of people. The story kicks off in Tilja's secluded home in the Valley. It's a pretty chill place, full of tons of farms and nice folks. Sounds pretty pleasant, right? It turns out the Valley's in danger, so Tilja's forced to leave her secluded farmstead to journey into the Empire. The Valley represents Tilja's childhood—peaceful and safe.
When Tilja ventures into the Empire, she encounters some bad dudes. Those in power are corrupt, and the poor are really poorly off. Unlike the Valley, the Empire is chock-full of hierarchical structures, complete with a super oppressive ruler at the top. The Empire is supremely organized, with fields everywhere and the peasants that farm them. It's pretty dry, but the near-slave labor helps:
There wasn't anything special about the place that Tilja could see, only the slow-moving stream, wriggling away between the fields, and every so soften someone working an endless rope that dipped below the surface and drew bucket after bucket up the steep bank and tipped them into the ditch at the top. That was how the ditches were filled, she realized, and that was why the fields ended as suddenly as they did, because it was as far as the water could be made to flow. Without those hoists, and the hundreds of peasants toiling at them all day long, this great, rich area would have been as barren as the parched plain beyond it. (7.7)
The Emperor either oppresses magicians or forces them to work for him as his Watchers—though in the Valley, magicians can run free and frolic as they please. Tilja confronts intensely unfair circumstances for the first time when she goes to the Empire, and it's a real learning experience. Not every place is as fair—both in terms of justice and appearance—as where she grew up.
The last major stop on Tilja's Tour of the Empire is Faheel's island. Only Faheel's powers—and Tilja's—seem to work here. Faheel is the big guy on campus on his island… and also the only guy. His island is isolated from the Empire—like the Valley—but unlike the Valley, the island has just one dude living there.
You might think that the most powerful magician in the world with an island all to himself would set up all sorts of magical contraptions to make life easier and cool, but when Tilja arrives she finds a surprisingly ordinary place. Check out this description:
Again he turned and led the way through the garden. Tilja looked around her with surprise as she walked beside him. Like Faheel himself, this was not at all what she had expected. A magician's garden should have been extraordinary, surely--extraordinarily beautiful, extraordinarily neat, every plant not only wonderfully strange but doing precisely what it was supposed to. Instead, Faheel's garden, though certainly beautiful, was beautiful only with a kind of heightened ordinariness. There were gardens almost like this in the Valley, despite the harsher climate, gardens crammed with all the various plants their fanatical owners could fit in. Here were fruit trees and vegetables in straight rows, healthy and strong, though some of the rows needed hoeing, and there were masses of different flowers, and marvelous wafts of their scent floating in the mild, warm breeze, but often they sprawled among each other and some could have done with deadheading, and a few weeds poked up among them, and there were even patches that seemed to have been let go wild. (11.98)
Not exactly oozing magic, right? Faheel's magical wards keep the status quo intact on the island—just like they do in the Valley. This is the place where Tilja gets her groove on, magically speaking. She finally discovers, through Faheel's instructions and explanations, what kind of magic she has and just what she can do.