"You know," Sypha peeks slyly between her fingers, "There's a tacit Speaker tradition of disseminating misinformation when it suits the protection of delicate truths. If you want an alibi, we could start teasing that one out into the world."

Which, actually, ties to his suggestion of invoking him with the elders. Sypha twists her hands together, purses her lips, and then blurts: "I've been trying to figure out how to tell them about you. I wondered at first if they would even believe me, but now there's...this." The knowledge of Speaker magic, however brittle and threadbare. She taps her fingers to her mouth.

There are rituals to accessing knowledge. The Speaker aversion to written word has as much to do with its easy access as its easy destruction - in the wrong hands, information can cause as much devastation as innovation. And so there are steps, rote questions, call-and-response patterns that must be danced to get at the things a seeker might wish to know. Approach one of the elders asking about magic, and they'd assume she wanted to talk about the weather.

"I could start there," she muses, "Ask about you as a historical figure, work my way backward through the oral chronology. It's a way to test the current opinion on you, too. I confess, it's been a long time since I've taken a folklore refresher."