So here he was in a world where none of that meant diddly. What was he supposed to do with himself? He couldn’t earn a living. He wasn’t really strong enough for physical labor and the only thing he knew how to do was useless.
Goddamn that old wizard, anyway. Then he started guiltily remembering Moira’s admonition against cursing. I wonder if it matters if you just do it in your head?
If he was big and strong it might have helped. But he was skinny and gangly. The only difference between him and the classic pencil-necked geek was that he didn’t wear glasses.
Good thing too, he thought. If I did, I’d probably have broken them by now.
It wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t fair.
Somehow he got to sleep and dreamed uneasily of home and his beloved computers.
The next morning Wiz was sore all over. His legs ached from the unaccustomed exercise and the rest of him hurt from sleeping on the ground.
Moira was already up and seemingly none the worse for the night. Her copper hair was combed and hung down her back in a long braid. Her face was freshly scrubbed and she looked heart-stoppingly beautiful.
She was sitting cross-legged going through the contents of her worn leather shoulder bag. There was already a pile of things on the ground beside her.
“I do not think I can afford to keep all these things,” she said in response to his unasked question. “I will have to discard them carefully as we go.”
“I’ll carry them for you.”
Moira snorted. “The problem is not weight, you idiot. Magic calls to magic and these things,” she gestured, “are magical. The League may be able to find us through them.”
She looked down at the small pile and sighed. “They cost much time and no little effort to gain. All are useful and in a way they are all parts of me. But,” she added with forced cheerfulness, “better to discard them now than to have them lead the League to us.”
“Uh, right.”
Moira gathered the items back into her pouch. “I will dispose of them one at a time as we go along,” she said standing up. “It will make them harder to find, I hope.”
Wiz scrambled to his feet, feeling the kinks in his muscles stretch.
“We can make better time today,” the hedge witch said. “Mid-Summer’s Day is past and the magic will be less strong. We do not have to move quite so cautiously.”
“Great,” Wiz muttered, appalled at the prospect.
True to her word, Moira set an even faster pace for the day’s journey. Wiz struggled to keep up, but he didn’t do any better than he had the day before. Several times they had to stop while he rested and Moira fidgeted.
From time to time Moira would take something from her pouch. Sometimes she flung the object as far as she could into the woods. A couple of times she buried it carefully. Once she hid a folded bit of cloth in a hollow log and once she dropped a piece of carved wood into a swiftly running stream.
Wiz could see the effort it took her to discard each of those items but he said nothing. There was nothing he could say.
The forest was more open than it had been the day before. The trees were smaller here. They were just as thick where they grew, but they were interspersed with clearings. Once they passed the ruins of a rock wall, running crazily through the woods.
They kept to the forest and stayed as deep among the trees as possible. Occasionally they had to skirt an open space and it was near one such clearing that Moira stopped suddenly and sniffed.
“Do you smell it?” she asked.
Wiz sniffed. “Something burnt, I think.”
“Come on,” Moira said, forging ahead and breasting through the undergrowth.
They were in the clearing before they recognized it. One minute they were pushing through bushes and brambles and the next they were standing on the fringe of a meadow, looking at the smoldering remains of a homestead.
There had been at least three buildings, now all were charred ruins. The central one, obviously a house, had stone walls which stood blackened and roofless. The soot was heaviest above the door and window lintels and a few charcoaled beams still spanned the structure. Of the nearer, larger building, a planked barn, there was almost nothing left. On the other side of the house was a log building with part of one wall standing.