Suddenly it was quiet. The fire was a friendly little campfire again and the cool night air flowed into Wiz’s lungs and soothed his scorched face. Moira stood across the fire from him, her hair singed, her cloak smouldering and her eyes blazing.
“Yes.” She snapped. “That’s exactly what I mean.”
“I’m sorry,” Wiz stammered. “I didn’t mean to . . .” Then his jaw dropped. “Hey, wait a minute. That was magic!”
“That was stupid,” the hedge witch countered, beating out an ember on her cloak.
“No, I mean I worked magic,” Wiz said eagerly. “That means I am a magician. Bal-Simba was wrong.” He grinned and shook his head. “Son of a gun.”
“What you are is an idiot,” Moira snapped. “Any fool can work magic, and far too many fools do.”
“But . . .”
“Didn’t you listen to anything I just told you? Magic is all around us. It is easy to make. Any child can do it. If you are careless you can make it by accident as you just did.”
“Well, if it’s so easy to make . . .”
“Sparrow, easy to make and useful are not the same thing. To be useful magic must be controlled. Could you have stopped what you just created just now? Of course not! If I had not been here you would have burned the forest down. A careless word, a thoughtless gesture and you loose magic on the world.”
She stopped and looked around the clearing for signs of live coals. “And mark well, magic is not easy to learn. There are a hundred ways, perhaps a thousand of doing what you just did. And most of them are useless because they cannot be controlled. Without control magic is not just useless, it is hideously dangerous.”
“But I still made magic,” Wiz protested.
Moira snorted. “You made it once. By accident. What makes you think you could do it again?”
“What makes you think I couldn’t?” Wiz countered, picking up the stick. “All I have to do is point at the fire and say . . .”
“Don’t,
“ Moira yelled. “Don’t even think of trying it again.”
Wiz lowered the stick and looked at her.
“Sparrow, heed me and heed me well. The chance that you could do that again is almost nil. The essence of success in magic is to repeat absolutely everything with not the tiniest variation every single time you recite a spell.”
She gestured at him. “Look at you. You have shifted your stance, you are holding the stick at a different angle, you are facing southeast instead of North, you are . . . oh, different in a dozen ways. Could you say those words with exactly the same inflection? Could you give your wrist exactly the twist you used in the gesture? Could you clench your left hand in exactly the same way?”
“Is all that important?”
“All that is vital ,” Moira told him. “All that and much more. The phase of the moon, the angle of the sun. The hour of the day or night. All enter into magic and all must be considered.
“No matter what you have been told, magical talent does not consist of some special affinity for magic, some supernatural gift. Magical ability is the ability to control what you produce. And that turns on noticing the tiniest detail of what is done and being able to repeat it flawlessly.”
That makes a weird kind of sense, Wiz admitted to himself. Like programming. There’s no redundancy in the language and the tiniest mistake can have major consequences. Look at all the time I’ve spent going over code trying to find the missing semicolon at the end of a statement, or a couple of transposed letters. It also meant he probably was a magical klutz. He was the kind of guy who walked into doors and spent five minutes hunting for his car every time he went to the mall.
“Wait a minute, though,” Wiz said. “If all it takes is a good memory, why can’t most people learn to do magic?”
Moira flicked a strand of coppery hair away from her face with an exasperated gesture. “A good memory is the least part of what we call the talent.”