Moira took her dinner in her room that night, making Ugo grumble and complain about the stairs he had to climb to take it to her. Shiara made a point of not noticing and Wiz picked at his food and muttered.
The argument marked a change in their relationship. Wiz still loved Moira, but he began to notice things about her he hadn’t seen before. She had a temper, he realized, and a lot of the time the things she said to him weren’t justified. She was beautiful but she wasn’t really pretty by the conventional standard of either world. Most of all, he saw, she was terribly involved with her work. She was as married to being a hedge witch as Wiz had been to computers.
For her part, Moira seemed to warm slightly to Wiz. She never spoke of their fight in the cellar and Wiz could see she still resented the things he had said, but she started to unbend a little. They could hardly be called close, but Moira began to go a little beyond common civility and Wiz’s dreams were no longer haunted by Moira.
Nine
Magic for Idiots and
English Majors
Slowly summer came to an end. The air grew cooler and the trees began to change. Standing on the battlements Wiz could watch flocks of birds winging their way over the multicolor patchwork tapestry of the Wild Wood. The swallows no longer flitted about in the evenings and the nights bore a touch of frost.
The garden was harvested now and Moira and Shiara spent their days in the kitchen, salting, pickling, preserving and laying by. Wiz helped where he could in the kitchen or out in the garden where Ugo was preparing the earth for its winter’s rest.
In some ways Wiz was more at home in the kitchen than Moira. The way of preserving that the hedge witch knew relied heavily on magic. But for Shiara’s comfort there could be no magic in the kitchen at Heart’s Ease.
“These will not be as good as if they were kept by a spell, but we will relish them in deep winter nonetheless,” Moira said one afternoon as they chopped vegetables to be pickled in brine.
“Yeah,” said Wiz, who had never particularly liked sauerkraut. “You know on my world we would can most of this stuff. Or freeze it.”
“Freezing I understand, but what is canning?”
“We’d cook the vegetables in their containers in a boiling water bath and then seal them while they were still very hot. They’d keep for years like that.”
“Why cook them before you sealed them?”
“To kill the bugs.” He caught the look on her face. “Germs, bacteria, tiny animals that make food spoil.”
“You know about those too?” Moira asked.
“Sure. But I’m surprised you don’t think disease is caused by evil spells.”
“I told you that there is no such thing as an evil spell,” Moira said, nettled. “And some ills are caused by spells. But most of them are the result of tiny creatures which can infest larger living things. What I do not understand is how you can sense them without magic.”
“We can see them with the aid of our instruments. We have optical and electron microscopes that let us watch even viruses—those are the really tiny ones.”
“You actually see them?” Moira shook her head. “I do not know, Sparrow. Sometimes I think your people must be wizards.”
“I’m not.”
Moira bit her lip and turned back to her cutting.
As evenings lengthened the three of them took to sitting around the fireplace in the hall enjoying the heat from the wood Wiz had cut. Usually Moira would mend while Wiz and Shiara talked.
“Lady, could you tell me about magic?” Wiz asked one evening.
“I don’t know many of the tales of wonders,” Shiara said. She smiled ruefully. “The stories are the work of bards, not the people who lived them.”
“I don’t mean that. What I’m interested in is how magic works. How you get the effects you produce.”
Moira looked up from her mending and glared. Shiara said nothing for a space.
“Why do you want to know?” She asked finally.