Rick Cook - Wizard’s Bane

Moira drew herself up. "If my feelings do not meet with your approval I am truly sorry! It is perhaps unreasonable of me, but that is the way I do feel."

"I doubt it," Wiz bit out. "Bal-Simba’s loss was greater than yours and he doesn’t hold me responsible. There’s something a whole lot more personal here. Now what?"

"I don’t…"

"Lady, I think the least, the very least, you owe me is a straight answer."

Moira didn’t reply for a long time. "I think," she said finally, "it is because you remind me of my failure."

"What failure?"

"The death of Patrius." Moira’s eyes filled with tears. "Don’t you see? I failed in my duty and Patrius died."

"What I see is you trying to take the whole bleeding world on your shoulders," Wiz snapped. "Look, I’m sorry for what happened to Patrius, all right? But I didn’t make it happen. I was kidnapped. Remember?"

"You were involved," Moira shot back. "If he hadn’t Summoned you, he wouldn’t have died."

"Wrong. If he hadn’t gotten me he would have gotten someone else—maybe the super-wizard he wanted, I don’t know. But the point is, I had nothing to do with it. He made the choice of his own free will. He knew the risks. I am not responsible. "

"No," Moira admitted slowly, "you were not."

"And I’ll tell you something else, lady. You weren’t responsible either."

"Little you know about it! An acolyte’s job is to protect the master."

"You’re not an acolyte. You’re a hedge-witch Patrius stumbled across and roped into his scheme. From what you and the others tell me, there is no way you could have protected him."

"Thank you," Moira said tightly. "All I needed was to be reminded of my weakness."

"Yes, you do need to be reminded of it!" Wiz flared. "You’re not all-powerful and you cannot be held responsible for something utterly beyond your control."

"Ohhh!" Moira gasped, turning from him.

"I’ll tell you something else you’re not responsible for," he said to her back. "You’re not responsible for what happened to your family. You didn’t do it and you can’t undo it and feeling guilty about it is only going to make you miserable."

Moira spun on her heel and slapped him with all the force of her body. Wiz’s head snapped to the side and he staggered back. Their eyes locked. Then Moira’s shoulders heaved and she began to sob silently, hugging herself and rocking back and forth on her heels.

Wiz took a step toward her and stopped. "Look, I’m sorry I said that. I shouldn’t have, Okay?"

"But dammit," he added forcefully, "it’s true!" and he turned and left the cellar.

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.

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.

Wiz shrugged. "No reason. We don’t have magic where I come from and I’m curious."

"Magic is not taught save to those duly apprenticed to the Craft," Moira scolded. "You are too old to become an apprentice."

"Hey, I don’t want to make magic, I just want to know how it works, okay?" They both looked at Shiara.

"You do not intend to practice magic?" she asked.

"No, Lady." Wiz said. Then he added: "I don’t have the talent for it anyway."

Shiara stroked the line of her jaw with her index finger, as she often did when she was thinking.

"Normally it is as Moira says," she said at last. "However there is nothing that forbids merely discussing magic in a general fashion with an outsider—so long as there is no attempt to use the knowledge. If you will promise me never to try to practice magic, I will attempt to answer your questions."

"Thank you, Lady. Yes, I will promise."

Shiara nodded. Moira sniffed and bent to her mending.

After that Wiz and Shiara talked almost every night. Moira usually went to bed earlier than they did and out of deference to her feelings they waited until she had retired. Then Wiz would try to explain his world and computers to Shiara and the former wizardess would tell Wiz about the ways of magic. While Shiara learned about video game-user operating systems, Wiz learned about initiation rites and spell weaving.