Nita rolled her eyes. "Probably I could," she said, "but the trouble is, that bread was made with the seeds, and it thinks they belong there."
"Bread thinks* What about?"
"Uh, well, it— See, when you combine the yeast with the flour, the yeasts—" Nita suddenly realized that if this went on much longer, she was going to wind up explaining some of the weirder facts of life to her mother, and she wasn't sure that either she or her mother was ready. "Mom, the wizardry would just be a real pain to write. Probably simpler just to take the seeds out with my fingers."
Her mother raised her eyebrows, let out a breath, and made a note. "Small loaf of nonseeded rye for daughter whose delicate aesthetic sensibilities are offended by picking a few seeds out of a slice of bread."
"Mom, picking them out doesn't help. The taste is still there!"
"Scouring pads... chicken breasts..." Her mom gnawed reflectively on the cap of the pen. "Shampoo, aspirin, soup—"
"Not the cream-of-chemical kind, Mom!"
"Half a dozen cans of nonchemical soup for the budding gourmet." Her mother looked vague for a moment, then glanced over at what Nita was writing. She squinted a little. "Either I really do need reading glasses or you're doing math at a much higher level than I thought."
Nita sighed. "No, Mom, it's the Speech. It has some expressions in common with calculus, but they're—" "What about your homework?"
"I finished it at school so I wouldn't keep getting interrupted in the middle of it, like I am here!" "Oh dear," her mother said, peeling off another note and starting to write on it. "No seedless rye for you." Nita immediately felt embarrassed. "Mom, I'm sorry—"
"We all have stress, honey, but we don't have to snap at each other." The back door creaked open, and Nita's father came in and went to the sink.
Nita's mother glanced up. "Harry, I thought you said you were going to oil that thing. It's driving me nuts."
"We're out of oil," Nita's father said as he washed his hands. "Oil," her mother said, and jotted it down on the sticky note. "What else?"
Her father picked up a dish towel and stood behind her mother's chair, looking down at the shopping list. "Lint?" he said.
This time her mother squinted at the notepaper. "That's 'list.'"
"Could have fooled me."
Nita's mom bent closer to the paper. "I see your point. I guess I really should go see the optometrist."
"Or maybe you should stop using the computer to write everything," her dad said, going to hang up the towel. "Your handwriting's going to pot."
"So's yours, sweetheart."
"I know. That's how I can tell what's happening to yours." Her father opened the refrigerator, gazed inside, and said, "Beer."
"Oh, now wait a minute. You said—"
"I lost ten pounds last month. The diet's working. After a hard day in the shop, can't I even have a cold beer? Just one?"
Nita put her head down over her notebook and concentrated on not snickering.
"We'll discuss that later. Oh, by the way, new sneakers for you," her mother said, giving her father a severe look, "before your old ones get up and start running around by themselves, without either of our daughters being involved."
"Oh, come on, Betty, they're not that bad!"
"You put your head in the closet, take a sniff, and tell me that again... assuming you make it out of there alive... If you can even tell anymore. I think all those flowers you work with are killing your sense of smell—"
"You don't complain about them when I bring home roses."
"It counts for more when somebody brings roses home if he's not also the florist!"
Nita's dad laughed and started to sing in off-key imitation of Neil Diamond, "Youuu don't bring me floooooowerrrs...," as he headed for the back bedroom.
Nita's mom raised her eyebrows. "Harold Edward Callahan," she said as she turned her attention back to her list making, "you are potentially shortening your lifespan..."
The only answer was louder singing, in a key that her father favored but few other human beings could have recognized. Nita hid her smile until her mother was sufficiently distracted, and then went back to her own business, making a few more notes on the clean page. After some minutes of not being able to think of anything to add, she finally closed the notebook and pushed it away. She'd done as much with the spell as she could do on paper. The rest of it was going to have to wait to be tested out in the real world.
She sighed as she picked up her copy of the wizard's manual and dropped it on top of her notebook. Her mother glanced over at her. "Finished?"
"In a moment. The manual's acquiring what I just did."
Her mother raised her eyebrows. "Doesn't it go the other way around? I thought you got the spells out of the book in the first place."
"Not all of them. Sometimes you have to build something completely new if there's no precedent spell to help you along. Then when you test the new spell out and it works okay, the manual picks it up and makes it available for other wizards to use. Most of what's in here originally came from other wizards, over a lot of years." She gave the wizard's manual a little nudge. "Some wizards don't do anything much but write spells and construct custom wizardries. Tom, for example."
"Really," Nita's mother said, looking down at her grocery list again. "I thought he wrote things for TV."
"He does that, too. Even wizards have to pay the bills," Nita said. She got up and stretched. "Mom, I should get going."
Her mother gave her a thoughtful look. "You know what I'm going to say..." "'Be careful.' It's okay, Mom. This spell isn't anything dangerous." "I've heard that one before."
"No, seriously. It's just taking out the garbage, this one."
Her mother's expression went suddenly wicked. "While we're on the subject—"
"It's Dairine's turn today," Nita said hurriedly, shrugging into the denim jacket she'd left over the chair earlier. "See ya later, Mom..." She kissed her mom, grabbed the manual from on top of her notebook, and headed out the door.
In the backyard, she paused to look around. Long shadows trailed from various dusty lawn furniture; it was only six-thirty, but the sun was low. The summer had been short for her in some ways—half of it lost to the trip to Ireland and the rush of events that had followed. Now it seemed as if, within barely a finger-snap of summer, the fall was well under way. All around her, with a wizard's ear Nita could hear the murmur of the birches and maples beginning to relax toward the winter's long rest, leaning against the earth and waiting with mild expectation for the brief brilliant fireworks of leaf-turn; the long lazy conversation of foliage moving in wind; and the light of sun and stars beginning to taper off to silence now, as the hectic immediacy of summer wound down.
She leaned against the trunk of the rowan tree in the middle of the backyard and looked up through the down-drooping branches with their stalks of slender oval leaves, the green of them slowly browning now, the dulled color only pointing up the many heavy clusters of glowing BB-sized fruit that glinted scarlet from every branch in the late, brassy light. "Nice berries this year, Liused," Nita said.
It took a few moments for her to hear the answer: Even with the Speech, there was no dropping instantly into a tree's time sense from human life speed. Not bad this time out... not bad at all, the tree said modestly. Going on assignment?
"Just a quick one," Nita said. "I hope."
Need any thing from me?
"No, that last replacement's still in good shape. Thanks, though."
You're always welcome. Go well, then.
She leaned for a moment more to let her time sense come back up to its normal speed, then patted the rowan tree's trunk and went out into the open space by the birdbath. There she paused for a little to just listen to it alclass="underline" life, going about its business all around her— the scratchy self-absorbed noise of the grass growing, the faint rustle and hum of bugs and earthworms contentedly digging in the ground, the persistent little string music of a garden spider fastening web strand to web strand in a nearby bush—repetitive, intense, and mathematically precise. Everything was purposeful... everything was, if not actually intelligent, then at least aware—even things that science didn't usually think were aware, because science didn't yet know how to measure or overhear the kinds of consciousness they had.