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."