Grimoire management was a delicate business. The utmost concentration was essential, especially in the middle of a lively adventuring party's camp. Thus, Aloth failed to notice the Watcher's approach until she suddenly plopped down beside him as he was in the middle of imbuing one of his grimoire's pages with the soul energy necessary to cast Chain Lightning, tracing out the intricate lines of the spell on the yellowed page. Startled out of his intense concentration, he uttered an invective he'd learned from Iselmyr. Lenneth uttered a startled giggle. Aloth sighed.
"All right," he grumbled peevishly, "tell me what you want so I can get back to preparing for tomorrow. I'll have to start this page over now."
"Oh," Lenneth said, her voice soft, brows knitting in concern as she saw, too late, what she'd interrupted. "I'm sorry. I didn't realize."
"It's all right," Aloth sighed again, leaning back from the tome open on his lap and blinking away the eyestrain of such intense focus. "It's hardly urgent; I have all evening," he assured her, attempting to affect a polite and pleasant demeanor and not to think too much on her nearness or the warmth that seemed to radiate as if from her very soul in such proximity. He fancied that his grimoire, deprived suddenly of the energy he had been so carefully feeding it, tingled and shivered like iron filings about to leap to a magnet. "What can I do for you, Watcher?"
She eyed the tome for a moment longer before looking back to the wizard. "Do any of the special dishes you're supposed to serve for the Feast of Feasts involve boar?"
Aloth blinked at her. Once. Twice, before he could find words, and even then it was just to echo, "Boar?"
"Because Hiravias just brought one back - only slightly mangled, but that's what you get when you send a stelgaer out as your hunting party - and it seemed like a special occasion might be warranted, and it is the first week of Deep Summer, so I thought…" She finally trailed off and shrugged.
"I...haven't celebrated the Feast of Feasts for years," Aloth mused. "But yes, there is something involving a boar stuffed with small fowl on the fourth day."
"Effigy's eyes," Lenneth swore. "It's only Cönyngsdag. Don't know that the boar would keep for two more days, even if we wanted to bother dragging it along on the road."
"I should be very interested to see how you managed to cook such a dish on the road in the first place," Aloth said, not trying very hard to suppress the smirk that arose at the thought of her doing just that. "Why do you want to do such a thing, anyway?"
"For fun?" she shrugged. "To raise morale? I don't know, what's the point of roasting a whole boar without making a special occasion of it?"
"I meant that it seems odd to celebrate an Aedyran holiday while you're traveling through the Dyrwood with a company consisting of one whole Aedyran. Didn't you say you were from Rauatai?"
"Once upon a time," Lenneth admitted. "Haven't been back in years. And my parents both came from other places before they lingered in Rauatai long enough to have kids, so wandering's in my blood. Feels like I'm from a lot of places, these days."
"Have your travels taken you as far as Aedyr, then?" he asked, his voice lowering a bit in a sudden fit of...shyness, or something like it he couldn't quite name, at the thought of Lenneth in the land of his birth.
"Not yet," she said with a brief glance his way, and a look about her that somehow seemed in concord with the nameless feeling that had come over him.
"How do you know of the Feast of Feasts, then?" Aloth pressed. "I didn't think it was celebrated anywhere in this part of the world. Especially not in the Dyrwood, given its history with the fercönyng."
"Unfortunately not, as far as I know," she confirmed, producing a small, dog-eared book from a pocket somewhere. On its faded cover he could just make out the words Aedyre Customs. "Nicked it back in Defiance Bay," she explained as he thumbed through the narrow pages. "It's been good reading. It makes it all sound so...glamorous."
Aloth snorted. "Then it takes serious liberties. And as a wizard, I'm obliged to remind you that the point of a glamour is to conceal the reality."
"Oh, I know," Lenneth grinned, amusement bubbling through her voice. "Never ran a con that didn't call for a bit of glamour to do just that." And she fluttered her eyelashes at him in a way that she probably meant only in jest at her former career, but its effect on him was more like she had cast some sort of gravity-twisting spell in the region of his stomach. Glamour, indeed. Feeling a moment's sympathy with the targets of her past cons, Aloth fixed his eyes on his grimoire and caught his breath as she babbled on, "Anyway, maybe we'll throw a proper Feast of Feasts when we're back at Caed Nua. Or the last day or two of it, anyway. You'll have to fill in the gaps for me on how to do it properly; the book's so short it doesn't go into much detail." She nudged him with an elbow till he reluctantly glanced up, certain he felt her warmth of spirit reflected in his own face. She surely noticed the blushing, but mercifully only asked, "You don't mind, do you? I know my curiosity is excessive at times, but you are our only expert on all things Aedyran. And magic. And the Leaden Key, about which I do have more questions…"
Aloth groaned at the mention of his former career. "If those are the options, then holiday traditions it is."
"Splendid!" she smiled. Then she dropped her eyes, blushing a bit herself now as she added, "You'll let me know, though, if I'm bothering you too much with questions? I don't mean to annoy you."
"You don't," he replied without hesitation. Annoy was certainly not the word for her effect on him, though he was doing his utmost not to consider too closely what else to call it. "Your curiosity is...it's…" A welcome distraction. An endearing glimpse of your mind's quirks. Refreshing in contrast to the two-faced civility of Aedyr. Confusing at times and never dull. But all he could come up with to actually say was, "...oddly...charming."
Given the delighted and predatory smirk this brought to her face, that may have been the wrong thing to say. Or, he reflected, exactly the right thing, as she leaned closer and said, "Well, then. Can I charm you with another question?"
"Go on," he said, already quite charmed.
She gestured to the grimoire, still open across his lap. "How does it work, your book?"
"My grimoire," he corrected automatically, and she nodded with a look of eager inquiry in her eyes.
"Are the spells just too much to memorize, that they have to be written down?" she asked.
Aloth huffed. "Not at all. The words of power are simple enough. I don't just read them from the grimoire; the spells themselves - the soul energy that powers them - are stored in the pages, contained and defined by the words and symbols, by how they're arranged. The challenge is not in recalling phrases, but in coaxing that energy back out of the grimoire when I need it, in the form that I need. It must be stored just so; released just so - it takes years of study to master the precision required to cast from even the simplest grimoire, and it takes strength of will to bend it to your purpose, not to mention strength of arms to heft the thing."
"Oh." Lenneth frowned. "Sounds more complicated than I thought."
"Everything's more complicated than you think, when you start to look closer at it," Aloth soothed.
"True," she shrugged, still looking disappointed.
"Watcher," he asked, appraising that look of disappointment and finding it unacceptable not to resolve it, if he could, "do you...Why did you ask about the grimoire?"
"Honestly," she sighed, "I thought...I hoped maybe I could learn a bit of what you do. I mean, I've about got the hang of shooting a pistol, now, but what with sticking to the back of our group to make good use of it, I've got a far better view than I used to of my favorite wizard at work," she elbowed him again, gently now that she had his full attention anyway, "and it's...well. It's a wonder to behold, Aloth."
Stumbling over that favorite (and then chiding himself, you're the only wizard here, it doesn't count), it took him a moment to catch up and process her words. "You...want to learn to do magic?"
"It was a silly idea," she shrugged, glancing away. "Don't know where I'd put a grimoire, anyway, amongst all the knives and the pistol and everything. Or when there'd be time to learn something that takes years."
"Years to master," he reiterated, eyeing her thoughtfully. "But...to make a beginning…perhaps a few of the simpler spells..."
Her eyes were wide as she looked back to him. "You're not serious."
"Well, I can show you the basics, anyway. I don't know if you could learn to cast in time to put it to use against Thaos, but you could certainly learn how it works. An awareness of the process would be of strategic value to you, at the very least, when you're directing me in battle or facing mages among our opponents."
She studied him for a moment. "You are...far more in favor of this than I'd have guessed."
"Charmed by your curiosity, no doubt," he smirked, winning her brightest giggle in response. He shifted the grimoire from his lap halfway to hers, so that they could both see as he flipped back to the first pages and traced a finger over the lines he'd penned there ages ago - the arcane phrases alongside diagrams like little sparkling stars. "Now this," he began, "would complement your own skills well. Arkemyr's Dazzling Lights - leave an enemy dazed, then slip into the shadows, as you so often do. To such great effect, I dare say."
She traced a finger over the diagrams, following the path of Aloth's own hand, then looked up at him with her smile wide and her eyes sparkling as if reflecting the spell itself. "Arkemyr's Dazzling Lights," she repeated slowly, savoring the words. "Sounds glamorous."