Moira met Bal-Simba in the great hall.
"Forgive me, Lord. I do not mean to pry into what is not my affair, but what did you find out about Sparrow?"
Bal-Simba shrugged. "As we suspected Lady. He has no magic and none of the Council can imagine what use he might be to us."
Moira closed her eyes and sighed. "I had hoped…"
"So had we all, Lady," Bal-Simba rumbled. "But do you care so much for him?"
"Care for him?" Moira blazed. "I can’t stand him! Lord, he is not competent to weed a garden! He can barely be trusted within these walls by himself and he needs a keeper if he goes abroad."
"You should not be so hard on him," Bal-Simba said. "He cannot help it that he is as he is. Would you fare better in his world?"
"You are right, Lord," Moira sighed. "But it is so terribly hard when he is making eyes at me constantly. And when I look at him I’m reminded of what he cost us. He cost us so much and he is worth so little."
"Do not presume to judge his worth," Bal-Simba rumbled. "True worth is often hidden, even from the Mighty."
"I know, but… Oh, Lord, let me return to the Fringe and my people," she pleaded. "They need me and Shiara can look after him."
Bal-Simba shook his head. "Your people are looked after, little one. As for letting you go—do you so relish the trip back across the Wild Wood and through the Fringe alone?"
Moira thrust out her chin. "I did it before, and with him in tow."
The black wizard shook his head. "And you made it only by luck and the grace of an elf duke. I do not think Aelric would be so accommodating a second time and you used more than your share of luck getting here."
"You mean I’m trapped here?"
"For a time, little one. When the League’s interest has died somewhat more, we can bring both of you back to the Capital by the Wizard’s Way. From there you may go as you will. In the meantime, try to be kind to our lost Sparrow."
Moira sighed. "I will try, Lord. But it is not easy."
"Very little in life is," the wizard said.
Wiz stood at the top of Heart’s Ease and looked west over the Wild Wood. The sun was going down and already the shadows had stretched across the clearing below. The swallows swooped and wheeled over the keep and Wiz heard the whoosh of their passage more often than he saw one flit by.
"Is it a beautiful sunset, Sparrow?" asked a soft voice behind him. Wiz turned and saw Shiara standing by the door.
Wiz swallowed his misery. "Yes Lady, it is a very pretty sunset."
Shiara moved unerringly to the parapet. "Describe it for me if you would."
"Well, there are a lot of clouds and they’re all red and orange. The sun’s almost down on the horizon, but it’s still too bright to look at directly. The sunlight’s only on the very tops of the trees, so they’re bright green and everything else is a real dark green."
They stood together in silence for a bit.
"Before—before I used to love to watch the sunset," Shiara said.
"I never had much time for sunsets," Wiz told her. "I was always too busy."
"Too busy for the sun?" Shiara’s face clouded slightly. "Too busy for the sun, Sparrow?"
Wiz sighed. "Yeh. Too busy for the sun and a lot of other things. There was always so much to do, so much to learn." He grinned wryly. "You may not believe this, but computer programming really is a discipline. You have to work and study and slave over it to be any good. I did and I was good. One of the best."
"These things sound like hard taskmasters."
"Sure, sometimes. But it was rewarding too. There were always new things to discover and new ways to apply what you knew. Someone was always coming up with a new hack or a user would find some kind of obscure bug—ah, problem."
"And you devoted your life to this. To the exclusion of everything else?"
"Yeah, I guess I did. Oh, I had friends. I was even engaged to be married once. But mostly it was computers. From when I was fourteen years old and my school got its first time-sharing terminal." He smiled. "I used to spend hours with that thing, trying to make it do stuff the designers never thought of."
"This girl you were promised to, what happened?"
Wiz shrugged. "We broke up. She had kind of a bad temper and I think she resented the time I spent with the machines."
"I’m sorry."
"Hey, don’t be. She married someone else and the last I heard they were happy together."
"I meant for you."
Wiz shrugged again. "Don’t be," he repeated. "I wouldn’t have been a very good husband and I had the computers." He turned to face her, away from the forest and the setting sun.
"You know the worst thing about this business? It’s not being jerked out of my own world and plopped down here. It’s not being chased by a bunch of monsters out of the Brothers Grimm’s nightmares. It’s that there are no computers. It’s that I’ll never again be able to do the thing I spent all my life learning to do. The thing I love most doesn’t exist here at all. I can’t have it ever again."
"I know, Sparrow," said Shiara the Silver softly, looking out toward the sunset with unseeing eyes. "Oh I know."
"I’m sorry Lady," said Wiz contritely. "I’ve been thinking of my own problems."
"We each of us dwell on our own lot," Shiara said briskly, "sometimes too much. The real question is what do we do to go beyond it."
They were silent for a bit as the clouds darkened from orange to purple and the shadows crept deeper across the yard below. The swallows were fewer now and a lone brave bat fluttered around the battlements, seeking the insects that had attracted the birds.
"Lady, may I ask you a kind of personal question?"
"You may ask," said Shiara in a tone that implied it might not be answered.
"How do you go about rebuilding a life? I mean I can’t work with computers here and that’s all I know. How do I become something else?"
"The same way you became a—ah, hacker? Yes, hacker. One day at a time. You learn and you try to grow." She smiled. "You will find compensation, I think."
Bal-Simba left them that evening, walking the Wizard’s Wary back to the Capital. For several days Wiz remained sunk in black depression, dividing his time between the battlements and his room and only coming down to eat a hasty and silent evening meal. Ugo took over the woodcutting chores again.
Finally, on the fifth day, Shiara asked for his help.
"We have many things ripening in the garden," she explained. "Moira is busy in the kitchen preserving what she has picked, Ugo has so much else to do and I," she spread her hands helplessly, "I am not much good at harvesting, I am afraid."
Moira looked askance at Wiz when Shiara brought him to the kitchen for directions. But he had been so genuinely miserable since Bal-Simba’s visit that she kept her reservations to herself. Anything to get him out of himself, she thought, even if it means ruining half the crop.
So Wiz took a large basket and set to work picking beans. He worked his way down the rows without thought, examining every vine methodically. The beans had been trained to tripods of sticks, making rows of leafy green tents. As instructed, he took only those pods which were tan and dry, meaning the beans within were fully ripe.
He filled the basket and two more like it before the afternoon was over. Then he sat down outside the kitchen and carefully shelled the beans he had picked.
He was nearly done with the shelling when Moira came out of the kitchen and saw him working.
"Why thank you, Sparrow," she said in genuine pleasure. "That is well done indeed."
Once it would have thrilled Wiz to hear her praise him like that. But that time was past. "Pretty good for someone who’s worthless, huh?"