Isabella drinks soup directly from the bowl. "Do you know which way Petaal appeared to begin with? Species too, that's always interesting. Path was a raccoon."

"Nope," says Petaal, curling her fluffy tail around Kas's neck.

Pathalan is back pretty quickly. He pecks at the window, and Isabella gets up to let him in. He stashes the extra receipt in her bag and goes back to sitting on her shoulder and nuzzles fluffy feathers on her cheek. Isabella murmurs the answer to his question in his ear, then drinks more soup; Path steals a bit of meat out of it.

"Why did you want me to buy you lunch?" Isabella asks. "You could've just told me which streets led to this place."

"...Um, because I'm broke and hungry?" he says.

"Oh. Fair enough. You can order something else if you want," she shrugs. "I don't think Mrs. Carmichael will actually complain to Metis if the card gets charged for a suspiciously large meal one time."

He grins widely. "Thanks!"

Isabella grins back. "Witches trade in favors, services, that sort of thing, not in money, but Metis is pretty modern for someone who was born in the 1700s, and she'll trade for things like 'the use of a credit card in your name for a year'. If the Carmichaels' kid gets sick again I think they'll want a history of not complaining about the favor while it's in progress. We don't even use it that much."

"So what's she want from the book?"

"I don't know. I'm supposed to read it on my way home and try to guess which spell she's interested in," says Isabella, rolling her eyes.

"Sounds like fun," says Kas. He takes the opportunity to order something else as the person who took their orders originally walks by again.

"After a fashion. I do like learning magic, and I like Metis, but sometimes having a teacher is frustrating. There's no really good way to learn ritual magic solely out of books until you have a foundation, though."

"What's it like?" he asks curiously.

"Witchcraft? Depends what you're doing," Isabella says. "The spell I have on so Path doesn't shred me, and my birth blessing, and the healing Metis did on the Carmichael kid, aren't anything alike."

"Well, what's a birth blessing?"

"When a witch in my clan is born, someone - often her grandmother, sometimes another relative or a friend of the family - performs a ritual to give her a certain embedded blessing - an ability or a protection or something. We learn to do our own magic a little later than clans that don't do this, because the birth blessing sucks up some of our power. And the person doing the blessing can't pick exactly what it is, although they can pick which goddess to invoke and that steers it some."

"Cool," says Kas. "What's yours?"

"Mind-affecting spells act like I don't exist. They're not common, but they're nasty," says Isabella. "Courtesy of Evisa Iannakara. I think the relevant portfolio item was solitude. My great-grandmother was aiming for art. She wanted a painter, a runecaster. I can runecast but I need to make them big and they don't turn out very pretty."

"Not that I know what runecasting is, either," Kas says cheerfully.

"Oh, it's when the ritual involves writing symbols onto a surface, instead of being primarily oriented around verse or herbs or sacrificial power. It's kind of an artificial distinction. Plenty of heavier-duty magic involves all four and even little stuff can have two of those."

"This magic stuff sounds pretty cool," he says, smiling. Petaal cuddles up and sticks her nose in his ear.

"It is," Isabella says. "I think it's a pity only witches can learn it. And I'm very glad I'm a witch."

"I wonder why only witches can learn it," says Kas.