"Oh, I love to cook."

"Aha. Yes, you'll like the kitchen spell. It does take some getting used to, though - the spell does for you, and you do for the spell, it has to learn what you mean when you tell it this or that. I don't have to read off my pancake recipe anymore to get all the ingredients because I don't often change them, but if I did my kitchen would be petulant for hours."

"How large is the spell's vocabulary? Could I teach it several varieties of pancakes and not run into trouble so long as I kept the names straight?"

"Yes, if the names are all distinct it will do fine, it has no trouble with the complexities of white bean soup versus black bean soup. Its memory is as large as I make it - mine's got a stack of paper tucked away in a cupboard-space to serve and hasn't run out of room yet."

She laughs. "How delightful. Yes, unless Mother raises an unexpected objection, I certainly think you should enchant our kitchen."

"All right!" Normally she would bring up compensation at this point, but a kitchen enchantment and a witchsleeved bag are nowhere near what Bella would happily pay just for access to the Skyvault and possibly the sword. Plus this bonus wizard staff.

"You are helpful!"

"So helpful," agrees Bella. "Are there already any enchantments laid on the kitchen? That'll affect how I go about it."

"Not to my recollection, but the castle is quite old, so there's probably some residue."

"Residue that's not in active use? I can just suck that up into the marble if nobody minds to get it out of the way."

"As long as you're careful about it, I don't foresee a problem."

"What would the particular hazards of not being careful look like in this case?"

"If you took some magic that was in active use in whatever capacity, someone would be likely to get annoyed."

"That makes sense. The marble's pretty well set up to avoid that sort of thing. I didn't want to get evicted on account of practicing straight-up wizardry, after all."

"Wise," she comments.

"It's really a pity that wizards insist on such unfriendly forms of practice. And such secrecy. There are benign applications of their principles, but they're hard to dig up, and the wizards won't help anyone look."

"I agree."

"I do wonder what that one was doing. He didn't say anything useful on the subject?"

"No."

"There's nothing much in the part of the forest except the Tree of Pearls, which I can't imagine why it'd interest a wizard particularly."

"What's the Tree of Pearls, again?"

"It's a tree. It grows pearls," says Bella. "Instead of fruit. Or as fruit, depending on how you look at it. They're edible, in contrast to most pearls, quite tasty actually, also make lovely jewelry, I made Renée a necklace of them once."

"Did she eat it?"

"Nope. She wears it. I put pearls in my omelettes sometimes, though."

"That's kind of awesome," says Tony. "Unless you threw a real one in there by accident. Then, ow."