"Have you noticed any patterns about when it happens and when it doesn't?" Bella asks, finding them a table.

"Kinda," he says. "It happens more when I'm distracted, and it happens a lot when I'm angry."

"So maybe when they say you'll grow out of it what they mean is you'll learn to concentrate and calm down?"

"Maybe. Or maybe I'm just weird," he says. "I'm already starting to get the sense that nobody expected me to still be doing it after two years."

"I've heard of kids having problems with spontaneous magic and spells backfiring and stuff," says Tony. "It's not that rare. But I don't think it usually works the way it's going with you."

"I wonder if Healer Song knows anything about it, have you asked him?" Bella inquires.

He shrugs. "Nah."

"It is not always obvious to me if you really want the fire thing to go away," muses Bella.

"...What do you mean?" says Feral, cocking his head quizzically.

"Well - you don't seem to like it, I bet if I could wave my wand and make it go away you'd let me, but you don't seem to spend much time trying to work on it. Maybe you do it when I'm not looking or something."

"Depends," he says. "I like being able to set things on fire. I don't like doing it when I don't want to. So if it's all part of the same thing, then I don't want it to go away. I'd lose just the lighting things up by accident part in a second, though."

"Any witch or wizard - why is there not a collective term for that? Besides 'magic folk' which is clumsy? - can set things on fire."

"'W'," he suggests whimsically. "No, I mean set things on fire like I set things on fire. Anybody can cast spells; most people can't do what I can do."

"You mean like what you accidentally-on-purpose did to that guy's sleeve last year?"

"Exactly," he says. "And when I cast a spell to light something on fire, and I really want to, it goes up like flashpaper. I'd miss that if I lost it."

"It did come in handy that one time," acknowledges Bella. "I wouldn't make the tradeoff, though."

He shrugs. "I am getting better at the accidental part."

"How fast?"

"Not that fast."

"Like, how many times per hundred spells do you set a thing on fire?"

"...I don't really keep count?" he says. "And it matters how hard I'm trying not to?"

"Yeah, but is it more like fifty or like five?"

Bella settles for this description. She nibbles her sandwich. (She found enough information about animal intelligence last year to be comfortable eating non-magical meat again; her sandwich is turkey.)

Feral munches lunch.