Диана Дуэйн - Games Wizards Play

“Mmm, I take your point.”

“I dropped a decimal point , okay?” Dairine yelled, clutching at her hair as she swung away from them.

“Pretty heavy one, looks like,” her dad said, with a complete lack of sympathy.

It was bad enough when Nelaid got underhanded on her. But when her dad ganged up on her with him . . . “Aaaaaaaagh!!”

Her dad and Nelaid sighed and gazed at each other with that here-she-goes-again expression. How is this my life? Dairine thought, as she struggled to calm herself down. How can everything be so screwed up when I’m a wizard? And when I have a computer who’s also a wizard? And even my sister’s a wizard? And my dad’s okay with all this? And when I also now somehow have a space dad?! Which—not that she would have admitted it to anybody—was incredibly cool, especially since he was also a wizard, might as well be considered the king of his planet, and was deemed so powerful and scary by some of his own people that they routinely tried to assassinate him—

“Dairine.”

She blinked. Nelaid had glanced away from her father and was holding a tiny spark of white fire between thumb and forefinger. It was his manifestation of the wizard’s manual, and he was studying it the way someone would look at an interesting new bug. “I wonder if this might perhaps be a wise time to finish up.” He looked back to her father. “You dislike letting these sessions run too late into afternoon of your local day, which I believe is now well advanced . . .”

Her dad checked his watch. “Closing time’s coming on at the shop, yeah,” he said, “and there are a couple of things I want to check up on before we lock up for the evening.”

Suddenly Dairine felt very tired. It had been a long work session today, partly because her spring break period was ending and this would be the last day for a while that her schedule and Nelaid’s would coincide for more than a few hours at once. “Yeah,” Dairine said. “Okay.”

“I will set up the homeward transport for you outside, then.”

“Fine,” her dad said. “Come on back with us?” he asked Nelaid. “You did want to have a look at that rhododendron I was telling you about.”

“I will see you home, certainly, and after that I am at your disposal. Just give me a few seconds to collapse this.”

She and her dad headed for the barred gates that led out onto the terrace as Nelaid turned to decommission the stellar simulator. “And why not?” her dad murmured as they made their way out. “Got some shopping to do as well. No point in boring you with it when he likes to come along.”

Dairine snickered and went to lean against the chest-high balustrade at the far side of the terrace that surrounded this level of the Sunlords’ towering stone-spire palace. It wasn’t so long ago that the relationship had seemed not just ridiculous but unlikely. “Perhaps I would understand your personal situation more clearly if I were to see you more often in your own environment?” Nelaid had said. And that had unfortunately seemed too sensible for Dairine to object much, especially if she wanted to keep doing this work with him—the work Roshaun had done and that she wanted to learn, too, as a possible way to find out what had happened to him, and to get him back. So Dairine had said “Okay” and not thought too much more about it, except to hope that her father wouldn’t have too much trouble with their home life being occasionally invaded by someone who was more or less equivalent to an alien king.

Then, when her dad and Nelaid met, they not only liked each other a whole lot but knew it instantly , and Dairine realized her problems were even more complex than she’d feared. She’d wondered whether wizardry had been involved somehow, except that she knew Nelaid would never stoop to any such thing. He was way too serious and straightforward a wizard to even consider doing anything as potentially invasive as tampering with someone’s mind without consent.

He came visiting often enough that they’d begun passing him off as an uncle. Or, not ‘we’ did, Dairine thought. He did. “My brother,” Dairine had heard her dad say casually to a customer in the shop one afternoon, when she’d walked in after school. Nelaid was standing there with an armful of chrysanthemums, looking around in apparent confusion, while her dad stood behind the counter wrapping some kind of dish arrangement in white-and-gold gift paper. And what was extremely peculiar was that as they stood there—the tall broad-shouldered man with the prematurely silver hair and the very tall slim man with the longish hair that was almost exactly the red-gold of Dairine’s own—they really did look like they were related. And it’s not just the disguise-wizardry Nelaid’s wearing , Dairine had thought at the time. Something else is going on. Whatever it was, it made the relationship show in their eyes. It was so extremely odd, the whole idea that you could have family on other planets: or that it could have been lying there waiting for you for years and years without you ever expecting it . . .

Except that this isn’t the relationship I’m interested in having on another planet! This is just complicating things.

Things got even more complicated after that when her dad and Nelaid started going out shopping together. “If there’s a better way to teach you about our culture in a hurry,” her dad had said, “I don’t know what it’d be.” And off they’d gone to the Pathmark supermarket in Baldwin, and if there had been any sight that could spin your brain right around in your head, it was your father the florist standing in front of a heap of cantaloupes with the most senior wizard of a planet hundreds of light-years away, discussing seasons and the way axial tilt affects an area’s mean solar radiation, and how to use the little depression at the bottom of the melon that you pressed into to make sure it was ripe. It was weird enough to Dairine that Nelaid considered her father to be some kind of potential spiritual leader because he worked with plants. Though Wellakh people have always been a bit plant crazy. I guess you have to be when that’s where the oxygen comes from and the vegetation’s all that’s kept your planet habitable after a flare . . .

“So,” said Nelaid as he came through the gate into the body of the peak and waved it shut after him, heading out across the terrace to them. He had changed into charcoal trousers, a white shirt, and a navy blazer, with his hair still tied back but looking much shorter, thanks to a fairly simple concealment spell. Dairine had to turn away to hide her amusement—he looked like some kind of rock promoter heading for a casual business lunch.

As Nelaid walked, the polished redstone floor came alive with buried lines and circles and ellipses in blue light: a complex worldgating spell, densely interwritten with the Speech’s long flowing characters and spreading out from where they stood for about twenty meters on either side. “When next we meet collegially, Dairine, we need to spend some more time on the way you have been handling the relationship between the spectral radiance and solar wind mass loss. The sooner this is handled, the sooner we can avoid having to revisit this scenario and go on to something more, well, challenging.”

Dairine made her way over to the small, empty transport circle set aside for her inside the larger spell matrix and simply grunted vague agreement . . . because she was simply reluctant to complain. All her life she’d been infuriated by having teachers who always assumed her to be dumber than she was, some trick genius who had a weak spot they’d eventually discover if they just kept poking at her long enough. Nothing had prepared her for a teacher who routinely expected her to be far smarter than she was, and seemed intent on breaking her of the bad habit of taking it easy. And wow, I love that. Not that I’ll ever let him know. He’d just get as smug and insufferable as Roshaun . . .