Диана Дуэйн - Games Wizards Play

And her heart clenched. Dairine held her breath for a moment from reflex, then let it go. It’s getting to the point where I can think his name without it being painful . . .

Her dad went over to stand in his own locator circle and gazed around at the spell diagram. “This costs a lot of energy normally, doesn’t it?”

Nelaid, making his way to his own circle, glanced over at Dairine’s dad. “What?”

“This form of transport. Otherwise the kids’d be doing it every day.”

“Oh.” Nelaid chuckled. “Yes, especially when such distances are involved. But a Planetary has wide latitude in requesting such transport allotments from the Aethyrs, especially when one or more planets’ infrastructural benefits are concerned. And this training is good for both your stellar system and mine, in terms of augmenting local expertise. So the authorization was not hard to come by.”

“We need this, do we?”

“Oh, your world has its specialists,” Nelaid said, “some of them very gifted. Naturally we’ve conferred from time to time. Your star, however, has been under unusual pressure in recent years. In particular, the direct attentions of the Lost Aethyr: the one your people call the Lone Power.”

“That time the Sun went out . . .” Dairine’s dad said.

“Yes. Any star that had been through that kind of punishment might be expected to behave badly afterward: so having extra oversight in the neighborhood is seen as a good thing. And wizards native to Wellakh have over the millennia developed an unusual level of expertise in dealing with aberration in nongiant stars on the main sequence: Thahit has a history of being somewhat badly behaved indeed at intervals.”

“‘Somewhat’? You mean like slagging half the planet down with a single flare?” Dairine muttered.

“I have seen worse,” Nelaid said. “If you’re fortunate, you never will. Ready?” He checked to make sure they were both well inside their circles. The transport pattern flared into life around them—

—and when it died down again, they were standing in the dim brown light of a garden shed.

The backyard of Dairine’s dad’s flower shop was a paved area backing onto the alley where most of the deliveries arrived. In the high solid wooden wall there was a sliding gate that would open wide enough to let a van or small truck drive in, and off to one side was the shed in which they now stood. It was surrounded by the heaps of wooden crates that some flowers and supplies came in, stacked up to wait for the next flower delivery guy to take them away, and with the long thick-walled cardboard boxes in which more fragile cut flowers like roses and lilies got delivered. The crates were picked up for recycling once a week, after Dairine’s dad spent an afternoon of what he referred to as “line dancing,” stomping them flat before tying them up in bundles. The area wasn’t particularly tidy: it tended to get scattered with floral stakes, busted-off chunks of arrangement foam, the scraps of ribbons and paper that missed being thrown into the recycling bin, and all the other detritus that piled up around a florist’s business if the owner was too busy to sweep the floor more than once every few days. It was definitely not the type of place that made you think the shed in the corner, the one with the dust-obscured little windows and the door with rusty hinges, had a worldgate acceptor site in it.

“Clear?” said her dad, peering out the side window.

“Yeah,” Dairine said, squinting out through the one in the door. It was hard to see through it, but that was kind of the point.

“No sign of Mike?”

“I think he’s inside.” She saw something move past the shop’s rear window, the one in the workroom beside the walk-in fridge: a pair of arms completely laden down with a stack of long white boxes. “Yeah.”

“Okay.” He reached past her to pop open the catch of the door. “Go on and distract him. Nel, give me a couple moments, then come on in.”

“As you say.”

Her dad headed softly out, then opened the back gate so that Mike would think they’d come in that way. Dairine headed for the back door of the shop’s workroom. “Hey, Mike!”

Her dad’s assistant, a tall, skinny, auburn-haired stringbean of a guy in jeans and an Islanders sweatshirt, put his head through the tacky bead curtain that divided the front of the store from the back. “Hey, Dair!” he said. “Great timing, I was just going to start locking up.”

“It’s okay, I think Dad’ll do it,” she said as her father came in behind her.

“Mikey, did we get those boxes of mums that I—Oh, I see we did.” It would have been impossible not to see the thirty or so boxes of mums, which took up almost the entire floor space in the back of the shop and blocked access to both of the sinks and the stainless steel worktops.

“Yeah, I was getting set to go stack them in the walk-in.”

Her dad glanced at his watch. “It’s after five,” he said. “You go on. You know how your mom gets if I make you miss dinner.”

Mike laughed. “But what about the mums?”

“Leave them there. I’ll take care of them and the rest of the unloading.”

“Right, Mr. C. See you in the morning!”

“Eightish, okay?”

“Okay!” The front door slammed.

Dairine came out of the back room in time to see her dad walk up to the front door, turn the key in it, flip the CLOSED sign around to face out, and pull the blinds on the door and the shop window.

“Daddy, what about these boxes?” Dairine said, almost thankful to have something to do besides ride herd on a star that had been purposely programmed to blow up on her.

“Most of these need to go into the walk-in,” her dad said. “These white ones, oh, and that red one, there’s boutonniere material in those, leave them out for the moment. Don’t try to pick up more than one, you’ll throw your back out . . .”

She edged between some of the boxes to put Spot down in a spare space on one of the countertops as Nelaid slipped in through the back door, paused, and took a deep breath. “It smells of life in here,” he said, smiling. Glancing around, he added, “Quite crowded with it, in fact.”

“So true. And to keep it that way we need to get the boxes into the cooler . . .”

There was a knock on the frame of the rear door. Everyone looked up, alert and surprised, and then relaxed, because it was Tom Swale standing there—wearing a business suit, unusual for him, and slipping out of the suit jacket while they watched. “Hey,” he said. “Thought I might catch you. Harry, can I give you a hand with those?”

“Not worried about your shirt? Well, okay, here, grab the top few. What brings you here?”

“Saw your worldgate go off, and something else has come up. Good evening, sa ke Nelaid.”

“And to you, Advisory ke Swaal. Busy day?”

“Getting busier all the time,” Tom said. “Where do you want these, Harry?”

For a few moments nothing much went on except getting the long cardboard carnation boxes up off the floor and onto every available surface. “Yeah, that’s right—No, not on top of the fridge, it blocks the vent—Oh,” Dairine’s dad said then, starting to laugh as a pile of boxes went past him without anyone physically carrying them: but behind them Nelaid was nudging them gently along through the air with one finger. “Now there’s a trick I wish somebody would teach me.”

“A fair amount of other data would be needed as well,” said Nelaid, “and possibly a change of career . . .”

“A little late for that,” Dairine’s dad said. “Maybe I could just get you in every other weekend . . .”

The laughter got lost in more shuffling around of boxes. “This has to be the whole East Coast’s mum supply, Harry,” Tom said as he stacked his last few. “Long weekend, I take it.”