Диана Дуэйн: Wizards At War

“I’m surprised too,” Nita said. “Didn’t think I’d get over the lag so fast. Tom and Carl are coming over in a while. Oh, and Kit.”

“That’s fine.”

Nita rummaged in the cupboard over the counter by the stove to find herself a mug, then put the kettle on the burner for tea. She put one hand on the kettle and said to the water inside it, in the Speech, “You wouldn’t mind boiling for me, would you?”

There was a soft rush of response as the water inside the kettle heated up very abruptly. Nita took her hand off in a hurry. It took only about five seconds for the kettle to start whistling with steam.

Nita stood there and breathed hard for a moment, feeling as if she’d just run a couple of flights of stairs. No wizardry was without its price, even one so small as making water boil: one way or another, you paid for the energy.

“You’re getting impatient in your old age,” her father said, reaching into one of the canisters on the other side of the refrigerator and handing Nita a tea bag.

“Yup,” Nita said as she dropped the tea bag into the mug and poured boiling water on it.

She smiled. Her father seemed to have become surprisingly blasé in a very short time about wizardry in general—but Nita and Dairine had between them put their parents through a fair amount of wizardly business in the past couple of years, and the adults’ coping skills had improved in a hurry once they’d come to grips with the idea that the magic in the house wasn’t going to go away. We were lucky, I guess, Nita thought. So many wizards don’t dare come out to their families at all. Or they try it, and it doesn’t work, and then they have to make them forget… She got down some sugar from the cupboard. But look at him now. You’d think everybody had alien wizards living in their basement.

“It’s almost nine,” her dad said. “I should get ready to go, honey.”

“Okay,” Nita said as her dad headed through the dining room and toward the back of the house.

She wandered back into the dining room with her tea and pulled one of the spare chairs over from the wall, pushing it down to the far end of the table between Sker’ret and where Dairine had been sitting. The centipede—Nita smiled at herself. I should lay off that, she thought, it’s so Earth-centric… The Rirhait was carefully tearing out another page from the teen magazine. He then examined both sides of the page with great care before shredding it up with several pairs of small knife-sharp mandibles and stuffing it into his facial orifice.

“Where’d these come from?” Nita said to Dairine as she came back in.

“Carmela brought them,” Dairine said. “They’re sure not mine. I mean, look at the covers! You could find them in the dark. The publishers must think human females are nearly blind until they’re eighteen. And completely fixated on one segment of the visual spectrum.”

The Christmas tree— The Demisiv, I mean, Nita thought—reached out a frond-branch to pull another magazine off the pile. “I think the colors are delightful,” he said.

“That’s just because you’re a sucker for Day-Glo, Filif,” Dairine said. “You’ll get over it.”

Nita somehow wasn’t so sure about that. “And as for you, Sker’ret,” she said to the Rirhait, “you’re a one-being recycling center.”

“There’s a pile of Dad’s old Time magazines by the chair in the living room,” Dairine said. “For when you want something a little more substantial.”

“Oh, substance isn’t everything,” Sker’ret said. “Sometimes a little junk food’s just what you need.”

He munched away. Nita drank her tea, watching Roshaun read while he maneuvered the lollipop stick from one side of his mouth to the other. It was like catching some coolly elegant anime character relaxing between shots, because the bulge it produced in the Wellakhit’s face looked very out of place against that otherwise flawless facial structure, the emerald green eyes and the too-perfect blond hair.

Roshaun felt Nita’s gaze resting on him, and looked up. “What?”

It was exactly what Dairine would have said. Nita controlled her smile. “The lollipop…”

“What about it?”

“Hate to say this, but you’re kind of spoiling your grandeur.”

“What grandeur he has,” Dairine remarked.

“Kings are made no less noble by eating,” Roshaun said. “Rather, they ennoble what they eat.”

“Wow, who sold you that one?” Nita said. She grinned. At the same moment, her stomach growled, and she made up her mind about breakfast. “Think I’ll go ennoble a couple of waffles.”

Roshaun ignored her and continued to work on the lollipop, while Nita went back into the kitchen and headed for the freezer. “And you’re going to get cavities,” Dairine said.

As Nita turned around with the frozen-waffle box, she saw Roshaun deliberately arch one eyebrow. “How can a biped come down with a geological feature?”

“It’s hwatha-t, ” Dairine said, turning a page in the weekend section. “Not emiwai. ”

“Oh,” Roshaun said. “Well, it’s all right: people from my planet don’t get those.”

“I don’t care if you come from Dental Hygiene World,” Nita said as she put the waffles in the toaster and started it up, “you’ll get cavities all right if you start stuffing that much sugar in your face every day.”

Roshaun merely chewed briefly, and then reached out to the canister in the middle of the table for another lollipop. Nita winced. “Oh, Roshaun, don’t chew them up like that. It hurts just listening to you!”

“You sound like Sker’ret,” Dairine said, turning another page.

“Sker’ret is if nothing else enthusiastic and robust in his approach to the things he enjoys,” Roshaun said, “so I’ll take that as a compliment.” He got up and wandered out the back door.

As the screen door slammed behind him, Nita glanced over at Dairine. “You’ve got a live one there,” she said.

Dairine glanced up and shrugged. “Listen, at least he’s not complaining about our food anymore. You should have heard him last week.”

“I didn’t understand it, either. All your food’s lovely,” Sker’ret said, and munched another page of the teen magazine.

Nita’s waffles popped up. She went to the cupboard for a plate and pulled the waffles one by one out of the toaster, hissing a little as their heat stung her fingers. Dropping the waffles on the plate, she turned to root around on the shelf next to the stove for a bottle of maple syrup. “Got my hands full here,” she said in the Speech to the silverware drawer by the sink. “Would you mind?”

The drawer, well used to the request by now, slid open. Nita tucked the maple syrup bottle into the crook of her elbow while holding the plate in that hand, and went fishing in it for a knife and fork. “Thanks,” she said to the drawer.

It courteously closed itself as Nita headed into the dining room. Filif drifted past her in the opposite direction, brushing Nita with the fronds on one side as he passed. “You need anything?” Nita said.

“No, I’m just going out to root for a little,” Filif said, levitating gracefully past her and toward the back door. “I’ll be back shortly.”

Nita headed into the dining room; the screen door creaked open and banged shut behind her. She sat down and poured syrup on her waffles, then started to eat. “So what’re your plans for the day?” Dairine said.

“To stay right here until Tom and Carl turn up,” Nita said between bites.

“They’re coming here ?” Dairine said, looking alarmed.

Sker’ret looked surprised, too. “They’re your Seniors, aren’t they? Wouldn’t you normally go to them? ”