Диана Дуэйн - Wizard's Holiday

Nita stood up. “Quelt!” she said, and reached out two hands to take her by the shoulders.

Quelt backed away a step, and then another. “No,” she said. “I think perhaps you should both stay away from me for a while. I don’t know what to think, and looking at you makes me more uncertain every moment. I thought you were my cousins,” she said, and now the tears genuinely were starting. “I thought you were good!”

She stood there, trembling, for just a moment more, and then she fled down the beach toward her home.

In silence Kit and Nita watched her go.

“Now what do we do?” Kit said.

Nita shook her head. Her heart was heavy; she felt like crying herself, except that it wouldn’t have helped anything. “I have no idea,” she said.

Kit was silent for a long time. “I think I know,” he said at last. “For one thing, we sleep in the pup tents tonight.”

“I’d almost rather go home,” Nita said.

“I know,” Kit said. “So would I. Which is why I think we should stay here.”

Nita thought about that for a long moment. Finally, she nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “Going home would feel too much like running away.”

“And if Quelt decided she wanted to talk to us again between now and then,” Kit said, “wouldn’t we look guilty if we couldn’t be found?”

That was something that had occurred to Nita only seconds after wishing she could go home. “But if we’re in the pup tents,” she said, “she’ll know we wanted to give her a little privacy, a little room.”

“Yeah.” Kit got up, dusted himself off. “Then, as soon as Esemeli’s ready tomorrow, we get It to help us find Druvah, if he can be found. If he can, we get the truth from him and we can bring it to Quelt. And then we get our butts out of here before we do any more damage.”

Nita rubbed her eyes. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. Let’s get it over with.”

They got up together to go down to their building and put what they needed

for one more trip to the Relegate’s Naos into their pup tents. Behind them Ponch came trotting along, the leash around his neck, holding the loose end of it in his mouth, and with a thoughtful look in his eyes…

****

At about quarter of three in the morning, Dairine stood at the garage end of the driveway, once more gazing up at the Moon and waiting for the rest of the group to join her.

“Dairine,” a voice said out of the darkness.

It was her dad.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Where are they, honey?”

“They’ll be here soon.”

He came down the back steps and stood beside her, looking up at the Moon. For a few moments neither of them said anything.

“Remember when Nita went away,” Dairine said at last, “and we thought she might not come back again, because of the wizardry she was doing out in the ocean, with the whales?”

“And the shark,” her dad said. “Yes, I remember that.”

“This is like that,” Dairine said. “This is my shark.” She looked at her dad.

In the darkness it was hard to see expressions. Her dad laughed, and the laugh sounded strange and strained. “And here I was concerned about Nita because she might wind up being sent off somewhere else by the Powers That Be to do something dangerous,” he said. “Now it turns out the problem was going to be a little closer to home, right under my nose—”

“They didn’t send her,” Dairine said. “Not as such. But if when you’re away you find a mess, or a problem to fix, you don’t just walk away from it: You fix it. Now I have to go do the dangerous thing…and the stakes are bigger this time.”

“Are you sure you have to do this?” her dad said.

“It’s my star,” Dairine said. “I can’t just send my houseguests off to deal with it! I have to go with them. Especially—” She fell silent.

Dairine’s dad said, “I meant, are you sure what you’re planning to do to the Sun really has to be done?”

“Oh.” Dairine gulped, dry-mouthed, and nodded. “It was sanctioned,” she said, “at a very high level. We’d never have gotten the sanction in the first place if the job didn’t really need doing.”

She was finding it hard to speak. “I have to go pretty soon,” she said. “We have to. We’re who gets this job.”

Her dad was silent for a moment. “I don’t have to tell you not to do anything stupid,” he said then. “That’s the last thing you’ll do.”

“How can you be so sure?” Dairine said. “After the dumb thing I did that started all this—”

Her dad shook his head, plainly feeling around for the right words. “Maybe it wasn’t so dumb after all, what you did,” he said. “It brought these particular wizards here just in time to do a job that at least one of them is a specialist in. Prince

Unlikely.”

Dairine nodded and said nothing. Her feelings about Prince Unlikely were far too complex for her to discuss. For the moment, she was scared to death, and upset, and didn’t dare say how she felt for fear that it should overwhelm her and make her useless for what had to be done in a very little while. All she could do was go to her dad and hug him.

“Dairine, you may be thoughtless sometimes,” her dad said, “but never stupid. If there’s anything you’ve got, it’s a brain…and I’d say your heart’s in the right shape, too. Go do what you have to do. And be careful.”

He didn’t let her go for a long time…then finally released her and went inside.

At 3:00 a.m., Filif, Sker’ret, and Roshaun joined Dairine out at the far end of the backyard. The circle of the wizardry lay glowing on the ground, ready to be implemented, the elaborate interlace of sigils and symbols pulsing gently in the night.

With Spot in her arms, Dairine was doing as the others were doing: moving slowly around the periphery of the wizardry, checking its terms, making sure that everything added up, that nothing was misspelled or misplaced, and—most important—that each of their names was correctly included, and that each name was tied into the wizardry correctly for the role that wizard would be playing.

The roles divided fairly neatly for this piece of work. Roshaun, as main designer of the work and the one most familiar with the theory behind it, would be watching the timing of the wizardry and directing the others in when each stage should implement. Sker’ret, the fixer, would be the one to actually “flip the switches,” speaking the words in the Speech that would take them in, help them locate where they needed to be, and manipulate the Sun’s mass once they got to the right spot. Filif would be the main power source for the wizardry, the one whose job it was to “get out and push,” leaving the others free to do fine adjustments and to react to situations as they developed. “Our people’s life comes from that of our star,” he’d said to Dairine while they were still in the design stages, “a little more directly than usual. This is a chance to give the power back. The universe appreciates such resonances…”

And as for me, Dairine thought, I go along for the ride.

Roshaun glanced over at her and said nothing. Dairine paid no attention, being in the process of checking her name for the third time. Sker’ret finished his check and came along beside her, peering at her name.

She waved the darkness she was holding in her hand in front of Sker’ret’s various eyes. “You sure you can spare this?” she said.

He spared a few eyes to peer at it. “It’s not like I’m going to have much trouble getting home even if we blow this one up,” he said cheerfully. “I’ll just go through Grand Central.”

“You’ll love it,” Dairine said absently. “The food’s great there. Just please don’t eat the trains.”