“That won’t help,” said a small voice from the water.
She frowned and refused to answer. Above and beyond the trees that surrounded Tom Swale’s yard, very slowly, a single little puffy cloud could be seen cruising toward the low, late-afternoon Sun. It seemed to be in no hurry. If clouds had feet, it would have been dragging them.
Nita scowled harder. Hurry up! she thought in the Speech. Come on, get a move on!
But merely thinking something in the Speech doesn’t turn the idea into a spell… especially since wizardry is mostly about persuading creatures and things to do what you want, not ordering them around.
The cloud actually seemed to slow up. Then, finally, almost reluctantly, it started to pass in front of the sun.
Nita grinned. “Awright!” she said, looking down into the fishpond. “That’s the best one yet! I only missed it by half a minute.”
One of the koi, the one with the silver-coin scales, looked up out of the pond at her. “Fifty seconds,” Doitsu said.
“Or about fifty-five seconds too long,” said another voice, a human one, from behind her. “Doesn’t count. Try it again.”
Nita let out an annoyed breath and turned. “You guys are just being mean!”
“An oracular who predicts the future a minute late is possibly even less effective than one who gets it wrong all the time,” Tom Swale said, straightening up with a groan from the flower bed where he’d been working. “And will probably get a lot more frustrated.”
“Hey, thanks loads,” Nita said, and slumped against the fishpond’s rockwork.
“You’d hardly expect me to start lying to you at this late date,” Tom said, amused.
Nita gave him an annoyed look. “Let’s see you do any better!”
“Me? Why should I?” Tom frowned down at the next flower bed. “This is your gift we’re trying to sharpen up.”
“And, anyway, it’s too hot!”
“True,” Tom said, “but nothing to do with the business at hand. Come on, give it another try.”
Nita wiped her forehead; she was sweating. “It’s no use. I need a break.”
Another koi, a marmalade-colored one, put its head up out of the water. “You need to concentrate harder,” said Akagane. “You can’t be in that moment unless you’re in this one.”
“Blank your mind out first,” said Doitsu.
A third head came up, splotched in red and black on silver-white. “Pay more attention to the news,” said Showa.
Nita rolled her eyes. “None of you are helping!”
“It’s not help you need,” Tom said. “It’s practice. You think anybody learns to see futurity overnight?”
“Forget the future!” Nita said. “I can barely see the present!” She leaned back against the rocks behind the koi pond, rubbing her eyes: beams from the low sun piercing through the trees were glancing off the pond’s surface, and the glitter of them made her eyes water.
“The news’ll help with that, too,” Tom said. He was sweating; even in a T-shirt, the humidity that day was enough to make anybody miserable.
“And it’s not the future,” said Showa, backfinning toward where the rocks overhanging the pond made a small waterfall. “A future.”
Nita sighed. “But how can you tell you’ve got the right one?”
“You can’t,” said Akagane as she rose to the surface in Showa’s wake. “At least, you can’t tell for sure, or very clearly.”
“You can get a feeling,” said Doitsu, just hanging there in the water and fanning his fins. “Or a hunch.”
“But what if you’re wrong?”
Doitsu made a kind of shrug with his fins. “You try again. Assuming you haven’t blown up the world or something in the meantime…” And he submerged.
The other two koi sank down into the water as well. Nita sighed and leaned back, watching Tom as he walked over to another of the plant beds, squatted down beside it, and then let out a long, annoyed breath. He reached down in among some of the plants, pushed broad green leaves aside, and sighed.
“Guys,” Tom said in the Speech, “how many times do we have to have this conversation?” He picked something up, looked at it. It was a slug. He shook his head and tossed it off to one side, into another leafy bed. “Those are your strawberries—” fling— “over there! These are my strawberries—” fling— “over here!”
Nita gave him a crooked smile. “That can’t be real good for them.”
“Slugs are resilient,” Tom said.
Nita watched another one fly through the air. “Yeah. I see how they bounce…”
“Do I hear a criticism coming?”
Nita restrained herself, but wasn’t quite ready to stop teasing Tom yet. “Isn’t it weird that a Senior Wizard can talk the sky into hitting things with lightning but can’t talk a bunch of slugs out of eating his strawberries?”
Tom sighed. “Lightning’s a lot easier to talk to than slugs,” he said. “Not that you’re so much talking to the slug as to its DNA… which has been the way it is for about a hundred million years. Strawberries are a relatively recent development, to a slug. But then, so are human beings.” He grinned. “Anyway, I live in hope that they’ll get it eventually. But enough of you being on my case. Or just you. Kit’s running late. Where’s he gotten to?”
Nita rolled her eyes. “That’d be the question, the last couple weeks.”
Tom glanced up. “He’s missing Ponch, huh?”
Nita shrugged, not sure how to describe what was going on. Kit’s dog had been getting increasingly strange for a long time, but in the complex and disruptive events of the last month he had gone way beyond strange, right out of life and into something far greater. Kit wasn’t exactly sad about what had happened, but he was definitely sad at not having his dog around anymore. “It’s complicated,” Nita said. “I don’t think it’s just about Ponch. But he’s been away from home a lot.”
Tom straightened up again and gave Nita a look that was slightly concerned. “A lot of that going around right now…”
Nita sighed. “Tell me about it. But his sister Helena’s coming home from college in a couple of weeks. That has to be on his mind. And then there’s Carmela. He’s having trouble dealing with her lately.”
Tom pulled off his gardening gloves and tossed them up into the air: they vanished. “Yeah, well,” he said. “First time off the planet, and what does she do but stride out into the universe like she owns the place and blow up the Lone Power? For what that’s ever worth in the long term. Still, I could see where it might make Kit feel a little surplus.” Tom strolled back to her, his hands in his pockets. “Does Carmela seem any different?”
“No. Or yes,” Nita said. “But that might just be because of her PSAT scores.”
Tom put his eyebrows up. “Worse than expected?”
“Better,” Nita said. “It’s screwed up her college plans. She thought she was going to take it easy and go to the community college in Garden City. Now all of a sudden her pop and mama and her guidance counselor are giving her all this stuff about CalTech and Harvard.”
Tom gave Nita a wry look. “Interesting problem. But otherwise it sounds like you’re telling me that, though her PSATs might be an issue, shooting up a major interstellar transport center and being dragged halfway across the known Universe hasn’t particularly cramped her style.”
“No. And that’s what has me worried. Tom, tell me she’s not turning into a wizard!”
He laughed one big laugh. “Would it break your heart if she was?”
“Mine? Not really. Kit’s? That’s another story.”
“Not that I could do anything one way or the other,” Tom said. “If the Powers offered her the Oath and she accepted it. It’d be out of our hands. But wouldn’t you think it’s kind of late for her to become a wizard? You know how it goes. Onset in humans is usually between twelve and fourteen…”