“Some what?”
“It’s over by the blue food.”
“What? You’re on!”
Dairine stood off to one side, listening to Irina’s speech and trying not to get too impatient as she waited for the payoff: the moment when she’d get a sense of how much of a winner or loser her mentee was going to be.
The manual had given her little besides the bare facts: Merhnaz Farrahi, Mumbai, India, specialty: geomancy, seismics. Dairine’s initial reaction had been approval. Good specialty for that part of the world . . . there are never enough earthquake wranglers who’ve got the skill and smarts to stop the worst ones. But beyond that . . . who knew? The manual was not going to give you personality data. Dairine had tried to get it to do that, once or twice, when looking over the précis of a few of the other competitors. Some of their spells were so unusual that they made her want to know them better. And who knows, Dairine thought, if I meet my mentee and she’s boring, then afterward I’ll go hunt some of those guys up. At least the networking might be productive.
It was odd, though. The flush of excitement she’d felt in her dad’s shop on learning she would be included in this—after the inevitable annoyance at being thrown into it on such short notice—was fading. It was always good to meet other wizards when there wasn’t a calamity under way. There were some nice people out there on errantry, and hearing from them personally about the places they’d been and the cool things they’d done was endlessly more fascinating than just reading about it in the manual.
She thought again of the hectic, edgy excitement and camaraderie of the great gathering on the Moon at the beginning of the Pullulus War. Everyone had been terrified but up for it. Having to save the universe, Dairine thought, tends to put you on your best game . . . assuming it doesn’t also make you want to dig a hole and hide. In any case, there had been no leisure for hiding at that point. Everyone had thrown intervention groups together the best they could, headed out into space, and started tracking down the weapon that would bring the Lone Power’s plans to an end.
This was a much different business; more structured, more leisurely, and less deadly. It was going to be engaging enough, but probably not all that exciting, except with the manufactured sort of stimulation that comes with staged competitions everywhere. Which was just as well, because she had other things to be thinking about right now. So funny, Dairine thought. There are probably kids on the planet who would give anything to be here right now. And where do I want to be?
She smiled to herself. No matter how much of a pain in the butt her dad and Nelaid could be when they were tag-teaming her, if there was anywhere she wanted to be right now, it was in Sunplace, on Wellakh, on the terrace of that high spire of stone, leaning over the rail there . . .
And not alone.
In memory she leaned there again, and Roshaun was next to her. The interlude they’d shared before the terrible events on the Moon at the conclusion of the Pullulus War had been so brief that at times Dairine had to go back and check her manual to see whether one thing or another had actually happened. Did I really lean here with you, with our elbows banging together, so that you kept nudging me and I kept nudging you, and we were both doing it to annoy each other, and it didn’t do anything but make us both laugh? That bus ride we took to the mall, did you really have one of those lollipops sticking out of your face then? When we were sitting on the steps that one evening, and the lilacs were out . . . were you really looking at me the way I thought you were?
And then came their time on the Moon. Not the Moon on the day when everything went wrong: but the Moon when she took him there, after first pointing it out to him in the sky. That whole thing got splashed out of the Earth, a long time ago. And it was just the right size to form up . . . Really? By how small a chance you had a Moon at all, then . . . Yeah, we use it as a paradigm for how sometimes you get incredibly lucky. The way things do go right sometimes.
Except that things had then gone most spectacularly wrong.
My best friend. Truly the best friend: the one who couldn’t be mistaken for anything else—the one who had to be your best friend because there was simply no other way you could be putting up with him on a regular basis. The infuriating, hilarious, smart, ignorant, stuck-up creature with his ridiculous snotty bearing and his formal ways and flashy clothes; the young King who (once he got the position) didn’t want to be a king at all, but who resigned himself to doing it as well as it could be done because that was the way he handled things. The terrifyingly competent wizard, the guy who refused to take anyone’s crap but would laugh at her with that supercilious look when she delivered it to him by the truckload. The one who never took her seriously. The one who always took her seriously.
Roshaun. Where the hell are you?
It was the silent cry that started every day and ended every one. Sometimes Dairine heard it in her sleep; sometimes the rawness of it woke her up. She would lie there in the frontier between dream and awakening, knowing she was at home in bed, but also knowing that she was kneeling in the cold dust of the Moon with the Sunstone in her hands, someone else’s Sunstone, the heavy collar and the bright gem that had simply parted company with him somehow and now lay there in the talcum-powdery, gunpowder-smelling moondust. And the stones hurt her knees, but not as much as her chest hurt because he had been there and now he was gone.
Not dead. That much she knew (though her own cowardice had kept her from being sure about that for a long time). But not alive, either. Something had happened to his physical body: it had seemingly been burned away in the terrible wash of coronal energies that Roshaun had tried to turn against the Pullulus as it closed in around Earth. And the worst thing about it, Dairine thought, was that it made no difference, at the end. The power that would end the Pullulus came from another direction entirely.
Well, maybe it’s not true that it made no difference, she thought. He bought Kit and Ponch time to make it happen. But at the end of it, Roshaun was still gone.
But not forever. That resolution, too, came at the beginning of every day and the end of every one. I’ll find you, she thought. I don’t care how long it takes . . .
There was a patter of applause going around the room as Irina finished her speech. Okay, Dairine thought, let’s find out how terrible this is going to be. She put Spot down. “See anybody?” she said.
Not yet.
About a quarter of the way around the room, Dairine could see Kit and Nita making their way toward the side of one of buffet tables. So they’re taken care of now, she thought as she saw them come to a halt in front of a skinny dark-haired guy even taller than Kit. That’s going to be interesting, she thought. Kit was very proud of his height: sometimes she wondered if Nita had noticed how incredibly happy he’d been when his middle-school growth spurt began, or realized how he’d hated being short—