“Thank you,” she said, and headed up the stairs.
At the top she paused and looked around in astonishment. The room she’d entered was easily the size of the bottom floor of her whole house. Up here all the marble was white, and between the wide windows that let in the morning light there were framed prints and paintings—modern art, mostly, though there were some portraits as well—and at least one gigantic flat-screen TV down at the far end, with a huge U-shaped white couch in front of it. And from the couch Mehrnaz, in another of her silky overcoat-like tops but without her headscarf, had just jumped up and was coming over to Dairine. “There you are! I was worried about you, why didn’t you teleport straight in?”
“Thought I’d walk some of the way,” Dairine said. “Local color . . .”
“In this traffic? It’s such an awful time for that, and it’s hot already. And it’s got to be the middle of the night for you, you must be exhausted! How about some tea?”
“Okay. Thanks.”
She followed Mehrnaz back to the couch, looking around the big room. Another stairway led up to a higher leveclass="underline" more closed doors of dark carved wood were set into the room’s rear wall. Inside the U of the couch was a glass coffee table, scattered with magazines and TV remotes. Mehrnaz picked up one of the remotes, fiddled with it a moment, put it down. “Did you bring your friend?”
“Never go anywhere without him,” Dairine said, sitting down and unbuckling the bag.
One of the doors beside the huge TV opened up, and a petite woman in a light- and dark-gold sari came out. “Yes, miss?”
“Lakshmi, will you bring us some tea, please? Thank you.”
The woman disappeared. My God, servants? Dairine thought. And did she just use the remote to call her? That’s a new one. But for the moment she simply pulled Spot out of the bag—he having pulled in all legs and eyes and anything that made him look like something besides a laptop—and put him down on the table. Then she looked over the back of the sofa at the huge space. “Seriously, Mehrnaz, you ever consider playing football in here?”
Mehrnaz gave her a thoughtful look. “American football or football football?”
Dairine burst out laughing. “You could go either way. This is . . . Well, this is incredible! You didn’t tell me you lived in the Taj Mahal.”
“What?” Mehrnaz laughed at her. “This? You should see some of our neighbors’ houses. This is just a flat! And not such a big one.”
Dairine shook her head. “You think this is small?”
“My mother won’t let me say ‘small,’” Mehrnaz said. “She insists on ‘modest’ . . . ”
The door beside the TV opened again and the lady in the sari reappeared, this time with a tray holding a teapot and cups and saucers and milk and sugar. She put the tray on the table, smiled at Dairine, and flitted away again, closing the door behind her.
Mehrnaz poured a cup for Dairine. “How do you like it?”
“A lot of sugar.”
“Brown or white?”
“I’ll try the brown. Yeah, two’s enough, thanks.”
Dairine accepted the cup gratefully, noticed the china in passing—extraordinarily thin and fine with a delicate rose pattern—and took a few sips while thinking, It’s no use, I’ve got to ask, this is going to drive me crazy. “Mehrnaz, before we start getting down to work . . . please get me straight on one thing. Are you rich?”
Mehrnaz’s face went thoughtful while she considered that. That she had to stop to consider it said more to Dairine than almost anything else. “I guess we are,” she said. “Not that some of our neighbors would think so! They’d say we’re just moderately well-to-do. And some of the older ones wouldn’t think much of us because they’d say we ‘came up from trade.’ Worked for money, instead of inheriting it. The nonwizardly side of the family is into IT and cellular telephony.”
Dairine shook her head. “I don’t get it. How is getting rich from your own work not good?”
Mehrnaz shrugged. “It’s sort of a class thing, I suppose.”
“Is it like the caste system?”
“Mmm, in a way.” Mehrnaz made a helpless expression. “Or just snobbery, maybe. But I don’t think most of the family cares about that one way or the other, because the nonwizardly side of the family is very, very small. Most of us are wizards. Aunts and uncles and grandparents for a few generations back, and all these cousins—” She laughed. “Not cousins the hrasht way. Just cousins. There was a wedding, a couple years back, my second-oldest sister, and we sat around and tried to count them all. It was hopeless. We had to stop at two hundred.”
“Sometimes I wonder if big families are all the fun they’re supposed to be . . .” Dairine said.
Mehrnaz put her teacup down, leaned back against the cushion of the sofa, and rolled her eyes. “Funny you should mention football, because that’s what it’s like, being stuck in a football match all the time. Everybody running around in all directions, pursuing all these different goals, chasing after all these projects. And everybody who’s not doing that themselves is standing on the sidelines and cheering for some of them and booing at the others. It’s so exhausting.” She covered her face, rubbed it. “What’s it like, having just one sister? How many aunts and uncles have you got? Tell me it’s only three or four.”
“Three, now,” Dairine said. “We lost a couple of them young.” She sighed. Their uncle Joel had been a particular favorite of hers and Nita’s, the source of the Space Pen that Nita loved so much and that had in some ways been at the heart of her getting into wizardry.
“That’s such a shame! I’m so sorry,” Mehrnaz said.
“It’s okay,” Dairine said. “It’s a long time ago now. Or it seems that way. And as for having just one sister—” She had to smile. “It can still be pretty intense. Especially when she’s a wizard and you’re not.”
“Oh, dear Powers, were you jealous of her?”
Dairine grinned. “You have no idea. But it got better after she was almost eaten by a shark.”
Mehrnaz stared.
“No, I don’t mean that being eaten by a shark was going to make it better! I mean, after that, They came for me. And I found out that I was being jealous of the wrong things, and that being almost eaten by a shark could be the least of your worries.”
Mehrnaz sat there on the sofa shaking her head. “Some of this was in the manual,” she said in a hushed voice. “But it sounds so much more interesting when you tell it. . . . And yet not so scary.”
“It could be scary enough,” Dairine said. “Believe me. I’ll tell you everything you want to know.” She finished her tea and put the cup down, already feeling better from the hit of caffeine. Though I can see I’m going to have to take Tom’s advice . . . “So you’ve got to tell me how things work here first. You say most of your family’s wizardly . . . so what about the rest of them? Do they know about you?”
“Oh yes,” Mehrnaz said. “Everybody knows from when they’re little that a lot of the family does magic. It’s kind of taken for granted.”
“What about the, uh . . .”
“The household staff? Oh, they know. But they really, really like their jobs, so they don’t discuss it. In return we take very good care of them—very favorable salaries and benefits packages.”