Dairine laughed. “Well, half the people wouldn’t notice. You know how people are when they see something happening that they can’t believe! Half the time they forget all about it. But no nonwizards are going to get into the secure areas. They’re being spell-shielded so that people who have no business there don’t want to go in, and don’t notice anything happening. The organizing committee could have staged this part of the Invitational someplace out of the way, but New York’s convenient for everybody because of the worldgating complex, and of course it’s historically fascinating.” Dairine had another sip of tea. “They like to do this stage in a shared space, since it’s not dangerous. Last time they did the Cull—the initial deselection—in the Sydney Opera House, and nobody batted an eye. They’re in Australia again this time for the semifinals. Canberra.” She shrugged as if it was all no big deal.
Dori sat there blinking for a moment and put two more sugars in her tea than she’d been planning to. “Well, that’s good to hear,” Dori said. “Though still, even in a protected place like that—there will, after all, still be a lot of unfamiliar wizards—”
“Seniors,” Dairine said with a put-upon expression, “and Advisories all over the place, peering over our shoulders all the time . . .”
“—and some of those wizards will be boys—”
Mehrnaz suddenly became fascinated by the plate of biscuits to her right on the table, so that her face was turned away from her mama’s while she considered which one to pick next. Dairine, though, was positioned to see her mentee’s panicked expression through Spot’s eyes, as he was sitting on Mehrnaz’s far side.
Uh huh, Dairine thought. There we go. “Boys?” she said, incredulous, and laughed. “Dori, both of us are going to be way too busy with this to be thinking about boys. We’ve got work to do.”
“Well, yes, but it’s always when we’re thinking about other matters that things happen, isn’t it?”
Dori looked away while saying this, and Dairine became absolutely sure she was thinking, Because it did with me.
“That is not going to be allowed to occur,” Dairine said. “Boys have their place in life, but not for the next two weeks.”
“Ah. And you don’t have a boyfriend either, then?”
Dairine looked Dori straight in the eye, and said in the Speech, “I have absolutely no interest in any guy on this planet.”
Mehrnaz’s mother’s eyes widened at the sudden change of language. Then she looked very relieved. “Oh well, that’s all right then,” she said.
“And I am not going to let her get in any trouble,” Dairine said, once more in the Speech. “I promise you that.”
“Well of course you’re not, my dear, would the Powers have set you two up otherwise? I’m so glad we understand each other.” And the subtext then quieted down enough for that to seem to be the only thing Dori was saying. Except possibly, I really am relieved. “Do you girls want some more tea?”
“Not right now, Mama,” said Mehrnaz. “We’ll ring for Lakshmi if we need anything.”
“All right then,” her mother said, and smiled fondly at both of them. “I’m keeping you from being busy, aren’t I? I’ll get out of your way, then; I had some shopping planned for this morning anyway. You two have fun now. It was so interesting to meet you, Dairine!”
“You too,” Dairine said. You have no idea.
Dairine shot Mehrnaz a sideways look and didn’t say a thing more until the door closed behind her mentee’s mother. Then she spluttered with laughter. “‘Have fun!’ What’s she think we’re going to be doing, going halfway around the planet to play with our Barbie dolls?”
Mehrnaz giggled too. “Truly, I don’t mean to mock her. She’s a wonderful mother.” Dairine held her face stilclass="underline" she was having some of her own thoughts about that. Perhaps Mehrnaz suspected as much; her tone went embarrassed again. “Though I am sorry she started to give you the Inquisition there. Half the time she treats me like I’m about six. The rest of it, she gives me grief about not acting grown-up enough. And when I do, she scolds me.”
Dairine sighed and shook her head. “We all get that, wizards or not.”
“But, mostly she’s good. Our family is, well, kind of complicated. In some ways, she’s sort of the eye of the hurricane.” But then Mehrnaz smiled. “And as far as wizardry goes, no one, no one can do what she does with food. People talk about magic in the kitchen—well, she is the magic. Give her half a chance and she’ll cook for you and stuff you until you have no choice but to teleport afterward, because the only other way you can move is to roll.”
Dairine’s stomach chose that moment to growl. “Oh God,” she said, “it keeps doing this to me. My body clock is so messed up.”
Mehrnaz grabbed the remote. “I’ll send for something,” she said. “These little biscuity things are never enough, they just make you hungrier . . .”
Her stomach growled again, and Dairine couldn’t do anything but laugh. “You know, when I was coming up the street the other day, I smelled—someone was frying onions . . .”
“You went by the bhaji shop,” Mehrnaz said with a grin. “Oh, you wait. I’ll send for a bag. Two bags.”
Dairine grinned and bounced up off the couch to go look at the spell diagram again. Mehrnaz joined her. “Look how this came down,” Dairine said. “Not a line out of place. We are going to make spell casting the hot thing of this Invitational. Mehrnaz, I’m telling you, half the people in the quarter-finals are going to be doing it.”
“It’ll be nice to watch them,” Mehrnaz said, her voice very soft.
Dairine gave her a stern look. “I can hear you thinking, and it’s not going to go that way. You are not going to be a spectator. You are going to be in the middle of it, competing.”
Mehrnaz turned, confused. “Don’t tell me you do psychotropic spelling too! Mind reading? That’s so smooth! I never even felt you doing that!”
“It wasn’t mind reading,” Dairine said. “It was prediction.” She thought of Nelaid again, and smiled.
“I thought that was your sister,” Mehrnaz said, sounding dubious.
“She’s a visionary,” Dairine said. “The prediction stuff comes and goes: she’s still working on it. Kind of a sore point with her, so when you finally meet her, I wouldn’t dwell on it. It’s been driving her nuts lately.”
“Is she no good at it?” said Mehrnaz.
“I get a feeling sometimes she’s too good,” Dairine said, “and it’s starting to freak her out. But never mind that right now. Go on, pick a place to stand and let’s hear you present again . . .”
In her dream Nita was standing in the Cavern of Writings on Mars, and the place was afire with wizardry . . . and this was bad.
It had often bothered Nita that when she’d first come there in company with Carmela and S’reee, there hadn’t been time to appreciate the place as the work of art that it was. The vanished people they were seeking had taken this amazing space, the remains of a single giant bubble of gas buried deep in molten lava, and smoothed the jet-black walls of it to a near-perfect truncated sphere. Then they had written those walls full of history and prophecy and knowledge, deep-graven in ancient angular characters whose meaning had fallen out of the body of wizardly knowledge under the sheer weight of time—of past ages during which no living species had seen or read those characters or even heard of the species that had written them there.