He glanced around him. “Catch you two at the party later?”
“Sure,” Nita said.
Tom vanished.
Over at what Kit was now thinking of as the Tame Lightning stand, the argument was getting even louder. Nita was observing this with dubious interest: two wizards, one a big broad-shouldered weightlifting kind of guy and one slimmer and shaggy-haired, were standing almost chest to chest and waving their arms and alternately pointing at the spell and shouting at each other. The argument seemed to have something to do with ionization. The stand’s owner, perhaps fortunately, didn’t seem to be anywhere close by.
“Have you ever seen anything like that before?” Nita said, sounding scandalized.
“In the middle of a baseball game maybe,” Kit said. “Not with wizards.”
Nita shook her head. “Don’t think anyone’s planning to kick dirt over anybody’s shoes . . .”
Kit wondered if it would break out into a full-fledged shoving match before or after the prejudging session ended. “Can it be that all these enlightened, magical people we’ve been working with are actually just human beings after all?”
“‘Just human beings’?”
“You know what I mean.”
Looking bemused, Nita watched the argument roll on. “Maybe it’s true that the worst brings out the best in everybody . . .”
“Yeah. And now I’m beginning to think, also vice versa. You wouldn’t have seen any of this while the Pullulus situation was going on.”
Nita snickered. “Well, the universe was about to end! Kind of a different situation . . .”
“Not to judge by some of these guys . . . It’s like that saying about football.”
“What?”
“Something of Ronan’s. ‘Football isn’t a matter of life and death. It’s way more important than that.’”
“The winning thing.”
“The being-seen-to-be-winning thing . . .”
Nita shook her head again. “I always thought wizards didn’t do this kind of stuff.”
Kit shrugged. “Maybe it’s just the numbers? We haven’t worked with all that many other wizards really. Maybe we needed a bigger statistical sample.”
Nita’s expression was amused. “Maybe somebody thinks it’s important that we all find out that other wizards are just people.”
“Then maybe this should happen more than once every eleven years.”
She laughed. Right on the end of the laugh came a second chime, louder. “That’s it,” Kit said, as the room started to break out in applause. “Should we go find Penn?”
“Probably a good idea, if it’s going to get as crowded down here as Tom thinks.”
They made their way down the long concourse, mostly against the stream of wizards and other attendees who were gravitating toward the relaxation area (or in some cases, levitating toward it). “Did you see Dairine at all while you were going around?” Kit said.
“Once at a distance, but she was busy,” Nita said. “There were about a hundred people around her mentee. It was a real crush, she was answering questions or something . . . I let her be. She didn’t look like she needed help.”
Kit nodded. Penn’s project had attracted a fair amount of attention, too. But does that even mean anything? he wondered. “Do we have a plan now?” he said.
“For what to do if he gets culled?” Nita said. She exhaled in a way that suggested she was annoyed at herself. “Resist the urge to celebrate?”
“Yeah,” Kit said, “mostly.”
“And if he makes it past . . .”
It was Kit’s turn to shake his head. He’ll be insufferable, he thought, twice as bad as before. Three times.
“We’re going to have to spend a while thinking about how to handle that,” Nita said. “Because I’m wondering if in some ways we’ve been too hard on him.”
Kit blinked. He stopped and stared at her. “What?”
“You saw him,” Nita said. “Yeah, sure, Mr. I’m a Tough Guy, I Can Handle Anything? When somebody put a real sun underneath him, that changed real fast. What was that about?”
“Him forgetting to treat you like you were the wizardly version of arm candy, for one thing,” Kit said. “I remember that.”
Nita gave him a look that was both surprised and perplexed. Kit swallowed. Uh oh, did I sound too angry just then?
“Yeah,” Nita said, “okay. No argument. But the other thing still worries me. If he goes through to the next round, he’s going to be exposed to a lot more examination, a lot more pressure. We need to find out what was going on with that before one of the judges does, and fails him on it. Because if he passes this, he’ll be building himself up and up in his head until the next round . . .”
Kit sighed as the still-rotating globe of Penn’s spell diagram came into view. He was fairly sure he knew what she was thinking: And when he gets dropped out, which is likely, he’ll fall hard. This was as much about Nita not wanting the two of them to look bad as anything else.
At least I sure hope it is . . .
He didn’t have a chance to take that thought any further. Penn was heading toward them, grinning, pumping one fist in the air. Kit found himself half wishing that in the excitement Penn would knock that ridiculous top hat off himself.
“A hundred and eighty-three tokens!” Penn shouted at them. “Are we brilliant or what?”
“It’s not what we think we are—” Kit said.
“For certain values of ‘we,’” said Nita, sounding a bit dry. “The question’s going to be how brilliant the judges think we are. Or you, rather.”
“But you saw me out there! No one else came close to that level of class.”
“That’s so true,” Nita said in that innocent tone of voice that Kit had been hearing way too much lately. “Penn, have you had anything to eat all day?”
“Aww, that’s so nurturing of you!” Penn said. “Better watch out, can’t have you getting Kit nervous!”
Kit closed his eyes for a second. He doesn’t just have a gift for saying the wrong thing, he thought, he’s got a superpower. He opened his eyes and was surprised to see Penn still standing there and not scorched to a crisp.
Nita was regarding Penn the way someone might look at an incompletely housebroken puppy who miraculously hadn’t yet made a mess on the rug. “You have half an hour to get down to the far end and eat a sandwich and have a smoothie or something,” she said. “If you pass out from blood sugar issues in front of all these people when the results come out, you don’t want them thinking you fainted from shock.”
“Wow, of course, you’re absolutely right. As my lady commands,” Penn said, and bowed deeply to Nita, sweeping his hat off. He reset it at a jaunty angle and set off down the concourse, nodding regally at everyone he passed.
Kit and Nita watched him go. Then Nita looked up at Kit.
“The Powers That Be,” she said, “seriously owe me for this one.”
“Let me know when you figure out how to collect,” Kit said, and they headed after their mentee.
A little while thereafter it seemed to Nita as if all three hundred or so of the competitors were milling around down in the chill-out space, talking and laughing and looking relieved that it was all over—though there were also a lot of people standing around quietly with friends or relatives and looking tense. It was like the aftermath of any big test at school, the SATs or something similar; relief, anxiety, people talking about what they’d done well and more often what they thought they’d screwed up.