After she died. “I have to tell you,” Nita said, “except for—some similar recent history—I don’t know what the Powers are thinking of by assigning us to him as mentors. He only listens to us about half the time.”
“That’s half the time better than the rest of us usually get with him. As I said, he doesn’t usually want to talk about his own practice much. But who are we to second-guess the Powers?”
Nita snickered. “Lately that’s my whole business day.”
The door to the kitchen flew open. “Come on, Juanita,” Penn said, “I’ve got the stuff I need. We’ve gotta get back. Work to do . . .” He went over to his grandfather and grabbed him by the head and kissed him on top of it: then dropped the glowing token on the table in front of him. “There, now you’ve seen it, satisfied?”
Penn’s grandfather peered at it. “If I say that I am, it could shatter your whole image of me.”
“Too true, Baba.”
“It’s smaller than I thought. They should have given you something bigger.”
“See that, Juanita! If I’d have gotten culled I’d never have heard the end of it. And when I don’t get culled, it’s still not good enough for him!”
Nita thought it smarter not to respond to this. Penn laughed and headed toward the kitchen door. “I’ll come back and see you when I’m famous, Baba. Better be nice to me then or it won’t happen twice.”
“If you don’t hurry up it won’t even happen once,” his grandfather growled. “The Powers might have plans for me, and don’t think I’ll keep Them waiting just because you might drop by.” Nita caught a flicker of a wry look from under his bushy dark brows: You see what I put up with.
“Respected elder,” Nita said, giving him a slight bow, “dai stihó . . .”
“Why are you bothering being nice to him?” Penn said, holding the door open and jerking his head impatiently for her to hurry. “He wouldn’t have bothered to do it to you.”
“’Course he wouldn’t,” Nita murmured with a last sidewise look at Penn’s grandfather, and brushed past Penn without a glance.
Dairine stood in the little spinney of sassafras trees at the far end of the Callahans’ backyard. The doorway to the place she wanted to go was hidden, but she knew that Nita had left the aschetic space commissioned and on standby. It was safe enough, after all; the portal proper was keyed to the personalities of Nita and the wizards she was working with, which naturally included Dairine.
It was evening, warm still after the day, with just a slight breeze moving in the trees around her. Nita was off working with Penn, and would be for a while. That suited Dairine perfectly. Right now, right here, she was going to be overstepping her bounds a little, and the last thing she wanted was to have Nita lecturing her.
She spoke the brief coded series of characters in the Speech, like a keypad combination, that popped open the portal to the aschetic space. Access to it was still private; Nita had re-booked it for her own use until the Invitational was over. Which is interesting, Dairine thought as she stepped through. I think she foresees a lot of trouble with Penn . . .
Foresight, of course: that was more and more the issue with Nita. Dairine was getting the idea that there were things Nita was afraid to see. She’d come downstairs some mornings lately with a very guarded expression on her face. Only Dairine, who had known her longer than anyone else, would’ve recognized it for what it was: dread. Nita had seen something that frightened her, and she wasn’t discussing it with anybody. And if I ask her, she’s going to deny it, Dairine thought. She’s afraid that even sharing information about what she’s seen might somehow change the future.
Dairine stood there on the endless, black-and-white checkerboard floor and shook her head. Of all the gifts she would’ve wanted nothing of, seeing the future badly, or even incompletely, would be chief among them. One of the things she’d always liked best about her big sister was that Nita knew how to make up her mind. She would make a choice, and then she would go for it, wholeheartedly. But that wasn’t happening so much anymore. Choice was beginning to frighten her. Or rather, she sees a whole bunch of choices in front of her and she doesn’t know which one will make things turn out the way she wants. And so she hesitates . . .
Like I’m doing now, Dairine thought, laughing softly at herself. She felt around in the malleable space to find the otherspace pocket where its controlling kernel was stored. A few moments later she was holding it. Dairine was nowhere near as expert with this as Nita was; Neets had had so much practice with it before their mom died. But she understood the general principles.
She turned the kernel over and over in her hands, pulled out its recent history strand, which Nita had thoughtfully tagged with the image of a clock, and ran her fingers down its nodes until she found the settings for her last session in there with Penn. Dairine squeezed the node, and Penn’s spell spread itself out across the floor.
She looked it over with satisfaction as she noted that Nita had instructed this display of the spell to sync itself with Penn’s most recent version, the edited and cleaned-up wizardry that he’d presented at the Cull. It was much neater now, much more concise than the original work, but there were still things about it that bothered her.
Dairine stood there in silence, then started walking around the spell, letting it sink in. This kind of analysis was something she’d been working on with Nelaid. What frustrated her at such times, though, was how easy he made it look.
And Roshaun had been even better at it. The easy fluency of the way he handled fire, that sense that he and his element were one and understood each other intimately—Dairine wondered rather desperately if she was ever going to have that. In fact, she thought, let’s be honest with ourselves here, shall we? I will never be as good as he is.
Anyway, there was so much more to the way Roshaun had been than mere expertise. Courage, she thought. In her mind, Dairine saw again that terrible abyss of fire over which she and Filif and Sker’ret and Roshaun had hung, all the while knowing that they might die doing what they were trying to do—tinkering with the insides of a living star to keep it from flaring and destroying half the life on Earth. But it was a death that would’ve been over in the blink of an eye. One moment they’d have been breathing, and in the next, they’d all have been sitting in Timeheart, wondering what they’d got wrong.
Roshaun, though, hadn’t been content to sit tight and let death come to him. He’d walked down willingly into that danger, barely shielded, as calmly as someone going downstairs in the middle of the night for a drink of water. And Dairine had seen the look in his eyes before he went—and had known why he did it. It was almost too much of a burden to bear: the passage of time made it harder, not easier.
She shook her head. Not the time to be thinking about that . . . Right now the issue was Penn’s spell. Something about it had been bothering her since she had first laid eyes on it. Something that I’m missing. It wasn’t strictly structural, or at least she didn’t think so. But she was having trouble identifying what was wrong, and part of the difficulty was in the way Penn diagrammed his spells. He just keeps leaving these big messy blanks all over them . . .
Dairine stood still again, staring down. Big messy blanks, she thought. Life seems full of those lately. The big messy blank left where her mother had been. The big messy blank left where Roshaun had been. One of them, at least, she might be able to do something about. If only she could handle these damn blank spots . . .