With all the appealing outdoor terraces around the convention center where people who felt inclined could bask in the sunshine, and with the lovely warm weather then prevailing, the whole feeling of the event seemed to Nita to have taken a more leisurely turn. This struck her as a good thing, as the tension level had ratcheted up a great deal. Quite a lot of people, especially Australian wizards, had come in to take part in the proceedings and see who went through to the finals. These attendees had started arriving early to learn how the initial rankings stacked up. But there was no mistaking the casual guests for the competitors, who all had a twitchy look to them that instantly set them apart.
There was a good reason for this: the drastic results of the previous round had led a lot of people to suspect that the trend toward unusually hard judging was likely to continue. And when the four core judges were announced, this theory was instantly confirmed. One of the core group was naturally Irina Mladen. Another was Jarrah Corowa, possibly one of the most famous wizards of Aboriginal origin on the planet, and an expert in spells that had to do with materials technologies. A third was the venerable Yi Ling Harrie from Singapore, at ninety-three one of the oldest and best-known aeromancers still in active practice; and the fourth was Malak Marouane, Moroccan-born but practicing mostly in animal communications in Central Africa. Nita, looking over their images in her manual, thought with anticipation of the response should Penn call any one of them a “lovely lady.” It’d be memorable . . .
The problem was that she wouldn’t get to see it, as mentors were not permitted in their mentees’ judging sessions. Penn and his spell would stand in front of the four core judges and three others selected for their expertise in the field of wizardry in which his spell was positioned. He and that spell would stand or fall together on their own merits—which suited Nita entirely.
Nita was wandering down the long concourse that faced onto the nearby lakes when about halfway toward the end she spotted a familiar orange jumpsuit. “You’re kind of early,” Nita said as she came up behind Lissa and patted her on the back. “What time is it in Toronto?”
“Don’t ask me,” Lissa said. “I’ve been here for three days.”
Nita looked at her in bemusement. “No tan?”
“I don’t do tan,” Lissa said. “I hate the beach, it gets you full of sand. But there are lakes here, and I like to row and talk to the fish.” She glanced around. “Where’s Kit?”
“Not here yet,” Nita said. “In a couple of hours.”
“Zone lag?”
Nita shook her head. “Annoying mentee syndrome.”
“Yeah, you’ve got a hard case with that one,” Lissa said. “Well, never mind him. Come on out to the terrace! It’s full of wizards.”
“Nobody else?”
“Nope, they put up signs with that boring font out there and then they had to fine-tune where the signs were pointing, because we started having sleeping kookaburras fall out of the trees on people.” They went out through automatic doors into blinding sunshine. “A lot of the local crowd’s here. Some of the game group, too. Matt’s here, but he lives down the road, why wouldn’t he be, and his boyfriend, that little guy in the duster. And there’s Adele, and those German twins—”
Nita paused to try to figure out who in the crowd had a dust cloth, and the only little guy in sight was wearing a long coat—Then she blinked. “His boyfriend?”
“Yeah, name’s Daki or Doki or something, I always get it wrong when I try to remember. Did I mention Adele? She . . .”
“Yeah, Adele,” Nita said, losing the thread for a moment while the back of her brain shouted at her, Yes, here I am again, your old friend the universe, and I’m stalking you and making everybody talk about sex things all of a sudden! And how did you not know Matt had a boyfriend? Were you purposely not noticing because thinking the word made you nervous? Were you—
“Shut up,” she said under her breath to the universe.
“What?”
“Oh! Sorry! Not you.”
“Oh, your invisible friend?”
Nita started to say yes, more or less out of habit, and then stopped herself. “Might as well be.”
“Well, let’s get you and him a smoothie or something, you look parched!”
And within a few minutes Nita was sitting on one of a circle of loungers under the shade afforded by the projecting eaves of the building, stirring a mango smoothie with a straw and looking at a wizardly projection of the morning session’s results so far. The quiet interlude was welcome, as she was still reacting to what Lissa had told her about Matt. How did I never realize he was gay? She took a long drink. I feel like an idiot. And then she laughed at herself. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve missed something like that. Guess it’s too much to hope it’ll be the last . . .
“Well, this looks sybaritic,” said a familiar voice from overhead.
Nita looked up in surprise. “Carl!” she said. And sure enough, there was her other Supervisory wizard in a white linen shirt and khaki shorts and Ray-Bans and sneakers, and carrying some kind of orange-creamsicle-colored drink with a little umbrella in it. “Are you proctoring?” Then Nita thought again. “No, wait, they don’t need to do that for this round, do they?”
Carl sat down on the lounger next to hers. “No, the judging panels handle any security that the spells need when they’re examining them. Today I’m here for the networking.” He smiled slyly at her. “And because of neighborhood interest.”
“Oh, okay.”
“But also, I meant to look you up,” Carl said.
Nita found herself wondering guiltily if a Supervisory could hear you thinking about killing your mentee. “Uh—”
“You’re not in any trouble,” Carl said.
She gave him a suspicious sideways glance. “How do you do that?”
“By having been your age once,” Carl said, “and being able to see your face.”
Nita snorted. “Okay.”
He took a long pull on the straw in his drink. “I was curious, after the first round, to ask you whether you were contemplating a change of focus.”
She was mystified. “Focus? . . . And I didn’t see you at the first round.”
Carl chuckled. “I have my sources. Have you given any thought to whom you’ve spent a significant portion of your time hanging out with so far? I mean, planets. To the exclusion of both Kit and your own mentee, sometimes.”
She shrugged. “Kit’s been wandering around meeting people. We both have; that’s how I ran into Jovie and Pluto.”
“‘Jovie,’” Carl said, and grinned into his drink.
“He didn’t mind.”
“No,” Carl said, “he wouldn’t have.”
“And as for my own mentee, he’s a pain in the ass and doesn’t want to listen to me any more than he has to. I’m the wrong sex or something.”
Carl gave her a resigned look. “Cultural?”
“Personal.”
“Oh well.”
“But Carl, seriously . . . What do you do when your mentee doesn’t want to be mentored? I mean, without breaking the commitment?”
He looked out toward the lake and thought about it. “Why are you so intent on staying in it?”
The question caught her briefly by surprise. “Well, the Powers That Be put me in this position. Normally they’ve got reasons for that kind of thing.”
“That’s true,” Carl said. “But it’s not as if they’re requiring blind obedience of you. There are cases in which a mentor can do the person they’re mentoring more good by walking than they can by staying stubbornly in place. You’re the only one who can make that judgment call, and the Powers trust you to do that.”
Nita sniffed and drank some more of her smoothie. “Don’t make it sound too good,” she said.