Carl laughed. “In our time working together,” he said, “have I ever been shy about giving you bad news when it was necessary?”
An image rose in Nita’s mind: a South Shore beach, with the Sun shining down on the sand and the water and a young girl who was in the process of realizing that she had made a promise that was almost certainly going to be deadly for her to keep. “No,” Nita said. “That hasn’t been a problem.”
“So you can make some assumptions about the good news, then. Assuming it actually is good. Problem is, you’re the only one who can decide that.”
Nita smiled and sucked down the last of her smoothie so that the straw gurgled. “I was about to start complaining about you and the Powers treating me like a grownup who knows the right thing to do,” she said. “Maybe I changed my mind.”
Carl leaned back and stretched out his legs. “The truth is that not all the situations the Powers put us into are optimal,” he said. “They may have great insight and be able to see deeper into causality than we routinely can at our level, but they’re not omniscient and they’ve never pretended to be. They’ll make a judgment call sometimes, as in this case, that a good result is likely if you put a given combination of people together. And since they hate to waste energy, they’ll routinely make sure that it’s the best possible result that can be achieved, and that it will do as many people good as possible. You may be having an effect on your mentee that isn’t obvious to you. The difficulty, of course, is that since we’re not omniscient either, we may sometimes do our jobs and think we’ve failed . . . and still have done massive good to someone that we may never be aware of.”
“I prefer to be aware of it,” Nita said.
“So do we all,” Carl said. “I’d also prefer it to rain chocolate-frosted donuts in my kitchen on Sunday mornings, but I don’t seem to be getting a lot of that. Plainly the universe is mismanaged.”
Nita snickered. “So you’re saying I should keep doing what I’m doing and hope for the best.”
“There’s always the chance that the one who’s being done good by this is you,” said Carl.
She gave him a sideways look. “By being told over and over that no matter how smart I act, I’m really some airhead whose highest purpose is to hang off some guy’s arm?”
“If your mentee’s telling you that over and over,” Carl said, with a very grim small smile, “I think it’s very likely that you may sooner or later respond in a way that changes his mind. If only by repetition.”
Nita’s gaze went to the lake. “Pity that’s not the ocean. I could drop him in it. I’ve got friends out there. With teeth.”
Carl shook his head. “Do what you normally do,” he said. “Leave the rest to the Powers. And if you feel you absolutely must go, trust that that’s what’s needed. You can’t get this wrong.”
And then he sat up straight. “Whoops,” he said, “incoming!”
And just like that he vanished.
Nita shook her head, both because he’d just done that in full view of the road between the convention center and the lake—but then they’ll have this whole side of the place spell-shielded—and because he had done it soundlessly. She sat up a little straighter, looking around. Kit?
No answer. Not that she always got one by silent communications these days, especially since things had begun to shift between them.
The automatic doors to the building opened, and Penn came bursting out in flowered beach jams, some kind of brocaded vest, and flip-flops. As he stood there looking almost frantically from side to side, it was only with the greatest difficulty that Nita kept herself from laughing out loud. The way he dresses, she thought, there has to be a word . . .
Penn spotted her and immediately headed her way. Flamboyant, Nita thought. That’s a good word. But no Kit? Interesting . . .
“Juanita!”
She rolled her eyes. It wasn’t the normal stagy delivery of her name, though. Penn sounded upset.
As he came over to stand by her chair, Nita tilted her head up and did her best to betray nothing more than mild curiosity. “What?”
“I’m, uh,” Penn said. “I’m due in there pretty soon—”
She glanced at her watch. “About ten minutes,” Nita said. “And?” She glanced toward the doors, but there was no action there. “Where’s Kit?”
“Uh,” Penn said, not looking Nita in the eye, and plainly not wanting to. “He, uh, he said he had other things to do.”
Better things to do, Nita’s mind instantly supplied. He got angry at something Penn said, and he dumped him. Did Carl know this was happening? There are no accidents . . .
“You pissed him off, didn’t you,” Nita said. “Penn, one of these days you’re going to stop being so certain you know what people are thinking before they open their mouths, and your life’s going to get a whole lot simpler.”
Slowly and reluctantly Penn sat down sideways on the lounger that Carl had vacated.
“I, uh,” he said, and then seemed to run out of words.
“Yes?” Nita said.
“. . . I’m not sure I can go through with this.”
All right, Nita thought, here we go. There had been something about Penn’s mood the last couple of days that had been ringing alarm bells for her. But whether he was likely to want to talk to her about it now was another question. “What’s going on?” she said.
“I don’t know,” Penn said, bending half over and rubbing his hands through his hair. “I don’t know! This morning, and then later, just now, after Kit left . . . I keep having these times when, I don’t know, I look at the spell and it doesn’t seem to make any sense. And that’s ridiculous! How can it not make sense?”
Nita sighed. “Haven’t you ever had the thing,” she said, “where you look at a sentence after you’ve read it too many times, and it doesn’t mean anything? Or you say your own name too many times, and it turns into this gibberish word. There’s a wizardly version of that too.”
“No,” Penn said miserably. “If only Kit was here!”
If only, Nita thought. He’d love to see this: he’d laugh so hard. “Penn,” she said. “Am I or am I not one of your mentors?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Then be quiet, because I’m about to explain it all to you. You’re getting cold feet.”
Penn stared at his flip-flops in confusion.
“Cold feet!” Nita said. “It’s finally sunk in for you that you’re coming up against something that a flashy presentation and some fast talking won’t be enough to get you through. This isn’t just about knowing how to handle hecklers or deflect difficult questions, or be flashy or showy or cute. You’re going to be standing in front of seven wizards who’re going to scare you spitless. And you know what? They’ll be doing that to everybody they judge today. Just this once, you’re going to get to act like everybody else. You’re going to be scared.”
He stared at Nita with an expression of utter dismay that suggested he was getting a head start.
“And then you’re going to push through it,” Nita said. “You’re going to walk into that judging room and take a deep breath and say to yourself, I am scared but I’m going to do this anyway. Wizards do this every day. People do this every day. I’ve done it, Kit’s done it, and now it’s your turn.”
She got up off her lounger. “Come on,” she said.
Penn didn’t move.
She glared at him. “Have some dignity, Penn,” she said. “Get up and walk. Don’t make me levitate you. Because under your own power or with assistance, you are going into that room. And what state you’re in when you come out of it is going to be entirely up to you.”