Very slowly he got up and started to make for the doors. Nita waited until he caught up with her. “Stop hanging your head like that!” she said as they walked. “Hold your head up. It makes you braver.”
“What?”
“There are physiological changes,” Nita said. “Not gonna start explaining them now. Take a deep breath. Yeah. Let it out now. Have you got your manual?”
“Uh. In a pocket.”
“Good. Got the basic version of the spell cued up in it?”
“Yeah.”
“Breathe again. Just get in the habit of it, I can’t be in the room with you to remind you.”
He sucked air in, let it out again as they went through the doors into the main concourse. “You’re doing fine,” Nita said. “Once you’re rolling, this will pass. You know your subject, I know you do. The only reason you’re experiencing a panic is that you’ve realized you can’t sweet-talk or swindle these judges into giving you the benefit of the doubt. And you don’t have to. They’ll listen to you if you just talk to them about the spell. Right? Tell them what you built. And tell them why you built it. Remember how you explained the difference it was going to make for people? Tell them about that.”
Nita had passed the judging rooms on the way out to the terrace and knew where they were. Two of them had message boards that said, in the Speech, UNSCHEDULED. The third was blank. Nita stopped by its closed doors, and exactly as she and Penn paused there, the signboard outside the door lit up with Penn’s name in English and Chinese and the Speech.
He stared at his name as if he’d never seen it before. “I, I can’t . . .”
“You can,” Nita said. “You can do this, Penn. And you’re going to. Now remember: always take a breath when somebody asks you a question—it gives you extra time to think. See your spell in your head, now? Good.”
The door opened before him.
“In,” Nita said. “And good luck, cousin.”
Penn hesitated. Then, like someone sleepwalking, in he went.
The door closed.
Nita sagged, passed a hand over her face, and laughed at herself. Poor guy, she thought. Who knew he was going to freeze up like that?
From inside her otherspace pocket, Nita’s manual pinged softly.
She moved off to one side of the doors, unzipped the air, pulled the manual out and checked its messaging section. As she opened up to the section with its edges flashing blue, words were already spelling themselves out across its first page.
Is he there?
Nita laughed. “Yeah.”
Did he go in?
“Finally.”
Under his own power?
“Believe it or not, yeah. Look, get over here when you can . . . we’re going to need to present a united front when he comes out of there.”
Be there in twenty.
“See you,” Nita said. She closed the manual and put it away, then headed for the doors to the outside terrace.
Dairine made her way down to the prejudging area in the convention center where she’d agreed to meet Mehrnaz that afternoon. There were a lot of wizards and other guests hanging around, looking at the results of those coming out of judging and the rankings as they stood. Maybe half of the semifinalists had been through the judging by now, and Mehrnaz was scheduled in about half an hour. It’s a good time to be scheduled: less reason to panic . . .
Dairine put Spot down while she looked through the crowd, and after a moment caught sight of Mehrnaz. But she wasn’t alone. Next to her stood an imposingly tall and darkly handsome woman in a rusty-colored silk hijab and a long below-the-knee tunic, subtly patterned in dun and gold, over dark designer jeans and sandals. She had huge dark eyes and a long pretty face, but her mouth had a set of lines around it on each side that suggested her lips were more normally drawn down in an expression of disappointment.
All right, now what? Dairine thought, and hung back to get a sense of what was going on.
“Why are they making you wait like this?” the woman said. “It’s disgraceful.”
“There are people scheduled ahead of me, ameh,” Merhnaz said. “Everybody has to wait their turn.”
“I don’t see why,” said the woman, sounding most annoyed. “Surely they must know who they’re keeping waiting, who you’re affiliated with; why would you be here otherwise?”
There was a pause at that, and Dairine saw Mehrnaz’s glance go sideways, as if there was something she didn’t want the woman to see there. “Well, the spell, ameh . . .”
“Oh, but you know that’s not the issue at all, because the family doesn’t waste time on these things anymore, do we?” It was a soft, warm voice, but so dismissive, and the woman’s expression suggested that she was amused at how simple-minded Mehrnaz was. “Not that it’s not a nice gesture, I suppose, but there are so many uncertainties in that whole scholium of wizardries. No way to guarantee the results . . . so many ways to fail. And who bothers with anything that they can’t be sure will work? It’s wasted effort, though I’m sure it’s nice of you to make the attempt to keep up the old family tradition, your Uncle Khorazir does love that kind of thing and it’s no wonder you’d want to please him, he knows so many useful people . . .”
That is the stupidest reason to specialize in one kind of wizardry that I’ve ever heard, Dairine thought, folding her arms.
“But ameh, that’s not what it’s about. If someone just—”
The woman looked down at Mehrnaz with affectionate disbelief. “You’re truly going to tell me that you thought you might be able to work out how to do something about the old homeplace’s slipstrike faults when generations of your family weren’t able to do a thing? Even great wizards like your grandfather Bardia? He gave up on it after a year, said the very idea was hopeless. Surely you don’t think you can do what he couldn’t do! Though it’s brave of you to try, but there’s no point in you trying to prove anything to us that way. We know it’s taken you longer than everyone else in the family to find a specialty, there’s no reason for you to wear yourself out over impossibilities. Everybody moves at their own speed, we know you’re a bit slow, but it’s absolutely all right, you have to manage what you can. And even if—”
The woman looked amused at the idea that seemed just to have come to her. “Even if you got somewhere along those lines . . . well, you wouldn’t like to embarrass your grandfather, would you? He’d be so hurt. None of us would want that.”
Mehrnaz turned away again, looked at the ground. “I just . . .” she said, and trailed off.
This is it, Dairine realized. This is why she melted down after the Cull. This is the source of the trouble.
“You wanted to do your best,” the woman said, in that particular sympathetic tone that says someone’s trying to be kind to you while also implying that you’re a fool, and not listening to anything you say or caring about what you want. “I know, I know! And it’s understandable, the way things go so wrong for you most of the time! Well, the whole point now is to make these people hurry up so that you can get this demonstration over with and come home. There are much more important things for you to be doing—”