“Not half of what she’s got coming,” Dairine said. “And come on, tell me that you haven’t wanted to do that since you were old enough to talk! Because it’s been going on that long, hasn’t it? Come on, Mehrnaz, say it in the Speech.”
Mehrnaz opened her mouth, closed it again.
“But I get it now,” Dairine said.
“Get what?”
Dairine frowned. Whatever problems she’d had in her home life, one of them had not been having the people around her assuming that she couldn’t do things. Her mom and dad had always been in the “Yes you can, get on with it” department. Sometimes she had shocked them, sure, by how far she’d go to get on with things. But no one would tell her “No you can’t” unless it was things like “No you can’t take the barbecue apart while there are briquettes in it that are on fire!”
Dairine smiled dryly to herself. Not that that stopped me either . . . But what Mehrnaz had here, she now realized, was another problem entirely.
If this woman starts interfering, Dairine thought, I’m gonna get her butt kicked out of here so hard she’ll feel the universe slam on it on the way out, and I’ll laugh for hours while she complains.
For the moment, Dairine simply shook her head. “Leave it for now,” she said. “We’ve got twenty minutes or so, and I want to see what you did with that force-diffusion routine. Let’s have a look . . .”
Mehrnaz was in the judging room for nearly forty minutes. Dairine spent a good while pacing up and down outside it, waiting for any sign of Aunt Afsoun: but there wasn’t any. And maybe she’s gone home. Good riddance, then.
She was just turning around to pace one more leg in front of the doors when the message board changed. JUDGING, it had said over Mehrnaz’s picture and her name in English and the Speech and Farsi. But now it went flick and said PASSED.
“Yes!!” Dairine exclaimed, and waited for the doors to open. A moment later they did, and Mehrnaz walked out . . .
And it was clear that something was terribly wrong, for Mehrnaz was coming out into the concourse with that terrible rigid-spine posture that Dairine had seen before. God, she looks like someone who’s about to get beaten up—
In that instant Dairine remembered Nita’s horrible conjecture. Not even wizards are proof against that . . .
Mehrnaz walked right past Dairine, didn’t even stop. Dairine froze, for a moment, then went after Mehrnaz in a hurry.
“Mehrnaz,” she said, because the girl wasn’t stopping. “Mehr! Wait up!”
It’s not possible, not possible that her own family would do that to her. They’re wizards. And even if they were doing that—she could stop them, she’d—
She caught up with Mehrnaz, caught her by the arm. “Mehrnaz!”
She didn’t shake off Dairine’s hand, but the way she stopped suggested that she wanted to. “What,” she said in a dead-flat voice.
“Mehrnaz,” Dairine said. “I don’t—listen to me! They’re not—What’s the matter? You passed. You’re in the finals!”
“Yes,” Mehrnaz said, very softly. “That’s the problem.”
Dairine found herself trembling. “Nobody at home’s getting physically violent with you, are they? You don’t have to put up with that. If that’s going on, I don’t care who’s doing it to you, I swear I’ll take them apart like Lego!”
Mehrnaz held very still. “Touch me? Of course they won’t touch me. That would speed up entropy.” Dairine didn’t think she had ever heard the phrase used with such bitterness. “But you still don’t get it, do you? None of my family expected me to make it past the first Cull. I was supposed to fail.”
Dairine stood there dumbfounded.
“They don’t have to touch me,” Mehrnaz said. “There’s more than one kind of abuse. If I’d have lost today, that wouldn’t have been so bad. Oh, they’d make fun of me for a few weeks, a month, until they got bored with it. It would be the big joke in the family. How Mehrnaz almost got it right, but then screwed up in front of the whole world. Because she would, wouldn’t she? That’s her style.”
She stood there hunched, her fists clenched. It was a creepy stance for someone who was usually so fluid and graceful, so quick and easy in her movements. “But now, now I’ve done something really bad. Now I’ve made them all look like idiots. Because all my relatives have been telling their friends, and other people in the family, that this was going to be it for me. Everyone’s committed themselves to being sure that this would be as far as I could go. And you know why they say that? My grandfather, the famous one, you remember him? He made it past the Cull when he was in the Invitational, but he never got any further. And this isn’t even the quarter-finals, now. It’s so much worse. It’s the semis. Now I’ve made him look bad. That whole side of the family is cursing me now. They have to. It’s a loyalty thing.” She sounded resigned.
“Oh, God,” Dairine muttered.
“Yes,” Mehrnaz said. She smiled, but there was nothing remotely happy or funny about the expression. “Now on we go to the finals. And the whole family will be saying to everybody outside the family, oh, we’re so pleased, yes, we didn’t think she had it in her, isn’t it wonderful, talent will out, after all! It must be the stress, put one of our people in a crisis situation and they rise to meet it—”
She laughed bitterly. “But inside the house, they’re going to be ripping each other up. My grandfather’s side of the family is going to be all over my mama, saying, ‘You meant for this to happen, didn’t you? You set this up on purpose to make us look bad. Here you were claiming that you never thought she’d make it that far, but now see what’s happened!’ And my mother’s going to deny it, but they won’t believe her. They’ll be furious with her. And she’ll be furious with me . . . Though she’ll never show it in front of them! While I’m around, she’ll support me, to annoy them. But the moment the doors close, when I’m home trying to have some peace, she’ll find a hundred ways to make my life a little hell. And I get to put up with that, without complaining, and to be a good girl, with the pressure getting worse all the time until the finals come. Five days of every look, every word, everything that everybody does around me, being code for ‘You screwed it up. And now we’re going to punish you.’”
Dairine was still shaking all over with her own tension. “You could come live in my basement,” she said. “The last guests we had down there gave it rave reviews.”
“No,” Mehrnaz said. Some of the stiffness and anger went out of her posture when she raised her head and met Dairine’s eyes. It was, however, a more challenging look. “I have to tough it out on my own ground,” she said. “Because this isn’t just about competing in the Invitational proper, is it? This is about handling what goes on outside the competition, around the competition. The strains, and the pressures. It’s a test, all of it . . . another test, another game, that takes place outside the competition space. Isn’t it? The Powers are playing this game with the Lone Power. And we’re the pieces on the board.”
“Not the usual board game, is it?” Dairine said after a moment. “When the pieces have a voice . . .”
“Not at all,” Mehrnaz said. She was standing straighter. “It’s okay. I can play that game. No matter what happens in the competition space, this time I can refuse to let my family browbeat me into doing what I usually do.”