“Where’d you find those?” Djam said.
“Got a fair amount of the stuff over by our gates,” said Ronan. “Old cuttings left from when they were removing some of the local fauna, I’m guessing.” He paused, eyeing a spot down at the far end of the oblong that made the “seat” of the Stone Throne. “Here be okay?”
“Should work fine,” Cheleb said, helping Djam clear away some of the plates and food containers that were closest. Ronan arranged the wood in an artful pyramid on the spot, then looked toward Kit. “Do the honors?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah, sure.” Kit reached sideways into his otherspace pocket and pulled out his wand, stowed in there earlier when he’d been tidying. He smiled slightly in a moment of nostalgia: the spell for summoning fire from noon-forged steel was one of the first ones he’d learned. Kit whispered the fourteen Speech-words necessary for activation, braced the Edsel-antenna wand over his forearm, and fired. The piled-up firewood burst instantly into flame.
Kit tucked the wand away and watched the firelight dance over the faces of his friends and the ancient stones of another world, and shivered for a moment with the strangeness of it all. If someone had told me five years ago where I’d be now…
Tom sat back and chuckled. “And now what? Songs around the fire? Scary stories?”
“Got enough scary to be going on with at the moment, thanks,” Ronan said, rolling his eyes in the general direction of Thesba.
“Dessert,” Nita said. She’d set her lawn chair down next to where Kit had perched himself at one end of the Stone Throne; now she got up and started rummaging in one of the bags she’d brought with her but hadn’t yet opened. “Here,” she said to Djam, and held out a Creamsicle. “If you like that juice, I bet you’ll like this.”
“Ice cream,” Ronan said, impressed. “How do you have ice cream?!”
“With the power allowances they’ve given us for this, why wouldn’t I bring ice cream? I have a stasis field running in my puptent,” Nita said. “And one right here in this bag.”
“I hope you brought enough for everybody,” Tom said.
Nita snickered. “I brought enough for me,” she said, “for about a week. So that should be enough for everybody. Nothing fancy, just the usual mass market stuff. I would have brought Ben & Jerry’s, but some people apparently ate it all before we left home.”
Dairine looked angelically unconcerned by this accusation. To Kit’s surprise, Nita just gave her an annoyed look, and then shrugged. “Here, help me pass these out.”
Kit passed a fudgsicle over to Tom and an orange popsicle over to Cheleb, who needed some assistance with packaging concepts (”No, wait, don’t eat the paper!”) and then rather overenthusiastically disposed of the popsicle in three bites, spending the next several minutes groaning and clutching haes head due to the most emphatic case of brain freeze any of them had ever seen.
Kit had trouble not laughing at Cheleb being reduced to speechlessness for that long, but he just managed it. “Shame none of us thought we might have have a campfire before we came,” he said as he sat down again. “We could have brought stuff to make s’mores.”
Djam looked up in interest from his third plateful of multicolored veggies. “What’s a s’more?”
The conversation that ensued immediately got very tangled, and Kit saw Djam and Cheleb reacting with fascination and concern, since once or twice it seemed as if violence might be about to break out.
“Oh God. How are we supposed to show him?”
“Did anybody bring graham crackers?”
“What in the Powers’ sweet fecking names is a graham cracker?”
Laughter from Dairine. “How can you not know this?”
Ronan rolled his eyes. “Why should I bother when I know you’re going to enlighten me?”
“It’s brown, and flat, and it’s got wheat in it.”
“Well it’s a biscuit for feck’s sake, or a ‘cracker’ as you benighted language-fossilized creatures keep calling it—” Kit hid his eyes briefly at the mention of the word “cracker”: the last thirty-odd hours had left him with a new set of referents for it that he would probably never forget. “—and with a biscuit the odds are better than ninety percent that it’s got wheat in it…”
“No, whole wheat.”
“Kind of malty tasting…”
“Like a digestive biscuit?”
“What’s a digestive biscuit?”
“It’s not like one of those. Flatter,” Nita remarked around the remnant of the ice cream sandwich she’d almost finished. “Also they put honey in them.”
Dairine stared at Nita in growing horror. “Wait. Wait. Who uses honey grahams for s’mores? Who uses them for anything?”
“I like them,” Nita said. “I eat them all the time. You haven’t noticed?”
“I never— I thought it was Dad—” Dairine’s mouth opened and closed as if in a fairly high-quality imitation of a fish. “You’ve been the one who keeps buying those? You actually like them? Oh God how are we even related?!” She looked around at the group and waved her hands in a gesture of generalized rejection. “Either I’m adopted or she is.”
“I not only have honey grahams,” Nita said, “but I have—” She looked faintly embarrassed. “Marshmallow fluff.”
Ronan looked mystified. “Powers preserve us, what’s that now? Something else I don’t need to know about.”
“No matter how you try, that will never be a s’more,” Dairine said, indignant. “Not on the best day it ever has!”
“We could give it a shot, though…” Nita said. “Wait five. I’ll be back.” She headed out toward the short-jump pad.
“Why are these so important?” Djam said. “Is the ritual something to do with the fire?”
“Well, not exactly—”
“It’s more of a tradition…”
Ronan sniffed. “Not everywhere, because I’ve never heard of it!”
“Some of our people, when they go camping,” Tom said, “make these as a sweet, a last-course snack. A sort of dessert.”
Some discussion of camping ensued, and the tradition of singing around campfires, and why there would be none of that tonight (“My voice is wrecked from shouting at my gates all day,” Ronan insisted, “so if you think I’m going to wreck it some more recreationally…!”). This was still in full flow when Nita reappeared with a box of honey grahams and a jar of marshmallow fluff.
“I can’t believe this,” Ronan said, taking the jar, opening it, and testing a fingerful of the contents. He made a very dubious face. “…And your people have this myth about ours having terrible teeth? How do any of you even have teeth when you eat shite like this? Honestly.”
“I’m doing the best I can with what I’ve got,” Nita said. “Which—” She produced a long thick paper-wrapped bar from under her arm. “Is not too badly, under the circumstances.”
Djam’s nostrils flickered and his eyes went wide. “Wait. You have chocolate? How do you have chocolate?”
Kit looked over at Nita, and Nita looked at Ronan, and all three of them burst out laughing. “Oh no,” Djam said, fluffing up his fur in what Kit was coming to recognize as an ironic gesture, “I forgot, you’re from there! That planet!”
“Distant, Fabulous Dirt,” Cheleb said. “Fabled Home of Chocolate.” Hae gave Kit an amused look that suggested hae was quoting a commercial hae’d heard, probably at the Crossings.
“My sister,” Kit said, “is going into business with that one as an intergalactic cocoa dealer.” He jerked his chin at Ronan. “It’s going to be so interesting to watch…” Privately he hoped “dealer” was the right word, and not “smuggler.” But the boundaries were liable to blur sometimes in intergalactic usage, and doubly so where Carmela was involved.
“Sorry,” Cheleb said. “Amazed again. Can’t get over idea of people actually eating it instead of depositing in financial institution.”