That was the question that got asked most frequently. Filif was fixated on the concept. “Those decorations,” Filif said, “those look especially nice…” He moved over to the window in question and peered in.
Dairine came up behind him, not wanting to touch him—that always ran the risk of breaking the visual illusion—but she leaned over him and whispered, “I don’t think these are for you.”
“Why not?”
“Well…” Dairine looked up at the sign over the store’s door. “Can you read that?”
Filif turned his human face up toward the sign, dutifully. Though he seemed to be looking at it with human eyes, somehow Dairine could still perceive the alert attention of a whole array of berries trained on the letters. “Victoria’s—did I pronounce that right? Secret.”
“That’s right,” Dairine said.
“Who’s Victoria?” said Filif. “And what’s its secret?”
“I’ve never been clear about that myself,” Dairine said. “But if you start wearing those, people are going to talk. Come on.” She turned away, having a great deal of difficulty dealing with the image of a Christmas tree in a garter belt.
Filif moved away carefully, but not without a backward look at the bright colors of the lingerie in the window. Then Dairine saw Sker’ret hurrying ahead of them, and she began to fear the worst. “Sker’ret?” she said. “Wait up!”
She went after him as quickly as she could, with a glance at Carmela to suggest that she should keep an eye on the others. But Carmela already had her hands full. She and Roshaun had paused by a window display of clothes and were apparently discussing them. Sker’ret had moved a little farther away and was closely examining a freestanding gift stall stacked high with balloons, cards, gift plaques, and bright-colored candies. Oh no, Dairine thought. What is it with the colors? These guys are like five-year-olds.
The sound of laughter came to Dairine from down the mall. A group of five older kids—high school juniors, Dairine guessed—came wandering along toward them, much more interested in the shoppers of their own age than in the merchandise. “Hey, sweet things!” one of them called to Carmela. “Who’s your skinny friend?”
Carmela didn’t respond. “Hey, elf boy!” shouted another of the guys. “Nice hair!” This was followed by a chorus of snickering and laughter.
Dairine saw Roshaun draw himself up to his full height and turned to favor the oncoming group with an expression of truly withering scorn. “‘Elf boy’?” he said softly. “What kind of disrespectful, speciesist—” One of his hands moved in a gesture that Dairine recognized as the preliminary to producing some predesigned wizardry. She gulped and hurried toward him.
But Carmela merely glanced over her shoulder at the approaching group. “Ah,
ah, ah,” she said under her breath, and reached out sideways to take Roshaun’s hand in hers. Roshaun’s eyes went wide, and he stopped absolutely still, as if he’d been frozen that way.
Dairine slowed down a little, caught between surprise and admiration. She may not be a wizard, she thought, but she’s got some moves. Just loudly enough to be heard, as the five passed close by, Carmela said to Roshaun, “Don’t mind them. They’re just wonder-struck by your profound majesty and glory and so forth. We don’t get a lot of princes around here, and when they see somebody like you and contrast your elevated station with their tiny antlike lives, it’s really hard for them to cope.”
Carmela said all this not in English, but in perfect Japanese, the language she’d been studying when she first started to pick up the Speech. As wizards, Dairine and Roshaun had no problem understanding her; they heard the language “through” the Speech and made sense of it that way. But the five guys were completely thrown off. They saw what seemed like a Japanese translator of some kind—who looked at them as coolly as if they were members of an alien species—who was apparently carefully translating what they’d said for someone who looked like a living anime star, someone whose expression was better suited to the last half hour of a samurai movie than anything else…the part where things really break loose.
Dairine saw faint unease ripple through the guys as they found themselves facing something they didn’t understand. The guys passed close to Carmela and Roshaun, who watched them with expressions of clinical interest and complete disdain, and didn’t stop—just headed on down the mall. It took a few moments for them to get their composure back, and then one of them muttered something under his breath.
Roshaun looked at Carmela in curiosity as Dairine came over to them. “‘Duckhead’?” he said. “He called me a duckhead. A…duck? That’s some kind of flying creature, isn’t it?”
Carmela had let go of Roshaun’s hand and was gazing after the five nonplussed guys with barely concealed amusement. Now she glanced over at Dairine, not saying anything.
“Uh,” Dairine said. “Yeah, it is. They swim, too.”
Roshaun looked thoughtful. “I see. The idiom suggests that a humanoid can share the same attributes of flexibility…the ability to adapt to multiple environments. I like that. Evidently they saw they’d misjudged me, even if it took them a few moments.”
Dairine was ever so glad that what Roshaun had said had come out as a statement rather than a question, but then it didn’t seem to be Roshaun’s style to ask a lot of questions. Saved by a personal blind spot, Dairine thought with relief. Normally she hated being saved by anyone or anything, but at the moment, she was all too willing to make an exception.
Then Dairine remembered Sker’ret. She looked around in panic and saw him proceeding quickly up the mall ahead of them, looking in windows, while a shiny, silver, Mylar balloon bobbed and trailed along behind him. Hey, he’s got the hang of money already, she thought. Maybe this isn’t going all that badly.
Ahead of her, Carmela was now actually strolling along arm in arm with
Roshaun, pointing out things in the store windows to him. How does she do it? Dairine wondered. She’s got him eating out of her hand. Maybe I don’t want to know…She hurried off after Sker’ret.
He was going up one of the escalators at some speed. Dairine thought she knew why. The smell of fast food was coming from somewhere up ahead, and Sker’ret had targeted on that with the intensity of a heat-seeking missile looking for the tailpipe of a jet. “Sker’ret,” she called after him, “this is really no time for that. We can do this later! In fact we can all do it together!”
“Do what?” Sker’ret said.
“Eat,” Dairine said. “Again.”
Sker’ret was standing in the middle of the food court when Dairine caught up with him. His disguise was firmly in place, but Dairine could still dimly perceive, underneath the illusion, all his eyes writhing in every possible direction, looking around at all the goodies. Sker’ret turned slowly in a circle, looking at the kosher hot dog place, the McDonald’s, the Chinese fast food place, the burrito joint “This is wonderful!” he said. “Every planet should have places like this!”
“Oh, come on, Sker’ret,” Dairine said. “Rirhath B has places like this! Even the Crossings has some.”
“Not like this,” Sker’ret said, a little sadly. He stopped spinning, training all his available eyes on the kosher hot dog place. “Besides, I’m not allowed to go into the ones in the Crossings.”
For the moment, Dairine concealed her surprise. Sker’ret made his way back toward the escalator, stepping sadly onto the downward-running side and riding it back the way he’d come with an expression of deep sorrow. Dairine followed him, wondering what that had been about. Something else to ask him about later…
They rejoined the group and then set about systematically wandering through the entire mall, wing by wing, until everyone had seen everything. Even Roshaun was beginning to get a little tired as they got near the end of the “crawl”—a source of irrational pleasure for Dairine. Some of that otherwise indelible arrogance came off him; he looked like he just wanted to sit down for a while.