“At length,” Kit said. “It seems to have worked for the moment.”
“Yeah,” Nita said, “I had to sweet-talk the fridge a little myself just now.”
“You’re getting good at that,” Kit said. “Used to be you had more trouble with machines.”
Nita shrugged. “Experience?” she said. “Maybe I’m changing specialties. Or maybe yours is rubbing off. Look, don’t ask me.” She lowered her voice. “I was
going to say that if the noise is still too much for you over there, maybe you want to find an excuse to come over here for a while. It may not be any quieter, but it’s gonna be more interesting.”
“Why? What’s happening?”
“I don’t know, but—” Nita heard something then: a voice, higher than hers, younger than hers, coming up the driveway and singing, more or less to the tune of the chorus of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,” “Two weeks! Two weeks! I get two weeks off now, hurray, hurray—”
“Oh, boy,” Nita said. “Here it comes!”
The back door opened. “Two weeks! Two— Uh.”
There was a soft bang! as something materialized in the kitchen without being too careful about air displacement. “Uh-oh,” Spot’s voice said, sounding panic-stricken.
“Both of you stay right where you are,” Nita’s dad said.
Nita choked down her laughter. “Can’t miss this, gotta go!” she whispered, and hung up.
Dealing with
Unforeseen
Circumstances Carefully, intending to seem neither too sneaky nor too enthusiastic about it, Nita made her way into the dining room and sat down very quietly at the end of the dining room table, where she could just see into the kitchen.
Her dad and Tom were leaning against the kitchen counter, coffee cups in hand, looking at a suddenly very subdued Dairine. “I’ll give you three guesses,” Tom said, “why I’m here.”
Dairine leaned against the opposite counter and brushed her red bangs out of her eyes in a way that was meant to look casual, but to Nita’s practiced eye, the act was failing miserably. Dairine was freaked.
“And Spot knows, too, I’ll bet,” Tom said, “which is why he’s so skittish all of a sudden. Dairine, you know that as a responsible wizard you have an obligation to tell the people who’re still helping you manage your life about what’s going on with you…and when you’re intending to embark on some course of action that is going to affect them.”
“Uh, yeah, well, I was about to—”
“In some cases that information should really reach your family before you embark on the course of action, wouldn’t you say? Assuming that you want to stay in a good relationship with the Powers That Be. Which right now seems increasingly unlikely.”
Nita saw Dairine go so pale that her freckles looked about four shades darker than usual.
Tom put out his hand, and as if from the empty air, his wizard’s manual fell into it. It was a manual larger than Nita’s, nearly the size of a phone book—but as one of the supervisory wizards for this part of the East Coast, he had a lot more people, places, and things to look after in the course of his practice than Nita did. “Let me read you my copy of a message that doubtless will have reached you via Spot not too long ago,” Tom said, looking over his manual at Dairine as he opened the book and paged through it. “And which is doubtless why poor Spot is having a crisis of the nerves. ‘To: D. Callahan, T Swale, C. Romeo: We confirm availability for two of your species in the sponsored noninterventional excursus program at this time. However, your applicant supervisee-wizard’s proposal for an excursus is rejected for the following reasons: Durational impropriety. Evasion of local issues. Attempt to circumvent local dirigent authority…’” Tom paused, looking down the page with an expression of annoyed bemusement. “Actually,” he said, “despite the fact that the Powers That Be have listed about twelve other reasons here, those three are probably sufficient for the moment.”
“Okay, Tom,” Nita’s dad said. “For the wizardly challenged among us, this means… ?”
“Dairine,” Tom said, taking another drink of his coffee with his free hand, “has signed herself and Nita up for a cultural outreach program.”
What? Nita thought, her eyes going wide. She pushed herself very quietly back out of sight of the kitchen, flushing hot in one instant and cold in the next. Then, ever so carefully, she leaned forward again to see what her dad’s expression looked like.
He had raised his eyebrows, that was all. “Well, that doesn’t sound so bad…”
“Probably not, until you consider that it would have involved them spending ten to fourteen days halfway across the galaxy,” Tom said. “Or sometimes somewhere further off…though these young-practitioner exchanges usually stay within a radius of a hundred thousand light-years, for administrative reasons.”
Nita watched her dad’s expression shift from bemused to slightly concerned. “You mean,” he said, “this is like a student-exchange program here on Earth.”
“There are similarities,” Tom said. “But the similarities also mean that while Dairine and Nita were gone, you would have had other wizards staying here with you.”
Dairine’s father slowly turned his head and trained a look on Dairine that was so blank it was scary.
“I was going to tell you, Daddy,” Dairine said in a much smaller voice than previously. “It was just that—”
“You were going to tell me, huh?” Nita’s father said, in a flat, unrevealing voice that matched his expression. “Not ask me?”
Nita swallowed.
“I just thought if I got everything arranged,” Dairine said, in a smaller voice yet, “got it all set up, then I could talk to you and we could—”
Dairine’s dad looked at her severely. “What?” he said. “You were thinking you’d just present this thing to me as a fait accompli? Bad move.”
“Daddy, we’ve all been—” Dairine stopped. “Some time off would have been really—”
“Uh-huh,” Nita’s dad said, absolutely without inflection. Out of his view, Nita covered her face with her hands. “Did Nita know anything about this?”
“No.” Now Dairine was starting to sound a little sullen. “It was going to be a surprise.”
“The message confirms that,” Tom said. “It wasn’t Nita who was being sanctioned, Harry.”
Nita’s dad’s expression broke enough for him to frown at Dairine. “Well, it didn’t sound like Nita’s style. But for your part, consider yourself lucky that I don’t ground you.”
“I, however, don’t have that much leeway,” Tom said. “The message the Powers That Be dropped on my head, after this one, requires me to restrict you to Sol System for the next two weeks, as a corrective. So consider it done.”
“Aww, Tom!”
Tom snapped his manual closed and tossed it into the air. It vanished. “Next time,” Tom said, “think it through.”
Nita’s dad gave Dairine that terrible level look again. “Dairine, I think you should go take some private time to consider what you’ve been up to,” he said. “Forget leaving the solar system: For the time being, I don’t want you to leave the house. By any means, so no doing transport spells in your room, young lady. In fact, I don’t think I want to lay eyes on you again till Nita and I get back from doing the shopping. So go on now.”
“I really am sorry,” Dairine said, very, very low. Nita listened to the words, judging the tone critically, and gave Dairine about a six on a scale of ten for penitence. As Dairine hurried through the dining room past her, Nita kept her face carefully straight, but the glance that Dairine threw at her, knowing their dad couldn’t see it, made Nita revise the score about half a point upward. Dairine was angry, but also genuinely sorry.
Dairine vanished through the living room and up the stairs to her bedroom. “And since you’ve been sitting there taking all this in…” Tom said through the kitchen doorway. Nita blushed. Tom gave Nita a look that wasn’t half as severe as it might have been.