“Yeah, I’m tired, too,” Kit said, glancing up and down the driveway as Ponch wandered off down it. “You wouldn’t think a vacation’d leave you so wiped out.”
“And there won’t be much time to get rested up now,” Nita said. She looked down their street, where the branches of the maples beside the sidewalk, bare for so long, were now well clothed in that particular new spring yellow-green. The leaves that had been small when they first went off on their spring break were now almost full-sized. “At least there’s stuff to do…”
“And five whole days left before we have to go back to school.” Kit looked at her meaningfully.
Nita rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I know, the Mars thing. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. When did you get the idea it would be cute to carve my dad’s cellphone number on a rock in the middle of Syrtis Major? He hates it when people call me on his phone.”
Kit gave Nita a resigned look. “Sorry. I couldn’t resist.”
“Well, resist next time!” Nita said. “Anyway, we can’t just run off and start digging up half of Syrtis on our own. We have to talk to the rest of the intervention team and see if they’ve got any kind of idea where to start.”
“Yeah, but they said individual research was still okay,” Kit said as they walked up the driveway toward the gate leading to the backyard.
“You don’t fool me,” Nita said. “You just want to run all over Mars like some kind of areo-geek, and you want me to split the labor on the transport spell with you!”
“Oh, wait a minute now, it’s not that simple!”
Nita grinned, for he hadn’t denied it outright. Kit had developed a serious case of Mars fever—serious enough that he’d added a map of the planet’s two hemispheres to his bedroom wall and started sticking pins in it, the way he’d been doing with his map of the Moon for months. “It is cool, isn’t it,” Nita said, “standing there at sunset and seeing Earth? Just hanging there in the sky like a little blue star.”
“Yeah,” Kit said. “It’s not the same as when you do it from closer.”
“So let’s message Mamvish and see if she feels like getting the team together in the next few days. It’ll give you an excuse to go do some ‘new research.’ And we can take the guests along: they like to do tourist things, from what Dairine says.”
The screen door slammed again. Nita looked back to see Dairine wandering down toward them.
“Filif says he knows about Tom and Carl coming,” she said. “He’ll be up in a minute.”
“Okay,” Nita said. “Hey, you did a good job on the shield-spell around the yard. The energy for that has to have been costing you a fair amount. You need some help with it? Kit and I can take some of the strain.”
Dairine looked briefly pained. “No, it’s okay,” she said. “If it starts to be a problem before the guests have to go, you can make a donation. Spot’s holding the spell diagram for me at the moment.”
Nita blinked. “Hey, yeah, where is he this morning? I haven’t seen him.”
“He’s up in my bedroom,” Dairine said, “under the bed, saying, ‘Uh-oh.’”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Kit said. Dairine’s laptop computer was more than half wizard’s manual, if not more than half wizard, and the uh-oh-ing had proven at least once to be an indicator of some unspecified difficulty coming.
Nita shrugged. “Neither do I. But maybe Tom and Carl will know what the trouble is—”
The sound of a car turning into Nita’s driveway brought all their heads around. It was Tom’s big Nissan. “Since when do they drive over here?” Kit said as Filif came drifting toward them from the backyard gate. “They only live three blocks away.”
“Yeah,” Nita said over her shoulder. “Come on—”
A few moments later, Tom and Carl were getting out of Tom’s car: Tom looking as he usually did, tall and broad-shouldered, his hair graying, casually dressed in jeans and shirt with the sleeves rolled up; Carl, a little shorter, dark, dark-eyed, and—today at least—looking unusually intense, with the shirtsleeves down at full length. Nita’s attention fastened instantly on that intensity, and on Tom’s hair. He started going gray so fast, she thought. What’s been going on? What have I been missing?
Nita and Kit greeted the two Seniors as casually as would have been normal. “Hey, you three,” Tom said.
“Filif?” Carl said, turning to him. “Berries all in place?”
Filif laughed, a rustling sound. For the moment, anyway.
“Can we go in?” Carl said. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”
“Yeah,” Nita said. “Come on.” She gestured toward the door.
Kit pulled the screen door open, holding it for everybody. Nita dawdled a little, watching with fascination as Filif went up the back steps after Tom and Carl. It was hard to see how Filif did it: his people had some personal-privacy thing about their roots, and when they moved, there was always a visually opaque field around the root area, like a little cloud that concealed the actual locomotion.
When they were all inside, Nita slipped past them and into the dining room to rearrange the chairs. As Tom and Carl came in, Sker’ret and Roshaun rose to greet them, the respectful gesture of a less senior wizard to a more senior one—though Nita noticed with some annoyance that Roshaun looked slightly skeptical.
“Sker’ret,” Tom said, while Nita sorted out the seating, “I was talking to your honorable ancestor this morning. He sends his best.”
“Does he?” Sker’ret said, politely enough, but Nita thought she caught some edge behind the words. Roshaun was standing there off to one side, with Dairine, looking slightly superior as usual. Carl turned to him. “Roshaun ke Nelaid am Seriv am Teliuyve am Meseph am Veliz am Teriaunst am det Nuiiliat,” Carl said, “eniwe’ sa pheir—”And then he continued, not in the Speech, but in a beautiful flow of language that sounded more like running water than like words. Nonetheless, the meaning was plain, for those who speak the Speech can listen in it as well, comprehending any language. “A sorrow for your new burden, Sunborn. Bear it as befits you, and lay it down in its proper time, mere cast-off shadow as it is of the greater radiance beyond.”
Roshaun looked utterly stunned. He bowed to Tom and Carl as if they were as royal as he thought he was, or more so. “May it be so,” he said, “here and henceforward.”
They nodded to him, and moved around the table to get settled.
“Now those are Seniors,” Roshaun said under his breath as he sat down beside Nita. “I was wondering if your people had any worthy of the name.”
“You have no idea,” Nita said softly. She wondered yet again exactly what was involved in becoming a Senior. It’s not like they’re so old. It’s not like they’re just grown up, either. Lots of grown-ups are wizards, and they never make Senior level, or even Advisory. What is it? What do you have to do? How do they know so much stuff, and make it look so easy?