So You Want to Be a Wizard, New Millennium Edition (11 page)

They let her have it when they found her, as they had been intending to all day. Nita was tense all over as she waited for the first blows to fall… but they didn’t. She could feel them skidding away from her, not even touching her skin, and the girls who were punching and kicking her as hard as they could didn’t even seem to be seeing that it wasn’t working.

It was all Nita could do to keep from bursting out laughing. Instead she smothered her laughter and rolled around on the ground, falling back from the punches and making what she hoped were horrible groaning noises. And after a while Joanne and her four friends turned away to leave, satisfied that they had taught her a lesson.

Then Nita stood up and brushed herself off, uncut, unbruised, just a little dirty. “Joanne!” she called.

Amazed, Joanne turned around. And Nita laughed at her. “It won’t work anymore!” she said.

Joanne stood dumb.

“Never again,”
Nita said. She was tempted to turn her back on them and walk off, but that just didn’t feel like enough, somehow. Instead she walked
toward
them, watching the confusion in their eyes.

They started to back away from her, horrified. Nita kept coming. And then, as they backed up faster and faster, on a sudden urge Nita started to run: ran straight at them.

They went pale as Nita charged them, waving her arms in the air and screaming like a maniac, just
screaming
at the top of her lungs like something from a bad horror movie. “BOOOOOOOO!”

They broke and ran, all of them. Joanne was the first, and then the rest followed her in a ragged tail down Rose Avenue. Not a word, not a taunt. They just ran.

Nita stopped short. The feeling of triumph that had been growing in her withered almost instantly.
Some victory,
she thought.
It took so little, so little to scare them. Maybe I could have done that at any time, even without a shield. Maybe. And now I’ll never know for sure.

Are you all right?
Fred said quietly, bobbing again by her shoulder.
They didn’t hurt you this time.

“No,” Nita said. She was thinking of all the glorious plans she’d had to use her newfound wizardry on Joanne and her bunch, to shame them, confuse them, hurt them. And look what so small and inoffensive thing as a body shield had done to them. They were scared out of their minds. And they’d probably hate her worse than ever now.

I’ve got to be careful with this,
she thought.
I thought it was going to be all fun.

“C’mon, Fred,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

The week went by quickly for Nita. Though Carl had made the business of opening a worldgate sound fairly simple, she began to suspect that he’d been doing it so long that it actually seemed that way to him. It wasn’t simple, as her manual made plain as soon as she opened to the pertinent chapter… which was forty pages long in small print.

Grand Central worldgate had its own special requirements: specific supplies and objects that (for a wizard who didn’t routinely work with the gate) had to be present at an opening so that space would be properly bent, and spells that had to be learned just so. Nita’s cellphone, and she suspected Kit’s, were unusually busy for a couple of days, and there was a lot of texting and visiting back and forth as they divided up the work. Nita spent a lot of time keeping Fred from being noticed by her family, and also got to see a lot of Kit’s mother and father and sisters, all of whom were very friendly and kept forgetting that Nita couldn’t speak Spanish. She started to learn a little of it in self-defense. Kit’s dog told her the brand of dog biscuits it could never get enough of; she began bringing them with her when she visited. The dog spoke the Speech with a Spanish accent, and would constantly interrupt Kit and Nita as they discussed who should do what in the spelling. Kit wound up with most of the spoken work, since he had been using the Speech longer and was better at it; Nita picked up supplies.

Late on Friday afternoon, Nita was in a little antiques-and-junk store on Nassau Road, going through boxes of dusty odds and ends in search of a fork that was made of real silver instead of stainless steel. Fred was hanging over her shoulder, almost invisible, a faint red point lazily emitting heat. “You ever swallow anything accidentally before, Fred?” Nita said under her breath.

Not for a long time,
he said, glancing curiously at a pressed-glass saltshaker Nita was holding.
Not since I was a black hole, certainly. Black holes swallow everything, but a white hole’s business is emission. Within limits,
he added, and the air around him rippled with heat as he shuddered.
I don’t ever again want to emit the way I did after your pen went down. Some of those things
hurt
on the way out. And anyway, all that emission makes me nervous. Too much of that kind of thing and I could blow my quanta.

She looked up at him, worried. “Really? Have you emitted that much stuff that you’re in danger of blowing up?”

Oh, not really—I’d have to lose a lot more mass first. After all, before I was a black hole, I was a respectable-sized blue-white star, and even these days I massed a few hundred thousand times what your cute little yellow-dwarf Sun does. I wouldn’t worry about it—I’m nowhere near the critical threshold yet.

“’Cute’?’” Nita said.

Well, it is … And I suppose there’s no harm in getting better at emissions. I have been improving a lot. What’s that?

Nita looked farther down in the box, dug deep, and came up with a battered old fork. It was scratched and its tines were bent out of shape, but it was definitely silver, not stainless steel. “That’s what I needed,” she said under her breath. “Thanks, Fred. Now all I need is that piece of rowan wood, and then tonight I go over my part of the spells again…”

You sound worried.

“Well, yeah, a little,” Nita murmured, getting up. All that week her ability to hear what the plants were saying had been getting stronger and surer; the better she got with the Speech, the more sense the bushes and trees made. “It’s just—the rowan branch has to come off a live tree, Fred, and I can’t just
pick
it—that’d be like walking up to someone and pulling one of their fingers off. I have to ask for it. And if the tree won’t give it to me…”

Then you don’t get your pen back, at least not for a while.
Fred shimmered with colors and a feeling like a sigh.
I
am
a trouble to you.

“Fred, no. I have to hush for a moment now. Put your light out a moment so we can get out of here…”

Nita interrupted the shopkeeper’s intense concentration on a Gothic novel long enough to find out what the fork cost (a dollar) and buy it. A few steps outside the door, Fred was pacing her again. “If you’re trouble,” Nita said under her breath, “you’re the best trouble that’s happened around here for a while. You’re good to talk to, you’re good company—when you don’t forget and start emitting cosmic rays…”

Fred winked momentarily bright in a blush at Nita’s teasing. In an excited moment the night before he had forgotten himself and emitted a brief blast of ultrashortwave radiation, which had heated up Nita’s backyard a good deal, ionized the air for miles around, and produced a local but brilliant aurora.
Well, it’s an old habit, and old habits die hard. I’m working on it.

“Heat we don’t mind so much. Or ultraviolet, the longwave kind that doesn’t hurt people’s eyes.”

You fluoresce when I use that, though…

Nita laughed softly. “I don’t mind fluorescing. Though on second thought, don’t do that where anyone but Kit can see. I doubt my mother’d understand.”

They walked home together, chatting alternately about life in the suburbs and life in a part of deep space close to the Great Galactic Rift. Nita felt more relaxed than she had for months. Joanne had been out of sight since Monday afternoon at Tom and Carl’s. Even if she hadn’t, Nita had been practicing with that body shield, so that now she could run through the syllables of the spell in a matter of seconds, and nothing short of a bomb dropped on her could hurt her. She could even extend the spell to cover someone else, though it wasn’t quite so effective; she had a harder time convincing the air to harden up. But even that lessened protection would come in handy if she and Kit should be in trouble together at some point and there was no time to cooperate in a spelling. Not that she was expecting any more trouble. The excitement of a trip into the city was already catching at her. And this wasn’t just another shopping trip. Magic was loose in the world, and she was going to help work some….

*

She ate supper and did her homework almost without thinking about either, and as a result had to do much of the math homework twice. By the time she was finished, the sun was down and the backyard was filling with a cool blue twilight. In the front of the house, her mother and father and Dairine were watching TV as Nita walked out the side door and stood on the step, letting her eyes get used to the dimness and looking east at the rising Moon. Canned laughter echoed inside the house as Fred appeared by her shoulder.

My, that’s bright for something that doesn’t emit heat,
Fred said, looking at the Moon too.

“Reflected sunlight,” Nita said absently.

You’re going to talk to the tree now?

“Uh-huh.”

Then I’ll go stay with the others and watch that flat thing emit. Maybe I’ll figure out what it’s trying to get across.

“Good luck with that,” Nita said, amused, as Fred winked out.

She walked around into the backyard. Spring stars were coming out as she paused in the middle of the lawn and looked down the length of the yard at the rowan, a great round-crowned tree snowy with white flowers. Nita’s stomach tightened slightly with nervousness. It had been a long time ago, according to her manual, that the trees had gone to war on humankind’s behalf, against the dark powers that wanted to keep human intelligence from happening at all. The war had been a terrible one, lasting thousands of centuries—the trees and other plants taking more and more land, turning barren stone to soil that would support them and the animals and men to follow; the dark powers breaking the soil with earthquake and mountain building, scouring it with glaciers, climate-changing good ground for desert, and burning away forests in firestorms far more terrible than the small brushfires any forest needs to stay healthy. But the trees and the other plants had won at last.

They had spent many more centuries readying the world for men—but when men came, they forgot the old debts and wasted the forests more terribly than even the old dark powers. Trees had no particular reason to be friendly to people these days. Nita found herself thinking of that first tree that had spoken to her, angry over the destruction of its friend’s artwork. Even though the rowan tree had always been well tended, she wasn’t certain how it was going to respond to her. With the other ash trees, rowans had been in the forefront of the Battle; and they had long memories.

Nita sighed and sat down under the tree, book in hand, her back against its trunk. There was no need to start right away, anyhow—she needed a little while to recover from her homework. The stars looked at her through the rowan’s wind-stirred branches, getting brighter by the minute. There was that one pair of stars that always looked like eyes, they were so close together. It was one of the three little pairs associated with the Big Dipper. The Leaps of the Gazelle, the ancient Arabs had called them, seeing them as three sets of hoofprints left in the sky. “Kafza’at al Thiba,” Nita murmured, the old Arabic name. Her eyes wandered down toward the horizon, finding a faint reddish gleam. “Regulus.” And a whiter gleam, higher: “Arcturus.” And another, and another, old friends, with new names in the Speech, that she spoke silently, remembering Carl’s warning:
Eltháthtë … ur’Senaahel…
The distant fires flickered among shadowy leaves.
Lahirien…

And Methchánë and Ysen and Cahadhwy and Rasaugéhil…. They
do
look nice tonight.

Nita glanced up. The tree above her was leaning back comfortably on its roots, finished with the stretching-upward of growth for the day, and gazing at the stars as she was.
I was hoping that haze would clear off,
it said as silently as Nita had spoken, in a slow, relaxed drawl.
This will be a good night for talking to the wind. And other such transient creatures. I was wondering when you were going to come out and pay your respects, wizardling.

“Uh—“ Nita was reassured: the rowan sounded friendly. “It’s been a busy week.”

You never used to be too busy for
me, the rowan said, its whispery voice sounding ever so slightly wounded.
Always up in my branches you were, and falling out of them again. Or swinging. But I suppose you outgrew me.

Nita sat quiet for a moment, remembering how it had been when she was littler. She would swing for hours on end, talking to herself, pretending all kinds of things, talking to the tree and the world in general. And sometimes— “You talked
back!
” she said in shocked realization. “You
did,
I wasn’t imagining it!”

Certainly I talked. You were talking to
me
,
after all … Why are you surprised? Small children look at things and see them, listen to things and hear them. Of course they understand the Speech. Most of them never realize it any more than you did. It’s when they get older, and stop looking and listening, that they lose the Speech, and we lose them.
The rowan sighed, many leaves showing pale undersides as the wind moved them.
None of us are ever happy about losing our children. But every now and then we get one of you back.

“All that in the book was true, then,” Nita said. “About the Battle of the Trees—“

Certainly. Wasn’t it written in the Book of Night with Moon that this world’s life would become free to roam among our friends there
—the rowan stretched upward toward the turning stars for a moment—
if we helped? After the world was green and ready, we waited for a, long time. We started letting all sorts of strange creatures live in our branches after they came up out of the water. We watched them all; we never knew which of our guests would be the children we were promised. And then all of a sudden one odd-looking group of creatures went down out of our branches, and looked upward again, and called us by name in the Speech. Your kind…
The tree looked down musingly at Nita.
You’re still an odd-looking lot
, it said.