Wizard's Holiday, New Millennium Edition (37 page)

Dairine looked up at Roshaun. “I owe you an apology,” she said.

“You owe me nothing.”

“Yeah, well,” Dairine said, “in that case I have a word or two for you, Mr. I’m Prince of Everything I Survey. ‘We wouldn’t want people looking at us?’ ‘It wouldn’t be permitted?’ You don’t have a neighbor within a thousand miles! The only reason your palace is there on the Burnt Side is so that no one
has
to live by you. Your people are scared to death of being without you. And scared to death of you. Aren’t they?”

Roshaun turned to look up at the Moon, and didn’t say anything.

“You’re all that stands between them and destruction,” Dairine said, “at least in the version of history that most of your people know. They’re terrified of what would happen without you. And you’ve let them get that way, haven’t you? It’s easier than going out the front door every now and then and explaining that you’re just like other people, just with a few extra talents that were given you for
their
good, too, not just yours. Wizardry is service! But your family seems to have it a little backward. And the people all over Wellakh bring you everything you want, you live nice comfortable lives, all that. But someday, when wizards are a little commoner on your planet—”

Roshaun looked at Dairine with some discomfort. “I don’t set family policy,” he said.

“You will someday,” Dairine said. “Someday
you’ll
be Beloved of the Sun Lord and all that other stuff that translates into
king
on Wellakh. And I hope you start letting your people look at you then, because otherwise, I think that as soon as they find a way to do without you, they will. It’s only a matter of time until technology catches up to what only wizardry can do now, in terms of protecting your planet. And then where are you?”

Roshaun looked up at the Moon, and then, without much warning, sat down on the back step, half leaning on the scraggly climbing rosebush that went up the chimney. “Are you always so reticent?” he said.

Dairine blinked.

“I didn’t want to go on this excursus at first,” Roshaun said. “My mother said she thought I should. She wouldn’t say why. She discouraged me from coming back, even from using the pup-tent. I was angry about that. And then, a couple of days ago, a message came. My father has stepped down as Sun Lord. When I come back, I
am
king. For me, it starts now.”

He looked up at the Moon. “And it’s just as you say,” Roshaun said. “We’re— I found the Earth word, the… English word? Anyway, I looked it up. We’re
pariahs.
In people’s minds, we’ve become associated with the Burning. We’re its cure, but some people believe that maybe we were also its cause. They don’t dare live without us. They hate living with us. So they kill us when they can.” Roshaun shrugged. “It’s not easy, especially when the person they’re trying to assassinate is a wizard. But even wizards have to sleep. My father got tired of being the target; he’s been one for forty years. He resigned and it’s my turn now.”

Dairine’s knees felt weak under her. She had often enough had the Lone Power trying to kill her. She’d learned to cope with it. But having just
people
trying to kill you… that was something else entirely, and, strangely, it felt more awful. She sat down by Roshaun on the step and stared at the Moon so that she wouldn’t have to look at him.

“That’s
why we have to fix your star,” Roshaun said.

“You’re not involved,” Dairine said. “Nobody’s expectations are looking over your shoulder, saying, ‘He
had
to do that. He didn’t do it just because it was the right thing.’”

There was a long silence. “It would be nice if we had one of those,” Roshaun said.

Dairine looked up, confused. “What?”

“That.” He gestured with his chin at the Moon.

“Yeah,” Dairine said. “We like it.”

“We had one once,” Roshaun said, “a little one. But it was destroyed in the Burning.”

“We almost didn’t have this one,” Dairine said. “It was an accident. Something hit the Earth when it was still molten, and
that
splashed out.”

Roshaun looked at her in amazement.
“Really?”

“Really.” Dairine looked up at the first-quarter Moon. “It took a long time to round up and get solid. But there it is.”

“But if whatever hit your world had been just a little bigger—maybe neither piece of matter would have been big enough to coalesce, and there would never have been an Earth at all.” Roshaun sat there shaking his head.

“Yeah. It’s kind of a symbol,” Dairine said, “of how sometimes, even against the odds, you can get lucky.”

In the silence that followed, resolve formed. She stood up. “Come on,” she said. “It’s a nice view of the world from there. I’ll show you.”

Roshaun stood up, too, but for once he looked uncertain. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’ll be time soon—”

“We have time for this,” Dairine said. “Come on.” She looked over her shoulder. “Spot?”

He was nowhere nearby, which was unusual for him. “I can handle it,” Roshaun said, and opened his hand to look into the little sphere of light that was his manual, and showed what the Aethyrs told him. “Give me the coordinates,” he said to Dairine.

She recited them, and as Roshaun spoke the words after her, the circle of the wizardry formed up on the ground around them. Dairine bent over to add the bright scrawl of her name in the Speech, across the circle from Roshaun’s.
His name’s much shorter than I would have thought,
Dairine thought, as she straightened up and began to recite, in unison with Roshaun, the words of the translocation.

It was probably completely unnecessary for her to reach out and take Roshaun’s hand as the wizardry closed in around them and the view of her house and driveway dulled through the glowing curtain of Speech expressed and space bent slightly awry.
It’s just a precaution,
Dairine thought.
I wouldn’t want to lose him at this crucial moment
—

They vanished.

After their visit to the Lone Power, Nita and Kit had little to do but sit around on the beach for the rest of that afternoon, because Quelt was away dealing with the issue of the Great Vein again and wouldn’t be back until later, so Kuwilin told them.

Ponch spent the afternoon running up and down the beach, mostly in the water; Kit and Nita, in no mood to play with him, sat trying to work out how to tell Quelt what they’d learned. “Why should she believe any of this?” Kit said under his breath. He’d amassed a small pile of stones and was throwing them into the water one by one.

“Because we’re wizards,” Nita said, “and we wouldn’t lie to her. We can’t, in the Speech! And she knows that.”

“She should,” Kit said, throwing another rock in the water. “But even if she knows we’re telling the truth, I’m not sure she’s going to like what we have to tell her.”

“No,” Nita said. “She might even think it was just some weird misperception of ours, because we’re aliens… ”

Kit nodded, looking morose. “Where’s Ponch gone?” he said, looking up and down the beach.

Nita shook her head. Trying to keep track of a dog who could make his own universes, and walk at will through ones he hadn’t made, was always a challenge. “No idea. Weren’t you working on a thing to do with his special leash, so that you can track him down?”

“I was working on that, yeah,” Kit said. “It’s not perfect yet.” He reached into the little local space-pocket that followed him around, rummaged around in it, and came up with Ponch’s leash. Kit had made it of the Speech, with some added ingredients. The whole wizardry was wound together into a soft, infinitely extensible cord that nothing could break and that would allow the wizard who held on to it to safely follow Ponch wherever he might walk.

“Let’s see,” Kit said. He ran the faintly blue-glowing leash through his hands, closed his eyes for a moment. Nita could feel the direction-finding part of the wizardry come awake, but that was all—the wizardry was tuned to Kit specifically, and couldn’t otherwise be overheard.

He opened his eyes a moment later. “It’s all right,” he said. “He’s ten miles away, down the beach. He loves that he can just run and run and never run out of sand.” He stood up. “Don’t know how he’s got any pads left on his paws with all the running he’s been doing the past few days.” Kit got up. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he said, and vanished with a soft
pop
of imploding air.

Nita sat back against the dune and looked out at the glitter and roil of the sunlit water.
This was working so well,
she thought,
until I started to feel that something was wrong. Have I ruined myself somehow? Am I always going to go looking for what’s wrong, forever, so that even when things are perfectly all right, I can’t let them just be the way they are?

She sighed and picked up one of Kit’s stones, turning it over and over in her hand.
We could have spent a lovely couple of weeks here and left these happy people living their happy lives. And, all right, so there’s something else going on at the bottom of it all. So what? Is it my business to go out of my way to make the Alaalids unhappy, just so that they’ll possibly evolve into something better? Is there
—

A shadow fell over her, and Nita looked up, startled.

“Quelt!” she said.

“Nita… ”

Quelt had just come over the top of the dune. She stood there looking at Nita for a moment, and then sighed and came down, step by step, rather slowly.

“Are you all right? You look tired.”

“I am,” Quelt said, and sat down by Nita, looking at the water. “I am tired.” She looked troubled, too, but Nita wasn’t going to say anything about that; she had too many troubles on her mind to be accusing anyone else of having difficulty dealing with theirs. “There’s going to be more trouble with the Great Vein than I’d thought,” Quelt said. “The crust really is shifting down there: The layering’s become more complex than it used to be. It’s going to take days yet to sort it out.”

She sighed, leaning back on her elbows. “And on top of everything else, there seems to be something wrong with the Display,” Quelt said. “It seems to have stopped functioning, and I have no idea why… or what to do about it. It’s puzzling. The wizardry laid into that was always very resilient: Vereich told me that Druvah himself put it in place.” She shook her head.

Uh-oh,
Nita thought.
I wish I could put this off, but there’s not going to be a better time, and we can’t just sit around and hope that this issue goes away.

“Quelt,” Nita said, “I think I know how that happened.”

Quelt looked surprised. “You do?”

“Kit and Ponch were down in there, and it stopped working while Kit was viewing something to do with Druvah,” Nita said.
There. That’s the truth…

At that, Quelt turned a very strange look on Nita.
Anywhere else,
she thought,
in anyone else, it would look like suspicion,
Nita thought. “Something to do with Druvah,” Quelt said. “What about him?”

“Well… ”

Nita suddenly saw Kit coming down the beach. Trotting along beside him was Ponch; the wizardly leash was around his neck, and Ponch was carrying the other end of it in his mouth, like any more ordinary dog out for a walk. “Here he comes,” Nita said, feeling awful to push this off onto Kit.
But he was there. He can tell her better than I can.

“Hey, Quelt,” he said, as he came up to them,
“dai.”
Ponch, with the leash in his mouth, went straight to Quelt and started nuzzling her. She took his head under her arm and started rubbing his ears.

“He’s got you trained already,” Kit said. Nita caught his eye.
Here it comes…

After a moment Quelt looked up at him. “Nita says you were down in the Display when it failed,” she said.

“Yes,” Kit said.

Ponch looked up into Quelt’s eyes.
I think it was my fault,
he said.
Please don’t be angry at Kit.
Quelt produced a strange, unhappy smile and roughed up Ponch’s ears some more.

“I can’t let him try to take the blame for this,” Kit said. “I asked him to alter the way the Display was working. I wanted to hear what Druvah actually said to Esemeli.”

Quelt didn’t look up. “And what did you hear?”

Kit told her.

It took a long while. Kit’s memory was excellent, Nita thought; the phrasing he was using was that of an older time, and she could almost hear the ancient wizard speaking through him. All the time, though, Quelt’s expression never changed. She sat looking down at the sand until Kit finished.

“So then,” she said, “having heard that, you went to see Esemeli.”

“Yes,” Nita said. Now, she figured, it was her turn. She told Quelt everything the Lone One had said to them, leaving out not a word. It was surprisingly easy for her, for she had been turning all those words over again and again in her mind, looking for anything dangerous hidden under them that she might have missed the first time around. Once again, Quelt held very still, kept very silent, while Nita told her what the Lone Power had said about the Alaalids’ need to evolve. And then Nita fell silent herself, waiting to see what Quelt would do.

The silence lasted a long while, and Nita forced herself to listen to the water slipping up and down the beach, and the little hissing noises that happened when air got trapped in the sand and bubbled out. When she looked at Quelt again, she found the Alaalid gazing at her with an indrawn expression very unlike anything Nita had seen on her before.

“And you believe this?” Quelt said at last. “You believe these things It told you?”

Nita took a deep breath. “Yes,” she said.

“Because of the Oath you made It swear?”

“Not just that,” Nita said. “After I started hearing the whispering, it seemed to me that there was something”— she paused— “not
wrong
about it, not as such. But there was something missing about the world. I went looking for your world’s kernel. It’s not here, Quelt. It’s been separated from your world—and it shouldn’t be.”