A Wizard Abroad, New Millennium Edition (17 page)

Kit opened his mouth, too, and closed it, and then said, “I thought you’d be glad to see me.”

“You idiot, of
course
I’m glad to see you! But
what are you doing here?
I thought—”

“Oh.” Kit turned red, then started laughing. “Neets, uh, I feel like a complete lamebrain.”

She withheld comment for the moment. “Oh?”

“Well, I mean, you promised your folks that you wouldn’t come back to see me. But
I
never promised anybody anything. Because nobody asked me! So I said to my mom, ‘I have to go out for a while, I’ll be back for dinner.’ And she said, ‘Fine, have a nice time…’”

Nita climbed into the trailer, sat down on the bed and began laughing. “You’re kidding.”

“Neets,” Kit said, “I think they still don’t get it about me being a wizard. Not really. But who cares? As long as I come home on time for dinner, no one minds me being here.”

“That is just so great!” And she started laughing again. “Come see my aunt.”

And she dragged Kit inside. Her aunt had taken a little while off from phone calls to feed the cats, and now stood there looking at Kit with a can of cat food in her hand, and a somewhat bemused expression. “Aunt Annie,” Nita shouted, “this is Kit!”

“Ah.” Her aunt blinked. “Half a second, then, and I’ll feed him too.”

Nita snickered and sat him down at the table, and started making tea. Out of the tangle of mewing and hollering cats, one detached itself and strolled over to the kitchen table, jumped up on it, and regarded Kit with big eyes. It was Tualha. “And who is this?” she said.

Nita had to laugh a little at Kit’s bemused expression. “Kit, Tualha. She’s a bard. Tualha, Kit Rodriguez. He’s a wizard.”

“Dai stihó,”
said Kit.

“Slán,”
said the cat, looking him up and down. To Nita she said, “I see the Spanish have finally arrived.”

“What?”

“Kit, don’t get her started. She’ll be reciting poetry at you in a minute.”

“I don’t mind that.”

“So listen,” Nita’s aunt said then, coming over to the table and sitting down as she dried her hands on a dishcloth. “Kit, you’re welcome here, but one question. Do your parents know you’re a wizard?”

“What? Yeah, sure.”

She shook her head. “It’s getting easier these days than it used to be.” She looked at Nita, and then at Kit, and at Nita again. “Listen,” she said, “I want the straight word from you on this. You two aren’t doing what your mom and dad were concerned you were doing— I mean, what they told me they’d afraid you were doing. Even though you told them you weren’t.
Are
you?”

She had the grace to look embarrassed as she said it. Nita and Kit could do nothing but look at each other and then burst out laughing.

“Why does everyone
think
that?” Kit said, sounding momentarily aggrieved. “Its not like we spend the day panting at each other!” And he lost it and cracked up again.

“No,” Nita said to Aunt Annie. “We’re not.”

“Well,” said her aunt, “never mind, then. It’s matters here that really concern me, and I’ve got enough on my plate at the moment. You know anything about it?”

“There was a précis in the manual of what’s been going on here,” Kit said. He sighed. “We’ve got problems.”

That “we” was one of the nicest things Nita had heard in a long time. Even after just a few days, she’d had enough of working by herself. “Yeah. Well, the Seniors here seem to have at least a handle on what to do. I just hope it works. —Did you read about that?”

“Yeah. It seems they already made some progress. There’s a stone, is it? That they had to wake up—”

“It was half awake already,” Nita said. “It’s the other three that are going to be a problem.”

“Yeah. They said one of the other objects was ‘dormant,’ and the third and fourth were ‘unaccounted for.’ That doesn’t sound terrific.”

“Nope.”

“Listen,” Aunt Annie said, “I’ll leave you two to chat. I’ve got to get back on the phone.” She smiled at them and headed out of the room.

“Phone? What for?”

“Other wizards,” Nita said.

Kit looked mystified. “To just talk to them? Why doesn’t she just—”

“No, don’t do that!!”
Nita said, sitting bolt upright as Kit felt him starting to casually line up the beam-me-up spell in his head for demonstration purposes, then go after her aunt that way. “Not point to point inside the island; you absolutely can’t do that here!”

“What? Why not?”

“Feel around you for the overlays! They’re all over the place! And you better watch how you go home, too. You’ve got to keep the effect confined or there’ll be incredible trouble.”

Kit paused a moment, and then looked surprised. “Wow, you’re not kidding. How do you get
around
here?”

“I walk. Or there’s a bike to ride.”

“Well, let’s go do that, then. Sounds like I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

Nita slipped into the office, bent over Aunt Annie at her desk, scribbled a note on the top of the sticky-pad block: GOING OUT BIKE RIDING, OK?

Her aunt nodded and went right on with her conversation about spell structure.

***

They were out for a long time. Part of it was Kit rubbernecking at the scenery while they talked, but part of it was the weather turning odd. The thunderstorms the weathermen had been predicting materialized, but they dropped hail rather than rain. Nita and Kit had to take shelter from several of these showers under some trees—having had a long talk in the Speech with the air over their place of refuge to make sure the lightning wasn’t going to be at all interested in it—and when they finally got down to the dual carriageway again, they found hailstones as big as marbles lying around on the road, steaming bizarrely in the bright sunshine. The sound of thunder rumbled miles away, sporadic but threatening, all through the ride.

They’d been taking turns riding, or sometimes Kit would ride and Nita would sit on the crossbar, or the other way around. At the moment Kit was walking the bike beside her, looking around appreciatively. “This is great,” he said. “I guess if you had to be sent someplace, this is as good as any.”

“Huh,” Nita said. “I don’t remember you being real excited about it at first.”

He colored somewhat.

“Yeah, well.” Nita grinned. “Listen, how’s Dairine doing?”

“Still okay, as far as I can tell. I think she may have been busy, though: didn’t see her yesterday.”

“Wizards all over the place are real busy around now.” Nita shook her head, glancing around; the oppressive, thunderstorm-about-to-happen feeling had not stopped. She was still prickling, but not so violently as she had been this morning.

“Here it comes,” Kit said, looking up at one thundercloud that they had watched drifting halfway between them and the sea as they turned down the Kilquade road. Almost immediately as he said it, Nita saw the bolt of lightning lance down and strike one of the hills behind the farm. Silently she started counting seconds, and had barely gotten to “two” before the crack of thunder washed over them. “A little too close,” said Kit. “Let’s get inside.”

They headed down the driveway in a hurry, and came out into the gravelyard in front of the house. Nita was heading for the front door when Kit looked around him with a sudden surprised expression. “Wait a minute. What’s that?” he said.

“That what?” Nita was feeling a little cross. She could feel the rain coming on in the air, and didn’t want to stand around outside waiting for it, after all she’d been through today.

“That,” Kit said, swinging around as if looking for something. “Can’t you feel it? Inanimate. Strong.”

Nita shook her head, wondering what he was talking about. Kit was staring down toward the farmyard, between the buildings. “There’s something going on down there,” he said. “Something alive.”

“This place is full of horses and sheep and cows,” Nita said. “Kit—”

“No,” he said. “Not something that’s usually alive. It’s inanimate, it’s a thing, it’s—come on!”

He started down that way. There was another roll of thunder. Nita didn’t see the lightning-stroke this time. She went after him, muttering to herself. The problem was that Kit frequently sensed things she didn’t, just as she sensed things he didn’t. They had areas where their talents overlapped, certainly, but Nita’s specialty was live things; Kit had always been more for inanimate objects. And if he really felt he was on the trail of something important—

“It’s really weird,” he said as she caught up with him. “It’s nothing—I’ve never felt one that alive before.”

“One
what?”

Kit looked into the farmyard and shook his head, and gestured.
“That,”
he said.

Nita looked. There was nothing in the farmyard but Biddy the farrier’s pickup truck, with its forge on the back. “The truck?”

“Not the truck itself,” Kit said. “That’s a little more awake than usual, but nothing really strange. It’s the thing in back. That box. What
is
that?”

“It’s a forge, a portable forge,” Nita said, mystified. “She’s the lady who comes and puts the horses’ shoes on.”

Right then, Biddy herself came out of the hay barn, in the act of shrugging into a windbreaker. She looked up at the sky, pausing for a moment; then headed toward the truck.

“Uh oh,” Kit said, looking up too, with a panicked expression. And a second later, the lightning came down.

That was only the first thing that happened. As Kit said “uh oh,” Nita had felt the potential building in the air become suddenly unbearable, not just a prickling but a pain all over her. It was a matter of a second, even with her brains as tired as they were from spelling, to put a shield spell up around herself and Kit. She saw Biddy look up; she saw the lightning lance down at the truck. The breath went right out of Nita in horror, for there was simply no way she could quickly extend her shield so far. But Biddy lifted her hand abruptly—

—and the lightning simply went
elsewhere.
It didn’t strike anything else, it didn’t miss; it just stopped… and went away. There wasn’t even a thunderclap.

And Biddy stood there, looking up at the sky, and glanced around, looking to see whether anyone had been watching. Then she smiled very slightly, and got into the truck.

“Now what was that?” Kit whispered.

Nita pulled him behind the nearby smoking shed, out of sight of the truck as it turned, heading for the driveway. He barely noticed; he was watching the truck. “That,” he said, “is the lady who puts the horseshoes on’?”

“Yeah. Her name’s Biddy.”

“She’s a wizard!”

“She’s not,” Nita said. “She
can’t
be.” It just didn’t feel right somehow. “That wasn’t a wizardry.”

Kit shook his head. “Then what was it? How do you explain it? She swatted a lightning bolt away like a bug. And her truck, or that forge in her truck anyway, is
alive. That
I can feel.”

“I don’t know,” Nita said. “Things are getting really weird around here...”

“‘Getting!’”
Kit laughed, then looked thoughtful. “You going to tell your aunt about this?”

“I don’t know,” Nita said. “I think… I think I want to talk to Biddy first.”

“Makes sense,” Kit said. “Then what?”

“Check with the Seniors. They seem to be running this show.”

“Okay,” Kit said. “You’re on. But let’s go try to make some sense of this.”

***

The two of them made their way back to the caravan and sat talking until nearly midnight. The last thing Kit said was, “You been meeting a lot of people around here?” he said. “Kids, I mean?”

“Some. They’re OK.”

“Are they nice to you?”

Nita thought of Ronan, and immediately flushed hot. How was she supposed to explain this to Kit?

Explain what?
some part of her mind demanded.
Heaven only knows what he thinks about you: if anything,he probably thinks you’re too young for him.
“They’re fine,” she said after a moment. “They’re nice enough, the ones I’ve met.”

“Good.” He looked at Nita as if weighing whether to tell her something. “Just so you know… there’ve been some rumors going around at home.”

“Rumors?”

“Some of the kids back home,” Kit said, “were saying that I ‘got you in trouble,’ and your folks sent you away to deal with it.”

Nita’s mouth dropped open. She felt outraged, but also had to laugh because it was so stupidly funny. All she could do, finally, was burst out laughing. “No wonder you jumped when Aunt Annie poked you. Kit, who cares what they think? Idiots.” She bumped his shoulder with hers. “Go on home, it’s your dinnertime.”

“It’s — wait, it’s
what?
Already?
I thought I had another hour!” He got up hurriedly and started riffling through his manual.

“Don’t forget the overlays!!” Nita said. “You’ve gotta hold the transit field in a lot tighter than usual. And lay the overlay structures into the spell too,
explicitly.
You leave them out of your calculations, you’ll wind up in the middle of the Atlantic.”