He sat and stared into his teacup, and then said, "I guess we haven't any choice. Tomorrow night, then? At Matrix. Assuming the other Planetaries concur."
Doris nodded, and Ronan, and Nita's aunt. "Will the Treasures be all right here tonight, Johnny?" Aunt Annie said.
"I should think so. Let's meet at Matrix around seven. This ought to be done at about sunset, so that the Spear knows what it's for."
Everyone nodded and pushed their chairs back. Nita looked over at Dairine. "You came a long way for just this," she said.
Dairine stretched and grinned. "Worth it to see the expression on your face when I outlined that spell. What a look! I thought you were going to. . ."
"Never mind," Nita said. Becoming a wizard had mostly changed her sister for the better, but it also seemed to have increased some of Dairine's more annoying traits, like the bragging and teasing. "Listen, runt," she said, "I missed you too. How are Mum and Dad?"
Dairine shrugged. "Mum keeps going on about "her baby". Dad looks depressed all the time. They're fine." Then she chuckled. "They'll never try a stunt like this on you again."
"Oh?"
"Uh huh. I heard them arguing about it the other day. Went on for about an hour, and finally Mum said, 'If she wants to be a wizard, fine, let her. Better to have a daughter who's a wizard, than not have a daughter.' "
"All right," Nita said softly. "When can I. . ." She was about to say go home, except that it occurred to her that she didn't want to go home right this minute. Not until after the business with the Spear was settled, anyway. And besides, I'm on assignment… I'd have to see it through anyway. "Never mind," she said again. "Did you tell them where you were going?"
"What, and get them all upset again? No way. Mum hasn't worked out a way to get any promises out of me yet, and that's the way it's going to stay. For the time being, anyhow. What time is it at home when it's seven in the evening here?"
"Two in the afternoon."
"That's fine," Dairine said. "I don't have to be home for dinner until seven our time. Yes, I know where we're going: it's in the manual. See you tomorrow. Bye, Kit. Spot, heel!"
The computer scuttled over to her; cats hissed and bristled at it as it went by. Dairine vanished, and not one of the various papers on the table moved.
"Hey, pretty slick," Kit said.
Nita laughed to herself for a second. "Look," she said, “you'd better get back too. Your parents are going to start wondering."
"Let 'em wonder," Kit said. But he started heading for the door. Nita followed and said, "Make sure you get your sleep."
Kit laughed too, a rueful noise. Excitement sometimes made it hard for him to sleep the night before a big wizardry, and Nita was used to teasing him about the circles under his eyes. “I'll try," he said. "Take it easy, huh?"
"Yeah."
Kit vanished too; Johnny and Doris and Ronan headed out past Nita to Johnny's car, saying their goodnights as they went. As Ronan passed her, he said, "That was your sister?"
"Uh huh."
"You poor thing," said Ronan.
Nita nodded in complete agreement. "She has her uses, though," she said. "Hang loose."
Ronan chuckled and went out.
Nita went back into the kitchen, where she found her aunt staring moodily at a sink full of teacups. "They breed," she said, "I swear they do."
Nita laughed and reached up to the shelf that held the washing-up liquid.
9.
Casleán Na Mbroinn/
Caher Matrices
Castle Matrix
Sleep refused to come easily to her that night. Finally Nita got up about midnight and struggled back into her clothes, thinking that she would go and see whether there was a boring film on the last functioning TV channel.
She never made it past the back garden. It was a clear night, where the last few had been misty: and the Milky Way hung there overhead, nothing subtle about it for once, the Galaxy seen edge-on and for once looking it, ridiculously bright. Nita climbed up on the fence between the garden and the riding area, and just sat there and stared at it for a long time. Only a month or so ago now she had been out that way, among thousands of alien creatures: and she still felt stranger here than she had there…
The crunch of the gravel down the drive got her attention. Nita held very still and listened, suddenly finding herself getting very tense. Who knew what kind of people went sneaking about farms when everyone was in bed. . .
She knew, though. The tension got worse… not to say that it was entirely unpleasant.
By the time the dark shape turned the corner of the house and paused, looking around it, Nita's sight was so night-acclimatized that he might as well have been spotlit. And there were other indications, to another wizard anyway. Very quietly she said, "Dai."
He said nothing for the moment, just came over to where she sat on the fence. His head was on a level with hers; very faintly, the starlight caught in Ronan's eyes. "Dai," he said. It came out as more of a growl.
She laughed at him, very softly so as not to attract any attention in the house. "You sound angry all the time," she said, “You know that? Doesn't it wear you out?"
He turned away from her a moment, leaning against the fence next to her and looking up at the sky. "I couldn't sleep," he said.
Nita grunted softly and also looked up. "And you walked all the way up here from Bray? I'm glad I didn't bother going in to look at the TV. There must really be nothing on."
This time she actually felt him getting angry, sensed it rising off him like steam off a hard-ridden horse. "Look," she whispered as he opened his mouth, "just spare me. OK? Everything somebody says to you, you find a reason to get annoyed about it. It's a wonder anyone even talks to you any more. Except you're so. . ." Words jostled in her head: she shut up. Attractive. Sensitive. Helpless. . .
He opened his mouth again, shut it, and then opened it again and started to laugh, almost soundlessly. "Yeah. I guess. I've always been this way. But lately it's been getting worse. Like whatever causes it is getting closer."
And Ronan looked at her sidewise - a sort of wry expression, clearly visible even in this dimness. "Funny. I thought you were pretty different when I met you first. . ."
"And now you think I'm pretty much normal?" Nita said. "Nice of you."
"No," Ronan said, sounding annoyed. "I think you're more different than anybody around here. Especially the other girls." He sounded less annoyed. "A lot of them talk tough all the time, but if you push them, they give, right then. You, though, you don't talk tough - mostly. When you do, you're scary. . ." He shrugged. "And as for pushing - you just fall all over whoever does it, like a brick wall."
Nita flushed hot at this, not sure what to make of it. "Well, you're certainly different from everyone else I know," she said, and then shut her mouth again lest the confusion inside should start finding its way out and make her look like a total idiot.
But Ronan just laughed again. "You think loud, too," he said.
The last blush was nothing to this one, but Nita fought it down, starting to get annoyed herself. That broke off, though, when she saw the way he was looking at her. For once, there was no anger about it. Bizarrely, the look made her start to shake a little. Then it occurred to her that there was nothing bizarre about it, for it was not her own physical excitement she was feeling. She knew what that felt like-There was nothing in the manual about this. Or is there? Nita thought. Have I ever looked? It's not as if the subject has ever come up, working with Kit. . .
. . .and abruptly she knew, or started to know, rather more about it. Nita sat there in the starlight and swallowed, getting her first taste of what it was like for a native wizard to experience 'the Knowledge' - the direct input from the wizardly 'database' which was the way Irish wizards experienced the information. Would it keep getting this way for me if I stayed here longer? she wondered. But that was hardly important just now: there was other information to consider. Of course wizards got physical with each other som
etimes, just the same as other human beings did. But they experienced it somewhat differently. It had to do with the Speech, which had physical components as well as verbal and mental ones - and when two people expert in the Speech were attracted, they were likely to overhear one another's bodies as well as their minds. . .
Nita broke out in a sweat. Not mine, she thought, fascinated. She looked at Ronan, and for a long few moments her thoughts chased themselves unintelligibly through her head. Only one finally made itself plain:
Well, heck, I guess you have to start somewhere. And I do like him - otherwise I wouldn't even be thinking about this. . .
Ronan looked away. And Nita said, "You're not going to get any pushing out of me on this one." She was still shaking, but it was her own nervousness this time.
She just sat there and waited.
He leaned back on the fence a bit. His face was quite close to hers: she caught the starlight in his eyes one more time before he bent in to kiss her.
She spent the first two seconds trying to work out what to do with her nose. After that Nita was simply lost in sensation: the kiss itself, and what underlay it, the rush and pour of thought and emotion that was both of their minds getting tangled together. She was nervous about it at first, but after a moment it seemed completely natural, that odd fresh scent of his mind - green, she thought, of course, and was tempted to laugh; and behind it, another sensation, something faint but familiar. She couldn't place it. . .
The kiss broke. She blinked at him. Her heart was racing. The second kiss went on for a lot longer. This time they touched. This time, as the sweetness built in her body, Nita went shouldering through that welcoming greenness in mind, touching it, warm, but curiously hunting that sense of something else. And there in the dark was some of that anger, quite a bit of it actually, fretting, churning against itself. There was something down in the warm dark here, an irritant, a scent or colour that she knew, that made Ronan keep lashing out at everything: some kind of energy looking to be properly expressed. Not mere rage, but a righteous anger, turning on itself, without an outlet, impotent at the moment, straining to get out and be put to the right purpose. Nita blinked in the middle of the kiss. A flash of scarlet, an impression of something swift and fierce and hot-tempered, and utterly good. . .
Her eyes flew open with shock as she recognized the mind-sense of what was struggling down inside of Ronan. "Peach!" she whispered. But that had been only one of that creature's names. It had many others. Without her being able to prevent it, she felt Ronan's thought follow hers, down to the image of how she had seen Peach last - no longer a creature that had been hiding in the shape of a scarlet macaw, another wizard's 'pet'. He saw it as Nita had seen it last, in combat with the Lone One: moulted out of its old body, now radiant, immortal, unconquerable, one of the Powers that Be, the one with many names, the One's Champion. . .
"No," Ronan gasped. "Oh, no!"
And he was gone now, running, the sound of his going frantic on the gravel. Fading now. Gone. Nita sat there on the fence, shaking, half in tears, half too amazed to cry.
The night fell silent again around her.
She went back to bed again, but once more it was a long time before she could sleep…
The next evening she and her aunt and Kit got in the car together at about six-thirty. It was just starting to get dark; sunset was not until eight that night, and it wouldn't be completely dark until perhaps ten-thirty or eleven.
Castle Matrix was eastward from Greystones and Kilquade, in the mountains beyond Sugarloaf. They drove down many small narrow roads, which got smaller and narrower and bumpier all the way, until finally they came to a drive with two huge trees at the end of it, each one beginning to be covered with a great mass of red berries.
"Rowan," Nita's aunt said.
"I know," Nita said. "I have a friend at home who's a rowan tree."
Her aunt chuckled. "It's still so funny to hear things like that come out of one of my relatives… " she said.
"There it is," Kit said. They turned out of the drive into an open gravelled area. Off to one side of it, Castle Matrix rose. The main part of it was a plain square tower, about forty meters tall and fifteen meters on each side, of light grey granite. To Nita's intense delight, it actually had battlements on top. There were narrow arrow-slit windows here and there up and down the face of the tower, and a huge iron-bound oaken door at the bottom. Off to one side, the castle had been added to; there was an additional wing about fifteen meters high, with diamond-paned windows. A low fieldstone wall ran around the gravelled area. She wandered over to peer into it after they got out of the car. Biddy's truck was parked by that wall, and the forge was missing from the back of it.
The oak door swung open for them. There was
Johnny in his tracksuit, looking very ordinary except for what he held in one hand. It was a rod that burned with light. Nita recognized a tool she had used once before herself, a rowan wand that had spent time out in moonlight: a potent weapon for a lower-level wizard, though she couldn't imagine what Johnny needed one for. "Come on in," he said.
Nita and Kit went in behind her aunt, looking around in curiosity. About two meters inside the door was a long, heavy wine-coloured brocade curtain. "Draughts," Johnny said, pushing it aside; “you wouldn't believe the draughts we get in here in the winter."
They passed through it and looked around, and up, and up. This was the castle's main hall, about fifteen meters across; it had whitewashed walls, black-and-white tiled floors, and big, handsome, polished wooden tables. Immediately to their left was a huge fireplace with a strange sort of grate that seemed to be designed to hold the fire's coals up vertically rather than horizontally; a big iron spit and a crank to turn it stood in front, and there were smaller fireplaces, grills actually, on either side of the main grate. Tall arched windows, about two meters wide, were let into the west and south walls. The wooden tables had been pulled off to the sides of the big room, and in the middle of the floor, where all the tiles were dark, a most elaborate spell diagram was in the process of being laid out in white. Nita sniffed, and from her art classes identified the sweetish smell of water-based acrylic paint.
"Doesn't scuff off in the middle of a spell," Johnny said, picking up a brush. "Anyway. Welcome to Matrix."
"Have you always lived here?" Kit said, looking around in admiration. "Did you inherit it?"
"Oh, no," Johnny said. "I found this place in ruins. A big tree growing through what was left of the roof, right about here. . ." He pointed to the centre of the room, where the spell diagram was. "We had it removed when we started to renovate the place, my wife and I. She's in London at the moment with our son. But the Normans built the place, originally, some time in the eleven hundreds, when they were trying to subdue Ireland." He chuckled and looked down at his work. "They fell in love with it and got "more Irish than the Irish", as the saying goes."
"Seems to be a lot of that going around," Kit said.
Johnny nodded. "They built this place on the site of an old holy well… it's still here. But more than that. Matrix had been a centre for a lot of kinds of faith, or power, over the years. The Mother Goddesses were honoured here first… that's where its first name came from. Matrix means "womb", but the older form was probably "matricis" - the Castle of the Mothers. Then for a while I think the well was sacred to Brigit, the old fire-goddess; and later to Saint Brigid, the Mary of the Gael as they called her. Other mysteries were here later. There was some connection with the Knights Templar; some of them said this was one of the Grail Castles. But all those came later. We have older business tonight…"
"Are you about ready?" Aunt Annie said.
"Just about. Waiting on Biddy and Dairine. Ronan's in the back with Doris, making tea."
"Where else," Kit muttered.
"Give it time, you'll get used to it," Nita said. She wandered over to the diagram that Johnny was working on, noticing the elegance and cleanliness of it. Half the figures in the Speech that she was
used to tracing out laboriously and in whole, here were only hinted at; a single graceful stroke 'holding the place' for a figure or diagram much more complex. I guess when you're Senior for half a continent, though, you get enough practice to be able to do that … It was a big five-noded diagram, with a separate circle for each of the Treasures - each written around with the reinforcing and warding spells that each specific Treasure would need - and a fourth empty circle for the starsteel that would become the Spear. That fourth circle was particularly densely written-in, and Nita could understand why. The spell there was for the magnetic bottle that would be needed to confine the starsteel and cool it down until it was safe to work; for in its native condition inside the star it would not be solid metal, or even molten, but iron plasma at something more than seven thousand degrees Kelvin. If there was any specific part of the spell diagram Nita would have been interested in double-checking, that was it. But again the shorthand that Johnny was using was a little beyond her…
Nita stopped then, suddenly, and looked down as Johnny finished one character and touched it with the rowan rod. The acrylic flared briefly bright, then died down again.
Nita stared at the floor. “Something wrong?" Johnny said.
"There's something down there."
She was aware of Kit looking at her uncomprehendingly from off to one side, where he had been examining a set of old pikes mounted against the wall. "Yes, there is," Johnny said. "I didn't expect you to feel it, but then a lot of wizards older and more experienced than you don't. There's a power in the earth here; not the earth itself, though. The water table runs fairly high here, and this castle's element is Water. No surprise, since the place is more or less haunted by the "female principle". You saw the little stream that runs down by the forge, out by where you parked? We'll be doing work down there later."
Nita stood there just feeling it - a long, slow swelling, biding its time, caring nothing for the flash and dazzle and busyness of life, but only for slow nourishment, things growing, things prospering, birth, being. She glanced up at Johnny and said, "This is the only place where we could do what we have to, isn't it."