“What about you? You got somebody to step out with?” said Ronan.
“Uh, no,” Nita said, thinking regretfully of Kit. He loved to dance. “My buddy’s back in the States.”
“Oooh, a buddyyyyyy, she’s got a buddyyyyyy!!”
Nita grinned: she was now beyond the blushing point. Her sister had been teasing her about Kit for so long that this was a very minor salvo by comparison, and the cruder kids at her own school had long since run out of anything original to say and had ceased to get on her nerves.
“Aren’t you a little young for that?” Eva said, clearly teasing, to judge by the way Eamonn had started massaging her shoulders.
Nita arched her eyebrows. “Let’s just say that in my part of the world we make up our minds about this kind of thing early.”
“Whooooaaaaa!!” said the group, and started punching one another and making lewd remarks, only about half of which Nita understood.
“So if your buddy’s there, what are you doing here?” said Ronan.
“I know!” said Majella. “Her folks sent her away to separate them because they were—ahem!” And she shook her hand in a gesture intended to be slightly rude and slightly indicative of what they were doing.
Nita realized that a simple way to manage things might be to let them think exactly this. “Well, yeah,” she said. “Anyway, I’m stuck here for six weeks.”
“Stuck here! Only stuck here! In the best part of the Earth! Well, excuse us!” they said, and began ragging her shamelessly, explaining what a privilege it was that she should be among them, and telling her all the wonderful places there were to see, and things to do. She grinned at this at last, and said, “I bet none of you do those things.”
“Oh, well, those are tourist things,” Ronan said.
“Thanks loads,” said Nita.
They chatted about this and that for a long while. Nita found herself oddly interested by Ronan, despite his looks: maybe because of his looks. She didn’t know anyone at home who managed to look so dark and grim, no matter how punk they dressed: and there was an odd cheerful edge to his grimness that kept flashing out, a certain delight in having opinions, and having them loudly, in hopes that someone would be shocked. They ranged through music (“Mostly junk except for the Saw Doctors and The Script. And U2 of course”) and art (“All bollocks from start to finish”—Nita kept her mouth shut and made a note to find out what bollocks were), and quite a bit about politics, especially Irish politics, much of which left Nita completely in the dark. Ronan’s opinions of anyone who wanted to colonize or even unduly influence Ireland, from the British on back, were scathing. So were his views on people who thought they were Irish and weren’t really, or who weren’t Irish and thought they should have something to do with running the country, or thought that the Irish needed any kind of help with anything at all.
The others tended to nod agreement with Ronan, or if they disagreed, to keep fairly quiet about this: Nita noticed this particularly, and suspected that they had felt the edge of his temper once or twice. She grinned to herself, thinking that he would have a slightly hotter time of it if he tried it on her. She rather hoped Ronan would.
It was amazing how long a couple of pieces of chicken and a few Cokes could be made to last; fortunately, the people running the shop didn’t seem to care how long they stayed. Eventually, though, everybody had to leave: buses to catch, people to meet. One by one they said goodbye to Nita, and headed off, Ronan last of them. “Don’t get lost looking for leprechauns, now, Miss Yank,” he shouted to her over his shoulder as he made his way off down Bray’s main street.
Nita snickered and turned away, looking at the 45 bus pulling up across the street, and thought, Naah...I’ll walk home. It was only eight miles, and through extremely pretty countryside.
Except for the first part, the climb up one side of Bray Head, it was a long, easy walk down, taking Nita about an hour to get down to Greystones. She strolled down into the town. It was a more villagey-looking street than Bray’s, more compact. There were a couple of banks, a couple of food stores, small restaurants, a newsagent where you could get magazines and cards and candy. Various other small shops ...a dry cleaners’. And that was it.
Nita did, however, notice as she walked through more of something she’d seen in Bray, though she’d been a bit distracted then. There were a lot of stores that were doing “Going Out Of Business” sales, or were closed already and had “To Let” signs up in them. It’s what they said: the same kind of money trouble here as back home, though maybe worse. Apparently the cause of it here hadn’t been because of banks lending out a lot of money for bad mortgages on houses. Instead the banks had given way too much money to big building companies and developers, and when the banks had gone bad, the Irish government had promised to spend an insane amount of money to save them. The kindest phrase Ronan had found for this situation was “circlejerk”, and there had been a lot of others less kind. “No money, no work, we’re all going to have to emigrate again,” he said: “we’re all screwed.”
Nita sighed, stored it all away for later consideration, and kept walking. Where the stores gave way, Greystones started to be surrounded by big old houses, and estates of smaller ones. And then the fields began again—in fact, they began almost as soon as you had left the town. Nita strolled by the tiny golf course, looked down to Greystones’ south beach beyond it; walked past a cow with a blank expression, chewing its cud. “Dai stiho,” she said to it. It blinked at her and kept chewing.
The road climbed again, winding up through Killincarrig. Everything does have names here, Nita thought. It’s amazing. Really must get a map out. There may be one in the manual…
There was. She consulted it as she went up the road. At the top of the road, another crossed it at a T-intersection: she turned left. That way led toward Kilquade and Kilcoole and Newcastle with its little church.
The road climbed and dipped over a little bridge that crossed a dry river, then made its way along between high hedges. Birds dipped and sang high in the air. The sun was quite hot: there was no wind. Nita slogged around and just let her brain go a bit quiet, taking in the scenery, waiting to see what would present itself.
There came a point where there was a right turn, and a signpost pointing down between two more high hedges, toward Kilquade. Nita took it, making her way down the narrow road. The houses here were built well away from one another, even though they were small. As if everyone wants their privacy.
The road dipped and broadened, curving around in front of Saint Patrick’s. Nita stopped and looked at it for a moment. It was quite normal; a little white-painted church, with the tower off to one side of the building, and the bell with a circular pulley to make it go. There was a big field on one side, and visible behind it a hedge, and beyond that, some of Aunt Annie’s land, another field planted with oilseed rape, all afire with those bright yellow flowers. The hum of bees came from it, loud. Nita stood still and listened, smelled the air. No broken stained glass, no fire, no blackening.
She turned and looked off to her right. Well behind her, Nita could see Little Sugarloaf, which she had passed on her walk. And just beyond it, Great Sugarloaf, a very perfect cone, standing up straight, a sort of russet and green color this time of year; for in this heat, the bracken was beginning to go brown already. I wonder, she thought. Sideways…
She’d done it without wizardry yesterday. Now Nita stood there for a moment, and just looked. Not at Sugarloaf as it was, but as it could be; not this brown, but green. Nothing. Nothing…
…But it was green.
Her eyes widened a little. She looked at the nearby hedge. There were no flowers. She looked over her shoulder in panic at the church. The church looked just the same, but it was earlier in the year, much earlier. I wonder, she thought. How far can you take it? Do you have to be looking for anything in particular? Most wizardries required that you name the specifics that you wanted.
All right, she thought. What does it look like
? And what does it look like for them—for the ones who went sideways? She looked at Sugarloaf again. What does it look like? Show me. Come on, show me…
There was no ripple, no sense of change, no special effects. One minute it was Sugarloaf, green as if with new spring. The next minute—
It was a city.
There were no such cities in the world. No one had ever built such towers, such spires. It might all have been made of glass, what she saw, or crystal: a glass mountain, a crystal city, all sheen and fire. It needed no sunlight to make it shine. It shed its light all around, and the other hills nearby all had shadows cast away from it. As she lookedm Nita wasn’t entirely sure she didn’t see something moving in some of those shadows.
But for the moment, almost all she could really see was the light, the fire; Sugarloaf all one great mass of tower upon tower, arches, architraves, buttresses, leaping up; an architecture men could not have imagined, since it violated so many of their laws. It was touched a little with the human idiom, true. But those who had built it and lived in it—were living in it—had been dealing with the human idiom for a while, and had become enamored of it. “They’re still here,” Tualha had said, and laughed.
Nita blinked, and let the vision go—
And it was all gone. All that remained was brown bracken and a plain granite-gray mountain with its head scraped bare.
Nita let a long breath out and went walking again, back up to the last hill that would lead her up to her aunt’s driveway. “That simple,” she said to herself. “That easy...”
For wizards, at least. At the moment. But it shouldn’t be that easy...
Something had better be done.
If only I could find out what...!
She headed back to the farm.
***
The next morning was the foxhunt. She missed the earliest part of the operation, having been up reading late again that night, and using the manual to chat with Kit.
She’d propped the manual up against an empty tea mug on the caravan’s little work table, so that she could look at Kit’s face on the page and let him see hers inside a similar live-vision window. They were both agreed that though they could do mindtouch at this distance, it was way too tiring. And, Nita thought, maybe neither of us wants to feel the inside of the other one’s head too clearly right now…
“So first things first. What about the trees?” Nita said.
“They blinked,” Kit said, and grinned.
“Hard to do without eyes.”
“You know what I mean. They waved their branches, or whatever. I think you freaked them out.” He gave her an amused look. “That’s a tactic we may want to remember. Anyway, we’re all agreed in principle now. Just a matter of getting the final language of the agreement sorted out, and we can sign off on the final report and move on to something else.”
“Well, I think I know what qualifies for the ‘something else’ now,” Nita said. “You look at my profile today?”
“Yeah. The attached precis is kind of bare, though. Tell me what’s been happening.”
She spent some minutes talking him through her last day or so, and at the end of it all Kit nodded. “That sideways thing… that’s really bizarre. You don’t want to overdo that.”
“Why?”
“Well, doesn’t it make you twitch? You didn’t do any specific wizardry. It’s not right to get results without having done a spell first—” Kit shook his head. “You really start wondering what’s going on over there.”
“Yeah, well, it can’t be that bad, Kit. Look, when you do it you come back as easily as you go—”
“I sure hope you do,” he said. “Just keep an eye on the conditions. You’ve been lucky so far, but…”
Nita nodded. “Anyway, there’s more research to do. Whatever I’m on active status for, so far there haven’t been any big obvious hints on how to get to grips with it…”
“When not doing spells, do research,” Kit said. It was a favorite saying of Tom Swale’s.
Nita nodded. “How’s Dairine? Have you seen her?”
“Yesterday. She’s busy with something, as always… no idea what. Something about somebody’s planet.”
“Oh Lord, not again,” Nita said, and rubbed her eyes. “Sometimes I think she should be unlisted. She’s never going to have any peace at this rate.”
“Thought things might quiet down for her a little when her power levels started dropping off…”
“Well, you can wait a while more for that to happen,” Nita said, her voice dry, “because there’s no sign of it yet. Check her profile some time, if you want to depress yourself.”
“No thanks, I’ve done that… don’t feel the need to torture myself any further.”
Nita laughed, and then said the thing that had been at the back of her mind since the walk back from Bray and Greystones. “Will I sound like an idiot if I say I miss you already?”
“Why would you? I missed you already yesterday. …I saw your folks too, yesterday, by the way.”
“How are they?”
“Miserable,” Kit said. “Already. I really doubt they’ll ever try a stunt like this on you again. Your mom’s a wreck, though both of them are trying to act like everything’s fine. Anyway, they said they’d call you tonight. They said they were going to give you a couple of days to get yourself acclimated before they bothered you.”
“Fine by me,” Nita said, and sighed. “I don’t know about ‘acclimated,’ but I’ve had plenty to keep me busy. How’re things at your place?”
They passed into less tense conversation from there, finally saying good night as if they’d only been doing chat with a couple of blocks between them. But the conversation was still on Nita’s mind in the morning as she got her breakfast.
The kitchen was in havoc. A lot of the riders who were picking up their horses from the stable had come in for “a quick cup of tea.” Nita was learning that there was no such thing in Ireland as a quick cup of tea. What you got was several cups of tea, taking no less than half an hour, during which any interesting local news was passed on. “A quick cup of tea” might happen at any hour of the day or night, include any number of people, male or female, and always turned into a raging gossip session with hilarious laughter and recriminations.
But finally the demands for tea trailed off, and the kitchen began to clear out. The people who were in the hunt were impressively dressed, all red coats and black caps and beige riding britches and black shiny boots. They were discussing the course they would ride—apparently a mean one, from Calary Upper behind Sugarloaf, down through various farmers’ lands, straight down to Newcastle. The thing that was most confusing everybody was that, quite suddenly, there were no foxes anywhere. Some people were blaming hunt protesters or overzealous shooting by local farmers; others blamed the weather, crop dusting, sunspots, global warming. Nita grinned outright, and had another cup of tea. She was beginning to really like tea.
“Well, that’s all we’ll see of them,” said her Aunt Annie, pouring herself a cup as well and then flopping down in one of the kitchen chairs in thinly disguised relief.
“I thought the hunt was coming through here,” Nita said.
“Oh, they will, but that’s not until this afternoon.”
“No foxes, huh?” Nita said, in great satisfaction.
“Not a one.” Her aunt looked over at her and said, “Personally, I can’t say that I’m exactly broken-hearted.”