Dairine made her way over to the small, empty transport circle set aside for her inside the larger spell matrix and simply grunted vague agreement . . . because she was simply reluctant to complain. All her life she’d been infuriated by having teachers who always assumed her to be dumber than she was, some trick genius who had a weak spot they’d eventually discover if they just kept poking at her long enough. Nothing had prepared her for a teacher who routinely expected her to be far smarter than she was, and seemed intent on breaking her of the bad habit of taking it easy. And wow, I love that. Not that I’ll ever let him know. He’d just get as smug and insufferable as Roshaun . . .
And her heart clenched. Dairine held her breath for a moment from reflex, then let it go. It’s getting to the point where I can think his name without it being painful . . .
Her dad went over to stand in his own locator circle and gazed around at the spell diagram. “This costs a lot of energy normally, doesn’t it?”
Nelaid, making his way to his own circle, glanced over at Dairine’s dad. “What?”
“This form of transport. Otherwise the kids’d be doing it every day.”
“Oh.” Nelaid chuckled. “Yes, especially when such distances are involved. But a Planetary has wide latitude in requesting such transport allotments from the Aethyrs, especially when one or more planets’ infrastructural benefits are concerned. And this training is good for both your stellar system and mine, in terms of augmenting local expertise. So the authorization was not hard to come by.”
“We need this, do we?”
“Oh, your world has its specialists,” Nelaid said, “some of them very gifted. Naturally we’ve conferred from time to time. Your star, however, has been under unusual pressure in recent years. In particular, the direct attentions of the Lost Aethyr: the one your people call the Lone Power.”
“That time the Sun went out . . .” Dairine’s dad said.
“Yes. Any star that had been through that kind of punishment might be expected to behave badly afterward: so having extra oversight in the neighborhood is seen as a good thing. And wizards native to Wellakh have over the millennia developed an unusual level of expertise in dealing with aberration in nongiant stars on the main sequence: Thahit has a history of being somewhat badly behaved indeed at intervals.”
“‘Somewhat’? You mean like slagging half the planet down with a single flare?” Dairine muttered.
“I have seen worse,” Nelaid said. “If you’re fortunate, you never will. Ready?” He checked to make sure they were both well inside their circles. The transport pattern flared into life around them—
—and when it died down again, they were standing in the dim brown light of a garden shed.
The backyard of Dairine’s dad’s flower shop was a paved area backing onto the alley where most of the deliveries arrived. In the high solid wooden wall there was a sliding gate that would open wide enough to let a van or small truck drive in, and off to one side was the shed in which they now stood. It was surrounded by the heaps of wooden crates that some flowers and supplies came in, stacked up to wait for the next flower delivery guy to take them away, and with the long thick-walled cardboard boxes in which more fragile cut flowers like roses and lilies got delivered. The crates were picked up for recycling once a week, after Dairine’s dad spent an afternoon of what he referred to as “line dancing,” stomping them flat before tying them up in bundles. The area wasn’t particularly tidy: it tended to get scattered with floral stakes, busted-off chunks of arrangement foam, the scraps of ribbons and paper that missed being thrown into the recycling bin, and all the other detritus that piled up around a florist’s business if the owner was too busy to sweep the floor more than once every few days. It was definitely not the type of place that made you think the shed in the corner, the one with the dust-obscured little windows and the door with rusty hinges, had a worldgate acceptor site in it.
“Clear?” said her dad, peering out the side window.
“Yeah,” Dairine said, squinting out through the one in the door. It was hard to see through it, but that was kind of the point.
“No sign of Mike?”
“I think he’s inside.” She saw something move past the shop’s rear window, the one in the workroom beside the walk-in fridge: a pair of arms completely laden down with a stack of long white boxes. “Yeah.”
“Okay.” He reached past her to pop open the catch of the door. “Go on and distract him. Nel, give me a couple moments, then come on in.”
“As you say.”
Her dad headed softly out, then opened the back gate so that Mike would think they’d come in that way. Dairine headed for the back door of the shop’s workroom. “Hey, Mike!”
Her dad’s assistant, a tall, skinny, auburn-haired stringbean of a guy in jeans and an Islanders sweatshirt, put his head through the tacky bead curtain that divided the front of the store from the back. “Hey, Dair!” he said. “Great timing, I was just going to start locking up.”
“It’s okay, I think Dad’ll do it,” she said as her father came in behind her.
“Mikey, did we get those boxes of mums that I—Oh, I see we did.” It would have been impossible not to see the thirty or so boxes of mums, which took up almost the entire floor space in the back of the shop and blocked access to both of the sinks and the stainless steel worktops.
“Yeah, I was getting set to go stack them in the walk-in.”
Her dad glanced at his watch. “It’s after five,” he said. “You go on. You know how your mom gets if I make you miss dinner.”
Mike laughed. “But what about the mums?”
“Leave them there. I’ll take care of them and the rest of the unloading.”
“Right, Mr. C. See you in the morning!”
“Eightish, okay?”
“Okay!” The front door slammed.
Dairine came out of the back room in time to see her dad walk up to the front door, turn the key in it, flip the CLOSED sign around to face out, and pull the blinds on the door and the shop window.
“Daddy, what about these boxes?” Dairine said, almost thankful to have something to do besides ride herd on a star that had been purposely programmed to blow up on her.
“Most of these need to go into the walk-in,” her dad said. “These white ones, oh, and that red one, there’s boutonniere material in those, leave them out for the moment. Don’t try to pick up more than one, you’ll throw your back out . . .”
She edged between some of the boxes to put Spot down in a spare space on one of the countertops as Nelaid slipped in through the back door, paused, and took a deep breath. “It smells of life in here,” he said, smiling. Glancing around, he added, “Quite crowded with it, in fact.”
“So true. And to keep it that way we need to get the boxes into the cooler . . .”
There was a knock on the frame of the rear door. Everyone looked up, alert and surprised, and then relaxed, because it was Tom Swale standing there—wearing a business suit, unusual for him, and slipping out of the suit jacket while they watched. “Hey,” he said. “Thought I might catch you. Harry, can I give you a hand with those?”
“Not worried about your shirt? Well, okay, here, grab the top few. What brings you here?”
“Saw your worldgate go off, and something else has come up. Good evening, sa ke Nelaid.”
“And to you, Advisory ke Swaal. Busy day?”
“Getting busier all the time,” Tom said. “Where do you want these, Harry?”
For a few moments nothing much went on except getting the long cardboard carnation boxes up off the floor and onto every available surface. “Yeah, that’s right—No, not on top of the fridge, it blocks the vent—Oh,” Dairine’s dad said then, starting to laugh as a pile of boxes went past him without anyone physically carrying them: but behind them Nelaid was nudging them gently along through the air with one finger. “Now there’s a trick I wish somebody would teach me.”
“A fair amount of other data would be needed
as well,” said Nelaid, “and possibly a change of career . . .”
“A little late for that,” Dairine’s dad said. “Maybe I could just get you in every other weekend . . .”
The laughter got lost in more shuffling around of boxes. “This has to be the whole East Coast’s mum supply, Harry,” Tom said as he stacked his last few. “Long weekend, I take it.”
“Two weddings, two funerals,” Dairine’s dad said. “I’ll be in here very early tomorrow.”
“Good thing I caught you now, then,” said Tom.
Dairine’s dad threw her a thoughtful glance as he reached for the water hose that ran from the work sink and started filling the first of a stack of tall plastic flower buckets. “Should I be scared to ask?”
“I did not do anything,” Dairine said in exasperation.
“Didn’t say you did,” said Tom.
She breathed out. “So if it’s not something I did, what is it?”
“Something you haven’t done yet.”
Her father and Nelaid stared at each other, and then Nelaid burst out laughing. “Have the Aethyrs installed a new, more efficient youth-disciplinary system then?” he said. “Will we now be sanctioning misbehaving wizards ahead of the fact?”
Tom laughed too. “I could see where it might save on paperwork. But no.” He looked at Dairine. “You haven’t checked your manual today?”
“I’ve been kind of busy. Not blowing things up,” Dairine said with a glare at her dad and Nelaid, intent on getting just a little more mileage out of this truism if she could.
“Well,” Tom said, “we were thinking of giving you the opportunity—offering you the opportunity, anyway,” he said, with a sideways glance at Dairine’s dad, “to blow up something else.”
Dairine couldn’t help it if the look she turned on him was suspicious. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Take a look at the scheduling in the manual,” Tom said, “while I give your dad a bit more of a lowdown.”
She pulled her manual out, stared at the blinking page edges, and cracked it open in a hurry. “I take it you’re speaking figuratively,” Dairine’s dad said, pushing the last few stacked boxes into line and then turning to lean his back against the stack.
“I’m hoping I will be,” Tom said with a dry grin, “but with these things you can never tell.”
“These things being?”
“I’m having my manual functions copy a précis of this data to your phone,” Tom said. “But pending your approval, I’ve nominated both Nita and Dairine as potential mentors for a wizardly event that’s going to start happening in the next couple weeks. It won’t be dangerous; they’ll probably both be more closely supervised than they have been when doing almost anything since they became wizards. There’ll be a lot of senior personnel around for this—a lot of attention to what they’re doing. By adults.”
“Meaning you?” her dad said as he pulled the lever to crack open the door of the walk-in fridge.
“Strangely enough, no. Or not directly. I’ve got other duties during this period, and so does Carl. Though we’ll check in from time to time, since there are attendees we’ve nominated. The event’s educational; in a way it’s about training the next generation of consultant wizards. By publicly recognizing the talent of some of the up-and-coming generation, we’re looking to get some of the newer wizards to think about making the research and development end of wizardry the main thrust of their careers.”
Dairine’s dad tilted his head to one side, looking interested. “So this is like a jobs fair?”
“Yes, but more than just that. A lot of networking goes on, and a lot of, well, showing off.” Tom chuckled. “Any time you put a group of gifted teenagers in the same place, in a situation where it’s a virtue to show off what they can do—well, you can imagine.”
“Probably no, I can’t,” Dairine’s dad said. But she felt reassured to see him smiling when she glanced up from her manual.
“As I said, we’ve got a lot of safeguards in place to minimize the risk for everybody. Especially because some of the candidates will be working with spells at a very theoretical level, and it’s always smart to make sure that if the spell starts to execute in a way that its designer didn’t intend, the effects can be contained. Believe me, there’s a lot of attention on that, since most of the best spells, the ones that are the most useful tools for wizards in the field, have dangerous aspects.”
“How large is the intake, Advisory?” Nelaid said.
“Three hundred candidate entrants, plus or minus twenty,” Dairine said, already halfway through the pages that had been blinking at her. She was starting to break out in a sweat, she was getting so excited, but she was determined not to give any sign of how she felt just yet.
Tom nodded. “Assuming we get about eighty percent uptake on the invitations. Each entrant’s assigned at least one mentor a few years older than they are, or same age but smarter. We keep the ages close: candidates learn better from younger mentors than older ones.” He looked at Dairine’s dad again. “While we recommend assignments, the Powers do the final matching for the closest fit and the best results.”
“So if a candidate wants to dump their mentor,” Dairine asked, “they can do that?”
“Or the mentor can step away from the relationship with the candidate,” Tom said. “Though it doesn’t happen often. Even if there’s some initial tension, the pairings are sufficiently appropriate for each other that they normally make it through to the final stages of competition.”
The word “competition” got down the back of Dairine’s neck and just buzzed there in her spine, very pleasantly. “What’s the prize?”
Her dad and Nelaid and Tom exchanged an amused look. “A year’s coaching relationship with Earth’s Planetary Wizard,” Tom said. “You remember her, Harry. She came to the barbecue at your place after the Mars business. Irina Mladen.”
“The nice blond lady with the baby and the parakeet? Of course.” He smiled. “She made sure she had my burger recipe before she left.”
“There you go,” Tom said. “That’s her.”
Dairine dropped her gaze back to her manual, thinking, Yes, the woman who could destroy the earth with a couple of sentences’ worth of the Speech and a word or two with the planet’s core . . . ! She closed her manual, resisting the urge to slap it shut in a fury. “How is it,” she said, trying not to sound too tightly angry, “that I never got to be in a competition like this as a candidate?”
“Bad timing, I’m afraid,” Tom said. “Experience has shown that it’s not all that productive to hold the Invitational more than once every eleven years. So that’s how it’s done. Anyway, even if you were eligible to compete in this cycle, that’s no guarantee that you’d be chosen as a candidate.” He gave her a look that was maybe just a little too knowing. “Even for the most successful candidates, this isn’t just about winning. It’s more about getting to know more wizards than just your local circle. Wizardry as it’s practiced on Earth is a very networky business; the sooner you learn how to get quickly into contact and work effectively with people you’ve only known for a very short time, the better it is for everyone. There are years when the stuff that goes on around the edges of the Invitational turns out to be more important than the events themselves. There’s no way to find out unless you play . . .”
“So what you’re telling me,” Dairine’s dad said, “is that she’s going to be riding herd on someone else to make sure they don’t blow something up.”
“Could very well be,” Tom said. “Candidates tend to be matched with mentors who’ll know, or recognize, how they’re most likely to screw up, and can keep it from happening.”
“Well . . .” Dairine’s dad folded his arms over his chest.
Dairine’s insides immediately went cold. No, no, he’s going to say no and I need this, I have to go to this—! “Dad . . .” she said, and then stopped herself.
His gaze, which had drifted in a vague, noncommittal way
along the floor, now flicked up to meet hers. In his eyes Dairine could see the potential grin that he hadn’t let out onto his face as yet. “Well.” He shifted his gaze sideways to delay it. “Nel, what do you think? Can she be spared from her lessons for a while?”
Dairine held her breath. Nelaid’s face was always much harder to read than her father’s, for various reasons—chief among them his alien facial kinesics, or the carefully guarded mindset of a man who while in office rarely saw a tenday or half a month go by without someone trying to assassinate him. That gaze now rested very consideringly on Dairine. “What do you think, petech? Do you think recent behavior warrants it?”
Apprentice, he’d just called her. Meaning that this was one of those trick questions. Dairine groaned inside. If she went humble and agreed with Nelaid, or said what she thought he wanted her to say, he was likely to kill this whole prospect. Which would be horrible, thought Dairine, since this sounds like the most interesting thing that’s happened since, well, since the world needed saving the last time! A whole bunch of new people—wizards I don’t know, people who’ll take me seriously. And maybe put me onto some spell or something that I’ve missed, something that’ll help me find out what I want to know about more than anything else, the one thing that matters—
“Spinning your wheels there?” her dad said. The grin was still not showing on his face, and Dairine knew it would be fatal to try to force it there. And her mind was still racing. She honestly did grudge any time away from the work she was doing with Wellakh’s star-simulator and with Thahit itself. Gradually she’d been reaching some possible conclusions about what might have caused Roshaun’s bizarre and untimely disappearance from the surface of the Moon at the end of the Pullulus War. But sometimes it makes sense to switch tracks. Especially when the one you’re on seems to go on forever and ever with no real results, just wishes and hopes and staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night, missing his goofy face with the lollipop sticking out of it . . .
Nelaid said, “Harold, we are surely unkind to leave her in these agonies for so long.” He glanced at Tom. “If your Advisory has gone so far as to recommend you for this role, and the Powers have gone so far as to second the recommendation, or confirm it, then there is no point in second-guessing them. If you find this appropriate, Harold, then I daresay I can manage my star’s well-being for a few weeks until my apprentice is at leisure again.”