“Where’d these come from?” Nita said to Dairine as she came back in.
“Carmela brought them,” Dairine said. “They’re sure not mine. I mean, look at the covers! You could find them in the dark. The publishers must think human females are nearly blind until they’re eighteen. And completely fixated on one segment of the visual spectrum.”
The Christmas tree—The Demisiv, I mean, Nita thought—reached out a frond-branch to pull another magazine off the pile. “I think the colors are delightful,” he said.
“That’s just because you’re a sucker for Day-Glo, Filif,” Dairine said. “You’ll get over it.”
Nita somehow wasn’t so sure about that. “And as for you, Sker’ret,” she said to the Rirhait, “you’re a one-being recycling center.”
“There’s a pile of Dad’s old Time magazines by the chair in the living room,” Dairine said. “For when you want something a little more substantial.”
“Oh, substance isn’t everything,” Sker’ret said. “Sometimes a little junk food’s just what you need.”
He munched away. Nita drank her tea, watching Roshaun read while he maneuvered the lollipop stick from one side of his mouth to the other. It was like catching some coolly elegant anime character relaxing between shots, because the bulge it produced in the Wellakhit’s face looked very out of place against that otherwise flawless facial structure, the emerald green eyes and the too-perfect blond hair.
Roshaun felt Nita’s gaze resting on him, and looked up. “What?”
It was exactly what Dairine would have said. Nita controlled her smile. “The lollipop…”
“What about it?”
“Hate to say this, but you’re kind of spoiling your grandeur.”
“What grandeur he has,” Dairine remarked.
“Kings are made no less noble by eating,” Roshaun said. “Rather, they ennoble what they eat.”
“Wow, who sold you that one?” Nita said. She grinned. At the same moment, her stomach growled, and she made up her mind about breakfast. “Think I’ll go ennoble a couple of waffles.”
Roshaun ignored her and continued to work on the lollipop, while Nita went back into the kitchen and headed for the freezer. “And you’re going to get cavities,” Dairine said.
As Nita turned around with the frozen-waffle box, she saw Roshaun deliberately arch one eyebrow. “How can a biped come down with a geological feature?”
“It’s hwatha-t,” Dairine said, turning a page in the weekend section. “Not emiwai.”
“Oh,” Roshaun said. “Well, it’s all right: people from my planet don’t get those.”
“I don’t care if you come from Dental Hygiene World,” Nita said as she put the waffles in the toaster and started it up, “you’ll get cavities all right if you start stuffing that much sugar in your face every day.”
Roshaun merely chewed briefly, and then reached out to the canister in the middle of the table for another lollipop. Nita winced. “Oh, Roshaun, don’t chew them up like that. It hurts just listening to you!”
“You sound like Sker’ret,” Dairine said, turning another page.
“Sker’ret is if nothing else enthusiastic and robust in his approach to the things he enjoys,” Roshaun said, “so I’ll take that as a compliment.” He got up and wandered out the back door.
As the screen door slammed behind him, Nita glanced over at Dairine. “You’ve got a live one there,” she said.
Dairine glanced up and shrugged. “Listen, at least he’s not complaining about our food anymore. You should have heard him last week.”
“I didn’t understand it, either. All your food’s lovely,” Sker’ret said, and munched another page of the teen magazine.
Nita’s waffles popped up. She went to the cupboard for a plate and pulled the waffles one by one out of the toaster, hissing a little as their heat stung her fingers. Dropping the waffles on the plate, she turned to root around on the shelf next to the stove for a bottle of maple syrup. “Got my hands full here,” she said in the Speech to the silverware drawer by the sink. “Would you mind?”
The drawer, well used to the request by now, slid open. Nita tucked the maple syrup bottle into the crook of her elbow while holding the plate in that hand, and went fishing in it for a knife and fork. “Thanks,” she said to the drawer.
It courteously closed itself as Nita headed into the dining room. Filif drifted past her in the opposite direction, brushing Nita with the fronds on one side as he passed. “You need anything?” Nita said.
“No, I’m just going out to root for a little,” Filif said, levitating gracefully past her and toward the back door. “I’ll be back shortly.”
Nita headed into the dining room; the screen door creaked open and banged shut behind her. She sat down and poured syrup on her waffles, then started to eat. “So what’re your plans for the day?” Dairine said.
“To stay right here until Tom and Carl turn up,” Nita said between bites.
“They’re coming here?” Dairine said, looking alarmed.
Sker’ret looked surprised, too. “They’re your Seniors, aren’t they? Wouldn’t you normally go to them?”
“Yeah, but what’s been normal lately?” Nita said.
The screen door creaked open again. A moment later, a black four-legged shape burst into the room and began jumping up on the people at the table, one after another, putting his front paws on them and licking them until they protested they’d had enough. When the large Labrador-ish creature got to Nita, he started the same procedure with her, and then paused, looking with sudden interest at her waffle.
“Oh, no, you don’t!” Nita said.
But it smells so nice, Ponch said silently.
“And it’s going to keep smelling nice until it’s all gone,” Nita said. “Oh, come on, don’t give me those big sad puppy-dog eyes. Kit gave you breakfast.”
He might not have. You haven’t asked.
There was no lessening of the puppy-dog–eyes effect. Nita went back to eating. “I don’t have to ask,” she said. “I know he did. You’re really pitiful, you know that?”
Not pitiful enough, it seems, Ponch said, in a tone of mild regret. He dropped to the floor again and went to sit by Sker’ret instead.
Sker’ret looked at Ponch with several eyes, then offered him a strip of torn-off magazine page. Ponch sniffed it, mouthed it briefly, and then let Sker’ret have it back, somewhat damp. Tastes like my dry dog food, Ponch said.
Kit came in from the kitchen in Ponch’s wake. “Did I hear you bad-mouthing breakfast?”
Not hers, Ponch said.
Kit flopped down in Roshaun’s vacant seat. Ponch got up and went to rest his head on Kit’s knee. I don’t mind the dry food so much when there’s some wet food. But when you have to eat it by itself—
“It tastes like cardboard, is that what you’re trying to tell me? Okay, we’ll try another brand.” Kit ruffled Ponch’s ears. “Boy, when you got smart, you sure got picky…”
I was always picky, Ponch said, with an air of wounded dignity. But now that I’m smart, I can tell you why.
Kit looked over at Nita, amused. As he did, it struck her that he looked a little different somehow. “Is it just me,” she said, “or are you having another growth spurt? You look taller today.”
“I am taller,” Kit said, looking toward the kitchen as the screen door creaked open again. “Probably so are you. Looks like ten days in eight-tenths Earth gravity makes your spine stretch. My mom picked up on it last night. She measured me and I’d gained half an inch.”
“Huh,” Nita said, turning her attention back to what was left of her waffle.
“I, too, am taller,” Roshaun said, coming back into the dining room. “Your gravity is somewhat lighter than ours at home.”
“You’re the last one around here who needs to be any taller,” Dairine said as Roshaun reached for the lollipop canister again. “I have to stand on a step stool to get your attention as it is.”
“You
finished that last one already?” Nita said, taking a bite of waffle as Roshaun sorted through the canister, pulling out a couple of the root-beer–flavored pops. “Roshaun, you’re not going to have any teeth left by the time you get home.”
“We shall see. And what is this delicacy?” He reached down into Nita’s plate and snitched a chunk of waffle off it just as Nita was about to spear it with her fork. As it was, she nearly speared him instead, and wasn’t terribly sorry about it. “Hey!” Nita said. “Cut it out!”
Roshaun ignored her, chewing. “A naive but pleasing contrast,” he said. “And I wouldn’t be so concerned about my sugar intake, if I were you.” He smiled at Nita.
“I don’t eat these every five minutes, Roshaun!” Nita said, but it was too late: he was already sauntering out again.
Kit smiled as the screen door slammed once more, but the smile was sardonic. “Is he for real?” Kit said under his breath.
“Real enough to fix a busted star,” Dairine said, giving Kit an annoyed look.
Kit raised his eyebrows. “Finish explaining this to me,” he said to Dairine as she got up, “because you didn’t get into detail yesterday. He’s a prince?”
“A king,” Dairine and Sker’ret said in chorus, sounding like they’d heard the correction much too often lately.
“The upgrade from ‘prince’ happened the other day,” Dairine said.
“And he won’t let us forget it,” Sker’ret said. “I think I liked him better as a prince. He was so much less self-assured…”
Dairine rolled her eyes. She made her way around the table and out, heading through the kitchen after Roshaun. Squeak, bang! went the screen door.
“Sker’ret, my boy,” said Nita’s dad as he came in from the living room, now dressed in jeans and a polo shirt for work, “your mastery of the art of irony becomes more comprehensive every day.”
It was hard to be sure how she could tell that an alien with no face was smiling, but Nita could tell. “You going now, Daddy?” she said.
“I want to get some bookkeeping done before I open the shop. See you, sweetie.” Once again, the screen door banged shut.
“Something going on with Dairine and Roshaun?” Kit said after a moment.
Nita shook her head. “At first I thought it might just be a crush,” she said. “But now I’m starting to wonder.” Nita speared the last pieces of waffle, and a thought hit her. “Hey, did Filif hear that he needs to be here?”
The wizards around the table looked at one another. “He went out as you were coming in, didn’t he?”
Nita nodded. “He’s probably out back,” she said. “I’ll check.”
She got up and put her plate in the kitchen sink; and with Kit in tow, and Ponch following him, she went out through the side door, down the brick steps to the driveway. The morning was a little hazy, but the sun was warm on their faces. The view up and down the driveway would have seemed clear enough to any non-wizardly person who happened to pass by, but Nita’s vision, well trained in perceiving active spelling by now, could see a tremor of power all around the edges of their property, a selective-visibility field that would hide the presence or actions of anything nonhuman. Inside the screening field, the leaves on the big lilac bushes across the driveway were out at last, and the flower-spikes were growing fast. Nita was glad to see them, though they also made her sad. The winter and the earliest part of the spring seemed to have lasted forever, some ways: any sign of things being made new was welcome. But her mom had loved those lilacs, and wouldn’t be seeing them again. Nita sighed.
“Yeah, I’m tired, too,” Kit said, glancing up and down the driveway as Ponch wandered off down it. “You wouldn’t think a vacation’d leave you so wiped out.”
“And there won’t be much time to get rested up now,” Nita said. She looked down their street, where the branches of the maples beside the sidewalk, bare for so long, were now well clothed in that particular new spring yellow-green. The leaves that had been small when they first went off on their spring break were now almost full-sized. “At least there’s stuff to do…”
“And five whole days left before we have to go back to school.” Kit looked at her meaningfully.
Nita rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I know, the Mars thing. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. When did you get the idea it would be cute to carve my dad’s cellphone number on a rock in the middle of Syrtis Major? He hates it when people call me on his phone.”
Kit gave Nita a resigned look. “Sorry. I couldn’t resist.”
“Well, resist next time!” Nita said. “Anyway, we can’t just run off and start digging up half of Syrtis on our own. We have to talk to the rest of the intervention team and see if they’ve got any kind of idea where to start.”
“Yeah, but they said individual research was still okay,” Kit said as they walked up the driveway toward the gate leading to the backyard.
“You don’t fool me,” Nita said. “You just want to run all over Mars like some kind of areo-geek, and you want me to split the labor on the transport spell with you!”
“Oh, wait a minute now, it’s not that simple!”
Nita grinned, for he hadn’t denied it outright. Kit had developed a serious case of Mars fever—serious enough that he’d added a map of the planet’s two hemispheres to his bedroom wall and started sticking pins in it, the way he’d been doing with his map of the Moon for months. “It is cool, isn’t it,” Nita said, “standing there at sunset and seeing Earth? Just hanging there in the sky like a little blue star.”
“Yeah,” Kit said. “It’s not the same as when you do it from closer.”
“So let’s message Mamvish and see if she feels like getting the team together in the next few days. It’ll give you an excuse to go do some ‘new research.’ And we can take the guests along: they like to do tourist things, from what Dairine says.”
The screen door slammed again. Nita looked back to see Dairine wandering down toward them.
“Filif says he knows about Tom and Carl coming,” she said. “He’ll be up in a minute.”
“Okay,” Nita said. “Hey, you did a good job on the shield-spell around the yard. The energy for that has to have been costing you a fair amount. You need some help with it? Kit and I can take some of the strain.”
Dairine looked briefly pained. “No, it’s okay,” she said. “If it starts to be a problem before the guests have to go, you can make a donation. Spot’s holding the spell diagram for me at the moment.”
Nita blinked. “Hey, yeah, where is he this morning? I haven’t seen him.”
“He’s up in my bedroom,” Dairine said, “under the bed, saying, ‘Uh-oh.’”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Kit said. Dairine’s laptop computer was more than half wizard’s manual, if not more than half wizard, and the uh-oh-ing had proven at least once to be an indicator of some unspecified difficulty coming.
Nita shrugged. “Neither do I. But maybe Tom and Carl will know what the trouble is—”
The sound of a car turning into Nita’s driveway brought all their heads around. It was Tom’s big Nissan. “Since when do they drive over here?” Kit said as Filif came drifting toward them from the backyard gate. “They only live three blocks away.”
“Yeah,” Nita said over her shoulder. “Come on—”
A few moments later, Tom and Carl were getting out of Tom’s car: Tom looking as he usually did, tall and broad-shouldered, his hair graying, casually dressed in jeans and shirt with the sleeves rolled up; Carl, a little shorter, dark, dark-eyed, and—today at least—looking unusually intense, with the shirtsleeves down at full length. Nita’s attention fastened instantly on that intensity, and on Tom’s hair. He started going gray so fast, she thought. What’s been going on? What have I been missing?
Nita and Kit greeted the two Seniors as casually as would have been normal. “Hey, you three,” Tom said.
“Filif?” Carl said, turning to him. “Berries all in place?”
Filif laughed, a rustling sound. For the moment, anyway.
“Can we go in?” Carl said. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”
“Yeah,” Nita said. “Come on.” She gestured toward the door.
Kit pulled the screen door open, holding it for everybody. Nita dawdled a little, watching with fascination as Filif went up the back steps after Tom and Carl. It was hard to see how Filif did it: his people had some personal-privacy thing about their roots, and when they moved, there was always a visually opaque field around the root area, like a little cloud that concealed the actual locomotion.
When they were all inside, Nita slipped past them and into the dining room to rearrange the chairs. As Tom and Carl came in, Sker’ret and Roshaun rose to greet them, the respectful gesture of a less senior wizard to a more senior one—though Nita noticed with some annoyance that Roshaun looked slightly skeptical.
“Sker’ret,” Tom said, while Nita sorted out the seating, “I was talking to your honorable ancestor this morning. He sends his best.”
“Does he?” Sker’ret said, politely enough, but Nita thought she caught some edge behind the words. Roshaun was standing there off to one side, with Dairine, looking slightly superior as usual. Carl turned to him. “Roshaun ke Nelaid am Seriv am Teliuyve am Meseph am Veliz am Teriaunst am det Nuiiliat,” Carl said, “eniwe’ sa pheir—”And then he continued, not in the Speech, but in a beautiful flow of language that sounded more like running water than like words. Nonetheless, the meaning was plain, for those who speak the Speech can listen in it as well, comprehending any language. “A sorrow for your new burden, Sunborn. Bear it as befits you, and lay it down in its proper time, mere cast-off shadow as it is of the greater radiance beyond.”
Roshaun looked utterly stunned. He bowed to Tom and Carl as if they were as royal as he thought he was, or more so. “May it be so,” he said, “here and henceforward.”
They nodded to him, and moved around the table to get settled.
“Now those are Seniors,” Roshaun said under his breath as he sat down beside Nita. “I was wondering if your people had any worthy of the name.”