Games Wizards Play

3

Wellakh / Hempstead

THE HUGE HIGH-CEILINGED SPACE was dark, walled in by rough stone. Only its floor was smooth, and mostly dark except where hot orange light fell on it in the center of the room. There, floating perhaps a meter above the floor, hung what appeared to be a giant burning globe of gas twenty meters across, turning slowly and gently in the air. Swarms of sunspots crept slowly across its surface in big clusters and patches: prominences arched out from it into the dark empty air, strained at what seemed to be gravity, fell back again.

In all the ways that mattered, it looked like a sun: specifically, a dark golden-orange subgiant star somewhere between types G and K, perhaps a G6. The only odd thing about it was the way it was throbbing—its surface blooming outward, shivering, then falling back again, shifting the big dark patches of sunspots around so that they drifted farther from one another briefly when the burning surface expanded, then flocked closer together when it collapsed back again.

The only other immediately peculiar aspect of the situation would have been the thin young redheaded girl in capri pants and sneakers and a long floppy purple print top who came stomping around from the far side of the huge burning globe, waving her arms and yelling at the top of her lungs, “Okay, that was completely out of bounds, there was no need to do that, and you may think it was cute, but pulling a cheap stunt like that absolutely and completely sucks!”

After a few moments’ silence, from behind the stellar simulator two other figures emerged: a big blocky silver-haired man in jeans and a polo shirt, and a much taller and slenderer man with tied-back red hair nearly down to his knees, wearing soft dark-amber trousers and boots and a long open vestlike robe a shade darker. The taller man folded his arms across his chest in a resigned manner and looked at the shorter one, who had shoved his hands into his pockets and was gazing at the far-off ceiling and shaking his head.

“Harold,” the taller man said, “pray advise me. Would this be an appropriate response to what we’ve just seen?”

Dairine’s father shrugged. “Was what happened just there something that was supposed to happen?”

“No, no, no, no, NO!” Dairine shouted, and stalked away from them, waving her arms in the air. “Don’t you two start trying to tag-team me, now, this is the last thing I need—”

“I mean, I don’t see what the fuss is about,” Dairine’s dad said. “It didn’t blow up anything like as hard as it did the time before last. This looks more like heavy breathing, and it seems to be settling down. So relatively speaking, what you’re doing looks like an overreaction.”

“If I had been prepared for it, it’d never have happened!”

“Precisely the point,” Nelaid said. “This is about how you react when you are not prepared.”

Dairine whirled and threw a look at Nelaid that (if being a wizard was good for anything) should have vaporized him. Then she whirled away and went stomping off again.

The two men exchanged glances. “Harold,” said Nelaid, “is it, do you think, appropriate to discuss anger management strategies at some future date?”

“Nel,” said Dairine’s dad, sounding completely resigned, “you’re on.” They watched Dairine with their arms folded, in nearly matching poses, with nearly matching faces.

She stopped herself from coming around for another bout of stomping and paused long enough for a familiar shape to come pacing out of the shadows on numerous mechanical legs. Spot’s laptop-body was moving close to the ground and nothing like the normal number of stalked eyes were in evidence: he looked like he was purposely trying to keep a low profile.

No need for you to be doing that, she said silently as she scooped him up.

Yes there is, Spot said, and pulled his eyes in tightly enough to his upper carapace that they vanished into it.

“It is not fair that you won’t let me use Spot!” she said to Nelaid, hugging Spot to her as Nelaid and her father headed over to her.

“Fairness does not enter into it,” Nelaid said, “because, as I thought I surely must have made plain to you by now, while your mech-based colleague may indeed be specialized hardware, he is not specialized enough for this task. And we have been over this a good number of times. The Sunstone is more specialized and far more suitable to purpose when it comes to everyday maintenance of a star than even Spot’s most carefully tailored wizardly routines, regardless of how assiduously you have been attempting to alter them to suit your needs. Which are mostly impelled by laziness,” he said to Dairine’s dad.

“Tell me about it,” her dad said, rolling his eyes. “I blame these smartphones, myself. Nobody knows how to just remember anything anymore.”

Nelaid flashed what Dairine suspected was a very precisely calculated half-smile. “Wellakhit wizards have been looking for alternate modalities to the Stone for longer than people on your planet have known how to do algebra, and have yet to find anything as suitable as this particular orthorhombic silicate crystal for the work of mapping wizardry onto the fine structures of a solar interior. That you expect that you will be able to do so simply so that you can allow Spot to handle the imaging and patterning routines for you, rather than learning to build the spell interface inside your own mind while using the Sunstone for templating, is, well, ambitious at the very least. But also rather self-deluding.”

“You think ‘stubborn’ might fit into the description somewhere?” said her dad.

“Oh God, what have I done to deserve this?” Dairine muttered.

“That is possibly an issue you will want to take up with Roshaun at some later date,” Nelaid said.

Dairine froze.

There was a time, she thought, when if he’d said something like that to me, I’d either have broken down and cried or punched him out. Now, though—But how can he say his name as if he’s just stepped out of the room, as if what happened to him hadn’t—? Dairine’s throat went achy in the space of a breath. She hated it when that happened and there was no way to control it—

I can’t wait until I’m so much better at this that I can safely tell him just what I think of him! And she let out a breath of exasperation, more at herself than at him.—Sometime in the next century, at this rate. But in the meantime, Spot was squirming to get down. Dairine puffed out an angry breath and crouched down to put him on the floor and let him skitter away. “My son took some time to master the fine detail of structuring the plasma management routines,” Nelaid said, sounding completely unaware of Dairine’s anger, or (worse) uncaring of it. “It is neither fun nor easy, and it is never going to be. If as you have been saying you intend to fulfill some of his functions for our world as well as his, the technique must be learned as taught before you can go on to try to improve it.”

“If it’s worth doing,” Dairine’s dad said, “it’s worth doing right. Even when it’s a pain in the ass . . .”

One of his favorite sayings, and one she’d been sick of hearing since she was nine. Dairine had been furious at Nelaid, and now she was getting furious at her dad as well. Exponentially furious, she thought. But when they’re like this they’re more than the sum of their parts, so I get at least the square of how angry I normally am. If we could just have a huge blowup it’d be great, but they just keep calming each other down.

“Leaving aside the issue of how you operate on the simulator, or the star it represents,” said Nelaid, “I see I also still need to impress on you that just because one starts to feel more comfortable with a given star’s attributes and characteristics, that is no reason to allow the comfort or familiarity to bleed into one’s treatment of other stars that are overtly similar.”

“Well, it wouldn’t be an issue if you didn’t sneakily just change the simulator’s settings so that—”

“And why would a star on which you are operating normally take the trouble of notifying you before it is about to do something unexpected? The unexpectedness is the whole point. There is no more dangerous scenario than the one in which you are absolutely certain that you know what will happen. You were plainly quite certain of how the oblique shockfront was going to propagate in that last run, so much so that when the pressure densities of the plasma in the chromosphere underneath it started to change, you discounted the change entirely . . .”

“She did catch it before it blew, though,” Dairine’s dad said.

“True enough, Harold, but if she had been so careless with your star, the resultant derangement of its upper atmosphere, transient though it was, would shortly have done significant damage to the delicate upper levels of your planet’s atmosphere. Your climate would have suffered significantly as a result, and the survivors of the weather difficulties that would inevitably have followed would not have thanked Dairine for the increase in skin cancers and the cascade effects such as selective extinctions of species too fragile to cope with the change in lower-atmosphere UV levels.”

“Mmm, I take your point.”

“I dropped a decimal point, okay?” Dairine yelled, clutching at her hair as she swung away from them.

“Pretty heavy one, looks like,” her dad said, with a complete lack of sympathy.

It was bad enough when Nelaid got underhanded on her. But when her dad ganged up on her with him . . . “Aaaaaaaagh!!”

Her dad and Nelaid sighed and gazed at each other with that here-she-goes-again expression. How is this my life? Dairine thought, as she struggled to calm herself down. How can everything be so screwed up when I’m a wizard? And when I have a computer who’s also a wizard? And even my sister’s a wizard? And my dad’s okay with all this? And when I also now somehow have a space dad?! Which—not that she would have admitted it to anybody—was incredibly cool, especially since he was also a wizard, might as well be considered the king of his planet, and was deemed so powerful and scary by some of his own people that they routinely tried to assassinate him—

“Dairine.”

She blinked. Nelaid had glanced away from her father and was holding a tiny spark of white fire between thumb and forefinger. It was his manifestation of the wizard’s manual, and he was studying it the way someone would look at an interesting new bug. “I wonder if this might perhaps be a wise time to finish up.” He looked back to her father. “You dislike letting these sessions run too late into afternoon of your local day, which I believe is now well advanced . . .”

Her dad checked his watch. “Closing time’s coming on at the shop, yeah,” he said, “and there are a couple of things I want to check up on before we lock up for the evening.”

Suddenly Dairine felt very tired. It had been a long work session today, partly because her spring break period was ending and this would be the last day for a while that her schedule and Nelaid’s would coincide for more than a few hours at once. “Yeah,” Dairine said. “Okay.”

“I will set up the homeward transport for you outside, then.”

“Fine,” her dad said. “Come on back with us?” he asked Nelaid. “You did want to have a look at that rhododendron I was telling you about.”

“I will see you home, certainly, and after that I am at your disposal. Just give me a few seconds to collapse this.”

She and her dad headed for the barred gates that led out onto the terrace as Nelaid turned to decommission the stellar simulator. “And why not?” her dad murmured as they made their way out. “Got some shopping to do as well. No point in boring you with it when he likes to come along.”

Dairine snickered and went to lean against the chest-high balustrade at the far side of the terrace that surrounded this level of the Sunlords’ towering stone-spire palace. It wasn’t so long ago that the relationship had seemed not just ridiculous but unlikely. “Perhaps I would understand your personal situation more clearly if I were to see you more often in your own environment?” Nelaid had said. And that had unfortunately seemed too sensible for Dairine to object much, especially if she wanted to keep doing this work with him—the work Roshaun had done and that she wanted to learn, too, as a possible way to find out what had happened to him, and to get him back. So Dairine had said “Okay” and not thought too much more about it, except to hope that her father wouldn’t have too much trouble with their home life being occasionally invaded by someone who was more or less equivalent to an alien king.

Then, when her dad and Nelaid met, they not only liked each other a whole lot but knew it instantly, and Dairine realized her problems were even more complex than she’d feared. She’d wondered whether wizardry had been involved somehow, except that she knew Nelaid would never stoop to any such thing. He was way too serious and straightforward a wizard to even consider doing anything as potentially invasive as tampering with someone’s mind without consent.

He came visiting often enough that they’d begun passing him off as an uncle. Or, not ‘we’ did, Dairine thought. He did. “My brother,” Dairine had heard her dad say casually to a customer in the shop one afternoon, when she’d walked in after school. Nelaid was standing there with an armful of chrysanthemums, looking around in apparent confusion, while her dad stood behind the counter wrapping some kind of dish arrangement in white-and-gold gift paper. And what was extremely peculiar was that as they stood there—the tall broad-shouldered man with the prematurely silver hair and the very tall slim man with the longish hair that was almost exactly the red-gold of Dairine’s own—they really did look like they were related. And it’s not just the disguise-wizardry Nelaid’s wearing, Dairine had thought at the time. Something else is going on. Whatever it was, it made the relationship show in their eyes. It was so extremely odd, the whole idea that you could have family on other planets: or that it could have been lying there waiting for you for years and years without you ever expecting it . . .

Except that this isn’t the relationship I’m interested in having on another planet! This is just complicating things.

Things got even more complicated after that when her dad and Nelaid started going out shopping together. “If there’s a better way to teach you about our culture in a hurry,” her dad had said, “I don’t know what it’d be.” And off they’d gone to the Pathmark supermarket in Baldwin, and if there had been any sight that could spin your brain right around in your head, it was your father the florist standing in front of a heap of cantaloupes with the most senior wizard of a planet hundreds of light-years away, discussing seasons and the way axial tilt affects an area’s mean solar radiation, and how to use the little depression at the bottom of the melon that you pressed into to make sure it was ripe. It was weird enough to Dairine that Nelaid considered her father to be some kind of potential spiritual leader because he worked with plants. Though Wellakh people have always been a bit plant crazy. I guess you have to be when that’s where the oxygen comes from and the vegetation’s all that’s kept your planet habitable after a flare . . .

“So,” said Nelaid as he came through the gate into the body of the peak and waved it shut after him, heading out across the terrace to them. He had changed into charcoal trousers, a white shirt, and a navy blazer, with his hair still tied back but looking much shorter, thanks to a fairly simple concealment spell. Dairine had to turn away to hide her amusement—he looked like some kind of rock promoter heading for a casual business lunch.

As Nelaid walked, the polished redstone floor came alive with buried lines and circles and ellipses in blue light: a complex worldgating spell, densely interwritten with the Speech’s long flowing characters and spreading out from where they stood for about twenty meters on either side. “When next we meet collegially, Dairine, we need to spend some more time on the way you have been handling the relationship between the spectral radiance and solar wind mass loss. The sooner this is handled, the sooner we can avoid having to revisit this scenario and go on to something more, well, challenging.”

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.”

Dairine let out the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding, and grinned.

“How long’s this last, Tom?” Dairine’s dad said.

“Three weeks, give or take. There’s an informal plenary session to start, then a couple of orientation days for everyone to get to know each other. After that, informal spell assessments lead up to the eighth-finals, where spells are judged against each other theoretically for relative effectiveness. Quarter-finals are for ‘proof of concept,’ the demonstration of single elements of wizardries. That culls out another half of the competitors. All this time the mentors and candidates are working together—they sort out their own schedules and meet whenever they think they need to. After that, semifinals in front of a panel of twenty or so wizards at Advisory or Senior level. Two thirds of the competitors are set aside there. After that, three rounds of pre-finals go forward in groups of fifteen or twenty. And finally, five wizards do their full spell implementations at the big final session on the Moon.”

“Safer there, is it?” said Dairine’s dad.

Tom raised his eyebrows. “If something gets out of hand,” he said, “just as well that it happens over on the ‘dark side,’ especially these days. We have to work around the various lunar orbiters, and we usually put a stealth shield over the proceedings to be safe. Not that most of the spells even show, from space. But better to be sure.”

“And this can be worked around school, I take it?”

“Oh, yes. In your case, I see that your kids’ school has just gone to split sessions: that’ll make things easier for the three of them.” Dairine’s head came up again at that. “Oh, yes, Kit’s in it, too: he and Nita are a team on this as usual,” said Tom. “I have to go see his dad and mom after we’re done here. But otherwise, except for the big events, it’s up to the mentors and candidates how and where they meet. And of course worldwide worldgating travel’s subsidized for this, for the duration. It’s a bit of a perk.”

Dairine’s dad nodded. “So I get to go to this?” he said to Dairine. “When you make the final, or your candidate does.” And he grinned. Dairine grinned back.

“Sure you do,” Tom said. “You count as vital support personnel. No one would think of keeping you away.”

Tom dusted his hands off and picked up his jacket again. “So I’ll be on my way,” he said. “Unless there are any more boxes you need moved?”

“Nope,” Dairine’s dad said. “We’re sorted here.”

“Later, then.” And absolutely without noise, Tom vanished.

Dairine let out a long breath, staring at where he’d been. When she looked back at them, her dad and Nelaid were both smiling at her. “You two are so mean to me,” she said. “You were always going to say yes! You just let me stand here and squirm.”

Nelaid looked at Harold, arched an eyebrow. “Has anyone considered introducing the concept of gratitude to this planet?” he started to say, and then was cut off suddenly on finding himself wearing Dairine around his middle, hugging him hard. The whoof of the breath going out of him was satisfying.

Her dad was the next victim, but he had a few moments to prepare. “You’re going to love this,” she said into his chest.

“Just make sure you do,” he replied, hugging her back. “That’s the whole point.”

Not the whole one, Dairine thought. But it’ll do . . .