Dedication:
For Lt. Col. Shaun Johnny' O'Driscoll, USAF (ret.)

CONTENTS

ADMONITION TO THE READER
1. an tSionainn Shannon
2. Cill Cumhaid Kilquade
3. Bri Cualann Bray
4. Ath na Sceire Enniskerry
5. Faoin gCnoc Under the Hill
6. Baile atha Cliath Dublin
7. Slieve na Chulainn Great Sugarloaf Mountain
8. Cheárta na Chill Pheadair Kilpedder Forge
9. Casleán na mBroinn/Caher Matrices Castle Matrix
10. Lughnasád
11. ag na Machairi Teithra The Plains of Tethra
12. Tir na nOg

A SMALL GLOSSARY

Introduction

 -Next

ADMONITION TO THE READER

Geography in Ireland is an equivocal thing, and perhaps meant to be so. The more solid the borderline, the more dangerous the land's own response to it; the vaguer the boundary, the kindlier. This is best seen in the behavior of the borders between what we consider our own reality, and the other less familiar realities that shoulder up against it. Such boundaries are never very solid in Ireland, and never more dangerous than when one tries to define them, to cross over. Twilight is always safer there than full day, or full dark. This being the case, I have taken considerable liberties with locations and with 'established' boundaries, including those between counties and towns. County Wicklow is real enough, but there are a lot of things in the Wicklow in this book that are not presently located in the 'real' county -and my version of Bray is not meant to represent the real one… at the moment. The description of the townlands around Ballyvolan Farm and the neighborhood of Kilquade is more or less real, though the two are actually some miles apart. And Sugar loaf Mountain looks like parts of its description… occasionally.

Most specifically, though, Castle Matrix exists - possibly more concretely than anything else in the book. But it has been moved from its present, 'actual' location. Or perhaps one can more rightly say that Matrix has stayed where it is, where it always is, but Ireland has shifted around it. Stranger things have happened. In any case, let the inquisitive reader beware… and leave the maps at home.

—Diane Duane

1. an tSionainn
Shannon

 - Prev/Next

I am the Point of a Weapon (that poureth forth combat),

I am the God who fashioneth Fire for a head…

Who calleth the hosts from the House of Tethra?

Who is the troop, who is the God who fashioneth edges?

(Lebor Gabdla Erenn, tr. Macalister)

Three signs of the Return: the stranger in the door: the friendless wizard: the unmitigated Sun.

Three signs of the Monomachy: a smith without a forge: a saint without a cell: a day without a night. (Book of Night with Moon, triptychs 113, 598)

The first that Nita found out about what was going to happen was when she came in after a long afternoon's wizardry with Kit. They had been working for three days to attempt to resolve a territorial dispute among several trees. It isn't easy to argue with a tree. It isn't easy to get one to stop strangling another one with its roots. But they were well along towards what appeared to be a negotiated settlement, and Nita was worn out.

She came into the kitchen to find her mother cooking. Her mother cooked a great deal as a hobby, but she also cooked as therapy. Nita began to worry immediately when she noticed that her mother had embarked on some extremely complicated project that seemed to require three souffle dishes and the use of every appliance in the kitchen at once. She decided to get out as fast as she could, before she was asked to wash something. "Hi, Mum," she said, and edged hurriedly towards the door into the rest of the house.

"What's the rush?" said her mother. “Don't you want to see what I'm doing?"

"Sure," said Nita, who wanted to do no such thing. "What are you doing?"

"I've been thinking," said her mother.

Nita began to worry more than ever. Her mother was at her most dangerous when she was thinking, and it rarely meant anything but trouble for Nita. 'About what?"

"Sit down, honey. Don't look as if you're going to go flying out the door any minute. I need to talk to you."

Uh oh… here it comes! Nita sat down and began playing spin-the-spoon games with one of the wooden spoons that among many other utensils was littering the kitchen table.

“Honey," her mother said,"this wizardry...”

“It's going pretty well with the trees, Mum," Nita said, desperate to guide her mother on to some subject more positive. Her present tone didn't sound positive at all.

“No, I don't mean that, honey. Talking to trees - that's all right, that doesn't bother me. The kind of things you've been doing lately… you and Kit…"

Oh no. "Mum, we haven't got in trouble, not really. And we've been doing pretty well, for new wizards. When you're as young as we are. . ."

"Exactly," her mother said. "When you're as young as you are." She did something noisy with the blender for a moment and then said, "Hon, don't you think it would be a good idea if you just let all this - have a rest? Just for a month or so."

Nita looked at her mother without understanding at all, and worrying. "What do you mean?"

"Well, your dad and I have been talking - and you and Kit have been seeing an awful lot of each other in connection with this wizard business. We're thinking that it might be a good idea if you two sort of… didn't see each other for a little while."

"Mum!"

"No, hear me out. I understand you're good friends, I know there's nothing… physical going on between you, so put that out of your mind. We're very glad each of you has such a good friend. That's not a concern. What is a concern is that you two are spending a lot of time on this magic stuff, at the expense of everything else. That's all you do. You go out in the morning, you come back worn out, you barely have energy to speak to us sometimes… What about your childhood?"

"What about it?" Nita said, in some slight annoyance. Her experience of most of her childhood so far had been that it varied between painful and boring. Wizardry might be painful occasionally, but it was never boring. 'Mum - you don't understand. This isn't something that you can just turn off. You take the Wizard's Oath for life."

“Oh, honey!” her mother said in some distress, and dropped a spoon. She picked it up, wiping it off. 'Why do you have to make this harder than it. Never mind. Look. Dad thinks it would be a good idea if you went to visit your Aunt Annie in Ireland for a month or so, until school starts again."

“Ireland!”

'Well, yes. She's been inviting us over there for a while now. We can't go with you, of course -we've had our holiday for this year, and Dad has to be at work. He can't take any more time off. But you could certainly go. School doesn't start until September the ninth. That would give you a good month and a half now."

There was going to be nothing good about it, as far as Nita was concerned. The best part of the summer, the best weather, the leisure time that she had been looking forward to using working with Kit. . .

“Mum," Nita said, changing tack, "how are you going to afford this?"

“Honey, you leave that to your dad and me to handle. Right now we're more concerned with doing the right thing for you. And for Kit."

“Oh, you've been talking to his parents, have you?"

“No, we haven't. I think they're going to have to sort things out with Kit in their own way: I wouldn't presume to dictate to them. But we want you to go to Ireland for six weeks or so and take a breather. And see something different: something in the real world."

Oh dear, Nita thought. They think this is the real world. Or all of it that really matters, anyway. “Mum," she said, “I don't know if you understand what you're doing here. A wizard doesn't stop doing wizardry just because they're not at home. If I go on call in Ireland, I go on call, and there's nothing that's going to stop it. Or can stop it. I've made my promises. If I have to go on call, wouldn't you rather have me here, where you and Dad can keep an eye on me and know exactly what's going on all the time?"

Nita's mother frowned at that, and then looked at Nita with an expression compounded of equal parts of suspicion and amusement. “Sneaky," she said. "No; I'm sorry. Your Aunt Annie will keep good close tabs on you - we've had a couple of talks with her about that. . ."

Nita's eyebrows went up at that - first in annoyance that it was going to be difficult to get away and do anything useful if there was need: then in alarm. "Oh, Mum, you didn't tell her that I'm. . ."

“No, we didn't tell her that you're a wizard! What are we supposed to do, honey? Say to your aunt, "Listen, Anne, you have to understand that our daughter might vanish suddenly. No, I don't mean run away - just disappear into thin air. And if she goes to the Moon, tell her to dress up warm.” "

Nita's mother gave her a wry look and reached out for the wooden spoon that Nita had been playing with. “No. You managed to hide it from us long enough, Heaven knows… you shouldn't have any trouble keeping things under cover with your aunt." She paused to start folding some beaten egg white into another mixture she had been working on. "Your dad is going to see about the plane tickets tomorrow. I think it's Saturday that you'll be leaving - the fare is cheaper then."

“I could just, you know, go there," Nita said desperately. "It would save you the money, at least."

“I think we'll do this the old-fashioned way," Nita's mother said calmly. "Even you would have some logistical problems with arriving at the airport and getting off the plane without anyone noticing that you hadn't been there before."

Nita frowned and began to work on that one.

“Wo," Nita's mother said. "Forget it. We'll send enough pocket money for you to get along with; you'll have plenty of kids to play with. . ."

Play with, Nita thought, and groaned inwardly.

“Come on, Neets, cheer up a little! It should be interesting, going to a foreign country for the first time."

I've been to foreign galaxies, Nita thought. But this I'm not so sure about. However, further argument wasn't going to help her. No matter: there were ways around this problem, if she would just keep her mouth shut.

“OK," she said.” I'll go - but I won't like it."

Her mother gazed at her thoughtfully. "I thought you were the one who told me that wizardry was about doing what you had to, whether you liked it or not?"

“It's true," Nita said, and got up to go out.

“And Nita," her mother said.

"What, Mum?"

“I want your promise that you will not be popping back here on the sly to visit Kit. That little "beam-me-up-Scotty" spell that he's so fond of, and that I see you two using when you want to save your train fare for ice cream."

Nita went white, then flushed hot. That was the one option she had been counting on to make this whole thing tolerable. “Mum! But Mum, it's easy, I can just. . ."

“You can not just. We want you to take a break from each other for a while. Now I want you to promise me."

Nita let out a long breath. Her mother had her, and knew she did; for a wizard's promise had to be kept. When you spend your life working with words that describe and explain, and even change, the way the Universe is, you can't play around with those words, and you can't lie… at least not without major and unpleasant consequences.

“I promise," Nita said, hating it. “But this is going to be miserable."

“We'll see about that," Nita's mother said. "You go ahead now, and do what you have to do."

“Oh, no!" Kit said. "This is dire."

They were sitting on the Moon, on a peak of the Carpathian Mountains, about twenty miles south of the crater Copernicus. The view of Earth from there this time of month was good; she was waxing towards the full, while on the Moon there was nothing but a sun very low on the horizon. Long, long shadows stretched across the breadth of the Carpathians, so that the illuminated crests of the jagged peaks stood up from great pools of darkness, like rough-hewn pyramids floating on nothing. It was cold there; the wizardly force-field that surrounded them snowed flakes of frozen air gently on to the powdery white rock around them when they moved and changed the field's inner volume. But cold as it was, it was private.

"We were just getting somewhere with the trees," Nita muttered. "I can't believe this."

"Do they really think it's going to make a difference?"

"Oh, I don't know. Who knows what they think, half the time? And the worst of it is, they won't let me come back." Nita picked up a small piece of pumice and chucked it away, watching as it sailed about a hundred meters away in the light gravity and bounced a couple of meters high when it first hit the ground again. It continued bouncing down the mountain, and she watched it idly. "We had three other projects waiting to be started. They're all shot now: there won't be any time to do anything about them before I have to go."

Kit stretched and looked unhappy. "We can still talk mind to mind; you can coach me at a distance when I need help. Or I can help you. . ."

"It's not the same." She had often enough tried explaining to her parents the 'high' you got from working closely with another wizard: the feeling that magic made in your mind while working with another, the texture, was utterly unlike that of a wizardry worked alone - more dangerous, more difficult, ultimately more satisfying.

Nita sighed. "There must be some way we can work around this. How are your parents handling things lately?"

At that Kit sighed too. "Variable. My dad doesn't mind it so much. He says, "Big deal, my son's a brujo." My mother… she has this idea that we are somehow meddling with Dark Forces." Kit made a fake theremin noise, like that heard in a bad horror movie when the monster is lurking around a corner, about to jump on someone. Nita laughed.

Kit shook his head. "When are they making you leave?"

"Saturday." Nita rested her chin on one hand, picked up another rock and chucked it away. "All of a sudden there's all this stuff I have to pack, and all these things we have to do. Go to the passport office and wave the tickets at them so they'll give me one fast. Go to the bank and get foreign money. Buy new clothes. Wash the old ones." She rolled her eyes and fell silent. Nita hated that kind of rushed busy-ness, and she was up to her neck in it now.

"How's your sister holding up?"

Nita laughed. "Dairine likes me, but she's hardly heartbroken. Besides, she's busy managing her wizardry these days… spends most of her time working with her computer. You wouldn't believe some of the conversations I've heard over its voice-link recently." She fell into an imitation of Dairine's high-pitched voice, made even more squeaky by annoyance. "No, I will not move your galaxy… what do you want to move it for? It's fine right where it is!"

"Sheesh," Kit said. Dairine, as a very new wizard, was presently at the height of her power; as a very young wizard, she was also more powerful at the moment than both of them put together. The only thing they had on her at the moment was experience.

“Yeah. We don't fight nearly as much as we used to… she's gone really quiet. I'm not sure it's normal."

“Oh," Kit said, and laughed out loud. "You mean, like we're normal. We're beginning to sound like our parents."

Nita had to laugh at that too. "You may have something there." But then the amusement went out of her. "Oh, Kit," she said, “ I'm going to miss you. I miss you already, and I haven't left."

"Hey, c'mon," he said, and punched her in the shoulder. "You'll get over it. You'll meet some guy over there and. . ."

"Don't joke," Nita said, irritable. "I don't care about meeting "some guy over there". They're probably all geeks. I don't even know if they speak the same language."

"Your aunt does."

"My aunt is American," Nita said.

"Yeah, they speak English over there," Kit said. "It's not all just Irish." He looked at Nita with a concerned expression. "Come on, Neets. If life hands you lemons, make lemonade. You can see a new place, you can probably meet some of their wizards. They'll be in the directory. Neets… give it a chance," he said, glancing around them. He picked up a rock too, turning it over and over in his hands. "Where are you going to be? Dublin? Or somewhere else?"

"That's all there is," Nita said grimly. "Dublin, and the country. All potato fields and cow pastures."

"Saw that in the manual, did you?"

Nita rolled her eyes. Kit could be incredibly pedantic sometimes. "No."

Kit sighed and looked at her. "I'm going to miss you too," he said. “I miss you already."

She looked at him, and saw it was true: and the bad mood fell off her, or mostly off, replaced by a feeling of unhappy resignation. "It's only six weeks," she said then.

Kit's face matched her feeling. "We'll do it standing on our heads," he said.

Nita smiled at him unhappily. Since wizards did not lie outright, when one tried to stretch the truth, it showed woefully. "Come on," she said, "we're running out of air. Let's get on with it."

Saturday came.

Kit came with them on the ride to the airport. It was a grim, silent sort of ride, broken only by the kind of strained conversation people make when they desperately need to say something, anything, to keep the silence from getting too thick. At least, it seemed silent. She and Kit would pass the occasional comment mind-to-mind. It wasn't all that easy; they didn't do it much… they'd got in the habit of just talking to each other, since telepathy often got itself tangled up with a lot of other information you didn't need, or want, the other person to have. But now, habits or not, they were going to have to get a lot better at mindtouch if they were going to talk at all frequently.

They reached the airport, did the formalities with the ticket, checked in Nita's bag - a medium-sized one, not too difficult for her to handle herself, though she was privately determined to make it weightless if she had to carry it anywhere alone. And then the announcement system called her flight, and there was nothing to do but go on.

She hugged her mum, and her dad. "Have a good time now," her father said.

She sighed and said, “I'll try, Daddy. Mummy. . .“ And she was surprised at herself; she didn't usually call her mother 'Mummy'. They hugged again, hard.

"Be good, now," her mother said. “Don't. . .“ She trailed off. The “don't” was a huge one, and Nita could hear in it all the things parents always say: don't get in trouble, don't forget to wash - but most specifically, don't get into anything dangerous, like the last time. Or the time before that. Or the time before that. . .

"I'll try, Mum," she said. It was all she could guarantee.

Then she looked at Kit. 'Dai," he said.

"Dai stihó," she replied. It was the greeting and farewell of one wizard to another in the wizardly Speech: it meant as much 'Bye for forever' as 'Bye for now'. For Nita, at the moment, it felt rather more like the first.

At that point she simply couldn't stand it any more. She waved, a weak gesture, and turned her back on them all, and slung her rucksack over her shoulder, and her warm jacket that her mother had insisted she bring, and she walked down the long, cold hall of the airport, towards the plane.

It was a 747. Her sensitivity was running high -perhaps because of her own nervousness and distress at leaving - but the plane was alive in the way that mechanical things usually seemed to her as a result of working with Kit. That was his speciality - the ability to feel what a rock was saying, reading the secret thoughts of a lift or a freezer, the odd thing-thoughts that run in the currents of energy which occur naturally or are built into physical objects, manmade or not. She could hear the plane straining against the chocks behind its many wheels, and its engines thinking of eating cold, cold air at thirty degrees below, and pushing it out behind. There was a sense of purpose about it, of restraint, and of eagerness to get out of there, to be gone.

It was a reassuring sort of feeling. She absently returned the smile of the stewardess at the plane's door, and patted the plane as she got in; let the lady help her find her seat, so as to feel that she was doing something useful. Nita sat herself down by the window, fastened her seat belt, and got out her manual.

For a moment she just held it in her hand. Just a small beat-up book in a buckram library binding, with the apparent title, so YOU WANT TO BE A WIZARD?, the supposed author's name, Hearn, and the Dewey Decimal System number, all written on the spine in white ink. Nita shook her head and smiled at the book, a little conspiratorially, for it was a lot more than that. Was it only two years ago, no, two and a half now, that she had found it in the local library? Or it had found her; she still wasn't too sure, remembering the way something had seemed to grab her hand as she ran it along the shelf where the book had been sitting. Whether it was alive was a subject on which the manual itself threw no light. Certainly it changed, adding new spells and other information as needed, updating news of what other wizards in the world were doing. Using it, she had found Kit in the middle of a wizardry of his own, and helped him with it, so passing through their Ordeal together and starting their partnership. They had got into deep trouble together, several times: but together, they had always got out again.

Nita sighed and started paging through the manual, very much missing the 'together' part of the arrangement. She had been resisting looking for the information on Ireland that Kit had mentioned until this point, hoping against hope that there would be a stay of execution. Even now she cherished the idea that her mother or father might come pushing down the narrow aisle between the seats, saying, “No, no, we've changed our minds!" But she knew it was futile. When her mother got an idea into her head, she was almost as stubborn as Nita was.

So she sat there, and looked down at the manual. It had fallen open at the Wizard's Oath.

In Life's name, and for Life's sake, I assert that I will employ the Art which is Its gift in Life's service alone, rejecting all other usages. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; nor will I change any creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened, or threaten another. To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will ever put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so - looking always toward the Heart of Time, where all our sundered times are one, and all our myriad worlds lie whole, in the One from Whom they proceeded…

The whole plane wobbled as the little tug in front of it pushed it away from the gate. Nita peered out the window. Pressing her nose against the cool plastic and looking out, she could just barely make out her mother and father gazing through the window at her; her mother waving a little tentatively, her father gripping the railing in front of the window, not moving. And a little behind them, out of their range of vision, looking out the window too, Kit.

Stay warm, he said in her head.

Kit, it's not like I'm going away. We'll be hearing from each other all the time in our heads. It's not like I'm really going away… Is it?

She was quiet for a moment. The tug pushing the plane began to turn it, so that her view of him was lost.

Yes it is, he said.

Yeah, well. She caught herself sighing again. Look, you're going to have the trees to deal with again, and you need time to plan what you're going to do. And I need time to calm myself down. Going to call me later?

Yeah. What time?

This thing won't be down until early tomorrow morning, their time, she said.

Doesn't want to come down at all, from the feel of it, Kit said drily.

Nita chuckled, caught an odd look from a passing stewardess, and made herself busy looking as if she had read something funny in her manual. Yeah. Call me about this time tomorrow.

You got it. Have a good flight!

For what it's worth, Nita said.

The plane began to trundle purposefully out towards the runway. They didn't have to wait long; air traffic control gave them clearance right away -Nita, eavesdropping along the plane's nerves, heard the pilot acknowledging it. Half a minute later the plane screamed delight and leaped into the air.

New York slid away behind them, replaced by the open sea.

Seven hours later, they landed in Shannon.

Nita had thought she would be completely unable to sleep, but when they turned out most of the lights in the plane after the meal service, she leaned her head against the window to see if she could relax enough to watch the film a little.

The next thing she knew, the sun was coming in the window, and there was land below them. Nita looked down into the early sun - six o'clock in the morning, it was - and saw the ragged black coastline and the curling water white where the water smashed into the rocks, where the Atlantic threw itself in fury against this first eastern barrier to its will. And then green - everywhere green, divided by little lines of hedge; a hundred shades of green, emerald, viridian, khaki, the pale green that has no right to be anywhere outside of spring - hedgerows winding between, white dots of sheep, tiny cars crawling along little toy roads: but always the green. The plane turned and she saw the beginning sprawl of houses, and Shannon town - a little city, barely the size of her own.

The plane was turning to line up with the airport's active runway, and the sun caught her full in the eyes. She shivered, a feeling that had nothing to do with the warmth of the sudden light. That was warm enough, but the feeling was cold. Something about to happen, something about the lances of light, the fire. . .Nita shook her head: the feeling was gone. I didn't sleep very well, she thought. I'm susceptible to weird ideas. But then when wizards have weird ideas, they do well to pay attention to them. She forced herself to relive the feeling, to think again of the cold, and the fire, the sun like a spear. . .

Nothing came of it. She shrugged, and watched the plane finish its turn and drop towards the runway.

It took them about fifteen minutes to get down, and for the plane to trundle up to the arrivals area. With her rucksack over her back, she said goodbye at passport control to the stewardess who was taking care of her. “No, I can manage myself, thanks…"

She went up to the first empty desk she found and laid her passport on it, and smiled at the man.

He looked down at her and said, “Here's a wee dote of a thing to be traveling all alone. And how are you this morning?"

“I didn't sleep very well on the plane," Nita said.

“Sure I can't do that myself," the man said, riffling through her passport. “Keep hearing things all the time. Coming to see relatives, are you? Here's a nice clean passport then," the man said. “Where do you want the stamp, pet? First page? Or save that for something more interesting?"

Nita thought of the first time she had cleared 'passport' formalities at the great Crossroads world-gating facility, six galaxies over, and warmed to the man. “Let that be the first one, please," she said. The man stamped the passport with relish. He was a big kindly man with a large nose and little cheerful eyes. He handed the passport back to her and said, “You're very welcome in Ireland, pet. You ask for help if you need it, now. Chad milfallcha."

At least, she had seen that spelled over the doorway past the arrivals hall: cead mile faille - 'a hundred thousand welcomes'. 'Thank you," she said, and walked on towards baggage claim and the big duty-free shop. She wandered around it with her mouth open for a little while, never having quite seen anything like it before. It was the size of a small department store, filled with crystal and linen and china and smoked salmon, and books.

Soon she needed to go to the gate for the flight that would take her to Dublin.

Another flight, another plane equally eager to be gone. It was about an hour's flight, over the green, the thousand shades - and all the bright rivers winding amongst the hills, blazing like fire when the sun caught them. Her ears had started popping from the plane's descent almost as soon as it reached altitude, and Nita looked down and found herself and the plane sinking gently towards a great green range of mountains, and three mountains notable even among the others. Nita's mother had told her about these three, and had shown her pictures. One of them wasn't a mountain, but a promontory: Bray Head, sticking out into the sea like a fist laid on a table with the knuckles sticking up. Then, a mile further inland, and westward, Little Sugarloaf, a hill half again as high as Bray Head. And then westward another mile, and higher than both the others, Great Sugarloaf, Slieve na Chulainn as the Irish had it: the mountain of Wicklow, its name said. It was certainly one of the most noticeable - a grey stony cone, pointed, its slopes green with heather -no tree grew there. The plane turned off leftward, making its way up to Dublin Airport. Another ten minutes and they were down.

Nita got her bag back, got a trolley, looked around curiously at the automatic change machine that took your money and gave you Irish money back, and briefly regretted that she didn't have an excuse to use it. She sighed and pushed her trolley out through the customs area, out through the sliding doors and past the bored uniformed man at the desk who kept people from coming in the wrong way.

“Nita!" And there was her Aunt Annie. Nita grinned. After spending your life with people you know, and then having to spend a whole day with people you didn't know, the sight of her was a pleasure. Nita's aunt hurried over to her and gave her a big hug.

She was a big silver-haired lady, big about the shoulders, a little broad in the beam; a friendly face with pale grey-blue eyes. Her hair was tied back in a short ponytail behind. “How was your flight? Were you OK?"

“I was fine, Aunt Annie. But I'm really tired… I wouldn't mind going home."

“Sure, honey. You come right out here, the car's right outside." She pushed the trolley out into the little parking lot.

The morning was holding fresh and fine. Little white clouds were flying past in a blue sky; Nita put her arms around herself and hugged herself in surprise at the cold. “Mum told me it might be chilly, and I didn't believe her. It's July!"

“Listen, my dear," her aunt said,"this is one of the cooler days we've been having lately. The weather-people say it's going to get warm again tomorrow: up in the seventies."

“Warm," Nita said, wondering. It had been in the nineties on the Island when she left.

“We haven't had much rain, either," said her aunt. "It's been a dry summer, and they're talking about it turning into a drought if it doesn't rain this week or next." She laughed a little as she came up to a white Toyota and opened its boot. They drove around to the parking lots ticket booth, paid the fee, and went out. Nita spent a few interested moments adjusting to the fact that her aunt was driving on the left side of the road. “So tell me," Aunt Annie said, “how are your parents?"

Nita started telling her, with only half her mind on the business; the rest of her was busy looking at the scenery as they came out on to the main road - or the 'dual carriageway', as all the signs called it - heading south towards Dublin, and past it to Wicklow. AN LAR, said one sign: and under that it said DUBLIN: 8. "What's "An Lar"?" Nita said.

"That's Irish for "to the city centre"," said her aunt.

"We're about fifteen miles south of Dublin… it'll take us about an hour to get through it and home, the way the traffic is. Do you want to stop in town for lunch? Are you hungry?"

"Nnnnnno," Nita said, yawning. "I think I'd rather just go and fall over and get some sleep. I didn't get much on the plane."

Her aunt nodded. "No problem with that… you get rid of your jetlag. The country won't be going anywhere while you get caught up on your sleep."

And so they drove through the city. Nita was surprised to see how much it looked like suburban New York, except that - except. . .Nita found that she kept saying 'except' about every thirty seconds. Things looked the same, and then she would see something completely weird that she didn't understand at all. The street signs, half in Irish and half in English, were a constant fascination. It was a very peculiar-looking language, with a lot of extra letters, and small letters in front of capital letters at the beginnings of words, something she had never seen before. And the pronunciations. . .She tried pronouncing a few of the words, and her aunt howled with laughter and coached her. "No, no! If you try to pronounce Irish the way it looks, you'll go crazy. That one's pronounced 'bally aha-cleeah'."

Nita nodded and went on with a brief version of how things were at home as they drove through the city, out past shops and department stores and parts of town that looked exactly like New York to Nita's eyes, though much cleaner; and then started to pass through areas where small modern housing developments mixed with old homes that had beautiful clear or stained-glass fanlights above their front doors, and elaborate molded plaster ceilings that could be glimpsed here and there through open curtains.

Then these houses, too, gave way, starting to be replaced by housing developments again, older ones now. The dual carriageway, which had become just one lane on each side for a while, now reasserted itself. And then fields started to appear, and big vacant areas that to Nita's astonishment and delight had shaggy horses casually grazing on them, right by the side of the road. "Whose are they?" Nita said.

"They're tinkers' ponies," her aunt said. "The traveling people leave them where they can get some grass, if the grass where their caravans are is grazed down already. Look over there." She pointed off to one side.

Nita looked, expecting to see some kind of a barrel-shaped, brightly-coloured wagon. Instead there was just a caravan parked off to one side of the road, with no car hitched to it. There seemed to be clothes laid over the nearby hedge in the sun: laundry, Nita realized. As they passed, she got just a glimpse of a small fire burning near the caravan, and several small children sitting or crouching around it, feeding it sticks. Then they had swept by.

"Are they gypsies?" Nita said.

Her aunt shrugged. "Some of them say they are. Others are just people who don't like to live in houses, in one place… they'd rather move around and be free. We have a fair number of them down by us."

Nita filed this with about twenty other things she was going to have to ask more about at her leisure. They passed more small housing developments -'estates', her aunt called them - where houses sited by themselves seemed to be the exception rather than the rule. Rather, two houses were usually built squished together so that they shared one wall, and each one was a mirror image of the other.

And then even the housing estates started to give out. There was a last gasp of them as they passed through a town called Shankill, where the road had narrowed down to a single lane each way again. Shortly after that it curved off to the right, away from what looked like an even larger town. "That's Bray," Aunt Annie said. "We do some of our shopping there. But this is officially County Wicklow, now: you're out of Dublin when you get near the Dargle."

Nita hadn't noticed the river: it was hidden behind rows of little houses. "That's Little Bray," her aunt said. "And now, here's Kilcroney."

The road widened out abruptly into hill and forest, and two lanes on each side again. "Everything has names," Nita said.

"Every acre of this place has names," her aunt said. "Every town has "townlands" around it, and every one of them has a different name. Almost every field, and every valley and hill." She smiled. "I rather like it."

"I think I might too," Nita said. A wizard could best do spells when everything in them was completely named: and it was always easier to use existing names than to coin new ones - which you had to do if no-one had previously named a thing or place, or if it didn't know its own name already. And the name you coined had to be right, otherwise the wizardry would backfire.

“There," her aunt said, maneuvering around a couple of curves in the road. "There's our mountain."

Nita peered past her aunt, out towards the right. There was Great Sugarloaf. It looked very different from how it had looked from the air - sharper, more imposing, more dangerous. Heather did its best to grow up its sides, but the bare granite of the mountain's peak defeated it about two-thirds of the way up. Scree and boulders lay clear to see all about the mountain's bald head.

The road ran past a service station where geese and a goat grazed behind a fence, watching the traffic; then through a shallow ravine that ran between two thickly-forested hills. Sunlight would fall down the middle of it at noon, Nita guessed, but at the moment the whole deep vale was in shadow. "Glen of the Downs," Aunt Annie said. "We're almost home. That's a nice place to hike to, down there, where the picnic benches are."

After a couple more miles down the dual carriageway, Aunt Annie turned off down a little lane. To Nita's eyes this road looked barely wide enough for one car, let alone two, but to her shock several other cars passed them, and Aunt Annie never even slowed down, though she crunched so far over on the left side of the road that the hedges scraped the doors.

"See that town down there on the left? That's Greystones," said Aunt Annie. "We do the best part of our shopping there. But here. . ." She turned off down another lane, this one literally just wide enough to let one car through. In half a minute they came out in the graveled 'parking lot' in front of a little house. Around it, on all sides, fenced fields and farm buildings stretched. It was forty acres, Nita knew: her aunt's life savings had gone into the farm, her great love.

"Welcome to Ballyvolan," her aunt said. "Come on in and we"ll get you something to eat."

They did more than that. They gave her a place to stay which was uniquely her own, and Nita was very pleased.

They put her up, not in the house, but in a caravan out the back: a trailer, as she would have called it. She was getting the feeling that everything here had different names that she was going to have to get used to. But she was used to that; everything had different names in wizardry, too… yet it struck her as quite strange being here in this odd place where people she knew to be speaking English as their first language were nonetheless speaking it in accents so odd she couldn't make out more than one word in three. The accents came in all variations of thick, thin, light, impenetrable, lilting, dark; and people would run all their words together and talk very fast. Or very softly, so that Nita shortly began feeling as if she was shouting every time she opened her mouth.They gave her the caravan, and left her alone. “You'll want to just fall over and sleep, I should think," Aunt Annie said. "Come in when you're ready and we'll feed you." So Nita had unpacked her bag, and sat down on the little bed built into the side of the caravan. It was a good size for her. Its windows afforded a clear view of the path from the house, so that if she was to do a wizardry, she would have a few seconds to shut it down before anyone got close enough to see what was going on. There were cupboards and drawers, a shelf above the head of the bed, a little cupboard to hang things in, a table with a comfortable bench-seat to work at, and lights set in the walls here and there, and an electric heater to keep everything warm if it got cool at night.

She leaned back on the bed with her manual in her hands, meaning to read through some of its Irish material before she dropped off. She never had a chance.

Nita woke up to find it dark outside. Or not truly dark, but a very dark twilight. She glanced at her watch and saw that it was almost eleven at night. They had let her sleep, and she was ravenous. Boy, I must have needed that, she thought, and swung her" feet to the floor, stretching and scrubbing at her eyes.

That was when she heard the sound: horses' hooves, right outside the door. That wasn't a surprise, except that they would be out there so late. Annie's farm was partly a livery stables, where people kept their horses because they didn't have stables of their own, or where they left them to be exercised and trained for shows. There were a couple of low voices, men's voices Nita thought, discussing something quietly. That was no surprise either: there were quite a few people working on Aunt Annie's farm - she had been introduced to a lot of them when she first arrived, and had forgotten most of their names. One of the people outside chuckled, said something inaudible.

Nita snapped the bedside light on so that she wouldn't bash into things, and got up and opened the caravan door to look out and say hello.

Except that no-one was there.

"Huh," she said.

She went out through the little concrete yard to the front of the house, where the front door was open, as Aunt Annie had told her it almost always was except when everyone had gone to bed. Her aunt was in the big quarry-tiled kitchen, making a cup of tea.

"So there you are!" she said. "Did you sleep well? Do you want a cuppa?"

"What? Oh, right. Yes, please," Nita said, and sat down in one of the chairs drawn up around the big pine table. One of the cats, a black-and-white creature, jumped into her lap: she had forgotten its name too in the general blur of arrival. "Hi there," she said to it, stroking it.

"Milk? Sugar?"

"Just sugar, please," Nita said. "Aunt Annie, who were those people out there with the horses?"

Her aunt looked at her. "People with the horses? All the staff have gone home. At least I thought they did."

"No, I heard them. The hooves were right outside my door, but when I looked, they'd gone away. Didn't take them long," she added.

Aunt Annie looked at her again as she came over and put Nita's teacup down. Her expression was rather different this time. "Oh," she said. 'You mean the ghosts."

Nita stared.

"Welcome to Ireland," said her aunt.

2. Cill Cumhaid
Kilquade

 - Prev/Next

Nita sat back and blinked a little. Her aunt stirred her tea and said, "Do ghosts bother you?"

"Not particularly," Nita said, wondering just how to deal with this line of enquiry. Wizards knew that very few ghosts had anything to do with people's souls hanging around somewhere. Most apparitions, especially ones that repeated, tended to be caused by a kind of 'tape recording' that violent emotion could make on matter under certain circumstances, impressing its energy into the molecular structure of physical things. Over long periods of time the 'recording' would fade away, but in the meantime it would replay every now and then, for good reasons or no reason, and upset the people who happened to see it. And if they happened to believe that such a thing was caused by human souls, the effects would get steadily worse, fed by the emotions of the living.

Nita knew all this, certainly. But how much of it could she safely tell her aunt? And how to get it across without sounding like she knew more than a fourteen-year-old should?

“Good," her aunt was saying. She drank her tea and looked at Nita across the table with those cool blue-grey eyes. “Did you hear the church bells, earlier?"

"Uh, no. I must have been asleep."

"We have a little church down the road," Aunt Annie said. "About three hundred years ago, after the English killed their King - Charles the First, it was - his "replacement", an English general named Oliver Cromwell, came through here." Her aunt took another long drink of tea. "He and his army went up and down this country throwing out the Irish landowners and installing English ones in their places. He sacked cities and burned houses and churches - ours was one - and got himself quite a name for unnecessary cruelty." Aunt Annie looked out the kitchen window, into the near-dark, watching the apple trees out the back move slightly in the wind. "I think what you heard was, well, a reminder of some soldiers of his, who were camped here on guard late at night. You can hear the horses, and you can hear the soldiers talking, though you usually can't make out what they're saying."

"As if they were in the next room," Nita said.

"That's right. The memory just reasserts itself every now and then; other people have heard it happening. It's usually pretty low-key." She looked at Nita keenly.

Nita shrugged in agreement. "They didn't bother me. They didn't seem particularly, well, "ghostly". No going "Ooooooo" or trying to scare anyone."

"That's right," her aunt said, sounding relieved. "Are you hungry?"

"I could eat a cow," Nita said, suspecting that in this household it would be wiser not to offer to eat horses.

"I've got some beefburgers," her aunt said, getting up, "and some chicken…"

Nita got up to help, and to poke around the kitchen a little. All the appliances were about half the size she was used to. She wondered whether this was her aunt's preference, or whether most of the cookers and refrigerators sold here were like that, for on the drive in she had kept getting a feeling that everything was a bit smaller than usual, had been scaled down somewhat. The rooms in her aunt's house were smaller than she was used to, as well, reinforcing the impression. "So have you got other ghosts," Nita said, "or are those all?"

"Nope, that's it." Her aunt chuckled a bit and pulled out a frying pan. "You want more, though, you won't have far to go. This country is thick with them. Old memories. Everything here has a long memory… longer than it should have, maybe." She sighed and went rooting in a drawer for a few moments. "There's a lot of history in Ireland," Aunt Annie said. "A lot of bad experiences and bad feelings. It's a problem sometimes." She came up with a spatula. "Do you want onions?"

"Yes, please," Nita said. Her aunt came up with a knife and handed it to Nita, then found an onion in a bin by the door and put it on the worktop. "Hope you don't mind crying a little," she said.

"No problem."

They puttered about the kitchen together, talking about this and that: family gossip, mostly. Aunt Annie was Nita's father's eldest sister, married once about twenty-five years ago, and divorced about five years later. Her ex-husband was typically referred to in Nita's family as 'that waste of time', but no-one at home had ever been too forthcoming about just why he was a waste, and Nita had decided it was none of her business. Aunt Annie had three kids, two sons and a daughter, all grown up now and moved out: two of them lived in the States, one in Ireland. Nita had met her two male cousins a couple of years ago, when she was very young, and only dimly remembered Todd and Alec as big, dark-haired, booming shapes that gave her endless piggyback rides.

At any rate, her aunt had moved with her kids to Ireland after the divorce, and had busied herself with becoming a successful farmer and stable-manager. Now she had other people to manage her stables for her: she saw to the finances of the farm, kept an eye on the function of the riding school that also was based on her land, and otherwise lived the life of a moderately well-to-do countrywoman.

They fried up beefburgers and onions. There were no rolls: her aunt took down a loaf of bread and cut thickish slices from it for both of them. "Didn't you have any dinner?" Nita said. "It's way past time."

“We don't have set mealtimes," Aunt Annie said. 'My staff come in and get a snack when they can, and I tend to eat when I'm hungry. I was busy with the accounts for most of this evening - didn't notice I was hungry until just now. Unlike some," she said, looking ruefully down at the floor around the cooker, which was suddenly littered with cats of various colours, “who are hungry whether they've just eaten or not."

Nita laughed and bent down to scratch the cats: the black-and-white cat again, and a marmalade-coloured cat with golden eyes, and a tiny delicate white-bibbed tabby, and another black-and-white cat of great dignity, who sat watching the others, and Nita and her aunt, unblinking. “Bear," Aunt Annie said, “and Chessie, and Big Paws. All of you, out of here: you've had your dinners! Now where's the mustard got to?"

She turned away to find it. Under her breath, Nita said hurriedly in the wizards' Speech, “You all get out of here and I'll see if I can liberate something for you later… "

They sat looking thoughtful - since almost everything that thinks can recognize and understand the Speech - then one by one got up and strolled off. Big Paws went last, looking thoughtfully at Nita as he did so. Her aunt had found the mustard, and noticed the exodus. “Huh," she said. “I guess they don't like the smell of the onions."

“It's pretty strong," Nita said, and started spreading mustard on bread.

When everything was ready, they sat down and ate. 'I hope you don't mind being a little on your own tomorrow," Aunt Annie said. “You hit us at kind of a busy time. There's going to be a hunt here in a few days, and we have to start getting ready for it."

“You mean like a fox hunt?" Nita said.

“That's right. Some of the local farmers have been complaining about their chicken flocks being raided. Anyway, some of our horses are involved, so we have to have the vet in to certify them fit, and then the farrier is coming in tomorrow afternoon to do some re-shoeing. It's going to be pretty hectic. If you want to be around here, that's fine: or if you think you'll be bored, you might want to go down to Greystones - it's a pretty easy bike ride from here. Or take the bus over to Bray and look around."

“OK," Nita said. I'll see how I feel… I'm still pretty tired."

“Traveling eastbound takes it out of you," Aunt Annie said. “It won't be so bad going back."

You said it, Nita thought. And the sooner the better. But she smiled anyway, and said, “I hope not."

They finished eating, and cleared the table. “If you want to watch TV late, you're going to be out of luck," her aunt said. “All but one of the TV stations shut down around midnight, and the one that's left mostly just shows old films. But if you feel inclined, go ahead."

“Uh, thanks. I thought I might read for a while. After that I may just go to sleep again… I'm still rather tired."

'That's fine. You make yourself completely at home." Her aunt looked at Nita with an expression that had some of Big Paws' look about it. “It must have been a bit of a wrench, just being shipped off like that."

What did they tell you, I wonder? Nita thought. “It was," she said after a moment. “But I'll cope."

Her aunt smiled. 'Typical of our side of the family," she said. “There's a long history of that. Well, if you get hungry or something later, just come on in and take what you need. Use the back door, though: I'm going to lock the front now, and turn in. I'll leave a light on for you in here. You know where everything is, the bathroom and so forth?"

“Yeah, Aunt Annie. Thanks."

Her aunt headed off. Nita looked around the kitchen to see if there was anything else that needed cleaning up - her mother had drummed into her that she should make sure she returned hospitality by helping out in the kitchen: her aunt hated washing-up more than anything else, her mother had said. But there was nothing left to do.

Except something that needed a wizard to do it, and Nita set about that straightaway.

She headed out the back door, out through a little archway into the concrete yard again. The only light was the one she had left on in the caravan, and it was dim. She paused outside the door. Even now, past midnight, the sky wasn't completely black. Nevertheless, it was blanketed with stars, much brighter than she was used to seeing them through the light pollution of the New York suburbs. And there was no sound here but the faintest breath of wind. Even the dual carriageway a mile away made no noise at all. It was as if everyone in this part of the country had gone to bed all at once. There was only one light visible, about a mile away across the fields: someone's house light. For someone who had always lived in places where the street had streetlights on all night, this utter darkness was a shock.

But the stars, she thought. The Milky Way was clearly visible, even bright. At home it was almost impossible to see it at all. At least there's been one thing worth seeing here.

She shivered hard then, and ducked back into the caravan to get her jacket, and her manual.

Once she had them she headed out across the concrete yard again, making for the log fence that separated the land immediately around Aunt Annie's house from the fields beyond it. The closest field was planted with something called oilseed rape -tall green plants with flowers at the top so extremely yellow that they had made Nita's eyes hurt to look at them in the sunshine that morning when she had arrived. The field beyond that was clean pasture, grassland being left fallow for this year. That was what Nita wanted, for there was a thick strip of woodland at the far side of it.

She made her way through the oilseed rape, enjoying the fragrance of it, and on to the next fence. This was barbed wire: she climbed one of the fenceposts carefully, so as not to tear anything. Cautiously, for the ground over here wasn't as even as it had been in the rape field, Nita made her way into the centre of the field, and opened her manual.

She said the two words that would make the pages generate enough light to read by, though not enough to mess up her night vision. Normally she wouldn't have needed the manual for this spell, which was more a matter of simple conversation than anything else; but she didn't know the name she needed to call, and had to look it up. The manual's index was straightforward as usual. “Canidae," she said under her breath. “Here we go."

The spell was a calling, but the kind that was a request, not a demand. She hoped there would be someone to respond. She recited the standard setup, the request for the Universe to hear. Then, “Ai mathrara," she said in the Speech, “if any hear, let them speak to me; for there's need."

And then she put the book down and sat there in the quiet, and waited.

It seemed to take a long time before she heard the soft sound of something rustling in the grass, about a hundred meters away. Normally she would never have heard it, except that her ears were sharpened by sitting in this total silence. The noise stopped.

“Mathrara," she said then, very quietly, “if that's you, then I'm here."

Another rustling, another silence.

“You speak it with an accent," said a voice in a series of short, soft barks, “but well enough. Let me see you."

Nita saw the long, low, sharp-nose shape come towards her. The dog-fox had a tail bigger and bushier and longer than she would have thought possible. Only the faintest firefly gleam from the manual's pages glinted in his eyes and silvered his fur, giving him enough of an outline for her to see him.

“So," the fox said.

“What accent?" Nita said, curious. As far as she knew, her accent in the Speech was quite good.

“We wouldn't say "mathrara" here. "Madreen rua", that would be it." And Nita chuckled, for that meant 'the little red dog' in the Speech.

“Local customs rule," Nita said, smiling. “As usual. I have a warning for you, madreen rua. There's a hunt coming through here in a few days."

The fox yipped quietly in surprise. “They are early, then."

“That's as may be," Nita said. “But if I were you, I'd spread the word to keep your people well out of this area, and probably for about five miles around on all sides. Maybe more. And you might lay off the chickens a little."

The fox laughed silently, a panting sound. “They've poisoned almost all the rats: what's a body to eat? But for the moment… as you say. I am warned, wizard. Your errand's done." It looked at her with a thoughtful look. “So then," it said. “Go well, wizard." And it whisked around and went bounding off through the pasture-grass without another word.

Nita shut her manual and sat there in the quiet for a while more, getting her breath back. Talking to animals differed in intensity the more clever the animal was, and the more or less used it was to human beings. Pets like cats and dogs tended to have more fully humanized personalities, and could easily be got to understand you; but they also tended to be short-spoken - possibly, Nita thought, because being domesticated and more or less confined to a daily routine, they had less to talk about. Wilder animals had more to say, but it was often more difficult to understand them, the message being coloured with hostility or fear, or plain old bewilderment. The fox lived on the fringes of human life, knew human ways, but was wary, and so there was a cool tinge, a remoteness, about the way it came across.

At any rate, she had fulfilled her own responsibilities for the evening. A wizard had a duty to prevent unnecessary pain, and fox-hunting did not strike Nita as particularly necessary, no matter what farmers might say about the need to exterminate 'vermin'. If a fox was stealing someone's chickens, let them shoot it cleanly, rather than chasing it in terror across half the countryside and getting dogs to rip it to shreds.

Meanwhile, there were other concerns.

Kit? she said in her head.

Yeah!

She paused a moment. What's that noise?

I'm chewing, Kit said.

Oh no, you're eating dinner!

It's not such a fascinating experience that I can't spare a few minutes to talk to you, he said. Nita got a distinct impression of slightly lumpy mashed potatoes, and restrained herself from swallowing. What's happening? Kit said.

This, she said, and gave him a series of pictures of the day as quickly as she could, ending with the fox. Great, huh?

Bored with me already, Kit said. I knew it.

Kit. . .I She would have punched him hard, had he been in range. As it was, he flinched a little from what he felt her fist and arm wanting to do. Look, she said, I'm worn out. I'll talk to you more in the morning.

He started to nod and stopped himself. She had to laugh a little. Have a good sleep, Kit said.

Will do.

She let the contact ebb away, then got up and started carefully walking back the way she had come. Behind her, from the woodland, a fox was barking; perhaps a mile away, another answered it.

Nita smiled to herself and headed for the caravan.

As she had thought, she wasn't able to stay up very late that night. She tried to watch some television, and as her aunt had warned her, only one channel of the six available was working, showing some old film that didn't interest her. So she turned it off and went back to the caravan again to read. Not before, on the sly, opening a small can of cat food and parceling it out to the cats. They accepted this with great pleasure, purring and rubbing and making their approval known: but none of them spoke to her.

She went back to bed and slept some more. The dreams were not entirely pleasant. In one of them, she thought she felt the earth move, but it was probably just the wind shaking the caravan. When she woke up, everything was quite still. It was early morning - how early she couldn't tell any more without her watch: the different sunrise time here had her thoroughly confused. She found her watch and saw to her surprise that, even though the sun was well up the sky, it was only seven o'clock in the morning.

She got up and dressed in yesterday's clothes, slipped into the house, had a quick shower, dressed again in clean clothes this time, and went to see what there was for breakfast. There were already several people in the kitchen, two of whom Nita had been introduced to earlier. One was Joe, the stable manager, a tall lean young man with a grin so wide that Nita thought his face was in danger of cracking. Another was Derval, the head riding instructor, a tall curly-haired woman, eternally smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. She had a drawly accent that made her sound almost American.

“There y'are then," Derval said. “You want some tea?"

Nita was beginning to think that every conversation in Ireland began this way. “Yes, please," she said, and rooted around in the big ceramic bread crock for the loaf. “Where's Aunt Annie?"

“Down at the riding school, waiting for the farrier. She said to tell you to come on down if you want to."

“OK," Nita said, and cut herself a slice of bread and put it in the toaster. The butter was already out on the worktop, as were a basket of eggs from the farm's hens, various packages of bacon and a gruesome-looking sausage called 'black pudding', more toast, some of it with bites out of it, boxes of cereal, and spilled sugar. Breakfast was a hurried business in this house, from the look of things.

Nita sat down with her tea and toast and pulled over the local weekly paper, The Bray People. Its front-page story was about someone's car catching on fire in the main street of Wicklow town, and Nita sat there paging through it in total wonder that any place in the world should be so quiet and uneventful that a story like that would make the front page. Derval looked over her shoulder and pointed with one finger at an advertisement in the classifieds that said BOGS FOR SALE. Nita burst out laughing.

“If you're going to be around the stable block," Derval said to her, going to get another piece of bread out of the toaster, “just one thing. Watch out for the horse in number five. He's got a bad habit of biting."

“Uh, yeah," Nita said. She had been wondering when she was going to have to mention this. “I'm a little scared of horses… I hadn't been planning to get too close to them."

“Scared of horses!" Joe said. “We'll fix that."

“Uh, maybe tomorrow," Nita said. She had been put up on a horse once, several years ago on holiday, and had immediately fallen off it. This had coloured her opinions about horses ever since.

Joe and Derval finished their breakfasts and headed out, leaving Nita surrounded by cats eager to shake her down for another free handout. “No way, you guys!" she said. “Once was a special occasion. You want more, you'd better talk to your boss."

They looked at her in thinly disguised disgust and stalked off. Nita finished her tea and toast, washed her cup and plate, and then wandered out into the concrete yard again. There was a pathway past the back of her caravan into the farm area proper, and the road that wound past the front of the house curved around to meet it. Here there was another large concreted area with two or three large brown, metal-sided, barnlike buildings arranged in a loose triangle around it. The field on the right-hand side as she faced it was full of horse-jumping paraphernalia, jumps and stiles; all around the edge of it ran a big track covered with wood shavings and chips for the horses to run on. Further down and on her right was the stabling barn, and beyond it what Derval had referred to as 'the riding school', a big covered building that had nothing in it except a floor thickly covered with the same chips as on the track outside. This was where the riders practiced when the weather was bad.

Nita took a little while to look around in there, found nothing of interest, and made her way back to the stables. There were about fifteen box stalls with various horses looking out over the doors, or eating their breakfasts, or standing there with vaguely bored expressions. She looked particularly at the horse in number five, who was a big handsome black horse. But he had a bad look in his eye, and when (since there was no human around to hear) she greeted him in the Speech, he eyed her coldly, laid his ears back and snorted, "Clear off, little girl, or I'll have your arm off."

Nita shrugged and moved on. Other horses were more forthcoming. When she spoke to them in the Speech, they answered, asking her for a sugar cube, or asking if she would please take them out. A few just tossed their heads, blinked lazily, and went back to their eating.

At the end of the stable barn was an extremely large pile of hay, kept under cover there so that the rain couldn't get at it, and the horses could be given it easily. Nita was standing for a moment looking at it, when something small and black, a rock she thought, fell down from the top of it. It tumbled down the hay, and even though Nita sidestepped, the falling black thing fell crookedly, and landed on top of one of her trainers.

She looked down in shock. It was a kitten, its body no bigger than one of her hands. It more or less staggered to its feet, looked up at her, and meowed, saying, "Sorry!"

"Don't mention it," Nita said.

The kitten, which was already in the act of scampering away after a windblown straw, stopped so suddenly that it fell over forwards. Nita restrained herself mightily from laughing. It righted itself, washed furiously for a second, then looked at her. "Another one," it said. "The wind does blow, doesn't it."

"Another what?"

"Another wizard. Are you deaf?"

"Uh, no," Nita said. "Sorry, I'm new here. Who are you, then?"

"I am Tualha Slaith, a princess of the People," she said, rattling it all off in a hurry, “a bard and a scholar. And who are you?"

“I'm Nita Callahan."

“Nita?" said the kitten. “What kind of name is that?"

Nita had to stop for a moment. She was amazed to be getting this much conversation out of a domestic cat, let alone a kitten that barely looked old enough to be weaned yet. “I think it was Spanish, originally," she said after a second or so. “Juanita is the long form."

“Aha, a Spaniard!" the kitten said, her eyes wide. "There's wine from the royal Pope, Upon the ocean green: And Spanish ale shall give you hope, My dark Rosaleen!"

“You've lost me," said Nita. “Anyway, I'm not a big ale fan…"

The kitten looked at Nita as if she was a very dun bulb indeed. “It's going to get really crowded in here shortly," the kitten said. “Let's go out." She scooted out the barn door, and Nita followed her, feeling rather bemused: out the back, into the area between the riding school and the stable block. The path led up towards the field where the jumping equipment was. There was no-one out there at the moment.

The kitten stopped several times in her run to crouch down, her little behind waggling, and pounce on a bug, or leaf, or stalk of grass, or blown bit of hay; and she always missed. Nita was having trouble controlling her reaction to this, but if there was one thing a wizard had practice in being, it was polite: so she managed. A little dusty whirlwind passed them by as they went between the riding school and the stable block, and Tualha paused to let it go by. “Good day," she said.

“You usually talk to wind?" Nita said, amused.

Tualha eyed her. "That's how the People go by," she said “the People of the Air. You are new here." She scuttled on.

They came to the fence. Tualha made a mighty leap halfway up on to the fencepost, hauled herself up claw over claw, and sat at the top, where she washed briefly.

Nita sat down on the fence next to her. “Aren't you a little young to be a bard?" she said.

The kitten looked Nita up and down. “Aren't you a little young to be a wizard?"

'Well, no, I'm fourteen.”

“And that's what percentage of your lifespan?"

“Uh. . ." Nita had to stop and figure it out.

“You can't even tell me right away? Poor sort of ban-draioa you'd make over here. Maths are important."

Nita flushed briefly. Whatever a ban-draioa might be, maths had never been one of her favorite things. “And you of Spanish blood," Tualha said, “but you don't know that song, about how the Spanish came to Ireland first? What do you know?"

“Not much sometimes," Nita said, suspecting that here, at least, that was probably going to be true. “I know about the Spanish Armada, a little." Very little, she added to herself. History had never been a favorite with her either, but she was beginning to suspect that that was going to have to change.

“That was only the fifteenth invasion," Tualha said. “The real causes of things go back much further. The wind moves, and things move in it. Now, in the beginning. . ."

“Do we have to go back that far?" Nita said dryly.

The kitten glared at her. “Don't interrupt. How do you expect to become wise?"

“How did you do it?"

Tualha shrugged. “I've been in the hills. But also, I had to be a bard: I was found in a bag. It's traditional."

Nita remembered her aunt saying something the previous night about one of the farm cats having been found in a sack by the roadside, abandoned and starving. The starving part, at least, had been dealt with: Tualha was as round as a little ball. “Anyway," Tualha said, glaring at Nita again, “it's all in the Book of Conquests, and the Book of Leinster, and the Yellow Book of Lecan."

"I doubt I could just go get those out of the library where I come from," Nita said,"so perhaps you'll enlighten me." She grinned.

"It's all in the wizards' Mastery anyway," Tualha said, "if you'd bothered to look. But grow wise by me. In the beginning there was no-one in this island; it was bleak and bare, nor was it an island at all. The Flood rose and covered it, and fell away again. Then two hundred and sixty-four years later came twenty-four men and twenty-four women: those were Partholon and his people. At that time in Ireland, there was only one treeless and grassless plain, three lakes and nine rivers; so they built some more."

"Built. . ."?" Nita said. "When was this?"

"Four hundred thousand years ago. Didn't I mention? Now do stop interrupting. They built mountains and carved valleys, and they fought the Fomor. The monster people," Tualha said in obvious annoyance at Nita's blank look;”the ones who were here before. The Fomori made a plague, the sickness that makes those who catch it hate and fight without thought; and the plague killed Partholon's people. So the Island that was not an island was empty. Then after another three thousand years, the people of Nemed came. They settled there and dug rivers and planted forests; and they met the Fomor and caught their plague - fought with them, and lost, and in the great strife of the battle the land was broken away from the greater land, and drowned in ice, and then water. When the ice melted and the water drew back, another people came after: the Fir Bolg. They brought new beasts and birds into the land, and there was song in the air and life in the waters."

“When did the cats get here?" Nita said.

“Later. Shush! The Fomor came to them too, though, with gifts and fair words, and married with them, and darkened their minds; and they caught the battle-sickness from the Fomor, and most died of it as all the others had: and the ones that were left had the bad blood of the Fomori in them, and became half-monstrous too.. . .Are you getting all this?" Tualha said.

“I think so." Nita resolved to have a look at her manual later, though, if as Tualha said all this information was in there. It might have been in a form that made sense to a cat at this point, but Nita was a little uncertain about it all, particularly about some of the dates.

“Well. After this the One grew angry that Its fair land was being ruined, and sent another people to live here. That was the Tuatha de Danaan, the Children and People of the Goddess Danu. They tried to parley with the Fir Bolg, but the Fir Bolg were sick with the battle-sickness of their Fomor blood, and would make no parley. So there was a great fight at the Plain of the Towers, Moytura. The battle came out a draw, and both sides drew apart and waited for a sign. And the sign came, sent by the One: the young hero-god, Lugh the Allcrafted. He told the Tuatha to bring the four treasures of the people of Dana, the Cup and Stone and Sword and Spear they had brought with them when they first came there from the Four Oldest Cities. Seven years he reforged those treasures with the power that was in him. Then the Children of Danu went forth to battle once more at Moytura. Lugh went forward with the Spear called Luin, and with it destroyed Balor of the Deadly Eye, and the Fomori."

Tualha stopped, panting a little. Nita made a list in her head. 'That's, let's see," she said,"six invasions. If you count the Tuatha."

“It's all invasions," said Tualha, “from the land's point of view."

Nita thought about that for a moment. “You may have something there. So then who threw the Tuatha out?"

Tualha laughed at her. "Sure, you're joking me," she said. "They're still here."

"What?" Nita said.

A leaf went by Tualha on the breeze. She jumped at it, missed spectacularly, and came down on the ground so hard that Nita could hear the breath go out of her in a squeak. Nita couldn't help it any more: she burst out laughing. "I'm sorry, I really am," she said, "but I think you need some practice."

Tualha looked at her scathingly. "When you're a cat-bard," she said, "you get to choose. You get to be fast, or you get to be clever. And no offence, but I prefer clever. Not sure what you prefer, Shonaiula ni Cealodhain," she muttered, and scuttered off.

Nita chuckled a little, then got up and made her way back the way Tualha had gone, through the area between the riding school and the stables. As she went she noticed a sort of burning smell, and put her head quickly into the stable-block to make sure that something flammable hadn't fallen into the hay. She couldn't see anything but one of the grooms leading a chestnut horse out.

In the concreted yard, she found the source of the burning. There was a small pickup truck out there, and a square steel box about half a meter square had been unloaded from it. It's a forge, Nita thought, as the little woman standing by it pulled at a cord hanging out of one side, and pulled at it again, and again, like someone trying to start a lawnmower.

The comparison was apt, since a moment later a compressor stuttered and then roared to life. That pushes air into it, Nita thought, and then. . .The woman standing by it went around to one side of the portable forge and applied a blowtorch to an aperture there. How about that, Nita thought. Portable horseshoeing. . .

Nita went down to have a look as the chestnut horse was led up to the forge to be reshod. The woman standing by the forge had to be about sixty. She was of medium height, with short close-cropped white hair and little wire-rimmed glasses, wearing jeans and boots and a T-shirt. Her face was very lined and very cheerful, and her accent was lighter than a lot of them Nita had heard so far: in fact, she sounded like an American who had been here for a long time. "Ah, you again," she said to the chestnut as the groom led it up and fastened its reins to a loop on the back of the pickup truck's tailgate. "We'll do better than we did last time. Ah," the farrier said then, looking up immediately as Nita wandered over. "You'll be Miz Callahan's niece."

"That's right," Nita said, and put her hand out to shake. She was getting used to the ritual by now, and was becoming relieved that no-one was in a position to offer her any tea.

The farrier held up her hands in apology: they were covered with honest grime. "Sorry," she said.

"I'm Biddy O'Dalaigh. How are you settling in?"

“Pretty well, thanks."

“Have you seen this done before?"

“Only on TV," Nita said. “And never out of the back of a truck."

Biddy laughed. “Makes it easier to get a day's work done," she said, rooting around in a box in the truck and coming out with a horseshoe. She looked critically from it to the horse's feet, then bent down to push it into the aperture of the furnace-box. “Used to be that all the farms had their own farriers. No-one can afford it now, though. So I go to my work, instead of people bringing it to me."

Nita leaned against the truck to watch. "You must travel a lot."

Biddy nodded and walked around to the front of the horse, stroking it and whistling to it softly between her teeth. "All over the county," she said. "A lot of horse shows and such." With her back to the horse's nose, she picked up its right forefoot and curled it around and under, grasping it between her knees. With a tool like a nail-puller, she went around the horse's hoof loosening the nails and prising them up one by one, and then changed her leverage and knocked the shoe completely up and off. With another tool, a smaller one with a sharp point, Biddy began trimming down the rough edges of the hoof. 'Tell Derval," Biddy said to Aisling, the blonde groom who had been handling the chestnut,"that he won't be needing the surgical shoes any more; the hoofs cleared up."

Nita was surprised. "Surgical horseshoes?" she said.

"Oh yes," Biddy said. "Horses have problems with their feet the same as people do. Tango here has been wearing a booster until this hoof grew back straight - he hurt his foot a few months ago, and that can make the hoof go crooked. It's just an overdeveloped toenail, after all." She patted Tango as she got up. "We're all better now, though, aren't we, my lad? And you'll have a nice run tomorrow." She reached into the truck and came up with a pair of tongs.

"This one's in the hunt?" Nita said.

Biddy nodded. "He belongs to Jim McAllister up on the Hill. Jim's a great one for a mad ride, though I don't think he cares about the fox at the end of it." She rooted around in the forge, stirring and rearranging the coals in it. Nita peered into the opening of it.

"Lava rocks?" she said.

"Oh aye, like in the barbecues. They work as well as charcoal unless you're doing drop forging or some such."

She turned her attention back to the hoof, scraping its edges a bit more. Then Biddy picked up the tongs again. "Here we go, now," she said, and took hold of the hoof again. With her free hand she plucked the horseshoe out of the furnace and slapped it hard against the hoof, exactly where she wanted it. There was a billow of smoke, and a stink like burned hair or nails.

Nita waved the smoke away. "Foul, isn't it," Biddy said, completely untroubled. After dunking the shoe into a bucket of cold water, she dropped the tongs, then took a hammer out of another belt loop, reached into a pocket for nails, and began fitting the shoe, tapping the nails in with great skill, each nail halfway in with one tap, all the way in with the next.

Nita watched Biddy do Tango's other three shoes. Then another horse was led out, and Nita turned away: this kind of thing was interesting enough, once. Maybe I'll go down to Greystones, she thought. Aunt Annie had told her that the bike was out in the shed behind the riding school, if she wanted to use it and no-one else had it. Or maybe I won't. It was strange, having nowhere familiar to go to, and no-one familiar to go with. Being at loose ends was not a sensation she was very used to: but she didn't feel quite bold enough at the moment to just go charging off into a strange town.

I wouldn't mind if Kit were here, though…

Nita wandered back the way she had come, back to the field where the jumping equipment lay around. She climbed over the fence and walked out into the field to look at it all; the odd barber-striped poles, the jumps and steps and stiles, some painted with brand names, or names of local shops.

The wind began to rise. From this field, which stood at the top of a gentle rise, you could see the ocean. Nita stood there and gazed at it for a while. The brightness it had worn this morning, under full sunlight, was gone. Now, with the sun behind a cloud, it was just a flat silvery expanse, dull and pewter-coloured. Nita smelled smoke again, and idly half-turned to look over her shoulder, towards the farrier's furnace.

And was rather shocked not to see it there at all… or anything else. The farm was gone.

The contour of the land was still there - the way it trended gently downhill past the farm buildings, and then up again toward the dual carriageway and the hills on its far side. But there were no buildings, no houses that she could see. The road was gone. Or not gone: reduced to a rutted dirt track. And the smoke. . .

She looked around her in great confusion. There was a pillar of black smoke rising up off to one side, blown westward by the rising wind off the sea. Very faintly in this silence she could hear cries, shouts. Something white over there was burning. It was the little white church down the road, St Patrick's of Kilquade, with its one bell. She stood there in astonishment, hearing the cries on the wind, and then a terrible metallic note, made faint by the distance: the one bell blowing in the wind, then shattering with heat and the fall of the tower that housed it. A silence followed the noise… then faint laughter, and the sound of glass exploding outwards in the force of the fire.

And a voice spoke, down by her feet. "Yes, they have been restless of late, those ghosts," said Tualha, looking where Nita looked, at the smoke. "I thought I might find you here. It's as I said, Shonaiula ni Cealodhain. The wind blows, and things get blown along in it. Bards and wizards alike. Why would you be here, otherwise? But better to be the wind than the straw, when the Carrion-Crow is on the wing. It always takes draoiceacht to set such situations to rights."

Nita gulped and tried to get hold of herself. This was a wizardry, but not one of a kind she had ever experienced. Worldgating, travel between planes, she knew. But those required extensive and specific spelling. Nothing of the sort had happened here. She had simply turned around… and been here. "Where are we?" she said softly. "How did we get here?"

"You went cliathánach," Tualha said. "Sideways, as I did. True, it's not usually so easy. But that's an indication that things are in the wind indeed."

"Sideways," Nita breathed. "Into the past. . ."

"Or the future," Tualha said, "or the never-was. All those are here. You know that."

"Of course I know it," Nita said, a bit irritable with the shock of everything. It was part of a wizard's most basic knowledge that the physical world coexisted with hundreds of thousands of others, both like it and very unlike. No amount of merely physical travel would get you into any of them. The right wizardry, though, and you had to move no more than a step. "It shouldn't be anything like this easy, though," she said.

Tualha looked up at her with wide, bland eyes. "It is easier here," she said. "It always has been. But you're right that it shouldn't be this easy. There's danger in it, both for the "daylight" world and the others."

Nita looked at the smoke, shaking her head. "What was it you said…? The wind blows, and things get blown along with it?"

Tualha said nothing. Nita stood there and thought how casually she had said to her mother, // I go on call in Ireland, I go on call, and that's it. It was not her mother's idea that she come here, after all. One of the Powers that Be had sent her here to do a job. She knew that when she got back to the farmhouse - if she got back to the farmhouse and opened her manual, she would find she was on active status again. And here she was, without her partner, without her usual Senior Wizards' support for their authority didn't run here: Europe had its own Senior structures. Alone, and with a problem that she didn't understand. . .She was going to have to catch up on her reading.

Tualha crouched and leaped at a bit of ash that the wind sailed past her. She missed it. Nita sighed. "How do we get back?" she said.

"You haven't done this before?" Tualha said. "Where were you looking when it happened?"

"At the ocean."

"Look back, then."

Nita turned her back on the smoke and the cries and the brittle music of breaking glass, and looked out to the flat grey sea, willing things to be as they had been before.

"There you are, then," Tualha said. Nita turned again. There was the farm, the riding school, the farmhouse: and the field, full of its prosaic jumping equipment, all decals and slightly peeling paint. "But indeed," Tualha said, "it's as I told you. Something must change. Get about it, before it gets about us."

3. Bri Cualann
Bray

 - Prev/Next

The next morning, Nita did what she usually did when she was confused - the thing that had made her a wizard in the first place. She went to the library.

She caught the bus in, a green double-decker that stopped at the end of her aunt's road, and climbed up to the second floor of the bus. There was no-one at all there, so she went straight forward to take the seat right at the front, its window looking directly forwards and four meters down on to the ground. It was interesting to ride along little country lanes and look right down on to the sheep and the hedges and the potholes from such a height.

But she didn't let it distract her for very long. The section in the wizard's manual on Ireland was quite lengthy. This was not a surprise to her, since at the moment the section on the United States was quite short… most likely since she wasn't there. The manual tended to have as much information as you needed on any particular subject, and simply waited for you to look for it.

She immediately found that she had been correct to be a little suspicious of Tualha's numbers. The things she had discussed as happening four hundred thousand years before had apparently actually happened four hundred million years before. This didn't surprise Nita either; she remembered Aunt

Annie saying yesterday that as far as she knew, the only times cats were concerned about were their mealtimes.

In any case, the manual told her of the formation of Ireland, some four hundred million years earlier; of the pushing up of the great chain of mountains that it shared with Newfoundland, and with the Pyrenees. A hundred and fifty million years later, the continental plate on which Ireland stood began to move so that the great island that had been both England and Ireland was flooded and split, and the ice came down and tore at it.

It just explained the science of it, of course. A wizard knows to look further than mere science for explanations. The world was made, and none of these things happen by accident. It was made by the Powers: not created in some abstract sense, but made, stone by stone, as an artist makes, or a cook, or a craftsman - with interest and care. The One, the only name that wizards have for that Power which was senior to the Powers that Be, and everything else, like a good manager had delegated many of its functions to the first-made creatures, the Powers -which some people in the past had called gods, and others had called angels. The Powers made different parts of the world, and became associated with them simply because they loved them, as people who make tend to love what they've made.

But something had gone wrong in Ireland's making. Someone had been - it was tempting to say 'interfering'. The manual said nothing specific about this: it tended to let one draw one's own conclusions on the more complex ethical issues. But several times, the Makers had begun to make the island; and several times, something had gone wrong. Cataclysms, a glacial movement that happened too quickly, a continental plate ramming another faster than had been intended. A misjudgement? A miscalculation? Nita thought not. She thought she saw here the interference of her old enemy, the Lone Power, the one which (for good or evil) invented death, and later went through the world seeing what It could destroy or warp.

It seemed that the bright Powers, the Builders, had not seen, or suspected, the flaws inserted in their building by the Lone Power's working. So Ireland had come undone several times, and had had to be patched. Indeed, the top part of it had only been welded on about two hundred and fifty million years after the original complex began to be formed - after other land that should have been Ireland was drowned beneath the sea.

So then. Two or three attempts to make, frustrated two or three times by the Lone Power, and then, as Tualha said, the One had become impatient. Or maybe impatience was an inaccurate emotion to attribute to the Power that conceived the whole universe at its beginning, and through to its end. The One's great intent, along with that of the wizards and the Powers that Be, who do Its will, is to preserve energy - to keep things running for as long as they can be made to run, with what's available… and not to waste unnecessarily. Building here was being actively hindered. So a new group of Makers came into the world to shape Ireland: greater powers, more senior, more central, than those who had worked here before. They would set it right.

They tried. Nita saw, between the telling of the manual and what Tualha told her, that just as the One had scaled up its response, so had the Lone Power. The Fomori had been growing more powerful each time they had been challenged. Each time they were put down, they came back more powerful yet. And then came the first battle of Moytura.

The version that Tualha gave her turned out to be much romanticized and classicized. Moytura itself was a great strife of forces over many centuries, as mountains were raised and thrown down, river valleys carved and choked; and the ice rose and fell. The battle went on here for a good while.

And then. . .Nita turned a page over, scanning down it. She was beginning to get the drift of this. Here was the arrival of Lugh of the Long Reach. She thought she knew this particular Power. She had met it once or twice. A young warrior, fierce, kindly, a little humorous, liable to travel in disguise: a Power known by many names in many places and times. Michael, Athene, Thor - it was the One's Champion, one of the greatest of all creatures: definitely a Power to be reckoned with. As Lugh, that Power had come and poured Its virtue into the great Treasures that the Tuatha had brought from the Four Cities.

Then he and the Tuatha had gone out with those weapons against Balor of the Evil Eye. Who was he? Nita thought. Was he the Lone Power Itself? Or some unfortunate creature that It corrupted and inhabited? That, too, was a favorite tactic. It didn't matter. Balor had held the humans of the island, and his twisted creatures the Fomori, and the other, lesser powers, in great terror for thousands of years. But then came the second battle, as Tualha had said, and all that had changed. War came from Heaven to Earth with a vengeance. The Champion, in the form of Lugh, struck Balor down.

Nita turned another page over and saw why Tualha had laughed at her so. Certainly it was laughable, the idea that anyone could just throw out ten of the senior Powers that Be. But something had happened. After putting down Balor, they had got busy with the job of finishing Ireland. They raised the mountains and smoothed them down, made the plains and the forests and lakes. And they fell more completely in love with the beautiful, marred place than any of their more junior predecessors had.

This was commoner in the Old World, Nita read, than in the new. In places like North America, where the native human peoples had stories not of specific gods, but more of heroes and the One, it indicated that the Powers which had made that place had gone away, well-satisfied with their work. In some places in the world, though, the satisfaction was never quite complete - places like Greece and Rome. Their Makers loved them too much to leave for a long time, though finally they let go. But there were still a few places in the world where the Powers had never let go. This was one of them.

I bet this is why Ireland has so much trouble, one way and another, Nita thought. The Powers won't move out and let the new tenants be there by themselves. Us. . .For like most other wizards, Nita knew quite well that the good Powers might indeed be good, but that didn't make them safe. Even the best of the Powers that Be could be blunted by too much commerce with humans and physical reality.

Nita read that the Tuatha, as the Irish had come to call them, had never left. And when the human people, the 'Milesians', came at last, they struck a bargain with them, agreeing to relinquish the lands and vanish into the hills. At least, that was how it looked to the humans. They knew that some hills in Ireland, at the four great feasts of the year, became more than hills. The nonphysical then became solider, realer; and the physical, if it was wise, would stay out of the way of what was older, stronger, harder, by far.

They had gone sideways, had the Tuatha. They could not bear to leave Ireland, and so they had gone just one over - or two, or five. It was still Ireland, but it was also a little bit closer to the far side of Reality, where, as Nita knew, lay Timeheart. She had been there several times, for brief periods. It looked different ways, depending on where and when you were. She had seen it look like a city, like the ocean, like the depths of space. What it always was, regardless of your viewpoint on it, was that place, that other universe or dimension, where the physical universe was as it would have been, had the Lone Power not taken exception and created something that the other Powers had not intended: entropy… death. The Powers simply moved into that universe near Timeheart that looked most like Ireland. But much coming and going had forged a link, broadening the road from a little track into a highway that it was easy to stumble on to. All of Ireland had become a place where one could suddenly go sideways. This to-ing and fro-ing of the greater and lesser Powers between Ireland that was, and their version of Ireland - Tir na nOg, as they called it, the Land of the Ever-Young - was very dangerous. But it wasn't a thing you could just stop: at least, Nita couldn't. And as for her. . .

Well, she had gone sideways, and it hadn't hurt her… but then she was a wizard, and apt to such things. If something like that started happening to ordinary people, though, people in the street who were standing waiting for a bus, and suddenly found themselves in the middle of a Viking invasion - or something worse. . .Nita shuddered.

The problem with being sent somewhere by the Powers that Be to do a job is that, frequently, they leave it to you to find out what the job is. Nita flipped through the book to the directory pages and saw that, yes indeed, she was on active status, and her aunt's address was listed. There was an address for a senior wizard as well, with an asterisk and a note saying, "Consult in case of emergency."

Well then, Nita thought, if they've put me on my own on this one, I suppose that's what it is. Must be something that having Kit around wouldn't help. The thought made her ache. Were the Powers trying to break up their partnership? Or on the other hand, was this just the kind of solo work that even a partnered wizard had to do every now and then? Well, either way, she was not going to refuse the commission. She shut the book as the bus bounced into Bray.

It was not a very big town, its main street about half the length of the main street at home; and as usual, everything continued to look small and cramped and a little worn-out by her standards. She berated herself inwardly. Just because you're used to everything looking slick and neat and new, doesn't mean that it has to be that way here. Aunt Annie had mentioned to her that Ireland had been in economic trouble for a while, and there just was not the money to spend on a lot of things that Nita took for granted.

She got off in the middle of town, across from the big Catholic church, and had a look around. There was a sign there that said Leabhlair poblachta, public library. She grinned a bit. Finding libraries had never been one of her problems.

The library was two buildings - one older, which had been a schoolhouse once, a big square granite-built building, very solid and dependable-looking, all on one storey; and the newer annexe, built in the same stone but a slightly more modern style. She spent a happy two or three hours there, browsing. Nita had had no idea there was so much written in the Irish language - so many poems, so many poets: humour, cartoon books, all kinds of neat things. And structurally the language looked, and occasionally sounded, very like the Speech. But she tried not to be distracted from what she was there for.

She picked out several large books on Irish mythology, and began going through them in hopes of correlating what Tualha had told her with what she had seen in the manual. Mostly she found confirmation for Tualha's version - the terrible eye of Balor that burnt everything it saw: many strange tales of the old 'gods and goddesses', the greater and lesser Powers that Be. As usual, the Powers had their jobs divided up. Among many others, there were Govan the smith and beer-brewer, Diancecht the great physician of the gods, and Brigid of the Fires, hearth-goddess and beast-goddess, artificer and miracle-worker; bard-gods and carpenter-gods, builders, charioteers, cooks and warriors.

And then there were the stories of the saints. When they came to Ireland, so many miracles attended them that Nita seriously wondered whether the stories she was reading were not in fact new versions of the tales about the Powers, transferred to the saints to make them 'respectable' to the new religion. Bridget's stories in particular were interesting, though there was confusion over whether the person they were happening to was the old goddess in disguise, or the new, mortal saint. Her miracles seemed to be of a friendly, homey sort, more useful than spectacular: she mended broken things and fed people, and said that her great wish was that everyone should be in Heaven with God and the angels, and should have a nice meal and a drink.

There was a lot more material, and Nita did her best to digest it. And then digestion came up to be considered seriously, since she hadn't had any breakfast. It was partly out of cowardice; she had woken up afraid to hang around the farm for long, lest she should look at some common thing and abruptly find herself back in time, or sideways in it. I'm really no safer here, though, she thought as she stepped out of the library, looking up and down the little street which ran parallel to Bray's main street. This calm-looking landscape with its little terraced houses ranged across the way, and the van unloading groceries for the supermarket around the corner, and the people all double-parked on the yellow lines, all this could shift in a moment. A second, and she might find herself outside the Stone Age encampment that was here once long ago: or the little row of wattled huts that the Romans came visiting once, and never left - their bones and coins had been found down by Bray Head: or the great eighteenth-century spa where people from Britain came for their holidays, promenading up and down the fine seafront. No, there was nowhere she could go to get away from things.

She went up to the main street and looked around for somewhere to get something to eat. There were some tea shops, but at the moment she felt like she had had enough tea for a lifetime. Instead, near the bridge over the Dargle, there was a place with a sign that said AMERICAN STYLE FRIED CHICKEN.

Hmm, Nita thought, her mouth watering as she made for it, we'll see about that.

She went in. As she ordered, she saw a few heads turn among the kids who were sitting there: probably at her accent. She smiled. They were going to have to get used to her for the little while she was going to be here.

She got herself a Coke and settled down to wait for her chicken to be ready, gazing idly over at the kids sitting at the other table. They were stealing glances back at her, boys and girls together: a little casual, a little shy, a little hostile. In that way, they looked almost exactly like almost everyone she knew at home. They did dress differently. Black seemed to be a big favorite here, and a kind of heavy boots that she had never seen before. Everyone seemed very into tight torn jeans, or just tight jeans, or very tight short skirts, all black again; and black leather seemed popular. She felt a little out of place in her quilted bodywarmer and her faded blue jeans, but she grinned back at the other kids and paid attention to her Coke again.

A couple of minutes later, two of them came over to her. She looked up amiably enough. One of them was a boy, very tall, with very shaggy dark hair, a long nose, with dark eyes set very close together, and a big wide mouth that could have been very funny or very cruel depending on the mood of its owner. The girl could have been his twin, except that she was shorter, and her hair was marvelously teased and ratted out into a great black mane. At least parts of it were black; some were stunningly purple, or pink. She was wearing a khaki T-shirt with a wonderfully torn and beaten-up leather jacket over it: black again, black jeans and those big heavy boots which Nita was becoming rather envious of.

"You a Yank?" said the boy. It wasn't entirely a question. There was something potentially a little nasty on the edge of it.

"Somebody has to be," Nita said. "You want to sit down?"

They looked at her and shuffled for a moment. "You staying in town?"

"No, I'm out in Kilquade."

"Relatives?"

"Yeah. Annie Callahan. She's my aunt."

"Woooaaa!" said the boy in a tone of voice that was only slightly mocking and only slightly impressed. "Rich relatives, huh?"

"I don't know if rich is the right word," Nita said.

"You here looking for your roots?" the girl asked.

Nita looked at her hair, looked at the girl's. 'Still attached to them, as far as I can tell. Though finding them around here doesn't seem to be a big problem."

There was a burst of laughter over this. "Come on and sit with us," they said. "I'm Ronan. This is Majella."

"OK."

Nita went with them. She was rapidly introduced to the others, who seemed to alternate between being extremely interested in her, and faintly scornful. The scorn seemed to be because she was an American, because they thought she had a lot of money, because they thought she thought they were poor, and various other reasons. The admiration seemed to be because she was American, because they thought she had a lot of money, and because she could see the big films six months earlier than everyone else. "Uh," Nita said finally, "my parents don't let me go and see all that many films. I have to keep my schoolwork up all the time, or they don't let me go out."

There was a general groan of agreement over this. "There's no escape," said Ronan.

More detailed introductions ensued. Most of the kids lived in Bray. One of them lived as far out as Greystones, but took the bus in 'for the crack', she said. Nita blinked a bit until she discovered that crack was not a drug here, but a word for really good conversation or fun. Nita was immediately instructed about all the nightclubs and all the discos she should go to. "How many discos do you have here?" she said, in some surprise. It then turned out that 'disco' was not a word for a specific kind of building, or a specific kind of music, as it was in the States, but just a dance that various pubs or hotels did once or twice a week. Several of them were no-alcohol kids' discos, highly thought of by this group, who went off into enthusiastic discussion of what they would wear and who they would go with.

"You got somebody to go with?" said Ronan.

"Uh, no," Nita said, thinking regretfully of Kit. He loved to dance. "My buddy's back in the States."

"Her buddyyyyyyV Nita grinned a little: she was now beyond the blushing point. Her sister had been teasing her about Kit for so long that this was a very minor sort of salvo by comparison.

"Aren't you a little young for that?" one of the girls said, clearly teasing, to judge by the young guy massaging her shoulders at the moment.

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 parents 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 thought about this for a moment, and thought that the simplest way to manage things was 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!" 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. Ronan's opinions of anyone who wanted to colonize Ireland, from the English 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 him, 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 a little 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 there. Eventually, though, everybody had to leave for one reason or another: 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.

She snickered and turned away, looking at the number forty-five bus pulling up across the street, and thought, Naah… Ill walk home. It was only eight miles, up the promontory of Bray Head and down the other side, through extremely pretty countryside.

It was a long, easy walk down, taking her about an hour to get down to Greystones. She strolled down into the town. It was a more villagey-looking street than Bray's, and smaller: a couple of banks, a couple of food shops, two small restaurants, a newsagents where you could get magazines and cards and sweets. Various other small shops… a dry cleaners. And that was it. After that, the town was 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," she said to it. It blinked at her and kept chewing.

The road climbed again, winding a bit, up through Killincarrig. Everything has names here, Nita thought. Ifs amazing. Every piece of ground… Aunt Annie was right. I 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-junction: she turned left. That way led towards Kilquade and Kilcoole and Newcastle with its little church.

This road climbed and dipped over a little bridge that crossed a dry river; up between high hedges. Birds dipped and sang high in the air. The sun was quite hot: there was no wind.

There came a point where there was a right turn, and a signpost pointing down between two more high hedges, towards 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 quite small; some were larger, though.

The road dipped and broadened, curving around in front of St 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 and 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, she 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 colour this time of year; for in this heat, the bracken was beginning to go brown already. I wonder, she thought. Sideways…

She had done it without wizardry yesterday. She 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. What does it look like? she thought. What does it look like for them, for the Sidhe?

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. No-one had ever built such towers, such spires. Glass, it might have been, 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. Nita was not entirely sure she didn't see something moving in some of those shadows. But for the moment, all she could see clearly 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 then 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 it go: and it was gone. Brown bracken again, plain granite mountain, with its head scraped bare. She let a long breath out and went walking again, back up to the last hill that would lead her up to her aunt's drive. "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 reading late again that night, and chatting with Kit. He hadn't been able to throw much light on anything, except that he missed her. "Kit," she said, "I don't know how much more of this I can take."

"You can take it," he said. "I can take it too. I saw your parents the other day."

"How are they?"

"They're fine… they're going to call you tonight. They said they were going to give you a couple of days to get yourself acclimatized before they bothered you."

"Fine by me," Nita said. "I've had enough to keep me busy."

She had felt Kit nod, thirty-five hundred miles away. "So I see," he said. “I'd watch doing that too much, Neets."

"Hm?"

"I mean, it makes me twitch a little bit. You didn't do any specific wizardry, but with that result - makes you wonder what's going on over there."

"Yeah, well, it can't be that bad, Kit. Look, you come back as easily as you go. . ."

"I hope you do," he said.

The conversation had trailed off after that. It was odd how it was becoming almost uncomfortable to talk to Kit, because their conversation couldn't run in the same channels it usually did, the easy, predictable ones. For the first time, she was having things to tell him that he hadn't actually participated in. "How's Dairine?" she said.

"She's been busy with something… I don't know what. Something about somebody's galaxy."

"Oh no, not again," Nita said. "Sometimes I think she should be unlisted. She's never going to have any peace, at least not while she's in breakthrough… and maybe not later."

They chatted on a bit, and then it trailed off.

Nita was thinking about this 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 whatever interesting local news there was 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. You could hear some terrific gossip if you hung around them, or so Nita was learning.

Finally the kitchen began to clear out a bit. The people who were in the hunt were splendidly dressed, all red coats and black caps and beige riding breeches and black shiny boots. They were discussing the course they would ride - a difficult one, from Calary Upper behind Great Sugarloaf, down through various farmers' lands, straight down to Newcastle. The thing that was bemusing them was that, suddenly, there were no reports of foxes anywhere. Nita smiled again to herself as she heard the discussion in the kitchen that morning. Everyone was excessively bemused about the situation. Some people blamed hunt protesters; others blamed the weather, crop dusting, sunspots, global warming, or overzealous shooting by local farmers. 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 Aunt Annie, pouring herself a cup as well and then flopping down in one of the kitchen chairs in thinly-disguised relief.

"I thought they were 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 brokenhearted."

"Me neither," said Nita.

"Doesn't matter. They'll hunt to a drag - it's just an old fox skin, that leaves a scent for the dogs: they drag it along the ground. They'll have a good time."

Nita nodded and went back to her reading, half-thinking of going down to Bray again that afternoon, to see if Ronan or Majella were around. Then she talked herself out of it. She would put a towel down outside, and lie out in the sun, and pretend it was the beach. She missed the beaches back home: the water here was much too cold to swim in.

So that was what she did.

And so it was, about two-fifteen, that she heard the cry of the hounds. She got up and pulled a T-shirt on over her bathing suit, put the manual in the caravan, and went to lean on the fence by the back field and see what she could see. She almost missed the first horseman to go by, far away, about a half mile across the field, actually; thundering through the pasture, one horseman with a long rope dragging behind him, and something dragging at the end of the rope.

There was a long pause. And then the note of the hounds came belling up over the fields, followed by the hounds themselves, woofing, lolloping, yipping. Then, over the rise behind them, came a splendid pouring of horses of all kinds: chestnut, brown, dapple, black, galloping over the hill; and a horn going tarantara! And the riders, halloing and riding as best they could after the hounds.

It took them about a minute and a half to go by. There were about fifty people, all in their red jackets and their beige breeches and not-so-black boots. Then they were gone. The sounds of the hounds and the horses' hooves faded away over the next hill, south of the potato field, and were gone. Nita listened to the last cries fade out, then went back to lie in the sun.

The horses started coming back to the farm about three hours later. There was much talk of rides and falls and jumps and water barriers, and a lot of other stuff that Nita didn't particularly understand. But everyone seemed to have had a good time.

Nita was very glad that it had been able to happen without any foxes being ripped up.

Dinnertime that evening was replaced by a marathon 'little cup of tea', as the grooms from the stables got together with the stablemanager and the instructors. It was at least eleven-thirty or twelve before the last of them left, having been given wine and whiskey and everything else that Aunt Annie had.

Nita came back in from the caravan, having had enough of the horsy talk about eight, and helped her aunt do the washing-up, or at least rinse the dishes and put them in the dishwasher. “There's that done with for this year," said her aunt. She rolled her eyes at the ceiling. "The way they eat!"

"Yeah. You need anything else, Aunt Annie?"

"No, I think we're OK for the night. You ready to turn in?"

"I'm going to have a little walk first."

"OK. Just watch out for those holes in the pasture. It's a little torn up out there, what with our neighbor's cows."

"Right."

She got her jacket and went out into the evening. It was twelve-thirty by now, but it still wasn't fully dark; in fact it was beginning, in the northeast, to think about slowly brightening again. Nita cast an eye up at the sky. There was a canopy of thin cloud, enough to obscure all but the very brightest stars, and the occasional planet. Jupiter was high, and the moon.

She wandered out into the pasture, into the total dark and the quiet, and just stood there and listened. It was the first time she had really felt relaxed since she had come here. In the great quiet she heard birds crying, somewhere a long way away. It might have been a rookery. She had heard that creaky, cawing sound a couple of times now, when the rooks were settled down for the night and some late noise disturbed them.

She stood there under the stars, waiting for the silence to resume. It didn't resume. It got louder.

More rooks. Or no - what was that?

The hair stood straight up all over her as she heard the howl. There are no wolves in Ireland! she told herself. The wolfhounds had been bred specifically to deal with them, and there hadn't been wolves in Ireland since the late lyoos some time.

But that howl came shuddering out of the night, and several others behind it; followed by yips and barks. And hooves. She heard hooves: not many sets, but just one this time, a long way off. One rider, one horse, galloping. What in the worlds. . .?

She strained to see in the moonlight. It was difficult to see; through this thin cloud, the moon was only at first quarter, and it was hard to see anything but a vague soft bloom of light over the cropland, black where it struck trees and hedgerows, the dimmest silver where it struck anything else. The sound got louder, the hooves; and the howls got louder too.

Hurriedly she said the first six words of a spell that had proved very handy to her in other times and places. It was a simple force-field spell, which made a sort of shell around the wizard who spoke it. Blows went sideways from it; physical force stopped at it and just slid off. One word would release it if she needed it - and she had a feeling she would.

In the dark, not too far away, she saw something moving. There were spells that would augment a wizard's vision, but she didn't have any of them prepared at the moment, and didn't have time to do any one of them from scratch. She didn't have her manual. She could just begin to see the faint silvering of moonlight on the big thing galloping towards her.

It was not a horse. No horse ever foaled was that tall. It went by a tree she knew the height of, at the edge of the field, and then by a fencepost that she knew was only two meters high. The top of the post came just below the creature's shoulder. A great, massive four-footed shape, sprinting towards her. Not a horse, not with those antlers, two meters across at least; not with that skull more than a meter long; belling, desperate, trumpeting, a sound like the night being torn edge to edge. She had seen its picture. It was an elk, but not like any elk that walked the Earth these days; the old Irish elk, extinct since the ice came down.

It went by her like a piece of storm, the breath like a blast of fog out of it as it went. It shook the ground as it ran, and its feet went deep into the soft pasture, spurning up great sods of grass. It flew on past and gave her never a look. Belling, on it went, with a great roar, a trumpeting like an elephant's. And behind it came the wolves.

They were not normal wolves. All the wolfhounds in Ireland could not have done anything about these. These were the wolves that had hunted the Irish elk when they still walked this part of the world. They were more than a meter high at the shoulder, easily; she saw them come past the fencepost too. They were rough-coated, their eyes huge and dark except when the Moon glinted on the head of one or another thrown up to howl as it ran. A faint mist of light clung to them that had nothing to do with the mist on the field, or the moonlight. Their teeth were longer than a normal wolfs; their feet were bigger, their claws were longer. Their tails were shorter, their heads were heavier and more brutish. They were dire-wolves, the wolves of the Stone Age or earlier, Canis lupus dims.

It suddenly occurred to Nita that there would be someone following behind this pack, as there had been this morning… that single set of hoofbeats, growing louder as the rider strove to break through into this world, behind his pack. And she didn't want to meet that rider.

The wolves tore towards her. There were about twenty of them. More than half of them held the main course that they had been running, on the elk's track: the rest saw or scented her, she had no idea which, and angled towards her. Nita said the sixth word of the spell, felt the shield wink into place around her. Hurriedly she said the first eighteen words of another spell she knew, one she was very reluctant to use; but she had no weapon-spell handy that was less dangerous, and frankly was more willing to see the wolves dead than herself. If they can be killed at all. Are they even real…?

She braced herself as best she could, and waited. The first wolf hit her shield - and didn't bounce; it knocked her down. Nita got a horrible glance of fangs trying desperately to break through to her -failing for the moment, failing. . .

In shock she fumbled for the last word of the killing spell; couldn't remember it. Those fangs knocked against the shield, right in front of her face, bending it in towards her. . .

That was when the hooves came down and broke the wolfs head, and kicked its body aside, and smashed its spine into the ground. There was an immediate flurry of other wolves fastening themselves to the great dark shape that was rearing above Nita, smashing at more of them with its hooves. It had bought her the second she needed; she remembered the nineteenth word. She said it.

The sound that followed was not one that she much enjoyed, but the spell worked, even though the shield hadn't. These creatures were flesh and blood enough that when you suddenly took all the cell membranes from between their cells, the result was quite effective. It rained blood briefly. Nita looked at another of the wolves near her, said the nineteenth word. It turned in mid-leap, and showered down in gore. She said the nineteenth word again, and again, and she kept saying it, having no weapon more merciful, until there was nothing near her but a sickly, black, wet patch in the field, gleaming dully in the moonlight… and the elk, the Irish elk, standing with its head down, panting, looking at her out of great, dumb, understanding eyes.

Nita let the shield spell go, staggered to her feet, and tottered over to the elk. Its flanks and shoulders were torn where the dire-wolves' teeth had met. Brother, she said in the Speech, let me see to those before you go.

Hurry, said the elk. The loss of the pack has slowed him. But he's coming.

He, Nita thought, and broke out in a cold sweat.

Fortunately there was plenty of blood around, blood being what you needed for almost all the healing spells. Nita had some experience with those. She called her manual to her and it came, hurriedly. She started turning pages, not worrying where the blood went that she was smeared with. "Here," she said, and began reading the quickest of the healing spells, a forced adhesion that caused the damaged tissue to at least hold together long enough for the knitting process to start. The spell was little more than wizardly superglue, but Nita was satisfied that the elk's body would be able to manage the rest of the business itself; the wounds weren't too serious.

It took about five minutes' recitation before the last of the wounds shut itself. The elk stood there shivering in all its limbs, as if expecting something to come after it out of the night. Nita was shivering too; the healer always partook of the suffering of the healed - that was part of the price paid.

Go now, she said. Get out of here!

The elk tossed its head and leapt away, galloping across the field. Nita stood there, panting, and wondering. 'Get out of here.' Where is 'here' any more? That broke through from 'sideways'.

She stood for a moment, listening. The sound of hoofbeats was fading: both the elk's, and whatever had been chasing it. She was relieved, though still concerned for the elk. The silence reasserted itself, deep and whole. The Moon came out from behind a cloud.

Nita looked up at it and sighed, then turned and Started making her way back to the farm. I'm going to have to do something about these clothes before the morning, she thought. I suppose the book has some washing spells… But she couldn't push the bigger problem out of her mind.

Without any spell done by me, something came through from 'sideways'. A lot of somethings.

We're in deep, deep trouble…

4. Ath na Sceire
Enniskerry

 - Prev/Next

It was at that point that Nita realized she needed expert help, and she needed it fast.

She pulled out her manual the next morning, and began going through it looking for the names and addresses of the local Senior Wizards. Addresses there were - there were four Seniors for Ireland, one of whom was on retirement leave, two of whom were on active assignment and hence not available for consultation, and one, the Area Advisory, who was located in a place called Castle Matrix. This impressed Nita, though not as much as it would have a couple of weeks before, when she had thought that probably half the people in Ireland lived in old castles. Now she hoped her business would take her that way… but you didn't go bothering the Area Advisory for a problem that you weren't yet sure couldn't be handled at a less central level.

She therefore concentrated on the addresses of wizards in the Bray and Grey stones area. There were about forty of these, which surprised her -she had been expecting fewer. Usually wizards on active status are only about one percent of the population, though in some places it can run as high as ten.

She looked the list up and down in mild perplexity. There was a problem in this part of the world; people tended not to use street numbers unless they lived in a housing estate. Sometimes they didn't even have a street; so that you might see an address that said, 'Ballyvolan, Kilquade, County Wicklow' - and if you didn't know where Kilquade was, or what Ballyvolan was, or what road it was down, you were in trouble.

She sighed, ticked off a couple of names in Bray that did have street numbers. That done, she went to find Aunt Annie.

"Going out, are you?" her aunt said.

"Yeah. Aunt Annie, can you tell me where Boghall Road is?"

"The Boghall Road? That's, um, just off the back road between Greystones and Bray. What for?"

"Oh, I met somebody in one of the cafes in Bray and I thought I might go over that way and see if I could find them." This was not entirely a fib -the sound and feel of Ronan's lean, edged, angry humour had kept coming back to her for the past day or so. It was just that the two phrases had nothing to do with one another, and if Aunt Annie thought they did, well… that was just fine.

Her aunt said, "Here, let me draw you a map."

"Oh, thank you!" Nita said with considerable gratitude. Her aunt sat down and sketched her a thumbnail map, and said, "If you get off the forty-five bus here, at the top of Boghall, it's not a long walk to wherever you're going. That sound all right?"

"Fine, Aunt Annie… thanks."

"What time will you be back?"

"Not very late."

"All right. Call if you run into any problems. And take an umbrella or something: the weathermen have been predicting thundery showers."

"Will do." And she headed out.

At first she considered not walking - Kit's 'beam-me-up-Scotty' spell could occasionally be extremely useful. However, there was always the danger, when 'beaming' around unfamiliar territory, that you might turn up somewhere that had people in it.

However, there was a handy bit of woodland not too far away from where the road from Greystones to Bray started trending downhill towards the downs, just outside of the big Kilruddery estate. Nita had noticed it coming upwards, the other day - a stand of five cypresses, very big, very old. Generally the only people who walked up that way were the traveling people who lived in their caravans by the side of the road there.

So Nita popped into that grove of trees and looked around her, and paused for a moment. It was a matter of curiosity. Though you might have a sense of how many wizards were working in the area, there was one quick way to find out. It was difficult for a wizard to spend as much as a day without doing some wizardry, the art being its own delight. She opened her manual, as she stood there under the trees in the summer sun, and quickly did the spell that showed one whatever active wizardries were working in an area. Ideally, what happened was that the world blanked out, and you were presented with a sort of schematic - points of light in a field over which the real world was dimly overlaid. She did not get what she was expecting. Nita staggered back against one of the trees, half-blinded. It was not just points of light that she was perceiving, but fields of it, whole patches of it - great tracts of residual wizardry that just had not gone away.

Its not supposed to do that! Nita thought. Ideally, the traces of a wizardry were gone by at most forty-eight hours later. But this. . .! It looked either as if the biggest wizardry on Earth had been done here about two days ago, or else - and this concerned Nita more - all the wizardries done here in the past were still here, in residue.

She shut the spell down and stood there, just shaking a bit. That last thought was not a good one. Doing a wizardry over another one, overlaying an old magic, was extremely dangerous. The two spells could synergize in a way that neither the wizard of the original spell, or the one presently working, could have expected. The results could be horrendous.

No wonder, she thought. If that's the reason for last night, something like that. . .Was I working in an overlay area? She called up the spell in memory for a moment more to look at it. All Kilquade was covered by one big patch of residual wizardry; all Bray was covered by another. There was in fact very little open space in this area that had not had a wizardry done on it at one tune or another. She thought with horror of what might have happened had she done a teleportation spell closer to a more heavily overlaid area, like Bray. It was not a pleasant prospect at all.

She walked down the Boghall Road. It was a suburban street, with a church and a school at one end, a computer factory at the other end, and a baker's, little shops, and more houses and housing estates scattered along it or branching off from it. Mothers were out walking their babies in buggies; kids were out kicking footballs around. It looked like an entirely normal place… and so it was, since there were wizards working in it.

Nita made her way down to the address she was looking for, on a street called Novara Court. All the houses here were very much the same. There was not much in the way of trees, as if people didn't want to block the view of Sugarloaf to the west, or Bray Head immediately to the east. And it was a handsome view.

Nita found the house and had an attack of shyness practically on the doorstep. How can I just go up and knock on the door and ask if there are wizards there? But that was exactly what she needed to do, and there was no way out of it. Nita went up and rang the bell.

There was a long, long wait. Oh good, Nita was just thinking, no-one's in. . .when the door was abruptly pulled open.

It was Ronan, from the chicken place.

He looked at her in astonishment.

She looked at him in much the same mood. Once again she was on the end of one of those coincidences of which wizards' lives are made, and which normal people (incorrectly) never take too seriously. A wizard, though, knows that there are no coincidences. And she had said to her aunt that she was coming to see him. I've got to watch what I say around here! And there was something else. An odd tremor -anticipation, a shiver down her back at the sight of him scowling at her, tall and dark, that she didn't quite know what to make of. . .

"R. Nolan?" she said. "Junior?"

"Yeah," he said, perplexed. "You're from. . ."

"I'm on errantry," Nita said, "and I greet you."

He looked at her with his mouth open. He suddenly looked like one of the terminally shocked fish that Nita had seen in the Bray fish market the other morning. "You?" he said.

"Me."

“You mean you're one of US?"

"Um." Nita made a wry face at him, and lowered her voice. "I've been places where the people had tentacles, and more eyes than you have hairs," she said, "and they didn't make this much fuss about it. Can we talk? I require an advice."

It was the formal phrasing for a wizard on assignment who needed technical information from another one. Ronan stared at her and said, "Just a minute. I'll get my jacket."

The door shut in her face, and Nita stood there on the doorstep, feeling like an idiot. After a moment Ronan came out again, and they walked. "Let's get out of here," he said. "I don't want to be seen."

Nita had to laugh at that, though she got an odd twinge of pain when he said it. Not seen with me? Or what? "What, am I contagious or something?" she said as they made their way down to the Boghall Road.

"No, it's just. . ." He didn't say what it was just. "Never mind. You mean you're a. . ."

"Can we stop having this part of the conversation?" Nita said, both irritated and amused. "There's more stuff to talk about. Listen. This going "sideways" thing. . ."

"What?"

"Going "sideways"," Nita said, getting a little more irritable. "I assume you know about it. Well, it's happened to me three times in the past two days, and I don't mind telling you that I don't like it very much. . ."

"You went sideways?" Ronan said. "We're not allowed to go sideways. . ."

"Listen," Nita said, "maybe you're not allowed to go sideways, fine, but I did it, and not on purpose, let me tell you. Now I need to talk to someone and find out what's going on here, because last night I was almost eaten by wolves and nearly stepped on by an Irish elk!"

"Jeez," said Ronan, almost in awe.

Nita smiled slightly. "My feelings exactly," she said. Carefully she told him how things had been going for her since she arrived.

"You could have been killed!" Ronan said.

"Tell me something I don't know," Nita said. "And I would like to avoid being killed in the future! Is this kind of thing normal?"

"Not really," Ronan said. "At least, not for us. We're not supposed to be doing that kind of thing. This whole area is badly overlaid."

"I saw that," Nita said. "But look… this kind of thing isn't safe. If a nonwizard falls into this. . ."

"You got that in one," Ronan said, looking grim. "Jeez, Kilquade. Kilquade was supposed to be comparatively quiet. Not like Bray. . ."

"Things have become very unquiet up that way," Nita said. "Do you have a Senior around here that we can go and talk to? This is not good at all."

"Sure. She's up in Enniskerry."

"Then let's get up there. I'm on active, and I don't know what for, and if I can't do wizardry for fear of overlays, I am going to have a nasty problem on my hands. Have you got your manual?"

He looked at her. "Manual?"

"You know. Your wizard's manual, where you get the spells and the ancillary data."

"You get them out of a book?"

Nita was confused. "Where else would you get them?"

Ronan looked at her as if she was very dim indeed. "The way we always have - the way the druids and bards did it for two, three thousand years, maybe more. We do it by memory!"

Now Nita's mouth fell open. "You learn the whole manual by heart? The whole body of spells?"

"Well, the basic stuff. You have to learn the basic incantations that make more detailed information available. But mostly, mostly you learn it by heart - the area restrictions, the address list - if a change happens, you usually just wake up knowing about it one morning - and you make sure you remember it." He shook his head. "Why? You mean you get it written down?"

Nita pulled out her manual and showed it to him. Ronan paged through it with a mixture of fascination and disgust. "I can't believe this. This makes it too easy!"

"Are you kidding? Do you have any idea how thick this thing can get sometimes? I think we have a little more information to deal with than you do over here."

"Don't be so sure," Ronan said, handing the manual back to her in some irritation. 'We may be a smaller place than you Yanks have to deal with, but it's a lot more complicated."

They walked down the street, each in a state of mild annoyance with the other. "Look," Nita said, "let's not fight over details. Are there a lot of you working around here?"

Ronan shook his head. "We don't seem able to keep a lot of our wizards after eighteen or so."

"Why?"

"Emigration," Ronan said. "England and the States. There's not much work here. You may be a wizard, but you've got to have a job too. You can't make something out of nothing… the Universe doesn't allow it."

"No," Nita said.

Ronan looked at her with more annoyance. "But there are still a fair number of locals. I can't understand why they should put you on active all of a sudden."

"Mmmh," Nita said. "Possibly past experience."

She didn't feel like going into much more detail. "Never mind that. Let's go and see your Senior."

“We'll have to take the bus," Ronan said.

So they did. Enniskerry was about four miles away. You had to cross the dual carriageway, and then go up a twisty-turny road which the locals called 'the thirteen-bend road'. It paralleled the course of the Glencree River as it poured down through beautiful woodland. Occasional old houses were scattered along the way, but mostly the road was bounded by hedges on one side and walls on the other, and the river chattering on the far side of the hedge.

They sat in the top of the bus. "I can't believe it," Ronan kept saying. "I mean, a Yank. . .!"

"Some of us have to be wizards," Nita said, rolling her eyes. "You know that. We can't function entirely with immigrants from Ireland." She grinned at him wickedly.

"Well, I suppose. But books."

"You should see my sister," Nita said. "She gets hers out of a computer."

"Jeez!" Ronan said in wonder and disgust.

They came to Enniskerry village. It was a pretty place; there was a smart little red-and-white hotel with peaked roofs, a pub, some small antique shops, a food shop and a florist. In the middle of the town's triangular 'square' was a wonderful blocky Victorian clock tower with a domed top and a weather vane. "Do we get out here?" Nita said.

"Not unless you want to spend ten minutes climbing the steepest hill you've ever seen," Ronan said.

"Noooo…I'll pass."

The bus paused in the square for a few minutes, then continued up the winding road that led westward. Where the road topped out, near another housing estate and a little shop, they got off. Ronan turned and began to walk back down the hill. "It's over here," he said.

They walked down the hill and crossed the road to a pair of wooden gates between two pillars, one of which had the words KILGARRON HOUSE painted on it. "Wow," Nita said.

There was a little side gate; Ronan opened it for her, and they stepped through. Inside it was a curving driveway leading to a large two-storey house, square and blocky, maybe a farmhouse once. It had a beautiful view of the Dargle valley, leading downward towards Bray, and also of the church and water meadow just down the hill.

They went up to the door and knocked. There was a long pause, and then a little old lady came to the door. She was very fresh-faced and smooth-skinned, and only the fact that her hair was quite silver really gave away much about her age. She was a little stocky, with very sharp, intelligent eyes. "Morning, Mrs Smyth," said Ronan.

"And good morning to you," she said in a faintly Scots accent. "Are you on business or pleasure?"

"Business," Ronan said, nodding at Nita. "She's on errantry."

"I greet you, ma'am," Nita said, as she would have said to an American Senior she was being introduced to. The lady blinked at her.

"Are you on active status?"

"Yes'm. At least the manual says so."

"Then you'd better come in and have a cup of tea, and tell me what it's all about."

Nita rolled her eyes slightly at the prospect of yet another cup of tea, and resigned herself to the inevitable.

They were made comfortable in the sitting-room, the tea was brought out, and Mrs Smyth poured it out formally for them, and gave them biscuits and sandwiches, and cakes, and encouraged them to eat more of them before she would let them tell her anything about what was going on. Then Nita began to explain again, as she had to Ronan. When she mentioned Tualha, Mrs Smyth's eyes widened a bit. When Nita mentioned going sideways, Mrs Smyth's jaw almost dropped. "My dear," she said. "I hope you understand that you must not do that again."

"Ma'am, I didn't do it on purpose the first time. Or the third. The only time I did it on purpose was when I looked at Sugarloaf. I won't do it again."

"I wonder… " Mrs Smyth said. "Well. Something is certainly in the wind. We're coming up to Lughnasád; I'd be surprised if it didn't have something to do with that."

Ronan bit his lip. Nita looked from one of them to the other. "I hope you'll forgive me if I don't know what's going on here," she said, "but if I'm going to be on active status…"

"No, indeed. Lughnasád is one of the four great holidays - Beltain, Samhain, and Imbolc. It used to be the harvest festival, a long time ago - people would celebrate the first crops coming in. And it also celebrated the turning of the heat of the summer towards the cooler weather."

"The heat of the summer?" Nita said, mildly sceptical. So far it had only got up into the mid-seventies.

Mrs Smyth blinked at her. "Oh, you're used to it warmer where you live? We're not, though. I think the drought is just about official now, isn't it, Ronan?"

'They said they were going to start water rationing," Ronan said.

"So," said Mrs Smyth. "I suppose that's another indication as well. Anyway, Nita's quite right; if this is allowed to continue, even the nonwizardly will start to notice it… and be endangered by it. This is, mmm, an undesirable outcome."

Nita couldn't help but laugh at that. "But what are you going to do about it?"

"Well, I think we're going to have to get together and discuss the matter."

"But if you don't do something. . ."

"My dear," Mrs Smyth said, "you come from a very… energetic… school of wizardry. I appreciate that. But we do things a little more slowly here. No, we need to call the local wizards and the Area Supervisors together, and discuss what needs to be done. It'll take a few days at least."

Nita chafed at that. It seemed to her that a few days might be too long. But she was a stranger here, and theoretically these people knew best. "What do you think they'll decide?" Ronan said.

Mrs Smyth shook her head. "It's hard to say. If we have here a rising of the old sort - a reassertion of the events associated with this holiday - then normally one would also have to reassert the events that stopped whatever thing it was that happened."

"But what was it that happened?" Nita said.

"The second battle of Moytura," Ronan said. "I suppose you won't have heard about it. . ."

“I've heard about it," Nita said. “A little cat told me. In considerable detail."

"A cat told you?"

"Yeah. She said she was a bard, and. . ."

Mrs Smyth looked at Nita in surprise. "You mentioned this before, but we didn't pursue it. How old was this cat?"

"She's a kitten. Not very old… maybe ten weeks."

Nita told them, as well as she could remember, everything that Tualha had said to her.

"That is interesting," Mrs Smyth said. "Normally cat-bards aren't born unless there's about to be some change in the 'ruled' world, the animal world - as well as the human one. And she mentioned the Carrion-Crow, did she?"

Nita nodded. “I get a feeling that's not good?"

Ronan made a face. 'The Morrigan is trouble," he said. "She turns up in the old stories, sometimes, as a war goddess. Or sometimes as three of them."

“It's the usual problem," Mrs Smyth said, “of the language not being adequate to describe the reality. The Morrigan is one of the Powers, a much diminished one… though even the lesser Powers were often mistaken for gods, in the ancient times. She has become, or made herself, the expression of change, and violence. A lot of that around here in the old days," she said, and sighed. “And now. But she's also the peace afterwards… if people will just let it be. "Carrion-Crow" she might be, but the crows are the aftermath of the battle, nature's attempt to clean it up… not the cause of it." Mrs Smyth turned her teacup around. “It's dangerous to see her… but not always bad. She shows herself as a tall dark woman, a fierce one. But she always smiles. She is Ireland, some ways: one of its personifications. Or its hauntings."

She looked up at Ronan again. “So, the Morrigan… and the Hunt. Some very old memories are being resurrected. The foxhunt's running must have reminded the world of an older hunt over the same ground."

'What were those?" Nita said. “They looked like dire-wolves, but they had some kind of werelight around them."

“They were faery dire-wolves," Mrs Smyth said, “from one of the companion worlds."

"Who was that following them?" Nita said.

Mrs Smyth looked at her. "I see by the Knowledge," she said,"that you've had a certain amount of dealing with the Other. The head of the Fomori - the Lone Power. I should say, a dangerous amount of dealings with It."

"I don't deal with It," Nita said. "Against It, possibly." She began to feel annoyed. "I don't think you need to doubt which side I'm on. Are you saying that you think I'm attracting this trouble?"

Wizards do not tell white lies to make people feel better. Mrs Smyth said nothing.

"Well, if I'm here for that purpose," Nita said, "I'm here because the Powers that Be sent me. If I'm a trigger, it's Their finger that's on it, not the Lone One's. The Lone One can't move wizards… you know that."

"No, I do know that," Mrs Smyth said. "There have been changes in the Lone One recently, and you had something to do with those."

"Something," Nita said.

Ronan looked at her, and then back at Mrs Smyth. "Her?"

"She was involved just now in the Song of the Twelve," Mrs Smyth said. Ronan looked wide-eyed. "She was also involved in. . .Well, never mind. It's a distinguished start: if you and your partner survive, of course. Wizardly talent is usually tested to destruction. Your sister," Mrs Smyth said, "where is she now? Did she come with you?"

"No, she's back in New York."

"Pity," Mrs Smyth said. "At any rate, I advise you to keep your use of wizardry to the minimum needed. Ronan, you'll want to speak to your friends among the locals, especially the young ones. If anyone finds themselves going sideways, tell them not to meddle."

"What kind of re-enactment were you thinking of doing?" Nita said.

"Well, my dear," Mrs Smyth said. "We have a problem. If there's a re-enactment of Moytura to be done, we don't have anything to do it with, even though one or two of the Treasures still exist."

“Then how do you mean you don't have anything to do it with?"

"Nita," Mrs Smyth said, "it took one of the Powers that Be a very long time to invest those four objects with strength enough to function against the Lone Power in the form It took. The legend says that anything that the Lone One in Balor's form beheld with his eye open, burst straightway into fire and fell as ash, and poisoned the ground for leagues around, so that nothing would grow there, and men who walked that ground died."

"Sounds like something nuclear," Nita said.

"So it might have been," Mrs Smyth said. "The Lone One has never minded using natural phenomena for Its own ends. But Its power was so terrible that only an army of all the wizards in Ireland - for that's what the druids were - could even think about going up against him; and without the Treasures to protect them, they all would have been destroyed. The Cup, known as the Cauldron of Rebirth, raised up their fallen, and the Sword, Fragarach the Answerer, held off Balor's creatures, and the Stone of Destiny kept the ground of Ireland whole and rooted when Balor would have dragged it off its foundations and overturned the whole island into the deep. All their power together, and all the wizards', was just enough to buy the time for the Spear of Lugh to pierce Balor's fire and quench it at last."

She took a sip of her tea. "Now, three of the four Treasures we still have - at least one of them is in the National Museum in Dublin. But they have no virtue any more. No-one believes that the gold and silver cup they have here, the Ardagh Chalice, is the Well of Transformations, the Bottomless Cauldron. No-one really believes that the notched bronze thing in the glass case is Fragarach, even though the legends say so. Its virtue has long since ebbed away as a result: the 'soul' in it, if you like, has departed. And the Stone of Destiny, the Lia Fail, is now just a cracked stone half buried in the ground somewhere up North, with an iron picket fence around it, and tourists come and take its picture because it's supposed to be Saint Patrick's gravestone or some such. Not because of what it really is, or was." Her smile was very rueful. “The thousands of years and the loss of true knowledge of the nature of the Protectors have taken them and made them just a cup, just a sword, and a rock."

"What about the Spear?"

"Its "soul" was the strongest of all of the Treasures," Mrs Smyth said. "It should be the easiest to find… but it's nowhere in the world that we can feel. No, what we're going to do - if a re-enactment. . ." She sighed. "I can't say. We're going to have to work something out from scratch. In the meantime, if I were you, I would step lightly. And thank you for coming to me. Where are you staying?"

"With my aunt, Anne Callahan, at Ballyvolan."

"Right," said Mrs Smyth, and made a note. "Now then; another cup of tea?"

Nita groaned.

They went down to the little tea shop in Enniskerry, and had a Coke to kill the time until the number forty-five bus was ready to leave. "She's not much like the Seniors at home," Nita said, thoughtful, "except she's as tough."

Ronan was sitting slumped back in his chair, his legs crossed, scowling out at her from under those black brows. The hair rose a little on Nita's neck, and she started to blush, and felt extremely stupid. "Just because she's not like your precious Seniors. . ." he said.

"Ronan, just shut up. You think you're the greatest thing on wheels, don't you?" And Nita scowled back at him, mostly to cover her own confusion at her anger. "You've got a chip on your shoulder the size of a two-by-four, and you'd better do something about it before it ruins your wizardry. And I'm not one of your little herd of head-nodders, so don't waste your dirty looks on me. You don't like the news, that's just tough."

He stared at Nita, and his expression had changed slightly when she dared to look at it again. He looked a little shocked, still angry: but there was an odd thread of liking there. "No," he said softly, "you're not one of them, are you? Girls have big mouths, where you come from."

She blushed again, feeling more like an idiot than ever, not understanding her own discomfiture. "Wizards tell the truth, where I come from," she said, annoyed. "I wasn't criticizing your Senior, as you would have discovered if you had let me finish. Your manners need work, too."

"And what else needs work?" he said, with that same odd soft tone.

She just looked at him, and her insides roiled.

That dark regard was disconcerting when it was bent hard on you. Worse still when he was smiling. He was the kind of guy who gets notes passed about him all day, the kind that girls look at from the safety of groups, stealing glances, laughing softly together at their shared thoughts about him.

"Hulloooo!!" he said to her, waving a hand in front of her face. "Earth to Nita!"

"Uh, nothing," she said hurriedly. She finished her Coke in one gulp. "Listen, the bus is ready to go."

"What's the hurry? I don't hear. . ." From outside there came a roar of diesel engine. Ronan looked at Nita oddly, then grinned. She flushed again, and inwardly swore at herself. Oh, he is something special. This is awful!

"Can't keep the man waiting," Ronan said, and got up. "You going to come with me?"

"Uh, no, I'll walk it. Fresh air," she said, mortified at the feebleness of the excuse. "Exercise."

"As far as the bus stop, then."

Reluctantly she walked out to see him that far.

"Do you have my number?" Ronan said as he got on. "Call me if you have any problems."

Problems! Do I have problems! Sweet Powers that Be. . . "I'll do that," Nita said. "You're in the book."

Ronan made an annoyed face. "I can't believe this," he said, and the bus doors shut in front of him.

Nita started home to Kilquade. It was a longish walk, about eight miles: but she was really beginning to enjoy the walking. This was one of the prettiest places she had ever been, and the quiet and the sound of the wind and the warm, fair weather were all conspiring to make it very pleasant. She ached slightly from the previous night's exertions, but there were some things worth aching for.

She couldn't get rid of the look of Ronan's face, the whole feel of him, the uneasy, uncomfortable sense of - power: there was no other word for it. Add to that the fact that he was good-looking, and funny, when he wasn't being angry - even then. . .Nita smiled grimly at herself, annoyed: it was funny to be so attracted to someone she so much wanted to give a few good kicks.

God help me, that's what it is. I fancy him.

The admission made her nervous. Neither parents at home or the sex education classes at school ever told you anything really useful about how to handle this kind of thing. Oh, the mechanics of it, body changes and so forth, and how not to catch diseases, and responsibility, and family planning, and all the rest of it. Not important stuff, like: kissing - how did you do it and still breathe? Is not wearing a bra a come-on? Is it worth chasing someone you fancy, or will it just make you look stupid? And if you catch him, what do you do then?

Or what do you do if you get caught…?

Nita heard something stirring in the hedge off to the right. At first she thought it was a bird - lots of birds nested in these hedges, encouraged by the thorns - but this sounded too loud. Nita paused, and saw a flash of colour, a soft russet red.

"Ai elhua," whispered a voice in the Speech, "I have a word for you."

Nita's eyebrows went up. She hunkered down by the hedge. The red dog-fox was deep inside it, curled up comfortably in a little hide against the wall that the hedge grew against.

"Madreen rua!" she said. "Are you all right?"

"Oh yes. But that you may be. . ." The fox glanced around, a shifty, conspiratorial look. "And that I may pay back a debt and all things be even again. There are wizardries afoot."

"No kidding."

"Then you should get help for them. One of the Ard-tuatha is in hide, not half a mile from here."

Nita was confused: there were several different ways to translate the term. "Ard. . .You mean, one of the Powers that Be? Here?"

"In truth. We are bound, we are all bound not to say exactly where, or who. But it is one of the Old Ones. Catch it at its work, and it must help you, yes?"

"That's one way to put it." Nita frowned. The Powers that Be were required to assist wizards when requested to do so. But you had to catch Them first… and They usually made that difficult, preferring to do Their work in secret. It made it harder for the Lone Power to sabotage it.

"Well," she said. "I am warned, madreen rua. My thanks."

"All's even," the fox said, and in the tiny space where it lay, it somehow managed to get up, turn around, and vanish back through a dark hole under the wall.

Nita got up and went on down the road, trying to make sense of what the fox had told her. It's hard to believe. Why would one of the Powers be living around here…?

She made her way down the little lane to her aunt's drive, and the farm. In the field to the right she could see Aunt Annie heading off with a rake over her shoulder, probably to do something about the new potatoes she had just planted. They were a rare breed, something called 'fir-apple potatoes', and Aunt Annie raked and weeded them herself every day, and wouldn't let anyone near them.

Nita grinned at this and went inside. She was just in the act of making herself another sandwich in the kitchen, when the phone began to ring. Nita ran for it, picked it up, and as she had heard others do, said, "Ballyvolan."

"Is Mrs Callahan there?"

"No, she's not… can I take a message for you?"

"Yes, please. Tell her that Shaun O'Driscoll called, and ask her to call back immediately, it's very urgent."

"All right." Nita scribbled the message down, and said, "I'll see if I can catch her; she just went out. Bye." And she ran out across the gravel yard, vaulted the fence, and headed into the field.

Far away, over the hill of the second field, she could see her aunt walking towards the little rise in the middle of it. Yelling at her seemed ridiculous at this point, so Nita just ran after her as quickly as she could, puffing. She still ached.

She was rather surprised to see her aunt take the rake off her shoulder, and bang the wooden end of it on the ground. She was even more surprised when the little hill split open, and her aunt walked into it.

Nita stood very still for a moment, and her mouth fell open.

Oh, no! she thought. And she remembered Tom's voice, from not so terribly long ago, saying to her father: "Well, you know, Ed, it's your side of the family that the wizardry comes down from…"

My dad's sister…

My aunt's a wizard!

Half torn between terror and laughter, she ran after her, towards the gaping darkness in the side of the hill.

5. Faoin gCnoc
Under the hill

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The chasm was deeper and wider than it looked. Is this happening in the real world? Nita thought, and paused for a moment to try to see with double vision, as she had seen the other day. True enough, mere daylight vision showed her a smooth hill - no crack; nothing. But then no-one in the house had seen her aunt. She had. Nita was seeing sideways where her aunt was, and this was sideways too. Not as sideways as it might have been, of course.

"Aunt Annie," she said, not loud, but urgently, and loud enough to carry. Ahead of her, her aunt stopped in shock, standing there with the rake.

She looked back at Nita and said, “Oh, no."

"Aunt Annie," Nita said, grinning a little in spite of herself, "what did they tell you about why they'd sent me here…?"

Aunt Annie's mouth opened and shut, and then she said, "When I get my hands on Ed… I'm going to rip his head off and hand it to him."

"They couldn't exactly tell you," Nita said, immediately wanting to defend her father. "It's not his fault."

"Maybe not," Aunt Annie said, "but Nita…! I had no idea!"

"Actually, I was hoping you wouldn't," Nita said, wryly. "I don't usually try to advertise it."

"But how can you be here?" Aunt Annie said. Then in she shook her head. "Never mind that now. That you're here means you're intended to be. I've got business. Let's go and see them."

"Them?"

"Be polite," Aunt Annie said. "And follow my lead."

Nita was entirely willing. She followed her aunt into the hill.

It was not a hill. It was a city. It was like the one that Nita had seen crowning Sugarloaf, but smaller, more intimate. It could not, of course, be inside the hill. It was two, three - ten? fifty? - universes over from the 'real world'. Broad streets, airy; shade, the sound of running water, stone as fluidly formed as if it had been clay once, or flesh - all paused in mid-movement, possibly to move again some day. There were echoes of thatched houses, and of old castles, and of castles no human being could have imagined, hints of architecture Nita recognized as extraterrestrial from her travels - apparently the builders had had connections elsewhere.

The light was different too; harder, sharper, somehow clearer than the light that rested on the fields around Aunt Annie's farm. Things seemed to have sharper edges, more weight, more meaning. Nothing here needed to glow with magical light, or anything so blatant. Things here were too busy being real… more real even than the 'real world'. It was a slightly unnerving effect.

"Oh, and one other thing," her aunt said. "Don't eat or drink anything here."

Nita burst out laughing. "There had to be one place in Ireland where no-one was going to make me drink tea or eat anything," she said.

Her aunt looked at her cockeyed, then laughed. "Well, you keep thinking of it that way."

They walked on among the high houses. "Where are we going?" Nita said.

"To talk to the people who live here," said Aunt Annie. "I do have certain rights. This is my land - I am the landowner. . ." She chuckled then. "As if anyone in Ireland can really own land. We all just borrow it for a while." She looked sidewise at Nita. "Where were you last night?"

"I was out with some very very large things that should have been wolves, but Weren't," Nita said. "Oh, by the way. There was a phone call for you. A Shaun O'Driscoll. . ." I

"I just bet," said Aunt Annie. "The Area Supervisor. Well, we'll see him shortly, but I need to deal with these first."

"These people. . ."

"You know the name," her aunt said. "We don't usually say it… it's considered impolite. Like shouting at someone, 'Hey, human!'."

The Sidhe, Nita thought. The people of the hills… the not-so-little people. "You see them often?" Nita said.

“Often enough. "Good fences make good neighbors," as the poet says. However, every now and then, when you share common ground, you need to have a good long chat over the fence. That's what this is about."

They came to the heart of the city. There were twelve trees in a circle, and three bright chairs under the trees, seemingly resting on the surface of a pool of water. Or rather, the chairs on either side of the central one were true chairs; the central one was a throne. The trees moved in the wind, and the shadows thrown by their branches wove and shifted on the surface of the bright water in patterns that seemed to Nita to be always on the edge of meaning.

People stood around and watched from under the shade of those trees; tall people, fair people, with beautiful dogs at heel. Handsome cats sat here and there, watching; unconcerned birds sang rainbows in the trees. Nita tried to look at a few of the people, and found it difficult. Not that they were indistinct. They were almost too solid to bear, and their clothes and weapons, in an antique style, all shone with certainty and existence.

The chairs on either side of the throne were filled; the throne itself was empty. Aunt Annie walked straight towards the throne, across the water. Nita watched with professional interest. She knew several ways to walk on water, but she felt safe in assuming that the water here was more assertive, and didn't mind being walked on without more active spelling. She headed out after her aunt.

Aunt Annie stopped about three meters away from the central throne, acknowledged it with a slight nod, and then looked at the person sitting in the right-hand chair. "The greeting of gods and men to you, Amadaun of the People of the Hill in Cualann. And to you, lady of this forth."

The lady bowed her head. "To you also, Aoine ni Cealodhain, greeting," said the man in the right-hand chair. "And greeting to you, Shonaiula ni Cealodhain."

Nita was slightly out of her depth, but she knew how to be polite. She bowed slightly and said, "I am on errantry, fair people, and the One greets you by me."

"This we had known," said the woman in the chair.

"Then perhaps you will explain to me," said Aunt Annie, "why my niece was chased halfway across my field last night by that one's hunt. I thought we had an agreement that if you saw any power of that kind waking, you would warn me so that I could take appropriate action."

"We had no warning ourselves, Aoine," said the lady.

"I would then appreciate your view of what's happening here. It's most unusual for you to have no warning of so major an intrusion, and that you didn't means we have trouble on our hands."

"Trouble rarely comes near us, Aoine. But it would be true to say that the past is becoming troublesome. We have had a messenger at our gates… one of the Fomori."

"And what did this messenger say?"

"That the old shall become new in our fields, and yours. He offered us… what we were offered once before. The end of your kind, once and for all."

Aunt Annie said nothing. The young man, the 'Amadaun', looked at Nita and said, "You must understand that the children of the Milesians are not looked upon with favour in some of the Fifth House."

"If you mean that some of the nonhuman species think humans were a silly idea," Nita said, "yes, I've heard that opinion before."

"There are those Powers in this part of the world, and children of the Powers - Powers fallen lower than we - who never looked kindly on human folk, and would be glad to see them all dead. At their own hands, or by the hands of other humans - so that old angers are inflamed, and old hatreds seem to live uncannily long."

"Yes," Nita said, "I've noticed that."

"It is the land, of course," said the fair young woman. "The land remembers too well. It saw Partholon come; it saw Nemed; it saw us, and the

Fir Bolg, and the hosts of man. One after another of us it threw off, in its way, having been taught to do so by the Lone One, and given a memory that other lands don't have - a sense of injury. Long time we've tried to heal that, but there is no healing it now. The old angers wake up again and again."

"There must be something that could be done," Nita said.

"If there is an answer, we do not have it," said the lady of the forth, "and the Fomori are at our gates. Soon enough they'll be at yours."

"They have been at our gates, they and their children, for a long while," said Aunt Annie, "under various names. We do what we can, as do you. What are the Fomori threatening you with this time?"

"Nothing concrete as yet. Of course they demanded tribute. They have done that before. We will of course refuse to give it; we have done that before too. And then they will begin to strike, here, and there, at the innocent, the ones who have no defense."

"That too we know about," said Aunt Annie, "for a long time now. Nonetheless, something needs to be done. I think all the wizards will now be called together. Probably there should be another meeting between us once that has taken place. Doing seems to have passed into our hands, these days, and out of yours."

"That seems to be true," said the Amadaun. "Advise us what you do. We will back you as much as possible. Meanwhile, rain has not fallen here for too long. We seem to be losing the ability to order our world as we used to. Something outside is becoming very strong… and Lughnasad is coming, when old battles are remembered. Even with the power of the Treasures, it was very close. We almost lost, last time. Without the Treasures. . ." The form on the left shook her head. "There is no saying. We need your help."

"Keep your people in, then, if you would," said Aunt Annie. "The "sideways" and the not-sideways parts of the world are getting too close together at the moment; we need to part them until this is resolved."

"We will do that. And you. . ." The Amadaun looked at Nita. "What would you say to us?"

Nita looked at the shining forms all around her, and shook her head. "I think you owe me one," she said. "For the hunt the other night. If your carelessness let that happen, I think you owe me a favour one of these days."

There were shocked looks at her boldness, and Aunt Annie looked at her sideways. But there was a wry smile from the Amadaun. "Our people have long known that a favour given must be returned, and a wrong done must be avenged," he said. "Come here, then, and let me speak a word in your ear."

Nita stepped up to him, wondering. The Amadaun leaned over and whispered; and the hair stood up all over Nita. It was a word in the Speech, a name… but not the kind of name mortals had. There was too much power in it, and too much time. She glanced sideways in shock, and met his eyes, and found no relief there: the time was there too.

"Should you need help," he said, "name that name."

"Thank you," Nita said, trying to get some of her composure back. “I'll do that. Meanwhile, I hope you do well, and that things are quiet for you."

"A mortal wishes what we wish," said the lady of the forth, smiling. "There's a change."

"Thank you," said Aunt Annie.

Nita rejoined her, and together they walked out the way they came. The sunlight looked thin and wan when they came out, when it should have looked golden; everything seemed a little unreal, a little fake, now.

Nita looked at Aunt Annie and was a little surprised to find that she had sweat standing out on her forehead. “Are you OK?" she said. “You look pale."

"I'm all right," said Aunt Annie. "It's just a strain talking to those people. They don't see time the way we do."

"I kind of liked it in there," Nita said.

Her aunt looked at her. "Yes, I thought you might. They prefer the young; the younger wizards have always bent a little more easily to their ways. I make them uneasy, too; I'm a little too close to mortality for their liking. But anyway," her aunt looked at Nita, "I can't believe it. You're a wizard!"

"At times I find it hard to believe myself," Nita said. "Like last night. My wizardry was not working terribly well."

"Yes, it's a problem we have around here," said her aunt. "The overlays… If I'd have known, I could have warned you."

"How could you have known? How was I supposed to tell you?" She broke out laughing. "What did they tell you when they sent me out here?"

Her aunt shook her head. "They said you were getting too involved with your friend Kit. He's your partner, I take it."

"Yeah. They're really nervous about it, Aunt Annie. I try to calm them down…"

"Listen, you're lucky. At least you were able to tell your parents. I was never able to tell your grandma and grandpa."

"Listen, even when they know, it doesn't always run smoothly. But Aunt Annie, look, what are we going to do?"

"We can't do anything just yet."

Nita groaned. Her aunt looked at her with a sympathetic expression. "Look, honey, I know. But the tradition of wizardry is different in this part of the world. They've been doing it for thousands of years longer than there even were American wizards. And don't forget that at home you're working in a relatively clean environment; the magic of the Amerind wizards was of a much more naturalistic kind. There was practically no overlay, since it worked so completely in conjunction with nature and the environment. Over here we're dealing with the equivalent of wizardly toxic waste… the accumulation of thousands of years of buildup. No, we take our time. We need to get everyone together to talk."

"When is this Lughnasad thing?"

"It starts tomorrow, really. . ."

"Tomorrow?!"

"It goes on for two weeks… don't panic. The first is the beginning of it: August the fifteenth is the end. It's the end that we have to worry about… things will be building up, forces will have to be released. It's going to be like a dam breaking. If we can dig a channel somehow, something for the power, the flow, to run off into… Otherwise. . ."

"Otherwise even the nonwizards are going to notice."

Her aunt laughed. "Nita, nonwizards have been noticing for years. Fortunately, Ireland just has a reputation for being a strange place. So when people hear these weird stories, they discount them. But we'll get the wizards together and talk to them. Meanwhile, try to restrain yourself. I know the urge to do wizardry all the time is very strong, especially at your age. But don't - you know - just don't."

And that was the last that was said about it for a while. Aunt Annie went into the estate office and shut herself in, and started making phone calls. Nita took herself off to her caravan to do some more reading in the manual.

As she turned the corner, she froze in surprise: the caravan shifted slightly as she looked at it. Someone was in there. She paused and tried to see through the window before coming any closer. Inside, someone bent forward into the light: a shadow moved. . .

She ran to the caravan door and threw it open. On the bed, Kit looked up in surprise, blinked at her. "Hi, Neets. What's the rush?"

Nita stood there with her mouth working, and nothing coming out. "What are you doing here?" she said finally.

Kit opened his mouth, too, and closed it, and then said, "I thought you'd be glad to see me."

"You idiot, I am glad to see you! But what are you doing here? I thought. . ."

"Oh." Kit turned red, then started laughing, "Neets, uh, I feel like a fool."

She withheld comment for the moment. "Oh?"

"Well, I mean, you promised your parents that you wouldn't come back to see me. But I never said anything of the kind. No-one asked me. So I said to my mum, "I have to go out for a while, I'll be back for dinner." And she said, "Fine, have a nice time… "

"Dynamite! Come and see my aunt."

She dragged him inside. Her aunt had taken a little while off from phone calls to feed the cats, and now stood there looking at Kit with a can of cat food in her hand, and a somewhat bemused expression. "Aunt Annie," Nita shouted,"this is Kit!"

"Ah." Her aunt blinked. "Haifa second, then, and I'll feed him too."

Nita snickered and sat him down at the table, and started making tea. Out of the tangle of mewing and hollering cats, one detached itself and strolled over to the kitchen table, jumped up on it, and regarded Kit with big eyes. It was Tualha. "And who is this?" she said.

Nita had to laugh a little at Kit's bemused expression. "Kit, Tualha. She's a bard. Tualha, Kit Rodriguez. He's a wizard."

"Dai stihó," said Kit.

"Slán," said the cat, looking him up and down. To Nita she said, "I see the Spanish have finally arrived."

"What?"

"Kit, don't get her started. She'll be reciting poetry at you in a minute."

"I don't mind that."

"So listen," Nita's aunt said then, coming over to the table and sitting down as she dried her hands on a dishcloth. "Kit, you're welcome here, but one question. Do your parents know you're a wizard?"

"Oh, yeah."

She shook her head. "It's getting easier these days than it used to be." She looked at Nita, and then at Kit, and at Nita again. "Listen," she said, "I want the straight word from you on this. You two aren't doing what your mum and dad were concerned you were doing - I mean, what they told me they thought you were doing. Are you?"

She had the grace to look embarrassed as she said it. Nita and Kit could do nothing but look at each other and then burst out laughing. "Why does everyone think that?" Kit said, sounding momentarily aggrieved. "Are we panting at each other or something?" Then he lost it and cracked up again.

"No," Nita said to Aunt Annie. "We're not."

"Well," said her aunt. "It's matters here that really concern me, and I've got enough on my plate at the moment. You know anything about it?"

"There was a preqis in the manual of what's been going on here," Kit said. He sighed. "We've got problems."

That 'we' was one of the nicest things Nita had heard in a long time. She had had enough of working by herself. "Yeah. Well, the Seniors here seem to have at least a handle on what to do. I just hope it works. Did you read about that?"

"Yeah. It seems they've already made some progress. There's a stone, is it? That they had to wake up-"

"It was half-awake already," Nita said. "It's the other three that are going to be a problem."

"Yeah. They said that the second one was "dormant", the third one was "unusable" and the fourth one was "unaccounted for". That doesn't sound terrific."

"Nope."

"Listen," Aunt Annie said, I"ll leave you two to chat. I've got to get back on the phone." She smiled at them and headed out of the room.

"Phone? What for?"

"Other wizards," Nita said.

Kit looked mystified. "To just talk to them? Why don't they. . ."

"NO, DON'T DO THAT!" she said, sitting bolt upright as she felt him starting to casually line up the beam-me-up spell in his head. "You can't do that here!"

"Why not?"

"Feel around you for the overlays! They're all over the place! And you better watch how you go home, too."

He paused a moment, and then looked surprised. "You're not kidding. How do you get around here?"

"I walk. Or there's a bike to ride."

"Well, let's go and do that, then. Sounds like I've got a lot of catching up to do."

Nita slipped into the office, bent over Aunt Annie at her desk, scribbled a note on her pad: Going out bike riding, OK? Her aunt nodded and went right on with her conversation about spell structure.

They were out for a long time. Part of it was Kit rubbernecking at the scenery while they talked. But part of it was the weather turning odd. The thunderstorms the weathermen had been predicting materialized, but they dropped hail rather than rain. They had to take shelter from several of these showers, and when they finally got down to the dual carriageway again, they found hailstones as big as marbles lying around on the road, steaming bizarrely in the bright sunshine. The sound of thunder rumbled miles away, sporadic but threatening, all through the ride.

They had been taking turns riding, or sometimes Kit would ride and Nita would sit on the crossbar, or the other way around. At the moment Kit was walking the bike beside her, looking around appreciatively. "This is great," he said. "I guess if you had to be sent somewhere, this is as good a place as any."

"Huh," Nita said. "I don't remember you being very excited about it at first."

He coloured somewhat. "Yeah, well."

Nita grinned. "Listen, how's Dairine getting on?"

"OK, as far as I can tell. I think she may be on assignment; she doesn't seem to have been around your place much in the past few days. Busy."

"I bet. Wizards all over the place are really busy about now." Nita shook her head. The oppressive, thunderstorm-about-to-happen feeling had not stopped. She was still prickling, but not so violently as she had been that morning.

"Here it comes," Kit said, looking up at one thundercloud that they had watched drifting halfway between them and the sea as they turned down the Kilquade road. Almost immediately as he said it, Nita saw the bolt of lightning lance down and strike one of the hills behind the farm. Silently she started counting seconds, and had barely got to 'two' before the crack of thunder washed over them. “A little too close," said Kit. "Let's get inside."

They headed down the drive in a hurry, and came out into the gravel yard in front of the house. Nita was heading for the front door when Kit looked around him with a sudden surprised expression. "Wait a minute. What's that?" he said.

"That what?" Nita was feeling a little cross. She could feel the rain coming on in the air, and didn't want to stand around outside waiting for it, after all she'd been through that day.

"That," Kit said, swinging around as if looking for something. "Can't you feel it? Inanimate. Strong."

Nita shook her head, wondering what he was talking about. Kit was staring down towards the farmyard, between the buildings. "There's something going on down there," he said. "Something alive."

"This place is full of horses and sheep and cows," Nita said. "Kit. . ."

"No," he said. “Not something that's usually alive. It's inanimate, it's a thing, it's - come on!"

He started down that way. There was another roll of thunder. Nita didn't see the lightning bolt this time. She went after him, muttering to herself. The problem was that Kit frequently sensed things she didn't, just as she sensed things he didn't. They had areas where their talents overlapped, certainly, but Nita's specialty was live things; Kit had always been more for inanimate objects. And if he really felt he was on the trail of something important. . .

"It's really weird," he said as she caught up with him. "It's nothing - I've never felt one that alive before."

"One what?

He looked into the farmyard and shook his head, and gestured. "That," he said.

Nita looked. There was nothing in the farmyard but Biddy the farrier's pickup truck, with its forge on the back. "That?"

"It's not the truck," Kit said. "Not the truck itself. That's a little more awake than usual, but nothing really strange. It's the thing in the back. That box. What is that?"

"It's a forge, a portable forge," Nita said, mystified. "She's the lady who comes and puts the horses' shoes on."

Right then, Biddy herself came out of the hay barn, in the act of shrugging into a waterproof jacket. She looked up at the sky, pausing for a moment; then headed towards the truck.

"Uh oh," Kit said, looking up too, with a panicked expression. And a second later, the lightning came down.

That was only the first thing that happened. As Kit said 'uh oh', Nita had felt the potential building in the air become suddenly unbearable, not just a prickling but a pain all over her. It was a matter of a second, even with her brains as tired as they were from spelling, to put a shield spell up around herself and Kit. She saw Biddy look up; she saw the lightning lance down at the truck. The breath went right out of Nita in horror, for there was no way, no way, she could extend her shield so far. . .

Biddy lifted her hand abruptly and the lightning simply went elsewhere. It didn't strike anything else, it didn't miss; it just stopped. And went away. There was not even a thunderclap.

And Biddy stood there, looking up at the sky, and glanced around, as if looking to see whether anyone had been watching. Then she smiled very slightly, and got into the truck.

"Now what was that ?" Kit whispered.

Nita pulled him behind the nearby smoking shed, out of sight of the truck as it turned, heading for the drive. He barely noticed; he was watching the truck. "Who is that?" he said.

"I told you, that's the lady who puts the horseshoes on. Biddy."

"She's a wizard!"

"She's not. She can't be," Nita said. It just didn't feel right. "That wasn't a wizardry. Wizards can hide. But the magic feels like magic, whatever."

Kit shook his head. "Then how do you explain that? She swatted a lightning bolt away like a bug. And her truck, or that forge in her truck anyway, is alive. That I can feel."

"I don't know," Nita said. "Things are getting weird around here…"

"Getting"!" Kit started to laugh, then sobered and looked thoughtful. "Are you going to tell your aunt about this?"

"I don't know," Nita said. "I think… I think I want to talk to Biddy first."

"Makes sense," Kit said. "Then what?"

"Check with the Seniors. They seem to be running this show."

"OK," Kit said. "You're on."

They talked until nearly midnight. The last thin Kit said was, "You been meeting a lot of people around here? Kids, I mean?"

"Some. They're OK."

"Are they nice to you?"

Nita thought of Ronan, and immediately flushed hot. How was she supposed to explain this to Kit Explain what? some part of her mind demanded. Heaven only knows what he thinks about you: if anything, he probably thinks you're too young for him. "They're fine," she said after a moment. "They're not geeky, the ones I've met."

“Some of the kids back home," Kit said, “They're saying that I had got you in trouble."

She burst out laughing. "No wonder you jumped in there when Aunt Annie questioned you. Kit, who cares what they think? Idiots." She punched him “Go on home, it's your dinnertime."

“Oh, blast, I forgot!" He got up hurriedly an started riffling through his manual.

“Don't forget the overlays!" Nita said. “You leave them out of your calculations, you'll wind up in th middle of the Atlantic."

“So? We have friends there." He found the page he was looking for.

“Küüüt!" Nita said, annoyed, until he looked í her. “Just be careful."

He nodded, and started reading the transposition spell under his breath. At the very end of it, on th last word, he looked back up at her.

“Don't be late tomorrow," Nita said quietly.

He nodded, and grinned, and the air slammed int the space where he had been.

Nita went to bed.