Games Wizards Play

  The problem was that she wouldn’t get to see it, as mentors were not permitted in their mentees’ judging sessions. Penn and his spell would stand in front of the four core judges and three others selected for their expertise in the field of wizardry in which his spell was positioned. He and that spell would stand or fall together on their own merits—which suited Nita entirely.

  Nita was wandering down the long concourse that faced onto the nearby lakes when about halfway toward the end she spotted a familiar orange jumpsuit. “You’re kind of early,” Nita said as she came up behind Lissa and patted her on the back. “What time is it in Toronto?”

  “Don’t ask me,” Lissa said. “I’ve been here for three days.”

  Nita looked at her in bemusement. “No tan?”

  “I don’t do tan,” Lissa said. “I hate the beach, it gets you full of sand. But there are lakes here, and I like to row and talk to the fish.” She glanced around. “Where’s Kit?”

  “Not here yet,” Nita said. “In a couple of hours.”

  “Zone lag?”

  Nita shook her head. “Annoying mentee syndrome.”

  “Yeah, you’ve got a hard case with that one,” Lissa said. “Well, never mind him. Come on out to the terrace! It’s full of wizards.”

  “Nobody else?”

  “Nope, they put up signs with that boring font out there and then they had to fine-tune where the signs were pointing, because we started having sleeping kookaburras fall out of the trees on people.” They went out through automatic doors into blinding sunshine. “A lot of the local crowd’s here. Some of the game group, too. Matt’s here, but he lives down the road, why wouldn’t he be, and his boyfriend, that little guy in the duster. And there’s Adele, and those German twins—”

  Nita paused to try to figure out who in the crowd had a dust cloth, and the only little guy in sight was wearing a long coat—Then she blinked. “His boyfriend?”

  “Yeah, name’s Daki or Doki or something, I always get it wrong when I try to remember. Did I mention Adele? She . . .”

  “Yeah, Adele,” Nita said, losing the thread for a moment while the back of her brain shouted at her, Yes, here I am again, your old friend the universe, and I’m stalking you and making everybody talk about sex things all of a sudden! And how did you not know Matt had a boyfriend? Were you purposely not noticing because thinking the word made you nervous? Were you—

  “Shut up,” she said under her breath to the universe.

  “What?”

  “Oh! Sorry! Not you.”

  “Oh, your invisible friend?”

  Nita started to say yes, more or less out of habit, and then stopped herself. “Might as well be.”

  “Well, let’s get you and him a smoothie or something, you look parched!”

  And within a few minutes Nita was sitting on one of a circle of loungers under the shade afforded by the projecting eaves of the building, stirring a mango smoothie with a straw and looking at a wizardly projection of the morning session’s results so far. The quiet interlude was welcome, as she was still reacting to what Lissa had told her about Matt. How did I never realize he was gay? She took a long drink. I feel like an idiot. And then she laughed at herself. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve missed something like that. Guess it’s too much to hope it’ll be the last . . .

  “Well, this looks sybaritic,” said a familiar voice from overhead.

  Nita looked up in surprise. “Carl!” she said. And sure enough, there was her other Supervisory wizard in a white linen shirt and khaki shorts and Ray-Bans and sneakers, and carrying some kind of orange-creamsicle-colored drink with a little umbrella in it. “Are you proctoring?” Then Nita thought again. “No, wait, they don’t need to do that for this round, do they?”

  Carl sat down on the lounger next to hers. “No, the judging panels handle any security that the spells need when they’re examining them. Today I’m here for the networking.” He smiled slyly at her. “And because of neighborhood interest.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “But also, I meant to look you up,” Carl said.

  Nita found herself wondering guiltily if a Supervisory could hear you thinking about killing your mentee. “Uh—”

  “You’re not in any trouble,” Carl said.

  She gave him a suspicious sideways glance. “How do you do that?”

  “By having been your age once,” Carl said, “and being able to see your face.”

  Nita snorted. “Okay.”

  He took a long pull on the straw in his drink. “I was curious, after the first round, to ask you whether you were contemplating a change of focus.”

  She was mystified. “Focus? . . . And I didn’t see you at the first round.”

  Carl chuckled. “I have my sources. Have you given any thought to whom you’ve spent a significant portion of your time hanging out with so far? I mean, planets. To the exclusion of both Kit and your own mentee, sometimes.”

  She shrugged. “Kit’s been wandering around meeting people. We both have; that’s how I ran into Jovie and Pluto.”

  “‘Jovie,’” Carl said, and grinned into his drink.

  “He didn’t mind.”

  “No,” Carl said, “he wouldn’t have.”

  “And as for my own mentee, he’s a pain in the ass and doesn’t want to listen to me any more than he has to. I’m the wrong sex or something.”

  Carl gave her a resigned look. “Cultural?”

  “Personal.”

  “Oh well.”

  “But Carl, seriously . . . What do you do when your mentee doesn’t want to be mentored? I mean, without breaking the commitment?”

  He looked out toward the lake and thought about it. “Why are you so intent on staying in it?”

  The question caught her briefly by surprise. “Well, the Powers That Be put me in this position. Normally they’ve got reasons for that kind of thing.”

  “That’s true,” Carl said. “But it’s not as if they’re requiring blind obedience of you. There are cases in which a mentor can do the person they’re mentoring more good by walking than they can by staying stubbornly in place. You’re the only one who can make that judgment call, and the Powers trust you to do that.”

  Nita sniffed and drank some more of her smoothie. “Don’t make it sound too good,” she said.

  Carl laughed. “In our time working together,” he said, “have I ever been shy about giving you bad news when it was necessary?”

  An image rose in Nita’s mind: a South Shore beach, with the Sun shining down on the sand and the water and a young girl who was in the process of realizing that she had made a promise that was almost certainly going to be deadly for her to keep. “No,” Nita said. “That hasn’t been a problem.”

  “So you can make some assumptions about the good news, then. Assuming it actually is good. Problem is, you’re the only one who can decide that.”

  Nita smiled and sucked down the last of her smoothie so that the straw gurgled. “I was about to start complaining about you and the Powers treating me like a grownup who knows the right thing to do,” she said. “Maybe I changed my mind.”

  Carl leaned back and stretched out his legs. “The truth is that not all the situations the Powers put us into are optimal,” he said. “They may have great insight and be able to see deeper into causality than we routinely can at our level, but they’re not omniscient and they’ve never pretended to be. They’ll make a judgment call sometimes, as in this case, that a good result is likely if you put a given combination of people together. And since they hate to waste energy, they’ll routinely make sure that it’s the best possible result that can be achieved, and that it will do as many people good as possible. You may be having an effect on your mentee that isn’t obvious to you. The difficulty, of course, is that since we’re not omniscient either, we may sometimes do our jobs and think we’ve failed . . . and still have done massive good to someone that we may never be aware of.”

  “I prefer to be aware o
f it,” Nita said.

  “So do we all,” Carl said. “I’d also prefer it to rain chocolate-frosted donuts in my kitchen on Sunday mornings, but I don’t seem to be getting a lot of that. Plainly the universe is mismanaged.”

  Nita snickered. “So you’re saying I should keep doing what I’m doing and hope for the best.”

  “There’s always the chance that the one who’s being done good by this is you,” said Carl.

  She gave him a sideways look. “By being told over and over that no matter how smart I act, I’m really some airhead whose highest purpose is to hang off some guy’s arm?”

  “If your mentee’s telling you that over and over,” Carl said, with a very grim small smile, “I think it’s very likely that you may sooner or later respond in a way that changes his mind. If only by repetition.”

  Nita’s gaze went to the lake. “Pity that’s not the ocean. I could drop him in it. I’ve got friends out there. With teeth.”

  Carl shook his head. “Do what you normally do,” he said. “Leave the rest to the Powers. And if you feel you absolutely must go, trust that that’s what’s needed. You can’t get this wrong.”

  And then he sat up straight. “Whoops,” he said, “incoming!”

  And just like that he vanished.

  Nita shook her head, both because he’d just done that in full view of the road between the convention center and the lake—but then they’ll have this whole side of the place spell-shielded—and because he had done it soundlessly. She sat up a little straighter, looking around. Kit?

  No answer. Not that she always got one by silent communications these days, especially since things had begun to shift between them.

  The automatic doors to the building opened, and Penn came bursting out in flowered beach jams, some kind of brocaded vest, and flip-flops. As he stood there looking almost frantically from side to side, it was only with the greatest difficulty that Nita kept herself from laughing out loud. The way he dresses, she thought, there has to be a word . . .

  Penn spotted her and immediately headed her way. Flamboyant, Nita thought. That’s a good word. But no Kit? Interesting . . .

  “Juanita!”

  She rolled her eyes. It wasn’t the normal stagy delivery of her name, though. Penn sounded upset.

  As he came over to stand by her chair, Nita tilted her head up and did her best to betray nothing more than mild curiosity. “What?”

  “I’m, uh,” Penn said. “I’m due in there pretty soon—”

  She glanced at her watch. “About ten minutes,” Nita said. “And?” She glanced toward the doors, but there was no action there. “Where’s Kit?”

  “Uh,” Penn said, not looking Nita in the eye, and plainly not wanting to. “He, uh, he said he had other things to do.”

  Better things to do, Nita’s mind instantly supplied. He got angry at something Penn said, and he dumped him. Did Carl know this was happening? There are no accidents . . .

  “You pissed him off, didn’t you,” Nita said. “Penn, one of these days you’re going to stop being so certain you know what people are thinking before they open their mouths, and your life’s going to get a whole lot simpler.”

  Slowly and reluctantly Penn sat down sideways on the lounger that Carl had vacated.

  “I, uh,” he said, and then seemed to run out of words.

  “Yes?” Nita said.

  “. . . I’m not sure I can go through with this.”

  All right, Nita thought, here we go. There had been something about Penn’s mood the last couple of days that had been ringing alarm bells for her. But whether he was likely to want to talk to her about it now was another question. “What’s going on?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” Penn said, bending half over and rubbing his hands through his hair. “I don’t know! This morning, and then later, just now, after Kit left . . . I keep having these times when, I don’t know, I look at the spell and it doesn’t seem to make any sense. And that’s ridiculous! How can it not make sense?”

  Nita sighed. “Haven’t you ever had the thing,” she said, “where you look at a sentence after you’ve read it too many times, and it doesn’t mean anything? Or you say your own name too many times, and it turns into this gibberish word. There’s a wizardly version of that too.”

  “No,” Penn said miserably. “If only Kit was here!”

  If only, Nita thought. He’d love to see this: he’d laugh so hard. “Penn,” she said. “Am I or am I not one of your mentors?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Then be quiet, because I’m about to explain it all to you. You’re getting cold feet.”

  Penn stared at his flip-flops in confusion.

  “Cold feet!” Nita said. “It’s finally sunk in for you that you’re coming up against something that a flashy presentation and some fast talking won’t be enough to get you through. This isn’t just about knowing how to handle hecklers or deflect difficult questions, or be flashy or showy or cute. You’re going to be standing in front of seven wizards who’re going to scare you spitless. And you know what? They’ll be doing that to everybody they judge today. Just this once, you’re going to get to act like everybody else. You’re going to be scared.”

  He stared at Nita with an expression of utter dismay that suggested he was getting a head start.

  “And then you’re going to push through it,” Nita said. “You’re going to walk into that judging room and take a deep breath and say to yourself, I am scared but I’m going to do this anyway. Wizards do this every day. People do this every day. I’ve done it, Kit’s done it, and now it’s your turn.”

  She got up off her lounger. “Come on,” she said.

  Penn didn’t move.

  She glared at him. “Have some dignity, Penn,” she said. “Get up and walk. Don’t make me levitate you. Because under your own power or with assistance, you are going into that room. And what state you’re in when you come out of it is going to be entirely up to you.”

  Very slowly he got up and started to make for the doors. Nita waited until he caught up with her. “Stop hanging your head like that!” she said as they walked. “Hold your head up. It makes you braver.”

  “What?”

  “There are physiological changes,” Nita said. “Not gonna start explaining them now. Take a deep breath. Yeah. Let it out now. Have you got your manual?”

  “Uh. In a pocket.”

  “Good. Got the basic version of the spell cued up in it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Breathe again. Just get in the habit of it, I can’t be in the room with you to remind you.”

  He sucked air in, let it out again as they went through the doors into the main concourse. “You’re doing fine,” Nita said. “Once you’re rolling, this will pass. You know your subject, I know you do. The only reason you’re experiencing a panic is that you’ve realized you can’t sweet-talk or swindle these judges into giving you the benefit of the doubt. And you don’t have to. They’ll listen to you if you just talk to them about the spell. Right? Tell them what you built. And tell them why you built it. Remember how you explained the difference it was going to make for people? Tell them about that.”

  Nita had passed the judging rooms on the way out to the terrace and knew where they were. Two of them had message boards that said, in the Speech, UNSCHEDULED. The third was blank. Nita stopped by its closed doors, and exactly as she and Penn paused there, the signboard outside the door lit up with Penn’s name in English and Chinese and the Speech.

  He stared at his name as if he’d never seen it before. “I, I can’t . . .”

  “You can,” Nita said. “You can do this, Penn. And you’re going to. Now remember: always take a breath when somebody asks you a question—it gives you extra time to think. See your spell in your head, now? Good.”

  The door opened before him.

  “In,” Nita said. “And good luck, cousin.”

  Penn hesitated. Then, like someone sleepwalking, in he went.


  The door closed.

  Nita sagged, passed a hand over her face, and laughed at herself. Poor guy, she thought. Who knew he was going to freeze up like that?

  From inside her otherspace pocket, Nita’s manual pinged softly.

  She moved off to one side of the doors, unzipped the air, pulled the manual out and checked its messaging section. As she opened up to the section with its edges flashing blue, words were already spelling themselves out across its first page.

  Is he there?

  Nita laughed. “Yeah.”

  Did he go in?

  “Finally.”

  Under his own power?

  “Believe it or not, yeah. Look, get over here when you can . . . we’re going to need to present a united front when he comes out of there.”

  Be there in twenty.

  “See you,” Nita said. She closed the manual and put it away, then headed for the doors to the outside terrace.

  Dairine made her way down to the prejudging area in the convention center where she’d agreed to meet Mehrnaz that afternoon. There were a lot of wizards and other guests hanging around, looking at the results of those coming out of judging and the rankings as they stood. Maybe half of the semifinalists had been through the judging by now, and Mehrnaz was scheduled in about half an hour. It’s a good time to be scheduled: less reason to panic . . .

  Dairine put Spot down while she looked through the crowd, and after a moment caught sight of Mehrnaz. But she wasn’t alone. Next to her stood an imposingly tall and darkly handsome woman in a rusty-colored silk hijab and a long below-the-knee tunic, subtly patterned in dun and gold, over dark designer jeans and sandals. She had huge dark eyes and a long pretty face, but her mouth had a set of lines around it on each side that suggested her lips were more normally drawn down in an expression of disappointment.

  All right, now what? Dairine thought, and hung back to get a sense of what was going on.