“Please,” Ronan said, and covered his eyes with one hand for a moment. “An image I didn’t need, thanks so much!” The ones he found in the bathtub some mornings were difficult enough to cope with, radioactive or not.
Pidge snickered. “Well. But even yer man in the red suit wouldn’t have much of a skill set next to the one you’d have. That special language? It’s the special Language. The Speech. Master it, you master wizardry. Takes a while to learn it. Some people spend their whole lives specializing in nothing else. Your first time out, the Powers that Be give you a bit of a boost—load in the basic vocabulary you’ll need for your Ordeal. Later, in this part of the world, you have to do it the Irish way. Hold it in memory—the way bards did, the way druids did. But not on Ordeal.”
“You mean,” Ronan said slowly, “if you want to be a wizard, you have to go through a qualifier round.”
Pidge nodded.
“And you’re playing against…?”
“The Power that fell out with the Powers That Be,” Pidge said. “…Literally fell out.”
Ronan sat a moment and digested this. “What happens if you don’t win?”
“Mostly,” Pidge said, “you don’t get to be a wizard.”
“‘Mostly.’ …Meaning there are other ways to fail out.”
“It happens,” Pidge said.
Ronan looked at Pidge hard. “There’s something here you’re not telling me. Like you’re trying not to scare me or something.”
“Well…”
“You’re gonna tell me I could die, aren’t you,” Ronan said. “…So?”
Pidge put his eyebrows up in slight surprise.
“Stands to reason,” Ronan said. “That kind of power, it’s not gonna come cheap, is it? If the Bad Fella—it is him, isn’t it? The Snake in the Grass?”
The eyeroll Pidge produced looked both resigned and amused. “He’s been called that, yeah.”
“Well, if it’s him, and this lets people get up his nose instead of the other way around, doesn’t seem like he’d just sit there and put up with it.”
“No,” Pidge said, stretching his arms up over his head for a moment to work a kink out of his back, then leaning back on them again. “No, you’d be right there.”
“So what are the odds I wouldn’t get through this thing—”
“Ordeal,” Pidge said.
“Okay. This Ordeal: what are the odds I wouldn’t make it?”
“Before it happens,” Pidge said, “there is not a single way in the world to tell.”
They sat there in the sun—there was some sun inside that brightness, or above it; Ronan could feel it —and jointly contemplated that for a while.
“Okay,” Ronan said eventually.
“‘Okay?’” said his friend. “That’s it?”
Ronan gave him a shove, his shoulder into Pidge’s. “What did I say about running referendums? I’m in. Where do I make my X?”
***
Pidge tilted his head back for a moment, as if feeling some of that hidden sun on his face, and a bit of a smile slid across it. But then he got more serious looking and started going through his jacket pockets.
“Okay,” he said. “There’s just one thing we’ve got to sort, because this is kind of a special case.”
“Of course I’m a special case,” Ronan said, running his hands through his hair. “Ask anybody.”
“Not talking about your would-be crushes here, Ro.”
“Excuse me, ‘would-be’?” He put on an air of just-slightly-wounded indignation. “You saw Jackie drooling just yesterday.”
“This is not a conversation we need to be having right now!” Pidge said. “Hold the thought till later, yeah? Got other fish to fry at the moment.”
Ronan assumed an attitude of utter concentrated attention to whatever his friend might be about to say. Then he crossed his eyes.
Pidge looked at him sideways and shoulder-shoved him. “Honestly,” he muttered, “what to do with you.”
“I’m all ears.”
“Not since your mam taped them back…”
Ronan roared with laughter. It was a story only a very few people knew, and he didn’t mind Pidge teasing him with it. “Okay,” he said after half a minute or so, wiping his eyes while Pidge grinned at him indulgently, “okay. Say your say.”
Pidge waited until he was dry-eyed again. “Here’s the problem,” he said. “Normally when someone becomes a wizard, the circumstances are a little less unusual—”
“Can you even hear yourself. The words ‘becomes a wizard’ and ‘less unusual’ in the same sentence?”
“Okay,” Pidge said. “Fine, granting you that. But what’s not so usual is that sometimes it becomes important that even the person committing to do something like this be, um, willing to have some parts of the situation be under cover until later.”
“You said it usually had to be kind of a secret thing, yeah? No problem.”
“But some parts of it would have to be that way… even from you. So that some of this setup… you wouldn’t remember, later on. For a long time, till things change, you might think it was a dream, parts of it. If you remember them at all. That’s unusual. And you need to okay it first.”
Ronan sat there for a moment, scowling and kicking the wall with his heels. “Don’t trust me with it, is that it?”
“You? You’d be trusted, no question,” Pidge said hastily. “No question at all. But there’s someone else… who might hear what you were thinking. And there’s no other way to protect you from that.”
“Ah.” Ronan brightened. “Our friend Mr. Squishy McSnakeface.”
Pidge stared at him… then spluttered with laughter. “That’s a new one!” he said. “Thanks for that.”
“So some of this stuff’d be, not just secret from other people…but secret from me, too.”
“Yes. Not forever… but for a while yet.”
“I’d be kind of a secret weapon, then.”
Pidge paused, then nodded. “Yes.”
“Sounds like it’s about something important, then.”
“It is.”
“Yet still you’re asking. If it’s that important, why don’t you just go ahead and do it?”
Pidge shook his head. “Not how we operate,” he said. After a moment he nodded down the road toward the intersection. “Herself—” Ronan knew he meant the statue, or rather the being it was meant to represent. “The One could’ve done what It liked, that time, when It wanted to get into the world that special way. But that’s not how things work. Beginnings matter. She had to give consent first.”
Ronan snorted. “Yeah, and then the gossip started. All those people who thought she was the local Bad Teen Mum.”
Pidge sighed. “Sometimes it’s hard. Especially if enough info’s leaked that there are prophecies that have to get fulfilled…”
Ronan rubbed his face with both hands. “Well, just so long as there aren’t any about me—”
Pidge didn’t say anything.
“Oh no!” Ronan said, and laughed again, as much in shock as from the conclusion he’d come to. “You want me to be some feckin’ Chosen One? Everybody knows how that ends up!”
“If there’s any choosing going be happening, it’ll be yours,” Pidge said.
Ronan sat there and frowned at the ground. “Well,” he said. “You said things might get worse. But then everything gets worse. Runs down, yeah?”
Very slowly, very sadly, Pidge nodded. “It does.”
“Well.” Ronan let out a sniff of laughter. “No news if this situation might do the same, then. But it’s like with Maurice before. You can’t just walk away, even if it looks kind of ugly. Somebody has to put themselves on the line for people, stick up for them, yeah? Otherwise, what’s it all for?”
The look Pidge gave him was interesting: as if something he’d said had somehow proven Pidge right. “That’s it, right there,” he said. “We’re a good match, and this is going to work.”
“Yeah,?
?? Ronan said, feeling suddenly more enthusiastic. “So come on, get on with it. In for a penny, yeah? So why not go in for a pound.”
Nodding, Pidge started going through his pockets again. “There’s a pledge to be made…”
Ronan snickered a little at that. “Yeah, saw that coming. Well, bring it on. And what are you looking for? I keep telling you you’ve got too many pockets in that thing.”
“Ah,” Pidge said, and finally found what he was after in his front left jeans pocket. Ronan leaned close and watched with great interest and a fair amount of excitement as he pulled out…
…a folded piece of notebook paper.
Ronan stared. “Oh come on now, what’s this?”
“What you’ve got to read.”
“You wrote it on this?” He shook his head in disbelief. “Why don’t you ever use that PD thingy yer mam gave you? That she spent about a million euro on at Christmas? You’ll hurt her feelings. Also it’s pretty cool.”
“I hate that thing,” Pidge muttered. “The keyboard’s way too wee and I can’t do the other input thing, the handwrite-y thing. It drives me crazy. And the batteries are shite.” He scowled. “Also I keep losing the stylus, and they’re expensive, those.”
Ronan sighed and squinted at the crumpled paper. “Look at the state of this. How long’ve you been carrying this around?”
“A while.”
“Sure it looks like it.” Ronan rubbed at the smudges on it. “What’s this gummy stuff?”
“Gluons,” Pidge said, and nudged him with his elbow and snickered.
Ronan gave him a narrow-eyed look. “Do not tell me you’re messing with substances. I’ll stomp you flat and hang you up and beat you like a rug.”
“Not glue, ya eedjit. Gluons.”
Ronan rolled his eyes. “Yeah, fine, mister Aced My Science Test Last Week. Go on, rub it in some more.”
Pidge snickered a little more, then sighed and smoothed the paper out over his knee so the folds were a little less prominent. The paper was the thin, wide-ruled kind you got in the cheap school exercise books they sold in the supermarket. Written on it in a rough square in the middle of the jaggedly torn-off page, apparently with a slightly leaky biro, were four or five sentences in a sloppy sort of upper-and-lower case print. You could see where whoever wrote it had tried to make the “square” even, but they couldn’t get the spacing of the words right, and there were a few crossouts and a few places where a longish word had been squeezed into a space too tight for it.
“That’s the Wizard’s Oath,” Pidge said.
Ronan rolled his head over nearly sideways and gave him a look. “This is the least magic thing I have ever seen.”
“It’s not magic,” Pidge said. “It’s wizardry. And yeah, sometimes it looks a little beat up around the edges. Because it is. And has been. For aeons.”
The other’s voice had gone a little edgy. “Beat up?” Ronan said. “As in… the other way?”
“Sometimes,” Pidge said. “It’s been a long fight. Sometimes you lose.”
He suddenly sounded kind of tired. That made Ronan stop and look closely at Pidge, since “tired” wasn’t one of his more normal modes of existence. When he was little (he’d once told Ronan very privately, and swore to kill him if he ever told anybody else) Pidge’s family had for years called him “Tigger” because they couldn’t get him to stop bouncing. Even now, he bounced most places when he wasn’t slowing himself down to keep up with you.
“So good doesn’t always triumph over evil?” Ronan said.
“If it did,” Pidge said, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” At least there was a slight edge of humor on the response this time, but somehow Ronan still found himself feeling sorry for Pidge.
“Okay,” Ronan said, “let’s see what you’ve got.” He took the piece of paper. “Besides awful handwriting. Janey mack, did you write this up against a tree or something?”
“Everybody’s a critic,” Pidge said, more amused. “Just see what you make of the content.”
Ronan smoothed the piece of paper out over his own knee. “Okay. ‘In Life’s name, and for Life’s sake, I assert—’” Then he stopped. “What’s it mean by ‘life’?”
Pidge looked absolutely gobsmacked, which made Ronan snicker. His friend looked hilarious with his wide mouth hanging open. “Sorry?”
“No, seriously. ‘Life’ like in life here? You said ‘This world’ before. Not just this world?”
“Nope. All the worlds.”
“So there is definitely life on other planets.”
Pidge gave him an amused look. “Even here they’ve suspected that for a long time.”
“Yeah, well, suspicion isn’t the same as someone handing you a piece of paper all covered with glue-y-ons and getting you to promise to protect something that might or might not be there.”
Pidge looked bemused for a moment. “Uh, okay.”
“‘Okay’ as in ‘yes there is?’”
A long concerned pause. “You’re not gonna call up the afternoon radio guy on RTE and tell him UFOs are real, are you?”
Ronan rolled his eyes. And then—taking in Pidge’s look of growing worry—he snickered, and when he couldn’t hold it in to just snickering any more, he burst out laughing so hard he almost fell off the wall. “Oh jeez, your face,” he gasped. “You should see yourself. No I will not call Joe if you tell me aliens exist. Which, it’s too late, you already have, otherwise you wouldn’t be giving me that look! But for feck’s sake, just commit yourself here, yeah? No wonder wizards are in trouble if all the recruiters are like you, you’re crap at it.”
Pidge pulled a sort of ‘excuse me’ face. “Probably just as well they’re not,” he said. “I’m a little out of my job description here, no question. Keep going…”
“Right. So Life’s got a capital letter on it. Like it’s a name.”
“And so it is.”
“For… anybody in particular?”
“Probably Who you’re thinking of, yeah.”
“…Okay,” Ronan said. “Not very personal, then.”
“Or possibly the most personal word there is for anything,” Pidge said. “If you made it. If it’s yours, if it’s still part of you, and really matters to you…”
Ronan thought about that for a moment. “Yeah, okay.” He scanned a little further along the sentence. “‘I assert’? Fancy word for just saying something.”
“But you’re not just saying something with this. Anybody can just say something, but when you assert it, you’re saying ‘This is true, this is serious, I believe in this.’”
“So okay, not a fancy word then. A specific one.”
“Wizardry’s all about the specific words,” Pidge said. “The exact word, the word that perfectly describes something. Sometimes it’s a name. Sometimes it’s both. In fact, a lot of the time it is. Gonna wind up learning a lot of those before you’re through.”
“All right. ‘Art?’ This is an art? Just so you know, I flunked crayons.”
“Anything can be an art if you’re serious enough about it,” Pidge said. He glanced up briefly in the direction of Bray Head. “Anything else you don’t like in the first line, or can we move on?”
“Now now,” Ronan said. “Me da says you’ve gotta be careful about what you sign.”
Pidge’s expression was resigned. “Actually, that’s sound, he’s got a point there. Next line?”
Ronan studied it. “Guard growth, ease pain,” he said, “okay, those are good.” He peered at the next sentence. “Seriously, I think I need to diagram this.”
“Seriously,” Pidge said, and snickered, “you’re such a pain in the arse.”
“Gotta be that way, yeah?” Ronan said. “If the Powers of Whatever need me, they’ve gotta know that’s part of the package. Wouldn’t be right to lie.”
“That’s sound too,” Pidge said, and shrugged, and grinned.
“So then. ‘Fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way…
’”
They went through it line by line. It was strange, the way this process seemed to go on a long while, but also to take no time at all. But then time itself felt very weird to Ronan now, as if he was hanging outside it, somehow.
Finally they came to the end of what was written on the paper, and Ronan couldn’t find anything to question about it. He’d always assumed the universe would end somehow, and he wasn’t fussed right now about exactly how. Wouldn’t be my problem anyway… He looked up at Pidge then and grinned a bit, turned the lined, wrinkled piece of paper over to check the other side. “That it?” he said. “Anything else I need to know about?”
“Ro,” Pidge said, rolling his eyes.
“Terms and conditions apply? Ask my physician or chemist for advice?”
“Ro.”
“Okay,” he said then, feeling sorry for Pidge, who’d been pretty patient with him until now (but that was his style). Ronan flipped the paper back over and got ready to read. He took a deep breath, because suddenly it felt like he needed it. And also, a strange nervousness had come over him, as if he was being watched, watched by a lot of people. Except there was no one there…no one in the road, no one on the pavement, everything empty and still and bright…
He shrugged.
“In Life’s name,” he said. Quieter, it was getting so much quieter— “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.” Everything so still, everything holding still, listening somehow— “I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way—” Silent now. When was it ever silent here? Even in the middle of the night? “—and I will change no object or creature unless its growth or life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened—”
He was aware that Pidge was watching him, and there was something so strangely intent about it—but he couldn’t stop to look more closely just now, there was a sense growing on him that he needed to hurry up, needed to finish this, that something was coming, something huger even than he expected. That narrow crack into something else was straining, wanting to jump wider, but it couldn’t until he finished—