From many fights Nita had overheard between her folks, Nita knew that when her dad said that, it never was. “Daddy,” she said. “I’m sorry. I really am. I love you, and I wish like anything I could do what you want. But I can’t.”
“Nita!” There was that rage again, full-blown, worse than before. Her father was on his feet, standing right over her, glaring at her. “You will do as I tell you!”
Hot all over, Nita shot to her feet—standing on the chair—and in sheer desperation shouted right back in his face. “Don’t you get it? There are some things in the world more important than doing what you tell me!”
Her father and mother stared at her, absolutely stunned. Nita stood there gasping, stunned herself.
“Besides,” Kit said quietly from out of her range of vision, “how would you stop us?”
Nita’s father turned away to stare at Kit now.
“Look,” Kit said. “Mr. Callahan, Mrs. Callahan—we gave our word that we’d do this.” What is this ‘we’? Nita thought, bemused. “And the wizardry we’re doing is mainly directed against the One who invented the broken promise. Breaking our word will play right into Its hands and cause a lot of people to die, at best. Maybe destroy this world, sooner or later, at worst.”
“But we have only your word on that!” Nita’s mother said.
“Yeah. But isn’t our word any good? And why would we lie to you about this? Considering that we’re going through all this crap for the sake of telling you the truth.”
Nita’s mother closed her mouth.
“She didn’t have to tell you,” Kit said, sounding angry for the first time. “But it would’ve been lying, in a way—and Nita thinks you’re worth not lying to.” He paused, then said, “I do too. We may just be kids, but we’re old enough to tell the truth. And to take it. Are you?”
The question wasn’t a taunt: It was honestly meant. “Even if you’re not, we’ll still have to do what we have to,” Nita said, though saying it made her unhappy. “When you two wake up in the morning, this could all seem like a dream to you—if it had to. I guess you’d better make up your minds, because we have to get some sleep or we won’t be worth dead fish tomorrow.”
Her parents were staring at each other. “Betty...” said Nita’s father.
“We need more time,” Nita’s mother said.
“I don’t think we’ve got it.”
Her mother looked back at her father. “If they’re right about this,” she said, “it’d be wrong of us to stop them if they can help.”
“But we’re responsible for them!”
“Apparently,” Nita’s mother said, in a peculiar mixture of pride and pain, “they’ve learned that lesson better than we suspected, Harry. Because now they seem to be making themselves responsible for us. And a lot of other people.”
Nita’s father said nothing for four or five breaths. Then he turned to her.
“I guess there comes a time when you can’t do anything but trust,” her father said, so slowly, with such reluctance. “It just seems—so soon.” And he swallowed. “Nita—is all this on the level?”
“Oh, Daddy.” She loved him, right then, and hurt for him, more than she could have told him. “I wish it wasn’t. But it is.”
Nita’s father was silent for several long breaths. “Millions of lives,” he said under his breath.
And another silence, which he finally broke as if it were a physical thing. “What time do you need to be up?”
“Sixish. I’ll set my alarm, Daddy.” Nita got stiffly down from the chair, aching all over. Behind her, Kit got up and brushed past her as Nita hugged first her dad good night. Maybe the last time she would ever hug him… or the second-to-the-last— Oh, don’t think of that now!
Her mother had caught Kit on the way past and hugged him—and now wouldn’t let Nita past without a hug either. She held her for a moment at arm’s length. “Thank you for—up there, baby,” she said, nodding once at the ceiling. Her eyes were wet, but she was smiling.
“It’s okay, Mom. Any time.” Is this what it feels like when your heart breaks? Oh, God, don’t let me cry!
“And thank you for trusting us.”
Nita swallowed. “You taught me how,” she said. And then she couldn’t stand it any more. She broke away and headed for her room, Kit right behind her.
She knew there was one hurdle left between her and bed. Actually, the hurdle was on the bed: sitting there crosslegged in the dark, looking at her with cool interest as they came in.
“Well?” Dairine said, as Nita flopped down on her stomach beside her, and the bed bounced them both once or twice. “I saw you disappear. Where’d’ya take them?”
“The Moon.”
“Oh, come on, Neets.”
“Dairine,” Kit said from the doorway. “Catch.”
Nita glanced up, saw her sister reach up and pick something out of the air: an irregular piece of pale, grainy stone, about the size and shape of an eraser. Dairine peered at it, rubbing it between her fingers. “What is this? Pumice?”
A moment of shocked silence ensued. Then Dairine’s voice scaled up to an aggrieved shriek. “You did go to the Moon! And you didn’t take me! You, you—” Apparently she couldn’t find anything sufficiently dirty to call them. “I’m gonna kill you!”
“Possibly wasted effort,” Nita said, looking at Kit. And somehow in this context, and after all this shock and stress, the idea suddenly struck Nita as so funny that she broke out into a completely inappropriate giggle. Ed, you were right. It just took a while… This was too much for Dairine, who promptly lunged at Nita. However, Kit as promptly jumped her, wrestled Dairine flat, stuffied her under the bedcovers and a couple of pillows, and more or less sat on her until she shut up and stopped struggling.
“Another time,” Nita said, this time managing to revise the wording in time to keep it from being an untruth. “Kit,” she said, husky-voiced. “Make a note to remind me about seeing to it that the junior Jedi here gets to the Moon in the near future. Next week, maybe. If she behaves.”
“Right,” Kit said. “You hear that under there?”
“Hwhmffm hnnoo rrhhrhn ffwmhhnhhuh,” said the blankets.
“Fine, but keep talking like that and your mouth’ll get stuck that way,” Kit said. He got up and let Dairine out from under the improvised restraints.
Nita’s sister extricated herself from the covers with an icy dignity that lasted just until she was sitting where she had been, back in control and smoothing her ruffled pajamas. “Mom’ n’ Dad didn’t kill you,” she said to Nita.
“Nope. You gave me good advice.”
“Huh? What advice?”
“Last night, I suspect,” Kit said. “That stuff about ‘Either keep your mouth shut, or tell the truth—’ ”
Nita nodded, looking from Kit to Dairine, while Dairine modestly polished her nails on her Yoda nightshirt. And Nita stared at her, and then started to laugh, but not from the pain this time: laughed so hard that she got the hiccups and fell over sideways, and Dairine looked at her as if she’d gone nuts, and Kit sat down and thumped her once or twice, worriedly, in the shoulder. “Neets? You okay?”
“Oh, Kit,” she managed to gasp at last, between bubbles of laughter. “What Picchu said—”
“Huh?”
“What Peach said. ‘Do what the night tells you—’ ” She went off into the giggles again.
Kit looked down at her, perplexed. “You lost me.”
Nita pushed herself upright, then reached out and tugged a couple of times, weakly, at the sleeve of Dairine’s nightshirt. “Kit! Oh God. Not night, like when it gets dark. ‘Knight’! Do what the knight tells you! As in the Junior Jedi here—” She went over sideways again and strangled her last few whoops of laughter in a convenient pillow.
“Well, it was good advice,” he said to Dairine. “Thanks, Dari.”
“Uh, sure,” said Dairine, amazed at another compliment.
Nita sat up again after a little while, wiping
her eyes. “Yeah,” she said. “Even if I took it before I remembered you said it… it was good advice.” She thought she would let her sister have just one more compliment—especially since it too was true, and information she might never have another chance to give her. “You’re gonna be one hot wizard someday,” Nita said.
Dairine sat speechless.
“Neets,” Kit said, “we’ve had a long day. And tomorrow’ll be longer. I’m sacking out. Dairine—”
“Right,” Nita said. “Night.” She lay down again, feeling glad, afraid, excited, shaky, light with impossible relief—a hundred things at once. She never noticed when Dairine got off her bed; she never heard Kit leave. She fell into sleep as if into a hole.
Foregathering Song
Nita sat hunched in a miserable little bundle on the beach, her arms wrapped around her knees as she stared at the bright morning sea without seeing it.
She’d gone to bed with the feeling that everything would be all right when she woke up in the morning. But she’d awakened to a pair of parents torn among insane curiosity, worry, approval, and disapproval, who drank cup after cup of coffee and stared at the lump of lunar pumice in the middle of the table, and made very little sense when they talked.
She hardly knew them. Her mom and dad alternated between talking to her, hanging on every word she said, and talking over her head about her, as if she weren’t there. And they kept touching her like a delicate thing that might break—though there was an undercurrent of anger in the touches that said her parents had suddenly discovered she was in some ways stronger than they were, and they didn’t like it.
Nita sighed. I’d give anything for one of Dad’s hugs that squeeze the air out and make you go squeak! she thought. Or to hear Mom do Donald Duck voices at me. But fat chance of that . . .
She let out a long, unhappy breath. Kit was finishing his breakfast at a leisurely pace and handling endless questions about wizardry from her parents—covering for her. Just as well: she had other business to attend to before they left.
“Tom,” she said, almost mourning, under her breath. Cellphone reception was crap again this morning, and despite using Manual messaging as Tom had recommended, there’d been no answer. In desperation she’d gone down to Friedman’s, left a message on Tom’s and Carl’s voicemail, and had “minded the store” under Dog’s watchful eye for a long time, waiting for Tom to return her call. She needed expert help, in a hurry. I’ve gone as far as I can on my own, she thought. I need advice! Oh, Tom, where are you?
As she’d expected. Nothing—
The last thing she expected was the sudden explosion of air that occurred about twenty feet down the beach from her, flinging sand in all directions. No, Nita corrected herself; the genuinely last thing she expected was what the explosion produced — a man with one towel wrapped around his waist and another draped around his neck. He was tall, broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted, with dark hair and the kind of face one sees on models in ads for expensive suits. It wasn’t Tom, but Carl.
He looked around him, saw Nita, and came over to her in a hurry, looking grave. “What’samatter, Nita?” he said, casual as always, but concerned. “I picked up on that even though it wasn’t meant for me.”
She looked up at him wanly and tried to smile just a little; but the smile was a dismal failure. “Uh, no. Look, no one was answering the phone—and then I was just thinking—”
“That wasn’t what I would call ‘just’ thinking,” Carl said, sitting down on the sand beside her. “Sometimes I forget what kind of power wizards have when they’re kids...”
Nita saw that Carl’s hair was wet. “I got you out of the shower,” she said. “I’m sorry...”
“No, I was out already. It’s okay.”
“Where’s Tom?” Nita said.
“He has a breakfast meeting with some people at ABC; he asked me to take his calls. Not that I had much choice, in your case… You’ve got big trouble, huh? Tell me about it.”
She did. It took her a while. Though she braced herself for it, the look of shock on Carl’s face when he heard about Nita’s accepting the Silent Lord’s part was so terrible, she started to leak tears again. Carl sat still while she finished the story.
“Do your folks know?” he said at last.
“No,” Nita said. “I didn’t tell them yet. And I don’t think I’m going to. I just—” She broke off, shaking her head. “I think Dad suspects—and Mom knows he does, and doesn’t want to talk to him about it.”
Carl let out a long breath. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said at last.
This wasn’t the most encouraging thing Nita had ever heard. A Senior Wizard always knew what to tell you. “Carl,” she said, tears still thick in her voice, “what can I do? I can’t—I can’t just die!”
It was the first time she had actually said the word out loud. It left her shaking all over like the aftermath of a particularly large wizardry, and the tears started coming again.
Carl was quiet. “Well, yeah, you can,” he said at last, gently. “People do it all the time. Sometimes for much less cause.”
“But there must be something I could do!”
Carl looked down at the sand. “What did you say you were going to do?”
Nita didn’t say anything; they both knew the answer very well. “You know what may have caused this?” Carl said.
“What?”
“Remember the blank-check sorcery you did while in the other Manhattan, that time? The open-ended request for help?”
“Yeah.”
“That kind of spell always says that at some later date you’ll be called upon to return the energy you use.” Carl looked somber. “You got your help. But it must have taken a lot of energy to seal a whole piece of another space away from every other space, forever...”
Nita scrubbed at her eyes, not much liking this line of reasoning. “But the spell never said anyone was going to have to die to pay back the price!”
“No. All it said was that you were going to have to pay back the exact amount of energy used up at some future date. And it must have been a very great amount, to require lifeprice to be paid. There’s no higher payment that can be made.” Carl fell silent a moment, then said, “Well, one.” And his face shut as if a door had closed behind his eyes.
Nita put her head down on her knees again. This wasn’t working the way it was supposed to. “Carl, there has to be something you, we could do—”
The surf crashed for a long time between her words and his. “Nita,” Carl said finally, “no. What you absolutely do not want is ‘something you could do.’ What you really want is for me to get you off the hook somehow, so you don’t have to carry through with your promise.”
Her head snapped up in shock. “You mean— Carl, don’t you care if I die or not?”
“I care a whole lot.” The pain in Carl’s voice made it plain that he did. “But unfortunately I also have to tell you the truth. That’s what Seniors are for; why do you think we’re given so much power to work with? We’re paid for what we do—and a lot of it isn’t pleasant.”
“Then tell me some truth! Tell me what to do—”
“No,” he said gently. “Never that. Nine-tenths of the power of wizardry comes from making up your own mind what you’re going to do. The rest of it is just mechanics.” Carl looked at her with a professional calm that reminded Nita of her family doctor. “What I can do is go over your options with you.”
She nodded.
“So first—what you’d like to do. You want to break your word and not sing the Song. Well, that’d be easy enough to pull off. You’d simply stay on land for the next week or so and not have anything further to do with the whales with whom you’ve been working. That would keep you out of the Song proper; you’d be alive three days from now.”
Carl looked out to sea as he spoke, nothing in his expression or his tone of voice hinting at either praise or condemnation. “There would naturally be results of that action. For one,
you took the Celebrant’s Oath in front of witnesses and called on the Powers of wizardry themselves to bring certain things about if you break the Oath. They will bring those things about, Nita. The Powers don’t forget. You’ll lose your wizardry. You’ll forget that there is any such thing as magic in the world. Also, any relationships you have with other wizards will collapse. You’d never have met Kit, for example, or me, or Tom, except for your wizardry. So we’ll cease to exist for you: those relationships will undo themselves and you’ll gladly forget they ever happened.”
Nita held still as stone.
“There’ll also be effects on the Song itself as a result of your leaving. Even if the group manages to find a replacement wizard to sing the Silent One—” Nita thought of Kit and froze. “—the Song itself will still have been sabotaged by your betrayal of your Oath. It won’t be effective. The undersea tremors, the attacks on the whales and all the rest of it will continue. Or the Lone Power will enter into the wizardry and throw it completely out of control—in which case I don’t want to think of what will happen to New York and the Island, sooner or later. If all the other wizards in the area worked together, we might be able to slow it down. But not for long.”
Carl took a breath. “And on top of everything else, breaking the Celebrant’s Oath will also be a violation of the Wizard’s Oath, your oath to assist in slowing down the death of the Universe. In your last moment as a wizard, as you lose your power, you will know beyond all doubt that the Universe around you is going to die sooner because of your actions. And all through your life there’ll always be something at the bottom of your heart that feels sad… and you’ll never be able to get rid of it, or even understand it.”
Nita didn’t move.
“That was all the ‘bad’ stuff. On the ‘good’ side I can tell you that you probably wouldn’t die of the upheavals that will start happening. What you did in Manhattan with Kit wouldn’t be forgotten by the Powers either; they pay their debts. I imagine your folks would get a sudden urge to go visit some relatives out of state—something like that—and be a good distance inland when the trouble started. And after the trouble, you’d go on to live what would seem a perfectly normal life. After all, most people think it’s normal to have a nameless sorrow at the bottom of your soul. You’d grow up, and find a job, and get married, or not, and work and play and do all the other things that both wizards and non-wizards do. And then you’d die.”