by Diane Duane
Areinnye turned her back on Ed and swam away, as if not caring what he said. “You take strange sides, Slayer,” the sperm said at last, cold-voiced. “The humans hunt those of your Mastery as relentlessly as they hunt us.”
“I take no sides, Areinnye,” Ed said, still following her. “Not with whales, or fish, or humans, or any other Power in the Sea or above it. Wizard that you are, you should know that.” He was beginning to circle her now. “And if I sing this Song, it is for the same reason that I have sung a hundred others: for the sake of my Mastery — and because I am pleased to sing. You had best put your distress aside and deal with the business we have come to discuss, lest something worse befall you.”
Areinnye turned slowly back toward the group. “Well, if you’ve come to administer me the Oath,” Areinnye said to S’reee, “you might as well get on with it. I was in the midst of hunting when you interrupted me.”
“Softly,” S’reee said. “Your power is a byword all throughout these parts; I want it in the Song. But we’re not so short of wizards that I’ll include one who’ll bring the High and Dry down on us. Choose, and tell me whether you can truthfully sing and leave your anger behind.”
Areinnye cruised slowly through the group, making no sound but the small ticking noises the sperm uses to navigate. “Seeing that the human who sings with us sings for the Sea’s sake,” she said at last, in that tight, flat voice, “I am content. But my heart is bitter in me for my calf’s loss, and I cannot forget that easily. Let the humans remember that, and keep their distance.”
“If that is well for you two—“ Kit and Nita both flicked tails in agreement. Well enough, then,” said S’reee. “Areinnye t’Hwio-dheii, those who gather to sing that Song that is the Sea’s shame and the Sea’s glory desire you to be of their company. Say, for my hearing, whether you consent to that Song.”
“I consent…” Areinnye sang her way through the responses with slow care, and Nita began to relax slightly. The sperm’s voice was beautiful, as pleasant as Kit’s, when she wasn’t angry. Yet she couldn’t help but catch a couple of Areinnye’s glances at Ed — as if she knew that she was being watched for her responses and would be watched in the future.
Then the third Question was asked, and Areinnye’s song scaled up in the high notes of final affirmation, a sound of tearing, chilly beauty. “Let me wander forever amid the broken and the lost, sooner than I shall refuse the Song,” Areinnye sang, “or what it brings about for the good of those who live.” But there was a faint note of scorn in the last phrase, as if the singer already counted herself among the lost and broken; and the notes on “those who live” twisted down the scale into a bitter diminuendo of pain that said life was a curse.
Now it was S’reee’s turn to look dubious; but it was too late.
“Well,” the sperm said, “when is the Foregathering? And where?”
“Tomorrow dawn,” said S’reee, “in the waters off the Hook. Will you be on time?”
“Yes,” Areinnye said. “So farewell.” And she turned tail and swam off.
Kit flicked a glance at Ed and said quietly to Nita, “Boy, that was a close one. If those two got started fighting…”
“It would not be anything like ‘close,’ “ Ed said. ‘
“Okay, great,” Kit said in mild annoyance, “she couldn’t kill you. But isn’t it just possible she might hurt you a little?”
“She would regret it if she did,” Ed said. “Blood in the water will call in some sharks, true. But their Master’s blood in the water will call them all in, whether they smell it or not… every shark for thousands of lengths around. That is my magic, you see. And whatever the Master-Shark might be fighting when his people arrived would shortly not be there at all, except as rags and scraps for fingerlings to eat.”
Nita and Kit and S’reee looked at each other.
“Why do we need Areinnye in the first place?” Nita said to S’reee. “Is she really that good a wizard?”
Turning, S’reee began to swim back the way they had come, through the now-darkening water. Hotshot paced her; and silently, pale in the dimness, Ed brought up the rear. “Yes,” S’reee said. “In fact, by rights, she should have been Ae’mhnuu’s apprentice, not I.”
Kit looked at her in surprise. “Why wasn’t she?”
S’reee made a little moan of annoyance. “I don’t know,” she said. “Areinnye is a much more powerful wizard than I am — even Ae’mhnuu agreed with me about that. Yet he refused her request to study with him, not just once but several times. And now this business with her calf—“ S’reee blew a few huge bubbles out her blowhole, making an unsettled noise. “Well, we’ll make it work out.”
“That shall yet be seen,” Ed said from behind them.
The Moon was high when Nita and Kit came out of the water close to the jetty and went looking for their clothes. Kit spent a while gazing longingly up at the silver-golden disc, while Nita dressed. “We’re really gonna get killed now, aren’t we?” he said, so quietly that Nita could hardly hear him.
“Uh-huh.” Nita sat down on the sand and stared out at the waves while Kit went hunting for his bathing suit and windbreaker.
“Whaddaya think they’ll do?” Kit said.
Nita shook her head. “No idea.”
Kit came up beside her, adjusting his windbreaker. “You think they’re gonna send me home?”
“They might,” she said.
They toiled up the last dune before home and looked down toward the little rough road that ran past the house. All the upstairs lights were on. The downstairs ones were dark; evidently Dairine had been sent to bed.
“Neets—“ Kit said. “What’re you gonna do?”
“I’m sworn, Kit. I’m in the Song. I have to be there.”
“You mean you’re going to—“
“Don’t,” she said, in genuine pain. She didn’t want him to say it, to think it, any more than she wanted to think it herself. And to tell the absolute truth, she wasn’t sure of what she was going to do about the Song yet.
“They don’t need me for the Song,” Kit said.
“It doesn’t look that way.”
“Yeah.” He was quiet a moment. “Look — if somehow I can get you off the hook, get your folks to think this is all my fault somehow, so that you can still go out…”
“No,” Nita said, scandalized. “Anyway, they’d never buy it. I promised my mom I’d be back on time last time — and blew it. Then I snuck out today. They know it’s me as much as you. I’m just gonna have to face the music.”
“With what?” Kit said.
“I don’t know.” The thought of treating her parents as enemies made her feel as if the bottom had fallen out of the Universe.
The one good thing, she thought, is that by tomorrow, tonight will be over.
I hope.
“C’mon,” she said. Together they went home.
The house was deadly still when they stepped in, and the screen door closing behind them seemed loud enough to be heard for miles around. The kitchen was dark; light flowed into it from the living room, the subdued illumination of a couple of table lamps. There was no sound of TV, even though Nita knew her dad’s passion for late movies; no music, despite her mom’s fondness for classics and symphonic rock at any hour of day or night.
Nita’s mouth felt dry as beach sand. She stopped where she was, tried to swallow, looked at Kit. He looked back, punched her lightly in the arm, then pushed past her and walked into the living room.
For the rest of her life, Nita thought, she would remember the way that room looked and felt when she walked in. The living room needed a new paint job, its rug was threadbare in places, and the walls were hung with bargain-basement seascapes, wide-eyed children of almost terminal cuteness, and, in one corner, something her dad called the Piece of Resistance — a garish matador done in day-glow paint on black velvet.
Her mother and father were sitting side by side on the Coca-Cola-colored couch, their backs straight. Th
ey looked up as Nita and Kit came through the door, and Nita saw her mother’s face tight with fear and her father’s closed like a door. They had been reading magazines; they put them aside, and the usually friendly room suddenly looked dingy as a prison, and the matador hurt Nita’s eyes.
“Sit down,” her father said. His voice, quiet, calm, sounded too much like Ed’s. She managed to hold onto her composure as she headed for Dairine’s favorite chair and sat down quickly.
“Pretty slick,” said her father. “My daughter appears to have a great future in breaking and entering. Or breaking and departing.”
Nita opened her mouth and shut it again. She could have dealt with a good scolding… but this chilly sarcasm terrified her. And there was no way out of it.
“Well?” her father said. “You’d better start coming up with some answers, young lady. You too,” he said to Kit, his eyes flashing; and at the sight of the anger, Nita felt a wash of relief. That look was normal. “Because what you two say is going to determine whether we send you straight home tomorrow morning, Kit — and whether we let you and Nita see any more of each other.”
Kit looked her father straight in the eye and said nothing.
Sperm whales! Nita thought, and it was nearly a curse. But then she took the thought back as she realized that Kit was waiting for her to say something first, to give him a lead. Great! Now all I have to do is do something!
What do I do?
“Kit,” her father said, “I warn you, I’m in no mood for Latin gallantry and the whole protect-the-lady business. You were entrusted to my care and I want answers. Your parents are going to hear about this in any case — what you say, or don’t say, is going to determine what I tell them. So be advised.”
“I understand,” Kit said. Then he glanced at Nita. “Neets?”
Nita shook her head ever so slightly, amazed as always by that frightened bravery that would wait for her to make a move, then back her utterly. It had nothing to do with the whalesark. Kit, Nita thought, practically trembling with the force of what she felt, you’re incredible! But I don’t have your guts — and I have to do something!
Her mother and father were looking at her, waiting.
Oh, Lord, Nita thought then, and bowed her head and put one hand over her face, for she suddenly knew what to do.
She looked up. “Mom,” she said — and then had to start over, for the word came out in a kind of strangled squeak. “Mom, you remember when we were talking the other day? And you said you wanted to know why we were staying out so much, because you thought something besides ‘nothing’ was going on?”
Her mother nodded, frozen-faced.
“Uh, well, there was,” Nita said, not sure where to go from there. Two months of wizardry, spells wrought and strange places visited and wonders seen — how to explain it all to nonwizards? Especially when they might not be able to see wizardry done right under their eyes — and in the past hadn’t? Never mind that, Nita told herself desperately. If you think too much, you’ll get cold feet. Just talk.
Her mother was wearing a ready-to-hear-the-worst expression. “No, not that,” Nita said, feeling downright cross that her mother was still thinking along those idiotic lines. “But this is going to take a while.”
Nita swallowed hard. “You remember in the spring,” she said, “that day Kit and I went into the city — and that night, the Sun went out?”
Her parents stared at her, still angry, and now slightly perplexed too.
“We had something to do with that,” Nita said.
Truthsong
And Nita began to tell them. By the time she saw from their faces just how crazy the story must be sounding, it was already much too late for her to stop.
She told them the story from the beginning — the day she had her hand snagged by an innocent-looking library book full of instructions for wizardry — to the end of her first great trial, and Kit’s, that terrible night when the forces of darkness got loose in Manhattan and would have turned first the city and then the world into a place bound in eternal night and cold, except for what she and Kit did. She told them about Advisory and Senior wizards, though she didn’t mention Tom and Carl; about places past the world where there was nothing but night, and about the place past life where there was nothing but day.
Not once did her parents say a word.
Mostly Kit kept quiet, except when Nita’s memory about something specific failed; then he spoke up and filled in the gap, and she went on again. The look on her father’s face was approaching anger again, and her mother was well into complete consternation, by the time Nita started telling them about the dolphin who nudged her in the back, the whale she and Kit found on the beach, and the story the whale had told them. She told them a little-very little, fearing for her own composure — about the Song of the Twelve and what she was going to be doing in it.
And then, not knowing what else to say, she stopped.
Her mother and father looked at each other.
Our daughter, the look said, is going to have to be hospitalized. She’s sick.
Nita’s mother finally turned to her. Her dad had bowed his head about a third of the way through the story, and except for that glance at her mother seemed unable to do anything but sit with his hands clasped tightly together. But her mother’s face was stricken.
“Nita,” she said, very gently — but her voice was shaking like the tightly clasped hands of the man beside her, “you don’t have to make up stories like this to keep us from being angry with you.”
Nita’s mouth fell open. “Mom,” she said, “are you trying to say you don’t believe me?”
“Nita,” her father said. His eyes were haunted, and his attempt to keep his voice sounding normal was failing miserably. “Give us a break. How are we supposed to believe a crazy story like this? Maybe you’ve got Kit believing it-” He broke off, as if wanting to find a way to explain all this, something reasonable. “I guess it’s understandable, he’s younger than you…”
Nita glanced over at Kit for the first time in a while and gulped. His annoyed look brought the sperm-whale battlecry scraping through her memories again.
“I’ll tell you how you’re supposed to believe it,” Kit said.
Nita’s mother and father looked at him.
Kit was suddenly sitting a little taller in the chair. And taller still, though he didn’t move a muscle. And taller — until Nita could see that Kit’s seat and the seat of the chair no longer had much to do with each other. He was hovering about two feet in the air.
“Like this,” Kit said.
Holding her breath, Nita looked from Kit to her parents.
They stared at Kit, their faces absolutely unmoved, as if waiting for something. Kit glanced over at Nita, shrugged, and kept floating up until he was sitting six feet or so above the floor. “Well?” he said.
They didn’t move a muscle.
“Harry—“ Nita’s mother said, then, after what seemed forever.
He didn’t say a thing.
“Harry,” her mother said, “I hate to admit it, but I think all this has gotten to me…”
Nita’s father simply kept looking at the chair.
Then, ever so slowly, he leaned his head back and looked up at Kit.
“Hypnosis,” Nita’s father said.
“Bull!” Kit said. “When did I hypnotize you?”
Nita’s father didn’t say anything.
“I haven’t said a thing,” Kit said. “If I hypnotized you without lights or words or anything, that’s a pretty good trick, isn’t it? You two better talk to each other and see if you’re seeing the same thing. If you aren’t, maybe I did hypnotize you. But if you are—“
Nita’s mother and father looked away from Kit with some effort. ‘Betty…” said Nita’s father.
Neither of them said anything further for a few seconds.
“Harry,” her mother said at last, “if I told you that I saw… saw Kit…” She stopped and swallowed. Then she started
again, and the same feeling that had shaken Nita earlier about Kit took hold of her and shook her about her mother. Evidently bravery came in odd forms, and out of unexpected places. “If I told you that I saw Kit not sitting in the chair any more,” her mother said, all at once and in a rush. Then her voice gave out on her.
“Above it,” her dad said. And that was all he could manage.
They stared at each other.
“You got it,” Kit said.
Nita’s dad broke away from looking at her mother and glared at Nita instead. “Hypnosis,” her father said. “There’s no other explanation.”
“Yes, there is!”Nita hollered at him, waving her arms in frustration, “but you don’t want to admit it!”
“Nita,” her mother said.
“Sorry,” Nita said. “Look, Kit… this isn’t going to do it. We need something more impressive.” She got up. “Come on,” she said. “Outside. It’s my turn.”
Nita yanked the front door open and ran outside, up the dune and down its far side toward the beach. There was a long pause before she heard the sound of footsteps following her down the wooden stairs. Shock, she thought, feeling both pity and amusement. If only there was some easier way! But there wasn’t… She made it down to the beach, picked the spot she wanted, then stood and waited for them to arrive.
First her mother, then her father, came clambering up the dune and slid down its far side, to stand on the beach and stare up and down it, looking for her. Then Kit appeared beside them in a small clap of air that startled her mother so badly she jumped. Her father stared.
“Sorry,” Kit said, “I should have warned you.” He was still sitting cross-legged in the air, and Nita noticed that he didn’t sound very sorry either.