by Diane Duane
There was a silence. “Well, Shaun?” Doris said. “You’re the Senior.”
Shaun sat and stared into his teacup, and then said, “I guess we haven’t any choice. Tomorrow night, then? At Matrix. Assuming the Planetary concurs.”
Doris nodded, and Ronan, and Nita’s aunt. “Will the Treasures be all right here tonight, Johnny?” Aunt Annie said.
“I should think so. Let’s meet at Matrix around eight-thirty: that’ll give us plenty of time to get ready. This ought to be done at about sunset, so that the Spear knows what it’s for.” Everyone nodded and pushed their chairs back.
Nita looked over at Dairine. “You came a long way for just this,” she said.
Dairine stretched and grinned. “Worth it to see the expression on your face when I outlined that spell. What a look! I thought you were gonna—”
“Never mind,” Nita said. Becoming a wizard had mostly changed her sister for the better, but it also seemed to have increased some of Dairine’s more annoying traits, like the bragging and teasing. “But I missed you too. How’re Mom and Dad?”
Dairine shrugged. “Mom keeps going on about ‘her baby.’ Dad looks depressed whenever he thinks she or I don’t see. So they’re fine.” Then she chuckled. “But they’ll definitely never try a stunt like this on you again.”
“Oh?”
“Uh huh. I heard them arguing about it the other day. Went on for about an hour, and finally Mom said, ‘If she wants to be a wizard, fine, let her. Better to have a daughter who’s a wizard, than not have a daughter.’”
“Awright,” Nita said softly. “When can I—” She was about to say go home, except that it occurred to her that she didn’t want to go home right this minute. Not until after the business with the Spear was settled, anyway. And besides, I’m on assignment....I’d have to see it through anyhow. “Never mind,” she said again. “Did you tell them where you were going?”
“What, and get them all crazed again? No way. Mom hasn’t figured out a way to get any promises out of me yet, and that’s the way it’s going to stay. For the time being, anyhow. What time is it at home when it’s eight-thirty in the evening here?”
“Three-thirty in the afternoon.”
“Great,” Dairine said. “I don’t have to be home for dinner until seven our time. Yes, I know where we’re going: it’s in the Manual.” Nita opened her mouth. “And yes, I know about the overlays, one of my superpowers is in fact the ability to read! See you tomorrow. Bye, Kit. Spot, heel!”
The computer scuttled over to her; cats hissed and bristled at it as it went by. Dairine vanished, and not one of the various papers on the table moved.
“Hey, pretty slick,” Kit said.
Nita laughed to herself for a second. “Look,” she said, “you’d better get back too. Your folks are going to start wondering.”
“Let ‘em wonder,” Kit said. But he started heading for the door. Nita followed and said, “Make sure you get your sleep.”
Kit laughed too, a rueful noise. Excitement sometimes made it hard for him to sleep the night before a big wizardry, and Nita was used to teasing him about the circles under his eyes. “I’ll try,” he said. “Take it easy, huh?”
“Yeah.”
Kit vanished too; Johnny and Doris and Ronan headed out past Nita to Johnny’s car, saying their goodnights as they went. As Ronan passed her, he said, “That was your sister?”
“Uh huh.”
“You poor thing,” said Ronan.
Nita nodded in complete agreement. “Your sympathy is appreciated,” she said. “But she’s got her uses. Take it easy—”
Ronan chuckled and went out.
Nita went back into the kitchen, where she found her aunt staring moodily at a sink full of teacups. “They breed,” she said, “I swear they do.”
Nita laughed, joined her at the sink and reached over for the dishwashing liquid.
9: Caisleán na mBronn / Caher Matrices / Castle Matrix
Sleep refused to come easily to Nita that night. Finally she got up about midnight and struggled back into her clothes, thinking that she’d go and see whether there was anything worth looking at on satellite.
She never made it past the back yard. It was a clear night, where the last few had been misty: and the Milky Way hung there overhead, nothing subtle about it for once, the Galaxy seen edge-on and for once looking it, ridiculously bright. Nita climbed up on the fence between the yard and the riding ring, and just sat there and stared at it for a long time. Only a month or so ago now she had been out that way, among thousands of alien creatures: and she still felt stranger here than she had there…
The crunch of gravel down the drive got her attention. Nita held very still and listened, waiting, suddenly finding herself getting very tense. Who knew what kind of people went sneaking around farms when everyone was in bed—
She knew, though. And when she recognized who was approaching, the tension got worse...not to say that it was entirely unpleasant.
By the time the dark shape turned the corner of the house and paused, looking around it, Nita’s sight was so night-acclimated that he might as well have been spotlit. And there were other indications, to another wizard anyway. Very quietly she said, “Dai.”
He said nothing for the moment, just came over to where she sat on the fence. His head was on a level with hers; very faintly, the starlight caught in Ronan’s eyes. “Dai stiho,” he said. It came out as more of a growl.
She laughed at him, very softly so as not to attract any attention in the house. “You sound angry all the time,” she said, “you know that? Doesn’t it run you down?”
He turned away from her a moment, leaning against the fence next to her and looking up at the sky. “I couldn’t sleep,” he said.
Nita grunted softly and looked up herself. “And you walked all the way up here from Bray? I’m glad I didn’t bother with the TV. There must really be nothing on.”
This time she actually felt Ronan getting angry, sensed it rising off him like steam off a hard-ridden horse. “Look,” she whispered as he opened his mouth and get himself started, “just spare me, okay? Nine times out of ten when somebody says something to you, you find a reason to get pissed off about it. It’s a wonder anyone even talks to you any more. Except you’re so—” Words jostled in her head: she shut up before any of them had a chance to get out. Hot. Sensitive. Helpless—
Ronan opened his mouth again, shut it, and then opened it again and started to laugh, almost soundlessly. “I guess— Yeah. I’ve always been this way. What’s the point in even trying to deny it? But lately it’s been getting worse. Like whatever causes it is getting closer.”
And Ronan looked at her sidewise—a sort of wry expression, clearly visible even in this dimness. “Funny. I thought you were so different when I met you first—”
“And now you think I’m so ordinary?” Nita said. “Thanks loads.”
“No!” Ronan said, sounding annoyed. “I think you’re way different from anybody around here. Especially the girls I’ve been hanging with.” And not only did some of the annoyance fall out of his voice, but he now started sounding a little bemused. “A lot of them talk tough all the time. I think they have this idea they need to keep up with the guys somehow. But when you push them, right away they give. You, though, you don’t talk tough—mostly. But when you do, jeez, you’re scary.” He shrugged. “And as for pushing—you just fall all over whoever tries it, like a brick wall.”
Nita flushed hot, not sure what to make of this. “Well, you’re sure different from everyone else I know,” she said. Then she shut her mouth again lest the confusion inside her should start finding its way out and make her look like a complete idiot.
But Ronan just laughed. “You think loud, too,” he said.
The last blush was nothing to this one, but Nita fought it down, starting to get annoyed herself. That broke off, though, when she saw the way he was looking at her. There really was no anger about it, for once; and the odd openness
of it made her start to shake a little. Then it occurred to Nita that there was nothing bizarre about it, for it wasn’t her own own physical excitement she was feeling. She knew perfectly well what that felt like—
She gulped, for there was nothing in the manual about this. Or is there? Nita thought. Have I ever even looked? It’s not as if the subject’s ever come up, working with Kit—
—and abruptly she knew, or started to know, rather more about it.
Nita sat there in the starlight and gulped again, getting her first strange taste of what it was like for a native wizard to experience “the Knowledge,” the direct input from the wizardly “database” that was the way Irish wizards experienced the information. Would it keep getting this way for me if I stayed here longer? she wondered. But that was hardly important just now: there was other information to consider. …Of course wizards got physical with each other sometimes, just the same as other human beings did. But they experienced it differently. The disparity had to do with the Speech, which had physical components as well as verbal and mental ones. And when two people expert in the Speech were attracted, they were likely to overhear one another’s bodies as well as their minds—
Nita broke out in a sweat as she looked at Ronan, and for a long few moments her thoughts chased themselves unintelligibly through her head. Only one finally made itself plain:
Well, heck, I guess you have to start somewhere. And I do like him—otherwise I wouldn’t even be thinking about this—
Ronan looked away. And Nita said, “You’re not going to get any pushing out of me on this one.” She was still shaking, but it was her own nervousness this time. She just sat there and waited.
He leaned back on the fence. His face was quite close to hers: she caught the starlight in his eyes one more time before he bent in to kiss her.
Nita spent the first two seconds trying to figure out what to do with her nose. After that Nita was simply lost in sensation: the kiss itself, and what underlay it, the rush and pour of thought and emotion that was both of their minds getting tangled together. She was nervous about it at first, but after a moment it seemed completely natural, that odd fresh scent of his mind—green, she thought, of course, and was tempted to laugh; and behind it, another sensation, something faint but familiar, she couldn’t place it—
The kiss broke. Her heart was racing. Nita blinked: their eyes met again.
The second kiss went on for a lot longer. This time they touched. This time, as the sweetness built in her body, Nita went shouldering through that welcoming greenness in mind, touching it, warm, but curiously hunting that sense of something else. And there in the dark was some of that anger, quite a bit of it actually, fretting, churning against itself; there was something down in the warm dark here, an irritant, a scent or color that she knew, that made Ronan keep lashing out at everything: some kind of energy looking to be properly expressed. Not mere rage, but a righteous anger, turning on itself, without an outlet, impotent at the moment, straining to get out and be put to right purpose.
Nita blinked in the middle of the kiss. A flash of scarlet, an impression of something swift and fierce and tempery, and utterly good—
Her eyes flew open with shock as she recognized the mind-sense of what was struggling down inside of Ronan. “Peach!” she whispered. But that had been only one of that creature’s names. It had many others. Without her being able to prevent it, she felt Ronan’s thought follow hers, down to the image of how she had seen Peach last—moulted out of its old body, now superb, immortal, unconquerable, one of the Powers that Be, the one with many names, the One’s Champion—
“No,” Ronan gasped. “Feck no!!”
And he was down off the fence and gone now, running, the sound of his going frantic on the gravel. Fading now. Gone. Nita sat there on the fence, shaking, half welling up in tears, half just too amazed to cry. Shortly the night fell silent again around her.
Nita swallowed, rubbed her eyes, got some control back. Then she took herself back to the caravan and went back to bed again. But once more it was a long time before she could sleep...
***
The next evening she and her aunt and Kit got in the car together at about eight. The shadows were just getting long: sunset was not until nine-thirty that night, and it wouldn’t be completely dark until maybe eleven.
Castle Matrix was westward from Greystones and Kilquade, in the mountains beyond Sugarloaf. They drove down many small narrow roads, which got smaller and narrower and bumpier all the way, until finally they came to a driveway with two huge trees at the end of it, each one beginning to be covered with a great mass of red berries.
“Rowan,” Nita’s her aunt said.
“I know,” Nita said. “I have a friend at home who’s a rowan tree.”
Her aunt chuckled. “It’s still so funny to hear things like that come out of one of my relatives…” she said.
“There it is,” said Kit.
They turned out of the driveway into an open graveled area. Off to one side of it, Castle Matrix rose. The main part of it was a plain square tower, about a hundred and twenty feet tall and fifty feet on a side, of light gray granite. To Nita’s intense delight, it actually had battlements on top. There were narrow arrow-slit windows here and there up and down the face of the tower, and a huge iron-bound oaken door at the bottom.
A low fieldstone wall ran around the graveled area. Off to one side, running into the wall, was an addition to the castle: a new wing about fifty feet high, with diamond-paned windows. Nita wandered over to idly peer in through these after they got out of the car. Biddy’s truck was parked nearby, against the wall, and the forge was missing from the back of it.
The oak door in the main keep swung open for them. There was Johnny in his three-piece suit, looking entirely ordinary except for what he held in one hand—a long slim rod burning with light. Nita recognized a tool she used occasionally herself: a rowan wand that had spent time out in moonlight. It was a potent enough weapon for a lower-level wizard or for casual use, though she couldn’t imagine what someone as high-powered as Johnny needed one for. “Come on in,” he said.
Nita and Kit went in behind her aunt, looking around in curiosity. About six feet inside the door was a long, heavy wine-colored brocade curtain. “Drafts,” Johnny said, pushing it aside; “you wouldn’t believe the drafts we get in here in winter.”
They passed through it and looked around, and up, and up. This was the castle’s main hall, about fifty feet across; it had whitewashed walls, black and white tiled floors, and big handsome polished wooden tables. Immediately to their left was a huge fireplace with a strange sort of grate that seemed to be designed to hold the fire’s coals up vertically rather than horizontally; a big iron spit and a crank to turn it stood in front, and there were smaller fireplaces, grills actually, on either side of the main grate. Tall arched windows, about five feet wide, were let into the west and south walls. The wooden tables had been pulled off to the sides of the big room, and in the middle of the floor, where all the tiles were dark, a most elaborate spell diagram was in the process of being laid out in white. Nita sniffed, and from her art classes identified the sweetish smell of water-based acrylic paint.
“Doesn’t scuff off in the middle of a spell,” Johnny said, picking up a brush. “Anyway. Welcome to Matrix.”
“Have you always lived here?” Kit said, looking around in admiration. “Did you inherit it?”
“Oh, no,” Johnny said. “I found this place in ruins. A big tree growing through what was left of the roof, right about here—” He pointed to the center of the room, where the spell diagram was. “We had it removed when we started to renovate the place, my wife and I. She’s in London at the moment with our son. But the Normans built the place, originally, some time in the eleven hundreds, when they were trying to subdue Ireland.” He chuckled and looked down at his work. “They fell in love with it and got ‘more Irish than the Irish,’ as the saying goes.”