A Wizard Abroad

away from one another, even though they were quite small; some were larger, though.

The road dipped and broadened, curving around in front of St Patrick's. Nita stopped and looked at it for a moment. It was quite normal. A little white-painted church, with the tower off to one side of the building, and the bell with a circular pulley to make it go. There was a big field on one side, and visible behind it a hedge, and beyond that, some of Aunt Annie's land, another field planted with oilseed rape and those bright yellow flowers. The hum of bees came from it, loud. Nita stood still and listened, smelled the air. No broken stained glass, no fire, no blackening. She turned and looked off to her right. Well behind her, she could see Little Sugarloaf, which she had passed on her walk. And just beyond it, Great Sugarloaf, a very perfect cone, standing up straight, a sort of russet and green colour this time of year; for in this heat, the bracken was beginning to go brown already. Iwonder, she thought.Sideways.

She had done it without wizardry yesterday. She stood there for a moment, and just looked. Not at Sugarloaf as it was, but as it could be; not this brown, but green.

Nothing.

Nothing. But it was green.

Her eyes widened a little. She looked at the nearby hedge. There were no flowers. She looked over her shoulder in panic at the church. The church looked just the same, but it was earlier in the year, much earlier. Iwonder, she thought.How far can you take it? Do you have to be looking for anything in particular? Most wizardries required that you name the specifics that you wanted.All right. What does it look like? she thought.What does it look like for them,for the Sidhe? She looked at Sugarloaf again.What does it look like? Show me. Come on, show me.

There was no ripple, no sense of change, no special effects. One minute it was Sugarloaf, green as if with new spring. The next minute — it was a city.

There were no such cities. No-one had ever built such towers, such spires. Glass, it might have been, or crystal: a glass mountain, a crystal city, all sheen and fire. It needed no sunlight to make it shine. It shed its light all around, and the other hills nearby all had shadows cast away from it. Nita was not entirely sure she didn't see something moving in some of those shadows. But for the moment, all she could see clearly was the light, the fire; Sugarloaf all one great mass of tower upon tower, arches, architraves, buttresses, leaping up; an architecture men could not have imagined, since it violated so many of their laws. It was touched a little with the human idiom, true; but then those who had built it and lived in it — were living in it — had been dealing with the human idiom for a while, and had become enamored of it. 'They're still here,' Tualha had said, and laughed. Nita blinked, and let it go: and it was gone. Brown bracken again, plain granite mountain, with its head scraped bare. She let a long breath out and went walking again, back up to the last hill that would lead her up to her aunt's drive. 'That simple,' she said to herself. 'That easy. ' For wizards, at least. At the moment.But it shouldn't be that easy. Something hadbetter be done. If only I could find out what? She headed back to the farm.

The next morning was the foxhunt. She missed the earliest part of the operation, having been reading late again that night, and chatting with Kit. He hadn't been able to throw much light on anything, except that he missed her. 'Kit,' she said, 'I don't know how much more of this I can take.'

'You can take it,' he said. 'I can take it too. I saw your parents the other day.' 'How are they?'

'They're fine. they're going to call you tonight. They said they were going to give you a couple of days to get yourself acclimatized before they bothered you.' 'Fine by me,' Nita said. 'I've had enough to keep me busy.'

She had felt Kit nod, thirty-five hundred miles away. 'So I see,' he said. 'I'd watch doing that too much, Neets.'

'Hm?'

'I mean, it makes me twitch a little bit. You didn't do any specific wizardry, but with that result — makes you wonder what's going on over there.'

'Yeah, well, it can't be that bad, Kit. Look, you come back as easily as you go. .' 'I hope you do,' he said.

The conversation had trailed off after that. It was odd how it was becoming almost uncomfortable to talk to Kit, because their conversation couldn't run in the same channels it usually did, the easy, predictable ones. For the first time, she was having things to tell him that he hadn't actually participated in. 'How's Dairine?' she said.

'She's been busy with something. I don't know what. Something about somebody's galaxy.' 'Oh no, not again,' Nita said. 'Sometimes I think she should be unlisted. She's never going to have any peace, at least not while she's in breakthrough. and maybe not later.' They chatted on a bit, and then it trailed off.

Nita was thinking about this in the morning as she got her breakfast. The kitchen was in havoc. A lot of the riders who were picking up their horses from the stable had come in for 'a quick cup of tea'. Nita was learning that there was no such thing in Ireland as a quick cup of tea. What you got was several cups of tea, taking no less than half an hour, during which whatever interesting local news there was was passed on. 'A quick cup of tea' might happen at any hour of the day or night, include any number of people, male or female, and always turned into a raging gossip session with hilarious laughter and recriminations. You could hear some terrific gossip if you hung around them, or so Nita was learning.

Finally the kitchen began to clear out a bit. The people who were in the hunt were splendidly dressed, all red coats and black caps and beige riding breeches and black shiny boots. They were discussing the course they would ride — a difficult one, from Calary Upper behind Great Sugarloaf, down through various farmers' lands, straight down to Newcastle. The thing that was bemusing them was that, suddenly, there were no reports of foxes anywhere. Nita smiled again to herself as she heard the discussion in the kitchen that morning. Everyone was excessively bemused about the situation. Some people blamed hunt protesters; others blamed the weather, crop dusting, sunspots, global warming, or overzealous shooting by local farmers. Nita grinned outright, and had another cup of tea. She was beginning to really like tea.

'Well, that's all we'll see of them,' said Aunt Annie, pouring herself a cup as well and then flopping down in one of the kitchen chairs in thinly-disguised relief.

'I thought they were coming through here,' Nita said.

'Oh, they will, but that's not until this afternoon.'

'No foxes, huh?' Nita said, in great satisfaction.

'Not a one.' Her aunt looked over at her and said, 'Personally, I can't say that I'm exactly brokenhearted.'

'Me neither,' said Nita.

'Doesn't matter. They'll hunt to a drag — it's just an old fox skin, that leaves a scent for the dogs: they drag it along the ground. They'll have a good time.'

Nita nodded and went back to her reading, half-thinking of going down to Bray again that afternoon, to see if Ronan or Majella were around. Then she talked herself out of it. She would put a towel down outside, and lie out in the sun, and pretend it was the beach. She missed the beaches back home: the water here was much too cold to swim in. So that was what she did.

And so it was, about two-fifteen, that she heard the cry of the hounds. She got up and pulled a T- shirt on over her bathing suit, put the manual in the caravan, and went to lean on the fence by the back field and see what she could see. She almost missed the first horseman to go by, far away, about a half mile across the field, actually; thundering through the pasture, one horseman with a long rope dragging behind him, and something dragging at the end of the rope. There was a long pause. And then the note of the hounds came belling up over the fields, followed by the hounds themselves, woofing, lolloping, yipping. Then, over the rise behind them, came a splendid pouring of horses of all kinds: chestnut, brown, dapple, black, galloping over the hill; and a horn goingtarantara! And the riders, halloing and riding as best they could after the hounds. It took them about a minute and a half to go by. There were about fifty people, all in their red jackets and their beige breeches and not-so-black boots. Then they were gone. The sounds of the hounds and the horses' hooves faded away over the next hill, south of the potato field, and were gone. Nita listened to the last cries fade out, then went back to lie in the sun. The horses started coming back to the farm about three hours later. There was much talk of rides and falls and jumps and water barriers, and a lot of other stuff that Nita didn't particularly understand. But