A Wizard Abroad

else?'

'That's all there is,' Nita said grimly. 'Dublin, and the country. All potato fields and cow pastures.'

'Saw that in the manual, did you?'

Nita rolled her eyes. Kit could be incredibly pedantic sometimes. 'No.'

Kit sighed and looked at her. 'I'm going to miss you too,' he said. 'Imiss you already.'

She looked at him, and saw it was true: and the bad mood fell off her, or mostly off, replaced by a feeling of unhappy resignation. 'It's only six weeks,' she said then.

Kit's face matched her feeling. 'We'll do it standing on our heads,' he said.

Nita smiled at him unhappily. Since wizards did not lie outright, when one tried to stretch the truth, it showed woefully. 'Come on,' she said, 'we're running out of air. Let's get on with it.' Saturday came.

Kit came with them on the ride to the airport. It was a grim, silent sort of ride, broken only by the kind of strained conversation people make when they desperately need to say something, anything, to keep the silence from getting too thick. At least, it seemed silent. She and Kit would pass the occasional comment mind-to-mind. It wasn't all that easy; they didn't do it much… they'd got in the habit of just talking to each other, since telepathy often got itself tangled up with a lot of other information you didn't need, or want, the other person to have. But now, habits or not, they were going to have to get a lot better at mindtouch if they were going to talk at all frequently. They reached the airport, did the formalities with the ticket, checked in Nita's bag — a medium-sized one, not too difficult for her to handle herself, though she was privately determined to make it weightless if she had to carry it anywhere alone. And then the announcement system called her flight, and there was nothing to do but go on.

She hugged her mum, and her dad. 'Have a good time now,' her father said.

She sighed and said, 'I'll try, Daddy. Mummy. .' And she was surprised at herself; she didn't usually call her mother 'Mummy'. They hugged again, hard.

'Be good, now,' her mother said. 'Don't. .' She trailed off. The 'don't' was a huge one, and Nita could hear in it all the things parents always say: don't get in trouble, don't forget to wash — but most specifically,don't get into anything dangerous, like the last time. Or the time before that. Or the time before that. .

'I'll try, Mum,' she said. It was all she could guarantee. Then she looked at Kit. 'Dai,' he said.

'Dai stiho,' she replied. It was the greeting and farewell of one wizard to another in the wizardly Speech: it meant as much 'Bye for forever' as 'Bye for now'. For Nita, at the moment, it felt rather more like the first.

At that point she simply couldn't stand it any more. She waved, a weak gesture, and turned her back on them all, and slung her rucksack over her shoulder, and her warm jacket that her mother had insisted she bring, and she walked down the long, cold hall of the airport, towards the plane. It was a 747. Her sensitivity was running high — perhaps because of her own nervousness and distress at leaving — but the plane was alive in the way that mechanical things usually seemed to her as a result of working with Kit. That was his speciality — the ability to feel what a rock was saying, reading the secret thoughts of a lift or a freezer, the odd thing-thoughts that run in the currents of energy which occur naturally or are built into physical objects, manmade or not. She could hear the plane straining against the chocks behind its many wheels, and its engines thinking of eating cold, cold air at thirty degrees below, and pushing it out behind. There was a sense of purpose about it, of restraint, and of eagerness to get out of there, to be gone.

It was a reassuring sort of feeling. She absently returned the smile of the stewardess at the plane's door, and patted the plane as she got in; let the lady help her find her seat, so as to feel that she was doing something useful. Nita sat herself down by the window, fastened her seat belt, and got out her manual.

For a moment she just held it in her hand. Just a small beat-up book in a buckram library binding, with the apparent title, so YOU WANT TO BE A WIZARD? the supposed author's name, Hearn, and the Dewey Decimal System number, all written on the spine in white ink. Nita shook her head and smiled at the book, a little conspiratorially, for it was a lot more than that. Was it only two years ago, no, two and a half now, that she had found it in the local library? Or it had found her; she still wasn't too sure, remembering the way something had seemed to grab her hand as she ran it along the shelf where the book had been sitting. Whether it was alive was a subject on which the manual itself threw no light. Certainly it changed, adding new spells and other information as needed, updating news of what other wizards in the world were doing. Using it, she had found Kit in the middle of a wizardry of his own, and helped him with it, so passing through their Ordeal together and starting their partnership. They had got into deep trouble together, several times: but together, they had always got out again.

Nita sighed and started paging through the manual, very much missing the 'together' part of the arrangement. She had been resisting looking for the information on Ireland that Kit had mentioned until this point, hoping against hope that there would be a stay of execution. Even now she cherished the idea that her mother or father might come pushing down the narrow aisle between the seats, saying, 'No, no, we've changed our minds!' But she knew it was futile. When her mother got an idea into her head, she was almost as stubborn as Nita was.

So she sat there, and looked down at the manual. It had fallen open at the Wizard's Oath. In Life's name, 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. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; nor will I change any creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened, or threaten another. To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will ever put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so — looking always toward the Heart of Time, where all our sundered times are one, and all our myriad worlds lie whole, in the One from Whom they proceeded.

The whole plane wobbled as the little tug in front of it pushed it away from the gate. Nita peered out the window. Pressing her nose against the cool plastic and looking out, she could just barely make out her mother and father gazing through the window at her; her mother waving a little tentatively, her father gripping the railing in front of the window, not moving. And a little behind them, out of their range of vision, looking out the window too, Kit. Stay warm, he said in her head.

Kit, it's not like I'm going away. We'll be hearing from each other all the time in our heads. It's not like I'm really going away… Is it?

She was quiet for a moment. The tug pushing the plane began to turn it, so that her view of him was lost.

Yes it is, he said.

Yeah, well. She caught herself sighing again. Look, you're going to have the trees to deal with again, and you need time to plan what you're going to do. And I need time to calm myself down. Going to call me later? Yeah. What time?

This thing won't be down until early tomorrow morning, their time, she said. Doesn't want to come down at all, from the feel of it, Kit said drily.

Nita chuckled, caught an odd look from a passing stewardess, and made herself busy looking as if she had read something funny in her manual.Yeah. Call me about this time tomorrow. You got it. Have a good flight! For what it's worth, Nita said.

The plane began to trundle purposefully out towards the runway. They didn't have to wait long; air traffic control gave them clearance right away — Nita, eavesdropping along the plane's nerves, heard the pilot acknowledging it. Half a minute later the plane screamed delight and leaped into the air. New York slid away behind them, replaced by the open sea. Seven hours later, they landed in Shannon.

Nita had thought she would be completely unable to sleep, but when they turned out most of the lights in the plane after the meal service, she leaned her head against the window to see if she could relax enough to watch the film a little.

The next thing she knew, the sun was coming in the window, and there was land below them. Nita looked down into the early sun — six o'clock in the morning, it was — and saw the ragged black coastline and the curling water white where the water smashed into the rocks, where the Atlantic threw itself in fury against this first eastern barrier to its will. And then green — everywhere green, divided by little lines of hedge; a hundred shades of green, emerald, viridian, khaki, the pale green that has no right to be anywhere outside of spring — hedgerows winding between, white dots of sheep, tiny cars crawling along little toy roads: but always the green. The plane