9. Caslean na mBroinn / Caher Matrices / Castle Matrix
Sleep refused to come easily to her that night. Finally Nita got up about midnight and struggled back into her clothes, thinking that she would go and see whether there was a boring film on the last functioning TV channel.
She never made it past the back garden. 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 garden and the riding area, 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 the gravel down the drive got her attention. Nita held very still and listened, suddenly finding herself getting very tense. Who knew what kind of people went sneaking about farms when everyone was in bed. .
She knew, though. 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-acclimatized 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,' 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 wear you out?'
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 also looked up. 'And you walked all the way up here from Bray? I'm glad I didn't bother going in to look at the TV. There must really be nothing on.'
This time she actually felt him getting angry, sensed it rising off him like steam off a hard-ridden horse. 'Look,' she whispered as he opened his mouth, 'just spare me. OK? Everything somebody says to you, you find a reason to get annoyed 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. Attractive. Sensitive. Helpless. . He opened his mouth again, shut it, and then opened it again and started to laugh, almost soundlessly. 'Yeah. I guess. I've always been this way. 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 pretty different when I met you first. .' 'And now you think I'm pretty much normal?' Nita said. 'Nice of you.' 'No,' Ronan said, sounding annoyed. 'I think you're more different than anybody around here. Especially the other girls.' He sounded less annoyed. 'A lot of them talk tough all the time, but if you push them, they give, right then. You, though, you don't talk tough — mostly. When you do, you're scary. .' He shrugged. 'And as for pushing — you just fall all over whoever does it, like a brick wall.'
Nita flushed hot at this, not sure what to make of it. 'Well, you're certainly different from everyone else I know,' she said, and then shut her mouth again lest the confusion inside should start finding its way out and make her look like a total idiot. But Ronan just laughed again. '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. For once, there was no anger about it. Bizarrely, the look made her start to shake a little. Then it occurred to her that there was nothing bizarre about it, for it was not her own physical excitement she was feeling. She knew what that felt like-There was nothing in the manual about this. Or is there? Nita thought. Have I ever looked? It's not as if the subject has 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 swallowed, getting her first taste of what it was like for a native wizard to experience 'the Knowledge' — the direct input from the wizardly 'database' which 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 somewhat differently. It 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. Not mine, she thought, fascinated. 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 a bit. His face was quite close to hers: she caught the starlight in his eyes one more time before he bent in to kiss her.
She spent the first two seconds trying to work 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. She blinked at him. Her heart was racing. 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 colour 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 the right purpose. Nita blinked in the middle of the kiss. A flash of scarlet, an impression of something swift and fierce and hot-tempered, 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 — no longer a creature that had been hiding in the shape of a scarlet macaw, another wizard's 'pet'. He saw it as Nita had seen it last, in combat with the Lone One: moulted out of its old body, now radiant, immortal, unconquerable, one of the Powers that Be, the one with many names, the One's Champion. . 'No,' Ronan gasped. 'Oh, no!'
And he was gone now, running, the sound of his going frantic on the gravel. Fading now. Gone. Nita sat there on the fence, shaking, half in tears, half too amazed to cry. The night fell silent again around her.
She 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 six-thirty. It was just starting to get dark; sunset was not until eight that night, and it wouldn't be completely dark until perhaps ten-thirty or eleven.
Castle Matrix was eastward 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 drive 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 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,' Kit said. They turned out of the drive into an open gravelled area. Off to one side of it, Castle Matrix rose. The main part of it was a plain square tower, about forty meters tall and fifteen meters on each side, of light grey 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. Off to one side, the castle had been added to; there was an additional wing about fifteen meters high, with diamond- paned windows. A low fieldstone wall ran around the gravelled area. She wandered over to peer into it after they
