A Wizard Alone

“Soon.”

“What happens when you win?”

“There’s no winning this battle. But also no losing it, because for the Enemy, for the shadow that stalks this darkness, there’s no winning the fight, either.”

For the first time, the knight moved, lifting his head up into the light. There was no telling how she knew it, but Nita knew that inside the helmet, the knight was smiling. All the darkness sang with the force of his resolve, and with his amusement — a grim but good-natured cheerfulness that seemed very strange when taken together with what he’d just said.

That good cheer in the face of what sounded like a hopeless situation struck a chord somewhere in Nita, even in her sleep. The sense got stronger and stronger in the dark air around her of a great strength being hoarded in this place for the oncoming battle, of an unusual bravery. Valor: That was the word that described what she felt seeping into this space from the glittering form at its center. It made her feel like she had to do something to be of use. “Are you sure there’s nothing I can do to help you?” Nita said.

The silence that followed stretched out much longer than the other two had.

“Tell what fights the Enemy that It will be held here,” the knight said. “That It will have to fight here, again and again. But that It won’t pass.” And again Nita could feel the fierce, amused smile inside the armor.

“I can’t stay,” Nita said. That was one of the only drawbacks to lucid dreaming: Even when reinforced by wizardry, a dream’s duration was very limited. “But I know where this place is now. I can come back if you need help, or I can bring someone else with me who can help you better—”

“No help will avail here,” the knight said, kindly enough, but sternly, too. “This fight must happen only as it has happened, or it will be lost. And if it’s lost, everything else will be—”

Without warning, darkness fell. Nita, uncertain where she was or what had happened, tried to see, but in that complete blackness, there was no way to see anything at all. Briefly, she heard the sound of laughter, challenging and cheerful, and the ringing scrape of a sword being drawn—

And then Nita was sitting up in her bed, open-eyed and startled in the less unnerving darkness of her own bedroom. She wasn’t frightened, even though she’d caught a taste, in the dream’s last moments, of what had been coming toward the knight out of the newly fallen blackness. She knew that Enemy too well to be shocked by Its appearance anymore. But the thought of leaving that glad, tough presence to fight all by itself irked her. And though she’d at least been able to make out what it was saying this time, that wasn’t the same as understanding it.

She glanced over at the hands of her bedside clock glowing in the darkness. They said two-thirty.

Nita sighed and lay down again, feeling more determined than ever to figure out what was going on.

In fact, she felt more determined than she had about anything for weeks.

“Tell what fights the Enemy that It will be held here…”

Eventually Nita fell asleep again, and down the corridors of dream, she heard the sword come scraping out of its sheath again, and again, and again…

Quandaries

When her alarm went off at about a quarter after six, Nita dragged herself out of bed, showered, and got ready for school with that fierce, small sword-sound still repeating itself in her memory.

When she woke her dad up, it was still very much on her mind. She found him a little later in the kitchen, having the coffee she’d made for him when she’d finished dressing, and saw him looking thoughtfully at her manual, which Nita had carried into the kitchen with her earlier and had left open and facedown on the counter.

“I thought you seemed a little distracted this morning,” he said, pouring milk into his coffee.

“You look like you’re working hard on something. Harder than usual.”

He means, harder than usual lately, Nita thought. “Yeah,” she said. “First-contact problem.”

“As in first contact with an alien species?”

“I think so,” Nita said. “We’ve been having some trouble communicating.”

Her dad shook his head. “I should get you to talk to my cut-flower distributor,” he said. “If you can get through to something from another planet, maybe you could even get through to him.”

Nita had heard enough stories about her dad’s troubles with this particular supplier in the past couple of years to make her uncertain. “I might need more power than I’ve got at the moment,” she said.

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” her dad said. “”What exactly did you do to your sister yesterday?“

Nita raised her eyebrows. “I got her to see sense,” she said.

Nita’s dad gave her a loving but skeptical look. “Using what kind of nuclear weapon?” he said.

“Just so I know when the government calls.”

Humor

, she thought. When was the last time I heard Daddy make a joke? Since… well. Since then.

“I moved her bedroom furniture around,” Nita said. “Did a couple of other things… nothing lifethreatening.”

She looked at her dad over the rim of her mug of tea as she took a drink. “Not that I didn’t think about it.”

Her dad sighed. “You wouldn’t have been the first one,” he said, rinsing out his coffee cup. He got his coat off the hook by the door and shrugged into it. “Keep an eye on her, though, will you?”

“Sure, Daddy.”

Her dad came over and gave her a hug that lingered for a moment. He put his chin down on the top of her head, something else he hadn’t done for a while, and said, “You’ve been the one holding everything together.

And that’s not fair to you. I feel like I haven’t been doing everything I could…“

Nita shook her head. “I’m not sure I see it that way, Daddy,” she said, and that was all she could get out.

He squeezed her, let her go. “The shop’s open late tonight,” he said. “I won’t be home till nine.

You have anything planned?”

Nita shook her head. “I need to do some research,” she said. “If I have to go out, it won’t be for long, and nowhere far.”

“Okay. Bye…”

She leaned against the counter again, leafing through her manual, while the sound of her dad’s car faded off down the road. She thought she knew how he felt: as if he was the weak link in the family. But she often felt that way herself, and she knew Dairine did, too — and they couldn’t all be right. This was something that had come up in one of her earliest talks with Mr. Millman, a simple piece of logic that had completely eluded Nita until then — probably her first sign that Millman was not just some “good idea” wished on her by the school, but was someone genuinely worth listening to. Nita knew now that all you could do was try to let the sense of inadequacy pass over you, or the other person, and dissipate. Arguing too hard about it was likely to make the other person think you were trying to hide the truth from them.

She sighed and turned another page. The size of her manual’s linguistics section had nearly tripled since she got up with the day’s research in mind, and she was left now with the realization that her own knowledge of the Speech was even more basic than she’d thought it was. I can’t believe how dumb I’ve been about this

, she thought. The quick vocabulary test she’d taken before her dad came down for his coffee had suggested that Nita was readily familiar with about 650 terms in the Speech… out of a possible 750,000. And more words were being rediscovered or coined every day by wizards of every species. There were even regional dialects and variants, alternate recensions used by species whose physiologies or brain structure, or sometimes even the structure of their home universe, meant that the most basic forms of the Speech had to be altered to make sense. I’ve been treating this like it was a dead language