A Wizard Abroad, New Millennium Edition (27 page)

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.”

“Seems to be a lot of that going around,” Kit said.

Johnny nodded. “They built this place on the site of an old holy well—it’s still here. But there’s more than that. Matrix had been a center for a lot of kinds of faith, or power, over the year. The Mother Goddesses were honored here first—that’s where its first name came from. Matrix means ‘womb,’ but the older form was probably ‘matricis’—the Castle of the Mothers. Then for a while I think the well was sacred to Brigit, the old fire-goddess; and later to Saint Brigid, the Mary of the Gael as they called her. Other mysteries were here later. There was some connection with the Knights Templar. Some of them said this was one of the Grail Castles. But all those came later. We’ve got much older business tonight...”

“Are you about ready?” Aunt Annie said.

“Just about. Waiting on Biddy and Dairine. Ronan’s in the back with Doris, making tea.”

“Where else,” Kit muttered.

“Give it time, you’ll get used to it,” Nita said. She wandered over to the diagram that Johnny was working on, noticing the elegance and cleanliness of it. Half the figures in the Speech that she was used to tracing out laboriously and in whole, here were only hinted at; a single graceful stroke “holding the place” for a figure or diagram much more complex.
I guess when you’re Senior for half a continent, though, you get enough practice to be able to do that...

It was a big five-noded diagram, with a separate circle for each of the Treasures—each written around with the reinforcing and warding spells that each specific Treasure would need—and a fourth empty circle for the starsteel that would become the Spear. That fourth circle was particularly densely written-in, and Nita could understand why. The spell there was for the magnetic bottle that would be needed to confine the starsteel and cool it down until it was safe to work; for in its native condition inside the star it would not be solid metal, or even molten, but iron
plasma
at something more than 7000 degrees Kelvin. If there was any specific part of the spell diagram Nita would have been interested in double-checking, that was it. But again the shorthand that Johnny was using was beyond her.

Nita stopped then, suddenly, and stared down at the floor as Johnny finished one character of the spell diagram and touched it with the rowan rod. The acrylic flared briefly bright, then died down again, and Johnny glanced up at her. “Something wrong?”

“There’s something
down
there.”

She was aware of Kit looking at her uncomprehendingly from off to one side, where he had been examining a set of old pikes mounted against the wall. “Yes, there is,” Johnny said. “I didn’t expect you to feel it, but then a lot of wizards older and more experienced than you don’t. There’s a power in the earth here; not the earth itself, though. The water table runs fairly high hereabouts, and this castle’s element is water. No surprise, since the place is more or less haunted by the ‘female principle.’ You saw the little stream that runs down by the forge, out by where you parked? We’ll be doing work down there later.”

Nita stood there just feeling it—a long, slow swelling of power, biding its time, caring nothing for the flash and dazzle and busyness of life, but only for slow nourishment, things growing, things prospering, birth, being. She glanced up at Johnny and said, “This is the only place where we could do what we have to, isn’t it.”

“To keep fire from getting out of hand,” he said, “you always need water,. One way or another, we’ve got plenty of it here.”

Doris came in, followed by Ronan with the tea-tray. He put it down on one of the tables and joined Nita and Kit as they looked at the diagram. Johnny finished one last figure, then stood up. “Tidy enough?” he said. “Did I miss anything?”

Nita shook her head in complete helpless ignorance. Kit said, “Don’t look at me,” and moved off to pour himself a cup of tea. Doris came to stand by Johnny and look the diagram over.

“All names seem to be in place,” she said. Her gaze dwelt particularly on one spot, which Nita had noticed earlier and not known what to make of. While the rest, of the spell was written in shorthand, the names of the participants were all written out in full, as was vitally necessary. Your name in the Speech was meant to describe you completely; to work with too shortened a version of your name was to dangerously shortchange yourself of your own potential power. The name written in the spot Nita was examining, though, was not the complex, fussy thing that most human names were. It was simple, just six curves and a stroke. Names that short tended to be like short words in the dictionary—the shorter they were, the more meanings they tended to have—and mortals did not have names like
that
one, all power and age. But then again, one of them spelling tonight was not mortal.
Still—there’s something odd about it. The usual ‘continuation’ curve is cut off awful short—

“Hi, y’all,” said Dairine as she swung in through the brocade curtain. “What’s shakin’? All set? Oh,” she said, stopping at the edge of the diagram and taking a long look at it.

“Does it meet with your approval?” Johnny said.

“Looks fine to me. Yo, Spot!” she called, looking over her shoulder. Her laptop/manual came scuttling in and sat itself down under a table.

“You picked out a star yet?” Nita said to Dairine, as her sister paused beside her.

Dairine shook her head. “Can’t predict the positions that accurately from this end,” she said. “We’re just going to have to wait until the timeslide’s fastened, and then have a look around and pick one that looks good.”

“Just make sure you pick a star that’s not scheduled to have inhabited planets later,” Kit said from the other side of the spell diagram.

Dairine looked at him with mild amusement. “Kit, from that end of time, it’s already happened. There never was a star to have planets.”

“You hope,” Kit said. “If it didn’t work, back then, then the star’s either still just fine, or it’s long since gone nova from its core being tampered with...and we’re all going to be so much plasma in about fifteen minutes.”

Dairine grinned at him. “Adds spice to life, doesn’t it? Don’t worry, Kit. I’m here.”

Kit looked at Nita with an expression that was eloquent of what he thought
that
was worth. Nita shrugged at him.
She is pretty hot stuff still,
she said privately.