Wizards At War

He might be right, Nita thought, uneasy. But what’s going on inside his head? “But we can at least find out what some of them are doing.”

“Sure.”

Ronan headed down the slope. Nita looked over her shoulder at the others, who were now clustering their own force fields up against hers and the one that contained Kit and Ponch. “Come on down,” she said to them. “Houseguests, watch the gravity, it’s about a sixth of what it is back home—” She turned and started to astronaut-bounce down the slope, kicking up silvery moondust behind her. The others followed after.

Kit caught up with Nita quickly, which was no surprise: he was expert in light gravity. As he bumped his bubble back up against hers, Nita got a look at the expression on his face. It was strange. “What’s up with you?”

“Oh, you know. Carmela…” Kit was looking downslope at the bottom of the crater with an expression that suggested his ears were still ringing; their departure from his house had not been a calm one. Carmela had taken it very badly that she was being left behind.

“Yeah,” Nita said. “Kit, relax. She’ll get over it.”

“Well, I still feel like pond scum. I didn’t have all day to stand around being oh so tactful.” He sighed. “Now I wish I had.”

Nita let out a breath. “Look, before we go away, see if you can find time to sit her down and explain it all in detail.”

“You’ve never had to explain something to Carmela,” Kit said. “The universe’s life span might not contain enough time…”

The others caught up with them. They continued down the slope into the flatter area of the crater floor. The biggest of the bubbles was not far ahead of them, and inside it a huge long figure floated, slightly curved, graceful; the long double-lobed tail of a humpback whale swung upward in greeting as she spotted them, and the tiny eye came alive with a smile to match the artificial one of the great long mouth. Nita bumped her own bubble up against the bigger force field, felt the wizardry that ran it analyze her own and adjust itself to include her personal parameters for oxygen requirements and respiration rates. A moment later she was inside. Nita trotted over, bouncing a little, to throw her arms as far as they’d go—not very far—around S’reee. “Dai, big sister!”

“And dai stihó to you, hNiii’t!” S’reee said, folding a long forefin partially around her in a friendly gesture, one that made her bob up and down a little where she hovered. “Didn’t think you’d have too much trouble finding me.”

“With the kind of air supply you need for a run like this,” Nita said, “it wasn’t going to be that hard.”

The humpback glanced toward the others following in Nita’s wake. “Busy up here today. And everyone’s well loaded with spells, I can feel.”

Nita lifted her right wrist and shook it. Her charm bracelet, every charm standing for a spell nine-tenths ready to be used and needing only a few words’ worth of activation, jingled gently. “Seemed smart to be ready for anything on this run,” she said. “But you are, too.” She glanced up above them at the surface of S’reee’s force field; to a wizard’s eye, it swirled with faint characters in the Speech, the way a bubble’s surface swirls with colors. “That’s some spell,” Nita said. “It almost seemed to do that inclusion by itself.”

“I’m not sure it didn’t,” S’reee said. “I’ve been doing things I used to think were impossible these past few days, since it all started to change.”

“S’reee!” Kit said, as he came up beside Nita, free of his own force field, and Ponch danced briefly on his hind legs near S’reee’s nose, getting her scent. Kit thumped S’reee’s broad side in a friendly way. “I didn’t know you did space!”

The whale chuckled, a long, slow, bubbly noise that finished in an upscaling whistle like a boiling kettle. “Why not? It’s just another Sea.” S’reee angled her head very slightly to one side, as Ponch lost interest and ran off underneath her. “And here come your excursus guests! Dai stihó, cousins. Welcome to the Moon,” she said to Filif and Sker’ret and Roshaun as they came in behind Dairine. Then she glanced past them again, and bent her head as if looking down at the moondust … and kept on bending until her nose almost touched it.

Belatedly Nita realized that what she was seeing was a bow. She looked over her shoulder and saw Ronan coming toward them, bouncing a little. “You know each other?” Nita said.

Ronan stopped his bounce just short of S’reee, waited until he got settled a little, and then put up a hand to rest it on her hide. He smiled, then, an unusually open look for him.

“Both of them,” S’reee said. “Rhoannann ‘took in the Sea,’ once. It was a notable Ordeal: those of us who live there couldn’t really have missed it. And as for the Other—I’m wizard enough these days to know the Finned Defender when I see him, whatever or whoever he’s wearing at the time. Elder brother, well met in the current that bears us!”

Ronan nodded back. “Dai,” he said. “And he greets you too.”