Wizards At War

Her eyebrows went up. “What about me?”

“Are you going to meet my father dressed like that?”

“Like what?” Dairine looked down at her cropped jeans and T-shirts and the long black tunic-y T-shirt that said “THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE 127.0.0.1”. “I look fine.”

“Surely something more formal…”

Dairine made a face. Of various things she hated, dressing up (except at Halloween) was close to the top of the list. “Why not just tell him this is formal wear on my planet?”

“I could tell him that,” Roshaun said, “but it would not be true.” He frowned.

Dairine sighed. “Oh, all right.” she said. “Spot?”

He came ambling over and she picked him up, flipped his screen open, called up the manual functions and started paging through the menus for what she wanted.

“It cannot be a seeming,” Roshaun said. “He will see through that.”

Dairine frowned. “You’re such a stick-in-the-mud sometimes.”

“And you are so intransigent and disrespectful,” Roshaun said, “nearly all of the time.”

“What? Just because I don’t let you walk all over me, Mister Royalty?”

Roshaun let out a long breath. “He is waiting,” he said. “This is going to be difficult enough as it is. Please do something about the way you look. Something genuine.”

Dairine grimaced. Still… She couldn’t think when he’d last said “please” to her; for a while she’d thought his vocabulary didn’t even contain the word. “Oh, all right,” she said, closed Spot’s lid again and put him down. “Spot, what’re the coordinates of my closet?”

“Here are the entath numbers,” he said, and rattled off a series of numbers and variables in the Speech. “Do you want me to set it up?”

“Sure, knock yourself out.”

A straightforward square dark doorway appeared in front of her. The darkness cleared to reveal the inside of the closet in Dairine’s bedroom. As usual, its floor was a tumble of mixed-up shoes and things fallen off hangers; her mother had always said that when the Holy Grail and world peace were finally found, they would be at the bottom of Dairine’s closet, under the old sneakers.

Dairine sighed and started pushing hangers aside. Last year’s Easter dress and the dress from the year before looked unutterably lame. Lots of jeans, lots of school clothes … but none of them suitable for meeting a former king. “This doesn’t look promising,” Dairine said under her breath.

“Hurry,” said Roshaun.

The tension in his voice cut short all the acid retorts Dairine could have deployed. “Oh, the heck with this,” she said, irritable. She turned her back on the closet. “Spot, close that. Do we have a routine for making clothes?”

“Searching,” Spot said, as the darkness went away. “Found.”

In her mind, Dairine looked down the link between them and saw the wizardry he’d located. It was a matter-restructuring protocol which would use what she was wearing and turn it into something else. She glanced at Roshaun. “How unisex is what you’ve got on?” she said.

He looked surprised. “‘Unisex’?”

“Do girls wear that kind of thing where you live?”

“Well, yes, but—” Surprise became confusion. “What is the problem with your own clothes? What do your people usually wear when meeting your leaders?”

“If we’ve got any guts at all, a real annoyed expression,” Dairine said. “Never mind, I can come up with something. Spot, hit it.”

“Working.”

A second too late it occurred to Dairine that this process might show Roshaun more about her than was anybody’s business but her own. A sudden chill ran over her body as every stitch of clothing on her pulled an inch or so away and resolved into its component atoms, then started to reassemble in new shapes. Her first urge was to duck behind the nearest sofa, but it was too late; any movement could possibly result in a dress that came out her ears. She closed her eyes, gritted her teeth, and held still.

The chill faded. Cautiously Dairine opened one eye. Roshaun’s expression was confused but not scandalized. Not that that means anything in particular. Does his culture even have a nudity taboo? Never mind, mine does! She looked down at herself.

“Whoa,” Dairine said.

She was wearing a simple, scoop-necked, short-sleeved, floor-length dress, in a velvety substance as green as grass and as light as fog. Around her left wrist, where her watch usually went, was a bracelet of emeralds the size of quail’s eggs, held together with nothing but a series of characters in the Speech—a delicate chain of symbols in softly burning green smoke, scrolling through the gems as she watched. Another chain just like it held a single similar stone at her throat.

“Nice,” Dairine said. Then she realized there was something on her head. She put her hands up to feel it.