Wizards At War

She got up and put her plate in the kitchen sink; and with Kit in tow, and Ponch following him, she went out through the side door, down the brick steps to the driveway. The morning was a little hazy, but the sun was warm on their faces. The view up and down the driveway would have seemed clear enough to any non-wizardly person who happened to pass by, but Nita’s vision, well trained in perceiving active spelling by now, could see a tremor of power all around the edges of their property, a selective-visibility field that would hide the presence or actions of anything nonhuman. Inside the screening field, the leaves on the big lilac bushes across the driveway were out at last, and the flower-spikes were growing fast. Nita was glad to see them, though they also made her sad. The winter and the earliest part of the spring seemed to have lasted forever, some ways: any sign of things being made new was welcome. But her mom had loved those lilacs, and wouldn’t be seeing them again. Nita sighed.

“Yeah, I’m tired, too,” Kit said, glancing up and down the driveway as Ponch wandered off down it. “You wouldn’t think a vacation’d leave you so wiped out.”

“And there won’t be much time to get rested up now,” Nita said. She looked down their street, where the branches of the maples beside the sidewalk, bare for so long, were now well clothed in that particular new spring yellow-green. The leaves that had been small when they first went off on their spring break were now almost full-sized. “At least there’s stuff to do…”

“And five whole days left before we have to go back to school.” Kit looked at her meaningfully.

Nita rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I know, the Mars thing. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. When did you get the idea it would be cute to carve my dad’s cellphone number on a rock in the middle of Syrtis Major? He hates it when people call me on his phone.”

Kit gave Nita a resigned look. “Sorry. I couldn’t resist.”

“Well, resist next time!” Nita said. “Anyway, we can’t just run off and start digging up half of Syrtis on our own. We have to talk to the rest of the intervention team and see if they’ve got any kind of idea where to start.”

“Yeah, but they said individual research was still okay,” Kit said as they walked up the driveway toward the gate leading to the backyard.

“You don’t fool me,” Nita said. “You just want to run all over Mars like some kind of areo-geek, and you want me to split the labor on the transport spell with you!”

“Oh, wait a minute now, it’s not that simple!”

Nita grinned, for he hadn’t denied it outright. Kit had developed a serious case of Mars fever—serious enough that he’d added a map of the planet’s two hemispheres to his bedroom wall and started sticking pins in it, the way he’d been doing with his map of the Moon for months. “It is cool, isn’t it,” Nita said, “standing there at sunset and seeing Earth? Just hanging there in the sky like a little blue star.”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “It’s not the same as when you do it from closer.”

“So let’s message Mamvish and see if she feels like getting the team together in the next few days. It’ll give you an excuse to go do some ‘new research.’ And we can take the guests along: they like to do tourist things, from what Dairine says.”

The screen door slammed again. Nita looked back to see Dairine wandering down toward them.

“Filif says he knows about Tom and Carl coming,” she said. “He’ll be up in a minute.”

“Okay,” Nita said. “Hey, you did a good job on the shield-spell around the yard. The energy for that has to have been costing you a fair amount. You need some help with it? Kit and I can take some of the strain.”

Dairine looked briefly pained. “No, it’s okay,” she said. “If it starts to be a problem before the guests have to go, you can make a donation. Spot’s holding the spell diagram for me at the moment.”

Nita blinked. “Hey, yeah, where is he this morning? I haven’t seen him.”

“He’s up in my bedroom,” Dairine said, “under the bed, saying, ‘Uh-oh.’”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Kit said. Dairine’s laptop computer was more than half wizard’s manual, if not more than half wizard, and the uh-oh-ing had proven at least once to be an indicator of some unspecified difficulty coming.

Nita shrugged. “Neither do I. But maybe Tom and Carl will know what the trouble is—”

The sound of a car turning into Nita’s driveway brought all their heads around. It was Tom’s big Nissan. “Since when do they drive over here?” Kit said as Filif came drifting toward them from the backyard gate. “They only live three blocks away.”

“Yeah,” Nita said over her shoulder. “Come on—”