Wizards At War

Nita leaned close to Filif and pushed his/her bangs aside to stare at his/her forehead. “What?” Kit said.

“He’s even got my zit!” Nita said, straightening up. She sounded rueful but impressed. “You’ve really been working hard on this, Fil.”

“I noticed you looking at it,” Filif said, “and inserted it. The image self-updates when you do that. Otherwise, it just runs true to your last memory of a given template. Here, look at this.”

And suddenly the other-Nita turned into Carmela.

Kit made an exaggerated choking noise and fell over. “Oh, no,” he said. “Not her, not here! No way.”

“What’s the matter?” Filif said, sounding confused. “Did I get something wrong?”

Nita snickered. “No,” she said, and got up to stretch. “I’d say you got it just right.” She looked at Kit in amusement. “No wonder ‘Mela spends so much time bugging you! You give her these huge reactions. If you didn’t make such a fuss, she wouldn’t have nearly so much fun.”

Kit rolled his eyes. Filif went back to being a tree again, and Ronan, too, stood up and had a stretch. “All right,” he said. “So all we need to do now is decide where to start looking for the Instrumentality.”

Kit looked up at Ronan. “You saw where Ponch brought us out. I think we should have some faith in his talent, and start our work near there. One of the cities isn’t too far from our landing site.”

“We’ll have a lot less trouble getting lost in the crowd where there are a lot more Yaldiv,” Nita said. She touched Sker’ret’s rotating globe with one finger. The view of the planet in her own manual and in the larger display expanded to show the cities’ locations. “Yup, that’s the bigger of the two cities.”

“So all we have to do now is tailor versions of Filif’s mochteroof for ourselves,” Sker’ret said.

Ronan nodded slowly. “Right you are,” he said. “And since it looks like the Yaldiv are diurnal—a lot of them go out of the city to work in the forest in the daytime, then come back when it starts to get dark—when they do, we’ll go back in with them.”

“Makes sense,” Sker’ret said. “We’ll need someplace near our target city to use as a base, though, somewhere to put up the pup tents. A cave or something similar.”

“My very thought,” Ronan said. “I’ll go see what I can find. Back in a tick.”

He vanished.

Nita stood looking down at the planet’s surface, while off to one side Sker’ret started laying down his short-transit routines, a lacy filigree of glowing lines embedded in the invisible surface they stood on. Kit wandered over to Nita. “You okay now?” he said.

“Huh? Oh, yeah. I got past it.” She folded her arms, hugging her manual to her. “It’s just … Ronan. Sometimes he sounds so normal.”

“Sometimes,” Kit said.

“But then without warning he gets edgy again.”

“So? Where he’s concerned, so do you,” Kit said.

Nita looked at him. “What?”

Kit shrugged. “You should see your face sometimes. It’s a real ‘You get on my nerves but I can’t take my eyes off you’ kind of look.”

Nita’s expression went suddenly exasperated. “There wasn’t anything like that going on with us,” she said.

“But there could have been.”

“Like what? He’s about a million years older than me!” Nita said.

“Two,” Kit said.

“Two million?”

“Two years older than you,” Kit said.

Nita looked less exasperated and more befuddled. “Your point being…?”

Kit took a breath. “You kissed him,” Kit said.

Nita briefly looked shocked. Then she rolled her eyes. “That was all I did.”

“I know that!”

“Yeah? And how, exactly?”

This, by itself, was almost enough to stop Kit cold. Wizards who worked closely together sometimes overheard things going on in each other’s heads that hadn’t been specifically “sent” by the other party. It was an occupational hazard … and a sign of their closeness. But this is as far as I’ve ever gotten along this line with her, Kit thought, miserable, and if I give up now, I may never have the guts to bring it up again! Or the time—

He opened his mouth. “Look, never mind, I can guess,” Nita muttered, and turned away. “Anyway, you know it’s true. And it just happened. It was just— He was— I don’t know. So vulnerable right then. You see how he is usually! Ronan being vulnerable—it’s kind of an attention-getter.”

She really did sound embarrassed. Back out of this slowly while you can, said some unusually nervous part of Kit’s brain.

“But I do feel a little better about him generally,” Nita said. “If I was feeling a little paranoid about him, maybe it was left over from the last time someone I trusted was being overshadowed by the Lone One. It’s not like Ronan can be overshadowed while he’s got the One’s Champion inside him.”

“As far as we know,” Kit said. “But a lot of things aren’t working the way they usually do.”