Chedrta na Chill Pheadair I

Kilpedder Forge

201

Casledn na mBroinn / Caher Matrices I

Castle Matrix

231

Lughnasdd 255

ag na Machairi Teithra I

The Plains of Tethra

276

Tir na nOg 307

A Small Glossary 333

Admonition to the Reader

Geography in Ireland is an equivocal thing, and is perhaps meant to be so. The more solid the borderUne, the more dangerous the land's own response to it; the more vague the boundary, the kindlier. This is best seen in the behavior of the borders between what we consider our own reality and the other less familiar realities that shoulder up against it. Such boundaries are never very solid in Ireland, and never more dangerous than when one tries to define them, to cross over. TwiHght is always safer there than full day, or full dark.

This being the case, I have taken considerable liberties with locations and "established" boundaries, including those between counties and towns. County Wicklow is real enough, but there are a lot of things in the Wicklow in this book that are not presently located in the "real" county—and my version of Bray is not meant to represent the real one... at the moment. The description of the townlands around Ballyvolan Farm and the neighborhood of Kilquade is more or less real, though the two are actually some miles apart. And Sugarloaf Mountain looks like parts of its description... occasionally.

Most specifically, though. Castle Matrix exists —possibly more concretely than anything else in the book. But it has been moved from its present, "actual" location. Or perhaps one can more rightly say that Matrix has stayed where it is, where it always is, but Ireland has shifted around it. Stranger things have happened. In any case, let the inquisitive reader beware... and leave the maps at home.

I am the Point of a Weapon (that poureth forth

combat), I am the God who fashioneth Fire for a head. Who is the troop, who is the God who

fashioneth edges?

— Lebor Gabdla trenn^ tr. Macalister

Three signs of the Return:

the stranger in the door;

the friendless wizard;

the unmitigated Sun. Three signs of the Monomachy:

a smith without a forge;

a saint without a cell;

a day without a night.

— Book of Night with Moon, triads 113, 598

an tSionainn

Shannon

NiTA FIRST FOUND OUT about what was going to happen when she came in after a long afternoon's wizardry with Kit. They had been working for three days in an attempt to resolve a territorial dispute among several trees. It isn't easy to argue with a tree. It isn't easy to get one to stop stran-ghng another one with its roots. But they were well along toward what appeared to be a negotiated settlement, and Nita was bushed.

She came into the kitchen to find her mother cooking. Her mother cooked a great deal as a hobby, but she also cooked as therapy, and Nita began to worry immediately when she noticed that her mother had embarked on some extremely complicated project that seemed to require three souffle dishes and the use of every appliance in the kitchen at once. She decided to get out as fast as she could, before she was asked to wash

an tSionainn

something. "Hi, Mom/' she said, and edged hurriedly toward the door into the rest of the house.

"What's the rush?" asked her mother. "Don't you want to see what I'm doing?"

"Sure," said Nita, who wanted to do no such thing. "What are you doing?"

"I've been thinking," said her mother.

Nita began to worry more than ever. Her mother was at her most dangerous when she was thinking, and it rarely meant anything but trouble for Nita. "About what?"

"Sit down, honey. Don't look as if you're going to go flying out the door any minute. I need to talk to you."

Uh'oh.. . here it comes! Nita sat down and began playing with one of the wooden spoons that, among many other utensils, were Uttering the kitchen table.

"Honey," her mother said, "this wizardry—"

"It's going pretty well with the trees. Mom," Nita said, desperate to guide her mother onto some more positive subject. Her present tone didn't sound positive at all.

"No, I don't mean that, honey. Talking to trees—that's all right, that doesn't bother me. The kind of things you've been doing lately... you and Kit..."

Oh no, "Mom, we haven't got in trouble, not really. And we've been doing pretty well, for new wizards. When you're as young as we are—"

"Exactly/' her mother said. "When you're as young as you are." She did something noisy with the blender for a moment and then said, "Hon, don't you think it would be a good idea if you just let all this—have a rest? Just for a month or so?"

Nita looked at her mother without understanding at all, still worrying. "How do you mean?"

"Well, your dad and I have been talking—and you and Kit have been seeing a whole lot of each other in connection with this wizard business. We're thinking that it might be a good idea if you two sort of...didn't see each other for a little while."

"Mom!"

"No, hear me out. I understand you're good friends, I know there's nothing... physical going on between you, so put that out of your mind. We're very glad each of you has such a good friend. That's not a concern. What is a concern is that you two are spending a lot of time on this magic stuff, at the expense of everything else. That's all you do. You go out in the morning, you come back wiped out, you barely have energy to speak to us sometimes... What about your childhood?"

"What about it?" Nita asked, with some slight annoyance. Her experience of most of her childhood so far had been that it varied between painful and boring. Wizardry might be painful occasionally,

an tSionainn

but It was never boring. "Mom—you don't understand. This isn't something you can just turn off. You take the Wizards' Oath for life"

"I know/' Nita's mother said again. "That's what worries me. You're a Httle young to be making up your mind about what you want to do with the rest of your Ufe."

Nita burst out laughing at that. "Are you kidding? You're the one who's been sitting through all the sessions with the guidance counselor at school! I'm not even fifteen, and already everybody's running off at the mouth about college every five minutes!"

"Now, Nita, that's not the same. That's just going to college. It's not—"

"It is the same! They want me to make career decisions, now, about what I'm going to do for twenty years, maybe thirty years, after I get out of college! And I'm not even sure what I want to do yet—except be a wizard! But the one thing I do want, and know that I want to do, you don't want me making decisions about! I don't get it!"

"Oh, honey!" her mother said in some distress, and dropped a spoon, picked it up, and wiped it off. "Why do you have to make this harder than it— Never mind. Look. Dad thinks it would be a good idea if you went to visit your aunt Annie in Ireland for a month or so, until school starts again."

''Irelandfr

"Well, yes. She's been inviting us over there for

a while now. We can't go with you, of course— we've had our vacation for this year, and Dad has to be at work. He can't take any more vacation time. But you could certainly go. School doesn't start until September ninth. That would give you a good month and a half."

There was going to be nothing good about it, as far as Nita was concerned. The best part of the summer, the best weather, the leisure time she had been looking forward to putting to use working with Kit.... "Mom," Nita said, changing tack, "how are you going to afford this?"

"Honey, you leave that to your dad and me to handle. Right now we're more concerned with doing the right thing for you. And for Kit."

"Oh, you've been talking to his folks, haven't you?"

"No, hon, actually we haven't. I think they're going to have to sort things out with Kit in their own way. I wouldn't presume to dictate to them. But we want you to go to Ireland for six weeks or so and take a breather. And see something different, something in the real world."

Oh deaVy Nita thought. They think this is the real world. Or all of it that really matters, anyway. "Mom," she said, "I don't know if you understand what you're doing here. Wizards don't stop doing wizardry just because they're not at home. If I go on call in Ireland, I go on call, and there's nothing that can stop it. I've made my promises. If I have to go on call, wouldn't you rather have

an tSionainn

me here, where you and Dad can keep an eye on me and know exactly what's going on all the time?"

Nita's mother frowned at that, and then looked at Nita with an expression compounded of equal parts suspicion and amusement. "Sneaky/' she said. "No, I'm sorry. Your aunt Annie will keep good, close tabs on you—we've had a couple of talks with her about that—"

Nita's eyebrows went up at that—first in annoyance that it was going to be difficult to get away and do an}^hing useful if there was need; then in alarm. **Oh, Mom, you didn't tell her that m—

"No, we didn't tell her that you're a wizard! What are we supposed to do, honey? Say to your aunt, 'Listen, Anne, you have to understand that our daughter might vanish suddenly. No, I don't mean run away, just disappear into thin air. And if she goes to the moon, tell her to dress warm.' " Nita's mother gave her a wry look and reached for the wooden spoon that Nita had been playing with. "No. We trust you to be discreet. You managed to hide it from us long enough, heaven knows... You shouldn't have any trouble keeping things undercover with your aunt." She paused to start folding some beaten egg white into another mixture she had been working on. "No, honey," she said. "Your dad is going to see about the plane tickets tomorrow. I think it's Saturday that you'll be leaving—the fare is cheaper then."

"I could just, you know, go there," Nita said desperately. "It would save you the money, at least."

"I think we'll do this the old-fashioned way," Nita's mother said calmly. "Even you would have some logistical problems arriving at the airport and getting off the plane without anyone noticing that you hadn't been there before."

Nita frowned and began to work on that one.

'Wo," Nita's mother said. "Forget it. We'll send enough pocket money for you to get along with; you'll have plenty of kids to play with—"

Play H'ithy Nita thought, and groaned inwardly.

"Come on, Neets, cheer up a little! It should be interesting, going to a foreign country for the first time."

I've been to foreign galaxies, Nita thought. But this I'm not so sure about But she also had a sense that further argument wasn't going to help her. No matter: There were ways around this problem, if she would just keep her mouth shut.

"OK," she said. "I'll go... But I won't like it."

Her mother gazed at her thoughtfully. "I thought you were the one who told me that wizardry was about doing what you had to, whether you liked it or not."

"It's true," Nita said, and got up to go out.

"And Nita," her mother said.

"What, Mom?"

"I want your promise that you will not be popping back here on the sly to visit Kit: that Uttle

an tSionainn

'beam-me-up-Scotty* spell that he's so fond of, and that I see you two using when you want to save your train fare for ice cream."

Nita went white, then flushed hot. That was the one thing she had been counting on to make this whole thing tolerable. ''Mom! But Mom, it's easy, I can just—"

"You cannot *just.' We want you to take a break from each other for a while. Now I want you to promise me."

Nita let out a long breath. Her mother had her and knew she did, for a wizard's promise had to be kept. When you spend your Ufe working with words that describe and explain—and even change—the way the universe is, you can't play around with those words, and you can't lie... at least not without major and unpleasant consequences. "I promise," Nita said, hating it. "But this is going to be miserable."

"We'll see about that," Nita's mother said. "You go ahead now and do what you have to do."

"Holy crap," Kit said. "This is dire^ They were sitting on the moon, on a peak of the Carpathian Mountains, about thirty kilometers south of the crater Copernicus. The view of earth from there this time of month was good; she was waxing toward the full, while on the moon there was nothing but a sun very low on the horizon. Long, long shadows stretched across the breadth of the Carpathians, so that the illuminated crests

of the jagged peaks stood up from great pools of darkness, like rough-hewn pyramids floating on nothing. It was cold there; the wizardly force field that surrounded them snowed flakes of frozen oxygen gently onto the powdery white rock around them whenever they moved and changed the field's inner volume. But cold as it was, it was private.

"We were just getting somewhere with the trees," Nita muttered. "I can't beUeve this."

"Do they really think it's going to make a difference?"

"Oh, I don't know. Who knows what they think, half the time? And the worst of it is, they won't let me come back." Nita picked up a small piece of pumice and chucked it away, watching as it sailed about a hundred yards in the light gravity and bounced several feet high when it first hit ground again. It continued bouncing down the mountain, and she watched it idly. "We had three other projects waiting to be started. They're all shot now: There won't be any time to do anything about them before I have to go."

Kit stretched and looked unhappy. "We can still talk mind to mind; you can coach me at a distance when I need help. Or I can help you—"

"It's not the same." She had often enough tried explaining to her parents the high you got from working closely with another wizard: The feeling that magic made in your mind while you worked with another, the texture, was utterly unlike that

an tSionainn

of a wizardry worked alone—more dangerous, more difficult, ultimately more satisfying.

Nita sighed. "There must be some way we can work around this. How are your folks handling things lately?"

At that, Kit sighed too. "Variable. My dad doesn't mind it so much. He says, *Big deal, my son's a brujo.' My mother... she has this idea that we are somehow meddling with dark forces." Kit made a fake theremin noise, the kind heard in bad old horror movies when the monster is lurking around a corner, about to jump on someone. Nita laughed.

Kit shook his head. "When are they making you leave?"

"Saturday." Nita rested her chin on one hand, picked up another rock, and chucked it away. "All of a sudden there's all this junk I have to pack, and all these things we have to do. Go to the bank and get foreign money. Buy new clothes. Wash the old ones." She rolled her eyes and fell silent. Nita hated that kind of rushed busyness, and she was up to her neck in it now.

"How's Dairine holding up?"

Nita laughed. "She likes me, but she's hardly heartbroken. Besides, she's busy managing her wizardry these days... spends most of her time working with her computer. You wouldn't believe some of the conversations I've heard over its voice-link recently." She fell into an imitation of Dairine's high-pitched voice, made even more

;;

squeaky by annoyance. " *No, I will not move your planet... What do you want to move it for} It's fine right where it is!' "

"Sheesh," Kit said. Dairine, as a very new wizard, was presently at the height of her power; as a very young wizard, she was also more powerful at the moment than both Nita and Kit put together. The only thing they had on her was experience.

"Yeah. We don't fight nearly as much as we used to... She's gotten real quiet. I'm not sure it's normal."

"Oh," Kit said, and laughed out loud. *Tou mean, like we're normal. We're beginning to sound like our folks."

Nita had to laugh at that, too. *Tfou may have something there."

But then the amusement went out of her. "My god. Kit," she said, "I'm gonna miss you. I miss you already, and I haven't leftV^

"Hey, come on," he said, and punched her in the shoulder. "You'll get over it. You'll meet some guy over there and—"

"Don't joke," Nita said irritably. "I don't care about meeting *some guy over there.' They're all geeks, for all I know. I don't even know if they speak the same language."

"Your aunt does."

"My aunt is American," Nita said.

"Yeah, they speak English over there," Kit said. "It's not all just Irish." He looked at Nita with a concerned expression. "Come on, Neets. If life

an tSionainn

hands you lemons, make lemonade. You can see a new place; you can probably meet some of their wizards. They'll be in the directory... Give it a chance." He picked up a rock, turning it over and over in his hands. "Where are you going to be? Dublin? Or somewhere else?"

"That's all there is," Nita said grimly. "Dublin, and the country. All potato fields and cow pastures."

"Saw that in the manual, did you?"

Nita rolled her eyes. Kit could be incredibly pedantic sometimes. "No."

"I was looking at the Irish chapter in the *His-tory of Wizardry' section of the manual a while back," Kit said. "A lot of interesting junk going on over there."

"Kit, I don't care what kind of junk is going on over there! I go on over here. This is where I do my work. Where you are. I'm one half of a team. What use am I without the rest?"

"Oh, I don't know. You might be good for something. Scrubbing the floors... washing the dishes..."

"You are a dead man," she said to Kit. "You know that?... Look, what are we going to do about the trees? We've got to get this cleared up before we go. I refuse to waste all this work."

"Well, I guess we could get them to agree to another session tomorrow. The part of the negotiation about the roots was going pretty welL I

guess if we can get Aras to loosen up a little about the seedling acorns, Uriv might concede a couple of points regarding the percentage of sunlight."

"We could always threaten to uproot them and plant them about three miles apart," Nita said.

Kit sighed and looked at her. "I'm going to miss you, too," he said. "I miss you already."

She looked at him and saw it was true, and the bad mood fell off her, or mostly off, replaced by a feeHng of unhappy resignation. "It's only six weeks," she said then.

Kit's face matched her feeling. "We'll do it standing on our heads," he said.

Nita smiled at him unhappily. Since wizards did not lie outright, when one tried to stretch the truth, it showed woefully. "Come on," she said, "we're running out of air. Let's get on with it."

Saturday came.

Kit went with them to the airport. It was a grim, silent ride, broken only by the kind of strained conversation people make when they desperately need to say something, anything, to keep the silence from getting too thick. At least it seemed silent. She and Kit would pass the occasional comment mind to mind. It wasn't all that easy, so they didn't do it much. They'd gotten in the habit of just talking to each other, since telepathy often got itself tangled up with a lot of other information you didn't need, or want, the other

an tSionainn

person to have. But now, habits or not, they were going to have to get a lot better at mindtouch if they were going to talk at all frequently.

They reached the airport, met the unescorted-minor representative from the airline, did the formalities with the ticket, and checked in Nita's bag—a medium-sized one, not too difficult for her to handle herself, though she was privately determined to make it weightless if she had to carry it anywhere alone. And then the loudspeakers announced her flight, and there was nothing to do but go through security and get on.

She hugged her mom and her dad. "Have a good time now,'' her father said.

She sighed and said, "Fll try. Daddy. Mommy—" And she was surprised at herself; she didn't usually call her mother Mommy. They hugged again, hard.

"You be good, now," Nita's mom said. "Don't..." She trailed off. The don't was a huge one, and Nita could hear in it all the things parents always say: Don't get in troublcy don't forget to wash —but most specifically. Don't get into anything dangeroHSy like the last time. Or the time before that. Or the time before that —

"I'll try. Mom," Nita said. It was all she could guarantee.

Then she looked at Kit. ''Dai," he said.

''Dai stihoy" she repHed. It was the greeting and farewell of one wizard to another in the wizardly Speech: It meant as much "Bye for forever" as

"Bye for now." For Nita, it felt more like the first.

At that point she simply couldn't stand it anymore. She waved, a weak little gesture, then turned her back on them all, slung her backpack over her shoulder, and with the airline representative, she walked off to go through security and then down the long, cold hall of the jetway toward the plane.

The plane was a Boeing 747. Nita's sensitivity was running high—perhaps because of her nervousness and distress at leaving—and the plane felt alive to her in the way that mechanical things usually did as a result of working with Kit. That was his specialty—the ability to feel what a rock was saying, to read the secret thoughts of an elevator or a refrigerator, and to sense the odd thing-thoughts that run in the currents of energy within physical objects, man-made or not. She could hear the plane straining against the chocks behind its many wheels, and its engines thinking of eating bitterly cold air at thirty thousand feet and pushing it out behind. There was a sense of purpose about the plane, a sense of restraint and of eagerness to get out of there, to be gone.

It was a reassuring feeling. Nita absently returned the smile of the flight attendant at the plane's door and patted the plane as she got in. She let the airline rep help her find her seat, so he could feel that he was doing something useful. Nita sat down by the window, fastened her seat belt, and as the rep went away, got out her manual.

For a moment she just held it in her hand. Just

an tSionainn

a small, beat-up book in a buckram library binding, printed with the apparent title. So You Want to Be a Wizard, and the supposed author's name, Hearnssen, and with the Dewey decimal number, 793.4, written on the spine in white ink. Nita shook her head and smiled at the book, a little conspiratorially, for it was a lot more than that. Had it already been two years, no, two and a half now, since she had found it in the local library? Or had it found her? She still wasn't sure, remembering the way something had seemed to grab her hand as she ran it along the shelf where the book had been sitting. Whether the book was alive was a subject on which the manual itself threw no light. Certainly it changed, adding new spells and other information as needed, updating news of what other wizards in the world were doing. Using the manual, Nita had found Kit in the middle of a wizardry of his own, and helped him with it, and in so doing started their partnership. They had gotten into deep trouble together, several times. But, together, they had always gotten out again. Nita sighed and started paging through the manual, very much missing the "together" part of the arrangement. She had resisted looking for the information on Ireland that Kit had mentioned until this point, hoping against hope that there would be a stay of execution. Even now she cherished the idea that her mother or father might come pushing down the narrow aisle between the seats, saying, "No, no, we've changed our minds!" But she

knew it was futile. When her mother got an idea into her head, she was almost as stubborn as Nita was.

So she sat there, and looked down at the manual. It had fallen open to the Wizards' Oath:

In Life's name, and for Life's sake, I assert that I will employ the Art, which is Its gift, in Life's service alone, rejecting all other usages. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; I will not change any creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened or threaten another. To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will ever put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so—looking always toward the Heart of Time, where all our sundered times are one, and all our myriad worlds lie whole, in the One from Whom they proceeded

The whole plane wobbled as the little tractor in front of it pushed it away from the gate. Nita peered out the window. Pressing her nose against the cool plastic and looking out, she could just barely make out her mother and father gazing through the window at her; her mother waving a little tentatively, her father gripping the railing in front of the window, not moving. And a little behind them, out of their range of vision, looking out the window too, Kit.

Stay warniy he said in her head.

Kit, it's not like Vm going away. We'll be

an tSionainn

hearing from each other all the time in our heads. It's not like Vm really going away ...Is it?

She was quiet for a moment. The tractor began turning the plane, so that her view of him was lost.

YeSy it iSy he said.

Yeahy well. She caught herself sighing again. Looky you're going to have the trees to deal with againy and you need time to plan what you're going to do. And I need time to calm myself down. Going to call me later?

Yeah. What time?

This thing won't be down until early tomorrow morningy their timCy she said.

Doesn't want to come down at all, from the feel of ity Kit said drily.

Nita chuckled, caught an odd look from a passing flight attendant, and made herself busy, looking as if she had read something funny in her manual. Yeah. Call me about this time tomorrow.

You got it. Have a good flight!

For what it's worthy Nita said.

The plane began to trundle purposefully out toward the runway. It didn't have to wait long; air traffic control gave them clearance right away. Nita, eavesdropping along the plane's nerves, heard the pilot acknowledging it. Half a minute later the plane screamed in delight and leaped into the air. Nita had to smile a little in spite of everything, wondering how much the pilots thought they had to do with the process of flight. The plane had its own ideas.

New York slid away behind them, replaced by the open sea.

Seven hours later, they landed in Shannon.

Nita had thought she would be completely unable to sleep, but when they turned out the lights in the plane after the meal service, she leaned her head against the window to see if she could relax enough to watch the movie a Uttle.

The next thing she knew, the sun was coming in the window, and there was land below them. Nita looked down into the early sun—six o'clock that morning, it was—and saw the ragged black coastline of Ireland and the curling water of the Atlantic, white where it smashed into the rocks, throwing itself in fury against this first eastern barrier to its will. And then Nita saw green, everywhere green, a hundred shades of green—emerald, viridian, the pale green that has no right to be anywhere outside of spring—with hedgerows winding among white dots of sheep, tiny cars crawling along httle toy roads—but always the green. The plane turned and she saw the beginning sprawl of houses and Shannon—a Httle city, barely the size of her own.

The plane was turning to line up with the airport's active runway, and the sun caught Nita full in the eyes. She shivered, a feeling that had nothing to do with the warmth of the sudden Hght. That was warm enough, but the feeling was cold: Something was about to happen, something about the

an tSianamn

hnces of li^it, the fire.... Nita shook her head: Tbe fediiig was gpne. Pm jet-lagged^ she thought. Fm susceptible to weird ideas. But when wizards have weird ideas, they do well to pay attention to them. She forced herself to re-live die feding, to think again of the cold and the fire, the sun like a ^ear—

Nothing came of it. She shrugged^ and watched as the plane finished its torn and dropped toward the runway.

It took them about fifteen minutes to get down and forthe jetway to be connected. With her backpack over her shoulder and yet another (she thought) uimecessary airline tep in tow, Nita went throng passport controL

She walked up to the first open desk she found, laid her passport on it, and smiled at the man, a big kindly guy widi a large nose and litde cheerful eyes. He looked down at her and said, 'here's a wee dote of a thing to be traveling all alone. And how are you this morning?"

*^ didn't sleep much on the plane,** Niu said.

''Sure. I can't do diat myself," the man said, riffling throu^ her passport. ''Keep hearing things all the time. Coming to see relatives, are you? Here's a nice dean passport, then. Where do you want die stan^, pet? First page? Or save diat for something more interesting?"

Nita diou^ of the first time she had cleared "passport" formalities at the great Crossroads

worldgating facility, six galaxies over, and illogi-cally warmed to the man. "Let that be the first one, please,'* she said. The man stamped the passport with relish and handed it back.

"You're very welcome in Ireland, pet. Chayd miVfallcha.'^

She had seen that, at least, spelled over the doorway past the jetway hall: Cead mile failte

—"A HUNDRED THOUSAND WELCOMES." "Thank

you," she said, and walked toward baggage claim.

It would be a w^hile yet before the connecting flight to Dublin. On the far side of the baggage hall and the customs people, Nita found herself in the big Shannon duty-free shop. The airline rep loitered by the entrance and chatted with one of the salesclerks while keeping an eye on Nita, who wandered around the place with her mouth open for a good while, never having seen anything quite like it before. The shop was the size of a small department store, and it was filled with crystal and linen and china and smoked salmon and books. Nita went straight for the books, not liking smoked salmon much. She found a couple of volumes of Irish stories and mythology and bought them with some of her odd pastel-colored Irish money. She remembered with some pain her mother looking at the bills and saying, "Who are all these people?"

"Writers," her father had said. "There's Yeats on the twenty, and Duns Scotus on the five: a historian. And Jonathan Swift on the ten. Look at the

an tSionainn

map of Dublin on the back of that one; I bet you can still find your way around with it—"

Nita put the memory away, hurting slightly. She hadn't thought she would miss her folks so much; after all, it was only seven hours since she'd seen them....

She went along to the gate for the flight that would take her to Dublin.

Another flight, another plane equally eager to be gone. It was about an hour's flight, over the thousand shades of green and all the bright rivers winding among the hills, blazing like fire when the sun caught them. Her ears had started popping from the plane's descent almost as soon as it reached cruising altitude, and Nita looked down and found herself and the plane sinking gently toward a great green range of mountains, with three peaks notable even among the others. Nita's mother had told her about these three and had shown her pictures. One of them wasn't a mountain, but a promontory: Bray Head, sticking out into the sea like a fist laid on a table with the knuckles sticking up. Then, a mile farther inland and westward was Little Sugarloaf, a hill half again as high as Bray Head. Another mile west, and higher than both the others, was Great Sugarloaf, Sliabh O Cualann as the Irish had it: the mountain of Wicklow. It was certainly one of the most noticeable—a gray stony cone, pointed, its slopes green with heather. No trees grew there.

The plane turned left, making its way to Dublin Airport. In another ten minutes, they were down.

Nita was met by yet another airline rep. She got her bag back, got a cart, and looked curiously at the automatic change machine that took your American money and gave you Irish money back. She briefly regretted that she didn't have an excuse to use it. She sighed and pushed her cart out through the customs folk, out through the sliding doors, and past the bored uniformed man at the desk who kept people from coming in the wrong way.

"Nita!"

And there was her aunt Annie. Nita grinned. After spending her life with people she knew, and then having to spend a whole day with people she didn't know, the sight of Aunt Annie was a pleasure. Nita's aunt hurried over to her and gave her a big hug. She signed the clipboard the rep held out for her, then waved the lady away.

Aunt Annie was a large, silver-haired lady, big about the shoulders, a little broad in the beam, with a friendly face and pale gray-blue eyes. Her hair was tied back in a short ponytail. "How was your flight? Did you do OK?"

"I did fine. Aunt Annie. But Fm real tired... I wouldn't mind going home."

"Sure, honey. You come right out here; the car's right outside." She pushed the cart out into the little parking lot.

The morning was fresh and fine. Little white

an tSionainn

clouds were flying past in a blue sky. Nita put her arms around herself and hugged herself in surprise at the cold. "Mom told me it might be chilly, and I didn't believe her. It's July!"

"This is one of the cooler days we've been having lately. Don't worry, though; the weather-people say it's going to get warm again tomorrow. Up in the seventies."

" *Warm,'" Nita repeated, wondering. It had been in the nineties on Long Island when she had left.

"We haven't had much rain, either," said her aunt. "It's been a dry summer, and they're talking about it turning into a drought if it doesn't rain this week or next." She laughed a little as she came up to a white Toyota and opened its trunk.

They drove around to the parking lot's ticket booth, paid the toll, and left the airport. Nita spent a few interesting moments adjusting to the fact that her aunt was driving on the left side of the road. "So tell me," Aimt Annie said, "how are your folks?"

Nita started telling her, with only half her mind on the business; the rest of her was busy looking at the scenery as they came out onto the freeway —or the dual carriageway, as all the signs called it—heading south toward Dublin and past it to Wicklow. AN LAR, said one sign, and under that it said DUBLIN: 8. "What's 'An LarY' Nita asked.

"That's Irish for 'to the city center,'" said her aunt. "We're going about fifteen miles south of

Dublin... It'll take us about an hour to get through the city and home, the way the traffic is. Do you want to stop in town for lunch? Are you hungry?"

"Nnnnnno," Nita said, "I think Td rather just go lie down and go to sleep. I didn't get enough on the plane."

Her aunt nodded. "No problem with that... You get rid of your jet lag. The country won't be going anywhere while you get caught up on your sleep."

And so they drove through the city. Nita was surprised to see how much it looked like suburban New York, except that—except.... Nita found that she kept saying "except" about every thirty seconds. Things looked the same, and then she would see something completely weird that she didn't understand at all. The street signs, half in Irish and half in English, were a constant fascination. It was a very peculiar-looking language, with a lot of extra letters and small letters in front of capital letters at the beginnings of words, something she had never seen before. And the pronunciations— She tried pronouncing a few of them, the last one being Baile atha Cliathy while her aunt howled with laughter and coached her. "No, no! If you try to pronounce Irish the way it looks, you'll go crazy. That one's pronounced 'bally ah-cleeah.' 'Dublin city.' "

Nita nodded and went on with a brief version of how things were at home, while looking at

an tSionainn

more of the signs they passed. There was something vaguely familiar about the language, for all the weirdness of its spelHngs.

They drove through the center of Dublin, down O'Connell Street, a thoroughfare about the width of a Manhattan avenue, three lanes on each side, with a broad pavement in between. People jaywalked across it with such total recklessness that Nita had to shake her head at their sheer brazen-ness. Down the big handsome avenue she and her aunt went, and through the city, out past shops and stores and parts of town that looked exactly Hke New York to Nita's eyes, though much cleaner; and then they started to pass through areas where small modern housing developments mixed with old brownstones that had beautiful clear or stained-glass fanlights above their front doors and elaborate molded plaster ceilings, which could be ghmpsed here and there through open curtains. Then the brownstones, too, gave way and started to be replaced by housing developments again, older ones now. The dual carriageway, which had become just one lane on each side for a while, now reasserted itself. And then fields started to appear, and big vacant lots that to Nita*s astonishment and delight had shaggy horses casually grazing on them, right by the side of the road. "Whose are they?'* Nita asked.

"They're tinker ponies," her aunt said. "The traveling people leave them where they can get some grass, if the grass where their caravans are is

grazed down already. Look there.'* She pointed off to one side.

Nita looked, expecting to see some kind of a barrel-shaped, brightly colored wagon. Instead there was just a trailer parked off to one side of the road, with no car hitched to it. There were clothes laid over the nearby hedge in the sun: Laundry, Nita realized. As they passed, she got just a gUmpse of a small fire burning near the trailer and several young children sitting or crouching around it, feeding it sticks. Then they had swept by.

"Are they gypsies?'* Nita asked.

Her aunt shrugged. "Some of them say they are. Others are just people who don't like to Hve in houses, in one place. They'd rather move around and be free. We have a fair number of them down by us."

Nita filed this with about twenty other things she was going to have to ask more about at her leisure. They passed more small housing developments—"estates," her aunt called them—where houses situated by themselves seemed to be the exception rather than the rule. Two houses were usually built squished together so that they shared one wall, and each house was a mirror image of the other.

And then even the estates started to disappear. There was a last gasp of them as Nita and Annie passed through a town called Shankill, where the road narrowed down to a single lane each way

I

an tSionainn

again. Shortly after that, the road curved to the right, away from what looked like an even larger town. "That's Bray," Aunt Annie said. "We do some of our shopping there. But this is officially County Wicklow now. You're out of Dublin when you get near the Dargle."

Nita hadn't noticed the river: It was hidden behind rows of little houses. "That's Little Bray," her aunt said. "And now, here's Kilcroney."

The road widened out abruptly into hill and forest, with two lanes on each side again. "Everything has names," Nita said.

"Every acre of this place has names," her aunt said. "Every town has townlands around it, and every one of them has a different name. Almost every field, and every valley and hill." She smiled. "I kind of like it."

"I think I might, too," Nita said. A wizard^s spells worked best when everything in them was completely named, and it was always easier to use existing names than to coin new ones—which you had to do if no one had previously named a thing or place, or if it didn't know its own name already. And the name you coined had to be right; otherwise the wizardry would backfire.

"There," her aunt said, maneuvering around a couple of curves in the road. "There's our mountain."

Nita peered past her aunt, out toward the right. There was Sugarloaf. It looked much different than it had from the air—sharper, more imposing,

more dangerous. Heather did its best to grow up the sides, but the bare granite of the mountain's peak defeated it about two-thirds of the way up. Scree and boulders lay all about the mountain's bald head.

The road ran past a service station where geese and a goat grazed behind a fence, watching the traffic, then through a shallow ravine that ran between two thickly forested hills. Sunlight would fall down the middle of it at noon, Nita guessed, but at the moment the whole deep vale was in shadow. *'Glen of the Downs," Aunt Annie said. "We're almost home. That's a nice place to hike to, down there, where the picnic benches are."

After driving a couple more miles on the dual carriageway. Aunt Annie turned down a little lane. To Nita's eyes the road looked barely wide enough for one car, let alone two, but to her shock several other cars passed them, and Aunt Annie never even slowed down, though she crunched so far over on the left side of the road that the hedges scraped the doors. The road began to trend downward, so that the gently sloping valley beneath it was visible, and beyond that, the sea, with the sun on it, blinding.

"See that town down there on the left? That's Greystones," said Aunt Annie. "We do the best part of our shopping there. But here—" She turned off down another lane, this one literally just wide enough to let one car through. In half a minute they came out in the graveled parking lot in

an tSionainn

front of a little house. Around it, on all sides, fenced fields and farm buildings stretched. It was forty acres, Nita knew: Her aunt's life savings had gone into the farm, her great love.

''Welcome to Ball}'^'olan," her aunt said. "Come on in and we'll get you settled in."

Aunt Annie did more than that. She gave Nita a place to stay that was uniquely her o\^ti, and Nita was very pleased.

Annie put her up not in the house, but in a caravan out in the back: a trailer, as she would have called it. She was getting the feeling that everj^hing here had different names that she was going to have to learn. But she was used to that; ever\thing had different names in wizardry, toa ... It^s going to take months to get everything straight^ she thought. And then thought immediately, / hope not! I don't want to be here for months. Six iveeks is plenty! But all the same, the sheer difference of things was beginning to get to her. She had been to other planets and spoken to aUen creatures in their own languages, but nothing had yet struck her as quite as strange as being here in this odd place where everything she knew was called something strange, and where people she knew to be speaking EngUsh as their first language were nonetheless speaking it in accents so thick she couldn't make out more than one word in three. None of the accents was what she had alwa\^ thought of as the typical Irish brogue, either. Ev-

identiy there was no such thing; the word brogue turned out to come from an old, sHghtly scornful Irish word that meant "tongue-tied," and had originally been used to describe people who couldn't speak Irish. At any rate, the accents came in all variations of thick, thin, light, impenetrable, lilting, dark; and people would run all their words together and talk very fast... or very softly, so that Nita soon began feeling as if she were shouting every time she opened her mouth.

Annie gave her the caravan and left her alone. *^ou'll want to crash and burn, I should think," Aunt Annie said. "You come in when you're ready and we'll feed you." So Nita had unpacked her bag and sat down on the httle bed built into the side of the trailer. It was a good size for her. The trailer's windows afforded a clear view of the path from the house, so that if she was doing a wizardry, she would have a few seconds to shut it down before anyone got close enough to see what was going on. There were cupboards and drawers, a shelf above the head of the bed, a little closet to hang things in, a table with a comfortable bench seat to work at, Hghts set in the walls here and there, and an electric heater to keep everything warm if it got cool at night.

She leaned back on the bed with her manual in her hands, meaning to read through some of its Irish material before she dropped off. She never had a chance.

an tSionainn

Nita woke to find it dark outside—or not truly-dark, but a very dark twilight. She glanced at her watch and saw that it was almost eleven at night. They had let her sleep, and she was ravenous. Boyy I must have needed that, she thought, and swung her feet to the floor, stretching and rubbing at her eyes.

That was when she heard the sound: horses' hooves, right outside the door. That wasn't a surprise, except that they would be out there so late. Annie's farm was partly a boarding stable, where people kept their horses because they didn't have stables of their own or where they left them to be exercised and trained for shows. There were a couple of low voices— Men's voices, Nita thought—discussing something quietly. That was no surprise, either: Quite a few people were working on Aunt Annie's farm. Nita had been introduced to a lot of them when she first arrived, and had forgotten most of their names. One of the people outside chuckled, sighed, said something inaudible.

Nita snapped on the bedside light so she wouldn't bash into things, got up, and opened the caravan door to look out and say hello.

But no one was there.

"Huh," she said.

She went out through the little concrete yard to the front of the house, where the front door was open, as Aunt Annie had told her it almost always was, except when everyone had gone to bed. Her

aunt was in the big quarry-tiled kitchen making a cup of tea.

"So there you are!" she said. "Did you sleep well? Do you want a cuppa?"

"What? Oh, right. Yes, please," Nita said, and sat down in one of the chairs drawn up around the big blond wood table. One of Aunt Annie's cats, a black-and-white creature, jumped into her lap: She had forgotten its name, too, in the general blur of her arrival. "Hi there," she said to it, stroking it.

"Milk? Sugar?"

"Just sugar, please," Nita said. "Aunt Annie, who were those people out there with the horses?"

Her aunt looked at her. "People with the horses? All the staff have gone home. At least I thought they did."

"No, I heard them. The hooves were right outside my door, but when I looked, they'd gone away. Didn't take them long," she added.

Aunt Annie looked at her again as she came over and put Nita's teacup down. Her expression was rather different this time. "Oh," she said. "You mean the ghosts."

Nita stared.

"Welcome to Ireland," said her aunt.

cm Cumhaid

Kilquade

NiTA SAT BACK and blinked a little. Her aunt stirred her tea and said, "Do ghosts bother you?" "Not particularly," Nita said, wondering just how to deal with this line of inquiry. Wizards knew that very few ghosts had anything to do with people's souls hanging around somewhere. Most apparitions, especially ones that repeated, tended to be caused by a kind of tape recording that violent emotion could make on matter under certain circumstances, impressing its energy into the molecular structure of physical things. Over long periods of time the "recording" would fade away, but in the meantime it would replay every now and then, for good reason or no reason, and upset the people who happened to see it. And if those people happened to beUeve that such a thing was caused by human souls, the effects would get

steadily worse, fed by the emotions of the living.

Nita knew all this, certainly. But how much of it could she safely tell her aunt? And how to get it across without sounding like she knew more than a fourteen-year-old should?

"Good," her aunt was saying. She drank her tea and looked at Nita across the table with those cool blue-gray eyes. "Did you hear the church bells, earher?''

"Uh, no. I must have been asleep.''

"We have a little church down the road,'' Aunt Annie said. "About three hundred years ago, after the English killed their king—Charles the First, it was—his replacement, a man named Oliver Cromwell, came through here." Her aunt took another long drink of tea. "He and his army went up and down this country throwing out the Irish landowners and installing English ones in their places. He sacked cities and burned houses, and got himself quite a name for unnecessary cruelty." Aunt Annie looked out the kitchen window, into the near dark, watching the apple trees in the backyard move slightly in the wind. "I think what you heard was, well, a reminder of some of his people, who were camped here on guard late at night. You can hear the horses, and you can hear the soldiers talking, though you usually can't make out what they're saying."

"As if they were in the next room," Nita said.

"That's right. The memory just reasserts itself

cm Cumhaid

every now and then; other people have heard it happening. It's usually pretty low-key." She looked at Nita keenly.

Nita shrugged in agreement. "They didn't bother me. They didn't seem, well, ghostly. No going 'Ooooooo' or trying to scare anyone."

"That's right," her aunt said, sounding reUeved. "Are you hungry?"

"I could eat a cow," Nita said, suspecting that in this household it would be wiser not to offer to eat horses.

"I've got some hamburger," her aunt said, getting up, "and some chicken..."

Nita got up to help, and poked around the kitchen a little. All the appliances were about half the size she was used to. She wondered whether this was her aunt's preference, or whether most of the stoves and refrigerators sold here were like that, for on the drive in she kept getting a feeling that everything was smaller than usual, had been scaled down somewhat. The rooms in her aunt's house were smaller than she was used to, as well, reinforcing the impression. "Do you have any other ghosts," Nita said, "or are those all?"

"Nope, that's it." Her aunt chuckled and pulled out a frying pan. "You want more, though, you won't have far to go. This country is thick with them. Old memories. Everything here has a long memory... longer than it should have, maybe." She sighed and went rooting in a drawer for a few moments. "A lot of history in Ireland," Aunt

Annie said, "a lot of bad experiences and bad feelings. It's a pain in the butt sometimes." She came up with a spatula. "Do you want onions?"

"Sure," Nita said.

Her aunt found a knife and handed it to Nita, then found an onion in a bin by the door and put it on the counter. "Hope you don't mind crying a little," she said.

"No problem."

They puttered about the kitchen together, talking about this and that: family gossip, mostly. Aunt Annie was Nita's father's eldest sister, married once about twenty-five years ago, and divorced about five years later. Her ex-husband was typically referred to in Nita's family as "that waste of time," but no one at home had ever been too forthcoming about just why he was a waste and Nita had decided it was none of her business. Aunt Annie had three kids, two sons and a daughter, all grown up now and moved out: Two of them now lived in Ireland, one in the States. Nita had met her two male cousins some years back, when she was very young, and remembered Todd and Alec only dimly as big, dark-haired, booming shapes that gave her endless piggyback rides.

Her aunt had moved with her kids to Ireland after the divorce, and had busied herself with becoming a successful farmer and stable-manager. Now she had other people to manage her stables for her: She saw to the finances of the farm, kept an eye on the function of the riding school that

cm Cumhaid

also was based on her land, and otherwise lived the Hfe of a moderately well-to-do countrywoman.

They fried up hamburgers and onions. There were no buns: Her aunt took down a loaf of bread and cut thickish slices from it for both of them. "Didn't you have supper?'' Nita said. "It's way past time."

"We don't have set mealtimes," Aunt Annie said. "My staff come in to get a snack when they can, and I tend to eat when I'm hungry. I was busy with the accounts for most of this evening— didn't notice I was hungry until just now. Unlike some," she said, looking ruefully down at the floor around the stove, which was suddenly littered with cats of various colors, "who are hungry whether they've just eaten or not."

Nita laughed and bent down to scratch the cats: the black-and-white one, again—Bronski—as well as a marmalade-colored cat with golden eyes; a tiny, delicate, white-bibbed tabby; and another black-and-white cat of great dignity, who sat watching the others, and Nita and her aunt, unblinking. "Bear," Aunt Annie said, "and Chessie, and Big Paws. All of you, out of here: You had your dinners! Now where's the mustard got to?"

She turned away to find it. Under her breath, Nita said hurriedly in the wizards' Speech, "You all get out of here and I'll see if I can Hberate something for you later..."

They sat looking thoughtful—since almost everything that thinks can recognize and understand

I

the Speech—then one by one got up and strolled off. Her aunt found the mustard and noticed the exodus. "Huh," she said. "Guess they don't like the smell of the onions."

"It's pretty strong," Nita said, smiled slightly, and started spreading mustard on bread.

When everything was ready, they sat down and ate. "I hope you don't mind being a little on your own tomorrow," Aunt Annie said. "You hit us at kind of a busy time. There's going to be a hunt here in a few days, and we have to start getting ready for it."

"You mean like a foxhunt?" Nita said.

"That's right. Some of the local farmers have been complaining about their chicken flocks being raided. Anyway, some of our horses are involved, so the vet has to certify them fit, and then the farrier is coming in tomorrow to do some re-shoeing. It's going to be pretty hectic. If you want to be around here, that's fine. Or if you think you'll be bored, you might want to go down to Greystones—it's a pretty easy bike ride from here. Or take the bus over to Bray and look around."

"OK," Nita said. "I'll see how I feel..."

"Traveling eastbound takes it out of you," Aunt Annie said. "It won't be so bad going back."

You said it, Nita thought. And the sooner the better. But she smiled anyway and said, "I hope not."

They finished up and cleared the table. "If you want to watch TV late, forget about the

cm Cumhaid

ground-based stations," her aunt said. "All but one of them shut down around midnight, and the one that's left mostly just shows old movies. There's a fair amount of stuff on the sateUite channels, though."

"Uh, thanks. I thought I might read for a while. After that I may just go to sleep again... I'm still kind of tired."

"That's fine. You make yourself completely at home." Her aunt looked at Nita with an expression as thoughtful, in its way, as the cats'. "It must have been a bit of a wrench, just being shipped off Hke that."

What did they tell you, I wonder? Nita thought. "It was," she said after a moment. "But I'll cope."

Her aunt smiled. "Typical of our side of the family," she said. "There's a long history of that. Well, if you get hungry or something later, just come on in and take what you need. Use the back door, though: I'm going to lock the front now and turn in. I'll leave a Hght on for you in here. You know where everything is, the bathroom and so forth?"

"Yeah, Aunt Annie. Thanks."

Her aunt headed off. Nita looked around the kitchen to see if there was anything else that needed cleaning up. Her mother had drummed into her that she should make sure she returned hospitaUty by helping out in the kitchen: Her aunt

hated doing dishes above almost anything else, her mother had said. But there was nothing left to do.

Except something that needed a wizard to do it, and Nita set about that straightaway.

She headed out the back door, out through a little archway into the concrete yard again. The only light was the one she had left on in the trailer, and it was dim. She paused outside the door and looked up. Even now, past midnight, the sky wasn't completely black. Nevertheless, it was blanketed with stars, much brighter than she was used to seeing through the light pollution of the New York suburbs. And there was no sound here but the faintest breath of wind. No sound came, even from the dual carriageway a mile away. It was as if everyone in this part of the country had gone to bed and turned out the lights all at once. There was only one light visible, about a mile away across the fields: someone's house light. For someone who had always lived in places where street-hghts glowed all night, this utter darkness was a shock.

But the starSy she thought. The Milky Way was clearly visible, even bright. At home it was almost impossible to see it at all. At least there's one thing worth seeing here.

She shivered hard then, and ducked back into the trailer to get her jacket, and her manual.

Once she had them she headed out across the yard, making for the log fence that separated the

cm Cumhaid

land immediately around Aunt Annie's house from the fields beyond it. The closest field was planted with oilseed rape, or "canola," as they call it in the States—tall green plants with flowers at the top so extremely yellow that they had made Nita's eyes hurt when she looked at them in the sunshine that morning. The field beyond that was clean pasture, grassland left fallow this year. That was what Nita wanted, for there was a thick strip of woodland at the far side of it.

She made her way through the oilseed rape, enjoying the fragrance of it, and on to the next fence. This was barbed wire: She cHmbed one of the fence posts carefully, so as not to tear anything. Cautiously, for the ground over here wasn't as even as it had been in the rape field, Nita made her way into the center of the field, and opened her manual.

She said the two words that would make the pages generate enough light to read by, though not enough to mess up her night vision. Normally she wouldn't have needed the manual for this spell, which was more a matter of simple conversation than anything else; but she didn't know the name she needed to call and had to look it up. The manual's index was straightforward, as usual. ''Canidaey'' she said under her breath. "Here we

The spell was a calling, but the kind that was a request, not a demand. She hoped there would be someone to respond. She recited the standard

setup, the request for the universe to hear. Then, ''Ai mathrdrUy'' she said in the Speech, "if any hear, let them speak to me, for there's need."

And then she put the book down and sat there in the quiet, and waited.

It seemed to take a long time before she heard the soft sound of something rustling in the grass, about a hundred yards away. Normally she would never have heard it, but her ears were sharpened by sitting in total silence. The noise stopped.

''MathrdrUy'' she said then, very quietly, "if that's you, then I'm here."

Another rustling, another silence.

"You speak it with an accent," said a voice in a series of short, soft barks, "but well enough. Let me see you."

Nita saw the long, low, sharp-nosed shape come toward her. The dog-fox had a tail bigger and bushier and longer than she would have thought possible. Only the faintest firefly gleam from the manual's pages silvered his fur, giving him enough of an outline to see, and glinted in his eyes.

"So," the fox said.

"What accent?" Nita asked, curious. As far as she knew, her accent in the Speech was quite good.

"We wouldn't say 'mathrdra' here. 'Madreen ruaj" that would be it." And Nita chuckled, because that meant "the little red dog" in the Speech.

"Local customs rule," Nita said, smiling. "As usual. I have a warning for you, madreen rua.

cm Cumhaid

There's a hunt coining through here in a few days."

The fox yipped softly in surprise. "They are early, then."

"Maybe," Nita said. "But if I were you, Td spread the word to keep your people well out of this area, and probably for about five miles around on all sides. Maybe more. And you might lay off the chickens a little."

The fox laughed quietly, a panting sound. "TheyVe poisoned almost all the rats: What's a body to eat? But for the moment... as you say. I am warned, wizard. Your errand's done." It looked at her thoughtfully.

"So then," the fox said. "Go well, wizard." And it whisked around and went bounding off through the pasture grass without another word.

Nita shut her manual and sat there in the quiet for a while more, getting her breath back. Talking to animals differed in intensity depending on how smart the animal was and how used to human beings it was. Pets like cats and dogs tended to have more fully humanized personalities, and could easily be made to understand you; but they also tended to be short-spoken— possibly^ Nita thought, because, being domesticated and more or less confined to a daily routine, they have less to talk about. Wilder animals had more to say, but it was often more difficult to understand them, the message being colored with hostiHty or fear, or plain old bewilderment. The fox lived on the fringes of human Hfe, knew human ways, but was

wary, and so there was a cool tinge, a remoteness, about the way it came across.

At any rate, she had fulfilled her responsibilities for the evening. A wizard had a duty to prevent unnecessary pain, and foxhunting did not strike Nita as particularly necessary, no matter what farmers might say about the need to exterminate vermin. If a fox was stealing someone's chickens, let the farmer shoot it cleanly, rather than chasing it in terror across half the countryside and getting dogs to rip it to shreds.

Meanwhile, there were other concerns.

Kit? she said in her head.

Yeah!

She paused a moment. What's that noise?

Vm chewing, Kit said.

Oh nOy you're eating dinner!

It's not such a fascinating experience that I can't take a few minutes out to talk to you, he said. Nita got a distinct impression of slightly lumpy mashed potatoes, and restrained herself from swallowing. What's happening? Kit asked.

ThiSy she said, and gave him a series of pictures of the day as quickly as she could, ending with the fox. Greaty huh?

Bored with me alreadyy Kit said. / knew it.

Kit — I She would have punched him hard, had he been in range. As it was, he flinched a little from what he felt her fist and arm wanting to do. Looky she said, I'm wiped, I'll talk to you more in the morning.

cm Cumhaid

He started to nod and stopped himself. She had to laugh a little. Have a good nighty Kit said.

wm do.

She let the contact ebb away, then got up and started carefully walking back the way she had come. Behind her, from the woodland, a fox was barking; another, perhaps a mile away, answered it.

Nita smiled to herself and headed for the trailer.

As she had thought, she wasn't able to stay up very late that night. She tried to watch some television, but even the sixty-odd satellite channels were fairly dull, showing either old movies that she wasn't interested in or foreign-language material that was a strain for even a wizard to follow. Finally she turned off the TV and went back to the trailer to read, though not before opening a small can of cat food on the sly and parceHng it out to the cats. They accepted this with great pleasure, purring and rubbing and making their approval known: But none of them spoke to her.

She went to bed and slept some more, but her dreams were not entirely pleasant. In one of them, she thought she felt the earth move, but it was probably just the wind shaking the trailer. When she woke up everything was quite still. It was early morning, how early she couldn't tell anymore without her watch: The different sunrise time here had her thoroughly confused. She found her watch

and saw to her surprise that, even though the sun was well up the sky, it was only 7:00 a.m.

She got up and dressed in yesterday's clothes, slipped into the house, took a quick shower, dressed again in clean clothes, and went to see what there was for breakfast. There were already several people in the kitchen, two of whom Nita had been introduced to the previous day. One was Joe, the stable master, a tall, lean young man with a grin so wide Nita thought his face was in danger of cracking. Another was Derval, the head trainer, a tall, curly haired woman, eternally smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. She had a drawly accent that made her sound almost American.

"There y'are then,'* Derval said. *Tou want some tea?"

Nita was beginning to think that every conversation in Ireland began this way. "Yes, please," she said, and rooted around in the big ceramic crock for the bread. "Where's Aunt Annie?"

"Down at the riding school, waiting for the farrier. She said to tell you to come on down if you want to."

"OK," Nita said, and cut herself a slice of bread and put it in the toaster. The butter was already out on the counter, along with a basket of eggs from the farm's hens; various packages of bacon and a gruesome-looking sausage called "black pudding"; more toast, some of it with bites out of it; boxes of cereal; and spilled sugar. Breakfast was

cm Cumhaid

a hurried business in this house, from the look of things.

Nita sat down with her tea and toast and pulled over the local weekly paper, the Wicklow People. Its front-page story was about someone's car catching on fire in the main street of Wicklow town, and Nita sat there paging through it in total wonder that anyplace in the world should be so quiet and uneventful that a story like that would make the front page. Derval looked over her shoulder and pointed with one finger at an advertisement in the classifieds that said bogs for sale. Nita burst out laughing.

"If you're going to be around the stable block," Derval said to her, going to get another piece of bread out of the toaster, "just one thing. Watch out for the horse in number five. He bites."

"Uh, yeah," Nita said. She had been wondering when she was going to have to mention this. "Fm a Httle scared of horses... I hadn't been planning to get too close to them."

"Scared of horses!" Joe said. "We'U fix that."

"Uh, maybe tomorrow," Nita said. She had been put up on a horse once, several years ago on vacation, and had immediately fallen off. This had colored her opinions about horses ever since.

Joe and Derval finished their breakfasts and headed out, leaving Nita surrounded by cats eager to shake her down for another handout. "No way, you guys!" she said. "Once was a special occasion. You want more, you'd better talk to your boss."

They looked at her with thinly disguised disgust and stalked off. Nita finished her tea and toast, washed her cup and plate, and then wandered out into the concrete yard. There was a path past the back of her trailer into the farm area proper, and the road that wound past the front of the house curved around to meet it. Here there was another large concrete area with two or three big, brown, metal-sided, barnUke buildings arranged in a loose triangle around it. The field on the right-hand side was full of horse-jumping paraphernalia, jumps and stiles; all around the edge of the field ran a big track covered with wood shavings and chips for the horses to run on. Farther down and to her right was the stabling barn, and beyond it was what Derval had referred to as "the riding school," a big covered building with nothing inside except a floor thickly covered with the same chips as on the track outside. This was where the riders practiced when the weather was bad.

Nita took a little while to look around in there, found nothing of interest, and made her way back to the stables. There were about fifteen box stalls with various horses looking out over the doors, or eating their breakfasts, or standing there with vaguely bored expressions. She looked closely at the horse in number five, which was a big handsome black stallion. But he had a bad look in his eye, and when she greeted him in the Speech (since there were no humans around to hear), he eyed

cm Cumhaid

her coldly, laid his ears back, and snorted, "Bugger off, little girl, or Fll have your arm off."

Nita shrugged and moved on. Other horses were more forthcoming. When she spoke to them in the Speech, they answered, asking her for a sugar cube or if she would please take them out. A few just tossed their heads, blinked lazily, and went back to their eating.

At the end of the stable bam was an extremely large pile of hay, kept under cover so that the rain couldn't get at it and the horses could be given it easily. Nita was looking at it when something small and black— A rocky she thought—fell down from the top of it. It tumbled down the hay, and even though Nita sidestepped, the black thing fell crookedly and landed on one of her sneakers.

She looked down in shock. It was a kitten, its body no bigger than one of her hands. It more or less staggered to its feet, looked up at her, and meowed, saying, "Sorry!"

"Don't mention it," Nita said.

The kitten, which was already scampering away after a windblown straw, stopped so suddenly that it fell over forward. Nita restrained herself from laughing. The kitten righted itself, washed furiously for a second, then looked at her. "Another one," it said. "The wind does blow, doesn't it?"

"Another what?"

"Another wizard. Are you deaf?"

"Uh, no," Nita said. "Sorry, I'm new here. Who are you?"

"I am Tualha Slaith, a princess of the People," she said, rattling it all off in a hurry, "a bard and a scholar. And who are you?"

"Fm Nita Callahan."

"Nita?" said the kitten. "What kind of name is that?"

Nita had to stop for a moment. She was amazed to be getting this much conversation out of a domestic cat, let alone a kitten that barely looked old enough to be weaned. "I think it was Spanish, originally," she said after a second or so. "Juanita is the long form."

"Aha, a Spaniard!" the kitten said, her eyes wide. " 'There's wine from the royal Pope / Upon the ocean green: / And Spanish ale shall give you hope, / My dark Rosaleen!' "

"You lost me," said Nita. "Anyway, Tm not a big ale fan..."

The kitten looked at Nita as if she were a very dim bulb indeed. "It's going to get crowded in here shortly," the kitten said. "Let's go out." She scooted out the barn door, and Nita followed her, feeling rather bemused, out the back into the area between the riding school and the stable block. The path led toward the field where the jumping equipment was. No one was there at the moment.

The kitten stopped several times in her run to crouch down, her butt waggling, and pounce on a bug, or leaf, or stalk of grass, or blown bit of hay. She always missed. Nita was having trouble controlling her reaction to this, but if there was one

cm Cumhaid

thing a wizard had practice in being, it was polite: So she managed. A Httle dusty whirlwind passed them as they walked between the riding school and the stable block, and Tualha paused to let it go by. "Good day," she said.

"Do you usually talk to wind?" Nita asked, amused.

Tualha eyed her. "That's how the People go by," she said. "The People of the Air. You are new here." She scuttled on.

They came to the fence. Tualha made a mighty leap halfway up onto the fence post, hauled herself up claw over claw, and sat at the top, where she washed briefly.

Nita sat down on the fence next to her. "Aren't you a Httle young to be a bard?" she asked.

The kitten looked Nita up and down. "Aren't you a little young to be a wizard?"

"Well, no, Fm fourteen..."

"And that's what percentage of your life span?"

"Uh—" Nita had to stop and figure it out.

"You can't even tell me right away? Poor sort of han-draoia you'd make over here. Maths are important."

Nita flushed briefly. Whatever a han-draoia might be, math had never been one of her favorite things. "And you of Spanish blood," Tualha said, "and you don't know that song, about how the Spanish came to Ireland first? What do you know?"

"Not much, sometimes," Nita said, suspecting

that here, at least, that was probably going to be true. *'I know about the Spanish Armada, a little." Very little, she added to herself. Social studies had never been a favorite with her, either, but she was beginning to suspect that was going to have to change.

"That was only the fifteenth invasion," Tualha said. "The real causes of things go back much further. The wind moves, and things move in it. Now, in the beginning—"

"Do we have to go back that far?" Nita asked drily.

The kitten glared at her. "Don't interrupt. How do you expect to become wise?"

"How did you do it?"

Tualha shrugged. "I've been in the hills. But also, I had to be a bard: I was found in a bag. It's traditional."

Nita remembered her aunt saying something the previous night about one of the farm cats having been found in a sack by the roadside, abandoned and starving. The starving part, at least, had been dealt with: Tualha was fat as a little ball. "Anyway," Tualha said, glaring at Nita again, "it's all in the Book of Conquests and the Book of Leinster and the Yellow Book of Lecan.'^

"I doubt I could just go get those out of the library where I come from," Nita said, "so perhaps you'll enlighten me." She grinned.

"It's all in the wizards' Mastery anyway," Tualha said, "if you'd bothered to look. But grow

cm Cumhaid

wise by me. In the beginning there was no one in this island; it was bleak and bare, nor was it an island at all. The Flood rose and covered it, and fell away again. Then two hundred and sixty-four years later came twenty-four men and twenty-four women: Those were Partholon and his people. At that time in Ireland was only one treeless and grassless plain, three lakes and nine rivers, so they built some more."

" ^Built—' " Nita said. "When was this?" "Four hundred thousand years ago. Didn't I mention? Now, do stop interrupting. They built mountains and carved valleys, and they fought the Fomori. The monster people," Tualha said in obvious annoyance at Nita's blank look. "The Fomori made a plague, the sickness that makes those who catch it hate and fight without thought; and the plague killed Partholon's people. So the island that was not an island was empty. Then, after another three thousand years, the people of Nemed came. They settled here and dug rivers and planted forests, and they met the Fomori and caught their plague—fought with them, and lost, and in the great strife of the battle the land was broken away from the greater land, and drowned in ice, and then water. When the ice melted and the water drew back, another people came: the Fir Bolg. They brought new beasts and birds into the land, and there was song in the air and Ufe in the :ers." 'When did the cats get here?" Nita asked.

"Later. Shush! The Fomori came to the Fir Bolg, too, with gifts and fair words, and married with them, and darkened their minds; and the Fir Bolg caught the battle-sickness from the Fomori, and most died of it, as all the others had. And the ones who were left had the bad blood of the Fomori in them and became half-monstrous, too. Are you getting all this?" Tualha asked.

"I think so." Nita resolved to have a look at her manual later, though, to see if, as Tualha said, all this information was in there. It might have been in a form that made sense to a cat, but Nita was a little uncertain about it all, particularly about some of the dates.

"Well. After this, the One grew angry that Its fair land was being ruined and sent another people to live here. That was the Tuatha de Danaan, the Children and People of the Goddess Danu. They tried to parley with the Fir Bolg, but the Fir Bolg were sick with the battle-sickness of their Fomori blood, and would make no parley. So there was a great fight at the Plain of the Towers, Moytura. The battle came out a draw, and both sides drew apart and waited for a sign. And the sign came, sent by the One: the young hero-god Lugh the Allcrafted. He told the Tuatha to bring the Four Treasures of the People of Danu, the cup and stone and sword and spear they had brought with them when they first came here from the Four Oldest Cities. Seven years he reforged those treasures with the power that was in him. Then the

cm Cumhaid

Children of Danu went forth to battle once more at Moytura. Lugh went forward with the spear called Luin, and with it destroyed Balor of the Deadly Eye, and the Fomori."

Tualha stopped, panting a little. Nita made a Hst in her head. "That's, let's see," she said, "six invasions. If you count the Tuatha."

"It's all invasions," said Tualha, "from the land's point of view."

Nita thought about that for a moment. ^Tou may have something there. So then who threw the Tuatha out?"

Tualha laughed at her. "Sure, you're joking me," she said. "They're still here."

"Say what?" Nita said.

A leaf went by Tualha on the breeze. She jumped at it, missed spectacularly, and came down on the ground so hard that Nita could hear the breath go out of her in a squeak. Nita couldn't help it anymore: She burst out laughing. "I'm sorry, I really am," she said, "but I think you need some practice."

Tualha looked at her scathingly. 'When you're a cat-bard," she said, "you get to choose. You get to be fast, or you get to be smart. And no offense, but I prefer smart. Not sure what you prefer, Shonaiula ni Cealodhain,'* she muttered, and scurried off.

Nita chuckled a Uttle, then got up and made her way back the way Tualha had gone, between the riding school and the stable. As she went she no-

ticed a sort of burning smell and put her head quickly into the stable block to make sure that something flammable hadn't fallen into the hay. She couldn't see anything but one of the grooms leading out a chestnut horse.

Out in the concrete yard she found the source of the burning. A small pickup truck was there, and a square steel box about two feet on each side had been unloaded from it. It's a forgCy Nita thought, as the woman standing by it pulled at a cord hanging out of one side, and pulled at it again and again, like someone trying to start a lawn mower.

The comparison was apt, since a moment later a compressor stuttered and then roared to life. That pushes air into it, Nita thought, and then — The woman went around to one side of the portable forge and appHed a blowtorch to an aperture there. How about that, Nita thought. Portable horseshoeing —

Nita went to have a look as the chestnut horse was led up to be re-shoed. The woman by the forge had to be about sixty. She was of medium height, with short, close-cropped white hair and little wire-rimmed glasses, and she was wearing jeans and boots and a T-shirt. Her face was very lined and very cheerful, and her accent was lighter than a lot of the accents Nita had heard so far: She sounded like someone half-trying to speak with an American accent. ''Ah, you again," she said to the chestnut as the groom led it up and fastened its

cm Cumhaid

reins to a loop on the back of the truck's tailgate. "We'll do better than we did last time. Ah," the farrier said then, looking up immediately as Nita wandered over. "You'll be Miz Callahan's niece."

"That's right," Nita said, and put her hand out to shake. She was getting used to the ritual by now, and was becoming reHeved that no one was in a position to offer her any tea.

The farrier held up her hands in apology for not shaking hands: They were covered with grime. "Sorry," she said. "I'm Biddy O Dalaigh. How are you settling in?"

"Pretty well, thanks."

"Have you seen this done before?"

"Only on TV," Nita said. "And never out of the back of a truck."

Biddy laughed. "Makes it easier to get a day's work done," she said, rooting around in a box in the truck and coming out with a horseshoe. She looked critically from it to the horse's feet, then bent down to push it into the aperture of the furnace-box. "Used to be that all the farms had their own farriers. No one can afford it now, though. So I go to my work, instead of people bringing it to me."

Nita leaned against the truck to watch. ^Tfou must travel a lot."

Biddy nodded and walked around to the front of the horse, stroking it and whistling to it softly between her teeth. "All over the county," she said. "A lot of horse shows and such." With her back

to the horse's nose, she picked up its right forefoot and curled it around and under, grasping it between her knees. With a tool Uke a nail-puller, she loosened the nails around the horse's hoof and pried them up one by one. Then she changed her leverage and knocked the shoe completely up and off. With another tool, a smaller one with a sharp point, Biddy began trimming down the rough edges of the hoof. "Tell Derval," Biddy said to Aisling, the blond groom handling the chestnut, "that he won't be needing the orthopedic any more; the hoof's cleared up."

Nita was surprised. "Orthopedic horseshoes?"

"Oh yes," Biddy said. "Horses have problems

with their feet the same as people do. Tango here

has been wearing a booster until this hoof grew

back in straight—he hurt the foot a few months

ago, and that can make the hoof go crooked. It's

just an overdeveloped toenail, after all." She patted

Tango as she got up. "We're all better now,

though, aren't we, my lad? And you'll have a nice

run tomorrow." She reached into the truck and

came up with a pair of tongs.

"He's in the hunt?" Nita asked.

Biddy nodded. "He belongs to Jim McAllister

up on the hill." She rooted around in the forge,

stirring and rearranging the coals.

Nita peered into the opening. "Lava rocks?" "Oh, aye, like in the barbecues. They work as well as charcoal unless you're doing drop-forging or some such."

all Cumhaid

Biddy turned her attention back to the hoof, scraping its edges a bit more. Then she picked up the tongs again. "Here we go, now," she said, and took hold of the hoof. With her free hand she used the tongs to pluck the horseshoe from the furnace and slap it hard against the hoof, exactly w^here she wanted it. There was a billow of smoke, and a stink like burned hair or nails.

Nita waved the smoke away.

"Foul, isn't it," Biddy said, untroubled. After removing the shoe from the hoof and dunking it in a bucket of cold water, she dropped the tongs, took a hammer out of a belt loop, reached into a pocket for nails, replaced the shoe on the hoof, and began tapping the nails in with great skill, each nail half\^"ay in with one tap, all the way in with the next.

Nita watched Biddy do Tango's three other shoes. Then another horse was led out, and Nita turned away: This kind of thing was interesting enough, once. Maybe I'll go down to GreystoneSy she thought. Aunt Annie had told her that the bike was in the shed behind the riding school, if she wanted to use it and no one else had it. Or maybe I won't It was strange, having nowhere famiUar to go and no one famiUar to go with. Being at loose ends was not a sensation she was used to, but she didn't feel quite bold enough at the moment to just go charging off into a strange town.

/ wouldn't mind if Kit were here^ though ...

Niu wandered back the way she had come.

back to the field where the jumping equipment lay around. She climbed over the fence and walked out into the field to look at it all: the odd candy-cane-striped poles, the jumps and steps and stiles, some painted with brand names or names of local shops.

The wind began to rise. From this field, which stood at the top of a gentle rise, Nita could see the ocean. She stood there and gazed at it for a while. The brightness it had worn this morning, under full sunlight, was gone. Now, with the sun behind a cloud, the ocean was just a flat, silvery expanse, dull and pewter-colored. Nita smelled smoke again, and idly half-turned to look over her shoulder, toward the farrier's furnace.

And was shocked not to see it there at all... or anything else. The farm was gone.

The contour of the land was still there—the way it trended gently downhill past where the farm buildings should stand, and then up again toward the dual carriageway and the hills on its far side. But there were no buildings, no houses that she could see. The road was gone. Or not gone: reduced to a rutted dirt track. And the smoke—

She looked around her in great confusion. There was a pillar of black smoke rising up off to one side, blown westward by the rising wind off the sea. Very faintly in the silence she could hear cries, shouts. Something white over there was burning. It was the little white church down the road, St. Patrick's of Kilquade, with its one bell. She stood there in astonishment, hearing the cries

cm Cumhaid

on the wind and then a terrible metallic note, made faint by the distance: the one bell blowing in the wind, then shattering with heat and the fall of the tower that housed it. A silence followed the noise... then faint laughter and the sound of glass exploding outward with the force of the fire.

And a voice spoke, down by her feet. "Yes, they have been restless of late, those ghosts,*' said Tualha, looking where Nita looked, at the smoke. "I thought I might find you here. It's as I said, Shonaiula ni Cealodhain. The wind blows, and things get blown along in it. Bards and wizards alike. Why would you be here, otherwise? But better to be the wind than the straw, when the Carrion-Crow is on the wing. It always takes draoiceacht to set such situations to rights."

Nita gulped and tried to get ahold of herself. This was a wizardry, but not one of a kind she had ever experienced. Worldgating, travel between planes, she knew. But those required extensive and specific spelling. Nothing of the sort had happened here. She had simply turned around... and been here. "Where are we?" she said softly. "How did we get here?"

"You went cliathdnach" Tualha said. " *Side-ways,' as I did. True, it's not usually so easy. But that's an indication that things are in the wind indeed."

"Sideways," Nita breathed. "Into the past—"

"Or the future," Tualha said, "or the never-was. All those are here. You know that."

"Of course I know it," Nita said. It was part of a wizard's most basic knowledge that the physical world coexisted with hundreds of thousands of others, both Hke and very unlike it. No amount of merely physical travel would get you into any of them. With the right wizardry, though, you had to move no more than a step. "It shouldn't be anything like this easy, though," she said.

Tualha looked up at her with wide, bland eyes. "It is easier here," she said. "It always has been. But you're right that it shouldn't be this easy. There's danger in it, both for the daylight world and the others."

Nita looked at the smoke, shaking her head. "What was it you said?... The wind blows, and things get blown along with it?"

Tualha said nothing. Nita stood there and thought how casually she had said to her mother, ''If I go on call in Irelandy I go on call, and that's it.'' It was not simply her mother's idea that she come here, after all. One of the Powers That Be had sent her here to do a job. She knew when she got back to the farmhouse— if she got back to the farmhouse—and opened her manual, she would find she was on active status again. And here she was, without her partner, without her usual Senior Wizards' support—for their authority didn't reach here: Europe had its own Seniors. Alone, and with a problem she didn't understand—she was going to have to get caught up on her reading.

Tualha crouched and leaped at a bit of ash that

cm Cumhaid

the wind sailed past her. She missed it. Nita sighed. "How do we get back?"

"You haven't done this before?" Tualha asked. "Where were you looking when it happened?"

"At the ocean."

"Look back, then."

Nita turned her back on the smoke and the cries and the brittle music of breaking glass, and looked out to the flat, gray sea, willing things to be as they had been before.

"There you are, then," Tualha said. Nita turned again. There was the farm, the riding school, the farmhouse—and the field, full of its prosaic jumping equipment, all decals and sHghtly peeling paint. "But indeed," Tualha said, "it's as I told you. Something must change. Get about it, before it gets about us."

Bri Cxxalann

Bray

The next morning Nita did what she usually did when she was confused—the thing that had made her a wizard in the first place. She went to the library.

She caught the bus to Bray, a green double-decker that stopped at the end of her aunt's road, and climbed up to the top level. There was no one at all there, so she took the seat right in front, its window looking directly forward and twelve feet down to the ground. It was interesting to ride along Httle country lanes and look down onto the sheep and the hedges and the potholes from such a height.

But she didn't let it distract her for very long. The section on Ireland in her wizard's manual was quite long. This did not surprise her, since at the moment the section on the United States was quite short... most likely since she wasn't there. The

Bri Cualann

manual tended to have as much information as you needed on any particular subject, and simply waited for you to look for it.

She immediately found that she had been correct to be a Httle suspicious of Tualha's numbers. The things she had discussed as happening four hundred thousand years before had actually happened four hundred million years before. This didn't surprise Nita, either; she remembered her aunt Annie saying yesterday that as far as she knew, the only times cats were really concerned about were their mealtimes.

The manual told her of the formation of Ireland some four hundred miUion years earlier; of the pushing up of the great chain of mountains that it shared with Newfoundland, and the Pyrenees. A hundred and fifty million years later, Greenland began to move away from the ancient European continent, creating a huge gap in what was to become the northern Atlantic. The great island that had been both England and Ireland was flooded, as the waters of other seas flowed into the gap, and then split; and the ice came down and tore at it, leaving the terrible glacial valleys of the western Irish coast that Nita had seen when she flew in.

That was just the science of it, of course. Science may accurately reveal the details about concrete occurrences, the "what"s and "how"s of life, but a wizard knows to look further than science for the "why"s. And wizards knew that the world was made: not created in some disinterested ab-

stract sense, like an assembly line of natural forces stamping out parts, but made, stone by stone, as an artist makes, or a craftsman, or a cook: with interest, and care. The One—the only name wizards have for that Power which was senior to the Powers That Be and everything else—like a good manager, had delegated many of its functions to the first-made creatures, the Powers, which some people in the past had called gods and others had called angels. The Powers made different parts of the world and became associated with them simply because they loved them, as people who make tend to love what they've made.

But something had gone wrong in Ireland's making. Someone had been—it was tempting to say "interfering." The manual said nothing specific about this. It tended to let one draw one's own conclusions on the more complex ethical issues. But several times the Makers had begun to make the island, and several times something had gone wrong: cataclysms, a glacial movement that happened too quickly, a continental plate ramming another faster than had been intended. A misjudg-ment? A miscalculation? Nita thought not. She thought she saw here the interference of her old enemy, the Lone Power, the One that (for good or evil) invented death and later went through the world seeing what It could destroy or warp.

It seemed that the Bright Powers, the Makers and Builders, had not seen, or suspected, the flaws inserted in their building by the Lone Power's

Bri Cualann

working. So Ireland had come undone several times, and had had to be patched. Indeed, the top part of it had been welded on about two hundred and fifty million years after the original complex began to be formed—after other land that should have been Ireland was drowned beneath the sea.

The Bright Powers made two or three attempts to form Ireland, were frustrated two or three times by the Lone Power... and then, as Tualha had said, the One had intervened. It sent a new group of Makers into the world to shape Ireland: Makers with greater powers and more seniority, more central, than those who had worked here before. They would set it right.

They tried. Nita understood, from the manual and from what Tualha had told her, that just as the One had increased Its response, so had the Lone Power. The Fomori had been growing more powerful each time they had been challenged. Each time they were put down, they came back more powerful yet. And then came the first battle of Moytura.

The version that Tualha had told Nita turned out to be much romanticized and classicized. Moytura itself was a great strife of forces over many centuries, as mountains were raised and thrown down, river valleys were carved and choked, and the ice rose and fell. You could still see the evidence in places in Ireland—rock more

warped and twisted than could be explained by any mere geological uprising or subsidence; places where fires had fallen and melted the stone in ways that geologists could make nothing of. Nita could make something of it. The weapons used to wage war in heaven had been brought to bear on Ireland. The battle went on for a good while.

And then—Nita turned a page over, scanning down it. She was beginning to get the drift of this. Here was the arrival of Lugh the AUcrafted. She thought she knew this particular Power. She had met It once or twice. A young warrior, fierce, kindly, a little humorous, Hable to travel in disguise: a Power known by many names in many places and times. Michael, Athene, Thor—It was the One's Champion, one of the greatest of all creatures: definitely a Power to be reckoned with. As Lugh, that Power had come and poured his virtue into the great Treasures that the Tuatha de Danaan had brought from the Four Oldest Cities.

Then he and the Tuatha had gone out with those weapons against Balor of the Evil Eye. Who was he? Nita wondered. The Lone Power Itself? Or some unfortunate creature that It corrupted and inhabited? That was one of the Lone Power's favorite tactics. Either way, Balor had held the humans of the island; his twisted creatures, the Fomori; and the other, lesser Powers in great terror for thousands of years. But then came the second battle of Moytura, as Tualha had said, and all

Bri Cualann

that changed. War came from heaven to earth with a vengeance. The Champion, in the form of Lugh, struck Balor down.

Nita turned another page. After putting down Balor, the Powers That Be had gotten busy finishing Ireland. They raised the mountains and smoothed them down, made the plains and the forests and lakes. And they fell more completely in love with the beautiful, marred place than any of their more junior predecessors had.

This was more common in the Old World, Nita read, than in the New. In places like North America, where the native human peoples had stories not of specific gods but instead about heroes and the One, it indicated that the Makers of that place had gone away, well-satisfied with their work. In some places in the world, though, the satisfaction took longer—places like Greece and Rome. Their Makers loved them too much to leave for a long while, though finally they did let go. But there were still a few places in the world where the Powers had never let go. This was one of them.

/ het this is why Ireland has so much troubley one way and anotheVy Nita thought. The Powers won't move out and let the new tenants be there by themselves. Like most wizards, Nita knew quite well that the Powers might indeed be good, but that didn*t make them safe. Even the best of the Powers That Be could be affected by too much commerce with humans and physical reaHty.

Nita read that the Tuatha de Danaan, as the

Irish had come to call the Builder-Powers, had never left. And when the human people, the "Milesians," came at last, the Powers struck a bargain with them, agreeing to relinquish the lands and vanish into the hills. At least, that was how it looked to the humans. They knew that some hills in Ireland, at the four great feasts of the year, became more than hills. The nonphysical then became more solid, more real, and the physical, if it was wise, would stay out of the way of what was older, stronger, and harder by far.

They had gone "sideways,** had the Tuatha. They could not bear to leave Ireland, and so they had gone just one universe over—or two, or five. It was still Ireland, but it was also a little bit closer to the depths of reality, where, as Nita knew, Timeheart lay. She had been there several times, for brief periods. It had different appearances, depending on where and when you were. She had seen it look like a city, like the ocean, like the depths of space. What it always waSy regardless of your viewpoint, was that place where the physical universe was as it would have been, had the Lone Power not taken exception and created something that the other Powers had not intended: entropy ... death. The Powers simply moved into a universe near Timeheart that to them looked most like Ireland.

But much coming and going between Ireland and the alternate universe had forged a link, broadening the road from a little track into a highway

Bri Cualann

easy to stumble onto. All of Ireland had become a place where one could suddenly go sideways. This to-ing and fro-ing of the greater and lesser Powers between the Ireland that was and their version of Ireland—Tir na nOg, as they called it, the Land of the Ever-Young—was very dangerous. But it wasn't a thing a lone wizard could just stop. At least, Nita couldn't stop it.

And she had gone sideways, and it hadn't hurt her... but then she was a wizard. If something like that started happening to regular people, though, people in the street who were standing waiting for a bus and suddenly found themselves in the middle of a Viking invasion—or something worse... Nita shuddered.

The problem with being sent somewhere by the Powers That Be to do a job is that, frequently, they leave it to you to find out what the job is. Nita flipped through the book to the directory pages and saw that, yes indeed, she was on active status, and her aunt's address was Hsted. There were local addresses for Senior wizards as well, asterisked with a note saying, "Consult in case of emergency."

Well theriy Nita thought, if they've put me on my own on this one, I guess that's what it is. Must be something that having Kit around wouldn't help. The thought made her ache. Were the Powers trying to break up their partnership? Or, on the other hand, was this just the kind of solo work

that even a partnered wizard had to do every now and then? Well, either way, she was not going to refuse the commission. She shut the book as the bus bounced into Bray.

Bray was not a very big town, its main street about half the length of the main street at home. As usual, everything continued to look small and cramped and a little worn-out by Nita's standards. She berated herself inwardly. Just because you're used to everything looking slick and neat and new doesn't mean that it has to be that way here. Aunt Annie had mentioned to her that Ireland had been in economic trouble for a while, and there just wasn*t the money to spend on things that Nita took for granted.

She got off in the middle of town, across from the big Catholic church, and had a look around. There was a sign that said leabhlair poblachta, "public Hbrary." She grinned. Finding libraries had never been one of her problems.

The library was two buildings—the older one, which had been a schoolhouse once, a big, square, granite building, very solid and dependable looking, all on one story; and the newer annex, built in the same stone but in a slightly more modern style. She spent a happy two or three hours there, browsing. Nita had had no idea there was so much written in the Irish language—so many poems, by so many poets, humor, cartoon books, all kinds of neat things. And structurally the language looked.

Bri Cualann

and occasionally sounded, very much like the Speech. But she tried not to be distracted from what she was there for.

She picked out several large books on Irish mythology and began going through them in hopes of correlating what Tualha had told her with what she had read in the manual. Mostly she found confirmation for Tualha's version—the terrible eye of Balor that burned everything it saw; many strange tales of the old "gods and goddesses/* the greater and lesser Powers That Be. As usual, the Powers had their jobs divided up. Among many others, there were Govan, the smith and beer brewer; Diancecht, the great physician of the gods; and Brigid of the Fires, hearth goddess and beast goddess, artificer and miracle worker; bard gods and carpenter gods; builders; charioteers; cooks; and warriors.

There were also tales of the "Httle people." Nita had to smile at that. Worldgating did odd things to the density and refractive index of air. Something near, seen through air whose structure was disturbed by wizardry, might seem far away, or small. But this was. an effect of diffraction, not magic. The "Httle people" were Uttle only to human perceptions, and only occasionally.

And then there were the stories of the saints. Bridget, for example. When the saints came to Ireland, so many miracles attended them that Nita seriously wondered whether the stories she was reading were not in fact new versions of the tales

about the Powers, transferred to the saints to make them respectable to the new reUgion. Bridget's stories in particular were interesting, though there was confusion over whether the person involved was the old goddess in disguise or the new, mortal saint. Her miracles seemed to be of a friendly, homey sort, more useful than spectacular: She fixed broken things and fed people, and she said that her great wish was that everyone should be in heaven with God and the angels, and should have a nice meal and a drink.

There was a lot more material, and Nita did her best to digest it. And then the topic of digestion came to be considered seriously, since she hadn't had any breakfast. It was partly out of cowardice; she had awakened afraid to hang around the farm for long, lest she should look at some common thing and abruptly find herself back in time, or sideways in it. Fm really no safer here, though^ she thought, as she stepped out of the Ubrary, looking up and down the little road that ran parallel to Bray's main street. This calm-looking landscape— with its brownstone houses and the truck unloading groceries for the supermarket around the corner, and the cars all double-parked on the yellow lines—all this could shift in a moment. A second, and she might find herself outside the Stone Age encampment that was here once long ago; or the Httle row of wattled huts that the Romans came to visit once and never left—their bones and coins had been found down by Bray Head; or the

Bri Cualann

great eighteenth-century spa where people from Britain came on their vacations, promenading up and down the fine seafront, a second Brighton. No, there was nowhere she could go to get away from going sideways.

Nita went up to the main street and looked around for somewhere to eat. There were some tea shops, but at the moment she felt Hke she had had enough tea for a lifetime. Instead, near the bridge over the Dargle, she saw a restaurant with a sign that said american-style fried chicken. Hmm, Nita thought, her mouth watering as she made for it, we'll see about that.

She went in. As she ordered, she saw a few heads turn among the kids who were sitting there, probably at her accent. She smiled. They were going to have to get used to the look of her for the little while she was going to be here.

She got a Coke and settled down to wait for her chicken, gazing idly over at the kids sitting at the other table. They were steaHng glances back at her, boys and girls together: a Uttle casual, a Uttle shy, a Uttle hostile. In that way, they looked almost exactly like everyone she knew at home. They did dress differently. Black seemed to be a big favorite here, as did a kind of heavy boot that she had never seen before. Everyone seemed very into tight, torn jeans, or just tight jeans, or very tight short skirts, all black again; and black leather seemed popular. She felt a Httle out of place in her down vest and her faded blue jeans, but she

grinned at the other kids and paid attention to her Coke again.

A couple of minutes later, two of them came over. She looked up. One of them was a boy, very-tall, with very shaggy dark hair, a long nose, dark eyes set very close together, and a big wide mouth that could have been very funny or very cruel depending on the mood of its owner. The girl could have been his twin, except that she was shorter, and her hair was teased and ratted out into a great black mane. At least parts of it were black; some were stunningly purple or pink. She was wearing a khaki T-shirt with a wonderfully torn and beat-up leather jacket over it—black again—black jeans, and those big heavy boots of which Nita was becoming envious.

"You a Yank?'* said the boy. It wasn't entirely a question. There was something potentially a little nasty on the edge of it.

"Somebody has to be," Nita said. "Wanna sit down?"

They looked at her and shuffled for a moment. "You staying in town?"

"No, I'm out in Kilquade."

"Relatives?"

"Yeah. Annie Callahan. She's my aunt."

"Woooaaa!" said the boy in a tone of voice that was only slightly mocking and only slightly impressed. "Rich relatives, huh?"

"I don't know if rich is the right word," Nita said.

Bri Cualann

"You here looking for your roots?'* the girl asked.

Nita looked at a lock of her own hair, then at the girl's. "Still attached to them, as far as I can tell. Though finding them around here doesn't seem to be a big problem."

There was a burst of laughter over this. "Come on and sit with us," the boy said. "I'm Ronan. This is Majella."

"OK."

Nita went with them. She was rapidly introduced to the others, who seemed to alternate between being extremely interested in her and being faintly scornful. The scorn seemed to be because she was an American, because they thought she had a lot of money, because they thought she thought they were poor, and various other reasons. The admiration seemed to be because she was American, because they thought she had a lot of money, and because she could see the big movies six months earlier than everyone else.

"Uh," Nita said finally, "my folks don't let me go see that many movies. I have to keep up my schoolwork all the time or they don't let me go out."

There was a general groan of agreement over this. "There's no escape," said Ronan.

More detailed introductions ensued. Most of the kids lived in Bray. One of them lived as far out as Greystones, but said she took the bus in "for the crack." Nita blinked until she discovered

that crack was not a drug here, but a word for really good conversation or fun. Nita was immediately instructed about all the nightclubs and all the discos she should go to. "How many discos do you have here?" she asked, in some surprise. It then turned out that disco was not a word for a specific kind of building, or a specific kind of music, as it was in the States, but a dance that various pubs or hotels held once or twice a week. Several of them were no-alcohol kids' discos, highly thought of by this group, who went off into an enthusiastic discussion of what they would wear and who they would go with.

"You got somebody to go with?" said Ronan.

"Uh, no," Nita said, thinking regretfully of Kit. He loved to dance. "My buddy's back in the States."

"Oooh, she's got a buddyyyyyyV Nita grinned a little: She was now beyond the blushing point. Her sister had been teasing her about Kit for so long that this was a very minor salvo by comparison.

"Aren't you a little young for that?" one of the girls said, clearly teasing, to judge by the young guy massaging her shoulders at the moment.

Nita arched her eyebrows. "Let's just say that in my part of the world we make up our minds about this kind of thing early."

"Whooooaaaaa!" said the group, and started punching one another and making lewd remarks, only about half of which Nita understood.

Bri Cualann

"So if your buddy's there, what are you doing here?" said Ronan.

"I know!'* said Majella. "Her folks sent her away to separate them because they were— ahemV And she shook her hand in a gesture intended to be sUghtly rude and sUghtly indicative of what they were doing.

Nita thought about this for a moment, and thought that the simplest way to manage things was to let them think exactly this. "Well, yeah," she said. "Anyway, I'm stuck here for six weeks."

"Stuck here! Only stuck here! In the best part of the earth! Well, excuse usV they said, and began ragging her shamelessly, explaining what a privilege it was that she should be among them, and teUing her all the wonderful places there were to see, and things to do. She grinned at this at last, and said, "I bet none of you do those things."

"Oh, well, those are tourist things," Ronan said.

"Thanks a lot," said Nita.

They chatted about this and that for a long while. Nita found herself oddly interested in Ronan, despite his looks—maybe because of his looks. She didn't know anyone at home who managed to look so dark and grim, no matter how punk he dressed. And there was an odd, cheerful edge to his grimness that kept flashing out, a certain delight in having opinions, and having them loudly, in hopes that someone would be shocked. Their conversation ranged through music ("Mostly junk except for the Cranberries") and art

("All bollocks"—Nita kept her mouth shut and made a note to find out what bollocks were), and quite a bit about politics, especially Irish politics, much of which left Nita completely in the dark. Ronan's opinions of anyone who wanted to colonize Ireland, from the English on back, were scathing. So were his views on people who thought they were Irish and weren't really, or who weren't Irish and thought they should have something to do with running the country, or thought that the Irish needed any kind of help with anything at all. The others tended to nod in agreement with him, or if they disagreed, to keep fairly quiet about this. Nita noticed this in particular, and suspected that they had felt the edge of his temper once or twice. She grinned to herself, thinking that he would have a slightly hotter time if he tried his temper on her. She sort of hoped he would.

It was amazing how long a couple of pieces of chicken and a few Cokes could be made to last; fortunately, the people running the shop didn't seem to care how long they stayed. Eventually, though, everybody had to leave: buses to catch, people to meet. One by one they said good-bye to Nita and headed off; Ronan was last. "Don't get lost looking for leprechauns, now. Miss Yank," he shouted to her over his shoulder as he made his way down Bray's main street.

She snickered and turned away, looking at the 45 bus pulling up across the street, and thought,

Bri Cualann

Noah ... ril walk home. It was only eight miles, and the walk would take her through extremely pretty countryside.

Except for the first part—the climb up one side of Bray Head—it was an easy walk down, taking her about an hour to get to Greystones. She strolled into the town. It was more villagey-looking than Bray, smaller: a couple of banks, a couple of food stores, two small restaurants, a newsstand where you could get magazines and cards and candy. Various other small shops...a dry cleaner. And that was it. After that, the street was lined with big old houses and estates of smaller ones. And then the fields began again—in fact, they began almost as soon as she left the town. Nita strolled by the tiny golf course, looked down to Greystones's south beach beyond it; she walked past a cow who was chewing its cud with a blank expression. ''Daiy'' she said to it. It blinked at her and kept chewing.

The road climbed again, winding up through Killincarrig. Everything does have a name here^ Nita thought. It's amazing. I really should get a map. There may be one in the manual. ..

There was. She consulted it as she went up the road. At the top of the hill, the road ended in a T-intersection: She turned left. That way led toward Kilquade and Kilcoole and Newcastle with its little church.

This road climbed and dipped over a little bridge that crossed a dry river, then rose between

high hedges. Birds dipped and sang high in the air. The sun was quite hot: There was no wind.

There came a point where there was a right turn, and a signpost pointing down between two more high hedges, toward Kilquade. Nita took it, making her way down the narrow road. The houses here were built well away from one another, even though they were small. Some were larger, though.

The road dipped and broadened, curving around in front of Saint Patrick's. Nita stopped and looked at it for a moment. It was quite normal, a little white-painted church, with the tower off to one side of the building and the bell with a puUey-and-gear to make it ring. There was a big field on one side, and visible behind it a hedge, and beyond that some of Aunt Annie's land: another field planted with oilseed rape and those bright yellow flowers. The hum of bees came from it, loud. Nita stood still and listened, smelled the air. No broken stained glass, no fire, no blackening.

She turned and looked off to her right. She could see Little Sugarloaf, which she had passed on her walk, well behind her. And just beyond it, Great Sugarloaf, a perfect cone, standing straight, a sort of russet and green color this time of year, for in this heat the bracken was beginning to go brown already. / wondeVy she thought. Sideways ...

She had done it without wizardry yesterday.

Bri Cualann

She stood there for a moment, and just looked. Not at Sugarloaf as it was, but as it could be; not this brown, but green.

Nothing.

Nothing...

... But it was green.

Her eyes widened a little. She looked at the nearby hedge. There were no flowers. She looked over her shoulder in panic at the church. The church looked just the same, but it was eariier in the year, much earlier. / wondeVy she thought. How far can I take it? Do I have to be looking for anything in particular? Most wizardries required that you name the specifics that you wanted.... All right. What does it look like? she thought. What could it look like?

She looked at Sugarloaf again. What does it look like? Show me. Come on, show me...

There was no ripple, no sense of change, no special effects. One minute it was Sugarloaf, green as if with new spring. The next minute—it was a city.

There were no such cities. No one had ever built such towers, such spires. Glass, it might have been, or crystal: a glass mountain, a crystal city, all sheen and fire. It needed no sunlight to make it shine. It shed its light all around, and the hills nearby all cast shadows away from it. Nita was not entirely sure she didn't see something moving in some of those shadows. For the moment, all she could see was the Hght, the fire; Sugarloaf all one

great mass of tower upon tower, arches, architraves, buttresses, leaping up; an architecture men could not have imagined, since it violated so many of their laws. It was touched a little with the human idiom, true; but then those who had built it and lived in it—were living in it—had been dealing with the human idiom for a while and had become enamored of it. "They're still here," Tualha had said, and laughed.

Nita blinked, and let it go. And it was gone. Brown bracken appeared again, and a plain granite mountain with its head scraped bare. She let out a long breath and went walking again, to the last hill that would lead her up to her aunt's driveway. That simpley she said to herself. That easy ... For wizards, at least. At the moment. But it shouldn't be that easy ...

Something had better be done.

If only I could find out what!

She headed back to the farm.

The next morning was the foxhunt. Nita slept in and missed the earliest part of the operation, having been reading and chatting with Kit until late the night before. He hadn't been able to throw much light on anything, except that he missed her.

Kity she had said, / don't know how much more of this I can take.

You can take it, he said. I can take it, too. I saw your folks the other day.

Bri Cualann

How are they?

They're fine... They We going to call you tonight They said they were going to give you a couple of days to get acclimated before they bothered you.

Fine by me, Nita said. Fve had enough to keep me busy.

She had felt Kit nod, thirty-five hundred miles away. So I see, he said. I'd watch doing that too much, Neets.

Hmf

I mean, it makes me twitch a little bit. You didn't do any specific wizardryy but with that result — makes you wonder what's going on over there.

Yeahy welly it can't be that bad. Kit. Look, you come back as easily as you go —

/ sure hope you doy he said.

The conversation had trailed off after that. It was odd how it was becoming almost uncomfortable to talk to Kit, because their conversation couldn't run in the same channels it usually did, the easy, predictable ones. For the first time, she had things to tell him that he hadn't participated in. How's Dairine? she asked.

She's been busy with something ...I don't know what. Something about somebody's planet.

Oh lordy not againy Nita said. Sometimes I think she should be unlisted. She's never going to have any peace, at least not while she's in break-

through ... and maybe not later. They chatted a while more, then grew silent.

Nita was thinking about this in the morning as she got her breakfast. The kitchen was in havoc. Many of the riders who were picking up their horses from the stable had come in for "a quick cup of tea." Nita was learning that there was no such thing in Ireland as a quick cup of tea. What you got were several cups of tea, taking no less than half an hour, during which every manner of interesting local news was passed on. "A quick cup of tea" might happen at any hour of the day or night, might include any number of people, male or female, and always turned into a raging gossip session with hilarious laughter and recriminations.

Finally the kitchen began to clear out. The people in the hunt were splendidly dressed, all red coats and black caps and beige riding britches and black shiny boots. They were discussing the course they would ride—a mean one—from Calary Upper behind Sugarloaf, down through various farmers' lands, straight to Newcastle. The thing that concerned them was that, suddenly, there were no foxes anywhere. Nita smiled to herself. Everyone was bemused by the situation. Some people blamed hunt protesters; others blamed the weather, crop dusting, sunspots, global warming, or overzealous shooting by local farmers. Nita grinned outright, and had another cup of tea. She was beginning to really like tea.

Bri Cualann

"Well, that's all we'll see of therriy'' said her aunt Annie, pouring herself a cup as well and then flopping down in one of the kitchen chairs in thinly-disguised relief.

"I thought they were coming through here," Nita said.

"Oh, they will, but that's not until this afternoon."

"No foxes, huh?" Nita said, in great satisfaction.

"Not a one." Her aunt looked over at her and said, "Personally, I can't say that I'm exactly brokenhearted."

"Me, either," said Nita.

"Doesn't matter. They'll hunt to a drag—it's just an old fox skin that leaves a scent for the dogs. They drag it along the ground. They'll have a good time."

Nita nodded and went back to her reading, half-thinking of going down to Bray again that afternoon, to see if Ronan or Majella was around. Then she talked herself out of it. It was too nice a

day; the sun was hot There was no reason to

go into a smelly town and suffocate herself with the bus fumes and traffic. She would put a towel down outside, lie in the sun, and pretend it was the beach. She missed the beaches back home: The water here was much too cold to swim in.

So that was what she did. And at about two-fifteen, she heard the cry of the hounds. She got up and pulled a T-shirt on over her bathing suit.

put the manual in the trailer, and went to lean on the fence by the back field and see what she could see. She almost missed seeing the first horseman go by. He was about a half mile away across the field, thundering through the pasture: one rider with a long rope dragging behind him, and something dragging at the end of the rope.

There was a long pause. And then the note of the hounds came belling up over the fields, followed by the hounds themselves, woofing, lolloping, yipping. Then, over the rise behind them, came a splendid pouring of horses of all kinds— chestnut, brown, dapple, black—galloping down the hill; and a horn going tarantaral And the riders, hallooing and riding as best they could after the hounds.

It took them about a minute and a half to go by. There were about fifty people, all in their red jackets and their beige breeches and not-so-black boots. Then they were gone. The sounds of the hounds and the horses' hooves faded away over the next hill, south of the potato field, and were gone. Nita listened to the last cries fade out, then went back to lie in the sun.

The horses started coming back to the farm, some of them trucked in by trailer from Newcastle, about three hours later. There was much talk of rides and falls and jumps and water barriers, and a lot of other stuff that Nita didn't particularly understand. But everyone seemed to have had a

Bri Cualann

good time. Nita was very glad that it had been able to happen without any foxes being ripped up.

Dinner that evening was replaced by a marathon "quick cup of tea," as the grooms from the stables got together with the stable-manager and the trainers. It was at least eleven-thirty or twelve before the last of them left, having been given wine and whiskey and everything else that Aunt Annie had.

Nita escaped to her trailer about eight, having had enough of the horsey talk, but came back later and helped her aunt do the dishes, or at least rinse them and put them in the dishwasher. "There's that done with for this year," said her aunt. She rolled her eyes at the ceiling. "The way they eat!"

"Yeah. You need anything else, Aunt Annie?"

"No, I think we're OK for the night. You ready to turn in?"

"Fm going to take a little walk first."

"OK. Just watch out for those holes in the pasture. It's pretty torn up out there, what with the neighbor's cows."

"Right."

Nita got her jacket and went out into the night. It was twelve-thirty by now, but it still wasn't fully dark; in fact, it was beginning, in the northeast, to slowly brighten again. Nita cast an eye up at the sky. There was a canopy of thin clouds, enough to obscure all but the very brightest stars and the occasional planet. Jupiter was high, as was the moon.

She wandered into the pasture, into the total dark and the quiet, and just stood there and Hs-tened. It was the first time she had really felt relaxed since she had come here. She was beginning to feel a little more in control of things: She had done enough reading to at least be able to go and see a Senior and tell him or her what she thought her problem was, and to be able to discuss it in terms that made some kind of sense to someone who lived here and was familiar with this kind of situation. In the great quiet she heard birds crying, somewhere a long way away. It might have been a rookery. She had heard that creaky, cawing sound a couple of times now, when the rooks were settled down for the night and some late noise disturbed them.

She stood there under the stars, waiting for the silence to resume. It didn't resume. The cawing got louder.

More rooks. Or no — what was that?

The hair stood straight up all over her as she heard the howl. There are no wolves in Ireland! she told herself. The wolfhounds had been bred specifically to deal with them, and there hadn't been wolves in Ireland since the late 1700s.

But that howl came shuddering out of the night, and several others behind it, followed by yips and barks. And the sound of hooves—not many sets of them, but just one, a long way off. One animal, galloping. What in the worlds — ? Have I gone sideways again?

Bri Cualann

She strained to see in the moonUght. It was hard. Through the thin clouds, the moon was only at first quarter, and it was hard to see anything but a vague bloom of Hght over the cropland, black where it struck trees and hedgerows, the dimmest silver where it struck anything else. The hoofbeats got louder; and the howls got louder, too.

Nita hurriedly said the first five words of a spell that had proved very handy to her in other times and places. It was a simple force-field spell, which made a sort of shell around the wizard who spoke it. Blows went sideways from it; physical force stopped at it and just sHd off. One word would release it if she needed to—and she had a feeling she would.

In the dark, not too far away, Nita saw something moving. There were spells that would augment a wizard's vision, but she didn't have any of them prepared at the moment. Now, though, she could just begin to see the faint silvering of moon-Hght on the big thing galloping toward her.

It was not a horse. No horse ever foaled was that tall. It went by a tree she knew the height of, at the edge of the field, and then by a fencepost she knew was only about six feet high. The top of the post came to just below its shoulder as the massive four-legged creature sprinted toward her. It definitely was not a horse, not with those antlers, six feet across at least; not with that skull, a yard and a half long; and no horse had such a voice, trumpeting, desperate, a sound like the night

being torn edge to edge. She had seen its picture. It was an elk, but not like any elk that walked the earth these days; it was the old Irish elk, extinct since the ice came down.

It went by her like a piece of storm, its breath like a blast of fog. It shook the ground as it ran, and its feet went deep into the soft pasture, churning up great chunks of grass. It flew past her and gave her never a look. Bellowing, on it went, with a great roar, a trumpeting like an elephant's. And behind it came the wolves.

They were not normal wolves. All the wolfhounds in Ireland could not have done anything about these. These were the wolves that had hunted the Irish elk when they still walked this part of the world. They were four feet high at the shoulder, easily. She saw them come past the fencepost, too. They were rough-coated, their eyes huge and dark except when the moon glinted in them as one or another threw up its head to howl as it ran. A faint mist of Hght clung to them that had nothing to do with the mist on the field, or the moonlight. Their teeth were longer than a regular wolfs; their feet were bigger; their heads were heavier and more brutish. They were dire wolves, the wolves of the Stone Age or earlier. Cams lupus dirus. They were hunting the elk.

It suddenly occurred to Nita that there might be someone following behind this pack, as there had been someone behind the dogs this morning ... and she did not want to meet that someone.

Bri Cualann

The wolves tore forward. There were about twenty of them. More than half of them held the main course, on the elk's track: The rest saw or scented her, she had no idea which, and angled toward her. Nita said the sixth word of the spell, felt the shield wink into place around her. Hurriedly she said the first eighteen words of another spell she knew, a killing spell she was very reluctant to use; but she had no weapon spell handy that was less dangerous, and frankly she was more willing to see the wolves dead than herself. If they can be killed at all Are they even real. .. ?

Nita braced herself as best she could, and waited. The first wolf hit her shield—and didn't bounce; it knocked her down. Nita got a horrible glimpse of fangs trying desperately to break through to her—failing for the moment—

In shock, she fumbled for the last word of the killing spell but couldn't remember it. Those fangs knocked against the shield, right in front of her face, bending the shield in toward her—

Suddenly, hooves came down from above and broke the wolf's head, and kicked its body aside, and smashed its spine into the ground. Other wolves bit and hung onto the great dark shape that was rearing above Nita, while it smashed at more of the wolves with its hooves. The elk had bought her the second she needed; she remembered the nineteenth word. She said it.

Nita did not enjoy the sound that followed, but the spell worked, even though the shield hadn't.

The wolves were flesh and blood enough that when you suddenly removed all the membranes from between their cells, the result was emphatic. It rained blood briefly. Nita looked at another of the wolves near her and said the nineteenth word. The wolf turned in mid-leap and showered down in gore. She said the nineteenth word again, and again, and she kept saying it, having no weapon more merciful, until there was nothing left but a sickly black wet patch in the field, gleaming dully in the moonlight... and the Irish elk, standing with its head down, panting, looking at her with great, dumb, understanding eyes.

Nita let the shield spell go, staggered to her feet, and tottered over to the elk. Its flanks and shoulders were torn where the dire wolves* teeth had met. "Brother," she said in the Speech, "let me see to those before you go."

"Hurry," said the elk. "The loss of the pack has slowed him. But he's coming."

Hey Nita thought, and broke out in a cold sweat.

Fortunately, there was plenty of blood around, blood being what you needed for almost all the healing spells. Nita had some experience with those. She called her manual to her and it came, hurriedly. She started turning pages, not worrying where the blood that she was smeared with went. "Here," she said, and began reading the quickest of the heaUng spells, a forced adhesion that would not require her own blood and would cause the

Bri Cualann

damaged tissue to at least hold together long enough for the knitting process to start. The spell was little more than wizardly Krazy Glue, but Nita was satisfied that the elk's body would be able to manage the rest of the business itself; the wounds weren't too serious.

It took about five minutes' recitation before the last of the wounds shut itself. The elk stood there shivering in all its limbs, as if expecting something to come after it out of the night. Nita was shivering, too; the healer always partook of the suffering of the healed—that was part of the price paid.

"Go now," she said. "Get out of here!"

The elk tossed its head and leaped away, galloping across the field. Nita stood there, panting, and wondering. ''Get out of here,'' Where is "here'' anymore? Did I go sideways... or did they?

She stood for a moment, listening. The silence reasserted itself, deep and whole, and the moon came out from behind a cloud.

Nita looked up at it and sighed, then turned and started making her way back to the farm. I'm going to have to do something about these clothes before morning, she thought. / suppose the book has some laundry spells... But she couldn't push the bigger problem out of her mind.

Without any spell worked by me, something came through from sideways. A lot of somethings.

I'm in deep, deep trouble ...

Aih na Sceire

Enniskerry

The next morning Nita decided she would need expert help, and fast.

She pulled out her manual and began going through it looking for the names and addresses of the local Seniors. There were four Seniors for Ireland—one was on retirement leave, two were on active assignment and hence not available for consults, and one, the Area Senior, was located in a place called Castle Matrix. This impressed Nita, though not as much as it would have a couple of weeks before, when she had thought that probably half the people in Ireland Hved in old castles. Now she hoped her business would take her that way... but you didn't go bothering the Area Advisory with a problem if you weren't sure it couldn't be handled at a less central level.

She therefore concentrated on the addresses of wizards in the Bray and Greystones area. There

Ath na Sceire

were about forty of these, which surprised her— she had been expecting fewer. Wizards on active status usually are only about one percent of the population, though in some places it can run as high as ten.

She looked the Hst up and down in mild perplexity. There was a problem in this part of the world; people tended not to use street numbers imless they Hved in a housing estate. Sometimes they didn't even have a street, so that you might see an address that said, "Ballyvolan, Kilquade, County Wicklow"—and if you didn't know where Kilquade was, or what Ballyvolan was, or what road it was on, you were in trouble.

She sighed, ticked off a couple of names in Bray that did have street numbers. That done, she went to find her aunt Annie.

"Going out, are you?" Annie asked.

*Tfeah. Aunt Annie, can you tell me where Boghall Road is?"

"The Boghall Road? That's, um, just off the back road between Greystones and Bray. What for?"

"Oh, I met somebody in one of the cafes in Bray yesterday, and I thought I might go over that way and see if I can find them." This was not entirely a fib—the sound and feel of Ronan's lean, edged, angry humor had kept coming back to her for the past day or so. It was just that the two phrases had nothing to do with each other, and if

Aunt Annie thought they did, well... that was just fine.

Her aunt said, "Here, let me draw you a map."

"Oh, thank you!" Nita said with considerable gratitude. Her aunt sat down, sketched her a thumbnail map, and said, "If you get off the 45 bus here, at the top of Boghall, it's not a long walk to wherever you're going. That sound all right?"

"Fine, Aunt Annie... thanks."

"What time will you be back?"

"Not real late."

"All right. Call if you run into any problems. And take an umbrella or something: The weathermen have been predicting thundershowers."

"WiU do." And she headed out.

She took the bus as far as a handy bit of woodland she had spotted not too far away from where the road from Greystones to Bray started downhill toward the town, just outside of the big Kilrud-dery estate. Nita had noticed it the other day—a stand of five cypresses, very big, very old. Generally the only people who walked up that way were the traveUng people who Hved in their trailers by the side of the road there.

So Nita popped into that grove of trees, looked around her, and paused for a moment. It was a matter of curiosity. Though you might have a sense of how many wizards were working in the area, there was one quick way to find out. It was

Ath na Sceire

difficult for a wizard to spend as much as a day without doing some wizardry, the Art being its own delight. She opened her manual, as she stood there under the trees in the summer sun, and quickly did the spell that showed one whatever active wizardries were working in an area. Ideally what happened was that the world blanked out and you were presented with a sort of schematic —points of light in a field—on which the real world was dimly overlaid. She did not get what she was expecting. Nita staggered back against one of the trees, half blinded. It was not just points of light that she was perceiving, but fields of it, whole patches of it—great tracts of residual wizardry that just had not gone away.

It's not supposed to do that! Nita thought. In theory the traces of a wizardry were gone by at least forty-eight hours later. But this — ! It looked as if either the biggest wizardry on earth had been done here about two days ago, or else—and this concerned Nita more—all the wizardries done here in the past were still here, in residue.

She shut down the spell and stood there shaking. That last thought was not a good one. Doing a wizardry over another one, overlaying an old magic, was extremely dangerous. The two spells could synergize in ways that neither the wizard who wrought the original spell nor the one presently working could have expected. The results could be horrendous.

No wonder, she thought. If that's the reason for

last nighty something like that — Was I working in an overlay area? She called up the spell in memory for a moment more to look at it. All of Kilquade was covered by one big patch of residual wizardry; all of Bray was covered by another. There was, in fact, very Httle open space in this area that had not had a wizardry done on it at one time or another. She thought with horror of what might have happened had she done a teleportation spell closer to a more heavily overlaid area, like Bray. It was not a pleasant prospect at all

She walked down the Boghall Road. It was a suburban street, with a church and a school at one end, a computer factory at the other end, and a baker's, Httle shops, and more houses and housing estates scattered along it or branching off from it. Mothers were out walking their babies in buggies; kids were out kicking soccer balls around.

Nita made her way to the address she was looking for, on a street called Novara Court, which branched off Boghall Road. All the houses here were very much the same. There was not much in the way of trees, as if people didn't want to block the view of Sugarloaf to the west or Bray Head immediately to the east. It was a handsome view.

Nita found the house but had an attack of shyness before she reached the doorstep. How can I just go up and knock on the door and ask if there are wizards there? But that was exactly what she needed to do, and there was no way out of it. Nita went up and rang the bell.

Ath na Sceire

There was a long, long wait. Oh goody Nita was just thinking, no one's home —when the door was abruptly pulled open.

It was Ronan, from the chicken place.

He looked at her in astonishment.

She looked at him in much the same mood. Once again she was on the end of one of those coincidences of which wizards' lives are made, and which normal people (incorrectly) never take too seriously. A wizard, though, knows there are no coincidences. And she had told her aunt that she was coming to see him. Fve got to watch what I say around here! And there was something else. An odd tremor—anticipation, a shiver down her back at the sight of him scowling at her, tall and dark, that she didn't quite know what to make of....

"R. Nolan?" she asked. "Junior?''

"Yeah," he said, perplexed. "You're from—"

"I'm on errantry," Nita said, "and I greet you."

He stared at her with his mouth open. "Fo/^?" he asked.

"Me."

"You mean you're one of «5?"

"Um." Nita made a wry face at him, and lowered her voice. "I've been places where the people had tentacles and more eyes than you have hairs," she said, "and they didn't make this much fuss about it. Can we talk? I require an advice."

It was the formal phrasing for a wizard on

assignment who needed technical information. Ronan stared at her and said, "J^st a minute. I'll get my jacket."

The door shut in her face, and Nita stood there on the doorstep, feeling like an idiot. After a moment Ronan came out again, and they walked. "Let's get out of here," he said. "I don't want to be seen."

Nita had to laugh at that, though she got an odd twinge of pain when he said it. Not seen with me? Or what? "What, am I contagious or something?" she asked, as they made their way down to the Boghall Road.

"No, it's just—" He didn't say what it was just. "Never mind. You mean youWe a—"

"Can we stop having this part of the conversation?" Nita said, both irritated and amused. "There's more stuff to talk about. Listen. This going sideways thing—"

"What?"

"Going sideways," Nita said, getting a Httle more irritated. "I assume you know about it. Well, it's happened to me twice in the past three days, and I don't mind telling you that I don't Hke it very much—"

''YoH went sideways}'' Ronan asked. "We're not allowed to go sideways—"

"Listen," Nita said, "maybe jo/^'re not allowed to go sideways, fine, but / did it, and not on purpose, let me tell you. Now I need to talk to

Ath na Sceire

someone and find out what's going on here, because last night I was almost eaten by wolves and nearly stepped on by an Irish elk!"

"Jeez," said Ronan, almost in awe.

Nita smiled slightly. "My feeUngs exactly," she said. Carefully she told him how things had been going for her since she arrived.

"You could have been killed!" Ronan said.

"Tell me something I don't know," Nita said. "And I would like to avoid being killed in the future! Is this kind of thing normal?"

"Not really," Ronan said. "At least, not for us. We're not supposed to be doing that kind of thing. This whole area is badly overlaid."

"I saw that," Nita said. "But look... this kind of thing isn't safe."

"You got that in one," Ronan said, looking grim. "Jeez, Kilquade, Kilquade was supposed to be comparatively quiet. Not like Bray—"

"Things have gotten very unquiet up that way," Nita said. "Do you have a Senior around here that we can go talk to? This is not good at all."

"Sure. She's up in Enniskerry."

"Then let's get up there. I'm on active, and I don't know what for, and if I can't do wizardry for fear of overlays I am going to have a nasty problem on my hands. Have you got your manual?"

He looked at her. "Manual?"

"You know. Your wizard's manual, where you get the spells and the ancillary data."

(

"You get them out of a book}'*

Nita was confused. ''Where else would you get them?"

Ronan looked at her as if she were very dim indeed. ''The way we always have—the way the druids and bards did it for two, three thousand years, maybe more. We do it by memory!"

Now Nita's mouth fell open. "You learn the whole manual by heart? The whole body of spells?"

"Well, the basic stuff. You have to learn the basic incantations that make more detailed information available. But mostly, mostly you learn it by heart—the area restrictions, the address Hst—if a change happens, you usually just wake up knowing about it one morning—and you make sure you remember it." He shook his head. "Why? You mean you get it written down?"

Nita pulled out her manual and showed it to him. Ronan paged through it with a mixture of fascination and disgust. "I can't believe this. This makes it too easy!"

"Are you kidding? Do you have any idea how thick this thing can get sometimes? I think we have a httle more information to deal with than you do over here."

"Don't be so sure," Ronan said, handing the manual back to her in some irritation. "We may be a smaller place than you Yanks have to deal with, but it's a lot more complicated."

They walked down the street, each in a state of

Ath na Sceire

mild annoyance with the other. "Look/' Nita said, "let's not fight over details. Are there a lot of you working around here? How many of you are there?"

Ronan shook his head. "Not a lot, really. We don't seem able to keep a lot of our wizards after eighteen or so."

"Why? What happens?"

"Emigration," Ronan said. "To England and the States. There's not much work here. You may be a wizard, but you've got to have a job, too. You can't make food or money out of nothing... The universe doesn't allow it."

"No," Nita said.

Ronan looked at her with more annoyance. "But there are still a fair number of locals. Can't understand why they should put you on active all of a sudden."

"Mmmh," Nita said. "Possibly past experience." She didn't feel like going into much more detail. "Never mind that. Let's go and see your Senior."

"We'll have to take the bus," Ronan said.

Enniskerry was about four miles away. Their bus crossed the dual carriageway and then went up a twisty, turny route the locals called "the thirteen-bend road." It paralleled the Glencree River as it poured down through beautiful woodland. Occasional old houses were scattered along

the way, but mostly the road was bounded by hedges on one side and walls on the other, and the river chattering on the far side of the hedge.

They sat in the top of the bus. "I can't believe it/' Ronan kept saying. "I mean, a Yank —!"

"Some of us have to be wizards," Nita said, rolling her eyes. "You know that. We can't function entirely with immigrants from Ireland." She grinned at him wickedly.

"Well, I suppose. But books!"

"You should see my sister," Nita said. "She gets hers out of a computer."

"Jeez," Ronan said in wonder and disgust.

They arrived at Enniskerry village. It was a pretty place; there was a handsome little red-and-white hotel with peaked roofs, a pub, some small antique stores, a food shop, and a florist. In the middle of the town's triangular "square" was a wonderful Victorian clock tower with a domed top and a weathervane. "Do we get off here?'* Nita asked.

"Not unless you want to spend ten minutes climbing the steepest hill you've ever seen."

"Noooo...I'll pass."

The bus paused in the square for a few minutes, then continued up the winding road, which led westward. Where the road topped out, near another housing estate and a little store, they got off. Ronan turned and began to walk back down the hill. "It's over here," he said.

Ath na Sceire

They walked partway down the hill and crossed the road to a pair of wooden gates between two pillars, one of which had the words kilgarron HOUSE painted on it. "Wow," Nita said.

There was a little side gate; Ronan opened it for her, and they stepped through. Inside was a curving driveway leading to a large two-story house. Square and blocky, it might have been a farmhouse once. It had a beautiful view of the Dargle Valley, leading down toward Bray, and also of the church and water meadow just down the hill.

They went up to the door and knocked. There was a long pause, and then a little old lady came to the door. She was fresh faced and smooth skinned, and only the fact that her hair was quite silver really gave away much about her age. She was a bit stocky, with sharp, intelligent eyes. "Morning, Mrs. Smyth," said Ronan.

"And good morning to you," she said in a faintly Scots accent. "Are you on business or pleasure?"

"Business," Ronan said, nodding at Nita. "She's on errantry."

"I greet you, ma'am," Nita said, as she would have said to an American Senior she was being introduced to. The lady blinked at her.

"Are you on active status?"

"Yes'm. At least the manual says so."

"Then you'd better come in and have a cup of tea, and tell me what it's all about."

Nita rolled her eyes sHghtly at the prospect of

yet another cup of tea, and resigned herself to the inevitable.

They were made comfortable in the sitting room, and the tea was brought out, and Mrs. Smyth poured it formally for them, and gave them cookies and sandwiches and cakes, and encouraged them to eat more before she would let them tell her anything about what was going on. Then Nita began to explain, as she had to Ronan. When she mentioned Tualha, and a few of the things the kitten had talked about, Mrs. Smyth's eyes widened. When Nita mentioned going sideways, Mrs. Smyth's jaw almost dropped. *'My dear," she said. "I hope you understand that you must not do that again."

"Ma'am, I didn't do it on purpose the first time. Or the third. The only time I did it on purpose was when I looked at Sugarloaf. I won't do it again."

"I wonder..." Mrs. Smyth said. "Well. Something is certainly in the wind. We're coming up on Lughnasad; I'd be surprised if it didn't have something to do with that."

Ronan bit his lip. Nita looked from one of them to the other. "I hope you'll forgive me if I don't know what's going on here," she said, "but if I'm going to be on active status..."

"No, indeed. Lughnasad is one of the four great holidays—with Beltain, Samhain, and Imbolc. It used to be the harvest festival, a long time ago:

Ath na Sceire

People would celebrate the first crops coming in. And it also celebrated the turning of the heat of the summer toward the cooler weather."

"The heat of the summer?" Nita said, mildly skeptical. So far it had only gotten up into the high seventies.

Mrs. Smyth blinked at her. "Oh, you're used to it warmer where you live? We're not, though. I think the drought is just about official now, isn't it, Ronan?"

"They said they were going to start water rationing," Ronan said.

"So," said Mrs. Smyth. "I suppose that's another indication as well. Anyway, Nita's quite right; if this is allowed to continue, even the nonwizardly will start to notice it... and be endangered by it. This is, mmm, an undesirable outcome."

Nita couldn't help but laugh at that. "But what are you going to do about it?"

"Well, I think we're going to have to get together and discuss the matter."

"But if you don't do something—"

"My dear," Mrs. Smyth said, "you come from a very... energetic... school of wizardry. I appreciate that. But we do things a little more slowly here. No, we need to call the local wizards and the Area Supervisors together, and discuss what needs to be done. It'll take a day at least."

Nita chafed at that. It seemed to her that a day might be too long. But she was a stranger here,

and theoretically these people knew best. "What do you think they'll decide?" Ronan said.

Mrs. Smyth shook her head. "It's hard to say. If we have here a rising of the old sort—a re-assertion of the events associated with this holiday—then normally one would also have to reassert, reenact, the events that stopped whatever thing it was that happened."

"But what was it that happened?" Nita said.

"The second battle of Moytura," Ronan said. "I suppose you won't have heard about it—"

"I've heard about it," Nita said. "A little cat told me. In considerable detail."

"A cat told you?"

"Yeah. She said she was a bard, and—"

Mrs. Smyth looked at Nita in surprise. "You mentioned this before, but we didn't pursue it. How old was this cat?"

"She's a kitten. Not very old... maybe ten weeks." Nita told them, as well as she could remember, everything Tualha had told her.

"That is interesting," Mrs. Smyth said. "Normally cat-bards aren't born unless there's about to be some change in the ruled world, the animal world—as well as the human one. And she mentioned the Carrion-Crow, did she?"

Nita nodded. "I get a feeling that's not good?"

Ronan made a face. "The Morrigan is trouble," he said. "She turns up in the old stories, sometimes as a war goddess, or sometimes as three of them."

"It's the usual problem," Mrs. Smyth said, "of

Ath na Sceire

the language not being adequate to describe the reality. The Morrigan is one of the Powers, a much diminished one... though even the lesser Powers were often mistaken for gods in the ancient times. She has become, or made herself, the expression of change and violence. There was a lot of that around here in the old days," she said, and sighed. "And now. But she's also the peace afterward... if people will just let it be. Carrion-Crow she might be, but the crows are the aftermath of the battle, nature's attempt to clean it up... not the cause of it." Mrs. Smyth turned her teacup around. "It's dangerous to see her... but not always bad. She shows herself as a tall, dark woman, a fierce one. But she almost always smiles. She is Ireland, in some ways: one of its personifications. Or its hauntings."

She looked up at Ronan again. "So, the Morrigan... and the Hunt. Some very old memories are being resurrected. The foxhunt's running must have reminded the world of an older hunt over the same ground."

"What were those animals?" Nita said. "They looked Uke dire wolves, but they had some kind of werehght around them."

"They were faery dire wolves," Mrs. Smyth said, "from one of the companion worlds."

"Who was following them?" Nita said.

Mrs. Smyth looked at her. "I see by the KjiowI-edge," she said, "that you've had a certain amount of dealing with the Other. The head of the

Fomori—the Lone Power. I should say, a dangerous amount of deaUngs with It.'*

"I don't deal with It," Nita said. '^Against It, possibly." She began to get angry. "I don't think you need to doubt which side I'm on. Are you saying that you think I'm attracting this trouble?"

Wizards do not tell white lies to make people feel better. Mrs. Smyth said nothing.

"Well, if I'm here for that purpose," Nita said, "I'm here because the Powers That Be sent me. If I'm a trigger, it's Their finger that's on me, not the Lone One's. The Lone One can't move wizards ... you know that."

"I do know that," Mrs. Smyth said. "There have been changes in the Lone One recently, and you had something to do with those."

"Something," Nita said.

Ronan looked at her, and then back at Mrs. Smyth. "Her?"

"She was involved just now in the Song of the Twelve," Mrs. Smyth said. Ronan looked at her wide-eyed. "She was also involved in— Well, never mind. It's a distinguished start—if you and your partner survive, of course. Wizardly talent is usually tested to destruction. Your sister," Mrs. Smyth said, "where is she now? Did she come with you?"

"No, she's back in New York."

"Pity," Mrs. Smyth said. "At any rate, I advise you to keep your use of wizardry to the minimum. Ronan, you'll want to speak to your friends

Ath na Sceire

among the locals, especially the young ones. If anyone finds themselves going sideways, tell them not to meddle."

"What kind of reenactment were you thinking of doing?'' Nita said.

"Well, my dear," Mrs. Smyth said, "we have a problem. If there's a reenactment of Moytura to be done, we don't have anything to do it with, even though three of the Treasures still exist."

"What do you mean, you don't have anything to do it with?"

"Nita," Mrs. Smyth said, "it took one of the Powers That Be a very long time to invest those objects with strength enough to function against the Lone Power in the form It took. The legend says that anything that the Lone One in Balor's form beheld with his eye open burst straightaway into fire and fell as ash, and poisoned the ground for leagues around so that nothing would grow there, and men who walked that ground died."

"Sounds nuclear," Nita said.

"So it might have been," Mrs. Smyth said. "The Lone One has never minded using natural phenomena for Its own ends. But Its power was so terrible that only an army of all the wizards in Ireland—for that's what the druids were—could even think about going up against It; and without the Treasures to protect them, they all would have been destroyed. The cup, known as the Cauldron of Rebirth, raised up their fallen; the sword, Fragarach the Answerer, held off Balor's creatures;

and the Stone of Destiny kept the ground of Ireland whole and rooted when Balor's dark ships would have dragged it off its foundations and overturned the whole island into the deep. All the Treasures' power together, and all the wizards', was just enough to buy the time for the Spear of Lugh to pierce Balor's fire and quench it at last."

She took a sip of her tea. "Now, three of the four Treasures we still have—at least one of them is in the National Museum in Dublin. But they have no virtue anymore. No one believes that the gold-and-silver cup they have there, the Ardagh Chalice, is actually the Well of Transformations, the Bottomless Cauldron. No one really believes that the poor old notched bronze blade in the glass case is Fragarach, even though the legends say so. Its virtue has long since ebbed away as a result: The soul in it, if you like, has departed. And the Lia Fail is now just a cracked stone half-buried in the ground somewhere up north, with an iron picket fence around it, and tourists come and take its picture because it's supposed to be Saint Patrick's gravestone or some such. Not because of what it really is, or was." Her smile was rueful. "The thousands of years and the loss of true knowledge of the nature of the Protectors have taken them and made them just a cup, just a sword, and a rock."

"What about the spear?"

"Its soul was the strongest of all of the Treasures," Mrs. Smyth said. "It should be the easiest

Ath na Sceire

to find... but it's nowhere in the world that we can feel. No, what we're going to do—if a reenactment—'' She sighed. "I'd say we might have to wake up what's left of the Treasures. We're going to have to work something out from scratch. In the meantime, if I were you, I would step lightly. And thank you for coming to me. Where are you staying?"

"With my aunt, Anne Callahan, at Ballyvolan." "Right," said Mrs. Smyth, and made a note. "Now then, another cup of tea?" Nita groaned.

Nita and Ronan went down to the little tea shop in Enniskerry and had a Coke to kill the time until the bus was ready to leave. "She's not much like the Seniors at home," Nita said, thoughtful, "except she's as tough."

Ronan was sitting slumped in his chair, his legs crossed, scowling out at her from under those black brows. The hair rose a little on Nita's neck, and she started to blush, and felt extremely stupid. "Just because she's not like your precious Seniors," he said.

"Ronan, just shut your face. You think you're the hottest thing on wheels, don't you?" And Nita scowled back at him, mostly to cover her own confusion at her anger. "You've got a chip on your shoulder the size of a two-by-four, and you'd better do something about it before it ruins your wiz-

ardry. And I'm not one of your little herd of head-nodders, so don't waste your dirty looks on me. You don't like the news, that's just tough."

He stared at Nita, and his expression had changed slightly when she dared to look at him again. He looked a little shocked, still angry; but there was an odd thread of Hking there. "No," he said softly, "you're not one of them, are you? Girls have mean mouths where you come from."

She blushed again, feeHng more Uke an idiot than ever, not understanding her own discomfort. "Wizards tell the truth where I come from," she said, annoyed. "I wasn't criticizing your Senior, as you would have discovered if you'd let me finish. Your manners need work, too."

"And what else needs work?" he said, that same odd soft tone.

She just looked at him, and her insides roiled. That dark regard was disconcerting when it was bent hard on you—worse still when he was smiling. He really is pretty cooly she thought, somewhat to her own horror. She wondered for a moment what some of the girls at school would think of this guy if they had a chance to see him. She knew what they would think, and what they would say. He was the kind of guy who gets notes passed about him all day, the kind that girls look at from the safety of groups, stealing glances, laughing softly together at their shared thoughts about him. What would you do if you got him alone, .. ?

Ath na Sceire

And she was alone with him.

"Hulloooo!" he said to her, waving a hand in front of her face. "Earth to Nita!"

"Uh, what?" she said hurriedly. She finished her Coke in one gulp. "Listen, the bus is starting up."

"What's the hurry? I don't hear—" From outside there came a roar of diesel engine. Ronan looked at Nita oddly, then grinned. She flushed again and inwardly swore at herself. Ohy he is cute. This is awful!

"Can't keep the man waiting," Ronan said, and got up. "You going to come with?"

"Uh, no, ril walk it. Fresh air," she said, mortified at the feebleness of the excuse. "Exercise."

"As far as the bus stop, then."

Reluctantly she walked out to see him that far.

"Do you have my number?" Ronan said as he got on. "Call me if you have any problems."

Problems! Do I have problems! Sweet Powers That Be... "I'll do that," Nita said. ^Tou're in the book."

Ronan made an annoyed face. "I can't believe this," he said, and the bus doors shut in front of him.

Nita started home to Kilquade. It was a longish walk, but she was really beginning to enjoy the walking. This was one of the prettiest places she had ever been, and the quiet and the sound of the wind and the warm, fair weather were all conspiring to make it very pleasant.

I

She couldn't get rid of the look of Ronan's face, the whole feel of him, the uneasy, uncomfortable sense of—power: There was no other word for it. Add to that the fact that he was good-looking, and funny, when he wasn't angry—even then—Nita smiled grimly at herself, annoyed: It was funny to want someone to whom she also wanted to give a few good kicks.

Heaven help we, that^s what it is. Fve got a crush on him.

The admission made her nervous. Neither her parents nor the sex education classes at school ever told her anything really useful about how to handle this kind of thing. Oh, the mechanics of it, body changes and so forth, and how not to catch diseases, and responsibility, and family planning. Not important stuff, like kissing—how do you do it and still breathe? Is not wearing a bra a come-on? Is it worth it to chase someone, or will that just make you look stupid? And if you catch him, what do you do then?

Or what do you do if you get caught?

Nita heard something stirring in the hedge off to the right. At first she thought it was a bird— lots of birds nested in these hedges, encouraged by the thorns—but this sounded too loud. Nita paused, and saw a flash of color, a soft, russet red.

^'Ai elhua/' whispered a voice in the Speech, "I have a word for you."

Nita's eyebrows went up. She hunkered down by the hedge. The red dog-fox was deep inside it,

Ath na Sceire

curled up comfortably in a little niche in the wall the hedge grew against.

''Madreen rua!" she said. "Are you all right?"

"Oh yes. But that you may be—" The fox glanced around, a shifty, conspiratorial look. "And that I may repay a debt and all things be even again. There are wizardries afoot."

"No kidding."

"Then you should get help for those wizardries. One of the Ard-Tuatha de Danaan is in hide, not half a mile from here."

Nita was confused: There were several different ways to translate the term. ''Ard — You mean, one of the Powers That Be? Here}''

"In truth. We are bound, we are all bound not to say exactly where, or who. But It is one of the Old Ones. Catch It at Its work, and It must help you, yes?"

"That's one way to put it." Nita frowned. The Powers That Be were required to assist wizards when requested to do so. But you had to catch Them first... and They usually made that difficult, preferring to do Their work in secret. That made it harder for the Lone Power to sabotage Them,

"Well," she said. "I am warned, madreen rua. My thanks."

"All's even," the fox said, and in the tiny space where it lay, it somehow managed to get up, turn around, and vanish back through a dark hole under the wall.

Nita got up and went on, trying to make sense

of what the fox had told her. It's bard to believe. Wby would one of the Powers be hanging around here?

She made her way down the hctie lane to her aunt's driveway and the faroL In the field to the right. Aunt Annie was heading off with a rake over her shoulder, probably to do something about the new potatoes she had just planted. They were a rare breed, something called fir-apple potatoes, and Aunt Annie raked and weeded them herself every day and wouldn't let anyone near them.

Nita griimed at this and went inside. She was making herself a sandwich in the kitchen when the phone began to ring. Nita ran for it, picked it up, and as she had heard others do, said, ^'Ballyvolan.''

Ts Mrs. Callahan diere^

*^o, she's not... Can I take a mess^^ for vou?"

''Yes, please. Tell her that Shaun O'Driscoll called, and ask her to call back immediately; it's very urgent."

'^All right." Nita scribbled down the message and said, *^'ll see if I can catch her; she just went out. Bye." And she ran out across the gravel yard, vaulted the fence, and headed into the field.

Far away, over the hill of the second field, she could see her aunt walking toward die litde rise in the middle of it. Yelling at her seemed ridiculous at this point, so ^nta just ran after her as quickly as she could, puffing.

She was rather surprised to see her aunt take

Ath na Sceire

the rake off her shoulder and bang the wooden end of it on the ground.

She was even more surprised when the Httle hill split open and her aunt walked into the fissure.

Nita stopped and stood very still for a moment, and her mouth fell open.

Oh no! she thought. And she remembered Tom, her local Senior wizard, saying to her father, "Well, you know, Ed, it's your side of the family that the wizardry comes down from..."

My dad's sister. ..

My aunt's a wizard!

Nita ran after her, toward the gaping darkness in the side of the hill.

Faoin gCnoc

Under the Hill

The fissure was deeper and wider than it looked. Is this happening in my world? Nita thought, and paused for a moment to try to see with double vision, as she had the other day. True enough, mere daylight vision showed her a smooth hill, no crack, nothing. But then no one in the house had seen her aunt... and she had. Nita was seeing sideways where her aunt was, and this was sideways, too. Not as sideways as it might have been, of course.

"Aunt Annie," she said, not loud, but urgently and with enough volume to carry. Ahead of her, her aunt stopped in shock, standing there with the rake.

She looked back at Nita and said, "Oh no." "Aunt Annie," Nita said, grinning a little in spite of herself, "what did they tell you about why they'd sent me here?"

Faoin gCnoc

Aunt Annie's mouth opened and shut, and then she said, "When I get my hands on Ed... Fm going to pull his head off and hand it to him/*

"They couldn't exactly tell you," Nita said, immediately wanting to defend her father. "It's not his fault."

"Maybe not," Aunt Annie said, "but, Nita! I had no idea!"

"Actually, I was hoping you wouldn't," Nita said, wryly. "I don't usually try to advertise it."

"But how can you be here?" Aunt Annie said. Then she shook her head. "Never mind that now. That you're here means you're intended to be. I've got business. Let's go see them."

"Them?"

*^Be polite," Aunt Annie said. "And follow my lead."

Nita was entirely willing. She followed her aunt into the hill.

It was not a hill. It was a city. It was like the one that Nita had seen crowning Sugarloaf, but smaller, more intimate. It could not, of course, be inside the hill. It was two, three—ten? fifty?—universes over from Nita's world: broad streets, airy shade, the sound of running water, stone as fluidly formed as if it had been clay once, or flesh—but paused in mid-movement, possibly to move again someday. The buildings showed hints of thatched houses and old castles and castles no human being could have imagined, hints of architecture Nita

recognized as extraterrestrial from her travels: Apparently the builders had had connections elsewhere.

The light was different, too: harder, somehow clearer than the light that rested on the fields around Aunt Annie's farm. Things seemed to have sharper edges, more weight, more meaning. Nothing here needed to glow with magical light or anything so blatant. Things here were too busy being re^/...more real even than the "real world.'* It was a slightly unnerving effect.

"Oh, and one other thing," her aunt said. "Don't eat or drink anything here."

Nita burst out laughing. "There had to be one place in Ireland where no one was going to make me drink tea or eat anything," she said.

Her aunt looked at her cockeyed, then laughed. "Well, you keep thinking of it that way."

They walked on among the high houses. "Where are we going?" Nita asked.

"To talk to the people who live here," said her aunt. "I do have certain rights. This is my land— I am the landowner—" She chuckled then. "As if anyone in Ireland can really own land. We all just borrow it for a while." She glanced at Nita. "Where were you last night?"

"I was out with some very, very large things that should have been wolves, but weren't," Nita said. "Oh, by the way. There was a phone call for you. A Shaun O'Driscoll—"

Faoin gCnoc

"I just bet/' said Aunt Annie. "The Area Senior. Well, we'll see him shortly, but I need to deal with these first."

"These people—"

"You know the name," her aunt said. ^'We don't usually say it; it's considered impolite. Like shouting at someone, *Hey, human!' "

The Sidhe, Nita thought. The people of the hills... the not'SO'little little people. "You see them often?" Nita said.

"Often enough. 'Good fences make good neighbors,' as the poet says. However, every now and then, when you share common ground, you need to have a good long chat over the fence. That's what this is about."

They came to the heart of the city. There were twelve trees in a circle, and three bright chairs im-der the trees, seemingly resting on the surface of a pool of water. Or rather, the chairs on either side of the central one were true chairs; the central one was a throne. The trees moved in the wind, and the shadows thrown by their branches wove and shifted on the surface of the bright water in patterns that seemed to Nita to be always on the edge of meaning. People stood around and watched from under the shade of those trees: tall people, fair people, with beautiful dogs at heel. Handsome cats sat here and there, watching; unconcerned birds sang rainbows in the trees. Nita tried to look at a few of the people and found it difficult. It wasn't that they were indistinct. They were almost

too solid to bear, and their clothes and weapons, in an antique style, all shone with certainty and existence.

The chairs on either side of the throne were filled; a man sat in one, a woman in the other. The throne was empty. Aunt Annie walked straight toward the three seats, across the water. Nita watched with professional interest. She knew several ways to walk on water, but she felt safe in assuming that the water here was more assertive and didn*t mind being walked on without more active speUing. She headed out after her aunt.

Aunt Annie stopped about ten feet away from the central throne, acknowledged it with a slight nod, and then looked at the person sitting in the right-hand chair. "The greeting of gods and men to you, Amadaim of the Queen of the Hill in Cualann. And to you. Lady of this Forth."

The lady bowed her head. "To you also, Aoine ni Cealodhairiy greeting," said the man in the right-hand chair. "And greeting to you, Shonaiula ni Cealodhain"

Nita was slightly out of her depth, but she knew how to be polite. She bowed slightly and said, "I am on errantry, fair people, and the One greets you by me."

"This we had known," said the woman in the chair.

"Then perhaps you will explain to me," said Aunt Annie, "why my niece was chased halfway across my field last night by that one's hunt. I

Faoin gCnoc

thought we had an agreement that if you saw any power of that kind waking, you would warn me so that I could take appropriate action."

"We had no warning ourselves, Aoiney*' said the woman.

"I would then appreciate your view of what*s happening here. It's most unusual for you to have no warning of so major an intrusion. That you didn't means we have trouble on our hands."

"Trouble rarely comes near us, Aoine. But it would be true to say that the past is becoming troublesome. We have had a messenger at our gates... one of the Fomori."

"And what did this messenger say?"

"That the old shall become new in our fields, and yours. He offered us... what we were offered once before: the end of your kind, once and for all."

Aunt Annie said nothing. The young man, the Amadaun, looked at Nita and said, "You must understand that the children of the Milesians are not looked upon with favor in some of the Fifth House."

"If you mean that some of the nonhuman species think humans were a dumb idea," Nita said, "yes, I've heard that opinion before."

"There are those Powers in this part of the world, and children of the Powers—Powers fallen lower than we—who never looked kindly on human folk and would be glad to see them all dead. At their own hands, or by the hands of other

humans—so that old angers are inflamed, and old hatreds seem to live uncannily long.'*

"Yes," Nita said, "I've noticed that."

"It is the land, of course," said the fair young woman. "The land remembers too well. It saw Partholon come; it saw Nemed; it saw us, and the Fir Bolg, and the hosts of man. It threw us off, one after the other, in its way, having been taught to do so by the Lone One, and was given a memory that other lands don't have—a sense of injury. Long time we've tried to heal that, but there is no healing it now. The old angers waken again and again."

"There must be something that could be done," Nita said.

"If there is an answer, we do not have it," said the Lady of the Forth, "and the Fomori are at our gates. Soon enough they'll be at yours."

"They have been at our gates, they and their children, for a long while," said Aunt Annie, "under various names. We do what we can, as do you. What are the Fomori threatening you with this time?"

"Nothing concrete as yet. Of course they demanded tribute. They have done that before. We will, of course, refuse to give it; we have done that before, too. And then they will begin to strike, here and there, at the innocent, the ones who have no defense."

"That too we know about," said Aunt Annie, "for a long time now. Nonetheless, something

Faoin gCnoc

needs to be done. I think all the wizards will now be called together. Probably there should be another meeting between us once that has happened. Doing seems to have passed into our hands, these days, and out of yours."

"That seems to be true,'* said the Amadaun. "Advise us what you do. We will back you as far as possible. Meantime, rain has not fallen here for too long. We seem to be losing the ability to order our world as we used to. Something outside is becoming very strong... and Lughnasad is coming, when old battles are remembered. Even with the power of the Treasures, it was very close. We almost lost last time. Without the Treasures—" The form on the left shook her head. "There is no saying. We need your help.*'

"Keep your people in, then, if you would," said Aunt Annie. "Sideways and the not-sideways parts of the world are getting too close together at the moment; we need to part them until this is resolved."

"We will do that. And you"—the Amadaun looked at Nita—"what would you say to us?"

Nita looked at the shining forms all around her and shook her head. "I think you owe me one," she said. "For the other night. If your carelessness let that happen, I think you owe me a favor one of these days."

There were shocked looks at her boldness, and Aunt Annie looked at her askance. But there was a wry smile from the Amadaun. "Our people have

long known that a favor given must be returned, and a wrong done must be avenged," he said. "Come here, then, and let me speak a word in your ear."

Nita stepped up to him, wondering. The Ama-daun leaned over and whispered; and the hair stood up all over Nita. It was a word in the Speech, a name... but not the kind of name mortals had. There was too much power in it, and too much time. She glanced at the Amadaun in shock, met his eyes, and found no relief there: The time was in them, too.

"Should you need help," the Amadaun said, "name that name."

"Thank you," Nita said, trying to get some of her composure back. "FU do that. Meanwhile, I hope you do well and that things are quiet for you."

"A mortal wishes what we wish," said the Lady of the Forth, smiling. "There's a change."

"Thank you," said Aunt Annie.

Nita rejoined her, and together they walked out the way they had come. The sunlight looked thin and wan when they came out, when it should have looked golden; everything seemed a little unreal, a little fake, compared with the way it had looked earlier.

Nita looked at Aunt Annie and was a little surprised to find that she had sweat standing out on her forehead. "Are you OK?" she said. "You look pale."

Faoin gCnoc

"Fm all right," said Aunt Annie. "It's just a strain talking to those people. They don't see time the way we do."

"I kind of Uked it in there," Nita said.

Her aunt looked at her. "Yes, I thought you might. They prefer the young; the younger wizards have always bent a little more easily to their ways. I make them uneasy, too; Tm a little too close to mortality for their liking... But anyway, I still can't beHeve it. You're a wizard!"

"At times I find it hard to beHeve myself," Niu said. "Like last night. My wizardry was not working terribly well."

"Yes, it's a problem we have around here," said her aunt. "The overlays... If I'd known, I could have warned you."

"How could you have known? How was I supposed to tell you?" She broke out laughing. "What did they tell you when they sent me out here?"

Her aunt shook her head. "They said you were getting too involved with your friend Kit. He's your partner, I take it."

"Yeah. They're really nervous about it. Aunt Annie. I try to calm them down..."

"Listen, you're lucky. At least you were able to tell your folks. I was never able to tell your grandma and grandpa."

"Even when they know," Nita said drily, "it doesn't always make for the best of times. But Aunt Annie, look, what are we going to do}'*

"We can't do anything just yet."

Nita groaned. Her aunt looked at her with a sympathetic expression. "Look, honey, I know. But the tradition of wizardry is different in this part of the world. They've been doing it for thousands of years before there even were American wizards. And don't forget that at home you're working in a relatively clean environment; the magic of the Native American wizards was of a much more naturalistic kind. There was practically no overlay, since their wizardry worked so completely in conjunction with nature and the environment. Over here we're dealing with the equivalent of wizardly toxic waste... the accumulation of thousands of years of buildup. No, we take our time. We need to get everyone together to talk."

"When is this Lughnasad thing?"

"It starts tomorrow, really—"

"Tomorrow?!"

"It goes on for two weeks... don't panic. The first week is the beginning of it; August fifteenth is the end. It's the end that we have to worry about. Things will be building up; forces will have to be released. It's going to be like a dam breaking. If we can dig a channel somehow, something for the power, the flow, to run off into... Otherwise—"

"Otherwise even the nonwizards are going to notice."

Her aunt laughed. "Nita, nonwizards have been noticing for years. Fortunately, Ireland just has a reputation for being a strange place. So when

Faoin gCnoc

people hear these weird stories, they discount them... It's not always a bad thing: For example, this is one of the only places in Europe where there were almost no witch trials. People were simply so used to bizarre things happening that there didn't seem any point... Everyone knew someone who was a Uttle strange... But, meantime, we'll get the wizards together and talk to them. Until then, try to restrain yourself. I know the urge to do wizardry all the time is very strong, especially at your age. But don't—you know—just don'tr

And that was the last that was said about it for a while. Aunt Annie went into the farm office, shut herself in, and started making phone calls. Nita returned to her trailer to do some more reading from the manual.

As she turned the comer, she froze in surprise: The trailer shifted sHghtly as she looked at it. Someone was in there. She paused and tried to see through the window before going any closer. Inside, someone bent forward into the Hght: A shadow moved—

She ran to the trailer door and threw it open. On the bed, Kit looked up in surprise, blinked at her. "Hi, Neets. What's the scoop?"

Nita stood there with her mouth working and nothing coming out. "What are you doing here?" she said finally.

Kit opened his mouth, too, and closed it, and then said, "I thought you'd be glad to see me."

"You turkey brain, I am glad to see you! But what are you doing here} I thought— *'

"Oh." Kit turned red, then started laughing. "Neets, uh, I feel like a dork."

She withheld comment for the moment. "Oh?"

"Well, I mean, you promised your folks that you wouldn't come back to see me. But / never said anything of the kind. No one asked me. So I said to my mom, *I have to go out for a while. Til be back for dinner.' And she said, Tine, have a nice time...' "

Nita climbed into the trailer, sat down on the bed and began laughing. "You're kidding."

"Neets," Kit said, "I think they still don't get it about me being a wizard. Not really. But who cares? As long as I come home on time for dinner, no one minds me being here."

"Great! Come meet my aunt/*

She dragged him inside. Her aunt had taken a break from phone calls to feed the cats, and now stood there looking at Kit with a can of cat food in her hand. "Aunt Annie," Nita shouted, "this is Kit!"

"Ah." Her aunt bHnked. "Half a second, then, and I'll feed him, too."

Nita snickered, sat Kit down at the table, and started making tea. Out of the tangle of mewing and hollering cats, one detached itself and strolled over to the kitchen table, jumped up on it, and regarded Kit with big eyes. It was Tualha. "And who is this?" she said.

Faoin gCnoc

Nita had to laugh a little at Kit's expression. "Kit, Tualha. She's a bard. Tualha, Kit Rodrigues. He's a wizard."

"'Dai stihd,'' said Kit.

''Sldriy'' said the cat, looking him up and down. To Nita she said, "I see the Spanish have finally arrived."

"What?"

"Kit, don't get her started. She'll be reciting poetry at you in a minute."

"I don't mind that-"

"So Usten," Nita's aunt said, coming over to the table and sitting down as she dried her hands on a dishcloth. "Kit, you're welcome here, but one question. Do your parents know you're a wizard?"

"Oh yeah."

She shook her head. "It's getting easier these days than it used to be." She looked at Nita, and then at Kit, and at Nita again. "Listen," she said, "I want the straight word from you on this. You two aren't doing what your mom and dad were concerned you were doing—I mean, what they told me they thought you were doing? Are you?"

She had the grace to look embarrassed as she said it. Nita and Kit could do nothing but look at each other and then burst out laughing. "Why does everyone think that?" Kit said, soimding momentarily aggrieved. "Do we go around panting at each other or something?" Then he lost it and cracked up again.

"No," Nita said to Aunt Annie. "We're not."

"Well," said her aunt, "never mind, then. It's matters here that really concern me, and I've got enough on my plate at the moment. You know anything about it?"

"There was a precis in the manual of what's been going on here," Kit said. He sighed. "We've got problems."

That we was one of the nicest things Nita had heard in a long time. She had had enough of working by herself. "Yeah. Well, the Seniors here seem to have at least a handle on what to do. I just hope it works. Did you read about that?"

"Yeah. It seems they've already made some progress. There's a stone—is it?—that they had to wake up—"

"It was half awake already," Nita said. "It's the other three objects that are going to be a problem."

"Yeah. They said one of the objects was 'dormant,' and another was 'unaccounted for.' That doesn't sound terrific."

"Nope."

"Listen," Aunt Annie said, "I'll leave you two to chat. I've got to get back on the phone." She smiled at them and headed out of the room.

"Phone? What for?"

"Other wizards," Nita said.

Kit looked mystified. "To just talk to them? Why don't they—"

"NO, DON'T DO THAT!" she yelled, sitting

Faoin gCnoc

bolt upright as she felt him casually starting to line up the beam-me-up spell in his head. "You can't do that here!''

"Why not?"

"Feel around you for the overlays! They're all over the place! And you better watch how you go home, too."

He paused a moment, and then looked surprised. "Wow, you're not kidding. How do you get around here?"

"I walk. Or there's a bike to ride."

"Well, let's go do that, then. Sounds like I've got a lot of catching up to do."

Nita slipped into the office, bent over Aunt Annie at her desk, scribbled a note on her pad: Going out bike ridings OK? Her aunt nodded and went right on with her conversation about spell structure.

They were out for a long time... partly because Kit was rubbernecking at the scenery while they walked and talked. But part of it was the weather turning odd. The thunderstorms the weathermen had been predicting materialized, but they dropped hail rather than rain. Nita and Kit had to take shelter from several of the showers, and when they finally got down to the dual carriageway again, they found hailstones as big as marbles lying on the road, steaming bizarrely in the bright sunshine. The sound of thunder rumbled miles away, sporadic but threatening, all through the ride.

They had been taking turns riding, or sometimes Kit would ride and Nita would sit on the handlebars, or the other way around. At the moment Kit was walking the bike beside Nita, looking around appreciatively. "This is great," he said. "I guess if you had to be sent someplace, this is as good as any."

"Huh," Nita said. "I don't remember you being real excited about it at first."

He colored somewhat. "Yeah, well."

Nita grinned. "Listen, how's Dairine doing?"

"OK, as far as I can tell. I think she may be on assignment; she doesn't seem to have been around your place much in the past few days. Busy."

"I bet. Wizards all over the place are real busy around now." Nita shook her head. The oppressive, thunderstorm-about-to-happen feeling had not stopped.

"Here it comes," Kit said, looking up at a thundercloud they had been watching. It was drifting halfway between them and the sea as they turned down the Kilquade road. Almost as soon as he spoke, Nita saw the bolt of Hghtning lance down and strike one of the hills behind the farm. Silently she started counting seconds, and had barely gotten to two before the crack of thunder washed over them. "A Uttle too close," said Kit. "Let's get inside."

They headed down the driveway in a hurry, and came to the gravel yard in front of the house. Nita

Faoin gCnoc

was heading for the front door when Kit looked around him with a sudden surprised expression. "Wait a minute. What's that?'' he said.

"That what}'' Nita was feeling a little cross. She could feel the rain coming in the air and didn't want to stand around outside waiting for it, after all she'd been through today.

"That," Kit said, swinging around as if looking for something. "Can't you feel it? Inanimate. Strong."

Nita shook her head, wondering what he was talking about. Kit was staring down toward the farmyard, between the buildings. "There's something going on down there," he said. "Something alive."

x^"This place is full of horses and sheep and cows," Nita said. "Kit—"

"No," he said. "Not something that's usually alive. It's inanimate, it's a thing, it's—come on!"

He started down that way. There was another roll of thunder. Nita didn't see the lightning stroke this time. She went after Kit, muttering to herself. Kit frequently sensed things she didn't, just as she sensed things he didn't. They had areas where their talents overlapped, certainly, but Nita's specialty was Hve things; Kit had always been more for inanimate objects. And if he really felt he was on the trail of something important^

"It's really weird," he said as she caught up with him. "It's nothing— I've never felt one that alive before."

"One whatr

He looked into the farmyard and shook his head and gestured. *'That," he said.

Nita looked. There was nothing in the farmyard but Biddy's pickup truck, with its forge on the back. ''Thatr

"It's not the truck itself," Kit said. "That's a little more awake than usual, but nothing really strange. It's the thing in back. That box. What is that?"

"It's a forge, a portable forge," Nita said, mystified. "It belongs to the lady who shoes the horses."

Right then, Biddy came out of the hay barn, shrugging into a windbreaker. She looked up at the sky, pausing for a moment, then headed toward the truck.

"Uh-oh," Kit said, looking up with a panicked expression.

Nita felt the electrical potential in the air become suddenly unbearable, not just a prickling but a pain all over her. It took Nita only a second to put up a shield spell around herself and Kit. She saw Biddy look up; she saw the Ughtning lance down at the truck. The breath went right out of Nita in horror, for there was simply no way she could quickly extend her shield so far—

Biddy lifted her hand abruptly—

—and the lightning simply went elsewhere. It didn't strike anything else, it didn't miss; it just

Faoin gCnoc

stopped. And went away. There was not even a thunderclap.

And Biddy stood there, looking up at the sky, and glanced around, looking to see whether anyone had been watching. Seeing no one, she smiled very slightly, and got into the truck.

"Now what was that?" Kit whispered.

Nita pulled him behind the nearby smoking shed, out of sight of the truck as it turned, heading for the driveway. He barely noticed; he was watching the truck. "Who is that?" he said. "Is that your aunt?"

"No. I told you, that's the lady who puts the horseshoes on. Biddy." -"She's a wizard!"

"She's not," Nita said. "She can't be." It just didn't feel right. "That wasn't a wizardry. Wizards can hide... but the magic still feels like magic, whatever."

Kit shook his head. "Then how do you explain that? She swatted a lightning bolt away like a bug. And her truck, or that forge in her truck anyway, is alive. That / can feel."

"I don't know," Nita said. "Things are getting weird around here..."

" ^Getting!'" Kit laughed, then looked thoughtful. "You going to tell your aunt about this?"

"I don't know," Nita said. "I think ... I think I want to talk to Biddy first."

"Makes sense," Kit said. "Then what?"

"Check with the Seniors. They seem to be running this show."

"OK," Kit said. ^Tou're on."

They talked until nearly midnight. The last thing Kit said was, "You been meeting a lot of people around here? Kids, I mean?"

"Some. The/re OK."

"Are they nice to you?"

Nita thought of Ronan and immediately flushed. How was she supposed to explain this to Kit? Explain what? some part of her mind demanded. Heaven only knows what Ronan thinks about you: If anything, he probably thinks you're too young for him. "They're fine," she said after a moment. "They're not geeky, the ones I've met."

"Some of the kids back home," Kit said, "are saying that I *got you in trouble.' "

She burst out laughing. "No wonder you jumped when Aunt Annie poked you. Idiots." She punched him. "Go on home, it's your dinnertime."

"Oh, crud, I forgot!" He got up hurriedly and started riffling through his manual.

"Don't forget the overlays!" Nita said. "If you leave them out of your calculations, you'll wind up in the middle of the Atlantic."

"So? We have friends there." He found the page he was looking for.

"Kiiiiiit!" Nita said, annoyed, until he looked at her. "Just be careful''

Faoin gCnoc

He nodded, and started reading the transposition spell under his breath. At the very end of it, on the last word, he looked back up at her.

"See you in a couple days,'* Nita said quietly.

He nodded and grinned, and the air slammed into the space where he had been.

Nita went to bed.

Baile aiha Cliath

Dublin

The next morning, when Nita came into the kitchen, Aunt Annie was sitting at the table with a portable phone and a cup of tea, going through the yellow pages. She looked up and said, "Want to go into town?*'

"Bray?"

"No, Dublin—"

The phone rang again. It had been doing that all morning: Nita had been able to hear it even out in the trailer. Aunt Annie sighed and picked up the receiver. Nita turned to get herself a cup of tea.

After a while Aunt Annie hung up and looked over at Nita. "We'll be meeting at a pub in town tonight," she said, starting to dial another number. "This should be fun for you; you haven't been in a pub yet."

Nita blinked at that. "Am I allowed?"

Baile atha Cliath

"Oh yes, they're not like bars in the States. You can't drink, of course, but you can be in a pub all right, as long as you're over a certain age and it's earlyish. Different pubs have different policies. But you'll have no problems." Aunt Annie chuckled, then, and said into the phone, "Doris? Anne. Johnny says tonight at nine, in the Long Hall. Will you call Shaun and Mairead? Right. Yes, we are. Right. Bye."

"How are we going into town?" Nita said. "Driving?"

"No, we'll take the train," Aunt Annie said. "Doris will give us a ride back; we're more or less on her way. Have your breakfast and we'll go. We can slouch around and do tourist things."

Nita grinned and went to get her jacket.

It turned out that she didn't need it. It was another hot day, up in the eighties now. They drove into Greystones to catch the shuttle train to Bray—the line was only electrified from Bray to DubHn—and stood on the platform, looking out toward Greystones's south beach. Dogs ran and barked, and there were even a few people in the water, which astonished Nita; she had felt the water while down by the seafront in Bray, and it was some of the coldest water she had ever experienced. Most of the people were out in the sun on the sand, turning very pink.

"Most of the time you can tell right away in the summer when someone is from Ireland," Aunt

Annie said, "especially when the sun's been out. It doesn't seem to occur to people here to use sunblock, since they see the sun so rarely... They all turn into lobsters, the poor things." She shook her head. "Not this year, though. People are actually getting tans."

Nita looked toward the big orange and black diesel train that was pulling in. "Global warming?" she asked.

Aunt Annie just shook her head. "Take one of the right-hand seats," she said. "You'll get a better view of the water as we go in."

Nita did. The train pulled out, and Nita looked out at the north beach as they passed it: more sun-bathers and someone riding a horse at a gallop.

"Aunt Annie," she said, "you know something? Why didn't I see your name when I went through the manual and looked in the wizards* directory?"

"ConfidentiaHty," her aunt said. "I wasn't known to you yet. The manual senses such things." She looked at Nita thoughtfully. "I suppose I really should have anticipated it; my kids came out nonwizardly, after all. But anyway, I was looking at my manual this morning... You've been busy."

"You've got that right," Nita said.

Aunt Annie smiled. "Not unusual. Things quiet down, though, after you get to be my age. I remember when I first got my manual, I had about three years when I hardly had a moment to myself.

Baile atha Cliath

Then things got calm when I went off to college."

"Did you have a partner?'*

The train went abruptly darkish, Ht only by the feeble ceiling lights, as it passed into the tunnel bored through Bray Head. "I did for a while," she said. "But she and I parted company eventually. It happens," she said, at Nita's stunned look. "You grow apart...or one partner finds something more important than the magic... or you start disagreeing about how to work."

Nita shook her head. She couldn't imagine not agreeing with Kit on a plan or course of action within a matter of seconds; and indeed, there had been times when if they hadn't been able to agree that fast, they would have been dead. "Do you still talk?" she asked.

"Oh yes, pretty often. We're friendly enough."

The train burst out into the light again, revealing the beach on the other side of Bray Head, and the iron-railed Promenade with its hotels and arcade, and the new aquarium. "Don't worry," said Aunt Annie. "I think maybe you and your partner have been through enough trouble together that you'll be working together for a long while."

They pulled into Bray station and changed to the sleek little bright green DubUn Area Rapid Transit train waiting at the next platform over. About half an hour later, the train slid into Tara Street station. Nita and her aunt got out and made their way beneath the skylights and down the escalator, out into the streets of Dublin.

It was a fascinating combination of old and new, and Nita was rather bewildered by it all at first. There were tiny cobbled alleys that looked as if they hadn't been repaved in a hundred years, or maybe two, right next to broad streets roaring with traffic and alive with lights and shoppers; old, old churches caught in the middle of shiny new shopping centers; noisy, cheerfully messy street markets in the shadow of big department stores.

"It takes a Httle while to get used to," her aunt said as they crossed the street south of O'Connell Bridge and headed past the stately fronts of Trinity College and the Bank of Ireland, on the way to the pedestrian precinct at Grafton Street. "If you come from one of the big cities in the States, Dublin can seem very small at first, sort of caught in a time warp, slower, more casual about things. Later—" she chuckled—"you wonder how you ever put up with a place where people are in such a hurry all the time. And you find that life can go along very well without all the conveniences you were used to once.'' She smiled. "It's the people here: They make the difference."

They turned left at the corner of Grafton Street, heading for the National Museum. It was next to the Dail, the Irish houses of parliament, arid Aunt Annie clearly knew her way around it. As soon as they had paid their admission fees, she led Nita down a flight of stairs, past a sign that said TREASURY. "There are a lot of gorgeous things

Baile atha Cliath

here," she said, "but this is probably the most famous of them."

They stopped in front of a glass case that was thicker than any of the others scattered around the big room. No one else was nearby. Nita moved close to look at it. The cup inside sat on a big Lucite pedestal; a bright spotlight was trained on it from above. Nita thought this might have been unnecessary... since she suspected the cup might be able to glow by itself.

"The Ardagh Chalice," her aunt said softly. Nita looked at it, not just with her eyes, but with a wizard's senses. She looked as hard as she could. The chalice was about two feet high and a foot wide, mostly gold, with elaborate and beautiful spiral patterns worked on its sides in silver, and ornamented with rubies and topazes. The jewels were lovely enough, but Nita had more of an eye for the engraved and inlaid knotwork ornamentation on the sides. They were spell diagrams in a very antique style, and though they looked simple, that was an illusion created by the extreme skill of whoever had designed them. They were subtle, and potentially of huge power; but they were now quiescent, emptied of their virtue.

"It's not really very old," Nita said.

"The physical aspects of it, no." Her aunt looked at it. "This chalice was made in the second century."

"Not the Holy Grail, then," Nita said.

Her aunt smiled slightly. "No. And yes. The Treasures might have been made by gods, but they were made of mortal matter... and matter passes. The problem is, of course, that the power put in them—the soul of the Treasures, more or less—is as immortal as the Powers that made them. The soul passes on when the envelope wears out— reincarnates, finds another body that's suitable. This cup was a vessel for a while. But not anymore, I think. Do you feel anything different?"

Nita looked at the cup again, longer this time. Finally she said, "I don't know. It's as if... if you knew how to shake this awake, this soul, you might do it. But you'd have to know how."

Her aunt nodded. "We may have to figure out how. Come and see the sword." They went up a flight of stairs and through another room or two. They finally stopped in a room full of ancient goldwork: torques and stickpins and necklaces and bracelets of gold, beads and bangles, carved plates linked together.

"Gold used to be mined in Wicklow," her aunt said, "not too far from us. But by the fourth century most of it was gone. Anyway, this is worth more than any of them, if you ask me."

The central case held the sword. It lay there very plain against red velvet, long and lean, shaped like a willow leaf, with no gold or jewel anywhere about it—a plain bronze blade, notched, scraped, somewhat withered-looking. Nita bent close to it,

Baile atha Cliath

feeling with all of her. "Now this is old," she said.

"Older than the cup," said Aunt Annie. "Bronze Age, at least."

Nita nodded. There was a faint feeling of purpose still in the old bronze, Hke a memory impressed on matter by a mind now gone, like the ghosts in Aunt Annie's backyard, a tape still replaying but heard very faintly. But there was no vigor in the sword, only recollection: wistful,

mournful, feeble "It might have been the real

sword once," Nita said. "But it's almost forgotten. There's not nearly as much there as in the cup. You're going to have a hard time waking it up."

Her aunt nodded. "That's what I think, too."

Nita shook her head. "And there's nothing else in the building that's even this much awake..." She sighed. "So we have the stone, and maybe the cup, and something that might work for the sword, but probably won't... and no spear."

"That about sums it up, yes. The wizards around the country will be looking for other swords that might work better. But the spirit of the Spear Luin seems to have passed completely. Either no body was strong enough to contain it... or it was just too powerful to be contained anymore in a universe that had no suitable envelope for it, and it passed out entirely."

Nita thought that it had passed. Spears were symbols of the element of fire, and fire was the most uncontainable of the five elements, next to plasma. Nita began to worry. Three of the Trea-

I

sures would not be enough, to judge from what

the Sidhe had hinted. But she was fresh out of

ideas about what to do.

She looked at her aunt. "Are we done here?" "I think so. Want to go over to Grafton

Street?"

"Sounds good."

They spent the afternoon doing, as her aunt had promised, touristy things; touring the shopping center at Saint Stephen's Green, having tea in the Shelbourne Hotel, listening to the street performers playing on pipes and banjos and, occasionally, spoons. They walked over O'Connell Bridge to look up the river Liffey at the graceful curve of the Halfpenny Bridge, one of the trademarks of Dublin; and browsed through the shops on the south side of the Halfpenny Bridge, Dublin's so-called Left Bank. They sat by the statue of the goddess of the Liffey in her stone Jacuzzi and were grateful for the spray; it was hotter that afternoon than it had been all summer. Mothers put their little children in the fountain, and they splashed happily. The patrolling Gardaiy the police, smiled and looked the other way.

About seven o'clock. Aunt Annie asked, "Dinner?" Nita agreed happily, and they went off to have a very New Yorkish pizza in a little restaurant on South Anne Street. Then they went a few blocks west, to the pub where that night's meeting would take place.

Baile atha Cliath

The Long Hall was a handsome place, fronted with windows of beveled and stained glass, arranged so that people standing inside, in front of the windows, couldn't quite be seen from outside. The glass in the tops of the windows was clear, showing the beautiful carved and painted plaster ceiling and the gas fixtures still hanging from it. Some of them had been converted for electricity; some hadn't.

Nita and Annie walked in, and Nita gazed admiringly at the huge polished hardwood bar and the antique mirrors, which reached nine feet up the wall at the back of the bar to the ceiling. Carved wood and beveled glass and brass railings were everywhere. So were many cheerful people, drinking, but talking more. The place was filled with the subdued roar of many conversations.

"We're in the back room. Hi, Jack," said Aimt Annie to one of the men behind the bar. He was busy filling a glass with creamy dark Guinness from one of the arched taps at the bar: He nodded to Aunt Annie but didn't say anything.

"Jack Mourne," Aunt Annie said to Nita, as they made their way through a low, carved archway into the back room. "He owns the place."

"Does he know what's going on?"

"I should think he does: He's one of the Area Advisory-Specialists. What would you like to drink, hon?"

"Can I get a Coke?"

"No problem. Be right back."

Nita found herself a seat at a small round wooden table with ornate iron legs and waited, fidgeting a little self-consciously. She had never been in a bar by herself, though Aunt Annie seemed to think that this wasn't quite the same. She might have a point, though, Nita thought. Here, the drinking looked almost incidental. People were shouting at each other across the back room, chatting, arguing, laughing, pointing, hollering.

"Here you go," Aunt Annie said, sitting down next to Nita with a relieved look. She handed Nita her drink and sipped briefly at her pint. "Perfect," she said. "Jack pulls the best pint in this part of town."

"Aunt Annie," Nita said, "if this is a wizard's meeting—how are you going to keep the regular people out of here?"

"Spell on the back-room archway," Aunt Annie said. "Look closely at the carving when you go to the rear ladies' room. Nonwizards hit it and decide they don't feel like going back there after all. On normal nights. Jack just takes the spell fin-ial off: that little carved flower in the lower right-hand corner. And no one can hear us through all this din anyway; but there are voice scramblers on just in case. Jack makes anything wizardly come out sounding like an argument about football. It's a nice scrambler, took him a while to write. But he's one of our best writers. You need a custom spell in this part of the world, it's Jack you come

Baile atha Cliath

to, or Marie Shaughnessy down in Arklow, or Charles and Alison Redpath up north in Aghalee."

"Then all these people back here are wizards?" Nita asked, looking around her in astonishment. She had never been in such a large gathering of her own before.

"Oh yes. All that could come on short notice, of course. Relax awhile; we can't do anything until Doris and Johnny get here."

So Nita drank her Coke and Hstened to the accents around her, and chatted every now and then with the people who came up to her aunt to say hello. If she had been mired in Irish accents before, the situation was much worse now: She heard about twenty different accents from as many different people, no two of them the same, and some very odd indeed. In addition, there were a lot of people from Northern Ireland down for this meeting, and their accents astounded her; they sounded more like New Yorkers than anything else, though more nasal. They all seemed like very open, friendly people, which to Nita seemed a Httle strange at first. Seeing what most Americans saw of Northern Ireland from the news, she half-expected them to be furtive and depressed, as if afraid a bomb might suddenly go off under them. But none of them was. One man in his thirties, a jocund young man in a leather jacket covered with patches, told Nita he had never seen a bomb or been within fifty miles of one, nor had anyone he knew. The peaceful, small-town life he described

seemed hard to reconcile with all the news photos Nita had seen of shattered buildings and people with ski masks and rifles.

There was a slight commotion at the door as Mrs. Smyth came in through the archway. "Hey, Doris, how they cuttin'?" someone shouted. Doris Smyth looked at the speaker and said something clear and carrying in Irish that provoked a roar of approval from the Hsteners, and caused the person who had asked the question to be genially pum-meled.

Behind Mrs. Smyth, someone else came in: a short man in a long overcoat and plaid scarf. At the sight of him, many of the wizards in the room called "Johnny!" or "Shaun!" and there was a general stir of approval through the back room. Nita bent over to her aunt Annie and said, "Who's that?"

"Shaun O'Driscoll," said Aunt Annie. "Or Johnny, some people call him. He's the Area Senior for Europe."

"Wow," Nita said, never having seen so high-ranked a wizard before. Area Seniors answered only to Regional Seniors, and Regionals to the three Seniors for Earth. When she had thought of the Senior in charge of all wizards from Shannon to Moscow and Oslo to Gibraltar, she had imagined someone more imposing—not a little man with thinning hair and (she saw as he took off his coat) a leisure suit. He didn't seem very old. He had a fierce-looking mustache, and his eyes were

Baile atha Cliath

very cool; he gazed around the room and returned all the greetings without ever quite smiling. It was the kind of effect, Nita thought, that made you want to try to get him to smile. It would be worth seeing when it happened, for his face was otherwise a nest of laugh Hnes.

Doris and Johnny were served pints by another of the gathered wizards, and people started settling down, leaning against the walls when they ran out of seats. Johnny didn't sit, but stood in the middle of the room, waiting for them to settle, like a teacher with a big, unruly class.

"Thanks for coming," he said. "I know this was short notice, but weVe had some serious problems crop up in the past few days, and there was no way to hope to manage them except by requiring an intervention meeting."

Some heads turned at this, and some murmuring was heard among the assembled wizards. "I know that wasn't the way it was announced," Johnny said, "but it turns out we have less time for this discussion than was originally thought when we organized this meeting last night and this morning. We have had serious transitional leakages all over the island, with some sympathetic transi-tionals in mainland Europe; and this condition has to be contained as quickly as possible. There have been echoes and ripples as far away as China and Peru.

"Anyway," Johnny said, "I want to thank those of you who were in the middle of other as-

r

159

signments and found them changed, or who were off active and were suddenly reactivated. The Powers That Be may not thank you until later, but I like to do it early. I also want to welcome those of you who have come unusual distances, including Nita Callahan. Stand up, love."

Nita flushed fiercely and hoped it didn't show too much in the pub's dim Ught. She stood up.

"Nita has been reassigned here temporarily courtesy of North American Regional. She has blood affinities with this area and was involved in the New York incursion, the Hudson Canyon intervention in June, and more recently, the Reconfiguration; Dairine Callahan is her sister."

There was a stir at this, which surprised Nita somewhat. She nodded and smiled a little uncertainly at Johnny; he gestured for her to sit down. "We're glad to have you," he said. "Bear with us: We do things a Httle differently here than you're used to, and if you think of anything that seems useful during this discussion, don't hesitate to sing out."

Huhy Nita thought, sitting down. Reassigned courtesy of North American Regional? Who's that? Not Tom and Carl Someone — or something — further in, or higher up? But she put the thought aside for the moment.

"C)ver the past four nights we've had sideways leakages in thirty-three out of thirty-six counties," Johnny said, "and how Monaghan, Wexford, and Westmeath were missed is a mystery to us,

Baile atha Cliath

especially since Westmeath contains the Hill of Tara. In the thirty-three counties, about ninety wizards have experienced timesHdes, Hve remembrances of the so-called Mythological Period, soHd remembrances that returned interactions, viewings of extradimensional objects without doing the wizardries required for such viewings, and even physical intervention by nonphysical entities or creatures not native to this reaUty, including physical attacks on occasion. One of us met CuchuUain in warp spasm, which is enough to turn anyone's hain That it happened in the middle of the big shopping center in Tallaght didn't help, either. The Brown Bull of Cooley was seen crossing the dual carriageway north of Shannon; it wandered down onto the larnrod Eireann tracks and caused a derailment, though fortunately neither the train drivers nor any of the other people on the train saw it, and by great good luck no one was hurt. Possibly most to the point, there was an earthquake in the fields north of Naas, at the old site of the Battle of Moytura.'*

This caused some anxious looks and muttering. Johnny motioned for the crowd to quiet down. "It was only about three point one on the Richter scale, and nothing came of it but some broken china. The Lia Fail is still managing to hold this island in one place and one piece, no matter what the poHticians say. But how long it can hold matters so stable is a good question. Much of its old

virtue is gone, as you know. Another such attack will certainly be more effective, on both natural and supernatural levels."

"Johnny,'* said one of the wizards sitting back by the wall, a handsome little dark-haired woman with a sharp face, "these transitional leakages, are we sure that something else isn't causing them? Something European?"

Johnny shook his head. "Fd prefer to blame Local Europe myself, Morgan, but we're out of luck on this one. All indications point at us."

"Then what are we going to do?"

Johnny looked grim. "We're going to have to re-create Moytura, I think. Unless someone else can think of something better."

Half the room started muttering to the other half. Johnny waited for the house to settle down. "Re-create Moytura with whatT' asked the Northern Ireland-based wizard Nita had been talking to, the young guy in the leather jacket.

"Good question," Johnny said. "Three of the Four Treasures are still with us, though diminished, as you know. In their present state, they're too weak to be of any use. But the souls of those Treasures are still in the world, or the Worlds, somewhere. We are going to have to recall those souls to suitable envelopes, and then take them out into battle against the Lone Power. We know that with them we have a chance. Without them..." He shrugged.

Baile atha Cliath

Relative silence fell for a few moments. **Who does the going-into-battle bit?" asked a voice from somewhere against the back wall.

"Lacking one of the Powers That Be, probably Doris and me to lead," Johnny said, "And all of you we can get together in one place."

*^Where are you going to get suitable envelopes, then?" asked another.

"We'll try to use the old ones," Doris said. "They've worked before: With a Httle coercion, they'll work again... or so we hope. The Lia Fail is still working; the Ardagh ChaHce we think we can reawaken."

"Don't you think the museum will miss it?" said the young wizard in the leather jacket,

Doris smiled sHghtly. "Not if a wizardry that looks and weighs exactly the same is sitting in the museum case," she said. "If the Taoiseach can borrow the ChaUce just to show it off at a poHticians* dinner party in Dublin Castle, I think we might take the loan of it for a night or so, for something important, and not feel too guilty afterward. But everything depends on the circumstances and the power of the ritual used to call the cup's soul back Which is what we're going to have to work on. It's not just warriors we're going to need to make this work, but poets. Where are Charles and Mson?"

"Stuck in traffic," said someone from the bar side of the room.

Johnny grinned. "Ah, the real world. But at

least Liam and Mairead and Nigel are here. I'll be wanting to talk to you three afterward. The rest of you: I want you all to talk to your Area Supervisors about your schedules for the next two weeks. Any one of you may have to drop everything at a moment's notice and lend a hand. Also, given the seriousness of the situation, travel restrictions on teleportation are off for the duration. Just use your judgment and be very careful about the overlays!"

More chatter erupted. In the middle of it, someone said, "But Johnny, wait a tick! Isn't this going to make things worse?"

Johnny waved for quiet. The room settled. "How do you mean?" he said.

"If you're going to call back the souls of the Treasures—if you can," said the speaker, a tall dignified-looking wizard with a mighty mustache, "isn't the land going to get even more awake and aware than it already is? I mean, the Treasures are the land, in some ways. At least that's what we were always told: four of the five elements, in their most personified forms. Air and water and earth and fire are going to wake up more than ever, until the situation is resolved and everything is laid to rest again."

Johnny nodded slowly. The room got quiet as people looked at his expression. "Yes," he said after a while. "It's going to get much worse. Which makes it to our advantage to get the situation resolved, as you say, as quickly as possible. Otherwise first Ireland, then the rest of Europe, and

Baile atha Cliath

eventually all the other continents are going to be overrun with the past happening again, and the dead walking, and all kinds of other inconveniences. If we can't stop this, then the barriers between present and past will break down everywhere, and the physical world will be progressively overrun by the nonphysical: All the myths and truths that became myth, all the dreams and nightmares, all the more central and more peripheral reaUties will superimpose themselves on this one... inextricably."

"For how long?" asked a small voice out of the hush.

"If that level of imposition ever takes hold fully," Johnny said, "I don't see how the process could ever be reversed."

Silence, broken only by the noise of cheerful conversation in the frontmost, nonwizardly part of the pub. "Right," said the man with the mustache. "But in the meantime, while you Seniors are intervening, Ireland's dreams and nightmares are going to keep coming true—even more than they have been—and the past will keep happening, and the dead and the undead and the immortal will walk. And 'other inconveniences.' "

"That's exactly right, Scott," Johnny said.

There was another long silence. Then a voice said, "I need another pint."

A chorus of other voices went up in agreement. Niu noticed that her Coke was long gone, and she was very thirsty.

"I'll get you another," her aunt Annie said, and got up. "Anybody else? Katherine? Nuala? Orla? Hi, Jim—" She moved off.

Nita sat there feeling somewhat shaky. "Hey, you look hke a sheet,*' said a voice by her. She looked up: It was Ronan.

She smiled faintly at him as he sat down and did her best to control herself. He looked even cuter than he had previously, if that was possible. Black leather suited him, and so did this subdued lighting. "I feel like one," she said. "How about you?"

"Sounds pretty bad," Ronan said. But he looked and sounded remarkably unconcerned. "Don't worry about *auld Shaun' there, he just likes to sound like doom and destruction all the time. Comes of being Area Senior; they all sound like the world's ending half the time."

Probably because it iSy Nita thought. It was only the sheer number of wizards in the world, and the sacrifices they kept making from week to week, that kept civilization on an even keel; or so it seemed to her. "Look, can I ask you something?"

"Sure."

"I'm just curious. Was your Ordeal bad?"

He looked pecuUarly at her. "Almost got me killed, if that's what you mean."

"So will crossing O'Connell Street," Nita said. "Never mind... I don't know what I mean. I mean, it seemed to me that my Ordeal was pretty awful. I was just curious whether I was an

Baile atha Cliath

exception, or whether everyone had that bad a time. My sister did, but she's not exactly a normal case. And I haven't had that many chances to discuss it with other wizards."

Ronan looked thoughtful and took a drink of his orange-and-lemon drink. "I got timesHd," he said.

Nita shrugged sHghtly. "We bought a timesUde from our local Seniors for ours," she said.

"I didn't buy mine," Ronan said. "I got it." He took another drink. "One day I took the Oath— the next I was walking up Vevay Road, you know, at the top of Bray by the Quinnsworth, the supermarket? Well, it stopped being Vevay Road. It was just a dirt track with some thatched huts down near where the school would be, at the bottom of the hill, and it was raining cats and dogs. Thunder and lightning."

Nita shivered: She disliked being caught out in the rain. "What did you do?"

"I went up Bray Head," Ronan said, bursting out in a laugh that sounded as if, in retrospect, he didn't believe his own craziness. "I wanted to see where everything was, you know? It was a mess. You know how the sea gets during a storm. Well, maybe you don't—"

"I Hve on Long Island," Nita said. "We get high-force gales on the Great South Bay, when the hurricanes come through. The whole sea is one big whitecap, spray so thick in the air you can't see—"

"Driving inland," Ronan said. "Between the rain and the spray, there was almost no difference between being in the water and being on the land. Well, I saw the boat come in, straight for the rocks. Little thing." He saw Nita's blank look and said, "The Romans."

That made her raise her eyebrows. She had seen the Roman coins that had been found at the base of Bray Head: She had seen a reconstruction of the archaeological site, with Roman bones. "They were going to try to set up a colony, weren't they?" she asked.

Ronan nodded. Nita watched him. She remembered that afternoon in the chicken place in Bray and the vehemence of Ronan's feelings about colonizers of any kind. But at the moment, Ronan just sat, and flushed a little, and looked away from Nita as he said, "Well, they were going to get killed, weren't they? Them and their Httle boat and all, in that sea. One of the lifeboats couldn't have stood it, let alone that Httle smack. So I *took the sea in.'"

Nita stared at him. What Ronan was describing was temporary but complete control of a pure element: using the wizardly Speech to describe every molecule of an object or area so completely and accurately that for a short period you become it. Control was barely the word for it. It became as much a part of you as your body... for a while. Then came the backlash, for human beings are not really meant to have more than one physical body

Baile atha Cliath

at a time. You might find the association impossible to break—and have to spend the rest of your life coexisting with what you had described, which would surely drive you insane. Or the strain of the wizardry itself might kill you. An adult wizard, full of experience, might have done such a wizardry once... and no other wizardry, ever again. A young wizard on Ordeal, or soon after, could have done it and lived... maybe. His head might never be entirely right again.

But here sat Ronan, still blushing slightly. He said, "It wasn't much of it I had to take, just the sea around Bray Head. The people in the boat jumped ship and made it ashore. I couldn't save the boat; it went all to pieces when I lost control. I must have passed out up there—the sHde came undone after a while, and some tourists doing the cliff walk from the Greystones side found me slipping down the rocks on the seaward side, and they called the Guardai. I spent a few days in the hospital." He shrugged. "Hypothermia," he added, and laughed. "Too true—but they never knew from what."

"Wow," Nita said under her breath, almost lost in admiration of him. She was starting to blush, but she ignored it as she looked at him again. "But you knew," she said, "that there was just the one boat. The Romans never made it here except for those people. Britain was giving them too much trouble. You could have let them go under."

If there was a little challenge in her voice,

Ronan didn't rise to it. "Could I?" he said. "I knew it was a timeslide. Would I have been changing history? Did I have any choice?"

"Damn straight you did,'' Nita said, again under her breath.

Ronan heard it. He looked up from under his brows at her, that familiar scowl. "That's as may be. What could I do? Seeing them waving their arms and trying to get off, and knowing they would drown if they tried it, in that water." He looked away again, as if slightly embarrassed. "Sure nothing came of it anyway. They were marooned; no one ever came after them. They settled down there, and married the people there, some of them. I'm related to them, for all I know."

Nita smiled slightly. "You didn't know that no one would come after them, though. Suppose you had changed history? Suppose you had just saved the lives of the people who were going to report back to Rome and bring in the conquerors?"

Ronan drank his drink and looked away.

Nita reached out and patted his arm—a casual enough gesture, she did it with Kit all the time, but as she did it to Ronan, the shock of it, the closeness of actually touching him, ran up her arm like fire and half wilted her. "Never mind," she said, trying to get some control back. The point of each wizard's Ordeal was always a private thing: That Ronan should share this much of it with her was more than he had to do. "You want another of those?" she said. "What do you call it?"

Baile atha Cliath

"A Saint Clements. ^Oranges and lemons, say the bells of Saint Clements—*" He burst out laughing at Nita's uncomprehending look. "Don't know that one, I take it. Not in America's top forty?"

Nita knew when she was being made fun of, and knew when not to take it seriously: Her heart warmed that he liked her enough to do it at all. "Eat turf and die, Paddy,'' she said, mocking, and got up, feeHng in her pocket for change.

She got Ronan's drink, and when she got back, found her own waiting for her, and rather to her surprise, Johnny sitting in her seat chatting with Ronan. "Here," Johnny said, and got up; "I was holding it for you. Listen, dear, I have a message for you. Tom and Carl send their best."

"You know them? How are they?" Nita said, sitting right up. "Are they OK? It was them, then!"

"They're fine. I consult with them fairly often, especially Tom: He's an Advisory to the North American Regional for compositional spelling. What was ^them'?"

"I mean, it was them who sent me on assignment. They, I mean."

Johnny smiled very sHghtly, and all his wrinkles deepened. "Ahh... no. Not even a Regional Senior, or one of the Planetaries, can actually put a wizard on active assignment. No matter how certain we are that the world's ending." He shot a humorous look at Ronan, and Ronan looked like

he was tempted to try to pull his head down inside his black tunleneck. "No, those decisions are made higher up. I might have mentioned North American Regional, but there are more than humans involved in that. Never mind for now. I take it Doris had a talk with you about our local problems."

Nita opened her mouth to answer, and was startled by a sudden shout from up front. "Last orders now, ten minutes, gentlemen. Last orders, please!*'

Johnny laughed at the look her face must have been wearing. "All the pubs have to close at eleven-thirty this time of year," he said. "Anyway, Doris says she told you the ropes."

"If you mean she told me not even to sneeze in the Speech," Nita said, "yes."

Johnny laughed under his breath. "It must seem hard. Believe me, it's for the best... and there'll be enough magic around here for anybody, come the end of the month, if things keep going the way they've been going. We'll be in touch with you, of course."

"Johnny," Ronan said suddenly, "this may be out of turn—"

"Knowing you, my lad," Johnny said, "probably."

"Johnny— Look, it's nothing personal," Ronan said, glancing at Nita and blushing furiously. "But why can't this be handled locally? Why do we need blow-ins?"

Baile atha Cliath

Nita turned red, too, with annoyance. She thought of about six different cutting things to say, but kept her mouth shut on them all.

Johnny simply looked mildly surprised. "Self-sufficiency, is it?" he said. "Have you fallen for that one? It's an illusion, Ro. Why do we need the help of the Tuatha de Danaan? Why do we need the Powers That Be? Or even the Lone Power? For that One has a function in the Universe, too. You know that. The whole lot of us are interconnected, and there's no way we can get away from it, or any one group of us solve even the Httlest problem entirely by ourselves. This matter is being handled locally. It's being handled on earth. Next thing, you're going to ask me what the Northern Irish wizards are doing here." His eyebrows went up and down. "You've been listening to too many poHticians. Better apologize to her before she turns you into a soggy beer mat," Johxmy said, patted Nita on the shoulder, and moved on.

"Time now, gentlemen, time now. Take those glasses away, CharHe!" Jack was shouting from the front of the pub. Nita did her best to keep her face still. She had gone hot and tight inside, and was holding onto herself hard; controlling her emotions had never been her strongest suit, and she had no desire to say something stupid here, where she was a guest and could make her aunt look bad. Besides, I'm a wizard among wizards. It should take more than some provincial punk with a chip on his shoulder to get me annoyed!

"Look, Nita," Ronan said. He sounded slightly desperate. "I didn't—"

"You bet you didn't," she said. And shut up. And then lost it again. "Look," she said, her voice low but fierce, "do you think this was my idea? Do you think I wouldn't rather be back home with my partner, taking care of business, than messing around in this dumb Httle place where you can't even twitch without permission? Do you think I don't have better things to do? 'Blow-ins,' " she said bitterly, and picked up her drink and began to swallow the whole thing at once, to shut herself up: At least she couldn't say what she was thinking while she was drinking something.

It was the wrong drink. In the middle of the second swallow she spluttered in shock at the alcoholic black-bread taste of it, and from beside her. Aunt Annie said, "You're going to get us thrown out of here, you know that? Here, have a napkin."

Nita gasped and choked and took the napkin gratefully, and began mopping Guinness off herself and the table. Ronan was leaning against the wall and laughing, soundlessly, but so hard that he was turning twice as red as he had been. Furious, Nita felt around in her head for the small simple spell that would dump his own drink in his lap. She then remembered where she was, and in rapid succession shoved the sodden napkin down the neck of his turtleneck and, while Ronan was fumbling for it, knocked his glass sideways with her

Baile atha Cliath

elbow. "Oops/* she said in utter innocence, as the drink went all over him.

"Come on now, gents, time now, time. Have you no homes to go to? You, too, ladies. No offense meant," Jack shouted from the front of the pub. The conversations were getting louder, if anything. Ronan sat and stared at his lap, and just as he Hfted his eyes to Nita's, Johnny went by and patted him on the shoulder, and said, "I told you she was going to turn you into a soggy beer maL No one ever listens to me. 'Night, Annie, give me a call in the morning..." And he was away.

"I guess we*d better go," Aunt Annie said, as the lights began flashing on and off to remind people that it was time to drink up and get out. "Doris is waiting. Ronan, do you need a ride home?"

"No, thank you, Mrs. Callahan," he said. "I came in with Barry."

"Right, then. Come on, Nita, let's call it a night."

Nita got up and looked down at Ronan. He was gazing back at her with an expression she couldn't interpret. Not anger, not amusement—what was it? She refused to waste her time trying to figure it out. "Keep your pants dry," she said to him, trying desperately to keep her face straight. Gratefully she followed Mrs. Smyth and Aimt Annie out, grinning to herself.

Blow-ins. Huh,

She grinned all the way home...and wasn't quite sure why.

Sliahh O Cualann

Great Sugarloaf Mountain

'"What's going on?" Kit asked the next afternoon. "How are things going with the Treasures?'*

They were sitting around the kitchen table, looking at the papers. "Well," Nita's aunt said, "Doris and a couple of the other Seniors are going to go in today and lift the Ardagh ChaUce. They'll leave a perfect copy in its place. They think they have a guess at how to make it wake up. Apparently whatever they did with the stone worked better than they expected; it seems your local Senior, Tom, is quite an asset," she said to Nita. "They were able to wake it up on the first try using the spell he wrote for them."

Nita nodded. "He says it's because he used to write so many commercials."

Aunt Annie chuckled. "I guess I can see the point. Well, anyway, it's awake. As you will have

Sliabh O Cualann

noticed, the land is getting, uh, restive... more than it was, an}^^ay."

"Are they going to bring the stone here? Or somewhere special?" asked Kit.

"Oh no... there's no need for that. The stone is the earth of Ireland, in some ways; any\v^here there is earth of Ireland, the stone is there in essence. The same way that the cup is the water of Ireland, and all wells and pools; the sword is the air of Ireland, the spear is the fire. The Treasures exist in essence in all the things they represent. But when they're awake, they coexist many times more powerfully than before. They themselves become weapons of considerable power; and the earth and air and water and fire themselves become weapons that we can rum to our advantage. We sincerely hope." She took a drink of her tea.

"What about the sword?" Kit said.

"It's hard to say," said Annie. "The cup is more awake than any of the envelopes they're thinking about using for the sword; so they're going to try the spell on the Chalice first and see how the re-animation works on that. If it does, they'll move on and try it on the sword in the museum."

"And the spear?" Kit said.

Aunt Annie shook her head. "No news. There are a lot of spears and pikes and whatnot lying around, but none of them seem ever to have been the Spear Luin. Which is a problem, for Luin was the weapon that overthrew Balor. The others were basically support for it,"

Kit shrugged. "Well, something'U turn up. Something always does."

"I wish I had your confidence/* Aunt Annie said, getting up to pour herself another cup.

"Something has to turn up," Kit said. "WeVe here."

• Nita punched him lightly. "Something's always turned up before," she said. "This is not Uke before..."

Kit shrugged again. "Listen, if I can't keep your spirits up, you won't do good work."

"How can my spirits be other than wonderful when I have this to look at?" she said, pushing the paper at him.

The Wicklow People had come out that morning; the usual details of the fortunes and misfortunes of Wicklow people overseas, or the failure of the county council to do something about an urgent local problem, or the accusations of one of the local political parties about the purported bad behavior of one of the others had been forced off the front pages. Other people besides Nita had been having problems.

SILLY SEASON COMES TO NORTH WICKLOW, Said

the headline. Underneath it was the beginning of a three-page feature story concerning the bizarre occurrences in the county that week. The trouble had started in the country. A farmer had claimed that a dinosaur—a small one, but still plainly a dinosaur—had been eating his sheep. These claims had been greeted with amusement by his

Sliabh O Cualann

neighbors, some of whom had suggested that he had, in the local way of putting it, "drink taken/*

The Gardai declined comment on this business, as they did about the reports of rocks rolling uphill at Ballywaltrim, or the problem incurred by the dairy-cattle farmer over by Kilmacanogue, who claimed his Guernsey herd was stolen— driven away across the dual carriageway by a man who said he was Finn MacCumhal, and was entitled to take any cattle that the owner was not strong enough to defend in battle. There was a chorus of noisy protests to Bray Urban District Council and Wicklow County Council about this—some people insisting that the psychiatric hospital at Newcastle needed to look into its security.

Matters were no better anywhere else in Ireland. There were reports from all over of people's lives being suddenly turned topsy-turvy by the appearance of ancient heroes, ancient villains, and ancient monsters, with which Ireland was well suppHed. Several people dug up buried treasures after being told where to find them by kindly ghosts; unicorns were seen in Avonmore Forest Park; merfoik were heard singing off Howth. The Gardai had no comment on these matters, either.

Nita and Kit were perusing these accounts when Johnny O'Driscoll arrived. Nita put the newspaper aside and introduced Kit to him. 'You're very welcome," Johnny said to him.

I

^'Your friend here will have warned you about the overlays, though/*

"She mentioned them, yes."

"Well, be careful. We have enough problems at the moment."

Nita poured a cup of tea for Johnny; he took it, drank it with a thankful air, and said, "Everyone else Fve talked to this morning has had a problem, so I might as well hear yours, too. What have you been up to?"

"Nothing really," she said. "But I did have an interesting conversation with a fox the other day." And she described her meeting with the dog-fox and the information he had given her.

Johnny looked thoughtful. "I have to say," he said, "that Fd suspected for some time that at least one of the Bright Powers was in the area, in human form. I had no solid confirmation. Normally, if one of Them is going to be in the area on business, the Knowledge gives warning of it, or the manual does, depending on which you use. But there's been no such warning. Then again, this isn't a normal situation. Anyway, I had other indications. Interesting to hear them confirmed."

Nita glanced over at Kit. "Why do They hide?" she said.

"To keep the other side from knowing that They're here. Except that the other side seems to know already, so that reason doesn't work in this case." He shook his head. "I don't know. The

Sliahh O Cualann

Powers are frequently beyond our ability to explain ... but there's nothing strange about that. They're the next major level of creation up from us, after all. Should a rock expect to be able to explain a human being?"

"We have enough trouble with that ourselves," Kit said.

"Just so. Anyway, whatever Power It is doubtless has good reasons for wanting to stay hidden. I wouldn't want to break Its cover prematurely."

Kit and Nita looked at each other.

"Meanwhile," Johnny said, "Anne, if it's all right with you, Doris will be stopping in this afternoon with what she's picked up. The Ennis-kerry region is too badly overlaid for her to keep it up there for a few minutes without the area remembering all kinds of things that are better not roused. Down here is a Httle cleaner; you and I can do something to suppress those memories about the Church and Cromwell's people."

"No problem," said Aimt Annie. "We'll put it in the back office."

"Fine. Your staff doesn't usually go in there?"

"Only my secretary. I can ask her not to."

"Fine. These Treasures are proving a little more dangerous than we thought. Harry, who went up to do the work on the stone, did it all right... but I think he's probably not going to be worth much of anything for the next few days. We have to be very careful that we don't let people spend too much time near these things. If you show me

where you want to put it, I'll build a warding for that room and see that it doesn't do anyone any damage."

"But how can the Treasures be hurting people?" Nita asked. "They're goodV

"Oh, absolutely," Johnny said. "There are probably no more powerful forces for good on the planet... except for human beings, naturally. But just because they're good doesn't mean they're safe:'

"Listen, Shaun," Aunt Annie said then, "is there any plan yet for where we're going to do the big ceremony, the reenactment?"

"It'll have to start up at Matrix," Johnny said. "It has all the necessary equipment. That's right," he said to Nita, "you haven't seen my place yet, have you? Not really my place, of course. No one owns Castle Matrix but itself... and whatever's under it. You'll see." He got up. "Anyway, Matrix is where it'll start. But where it'll end..." He shook his head. "I have to go down to Bray. Either of you need a ride?"

"Thanks," Nita said. "We were going to take thebus, butif it'sOK..."

"Sure, come on."

Johnny dropped them more or less in the center of town, where Herbert Road crosses Main Street. They waved good-bye to him as he drove off, and Kit said, "I didn't have any breakfast... I'm an empty shell. Is there anywhere to eat around here?"

Sliabh O Cualann

"There's a chicken place over here that's not too bad," Nita said. "I've got some money. Let's go in there."

They walked in, went to the counter, and ordered. Nita took one quick glance at the back of the restaurant, and her stomach turned over inside her in nervous response. Ronan was sitting back there. He shot Nita one quick glance and then looked down again at the Coke he was busy with.

"You OK?" Kit asked, as they turned away with their drinks and went to a table. "Your face is all weird."

"Uh," Nita said. "I poured a drink over a guy last night."

"You were out with a guy?"

Nita blushed. "No, not me. A bunch of us were out."

"What, a bunch of the kids around here?"

"What is this, the Spanish Inquisition? I was out with my aunt. There was a big wizards' meeting in town."

"Oh," Kit said.

Nita rolled her eyes and said, "Spare me! Never mind that." She took a drink of her Coke—her mouth was suddenly dry—and said, "Half a second." Then she got up and went back to Ronan's table.

He looked up at her with an expression partly unease and partly annoyance, and he still managed to smile on top of it all. "You forgot your Coke," he said.

"No, it's back there."

"I mean, I thought you were going to pour it on me."

She looked at him ruefully. "Listen, Ronan, Fm sorry. Look, come on and sit with us, and meet my partner."

"That's him?" He craned his neck a little.

"Yeah, he's just in from the States. Come on and sit with us."

Somewhat reluctantly, Ronan got up, bringing his drink, and went and stood by the table. "Kit," she said, "this is Ronan. Ronan, Kit Rodrigues."

They shook hands, Kit willingly enough, Ronan with some reserve, and they looked at each other. ''Dai stihoy'' Kit said.

Ronan raised his eyebrows as he sat down. *Tou can tell?"

Kit looked surprised. "It sticks out all over you."

"Your partner couldn't."

Kit shrugged. "It's always easier for guy wizards to tell guys, and girls to tell girls. Anyway, Neets has other things to think about. And she's in a weird place: You get thrown off. I didn't know her aunt was one of us till she was pointed out to me.

There was tension in the air. Nita had thought this would be a good idea, at first; now she was beginning to regret it. "I was just telling Ronan," she said to Kit, "that I was sorry I dumped the drink on him last night."

Sliabh O Cualann

Ronan looked bemused. "Watch out for her. She*s got a temper."

"I've noticed/' Kit said. "Just hope you never see her sister lose hers. Whoo! But Neets is no prize, either."

"Will you two stop talking about me as if Fm not here?" Nita said, annoyed. Then they both grinned at her, and she blushed. Bad enough being teased from just one direction.. .

"Scoot over. Kit," she said, sat down next to him, and started working on her Coke again. Then she said to Ronan, "How was your day?"

There was an abrupt sound of breaking glass from outside. All three of their heads jerked up at the same time. "What the heck—!" Kit said.

"Probably an accident," Ronan said, getting up hurriedly. "The comer next to here's a bad one; people are always coming around it too fast—"

The next sound of glass breaking was the shop's own window, and it was not a car that broke it. Something big, dark, and blunt slammed into it from outside, and plate glass rained in. The ladies behind the counter cried out in surprise and hurried to the back of the shop. The shop's three other patrons followed them, leaving Kit and Nita and Ronan standing there.

Something stepped in through the broken glass. If you had taken a human being, and coated it with tar, rolled it in gravel, and then turned it loose to walk around blindly smashing things, it might look something like the creature that appeared be-

fore them. At least, it would if it were about five feet tall and about four feet broad, with arms and thighs as thick as a man's waist, and a round ugly face like a boulder.

They looked at the creature in shock as it came toward them. "It's a drow," Ronan whispered. "Fomori..."

They could see others like it stalking past, out in the street. The sounds of breaking plate glass were spreading down the road. Cars screeched to a halt, horns blasted. There was one long screech followed by the sound of more breaking glass, and the crunch of metal, too, this time.

"Someone's hit one," Kit said.

"I feel sorry for their car," Ronan said. "Come on."

"How do you stop them?" asked Nita.

"Stop them?! You don't stop them. You run away!" Ronan said. He grabbed Nita's arm with one hand and Kit's with the other and hustled them out the back door.

They ducked into Castle Terrace behind the chicken place. Nita looked down to the end of the street, toward the remains of the old castle. Several of the drows were there, tearing the place up, or down. They appeared to be made of good Wick-low granite, and to dislike everything they saw. Several of them, down the street, were punching holes in the walls of the Bank of Ireland: Its alarm bell was ringing disconsolately. Another drow, in Herbert Road, was busy turning over a car, while

Sliabh O Cualann

people struggled and screamed and tried to get out of it.

"This is not good/' Nita muttered. "We can't just leave these things running all over the place!"

"There's no wizardry that can deal with these," Ronan said, "not with overlays all over the place! You've just got to get away! If they—"

That was when the heavy hand fell on Ronan's shoulder. "No wayV Kit said. He then spoke three words, very short and sharp. The drow reeled back, mostly because it had no head left. Rock dust sifted down past Ronan as Kit pulled him away. "You were saying?" Kit said, breathing hard.

A great crack or fissure ran down the drow from its neck straight down its center. It staggered and the crack spread. But something else happened as well. The drow got wider. It seemed to grow two heads, then six arms, then eight. It fell to the ground with a terrible crash and broke in two; and got up... twice. It had twinned.

"I was saying thaty'' Ronan said. "Run!"

Herbert Road was blocked by more drows. Nita, Kit, and Ronan dodged around the formerly single drow and ran into Main Street. People were running and screaming in all directions. Cars were being overturned; windows and wall's were being bashed in or pulled down. Two drows were in the process of overturning the monument in front of the Royal Hotel. "What the heck is this supposed

to be a reenactment of?" Nita asked, looking around in panic.

"It's not a reenactment. They're Fomori, doing what they always do... destroying everything in sight."

Nita looked up Main Street toward the old beam-and-plaster building that had been the town's market hall and was now the tourist center and museum. It was still fairly clear up there. "Come on," she said.

They ran up that way, accompanied by a lot of other people who apparently had the same idea. They didn't get much farther than the little arcade of shops in the middle of the street before they saw the first squat gray forms appearing down at the other end of the road. One of the drows began pulling at the gryphon-topped granite fountain in front of the Heritage Center.

They stopped. "No good," Nita said. "We don't dare use spells—they'll just backfire. We've got to do something else."

"Such as?" Ronan asked, desperate.

She smiled at him, rather crookedly. She was beginning to shake. "Let's try this," she said.

There was a format for these things. She swallowed, and called the name once; she called it twice. The second time it made her throat hurt— more in warning, she thought, than because of the sound of it. Something was saying to her. Are you sure? Very sure? She gulped, and said the name the

Sliabh O Cualann

third time. The word shook her and flung her down.

Nita sat up on the sidewalk, slightly dazed. It took a swallow or two to get her throat working again. Then she shouted in the Speech, "Pay me back what you owe me—and do it nowV^

Because wizardry was involved, she expected immediate results. Because wizardry was involved ... she got them.

Over the screams and the breaking glass, over the crashes of cars and the howling of the sirens of the Gardai came another sound: bells. Not church bells. It was as if someone had taken the sound of hoofbeats and tuned them, as if what came galloping did so on hooves of glass, or silver, a clangor of relentless and purposeful harmonies. Other bells were the sounds that bridles might make if each one were built Hke a musical instrument, made to be carried into battle and shaken to frighten the enemy—a sharp, chilly sound. The galloping and the sound of the bells came closer together and were joined by a third sound, a high, eerie singing noise, the sound that metal might make if you woke it up and taught it how to kill. The faces of the buildings near the Heritage Center flushed bright, as if a Hght came near them.

And then the tide of color poured itself down into Main Street from both sides of the Heritage Center, and the first of the drows fell away from the gryphon fountain, screaming as a crystal sword pierced it. The horses shone, the riders shone, but

not with any kind of light; they were simply more there than the main street was, more there than the broken glass, and the crashed cars, and the gray things; more vivid, more real. Everything seen in the same glance with them went paUid or dull— the crimson of cloaks and banners that burned like coals, the blues and emerald greens like spring suddenly afire amid the concrete, the gold of torques and arm rings glowing as if they were molten, the silver of hair burning like the moon through cloud, the raven of hair burning like the cold between the stars. The riders poured down into Main Street, and the drows fled screaming before them —not that it helped. Two of them took refuge in the smoked-glass-and-aluminum phone booths down at one end of the street; the faery horses smashed the booths to splinters with their hooves, then smashed the drows. Down past the Chinese restaurant, down past the real estate agents and the apphance stores, the riders came storming between the cars, or through them, as if the cars were not real to them; and perhaps they were not. The riders' swords shone and sang where the sunlight fell on them, that high, inhumanly joyous keen of metal that will never know rust. The riders had spears like tongues of fire, and sickles like sharpened moons, and bows of glass that fired arrows that did not miss. The gray things went down like lumps of stone when the weapons struck them. They lay like stone and didn't move again. The only screams were those of the drows now;

Sliabh O Cualann

everything mortal was hiding or standing very still, hoping against hope it wouldn't be noticed by the terrible beauty raging through the main street of Bray.

The riders swept down the street to where Nita and Ronan and Kit stood, their backs against the wall next to the pub by the arcade, and swept on past them, toward the Dargle, driving a crowd of the drows before them. A Garda sergeant in his blue shirtsleeves stood astounded on the corner and watched them pass, too dumbfounded to do anything but cross himself; several of the riders bowed to him as they passed, and smiled as they did it.

One of the riders turned aside from the bright tide, and paused by the wizards, looking down at Nita. He said, "Are you repaid, then?"

Nita looked up at him, at the crimson and emerald and golden splendor of his clothing and the impossible handsomeness of his face, and she felt dingy and shopworn by comparison. Her heart ached in her with pity for the wretched ordinariness of Hfe, seen next to this awful, assured beauty. But she said, "Yes, thank you. Thank you very much."

"I would have saved the favor, myself," said the black-haired rider, "for you'll need it more later. But what's done is done. And now get up and ride, for the Queen desires to speak with you."

"You mean the Lady of the Forth?" Nita said.

"No," said the rider. "The Queen of all the

Forths of this land. The Queen in Cualann, whom it is unwise to refuse... as it is unwise to refuse her Fool."

"The Amadaun!" Ronan said, his eyes going wide. "Do what he says/' he said to Nita. And she caught a flash of unnerved thought from him: He can kill with a look or a touchy this one, if offended —

"No problem with that," Nita said, at the moment having no time for Ronan's nervousness. "But one thing first." She looked around her in distress: the cars stopped or crashed in the street, the shattered glass, the stunned townspeople standing around. She beckoned Kit and Ronan off to one side a little and said, "We can't leave the place this way. Little hiccups in daily reality, people can deal with—but this? They'll never be able to explain it to themselves—"

"Or their insurance companies," Kit muttered.

Nita shook her head. "They'll lose their grip."

Ronan looked at them curiously. "What are you thinking of doing?"

Kdt looked thoughtfully at Nita. "Patch it?"

Nita nodded. Ronan stared at her. " Tatch it'? Patch what} With what?"

Nita bit her lip. "Time," she said. "With a spare piece. It's basic alternate-universe theory; you must know about this. Somewhere parallel to our universe, where this happened, there has to be one where this didn^t... where the drows never popped out, where this damage wasn't done. You

Sliabh O Cualann

patch this timeHne with an equivalent piece of that one/' She looked around her, considering. "The area and the timespan's small enough not to have to get an authorization, the way you'd have to for a full timesUde. And the reason's good, which is the whole point."

"But the overlays—"

"Ronan," Kit said, holding his voice very steady in a way Nita knew meant he was fighting not to lose his temper, "we can't sit around debating this all day. A few minutes more, and what's happened will have printed itself too strongly on these people's minds to be patched over. We'll be careful of the overlays. You in or what?"

Ronan looked from him to Nita. She shrugged, nodded.

"All right—"

"Here it is," Kit said, riffling through his manual. "We're inside the time limit, we can do the short form. Ronan?"

"Yes," Ronan said, looking slightly off to one side hke someone having an idea, "I see it. You start."

Kit and Nita started reading together: Ronan joined them. It was a little odd to hear the Speech for the first time in an Irish accent, but Nita didn't let that distract her, concentrating instead on the part of the spell that located and verified the piece of alternate spacetime they needed. They copied it

into the spell buffer prepared for it and held it ready. Then they performed the second part of the spell, which bilocated the copied spacetime with the one presently proceeding locally.

Kit looked up after a moment, breathing hard. Everything around them suddenly looked a Httle peculiar, as if every object had two sets of outlines, which were vibrating, jarring against one another. "Come on," he said to Nita and Ronan, "let's get out of here and drop it in place."

"How are we going?" Nita said, glancing up at the Amadaun.

There were suddenly three more horses beside him, bridled and saddled, ready to go. "Can you ride?"

"I can be carried," Nita said, utterly unhappy about the idea.

"Up, then."

Kdt helped her up. "Where is the Queen?" Nita asked the Amadaun. "Did she come out with you?"

"She did not: She goes not foraying anymore. Though because of you, that may change."

Nita thought about that for a minute. Ronan, meanwhile, swung up in his saddle with perfect ease, gathered up the reins, and sat there like a lord. Kit clambered up into his saddle, clutching the pommel.

"Don't fear," the Amadaun said. "You won't faU."

Sliabh O Cualann

Nita desperately hoped that was true. "OK," she said to Kit. "As soon as we're clear, let it drop."

The Amadaun turned his mount and led them at a walk up Herbert Road. By the entrance to the church parking lot. Kit paused, looked over his shoulder, said one word. Looking back toward the main street with Ronan, Nita saw the outlines of everything tremble, then suddenly solidify. With that, the glitter of broken glass in the road was gone, and a sudden confused silence fell over the shouting that had started in the street.

"Good," Kit said. "It took, nice and solid. Let's go."

And they rode. Nita knew these horses from old stories, but she still was not prepared for how fast they went. One moment she was trying to find a way to sit so that she wouldn't slip off; the next, she was galloping. Though it physically felt as if she were trapped in a dream sequence in a movie, the horse moving in slow motion, everything else blurred past her with such speed that she could hardly tell which way they were going. Apparently the Good People's horses didn't care about roads; rough or smooth was all one to them, for they ran "sideways," across water or fetlock-deep through a hillside in their path. The country around them appeared as it had—how many hundreds of years ago?—before there were roads, or people, or anything else to trouble the serenity of the world. It was an Ireland of apple trees in

flower, of long hillsides green with flowery meadows, deep forests, thickets of hazel and rowan.

They rode westward out of Bray and made for Sugarloaf.

In the sideways world, Sugarloaf was not a mountain, but a city that stood huge and golden, the towers lancing up as Nita had seen them from a distance back in Kilquade. The rider alongside them looked at Nita and at the view ahead and smiled slightly. "It is the chief of our duns in these parts," he said. "And the fairest. Other mountains are higher, but none was so well shaped, we thought."

"I saw."

"So you did. You have the gift; it comes of the blood, I suppose." The Fool looked at her. "Not a safe gift, though."

"Neither is wizardry," Nita said.

The Amadaun nodded. "As you will no doubt keep discovering before the end. No matter. We're here."

They dismounted before the great gates. The horses tossed their heads, somehow losing their saddles and tack at the same time, and wandered off into the surrounding meadows. "Come then," said the Fool. "The Queen holds summer court."

They did not go though the gates. The Fool led them instead a short distance around the high, shining walls to where an open pavilion of white silk was pitched in the meadow. Inside it was a simple chair, surrounded by several young

Sliabh O Cualann

women. In the chair sat another woman, who watched them come.

The Fool led them just inside the pavilion, in front of the lady in the chair. Later, Nita would have trouble remembering the lady's face; what chiefly struck her was the woman's hair, masses of it, a beautiful mellow gold like the wheat ripening in Aunt Annie's third field over. The thick braids of it that hung down reached almost to the ground; the rest was coiled up, braided, and wound around her head, the only crown she wore. She was dressed all in a white silk much finer than that of the pavilion, and she held something wrapped in more silk in her lap.

"The greeting of gods and man to you, wizards," she said.

They all bowed. "And to you, madam," Ronan said, "our greeting and the One's."

She bowed her head in return. "I may not keep you long here," she said. "You are on errantry, and we respect that. But word has come to us of what the wizards are doing. We know a little of draoiceacht ourselves, and we have something here that may be of use to you."

She turned her attention to the bundle in her lap. "Madam," Kit said, "may I ask a question?"

She looked up, and her eyes glinted a Httle with merriment. "Could I stop you?"

"Who are you, please?"

She sat back in the chair at that. "Bold one," she said. "But the stranger in the gate has a right

to ask. I am one who *died into the hills.' " Ronan turned his face away. 'Teel no shame," she said. "The name is long given to us by humans, and we are used to it. The first of us who lived here after the Making, and could not bear to leave, slipped sideways here, by what art you know; it is part of wizardry. We took ourselves to live outside of the world's time, and exiled ourselves as a result; we cannot go back except for a little while, every now and then. A night of moon to dance in; a morning, or an afternoon, on each of the four great turning-days of the year, when the hills stand open, and there is easy commerce between this world and yours. We are near one of those days now, which is why you can be here at all."

She turned back a bit of the silk of the wrapped thing in her lap, toying with it. "Now and then, the desire for the physical world becomes too much for us, and one or another of us crosses back into it—to live the Uves of human beings, in a world where things are definite and deadly, and what one does matters forever. We age swiftly when we do that, and our passions rule us; we do terrible deeds sometimes, forgetting the calm of the slower-running time outside the world. I have been back several times, and returned here after each visit, which makes me unusual... for many of us have gone over to try death and have not come back from it. Your world would know me by several names. I was called Aoife, and Fand, and Macha, and other names besides. But most

Sliabh O Cualann

important at the moment, I was called Emer, the wife of CuchuUain mac Sualtim, who was Hero of Ulster. And that is how I come by this."

She looked down at the bundle in her lap and slowly unfolded the wrappings around it. "After CuchuUain died," she said, "I gave it to Conall of the Hundred Battles. It passed from him, eventually; he could not bear the spirit that was in the thing. It was in pain, because there was no hand mighty enough to wield it anymore, and no mind that understood its power. Our wise folk thought at last that it ought to be brought out of the world, and *into the hills,' to spare its pain. And so it was. See—"

She slipped the silk aside, and held up what had been in it. It was a sword. There were no jewels on it; the hilt was plain gold, riveted with silver, and the blade was a long graceful willow-leaf curve of mirror-polished steel, about two and one-half feet long, coming to a "waist" about a foot above the hilt, then flaring slightly outward again. There was a wavy pattern in its steel, but more than that, the blade itself seemed to waver slightly, as if seen through a heat haze. Even in this golden Hght, with the summer of the Otherworld all around them, the Queen looked pale and plain as she held it up; the sword made whatever was seen with it seem less than real, as the Sidhe had done in Bray.

"Cruaidin Cailidcheann, he called it, the Hard, Hard-Headed. But it had another name first. Cuchullain's true father was not Sualtim, but Lugh

the Allcrafted; and this is Fragarach, the Answerer, the Sword of Air, which Lugh sent to him. Take it."

Nita put her hand out to it, and feh a cold fire burning, and a pressure of wind forcing her hand away. "It doesn't want me," she said.

"No. It has its own desires, and I can hold it only because I am one of the Undying. One of you," she said to Kit and Ronan.

Ronan put a hand out, then snatched it back, and scowled. "It doesn't want me, either."

"You then," she said to Kit. "Take it, young wizard, and give it to the Senior, with my blessing. He will be the one to wield it, I think. Say also to him," she said, turning to Ronan, "that I ask him again the question I have asked him before, and ask whether he has any new answer for me."

"I will," Ronan said, but his eyes sUd to Fragarach.

Kit bowed slightly. "And I'll deUver this." He took the sword, and apparently had no trouble with it.

"Go, then. The Amadaun will see you home. And have a care, for the One-Eyed is very strong. He is not as strong as he was once... but neither are the Treasures." The Queen's green eyes were troubled. "Nonetheless, they may serve. They must serve."

The three nodded.

"Go now."

The horses were brought for them, and they rode back to Nita's aunt's. The dual carriageway wasn't there, but they could recognize the Glen of the Downs as the Good People's horses left it swiftly behind them. The sea glinted before them with colors they had never seen before, under the Otherworld's sun, as they rode down the hill toward Kilquade; then the new colors faded, and there was nothing shining on the sea but mundane sunHght. The road faded into visibility around them at the end of Aunt Annie's driveway.

"Go well," said the Amadaun as they dismounted, and their three horses faded away. "We can do no more for you. One Treasure from the land itself; one from the hand of the People; one from humankind. The fourth must come from elsewhere: from one of the Powers, or not at all."

"You say you're a Fool," Nita said. "Are you making a joke?"

"Always. But the jokes are always true. Beware," he said. "And the One go with you."

He faded away as well. They turned and headed down the driveway. Kit carrying the sword across his hands and looking extremely nervous.

"You said things around here are getting weird?" he said to Nita.

She sighed. "Don't ask me for hints that they might get less weird," she said. "My money says things get worse yet."

Chedrta na Chill Pheadair

Kilpedder Forge

There it lay in the middle of the kitchen table, along with old Lotto tickets and a tea-stained copy of the Wicklow Peopky on top of the place mats, next to a plastic cookie tray with nothing but crumbs left in it, and the milk jar and sugar bowl: Fragarach the Answerer, shining under the light that hung down from the ceiling. They sat around it, nursing their tea, and looking at it. It was hard to look at anything else. The cats sat up on the kitchen counter, the way they did when waiting to be fed, and stared at it, too, big-eyed.

"And that was it," Kit said to Nita's aunt. "They said we would have to come up with the fourth one ourselves, somehow."

"Did they give you any hints?" Aunt Annie said.

Nita shook her head. "Unless you caught

Chedrta na Chill Pheadair

something that I didn't, Ronan. I can't always understand the way people talk around here."

Ronan shook his head. "I heard what you heard, more's the pity. I was hoping they might come up with the spear, too."

"You and me both," said Aunt Annie. She stretched, and slumped in her chair. Nita noticed how tired she looked and felt sorry for her.

"Did you do the warding you were going to do?" she said.

Her aunt nodded. "The back office is ready for the cup," she said. "Johnny went to help Doris with it; apparently it's more alive than they had expected and it was causing them trouble. They should be here in a while. Anyway, when you're in the back of the house, watch out for the office door. I had to draw the spell pattern partway up the inside of it to miss the rug in there, and if you open the door, it'll break the circuit. Just reach in through the door if you need something."

They nodded. "Aunt Annie," Nita said, "I was going to ask you. Where does Biddy the farrier live?"

She tried to make it sound nonchalant and had no idea whether she had succeeded. Her aunt looked at her a little curiously. "Just up the road in Kilpedder," she said. "Next to the shop across the dual carriageway. She has her regular forge there. Why?"

Nita tried not to squirm. "I had a couple of questions I wanted to ask her," she said.

"About her forge/* Kit said. "It's really neat. I hadn't seen a portable one like that before."

"Oh. Well, it's getting close to teatime: You should be able to find her up there in a while— her work rarely keeps her out much later than this.'*

Nita became aware of a low buzzing and looked around her. "Is that the oven timer?" she said.

Aunt Annie looked bemused. "No, the oven's not on."

They looked at each other as the buzzing got louder. Some of the spoons on the table began to vibrate gently, moving along the table a Uttle.

"Look at the sword!" Kit said. "It's vibrating."

It was. The low humming sound that Nita had mistaken for the oven timer was coming from it, and it was getting louder. "It sounds a Uttle like feedback," she said.

A faint beep-beep sound came from outside. The sword's hum got louder, and (Nita thought) more threatening. "Ohmigosh," her aunt said, "it's Doris and Johnny, and they've got the cup!'*

"Neat!" Kit said, and got up. "Let's go see!"

"No!" Aunt Annie said, sounding panic-stricken. "We don't have the place prepared to have two of the Treasures here at once! Put two of these things together without adequate preparation, and you're going to get something that makes atomic critical mass look Uke a wet firecracker!" She looked around hurriedly. "Crikey, I

Chedrta na Chill Pheadair

can't leave now! Kit, quick, take it and get out of here!"

He picked it up, rather nervously. It jumped and jittered in his hands, and the hum started to scale up into a howl. "Where?"

"Anywhere! Somewhere far! More than fifty miles. I'll cover you for the overlays, just go!"

He looked at Nita. "Copernicus," he said, and said three words, and vanished.

The air went whoomf into where he had been, not the usual explosion.

Outside, car doors slammed. "Here, let me get that for you, Doris," they heard Johnny say.

They all went to the door. Johnny was pulling the glass sliding door aside. Behind him came Doris Smyth, holding something wrapped in a pastel-striped pillowcase. The something shone through the pillowcase as if it were on fire: a still, cool, changeless fire that nonetheless rippled and wavered on everything it touched, like the sun looked at from underwater. "Back office, Anne?" said Doris, sounding strained but cheerful.

"Right. Don't open the door, just walk through it."

"Certainly. Johnny, you handle that; I have my hands full."

There was no room for them all down that narrow hall. Nita and Ronan stood there and watched as the three older wizards walked past the bookshelves and turned the corner, out of view. Except that they weren't entirely out of view at all; they

were faintly visible in the reflected light from the cup, even through the intervening walls. Nita shook her head.

"Don't do things like this at home, do you?" Ronan asked.

She grinned at him and headed back into the kitchen. "Neither do you, buster. Not as a rule, anyway.'*

She went to fill the kettle for the next inevitable round of tea. "Where's Copernicus?" Ronan said.

"On the moon. Southern hemisphere."

''The moonr

Nita shrugged. "She said more than fifty miles. That should be enough." Then she looked at Ronan's face as she plugged the kettle in. "Haven't you been there?"

"To the moon? No!"

"Why not? It's neat." He opened his mouth, and Nita suddenly felt annoyed at herself. "The overlays, I guess. I'm sorry. Look, there have to be some places you can teleport from safely. If you can find one, and hop over and see us, we'll run the wizardry through for you and show you around. It's no big deal."

"I'd like that," he said, and smiled slightly. It was a look Nita hadn't seen on him often: the chip off the shoulder for the moment and just a touch of wistfulness. "It must be grand," he said, "being where you don't have to be afraid to do all the wizardries you know can be done."

She laughed a Httle, and leaned against the

Chedrta na Chill Pheadair

counter, waiting for the kettle to boil. "It has its downside—you wouldn't believe tlite trouble you can get into. Remind me to tell you about the shark who almost ate me..."

"Want a look?'* Aunt Annie said, coming back into the kitchen with Johnny and Doris behind her.

"Yeah!'* Nita said. She headed down the hall, with Ronan behind her.

There was no need to do anything special. Walls meant nothing to the Hght of the Chalice— or rather the Hght of what was inside it. The Chalice sat on its pillowcase, with the gold inlay on the outside of the bowl, and in the spirals and curves that ran down its stem and massive foot, all burning as if molten and ready to flow off the cup at a moment's notice. The burning came from the blue-white light filling the Chalice's foot-and-a-half-wide bowl, a light that was Hquid, and still trembling slightly from having been moved. It shone through the metal as if it were glass, and through everything else it reached. Nita looked at her hands, and saw through them as if they were a sketch held up to sunHght: an incomplete and smudgy sketch, possibly in need of revision.

She looked at Ronan, and away again, shaking her head. Words seemed inadequate and out of place. But at the same time she couldn't help noticing his expression, like that of someone struggling with a memory and, oddly, not trying to remember, but to forget—

Maybe he felt her eyes on him: He turned his gaze away from the cup and looked at her with a troubled expression. "Let's get together sometime soon," he said. "I need to talk.'*

Nita suddenly found herself afraid to find out what he wanted to talk about. She nodded and went away hurriedly, back to the kitchen.

The three older wizards were sitting around the kitchen table, waiting for the tea to finish brewing. "There's a message for you from the Queen," Nita said to Johnny. He looked at her questioningly, and Nita repeated the message.

He smiled very slightly, and it was a sad look. "She's asking," Johnny said, "whether there's any hope that the world they have chosen to live in will ever come any closer to Timeheart. They love Ireland, make no mistake; but, at the same time, they're of the Powers, and they long for Time-heart, where they were created. But the legends say they must stay in the world they have chosen until the One's Champion comes back with his spear and they lose the world of their desire." He shook his head. "A while yet, I think..."

"Do you want Kit back?" Nita asked.

Johnny passed a hand over his forehead, smoothing his hair back. "Where is he?"

"The moon."

"That's all right, then. Wait a few minutes before you bring him back here. I can add a Hmiter to the binding on the cup that'll make it at least

Chedrta na Chill Pheadair

safe for the sword to be here with it. But the sword will need its own binding."

Doris poured the tea. "That's one less problem," she said. "Now if we just knew what to do about the spear, we'd be fairly ready."

There was silence around the table at that, and some hopeless looks. "You couldn't find anything that would work?" Nita said, as Ronan came in and sat down again.

"My dear," said Doris, "we have the original stone awake again, and what seems to be the original sword. The cup has ensouled very emphatically indeed. We dare not try to conjoin an inferior or weak spear to them. They would blast it out of existence. The resouled spear must be at least as strong as they—preferably much stronger. But we have no proper envelope. It's not strictly a change that a physicist would understand, but matter is not quite the robust stuff it was at the beginning of the world, when Creation as an art was young and the energies of it dwelt new and hot in the nucleus of every atom. As gravity and other forces have declined over many milHons of years, so has the basic... selfness... of matter. You see how the resouled Treasures make everything around them look insubstantial and unreal. The souls in them are reminding the matter they embody how matter was then. It was much closer to being alive."

"But then the spear's soul will remind the matter it's in. Won't it?"

"Not if the matter is simply unable to hold the

soul long enough in one place for the change to take," Johnny said. "It'd be Uke trying to hold a burning coal in a tissue. The spear's soul is the fiercest of them all. I had hoped I was wrong about this, but the research I've been doing over the past couple days indicates that no spear on earth would be strong enough now to contain the soul for long enough to do the trick, whether it had contained the soul before or not."

"Off the earth, then," Nita suggested.

Johnny cocked his head. "It's a thought that occurred to me. But the changes in matter that have happened here have happened everywhere else, too. And we keep coming back to the problem"—he smoothed his hair again—"that we don't have much time."

Ronan sighed and sat back. "It's a pity we can't just make a new one," he said.

Aunt Annie sighed, too. "Even if we had un-contaminated matter from the beginning of time," she said, "we wouldn't have the expertise to do anything with it. I think we're just going to have to keep looking for some other kind of answer." She glanced over at Johnny and Doris. They nodded.

Nita got up. "I'll go get Kit," she said. "Fifteen or twenty minutes be long enough?"

"Fine."

She looked at her aunt, who nodded. "The overlay buffer is still in place. Go ahead."

Nita said the transport spell quickly in her

Chedrta na Chill Pheadair

head, considering how much air she would need, doubling it as usual, and arranging the spell intake so that it would take the air from outside the house rather than inside—the memory of the last time she had done such a spell in her own house, without stopping to consider that her father's desk was covered with paperwork, was still with her. She vanished.

She found Kit sitting on his favorite rock—a pumice boulder on which he had been using a sharp piece of granite to whittle the crude likeness of a human face, for the bemusement of future lunar photographic surveys. The sword lay across his lap.

She climbed up beside him. "Johnny said he should be ready for you to come back in a little while."

"I don't want to go right back there," Kit said, turning the sword over in his lap and looking at it. "There's someone I want to have a talk with first."

"Biddy," Nita said.

Kit nodded. "Remember what the fox said to you," he said.

"Listen," Nita said. *Tou remember how you told me that you felt her forge was alive?" He nodded. Nita started to tell him what Doris had said about the relative liveness of matter at the beginning of time.

He stopped her. "It's OK, I heard it. I used your ears."

She punched him. "'Illegal brain-tapping! You didn't even ask me! What if you had overheard something I was thinking?"

"What, about Ronan?"

She blushed and punched him again, much harder, so that in the low gravity he fell off the boulder and bounced a couple of times in the moondust. "Great," he said, as he got up and dusted himself off. "This stuff is all down my shirt. Now Fm going to itch all night."

"Serves you right. Eavesdropper!"

"Still," he said, and looked thoughtful. "He's sharp, your buddy Ronan. Why shouldn't they make another one?"

"Because they don't know how. Whaddaya mean, *my buddy'?" She started heading around the rock to punch him again, far gone in embarrassment.

"Hmm," Kit said. "Neets, forget it, I'll lay off."

"Promises, promises."

"Look, let's go see Biddy.'*

"What are we going to say to her?"

He shook his head. " 'Come out with your hands up?' I don't know. But if one of Them is here. They need to be giving us a hand. Do you know where we're going?"

"Yeah. I'll pass you the coordinates."

Nita pictured the place in her head—she had seen it often enough when riding past it on the farm's bike—and translated the image quickly into coordinates that could be plugged into a transport

Chedrta na Chill Pheadair

spell. "Got it," Kit said. "Just change that bit there. Got it? Go."

They made the jump. Air slid out and away from them, and they were standing by the dual carriageway, near the pub that stood there. It was getting dark.

"Over here," Nita said, and led the way over to the right, where a small group of whitewashed buildings stood near the Kilpedder shop. There was a low iron gate at the entrance to them, covered with ornate and graceful wrought-iron work. A sign hanging on a nearby wall said

B. O DALAIGH, I.F.A.

Carefully and quietly Nita unlatched the gate and swung it inward. There were no lights showing in any of the buildings, though Biddy's truck was parked in front of one of them.

"Maybe she went out," Nita said.

Kit shook his head and went slowly to the truck. He put one hand up against the forge-box at the back. "Feel this," he said.

Nita laid her hand against it, and snatched it back with the shock. Life, for a wizard, is something that can be felt like the warmth from a radiator. This was not just a warmth, but a burning—and totally unlike the kind of low-level awareness that inanimate objects normally manifested.

"I can't beheve you didn't feel it the first time," Kit said.

"Different specialties, different sensitivities,"

said Nita. "Besides, I never touched it. But look at that."

She nodded at Fragarach. The dusk was falHng all around them, but it had no power over the sword; Fragarach shone as if it lay out in full sunlight, though the waning moon was high and the bats were out.

"It knows,*' Kit said. " 'Uncontaminated matter from the time of Creation,' did they say?" He chuckled. "Let's see if we can find her."

He went off around one of the outbuildings. Nita leaned against the forge, and breathed out.

"Looking for somebody?" Biddy said from the shadows.

Nita jumped, then laughed a little nervously. Get a grip on yourselfy she thought. Now what was the wording? She didn't move, just watched Biddy head over toward her. "Elder sister," Nita said, "in the One's name, honor and greeting."

"Now what do you mean by—" She stopped, as Kit came around the corner, with the sword in his hand. It had been bright enough. Now, in Biddy's immediate presence, it blazed.

Biddy looked at it and her face altered. Recognition and affection and surprise all appeared in it. "Now I thought that had been put away somewhere safe," she said in her soft drawl.

"It was," Nita said. "But nothing much is going to be safe anymore, unless it gets used."

"It knows you," Kit said. "I can feel that. It just about shouts that it knows you." There was

Chedrta na Chill Pheadair

an odd exultation in his face; Nita felt inclined to keep her distance for the moment. "And it knows your forge, there. I think maybe you made this." He hefted the sword, but there was something in the gesture that also looked as if the sword had moved itself, a small leap of excitement. "Or someone using the metal that's been built into that forge made this. Probably both."

Biddy looked at them thoughtfully and leaned against the wall, folding her arms.

"Cutlery isn't usually my stock in trade," Biddy said. "Pretty, though."

"Oh, come ow," Kit said. And Nita added, "I wish you'd ditch the accent. It's really bad."

"What?" Biddy said.

Nita had to laugh. "I'm sorry. It's probably good enough to fool the people around here, but it wouldn't fool a real American for very long. The morning I met you, I was wondering why you sounded so weird. Now I know." She laughed again. "You may be one of the Powers That Be, but you're no more perfect than we are. Especially not at sounding like you've hved somewhere you've never been!"

Biddy looked faintly shocked. Then she leaned back again, and she, too, laughed a little, then fell silent, looking at the sword.

"Well?" Kit said.

"Well," said Biddy. "May I see it, then?"

Kit went to her and handed her the sword hilt-first. She took it and held it up to examine it, lay-

ing it for a moment across the flat of her forearm. "Not much changed," she said. "Though it's more tired than I remember."

"You can do something about that," Nita said.

Biddy glanced over at her with a humorous look. "You have a lot of confidence in my abilities," she said.

"You'd better beHeve we do," Kit said. "We've worked with the Powers before."

"Not all of us are of equal ability," Biddy said. "And spending time in a physical body tends to affect one's ability to do one's job."

"The last Power we worked with took on the Lone One after spending ten years in the shape of a macaw, sitting on a perch and eating sunflower seeds," Kit said dryly, "so I wouldn't sell myself short if I were you."

Biddy sighed and looked at the sword. "How long have you been here?" Nita said.

"Since the beginning," Biddy said. She turned the sword over again and looked at Fragarach's flat, as if searching for flaws. "I never left. Couldn't bear to."

Nita boosted herself up onto the fence rail. "You were one of the ones who made Ireland, then."

Biddy nodded, turning Fragarach over again. "The first of the blow-ins," she said, and smiled slightly. "Here." She handed Fragarach back to Kit.

"The stories say that the Tuatha de Danaan

Chedrta na Chill Pheadair

came bringing the Treasures from the Four Cities/' Kit said. "Those are just parts of Time-heart, aren't they? And you were one of the ones who made the Treasures in the first place."

"I was the Smith of FaHas," said Biddy, "among others. I made Fragarach... yes."

"And then the stories tell about Govan, the Smith of the Gods, who came to Lugh the All-crafted," Nita said, "and how they went away together and took the Spear of Victory, Luin, and forged it full of fire and a fierce spirit..."

She looked at Nita and nodded slowly. "That was me as well."

"You could do that again," Kit said.

Biddy frowned. "I doubt it," she said. "The worlds aren't what they used to be, and neither is matter."

"The anvil in your forge is," Kit said.

"That can't be used as anything but an anvil," Biddy said. "Its nature is set, from time's beginning almost."

"But if you could get some more of that old original matter—you could do it. You could make another spear!"

"What do you take me for?" Biddy asked, laughing hopelessly. "You really didn't understand me. When you live in the physical world, you have to do it in a physical body. Those are the rules. And if you're going to spend as long in a mortal form as I have, you give up a lot of your power by necessity. It would burn the body out, other-

wise, and the brain; physicality just isn't robust enough to bear our state of being for very long. The memories all ebb away after a while. And why shouldn't they? I did my work well—too weU." She laughed, with some bitterness in the sound. "I fell in love with what I made and couldn't leave it. You're quite right that we're not perfect, especially that way. Once I had finished my part in making this place, I didn't want anything more but to be here in peace, forever. The One released me to do that—just to be here, and be useful in my small way, until I'm required to give my power back at the end of things. I do my forge work and live in the place I love."

"Then make yourself useful," Kit said, sounding grim. "Otherwise this place you love is going to be nothing but a big pile of cinders, after Balor gets through with it."

Biddy was shaking her head. "This is one use I can't be. I haven't the power to pull matter here from the heart of time, or its begiiming, either! And wizards or not, not even the Seniors have that kind of power!"

"I know someone who does," Nita said, "at the moment, anyway." Kit glanced at her, uncomprehending for a moment—then he got it, and his eyes glittered. "Never mind that now. The memories may ebb—but you can't have forgotten how you made that."

Biddy's eyes lingered on Fragarach. "No," she said. "That I remember very well."

Chedrta na Chill Pheadair

"And the spear?'* Kit said.

"I remember some of the details," Biddy said softly. "But I had that other Power to help me, the one they called Lugh the AUcrafted."

"I can't get you someone who knows how to do everything," Nita said, grinning, "but I can sure get you someone who thinks she does. Second best, maybe. But take it or leave it."

Biddy stood there, her eyes downcast, irresolute.

"Come on," Nita said. "We could require it of you, in the One's name. Once a Power, always a Power, regardless of how much or little of it you have left. Those are the rules, as you say. But—" She broke off.

Nita and Kit stood quiet. Biddy stared at the ground.

She looked up, then. "It's better than doing nothing, I suppose. Tell me what you want of me."

"Come have some tea at my aunt's," Nita said.

Kit groaned.

Some hours later almost all the free chairs in Aunt Annie's kitchen were full of wizards, all talking hard. Most of them there knew Biddy, and there had been some shock at Nita's announcement of who else she was besides the local farrier, but Fragarach's response to Biddy couldn't be explained in any other way. Shock had been quickly put aside in favor of planning.

"It was Ronan's idea," Nita said, and Ronan blushed right out to his ears. "We can make another. We can!"

"I'll entertain explanations of how," Johnny-said, sitting back and stroking his mustache. "Don't tell me you're thinking of pinching some ur-matter from Timeheart, either, because it won't work. Matter there is structured differently from the way matter was at the beginning of time in this universe."

"TimesHde, then," Kit said.

Johnny shook his head. "We would need a wizard with enough power to drive that kind of a sHde back far enough. You're talking billions of years."

Kit bent over to Nita and said, "Should I?"

"I think you'd better," Nita said, and sighed. It had been so quiet until now, relatively speaking. "It's after lunch. See if you can do it without raising the alarm, if you know what I mean."

Kit nodded and went out. "It might help," Aunt Annie said to Johnny, "if we understood a little more about exactly what kind of matter's needed."

"Well, you've got a bard around here somewhere, haven't you?" he said. "Let's hear the authorized version first, and then Biddy can give us what she remembers of the technicaUties so that we can work on the spelling proper."

"Hmm," Aunt Annie said. She went to the door. "Tualha! Kitty, kitty, kitty! Tuna!"

Chedrta na Chill Pheadair

The kitchen Immediately began to fill with meowing cats. "Do you really think this will work, Shaun?" Doris asked.

He stretched, then shrugged. "It*s our best chance, I think, considering that no envelope presently extant seems to be suitable. It seems as if the spear's soul burns out its containers the way— well..." He looked at Biddy, then away.

The kitty door flapped as Tualha scrambled in through it. She stood there, very small and black, with her tail pointing straight up in the air, and said, "Mew."

Nita burst out laughing. "Cut us some slack, Tualha. It's the Senior for Europe, and he wants your advice."

"Oh, well, that's different," Tualha said. She looked up at Aunt Annie and said, "First things first. What about that tuna?"

"There was a time," Johnny said, "when bards performed first, and then the lord of the hall gave them largesse."

Tualha looked disdainfully at him. "Welcome to the twentieth century. Tuna," she said to Nita's aunt. "And then cream, please."

Annie raised her eyebrows, and went to get it. It was astounding how fast such a small kitten could eat, especially in contrast to all the other cats, who had to be fed, too, so that they wouldn't steal Tualha's food. Eventually she was Hfted up on the table and given her saucer of cream there, and she lapped it with a thoughtful air, burping

occasionally, while the human wizards sat around and nursed their tea.

"Now then," Johnny said.

Tualha sat down and began washing her face. "What do you want to know?" she said.

"Tell us if you would, o bard, of the forging of the Spear Luin."

Tualha began washing behind one ear. "The Spear of Victory itself came from the city FaUas; Arias the poet-smith, whom some called Govan, made it there. The song says that Arias took a star and hammered it on the anvil, and so made the blade of the spear. Then the Tuatha de Danaan brought it with them through the air and the high air when they came to Ireland. And with them it stayed, and gave light to any place it was in, for the burning that was in it."

Tualha stopped, yawned, and then started in on the other ear. "Then came Balor, and made a tower of glass for himself and his creatures in the sea near Ireland. Balor's Ukeness was that of a human, but gross and misformed, and one eye squinted away almost to nothing for the hugeness and horrible-ness of the other. So great was it that it took four Fomori with forks of iron to pull the eyelid up when Balor wanted it so. And when it opened, what its glance fell on scorched and burned and was poisoned, and blasted off the world and out of it."

Glances were exchanged around the table. "It was foretold by other wizards," said Tualha, "that

Chedrta na Chill Pheadair

only fire and the spirit of fire would end Balor, and that one would come who had all skills, and was kin to Balor, and would make that end of him. So the Tuatha waited, looking for that one to come."

"Another of the Powers," Aunt Annie said, "by the sound of it. And a fairly central one, if Balor is another version of the Lone Power."

Johnny nodded. Tualha had tucked herself down into meat-loaf shape. "Nuada the King did not know who that one might be," she said, "so he gathered to him all the great Powers that were in Ireland in those days: Diancecht the Physician, and Badb the Lady of Battles, and the Morrigan, the Great Queen; he gathered in Govan the Smith, and Luchtar the Builder, and Brigit whose name meant the Fiery Arrow, who was healer and smith and poet all together; and cupbearers and druid-wizards and craftsmen of all kinds. And one day they were feasting when a young man came to the door of their great rath and asked to come in. The doorman asked what skill he had. He said he was a warrior, and a harper, and a storyteller, too, and a champion in the fight, and a smith, and a cupbearer and a doctor and a wizard and a poet. And when the Powers heard that, they said, 'This must be Lugh the Allcrafted, our deliverer. Let him in so that we can test his power.* They did that, and the young man could do everything he said he could: And the Ildanach, the Allcrafted, is what the Powers nicknamed him. Then they started

their plan to drive Balor and the threat of his eye, and his creatures, the Fomori, from Ireland forever."

Tualha looked thoughtfully at the saucer, then at Aunt Annie. Aunt Annie poured her some more cream. "Thirsty work," Tualha said, and had a brief drink. "Then," she said, Ucking cream off her whiskers, "Lugh went off in private for a long time with Govan the Smith; they took counsel and made a plan, and Lugh had the Spear of Victory brought to him. In secret Lugh and Govan labored for three years, or some say seven, forging the spear anew. Unquenchable fire they forged into it, and a fierce spirit—" Tualha yawned, and crouched down in meat-loaf shape again. "Then when they were done Lugh returned to the great rath of the Tuatha de Danaan with the spear, just in time to meet a party of the Fomori that had been sent there by Balor to demand a tribute of slaves from the Tuatha. Lugh unwrapped the spear and called on the Tuatha to cover their eyes, and the spear roared with rage and blasted the Fomori to ash on the instant, all but one that Lugh sent back to Balor to tell what had happened, and bring the message of Lugh's defiance to him." Tualha rolled over on her side and yawned again, blinking at them. "Then the war starts. Did you want anything else?"

"No, that'll do for now. Thank you." Something went POW! out in the front yard. All heads turned at that, and there were some

Chedrta na Chill Pheadair

concerned expressions; but a moment later they heard the front door slide open, and Kit walked in.

"Noisy, that," Johnny said. "You weren't so loud when you left."

"Not my fault," Kit said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.

Behind him, Nita*s sister, Dairine, walked into the kitchen: twelve years old, small, skinny, and bright-eyed, with a shock of red hair, wearing shorts and sneakers and a Batman T-shirt three sizes too large for her—one of Nita's, actually. Nita started to fume slightly—Dairine had started borrowing her clothes lately, and returning them in less than pristine condition—but there were more important things to be concerned about at the moment; she kept her annoyance to herself. Dairine glanced around the kitchen with interest, then said, "Hi, Neets. Hi, Aunt Annie!" And she put down the portable computer she was carrying, and went and gave her aunt a hug.

Johnny and Doris and Biddy and Ronan all watched this with some amusement. "My sister," Nita said to Johnny. "Dairine."

Johnny blinked. ''This is the Dairine Callahan who—" He paused, then, and laughed at himself. "It would be, wouldn't it? The youngest ones are always the strongest, after all. They're just getting a lot younger these days..."

Another chair was pulled in from the living room while introductions were made. Nita had to smile as she watched the portable computer unlean

itself from against the table leg, flop down flat on the floor, grow short spidery legs, and wander over to the cat food dish where Bronski was still eating. Bronski hissed at the computer, hit it hard with one paw, and when that didn't do any good, went out the cat door in a hurry.

Nita looked over at Kit, and said, "Any problems?''

"Nothing significant," he said. "She'd had her lunch, so we have a few hours."

"You brief her?"

"I know what you're trying to do, more or less," Dairine said, reaching out to take a cookie from the fresh package their aunt had brought out. "Mmm." She chewed for a few seconds, then said, "It's all been updating itself in the precis in my manual for the past few days." She nodded over at the computer, which was still examining the cat food dish with interest.

"The language is interesting," Johnny said, leaning back in his chair. " Took a star and hammered it on the anvil—' "

"When I was in Timeheart, I used meteoric iron," Biddy said quietly. "There seemed to be a certain... appropriateness to it."

"There's plenty of that around," Kit said. "Not all in museums, either."

"But not ur-matter," Doris said. "You would need meteoric iron from around the time of the birth of the universe."

Dairine shook her head. "It wouldn't be me-

Chedrta na Chill Pheadair

teoric," she said. **That early in the physical universe, there weren't any planetary bodies to shatter and turn into meteors yet, not even in the oldest galaxies." She looked at Nita for confirmation: Nita nodded. "You're going to have to get real starsteel.''

The older wizards looked at her. "From the nucleus of a star}" Johnny asked.

Dairine looked at him with interest. "Plenty of iron inside stars, especially the type As and Fs."

Biddy stared at Dairine. "You're suggesting that someone should put one end of a timeslide into the center of a star light-years away and millions of years back in time, and fasten the other end here} And then do what?"

"Forge what comes out at this end," Dairine said. "That's your department, though. You did that—" She glanced over into the next room where Fragarach lay on a sideboard with several layers of spell-warding glowing around it to keep its power from combining disastrously with that of the cup in the back office. "The techniques shouldn't be so different."

"You really think you can do this?" Doris asked Dairine.

"You mean, can I get you what you need?" Dairine said. She sat back in her chair and let her eyes drop closed a little, and then began to speak in the Speech. It was not exactly a spell, but the schematic for one, the outline, with certain key words and phrases left out so that nothing un-

toward would start to happen just yet. Nita lost the thread of it after about a minute: She had never heard any spell so complex in her life, and the several parts of it that she did understand—the power control parameters and the description of the matter that would be conducted down the time-slide, along with several names to be invoked—all rattled her badly. Nita knew that her sister had, in some ways, become the manual since her own Ordeal; and by way of semi-parenthood, Dairine had the power of a whole race of sentient computer wizards to draw on. But Nita had not had those facts brought home to her quite so definitely as they were being brought home now. She shivered; it was a little like being big sister to a nuclear explosion that could pick its own time to go off and was thinking of doing so soon.

Dairine stopped and opened her eyes again. "That's the procedure,"' she said. "It won't be easy, but at least it's not too complicated. When do you want to do it?"

Doris was shaking her head. " Torged fire into it,' " she said. "That spell would certainly produce that result. Shaun?"

Johnny was looking very thoughtful. "If the other end of the sUde were to slip out of place in either location or time," he said to Dairine, "it could annihilate the earth. You realize that, of course."

Dairine shrugged. "At the rate things are going, people might be thankful for something like that

Chedrta na Chill Pheadair

shortly. If I were you, Fd take the chance youVe got. I can do this now, but whether FU have the power next week, or next month, is a good guess. If the world still exists next week or next month.'*

There was a silence. "Well, Shaun?" Doris said. "You're the Supervisor."

He sat and stared into his teacup and then said, "I guess we haven't any choice. Tomorrow night, then? At Matrix. Assuming the other Planetaries concur."

Doris nodded, and Ronan, and Nita's aunt. "Will the Treasures be all right here tonight, Johnny?" Aunt Annie asked.

"I should think so. Let's meet at Matrix around eight-thirty in the evening; that'll give us plenty of time to get ready. This ought to be done at about sunset, so that the spear knows what it's for."

Everyone nodded and pushed their chairs back. Nita looked over at Dairine. "You came a long way for just this," she said.

Dairine stretched and grinned. "It was worth it to see the expression on your face when I outlined that spell. What a look! I thought you were gonna—"

"Never mind," Nita said. Becoming a wizard had mostly changed her sister for the better, but it also seemed to have increased some of Dairine's more annoying traits, like the bragging and teasing. "Listen, runt," she said, "I missed you, too. How are Mom and Dad?"

Dairine shrugged. "Mom keeps going on about

*her baby/ Dad looks depressed all the time. They're fine." Then she chuckled. "They'll never try a stunt Uke this on you again."

"Oh?"

"Uh-huh. I heard them arguing about it the other day. Went on for about an hour, and finally Mom said, 'If she wants to be a wizard, fine, let her. Better to have a daughter who's a wizard than not have a daughter.' "

''Awrighty'' Nita said softly. "When can I—" She was about to say go homey except that it occurred to her that she didn't want to-go home right this minute. Not until after the business with the spear was settled^ anyway. And besides, Vm on assignment ... Fd have to see it through anyway. "Never mind," she said again. "Did you tell them where you were going?"

"What, and get them all crazed again? No way. Mom hasn't figured out a way to get any promises out of me yet, and that's the way it's going to stay. For the time being, anyhow. What time is it at home when it's eight-thirty in the evening here?"

"Three-thirty in the afternoon."

"No sweat," Dairine said. "I don't have to be home for dinner until seven our time. Yes, I know where we're going; it's in the manual. See you tomorrow. Bye, Kit. Spot, heel!"

The computer scuttled over to her; cats hissed and bristled at it as it went by. Dairine vanished, and not one of the various papers on the table moved.

Chedrta na Chill Pheadair

"Hey, pretty slick," Kit said.

Nita laughed to herself for a second. "Look," she said, "you'd better get back, too. Your folks are going to start wondering."

"Let 'em wonder," Kit said. But he started heading for the door. Nita followed and said, "Make sure you get your sleep."

Kit laughed, too, a rueful noise. Excitement sometimes made it hard for him to sleep the night before a big wizardry, and Nita was used to teasing him about the circles under his eyes. "Fll try," he said. "Take it easy, huh?"

"Yeah."

Kit vanished, too; Johnny and Doris and Ronan headed out past Nita to Johnny's car, saying their good nights as they went. As Ronan passed her, he said, "That was your sister?"

"Uh-huh."

"You poor thing," said Ronan.

Nita nodded in complete agreement. "She has her uses, though," she said. "See you later."

Ronan chuckled and went out.

Nita went back into the kitchen, where she found her aunt staring moodily at a sink full of teacups. "They breed," she said, "I swear they do."

Nita laughed and reached up to the shelf that held the dishwashing liquid.

Casledn na mBroinn/ Caher Matrices

Castle Matrix

Sleep refused to come easily to Nita that night. Finally about midnight she got up and struggled back into her clothes, thinking that she would see if there was anything worth watching on TV, even if it was some boring movie on satellite or the twenty-four-hour news channel.

She never made it past the backyard. It was a clear night, while the last few had been misty, and the Milky Way hung overhead, nothing subtle about it: the galaxy seen edge-on and for once looking it, ridiculously bright. Nita climbed up on the fence between the yard and the riding ring and just sat there and stared at the stars for a long time. Only a month or so ago she had been out that way, among thousands of aUen creatures—and she still felt stranger here than she had there....

The crunch of the gravel down the drive got her attention. Nita held very still and Ustened,

Casledn na mBroinn/Caher Matrices

finding herself getting very tense. Who knew what kind of people went sneaking around farms when everyone was in bed...

She knew, though. The tension got worse... not to say that it was entirely unpleasant.

By the time the dark shape turned the corner of the house and paused, looking around, Nita's sight was so adjusted to the night that he might as well have been spotlit. And there were other indications, to another wizard, anyway. Very quietly she said, ''Dai.''

He said nothing for the moment, just came over to where she sat on the fence. His head was on a level with hers; very faintly, the starHght caught in Ronan's eyes. ''Dai/' he said. It came out as more of a growl.

She laughed at him, very softly so as not to attract any attention from the house. "You sound angry all the time," she said, "you know that? Doesn't it run you down?"

He turned away from her a moment, leaning against the fence next to her and looking up at the sky. "I couldn't sleep," he said.

Nita grunted softly and looked up herself. "And you walked all the way up here from Bray? Fm glad I didn't bother going in to look at the TV. There must really be nothing on."

This time she actually felt him getting angry, sensed it rising off him like steam off a hard-ridden horse. "Look," she whispered as he opened his mouth, "just spare me, OK? Everything some-

body says to you, you find a reason to get ticked off about it. It's a wonder anyone even talks to you anymore. Except you're so—" Words jostled in her head. She shut up. Cute, Sensitive, Help-less ...

He opened his mouth again, shut it, and then opened it again and started to laugh, almost soundlessly. "Yeah. I guess. I've always been this way. But lately it's been getting worse. Like whatever causes it is getting closer."

Ronan looked at her sidewise—a sort of wry expression, clearly visible even in this dimness. "Funny. I thought you were pretty different when I met you first—"

"And now you think I'm pretty normal?" Nita asked. "Thanks a lot."

"No," Ronan said, sounding annoyed. "I think you're more different than anybody around here. Especially the other girls." He sounded less annoyed. "A lot of them talk tough all the time, but if you push them, they give. You, though, you don't talk tough—mostly. When you do, you're scary." He shrugged. "And as for pushing—you just fall all over whoever does it, like a brick wall."

Nita blushed at this, not sure what to make of it. "Well, you're sure different from everyone else / know," she said, and then shut her mouth again lest the confusion inside find its way out and make her look like a total dork.

But Ronan just laughed again. "You think loud, too," he said.

Casledn na mBroinn/Caher Matrices

The last blush was nothing compared to this one, but Nita fought it down, starting to get annoyed herself. That broke off, though, when she saw the way he was looking at her. For once, there was no anger about it. Bizarrely, the look made her start to shake a little. Then it occurred to her that there was nothing bizarre about it, for it was not her own physical excitement she was feeling. She knew what that felt like.

There was nothing in the manual about this. Or is there? Nita thought. Have I ever looked? It's not as if the subject has ever come upy working with Kit —

Then abruptly she knew, or started to know, more about it. Nita sat there in the starlight and swallowed, getting her first taste of what it was like for a native wizard to experience the Knowledge, the direct input from the wizardly database, which was the way Irish wizards experienced the information. Would it keep getting this way for me if I stayed here longer? she wondered. But that was hardly important just now: There was other information to consider. Of course wizards got physical with each other sometimes, just the same as other human beings did. But they experienced it somewhat differently. It had to do with the Speech, which had physical components as well as verbal and mental ones—and when two people fluent in the Speech were attracted, they were likely to overhear each other's bodies as well as their minds—

Nita broke out in a sweat. Not mme, she thought, fascinated. She looked at Ronan, and for a long few moments her thoughts chased themselves unintelligibly through her head. Only one finally made itself plain:

Welly 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, 'Tfou'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.

She 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. She blinked at him. Her heart was racing.

The second kiss went on for a lot longer. This time, as the sweetness built in her body, Nita went

Casledn na mBroinn/Caher Matrices

shouldering through that welcoming greenness in his mind, touching it, 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 the right purpose. Nita bUnked in the middle of the kiss. A flash of scarlet, an impression of something swift and fierce and full of temper, and utterly good—

Her eyes flew open and she broke off the kiss in 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. "Nor

And he was gone now, running, the sound of his going frantic on the gravel. Fading. Gone. Nita sat there on the fence, shaking, half in tears, half too amazed to cry.

The night fell silent again around her. She went back to bed, but it was a long time before she could sleep.

The next evening she and her aunt and Kit got into 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 eastward 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 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 ..."

"There it is," said Kit. They turned out of the driveway into an open graveled area. Off to one side. 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-sHt windows here and there up and down the face of the tower, and a huge iron-bound oaken door at

Casledn na mBroinn/Caher Matrices

the bottom. Off to one side, an additional wing had been added. It was about fifty feet high, with diamond-paned windows. A low fieldstone wall ran around the graveled area. She wandered over to it after they got out of the car. Biddy's truck was parked by that wall, and the forge was missing from the back of it.

The oak door swung open for them. There was Johnny in his leisure suit, looking very ordinary except for what he held in one hand. It was a rod that burned with light. Nita recognized it as a tool she had used once before herself, a rowan wand that had spent time out in moonlight: a potent weapon for a lower-level wizard, though she couldn't imagine what Johnny needed one for. "Come on in," he said.

Nita and Kit went in behind Annie, 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 the curtain 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 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 set 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 very-elaborate spell diagram was being laid out in white. Nita sniffed, and recognized the sweetish smell of water-based acrylic paint from her art classes.

"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. *^e 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, sometime 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

Casledn na mBroinn/Caher Matrices

of kinds of faith, or power, over the years. 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 Bridget, the Mary of the Gael as they called her. Other mysteries were here later. There was some connection with the Knights Templars; some of them said this was one of the Grail Castles. But all those came later. We have older business tonight..."

"Are you about ready?'* Aunt Annie asked.

"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 cleanness 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 held the place for a figure or diagram much more complex. / guess when you're Senior for 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 existing three Treasures— each written around with the reinforcing and warding spells that each specific Treasure would need—and a fourth 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 star-steel and cool it down until it was safe to work; for in its native condition inside the star the star-steel would not be solid metal, or even molten, but iron plasma at something more than seven thousand 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 a Uttle beyond her....

Nita stopped then, suddenly, and looked down as Johnny finished one character and touched it with the rowan rod. The acrylic flared briefly bright, then died down again.

Nita stared at the floor.

"Something wrong?'' Johnny asked.

"There's something down there.'*

She was aware of Kit looking at her uncompre-hendingly 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 here, and this castle's element is water. No surprise, since the place is more or less haunted by the ^female principle,' and water and femaleness are associated. You saw the little stream that runs down by the forge, out by

Casledn na mBroinn/Caher Matrices

where you parked? We'll be doing work down there later."

Nita stood there just feeling it—a long, slow swelling, 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, "water, always. One way or another, we have 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 asked. "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 over the diagram.

"All names seem to be in place," she said. Her gaze dwelt particularly on one spot, which Nita had noticed earUer 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, which was vitally necessary. Your name in the Speech was meant to describe you completely, and to work with a shortened version of your name was to dangerously shortchange

yourself of your own potential power. The name written in the spot Doris and Nita were 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 are, the more meanings they tend to have— and mortals did not have names Hke that one, all power and age. But then again, one of them spelling tonight was not mortal. Still — there's some-thing odd ahout 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 asked.

"Looks fine to me. Yo, Spot!" she called, looking over her shoulder. The laptop computer came scuttHng in and sat down under a table.

"You picked out a star yet?" Nita asked 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 time-slide's fastened, and then take 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.

Casledn na mBroinn/Caher Matrices

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 at the mo-menty she said privately.

If she screws this upy we all will be. Kit replied. Ohy well. .. we've been in worse spots.

That was true enough. Nita had never had a Senior spelling with her, let alone the Senior for a whole continent. In the past it would have lent her a lot of peace of mind. At the moment, though, it didn't seem to be helping much.

Pre-spell nerves, Kit said. Me, too.

It was small consolation. Nita sat down for a moment, watching Johnny go over the last few details of the spell diagram with the rowan wand to activate and check the separate character groups. The curtain to the kitchen wing stirred, and Biddy came in slowly, carrying what looked like a long, wide, rectangular piece of metal.

She placed the object inside the node of the spell diagram that was meant to contain the iron

plasma, and then stood up, massaging her back. It was a bar of metal all right, about six inches thick and six inches wide, and about two feet long. The bar had a long, deep groove in it, about three inches wide and three inches deep, right down the length of it, to within about an inch of either end.

"There," she said to Johnny. "That's the casting mold I use for fireplace tools. The best I could come up with."

Dairine wandered over and looked at it. "How much does it hold?" she asked. "Molten metal, I mean."

"About twenty pounds."

"I mean in volume."

Biddy looked surprised. "I don't usually think of it in those terms. About a liter, I'd say."

"Hmm." Dairine looked at the mold, then glanced at the laptop computer. It got up from under the table, came over, and looked at the mold itself; then it and Dairine seemed to exchange glances, though how the computer did that with no eyes was a good question.

"Yeah," she said to it. To Biddy she said, "What's the melting temperature of the mold? I don't want to mess it up."

"It's case-hardened," she said. "About eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit."

"OK." Dairine looked thoughtful. "You want some carbon in with the iron?"

"About one and a half percent."

"Gotcha." Dairine looked at the computer for

Casledn na mBroinn/Caher Matrices

a moment; it made a soft disk-drive thinking noise, which amused Nita, since she could see that both its drives were empty. "OK," Dairine said to Johnny. "I'm ready when you are."

He took one last long look at the spell diagram as he stepped into the middle of it. "I know that in group speUings people usually divide the work up evenly among them," he said, "but if it's all right with you all, I'd sooner handle everything but the actual timesHde, and leave that part of things to Dairine. The Treasures themselves are going to need watching to make sure that they don't interfere, and I would prefer that each of you in the active diagram concentrate on that Does that seem appropriate to you?"

Everyone nodded or muttered agreement.

"All right, let's get to it. Doris, the cup—"

"Right," she said, and went into the kitchen. A moment later, Hght swelled behind the brocade curtain, and she elbowed it aside and carried in the Ardagh ChaHce. The whole thing blazed, and the knotwork designs running around its bowl and foot were so bright that to Nita's dazzled eyes they looked as if they were moving. Doris carefully bent down to place the cup in the center of its circle. It burned even brighter, and the light-liquid inside moved gently and threw ripples of brightness on the high ceiling.

"Water knows its own," Johnny said. "Doris, keep an eye on it. If any of these things is likely to get out of hand here, it's the cup."

"Oh, ril mind it all right, don't you worry-about that."

"We needn't do anything about the stone," Johnny said, glancing at the circle next to that of the cup. "We couldn't be much more in contact with the earth if we tried, and it's here already. Kit—"

Kit brought in Fragarach and laid it carefully in the circle waiting for it. Its light was burning low, but a breath of wind stirred the door curtains and the banners hanging from the ceiling as he put it in place.

"Air is ready," Johnny said. "One element only remaining, and that's the one we need. Ready, Dairine?"

She stepped into the circle for fire, next to the steel mold, and said, "Let's do it."

Johnny put his hands behind his back, bent over a Httle the way someone might bend over to read a newspaper lying on the ground, and began to speak, reading the spell from the diagram. Things had seemed quiet before—here, far from any town or road, close to sunset, that was hardly surprising—but the silence that shut down around them now, and into which the Speech began to fall, was more than natural. Nita felt her hair stand up on end, the old famiUar excitement and nervousness of the start of a spell combining with the effect of the wizardry itself on the space and matter within its range of influence. Under the silence Nita could hear, or sense, a constant slow rush and

Casledn na mBroinn/Caher Matrices

flow of water—or the essence of it—welling up and sinking away again, taking all dangerous influences away with it.

That was something of a problem, of course, for that same flow was Ukely to perceive the building energies of the wizardry itself as a dangerous influence, and try to carry it away as well. Nita had particularly noticed the careful reinforcement that Johnny had done around the edges of the spell to prevent this. But all the same, the soft rushing sound that she more felt than heard was washing against the boundaries of the wizardry, becoming more insistent as the spell progressed, like waves pushing harder and harder against a coastUne as the storm comes up behind them.

The spell was taking. It was always a sure sign when you began to perceive it as a physical thing, rather than just words spoken: Reality was being affected by it. Nita put up a tentative hand to the air in front of her and felt smooth, cool stone, though the air was clear and empty before her, or seemed that way. The Lia Fail was performing its function, holding the boundaries closed against whatever forces might come loose inside them.

The darkness was slowly falling outside, but not in the hall where they stood. Fragarach and the cup blazed, throwing long shadows back and up onto the walls from everyone who stood there—a clear, warm, pale light from the sword; a bluer, cooler burning from the cup. One moment the cup was brighter, the next the sword; Nita

could hear Johnny's voice straining a Uttle as his mind worked to keep them in balance until the symmetries of the first part of the spell were complete. There was no telling how long it would take. One moment he seemed to have been speaking forever, and the next, only for a few seconds. It was the usual confusion about time when you were in the middle of a spell. The world seemed to hold still while you redescribed it.

His voice stopped. Johnny looked over at Dairine.

She nodded, folded her arms, and began speaking. And if Nita's hair had stood up before, now she felt as if every hair had turned into a pin and was sticking her. Dairine was building the time-slide, the long pipeHne through spacetime that would conduct the starsteel to where they needed it. The timeslide would not, of course, actually exist in space or time, but would circumvent them both. Normal matter disliked such circumventions of the rules and complained bitterly during the process. Nita looked at Kit and saw him nearly in the same distress, his jaw clenched to help bear it. Ronan looked no better, nor did any of the grown-ups. But Dairine looked completely unaffected. She paused for a moment, examined the spell diagram, and then said five words, carefully, a second or so between them. She waited again.

Abruptly they were no longer in a room. They stood, all of them, on or around a glowing webwork in the middle of nothingness, but a

Casledn na mBroinn/Caher Matrices

nothingness that was strewn with stars, cluttered

with them, crowded with them. They're too close together! was Nita's first panicked thought. Not even in the hearts of young galaxies or new globular clusters was there stellar density like this; these stars were so close that some of their coronae were mingUng. In other spots, three or four stars were pulling matter out of one another in bizarrely warped accretion disks. New stars were forming all over the place, or trying to, as they stole matter from one another, swirled, kindled as she watched. This was the view from the other end of the timesHde that Dairine had constructed.

She's crazy, Nita thought. WeWe barely out of the big bang here — the universe can't be more than a few hundred thousand years old! But if Dairine heard Nita's thought, she gave no sign of it. One after another of the stars nearby seemed to veer close, then away again, as Dairine considered it, rejected it. For a few seconds the sunspotted globes of stars seemed to pour past them, twisting and skewing. Then one loomed up close, a big white star with a tinge of gold.

Dairine closed her eyes and spoke one more word.

It was as if the world had caught fire. Nita was frozen as much by her own horror as by the spell itself. With her outward senses, she knew that everything was fine, that the darkness of Matrix and the Hght of the Treasures was all around her; but her mind saw nothing but annihilation. A rav-

ening light so desperately destructive as to make the thought of physical existence seem ridiculous in the face of it, pressure and heat beyond anything she could imagine—she saw straight into the heart of this, and could not look away. Vaguely she could feel Dairine doing something, speaking again, naming in the Speech the amount and type of matter she wanted, the form, the place of delivery—all as casually as if she were filling out an order form. Dairine came to the end of her specifications, and was about to sign her name—

The rushing sound suddenly became deafening, and the perception of unquenchable fire was suddenly invaded by something: that cooler, bluer light, the feeling of liquid, quelling and subduing. Then, for the first time, Nita felt something from Dairine: panic, just barely controlled. The cup had sensed fire, and was trying to put it out—the essence of all quenchings was trying to flow up the timeslide, into the core of a live star. The least that could happen was that the timeslide would be deranged, and the whole energy output of that star would backfire down it—

Two more voices were raised then, in the Speech, quite suddenly—Doris's and Aunt Annie's —and their tone was astonishing. Nita almost burst out laughing, despite her terror, as the two of them scolded one of the elements of the universe as if it were an unruly child. They sounded as if they intended to send it to bed without dinner. Funny it might have been, but if the two of

Casledn na mBroinn/Caher Matrices

them had anything, they had certainty. The cup struggled, the blue Hght washed higher—then abruptly fell away.

Nita sagged with relief. Dairine had calmed down from her bad moment and was completing her end of the spell. Through the blinding images still in her mind, Nita could see Dairine look carefully at the metal mold resting on the floor, then crouch down and poke her finger very carefully at a spot in the air about a foot above it. She lowered her finger carefully to the mold, and said another word.

Fire followed her gesture. It paused in the spot where Dairine's finger had first paused, and Nita smelled ozone as the tiny spark of plasma took shape at this end of the timeslide and destroyed the air molecules in the spot where it had arrived. That one pinpoint of Hght drowned out even the fire of the Treasures and threw back shadows from everyone as stark as if they had been standing on the moon. Then the Hght began to flow down in a narrow incandescent pencil-Hne, cooling rapidly out of the plasma state into iron vapor and then into a molten solid again, as Dairine let it pass out of the smaU magnetic-bottle part of the speU and into the mold.

Slowly the mold fiUed, the steel of it smoking. AU the air began to smeU of burnt metal. Nita looked over at Dairine; she was turned into a white-and-black paper cutout by the ferocity of the light hanging a foot away from her nose, but

she seemed not to be bothered by it. Nita could see her beginning to shake, though—even Dairine couldn't hold a wizardry like this in place for long. Come oriy Dart, she thought. Hang in there —

The mold kept fiUing. Nita could feel the cup trying to get out of hand again, and her aunt and Doris holding it quiet by sheer skill in the Speech and calculated bad temper. Dairine was wobbling where she crouched, and put one hand behind her to steady herself, and sat down on the floor, but never once took her eyes off that spot in the air where the plasma was emerging—her end of the timeslide. If it moved, if it got jostled—

Come on, come on! Nita thought. How long can it take? Oh, please, God, don't let my sister get fried! Or the rest of us, she added hurriedly, as that possibiUty suddenly occurred to her. Come on, Dari, you little monster, you can do it!

The light very suddenly went out, with a noise like a large short circuit happening. Dairine fell over sideways. Everyone blinked; nothing was left but the light of the three Treasures—now looking very pale to their Hght-traumatized eyes—and one other light. The steel mold was full of it: iron, still liquid and burning red, skinning over and going dark, like cooling lava. Just the sight of it unnerved Nita and filled her with awe and delight. It somehow looked more definite and real than anything else in the area... anything else but Fragarach and the cup.

Nita went over to help Dairine up. Her sister

Casledn na mBroinn/Caher Matrices

tried to stand, couldn% and sagged against Nita.

"What's this 'little monster' stuff?" Dairine whispered. "It never even got really tough." And she passed out.

"Here," Johnny said from above Nita, and bent down to pick Dairine up. "Fll put her in on the couch. She's going to be out of it for a while. Biddy—"

Biddy was standing there looking at the mold and shaking all over. Nita glanced at Kit, who had noticed this as well. He shook his head, said nothing.

"I think we're going to have a late night," Johnny said. "You're all welcome to stay. We've got room for you. I think we should all take a break for an hour or so. Then—we've got a spear to forge."

He looked at Biddy. She was still trembling, as if with cold.

She looks worse than Dairine didy Kit said to Nita privately.

Nita glanced over at him. If she pulls her bit off that welly we'll be in good shape.

If Kit said. But why am I getting nervous all of a sudden?

Nita shook her head and went to find something to drink. She agreed with Kit. The problem was, wizards rarely got hunches that didn't have meaning, sooner or later.

She had a feeling it would be sooner.

I

Lughnasdd

NiTA WENT AND took a nap immediately. What she had seen had worn her out; and she had been drawn on for general energy assistance during the spell, too, so it was only understandable that she would feel a Httle wiped out afterward.

When she got up, it was two in the morning. Everything was very still except for a faint clanging sound, soft and repetitive, that wouldn't go away. She had an idea what it might be.

She got off the ancient bed in the upstairs bedroom Johnny had shown her and wandered down into the great hall. It was empty now: The spell diagram had been carefully scraped off, and the floor scrubbed. The clanging was closer.

She went gently out the front door of the hall and stood there, in the night, Ustening. Far off on a hill, a sheep went "baa." There was a faint hint of light about the far northeastern horizon, an

Lughnasdd

indication that the sun was already thinking about coming up again and would do so in a couple of hours. // it's like this noWy Nita thought, what must it be like around midsummer? It must hardly even get dark at all...

The sound was coming from off to her left. She followed a Uttle path around the edge of the castle toward where the drystone wall ran. The sound of water came chuckling softly up the riverbed beneath it, and the clanging continued, louder.

She made a small wizard-light to help her go. It sprang out of the air beside her, a small silver spark, and lit her way down the rough stone steps that went toward the water.

The clanging paused, then resumed. Ahead of her was a small, low building with a rough doorway. There was no door in it, just an opening surrounded by stones. She paused there and looked in.

The castle's forge was larger than it had seemed from outside in the dark. Biddy's steel-walled portable forge had been carried in and set up on one side; her anvil stood in the middle of the floor on a low stone table there. There was a stone trough, hke a watering trough for horses, off to one side, full of cold water that ran in and out from a channel to the river outside. Something else was there as well: the Ardagh Chalice, sitting all by itself on another stone sill, shining. Its Hght was quiet at the moment, though it flickered ever so

slightly in time with Biddy's hammer blows, when the sparks flew up.

Biddy kept hammering—not a simple single stroke, but a dang-tinky clang-tink, doubled with the rebound of the hammered ingot on the anvil; a sound like a heartbeat, but metallic. Biddy's shirt sleeves were rolled up, her shirt was soaked with sweat, and sweat stood out on her forehead. Johnny was leaning against a wall, watching; Kit was sitting on the edge of the trough, swinging his legs. He raised his eyebrows at Nita as she came in.

"I couldn't sleep," he said. "Even after I went home. So I came back. My folks think I'm still in bed... It's not a problem."

"What about Dairine?"

"I saw her home. If she needs to come back tomorrow, she can."

"I don't think we'll be needing her anymore at this point," said Johnny. "Also, I wouldn't like to put all my eggs in one basket. Some of us might not come back from this intervention, and the newer talents like Dairine may be needed for defenses elsewhere if we can't pull this off."

Nita came in close enough to see what Biddy was doing, while at the same time staying out of her way so as not to spoil her concentration. The bar of starsteel had now been hammered out flat. As Nita watched, Biddy paused and picked up the hot steel in her tongs, shoving it back into the

Lughnasdd

furnace. She turned up the feed to the propane bottle, and the steel began to glow cherry red, and brighter. "When are you going to do it?" Nita asked Johnny.

He sighed and leaned back. "I think we have to make our move tomorrow. May as well be: It's Lughnasad. A good day for it."

"But you can't have the spells ready by then," Biddy said to him. "You can't possibly—"

"They're ready enough," Johnny replied. *^e can't wait for the poetry of them to be perfect. It's not the old days anymore, unfortunately. Brute force and the Treasures are going to have to carry the day... or nothing."

Biddy looked with a critical eye at the steel. It was getting crocus yellow. She pulled it out hurriedly, put it back on the anvil and began beating it with the hammer in such a way that it folded over. Nita looked at the lines running up and down the length of the spear blank and reaUzed that she had already done this many times. This would strengthen the metal and give it a better edge. "When does the 'forging in the fierce spirit' bit start?" Nita asked.

Johnny laughed. "Oh, the re-ensoulment? As soon as Biddy's done. We can't wait any longer. Fortunately we don't have to do what the Power that worked with her the first time did, and actually call that spirit out of timelessness. It's here already, somewhere. All it needs is to be slipped into this body."

"It seems strange, sometimes," Kit said, leaning back and taking a drink out of a Coke he had with him. "The idea of weapons having souls..."

"Oh, it was common in the older days. It was a rare sword that wouldn't tell you its history when you picked it up—and verbally, not just the way one would do it these days, to a wizard sensitive to such things. That may be our problem today... that our weapons don't nag us anymore, or tell us what they think of what we're doing with them... just let themselves be used. But then they take their example from us. And bigger things than just people have lost their spirits over time: planets, nations..."

Nita looked at him curiously. "Nations have souls?"

"With so much life concentrated in them, how could they not? You must have seen how certain images, personiifications, keep recurring. All our countries have their own hauntings, good and bad. The bad ones get more press, unfortunately." He shifted against the stone of the wall. "But the good ones do keep resurfacing..."

Nita looked at the steel, cooling now on the anvil as Biddy rested for a moment. "How much longer do you need to fold it?"

Biddy shook her head. "It's had enough. There are maybe twenty thousand layers in there now, if I've done my figuring right."

"It's not the hardness of the steel itself that's going to make it useful as a weapon," Johnny said,

Lughnasdd

'^but you*re right; something useful should be

beautLful, too ... Let me know when you're ready."

"Not too long now," Biddy said. She put the spear blank in the fire one last time, and turned the gas up. The length of metal got hotter and hotter, reaching that crocus yellow shade again and getting brighter still. She watched the color critically. "About seven hundred degrees," Biddy said then. "That's all it needs. Kit, you want to move out of the way?"

Kit hopped dow^n and moved hurriedly to the side as Biddy plucked the steel out of the fire and came past him. It was radiating such heat that Nita could feel it from where she stood clear across the room. But Biddy seemed not to mind it. To Nita's surprise, Biddy headed, not to the water trough, but straight for the ChaHce.

"Straight in," Johrmy said.

Nita opened her mouth to say, You're nuts, that won't fit in there! But Biddy, holding the length of metal by one end, eased it straight down into the Hght-hquid in the cup—and in, and in, and in, far past the point where it should have come out the bouom of the Chahce, if the ChaHce had been any ordinzry kind of vessel. She held the metal there. A roar and a bubbling went up, and the hght of the Chahce rose and fell; but none of its contents flowed over the edge, and finally the bubbling died away and the roaring got quiet. Biddy pulled the metal up and out. It was dark again, almost a dark blue on its surface.

"So how exactly are we going to do this, Shaun?" Biddy said, as she laid the metal on the anvil again and reached for a file.

"Well. All the Dark Power's forays so far have been into our own world—twistings of our reality. We're just a beachhead, of course; it's Time-heart that's really being attacked. It's true, we have had some limited successes against it here, because we're fighting on our own ground, so to speak. But we can't hope to prosper if we stay merely on the defensive. We'll take it over into the Lone One's reality, into one more central. What happens there will affect what happens here."

"And what will happen here?" Kit said.

Johnny shook his head. "There's going to be a lot more trouble, and it can't be avoided. We'll move as fast as we can, try to finish the battle fast by forcing a fight with Balor immediately. I have a few ideas about how we can do that." He laughed ruefully. "Unfortunately, the only way I can test those ideas is to try them. If they don't work—" He shrugged.

"Then we're no worse off than we were," Nita said, "because the world looks like it's going to pieces at the moment anyway."

Johnny laughed softly. "The directness of the young. But you're right." He looked over at Biddy. "Let's finish this first. We can't do anything until it's done."

Biddy had been filing at the length of metal while they talked. The bar was now looking much

Lughnasdd

more like a spear blade and less like a long, flat piece of metal. The steel shone, even in that dim place where the only Ught was from the coals in the forge and the camp lantern on the shelf, and the cup standing nearby. It glinted the way Fraga-rach did—as if it lay in sunshine that the rest of them couldn't see.

Biddy kept working on the blade with file and polishing wheel and cloth, and then after about twenty minutes held it up for them to see. "Sloppy but fast," she said. Nita shook her head; she didn't see anything sloppy about it. The flat of the blade gleamed, and the point of it looked deadly, a wicked needle.

"OK," Johnny said. "Let's get it mounted. Then around dawn we'll finish the job." "Dawn will be fine. Then what?" "Then this afternoon we go to war." " "We'?" Nita asked "I take it you don't mean just us."

"No," Johnny said- "Wizards on active assignment will be helping... some just along for the ride, but they Hve here, and they feel involved. And when everybody's together, we go have us a

fight."

He headed off. Biddy was still standing by the anvil, looking at the head of the spear, her expression very still. She looked up after a little while to gaze over at Nita.

"Do you know what I've forged here?" she asked.

Nita looked at the spearhead, and found that there were two answers to that question. One of them had something to do with Ronan and the way he had run from her after she had seen the Champion buried in him the other night. That answer was still partially obscure. But as for the other— The edge of the spearhead glinted in the low light, and Nita suddenly remembered the way Johnny had written Biddy's name in the circle and the way it seemed to be cut off—

"Your death," Nita said, or rather the answer spoke itself.

Biddy folded her arms and leaned back against the stone wall of the forge. "I gave up making," she said after a while. "At least, the kind of making that I used to do. Can you have any idea"—she shook her head, smiling a little: a hopeless look— "what it's like to ensoul your consciousness in a mountain range while it's still molten, and spend a century watching every crystal form? And to plan the long slides of strata, the way erosion wears at your work, even the scrape of glaciers? To be what you make..." Biddy sighed. "And to know what it'll become? You can't do that in one of these bodies. And I said I would do so no more, and that rather than ever do so again I would give myself back to the One—"

Nita threw a glance at Kit. She had been there: She knew the sound of the kind of promise that means one thing when you make it... and then later you find that the meaning has changed, but

Lughnasdd

you are going to be held to the promise nonetheless. Or you hold to it

"And now," Nita said, "you have made something again. And you will have to do what you said. Become part of the making, as the Powers do..." But the Powers existed partly outside of time. One Hving in time, in a human body, might not find that body working too well after it came back from such an act of making. Nita shivered.

"I may not," Biddy said. But her voice was still full of doubts.

This tone of mind Nita knew as well. Her heart turned over inside her with pity and discomfort. Any advice would sound hollow to someone in Biddy's position, poised between sacrifice and refusal. But Nita thought of how it must have felt to the wizards who had advised her at one point or another. Still, they never shirked from reminding her of what she needed to do, though their hearts bled from it. It was the basic courtesy one wizard owed another—not to lie. How much more did a wizard owe that courtesy to one of the Powers?

"You can't very well get out of it at this point," Nita said. "Your name in the Speech is bound into the spelling we did yesterday. The name says who and what you are... and for how long." She swallowed. "Change the truth of that now, and the whole spell is ruined. You know that. No spear...no chance of ensouling it. No chance of saving Ireland."

Not to mention the rest of the world, Nita thought. But that would hardly seem germane to Biddy at the moment. "There it is, though," Nita said. ^'Refuse this making and you'll be part of the destruction of your first one... But you of all people should know what to do to keep this island healing, I would have thought.''

Biddy looked at her and said nothing.

Nita was immediately mortified. She had completely screwed it up. "Sorry," she said, "sorry, never mind, forget I said anything—" She went out of the forge hurriedly, feeKng totally hopeless and ineffective.

Kit came along after her. He said nothing to her until they were about halfway up to the house. "You sounded a little rattled back there, Neets," Kit said then. "Is there anything—"

"No," she said, and regretted it instantly. "Yes, but you can't do anything. Oh, Kit!—" So how do I tell him about last night? About what I saw inside Ronanf And the sight of that cool, sharp metal on the anvil had given her something else to think about. Its image resounded against the image of Ronan in her mind, leaving her with a feeling bizarrely compounded of disaster and triumph. But the resonance was incomplete. It must be fin-ishedy something—the Knowledge, perhaps—said to her. It has to be fully forged. Otherwise —

Nita breathed out. "I can't," she said, and she wasn't even sure who she was saying it to, or about what, anymore.

Lughnasdd

Kit punched her lightly in the arm a couple of times and said nothing.

They went back up to the upstairs bedroom together. Dawn wasn't that far away.

"It's not like the last time/' Kit said, "or the time before."

The room had big overstuffed chairs in it, and a big glass case full of books. "Look at this," Kit said, reaching up for one. ''How to Build Your Own Staircase ..." He started leafing through it.

"How do you mean, *not like the last rime'?" Nita asked, getting up on the bed and leaning back against the big headboard.

"We've always been doing our stuff pretty much by ourselves," he said. "This is different. We don't have a lot of say about what's going on." Kit looked over at her. "I don't know if I like it."

Nita knew what he meant. "Maybe this is more what it's like for grown-ups," she said. "I guess this is what it'll be like when we're older. If we survive."

"You think we might not?" asked Kit.

"I don't know. We've been in a lot of situations we thought might kill us. Or that looked bad for part of a continent, part of an ocean..."

"Sometimes part of a universe."

"I know. But this time it just seems more... It seems bigger this time, even though it's smaller. You know what I mean?"

"It means you're away from home," Kit said. "I feel it, too, a Uttle."

Nita yawned.

"But among other things/' Kit added, "it means that if we get killed, it's not our fault."

"Oh, great," said Nita. "You find the strangest ways to be positive..."

"The only thing I don't understand," Kit said, and then stopped. A moment later he said, "I think we're missing somebody."

"Like who?"

"I don't know. But there's something we're missing."

"Well, I hope you figure out who it is pretty quick," Nita said. "Tomorrow..."

"Today," Kit said.

Nita yawned at him again.

"Neets," Kit said. "What happens if we do die?"

"We get yelled at," Nita said, and then burst out laughing at herself. "I dunno."

"Timeheart?"

"I suppose." She shook her head. "I mean, you know it's going to happen someday... but I don't think I've ever thought it would happen today.'* She thought a moment, then said, "Well, maybe once or twice. Why? You got a bad feeling?"

"No. That's sort of what worries me. All the times we've been in real big trouble and come through, I've had awful bad feelings. But this time, nothing." He leaned back in the big fat chair and stared at the ceiling. "I keep wondering if that means something..."

Lughnasdd

Nita looked at him. "Would it be so bad?" she said. "I mean, if you know you're going to die anyway. Might as well go down fighting as die in a bed somewhere, or a car crash or something. It's more useful."

"You sound like Dairine," Kit mumbled.

"Insults," Nita said. "Not very mature of you. I do not''

He fell asleep as she watched him. He had always had a gift for that, except on the night before a wizardry. He was feeling as wiped out as she was, though; or else he considered himself off duty at the moment. Nita sighed, and leaned back herself....

She woke very suddenly indeed, and with that feeling of having pins stuck into her all over. She swung herself off the bed. Kit was sitting in the chair with his mouth open; she nudged him with her foot. His eyes flew open, and she said, "Kit—"

He felt it. He spared himself just time for one long stretch, then bounced up and headed out of the room. "They're doing it—"

She followed him around the upper gallery and down a tightly spiraling staircase in a corner tower of the castle. They came out on the bottom level, peered into the great hall, and saw nothing.

They're out in the forge. Kit said in her head. The predawn stillness was too much for even him to break. Come on —

They slipped out the front door; the squeak of it opening seemed as loud as a scream in that great quiet. Nothing spoke; outside, no bird sang; there was only that pale hint of light, high all around in the sky, omnidirectional, bemusing—morning twilight, with thin cloud over everything and mist clinging low, running along the ground, hanging in wisps and tatters from bushes, hovering over trees.

The top of the drywall was just visible. Nita and Kit paused by it and looked down to the forge: There was no one there. Out in the fields Nita said. That way —

They turned and made their way through the dew-wet grass, quietly, toward the shadow that lay beneath a nearby oak tree. They heard voices ahead of them, speaking in unison in the Speech. There was no light, there was no diagram drawn —just four people standing there at the cardinal points of a circle. Nita could just make out where the circle had been trodden down in the long grass of the pasture: a dark curve where everything else was pale with dew. Struck down into the center of the circle, on a long shaft, was the spear. The shaft was very plain: some light-colored wood—ash, maybe. The blade of the spear, almost three feet long, had been socketed into the shaft and bound with more of the starsteel. Very plain, it was; there it stood, pale shaft, paler blade, with wizards around it, setting up the spell. Nita's aunt stood at one quarter of the circle, Doris Smyth at the

Lughnasdd

second, Johnny at the third. The fourth was wrapped in shadow—a thin shape, wearing a long, dark cloak: Biddy. Only above the thrown-back hood did anything show: a faint gleam of silver hair, cropped short. Nita swallowed at the sight of her, kept quiet, watching.

The spell was about half built, to judge by the feeling of anticipation in the air. More than anticipation—it was a sort of insistent calling. Nita^s nerves were jangling at the edges with it, even though she knew perfectly well that the call wasn't meant for her. Something very powerful was being called, something that lived in her in some small way, and that fragment or fraction was responding.

The long chorus in the Speech went on, the sound of the wizards* voices twining together, building, insistent, demanding that something, some great Power, should come here, come bind itself, come be in the world, be physical, real as this world counts reality....

Nita listened to them and heard the wizardry begin to fold in on itself: the knot being tied, the insistence growing that something from outside the world, outside time, should wake up, heed the call, come here now\ All four voices ended on that tone of command, and the silence fell; and they waited.

Everything waited.

In the east the sky was going gold, and low

clouds were beginning to catch the fire of the sun that had not yet risen. The spear stood there in the cool light, still as a tree. Nita stood there watching it, holding her breath, not knowing what to expect.

Then it moved. It leaned, ever so slightly, eastward, leaned Hke a branch of a tree being blown that way in a wind. Leaned further. And it was beginning to make a sound as well. No^ Nita thought then. It's not making the sound itself. But the sound was certainly happening around it, a low vibration that sounded like the noise that there ought to be just before an earthquake: a low rumble in the bones and the blood. It wasn't audible to the ears. The mind heard it, though—the fabric of things, the structure of spacetime all around, rumbling, being pushed up from under, or down from above. The feeling of some immense pressure being brought to bear on this spot—

Nita looked at Kit, and with him put her back up against a tree.

The sense of pressure got stronger. And the benevolence—that was the strange part. What was coming definitely meant well... maybe a Httle too well for mortals to bear. It wanted all things healed, everything made well, no matter what pains it cost: everything being put right, straightened, filled. Nita held onto the tree as she felt that down-pressing force trying to tamper with her, with the cells of her body, her mind. They resisted.

Lughnasdd

in their dumb way, and so did she, thinking, Leave me the ivay I am! Leave me alone! I know you want — / know —

And that was exactly it. It wasn't a pressure, it was a being; not a thing, but a person; not just a person, but a Power. Coming down, here, now, swift to answer the call, fiercer than even Nita had thought, unstoppable now that it had heard the summons—and with a frightful violent strength, because it wasn't embodied, not chained by entropy and the other forces that work on matter, not yet.

Get in there, she thought, clinging to the tree as if she might be swept away. Get in there! The spear trembled, the blade of it shook on its shaft, a faint creaking sound of the wood betraying the strain as the metal binding tried to break, as the Power they had called tried to pour itself into this thing of wood and metal. For all the trouble that had gone into making it strong, the spear suddenly seemed to Nita to be very fragile in the face of this awful strength trying to inhabit it. The metal began to glow, the same cherr\^ red that Nita had seen in the furnace, getting hotter and looking more real—more soHd and concrete than anything in this world should look—as that Power pressed down into it, making it real, making it aHve, waking it up—

Expressions were visible now m this Hght, but the only one Nita could look at, though she could hardly bear to, was Biddy's. Biddy's eyes were

fixed desperately on the spear, as if it were some truth she wanted to see denied; an awful look of anticipation, potentially of horror, was on her face. But there was something else there as well: plain determination.

The metal was golden now, a hot, bright gold that didn't bear looking at, and scaling up past it toward white, almost the color of the star it had come from. White now, that blinding color of plasma new-plucked from the core. But not just metal anymore: alive, awake, and aware, looking at Nita.

That light fell on her. She hid her eyes and buried her face against the tree. It was useless. The light struck through everything. No escaping it— it would pierce through you, shake you apart—

And then it stopped.

She rubbed her eyes. They were useless for a few moments. Afterimages danced in them. Nita smelled burning. Wincing, squinting, she glanced around her.

The first Hght of the sun was coming up between two hills to the east. It fell on grass that was scorched in a great circle. She could see the little flakes of ash going up from where leaves of the tree had been burned. And in the middle of the circle, where the four wizards stood, somethmg stood and looked back at them. It was shaped like a spear, but this fooled no one. They knew they were watched and considered, cheerfully, gravely, by something that would kill any one, or all, of

Lughnasdd

them to do Its job—to find the darkness, pierce it, and be its end.

The socket and binding of the spear had held. Only the wood of the shaft was scorched black, but it was otherwise sound. Above it, the spearhead stood plain and cool and silvery—but there was something moving in the blade. The Unes of layered metal that Biddy had hammered in, black once, now wavered and twisted, needle-thin lines of fire, white and yellow-white, swirling and writhing in the metal. The air above the spear wrinkled and wavered the way air does above hot pavement in the summer, and the ozone smell was thick.

"It's awake," Kit said, softly, as if afraid of being overheard. "It worked!'' And he looked over at Biddy just in time to see her collapse.

They hurried to her. Nita looked helplessly at Johnny as he came over, hoisted Biddy up. Her eyes were closed. Her breathing was so shallow it was hardly to be seen. He shook his head.

"What's wrong with her?" Nita said.

"I'm not sure... We'll take her inside and find out. Meanwhile—" He glanced over at the spear, gleaming crimson where the early sun was catching it. "We're ready," he said. "It's Lughnasad. This evening we move."

Nita nodded and looked across the field. Dark in his denims, Ronan was standing there. He had no eyes for anything but the spear. He was wearing an expression like that of someone who finds

something that's lost, something he has been wanting for a long time, something without which he's not complete. It was a frightened look, and a frightening one.

What unnerved Nita even more was the way-she could feel the spear looking back at Ronan. The spear considered him to be just such a lost object, recovered after a long time: that which completes.

She turned and walked away, hurriedly, before the spear started to get any such ideas about her.

ag na ^Aachairi Teithra

The Plains of Tethra

All that day cars came and went at Matrix. People coming to stay were being dropped off; other people were heading out to pick up more people from the train station. The castle got full. All the wizards Nita had seen in the Long Hall were there, as were many she had never seen before. The gravel parking lot out front got full, and people started parking among the sheep. Everyone had tea. Nita made it several times (as did everyone else). People went out to town for fast food and brought it back, and a lot of baking and cooking went on back in the kitchen; Doris made soda bread seven or eight times, smiling more and more as the compliments got louder. But Nita had noticed that there was a certain desperate quality to the conversations; it was the kind of talk meant to keep people from noticing that they themselves were nervous.

Not only the Junior wizards were nervous. Nita had watched Johnny that morning as he carried the spear in from the field. He was wincing as he carried it. "Are you all right?" she asked him.

"Yes/' he said, and put the spear down to lean it against the doorpost— hurriedly^ Nita thought, and rather gratefully. Johnny rubbed his hands together. "Well, no. It really is hard to hold for even a little while... It burns.'' He laughed. "It can hardly help it—we went to enough trouble to make it do that! But there's someone else it wants."

"We could all take turns carrying it."

"No, I think it's made its choice. He just has to stop fighting it..." Johnny shook his head. "I think he will."

Nita was confused. "Is there something the matter with it, that it hurts to carry it?"

"The matter? Nothing! The matter's with us, I'm afraid. We called the Spirit of Fire, and we got it—the essence of purification, and triumph..." He trailed off, then said, "Patience isn't one of its attributes. It sees the dross in us... and wants to see it burned away, and us made perfect, now. That's not possible, of course. It's not easy, meeting one of the cardinal virtues face to face..."

He picked up the spear again and went off in a hurry.

She could feel it looking at her, though, and she understood now what Johnny had said about some weapons being able to speak. She knew what this one wanted.

ag na Machairi Teithra

She looked over her shoulder and was not even slightly surprised to find Ronan there, looking after Johnny. "Hey, Paddy,'' she said softly.

"Hey, Miss Yank." But there was none of the good old abrasiveness in his voice now, nothing but soft fear. He was quiet for a moment, and then said, "I hear it calling all the time now. Not just calling me, either. Him."

For a moment Nita wasn't sure what Ronan meant—until the flash of scarlet, of wings or a sword that burned, flickered in her mind's eye. "Oh," she said, and laughed sHghtly. "Sorry. I usually think of Him as a Her. That's how we saw—"

"//er?" Ronan sounded outraged, as if this was one shock too many.

Nita burst out laughing: For the moment, at least, Ronan sounded normal. "Give me a break! As if the Powers care about something Hke gender. They change names and shapes and sexes and bodies the way we change T-shirts." She rubbed one ear. The One's Champion, in the last shape She commonly wore, had bitten Nita there several times. "It doesn't make Them any less effective on the job."

They wandered off into the field a little way, absently. "He's in there, all right," Ronan said. He sounded like a man admitting he had cancer. "I hear this other voice—not mine— He wants the spear. It's His, from a long way back. Lugh." He coughed slightly. Nita realized then, blushing with

embarrassment for him, that he was trying to control the thickening in his throat, the tears. "Why me?" he asked softly.

"You're related," Nita said.

He stared at her.

It was true, though: The Knowledge made at least that much plain. "You've got some of His blood," she said, "from a ways back. You remember what the Queen said, about the Powers dipping in from outside of time and getting into relationships with people here for one reason or another. So He loved somebody when He was here physically, once. Maybe even as Lugh himself. Does it matter? When He finished the other job He was on, the One sent Him—or Her, whatever—another one. Busy guy. But as soon as He could. He came hunting—a suitable vessel. Like the spear did." And Nita smiled at him sHghtly. "Would you rather a blow-in got the job?"

Ronan smiled, but it was a weak smile. After a moment he said, "You knew Him. What's He like?"

She shook her head, not sure how to describe anything to Ronan that that flicker of scarlet across a dark mind didn't convey in itself. "Tough," she said. "Cranky, sometimes. But kind, too. Funny, sometimes. Always—very fierce, very—" She fumbled for words for a moment. "Very strong, very certain. Very right—"

Ronan shook his head. "It's not right for me," he said. "Why don't I get any say in this?"

ag na Machairi Teithra

"But you do," Nita said.

He didn't hear her. "I don't want certainty!" Ronan said softly. "I don't want answers! I don't even know what the questions are yet! Don't I get any time to find things out for myself, before Saint bloody Michael the Archangel or whatever else He's been lately moves in upstairs in my head and starts rearranging the furniture?"

Nita shook her head. "You can throw Him out, all right," she said. "You know the saying: Tower will not live long in the unwilling heart.' Goes for the Powers, too, I think. But first you'd better see what you've got to replace Him with that will be able to use the spear to cope with Balor, 'cause / can't think of anything offhand."

"If I once let Him run me," Ronan said, bitter in this certainty at least, "He's in to stay."

Nita shook her head. She could think of nothing useful to say.

"Miss Tough Mouth," Ronan said softly. "Ran out of smart lines at last. It had to happen eventually."

"If the advice was any good before it ran out," Nita said, halfway between annoyance and affection, "better make the most of it."

Ronan was quiet for a breath. Then he said, "The other night..."

Nita held very still.

Ronan looked away from her, toward the castle. After a moment he headed off that way.

Nita stood and watched him go. A few mo-

ments later, Kit said from behind her, "He's in a nasty bind."

Nita nodded. "It's a real pain," she said softly. "What happens if he's right?"

"Let's just hope he's saved everybody in the meantime," Kit said.

They went back to the castle to get ready and meet the many new arrivals. By three o'clock, there were some three hundred wizards there; by eight perhaps another two hundred had arrived from all over. "What are all those things they're carrying?" Kit asked Aunt Annie during one quiet moment outside.

"Johnny told everybody to come armed," her aunt said. They had, though they made a most peculiar-looking army. There were a lot of rakes and shovels. Some people actually had swords, and there were many wands and rods in evidence, of rowan and other woods; there were staves of oak and willow and beech. One wizard, for reasons Nita couldn't begin to guess, was carrying an egg-beater. Another one, the dark-haired sprightly lady that Nita had seen in the Long Hall, had a Viking axe of great beauty and age, and she was stalking around looking most intent to use it on something.

" 'It is a great glory of weapons that is in it,' " said a voice down by Nita's foot, " *borne by the fair-haired and the beautiful; all mannerly they are as young girls, but with the hearts of boon-

ag na Machairi Teithra

comrades and the courage of lions; whoever has been with them and parts from them, he is nine days fretting for their company—* "

"Tualha," Nita said, bending down to pick her up, "you're really getting off on this, aren't you?"

"A bard's place is in battle," Tualha said, perching on Nita's shoulder uncertainly and digging in her claws. "And a cat-bard's doubly so, for we have an example of fortitude and of boldness and of good heart to set for the rest of you."

Kit looked at her with amusement. "What would you do in a battle?" he said.

"What she's doing to me now wouldn't be bad," Nita said, gritting her teeth.

Tualha ignored her. "I would make poems and satires on the enemy," she said, "so that they would curl up and die of shame; and welts would rise up all over them if they did not die straightaway, so that they would wish they were dead from that out. And those that that did not work on—" She displayed her claws.

"You'd give them cat scratch fever," Kit said, and laughed. "Remind me to stay on your good side."

Tualha started scrambling up and over into the backpack Nita was now wearing. "Annie, what about this one?" someone shouted from the castle. Nita's aunt sighed and said, "I'll see you two later."

"Aunt Annie," Nita said, "have you seen Biddy since this morning?"

"Huh? Yes." Her aunt's face looked suddenly pinched.

"She's not any better," Nita said, her heart sinking.

"One of us who's a doctor had a look at her." Aunt Annie shook her head. "The body—well, it's comatose. No surprise. What lived in it has gone elsewhere." She sighed. "It'll wind up in the hospital in Newcastle, I would guess, and hang on a little while before giving up and dying. Bodies tend to do that..."

She shook her head and went off toward the wizard who was calling her.

From the door of the castle, Johnny shouted, "Can people start coming into the big hall? As many of you as can fit, anyhow."

Not everj'-one could, though they spent a while trying. Many wizards lined the gallery above, or stood and listened in the outer halls and corridors. Others hung about outside in the parking lot, eavesdropping with their wizardry. Not that the ones closest to the door couldn't hear Johnny anyway. The acoustics in the great hall were very crisp, and Johnny's sharp voice echoed there as he stood in the center of the floor, his arms folded.

"We're about ready to go," Johnny said when the assembled wizards had quieted. "I take it you're all as ready as you can be." The crowd shifted sHghtly. "I can't tell you a great deal about what to expect, except that we're going into what is, for us, the country of myth... so expect to see

ag na Machairi Teithra

even more of the old stories coming true, the legends that have been invading our world over the past few weeks. They'll be real. Just don't forget"—he smiled—"that we are the myths to them. In the Plains of Tethra, we are what they tell stories about, around the fire at night. So don't be afraid to use your wizardry; there aren't any overlays where we're going, or none that matter to what we're doing. At some point we'll be faced by an army. I don't know what it's going to look Hke. We've seen all kinds of Fomori over here in the last couple of weeks. I don't know how they'll appear on their own ground, but the important thing is not to be fooled by appearances. Anything can look like anything... so feel for essence and act accordingly. Don't forget that the People of the Hills, and the other nonphysicals who live over on that side, are as much oppressed by the Fomori and Balor as we have been in our world... maybe more so, and whether they actively come to our assistance or not, they're on our side. Be careful not to mistake them for Fomori and harm them. Don't get carried away in the excitement of things; remember your Oaths: no destruction that's not necessary."

Johnny paused. "One last thing," he said. "Most of us have never been in an intervention this crucial, or this dangerous. The odds against us are extremely high. Some of us"—and his glance swept across the group with great unease—"will not come back. It's a certainty. Please, please.

please ... be careful with your choice. One thing a wizard cannot patch, as you know, is any situation in which his or her own death occurs... so any of you with dependents, or responsibiHties that you think may supersede this one, please think about whether you want to cross over. We'll need guardians on this side, too, to keep an eye on the world-gate in case the Fomori try to stage a breakthrough behind.the main group. Bravery is valuable, but irresponsibility will doom us. Later, if not now. So think:'

The crowd was silent. Nita looked at Kit and saw him swallow.

"Those of you who need to excuse yourselves, just remain here when we pass through,'* Johnny said. "Meanwhile, let's open the gate."

He turned to Nita's aunt. "Anne? This was always one of your specialties. You want to do the honors?" He reached over to the table, lifted the sword Fragarach, and handed it to Nita's aunt.

She took it. A breath of wind went through the hall; the hangings whispered and rustled. Then Aunt Annie laid the sword over her shoulder and headed up the narrow spiral stairway to the top of the castle.

The wizards in the hall began to filter out into the graveled parking lot in front. Nita and Kit went along. Nita was curious to see what would happen. Gatings were an air sorcery; the business of parting the fabric of spacetime was attached to the element of air, with all those other subtle

ag na Machairi Teithra

forces that a wizard could feel but not see. Nita paused in the parking lot and craned her neck.

Against the low, golden sunset light, her aunt's silhouette appeared at the top of the tower, between two of the battlements. It was incongruous; a slightly portly lady with her hair tied back, in jeans and sneakers and a baggy sweatshirt, lifting up the Sword of Lugh with her two hands. She said, just loud enough to be heard down below, "Let the way be opened."

That was all it took; no complex spelUng was needed, not tonight. The barriers between things were worn too thin already. A wind sprang up behind the assembled wizards. It was Hght at first, so that the trees merely rustled, then harder, and leaves began to blow away, and the cypresses down by the water moaned and bent in the wind. Hats blew off; people's clothing tried to jump off them. Nita hugged herself; the wind was cold. Beside her. Kit zipped up his windbreaker, which had been flapping around him Uke a flag. He stared back into the teeth of the wind. "Here it comes," he said.

Nita turned to look over her shoulder. It looked like a rainstorm coming, the way she had seen them slide along the hills here; it was the darker kind of light: wispy, trailing from sky to earth, sweeping down on them. Behind it the landscape darkened, silvered, muted, as if someone had turned down the brightness control on a TV. Everything went vague and soft. The effect swept to-

ward them rapidly, swallowing the edges of the horizon, and then passed over them, roiling Hke a thundercloud. The wind dropped off as the effect passed.

Everything had become subdued, quiet; the warm light of sunset was now a dull, livid sort of light. The only bright thing to be seen was Fragarach, which had its own ideas about hght and shining,^ and scorned to take the local conditions into account.

Aunt Annie lowered her arms, looked around her, and disappeared from the battlements. Nita glanced around and saw that everything in sight was muted down to this pallid, threatening twilight. The sunset was a shadow, fading away. Overhead was only low cloud and mist—no stars, no moon.

"That's it," Johnny said. "Someone get the spear. Doris, the cup—'*

"Which way do we go?" asked one of the wizards.

"East, toward the sea, and the dawn. Always toward the east. Don't let yourselves get turned around."

Kit looked around. "There are a lot more trees here than there were before..."

"Yeah," said Nita. The only thing that was about the same was Castle Matrix, which surprised her. She had thought it would take some other shape here, as Sugarloaf had. But it looked like itself, with no change. The cars in the parking lot

ag na Machairi Teithra

were gone, though, and so was the parking lot itself. There was nothing but longish grass stretching away to a ride between the trees of the forest and out into a clearing on the far side. It was still a beautiful place, but it now had a grimness about it.

The wizards began moving out. "It was a lot brighter the last time we were here," Nita said to Kit, thinking of Sugarloaf.

He nodded. "The people here are under attack.'* So will we bcy she heard him think, but not say out loud for fear of unnerving her. Nita laughed softly; she could hardly be much more unnerved than she was at the moment.

Nita caught sight of Aunt Annie off to one side, carrying Fragarach. Some ways ahead of her, Doris Smyth walked with the cup still in its pillowcase. Nita and Kit passed her, and Nita couldn't help looking at the striped pillowcase quizzically. Doris caught the look and smiled. "Can't have it getting scratched," she said. "They'd ask questions when we bring it back."

Nita laughed, turned to say something to Kit, and stopped. Ahead of them she saw Ronan, stalking along in his black jeans and boots and leathers, carrying what looked Hke a pole wrapped in canvas. Except that she knew perfectly well that it wasn't a pole. She got the clear feeling that from inside the wrappings something was looking at her hard. / think he'll stop fighting it, Johnny had said.

"Come on," she said to Kit.

They made their way over to Ronan. *^ou OK?" Nita asked.

Ronan looked at her. "What a daft question. Why shouldn't I be OK?"

"The, uh—" Nita almost didn't like to say the spear's name in front of it. "Your friend there. Don't you have trouble carrying it? Johnny was having a real hard time."

"No. Should I? Is the wrapping coming undone?" ^

"Oh no," Nita said. "Never mind..." She particularly noticed, though, a slightly glazed look in Ronan's eyes, as if he was seeing something other than what the rest of them were seeing; it was an abstracted expression. Could the spear make it easier for the person it wanted to carry it, by dulling or numbing that person's own sense of it?

Or was it something else?

Nita shook her head, having no way to work out what was going on, and went on with Kit and all the others through the silvery twilight. It seemed to get a little less gloomy as they went on, though Nita suspected this was just because she was getting used to it. Then the darkness seemed to increase suddenly, and a shadow passed over them. Nita's head jerked up. Something big and winged flew over, cawing harshly, as the wizards passed through the space between two tongues of forest.

The bird came to rest on one of the tallest of the trees and looked down at them. The tree

ag na Machairi Teithra

shuddered and all its leaves fell off on the spot. The crow laughed harshly. It was one of the gray-backed ones called hoodie-crows; Nita had seen her aunt shoot at them, and swear when she missed, since hoodies attacked lambs during the lambing season—killing them by pecking out their eyes and going straight through their skulls. There was muttering among the crowd as everyone looked at the crow.

Johnny, up near the front of the group, called, "Well, Scaldcrow? Smell a battle, do you?"

"Have I ever failed to?'* said the bird in a scratchy, cawing voice; it was a woman's voice, and a nasty one, rich with wicked humor over some private joke. "I see it all red; a fierce, tempestuous fight, and great are its signs; destruction of life, the shattering of shields; wetting of sword-edge, strife and slaughter, the rumbling of war chariots! Go on then, and let there be sweet bloodshed and the clashing of arms, the sating of ravens, the feeding of crows!" And she laughed again.

"Yes, you would like that part," Johnny said, not sounding particularly impressed. "The rumbling of chariots, indeed! YouVe been picking up roadkills by the dual carriageway again. Great Queen."

"Go your ways," Doris said beside Johnny. "There'll be a battle right enough. But we'll need you at the end, so don't go far."

The crow looked down at them, and the light of the cup caught in her eyes. She was quiet for a

moment, then laughed harshly and vaulted up out of the tree, flapping off eastward. "I'll tell him you said so," she said, laughing still, and vanished into the mist.

Nita looked over at Ronan. "Now who was that?"

"It's just the Morrigan," he said.

Nita blanched. "Just!" said Kit. Apparently he had been researching matters in the manual as well. But Ronan just shrugged again.

"Oh, She's in a lot of the old stories," he said, "the chief of the battle goddesses; She loves to stir up troubles and wars." Nita shivered a little: She saw something more than the recitation of myth in Ronan's eyes. That dazzled look was about him again, but it was an expression of memory this time. He knew the Morrigan personally, or something looking through his eyes did... "But She can be good, too. She's one of the Powers that can go either way without warning."

"Well, She doesn't look real friendly at the moment," KLit said. "I'd just as soon She stayed out of this."

They walked on. Distances seemed oddly telescoped here. The landmarks were the same as they were in the real world, and Nita was ahready seeing things that had taken them half an hour to reach in the car. She was just pointing out Three Rock to Kit when they heard the first shouts of surprise from the wizards in front. And then the first wave of the Fomori hit them.

ag na Machairi Teithra

The Fomori ran at the wizards, screaming, from the shelter of the trees. Nita and Kit, being well off to one side and their view not blocked, had a chance to look the situation over before it got totally incomprehensible. There were a lot of the same kind of drow that they had seen in Bray; some of them were riding black creatures, which were horselike but fanged Uke tigers. There were strange headless humanoid creatures with eyes in their chests, and scaly wormlike beasts that flowed along the ground but were a hundred times the size of any snake. That much Nita could make out before the front Une of the Fomori smashed in among the leading wizards, and battle broke out.

The wizards counterattacked: Spells were shouted, and weapons alive with wizard-light struck. And the fight started to be a very uneven one, so much so that Nita was surprised by it. The drows, at least, had seemed much stronger in her own world. But here they went down quickly under the onslaught of the wizards. Many of the drows not directly attacked turned and ran wailing into the woods, and some of those who had been resisted simply fell down dead after a simple stunning-spell or in the backlash of a stasis or rebound wizardry.

"It's just a feint," said Kit, shaking his head in disbehef. "That can't be the best they've got."

"I hope you're right," Nita muttered.

"Oh no," Kit said softly. "Not already."

She looked where he was looking. Off to their

left a young woman was lying, loose-limbed and pale, like a broken doll thrown down. There were several drows lying in pieces by her, but it was no consolation, seeing they were spattered with that shade of red so bright, even in this dim light, that it looked fake. Nita shuddered, for experience had shown her that the fake look was a sure sign it was the real thing.

"Two more over that way," Kit muttered. "I thought there was supposed to be safety in numbers, Neets."

She shrugged. Two other wizards had gone over to check the young woman: Now one of them came back to Johnny, shaking her head.

"They'll have to be left here for now," Johnny said. "We'll see to them later...We can't wait. Come on."

There were a few moments of confusion while the wizards got themselves back in order. Then they headed out again.

"It's getting darker," Kit said, looking ahead. "Is that where we're supposed to be going? Downhill there?"

"I think so."

"Great," Kit said. "By the time we get down there, we won't be able to see anything."

That thought had occurred to Nita; it was getting hard enough to see their footing as it was, and since there were no roads here, this was a problem. She had made a small wizard-light to bob along in front of her, like an usher's flashlight in a movie

ag na Machairi Teithra

theater, to help her see where to put her feet. "You got anything ready to hit these things with?" Nita asked Kit.

He looked sideways at her and smiled very slightly. "Well," he said. "There's always the beam-me-up spell. If you just leave the locus specification for the far end of the spell blank—or if you specify somewhere, say, out in deep space—" Nita shuddered. "Yecch." Kit shrugged. "Better them than me." The wizards were heading downhill now, on a path paralleling the way the road ran in the real world, down onto the Uttle twisty ridge of Kilmolin and then farther down into Enniskerry village. As they went down, there seemed to be some confusion among the front ranks; they were milling around, and the wizards following were pushing up close behind them.

"Hmf," said the young wizard in the leather jacket as they came up abreast of him. "Not the best of positions. Look at that." He pointed down the valley. "All strung out like this, if anything should come at us from the sides, it'd break us in two. No, Johnny's doing the right thing, gathering us together. That way if anything happens—"

And then it did happen. The Fomori forces came down out of the trees again; they came from both sides in great crowds, hitting the group of wizards in the middle. From where they stood, Nita and Kit could see the crowd being shoved together, in danger of being pinched apart into two

groups that couldn't help each other. The fighting broke out in earnest now: flashes of wizard-fire repeating, a low sound of angry and startled cries beginning to ricochet up the valley. "Here we go," said the young wizard, and he was gone, off into the press.

Nita looked at Kit and asked, "Should we hold off—wait till it gets at us?" And then of course it was at them, as another attacking force hit the group up on the hill from both sides, and everything went crazy.

Nita had a great deal of difficulty remembering the fighting later. The one thing she did remember, rather to her horror, was that she enjoyed it a great deal. It helped a lot, knowing you were on the right side; though several times she wondered, as a drow or one of those black tiger-horse-looking things came at her, whether they knew that they were on the wrong side, and whether it affected them much. It didn't seem to. Everything turned into a wild confusion of waving arms and hands, shouting, being jostled and bumped. That was the worst of it, really; you could never tell what was going to bump into you, friend or enemy, and it kept you from reacting as quickly to enemies as you might—or else you accidentally hit a friend. Several times Nita was aware of not-so-accidentally elbowing other wizards, just in case they were something that was about to attack her—better to throw them a little off balance than to take the chance—and then of course she was

ag na Machairi Teithra

embarrassed afterward. She did it to Kit once, knocking him right over, and was mortified.

The other thing she remembered vividly was the screaming. At the time it didn't bother her particularly; later on she found herself wondering whether too much television had somehow dulled her reactions to the pain of others. Everything seemed remote, Uke something in the crowd scene from a movie. Nita remembered one moment with particular clarity, of seeing a drow come at her, and saying the spell that had not worked on Main Street in Bray, and seeing the spell then work entirely too well as the drow exploded into fragments and spHnters of stone that bled hot and splattered her with ichor that burned Hke drops of lava. Her wizard's shield took most of it, but a few drops got through, probably because she was distracted, and burned right through her clothes to her skin.

She wasn't able to keep track of what Kit was doing, but for the length of that strange battle, she didn't really care. She had her hands full. The screaming from all sides got louder, as beasts of the Fomor kind came at the wizards to savage them, sometimes missing, sometimes succeeding. That was when it began to come home to Nita that this was not a movie. One wizard went by her staggering and white-faced with shock and blood loss, one arm so badly torn that it seemed to be just barely hanging from his shoulder by a string. Another wizard, a young woman in jeans and a

sweatshirt, hurried to help, and carried him away. It was not a movie. People were getting killed here. And what happens next? Nita thought, during one lull when the fighting seemed to be happening somewhere else and she had lost sight of Kit. ^hat happens if you die when you're not in the real world? Where does your soul go? Does it know where to go when you die? But it seemed unwise to push that issue too far.

After a long while, there came another lull. Nita looked down the hill and saw nothing but human wizards milling around; there seemed to be no more drows, no more of the horse-things—just quiet. A lot of wizards, maybe ten percent of the whole group, had been hurt and were sitting or lying down on the ground while others tended to them. Nita didn't feel so wonderful herself; she sat down to rest on a log under the eaves of the forest, gasping for air.

After a while Kit found her. His clothes were spattered with burn holes, apparently from the hot lava-blood that lived in the drows, and he was limping as he came toward her. Nita staggered to her feet at the sight of him, but he shook his head and waved at her. "No, it's OK. I just turned my ankle."

"Well, come here, you can't just walk on it like that; it'll get worse. You won't be able to run anywhere if you have to."

He sat down on the log beside her. "Your specialty."

ag na Machairi Teithra

She nodded. She had always had a knack for the fixing and heaUng spells for either animate or inanimate objects. Spells for the living usually required the wizard's own blood, but there was no shortage of that; Nita had bashed herself pretty thoroughly trying to get loose from one drow that had caught hold of her. Now the memory made her shiver, but at the time it had seemed simply an annoyance and had made her angrier. She had blown up that drow while it was still holding her.

Nita shook her head and set to work. She spent five minutes or so working on Kit's leg. It was a strained tendon, and she talked it out of the strain and gave it the equivalent of several days' rest in several minutes. The spell seemed to come harder to her than usual, though, and at the end of it Nita was panting even harder than she had been from the exertion of the battle. "Something's not right,'' she said to Kit when she got her breath back. **It shouldn't take that much energy."

Kit was looking vaguely gloomy. "I think that's the catch," he said. "Wizardry works better here, but it takes more out of us—we can do less of it." He shook his head. "We'd better get this over with fast. In a few hours we won't be worth much."

She was too nervous to sit there much longer. Nita got up and dusted herself off. "Have you seen my aunt?" she said.

"She was down in front with Johnny, last I saw her. That was before the fighting started, though."

"Tualha," Nita said, turning to look over her

shoulder at the backpack, "you any good at finding people? There's quite a crowd down there.'*

The kitten's head emerged cautiously. Tualha looked around quickly, then said, "In this case it won't be hard. I should look for Fragarach's light, or the cup's."

It was as good a hint as any. After about twenty minutes' walking, Kit and Nita found Aunt Annie, and Tualha had been right: She was with Doris Smyth, and it was the blue-green fire of the cup that gave away their location. Doris was working with one of the more seriously wounded people. Two of the larger and more muscular wizards were easing a young woman with a torn leg down into the cup. She seemed no smaller than she should have been, and the cup seemed no larger, but nevertheless the woman was lost from the waist down in that cool light, and a few moments later, when the other wizards helped her to her feet again, the leg was whole.

Doris was looking wobbly. "I'll not be doing much more of this," she said to Nita's aunt. "The cup's able enough for it, but it's just a tool; it can't work by itself without someone to tell it what to do. And not I nor anyone else will be able to keep doing this again and again—not here. Not today." She looked over at Nita and Kit as if seeing them there for the first time, and her face was very distressed. "Away with you, out of here," she said, "you shouldn't be seeing things like this at your age." And she turned her attention away to

ag na Machairi Teithra

another hurt wizard who was being brought over.

Nita looked at Kit; his expression was a Httle sad. He motioned Nita over to one side, where her aunt was looking nearly as pale as Doris. "You OK, Aunt Annie?" Nita asked anxiously.

Her aunt nodded. "What about you?"

Annie was understandably preoccupied. She was looking off down the hillside, toward the place where Enniskerry would have been and past it. "It's awfully dark down there," she said softly.

Nita looked down the slope, past where the valley fell away along either side of the thirteen-bend road. Down where Bray and Shankill should have been, there was a wall of blackness, so opaque as to seem nearly solid. Just looking at it gave Nita a bad feeling.

"Something's on the other side of that," Kit said. "And it's watching us."

Her aunt looked at Nita regretfully. "I'm beginning to wish I'd left you home."

"You couldn't have. I would have found a way to come along, and you know it."

Her aunt suddenly reached out and hugged her. "Don't do anything stupid," she said.

"Listen, I was going to ask you about that—"

"Anne," Johnny said from one side. "Can I have a word?"

Feeling slightly embarrassed, Nita brushed herself off and was a little amused to see her aunt doing the same thing. "Look," Johnny said, "we can't have another set-to Hke that. Too many

people got killed." It was then that Nita noticed the tears running down his face, incongruous with his calm voice. "I think we're going to have to play our aces a little early."

Nita's aunt hefted Fragarach. Or was it the sword itself that rose eagerly in her hand? Nita had trouble telling. "If we use them too early," her aunt said slowly, "we won't have them for later. YouVe seen the way wizardry is behaving here."

"That's precisely the problem. First of all, the sword, the cup, and the stone were never much good against Balor the last time. And second, if we're all killed or driven off by his creatures before we get to him—or if they delay us past the point where our wizardry, or even that of the Treasures, still works, then all of this will have been for nothing. I want you to use Fragarach on the next lot—because they're out there waiting for us, under cover of those next two patches of woodland. If we get hit again after that, Doris will use the cup. And I can use the stone the same way, if there's need." He paused and looked at her. "Something wrong? You look a little pale."

She shook her head. "Shaun," she said, "I just don't know if I can do this."

"Not lack of power, surely."

"Oh no. It's just—" She held up Fragarach. "Shaun, we speak so Hghtly of re-ensouling these things. The trouble is, it worked. There's a soul in this, and an intelligence and a will —one much

ag na Machairi Teithra

older and stronger than mine, one that considers me mainly a form of transportation. Once I actually start to use it"—she laughed a little— "which is going to be the tool and which the user? I don't know how much of me is going to be left afterward; even now I can feel it pushing, pushing at my mind all the time. I don't know if you get the same sense from your rapport with the stone—it's earth, after all, and mostly passive. But if air, the lightest and most malleable of the elements, behaves this way—" She shook her head. "And what about fire, then? I have some experience, some ability to resist. But what's going to come of that poor child? What happens when the Power that comes with the spear puts forth Its full force—?"

She mentioned no names. Johnny shook his head. "Anne," he said, "we'd better just hope that it does; otherwise we're lost. Meanwhile, can you do your part? If not, I'll look for someone else. But you do have the rapport."

She looked at him. "I'll manage," she said.

Johnny headed off. "Get yourselves together," he said to the wizards he passed. "We're moving out, and the Fomori are going to come after us again."

Nita's aunt went after him. Nita watched her go and stood thinking a moment about Ronan. He doesn't have her experiencey she thought. But he has the power.

Not as muchy she heard Kit thinking. Not as

much as he might if he were younger... What's this going to do to him?

She glanced over at Kit, unnerved. They tended not to accidentally hear each other thinking anymore, but evidently this Otherworld had more effects than those on active wizardry.

A shout went up from the wizards down the slope. Nita saw a mass of dark forms come charging at them, out of the trees again.

There were a few more moments of confusion, milling around, screams. Then Kit grabbed her arm, and^ pointed. Down the slope, she saw it, the upraised little Hne of red light that grew from a spark to a tongue of fire, and from a tongue to a lance of it that arrowed up into the threatening sky. The wind began to rise behind them, moaning softly. Then it became louder, a chorus of voices in the trees, uncertain at first, then threatening, long howls of rage. The wind rose and rose, bend |

ing the trees down before it, whipping leaves and dirt through the air so that it became hard to see. The wizards staggered against the blast of it, but even as she fought to stay upright, Nita had a feeling that the wind was avoiding her, and the threat in it was for someone else.

She and Kit headed downhill, because that was the way the wind was pushing them; but the great mass of wizards was pushing down that way, too, their cries mingling with the wind's. The two fronts of Fomori that had struck them from either side were staggering back and away, farther down

ag na Machairi Teithra

the slope, blown that way, forced down by the

raging wind that blew them over and over, that dropped trees on them and tossed logs from the woods after them Uke matchsticks. The Fomori were almost at the bottom of the hill now, in the linle delJ where Enniskerr\' village would have stood. There was no bridge over the Glencree River in this world; ever\^one would have to ford it. The \^izards and the relentless viind pushed the Fomori down into the dell.

The wind rose to a scream then, and there were more sounds in it than screams: an odd sound of bells, which Nita recognized, and the sound of hooves, hke glass ringing on metaJ. Nita looked up and saw what few monals have seen and Hved to tell about: the Sluagh Ron, the Dark Ride of the Sidhe. The People of the Hills leave their anger at home when they ride—their day is done, and their anger is a matter of the songs their bards sing to wale away the endless afternoon. But that afternoon was broken now, and the legendar}' past had come haunting them as surely as it had come after the mortals. The Sidhe rode in anger now, as the People of the Air, in the whirlwind, with a clashing of spears that shone with the pale lire that flickers around the faery hills on haunted nights. Their horses burned as bright and as dark as storm clouds \^4th the sun behind them as they came galloping down the air. There was no more chance of telling how many riders there were than there was of counting the raindrops in a downpour. But two

forms stood out at the head of them: the Queen with her loosened hair flying wild, on a steed Hke night, and the Fool on a steed like stormy morning, with their spears in their hands and a wind and a light of madness about them.

At the sight of them, a great shriek of despair and terror went up from the Fomori. The Sidhe cried out in answer, a cry of such pure, delighted rage that Nita shuddered at the sound of it, and the Sluagh Ron hit the great crowd of Fomori from the south. The wizards parted left and right to let them through, and the Sidhe drove the Fomori straight downward into the Glencree ford and up against the ridge on the far side of the river. Wailing, the Fomori went, and the press of riders and the darkness borne on the wind hit them and hid them from sight.

After what seemed a very long while, the wind died down, leaving the riders waiting there and the wizards looking at them, among the dead bodies of Fomori, and the twitching, witless ones, driven mad by the sight of the onslaught. Johnny went from where he had been talking to Nita's aunt, who held a Fragarach much damped-down and diminished-looking, and stood by the tallest of the riders, taking the bridle of her horse. "Madam,'' he said, "we hadn't looked to see you here."

"We were called by our own element," the Queen said, looking down at Nita's aunt and Fragarach. "Besides, it has been too long since I went a-foraying; and since our world seems like

ag na Machairi Teithra

enough to die here, this is a good time to ride out again. We have not done badly. But I think we may not be able to do much more. All magics are diminishing in the face of our enemy's draoiceachty and I feel the weariness in my bones. Do not you?''

Johnny nodded. "Nevertheless, we will press on," he said.

"We will go with you and look on this ending," said the Amadaun, and paused. "If an ending is indeed what we are coming to."

"One way or another," Johnny said.

Tir na nOg

Johnny waved the wizards forward, and they started down the winding way that paralleled the river and led toward Bray.

"Did you hear that?'' Kit asked.

Nita shook her head; she was very tired. "Hear what?"

"What the Queen said. The weariness.' "

She had to laugh at that. "After what weVe been through today, you'd be nuts not to be tired."

"Yeah, but that's not it. Don't you feel more tired than you did when we were up at the top of the hill?"

Nita bUnked. "You're right."

Kit nodded down at the darkness in front of them. "That," he said. "There's some kind of energy-sapping spell tied up with it. Don't exert

Tir na nOg

yourself if you can avoid it—you may need that energy for later."

She looked at him with very mild annoyance; sometimes Kit's practical streak came close to getting him hit. ''What I really need right now in terms of energy is a candy bar," she said, ''but the only thing I've got left in my backpack is a cat. And I can't eat that." She made an amused face. "Too many bones."

Tualha poked her head from the backpack and hissed, not amused. Kit grinned and produced a candy bar from one pocket. Nita took it, squinted at it in the dimness. "It's got peanuts in it!" she said. "I hate peanuts!"

"Oh, OK," Kit said, grabbed it back, and started to unwrap it.

Nita grabbed it away from him, scowled at him, and began eating. Tualha snickered at her, then disappeared into the pack.

They kept walking along the course of the river: It was the route of the thirteen-bend road in the real world. Trees arched close overhead in the gloom, and the sound of the river down in its stony watercourse was muted. If something should hit us here, we'd have nowhere to go, Nita thought as she took another bite of the candy bar. And then the screaming began again, very close. It's not fair! she thought, as she saw the drows and pookas come crashing in among them from down the steep slope to their right. At that point she also discovered something else: A wizard with a

mouthful of caramel and peanuts is not much good for saying spells, even the last word of one that's already set up. She pushed backward out of the way while trying to swallow, managed it, and shouted the one word she needed just in time to blow away the drow that was heading for Kit's blind side, while he did the same to a pooka.

Something grabbed Nita from behind by her throat and chest, choking her. Nita fought to turn, for you can't blast what you can't see, but the stony hands held her hard and she couldn't get her breath; her vision started to blur.

Then there was a roaring noise behind her, the pressure released suddenly, and Nita fell, sprawling and gasping. She levered herself up, looking around her. "Kit—," she said, "did you—" And she ran out of words. All around them, the path through the forest was awash in blue-green light that rolled and flowed like water; and off to one side the river was climbing up out of its banks in response and running up onto the path. Both flows, of light and water together, were rushing with increasing speed eastward, leaving the wizards untouched but washing away the drows and pookas and other monsters Uke so much flotsam. Nita struggled to her feet again, against the flow. To Kit she said, "Looks like Doris is using the cup."

Kit nodded. "Come on, we should be breaking out into the open pretty soon. This path comes out in that flat ground by the freeway, doesn't it?"

Tir na nOg

"The dual carriageway, yeah... Tualha? You OKr

From inside the backpack, a small, aimoyed voice said, "Ask me again later."

Several more bends of the watercourse brought them out into the open ground. There was a great scattering of drows there, half-buried in the earth as if about a year's worth of mud had covered them there; many others, dealt with by the wizardry of individuals, lay broken or helpless. The last traces of the blue-green light of the cup's wizardry were sinking into the ground like water, along with the real water, which was running down into the watercourse of the Dargle, which the Glencree stream had just met. Kit and Nita splashed across the ford and up the other side, looking around them.

Nita sagged against Kit as she looked northward along the floodplain of the Dargle toward Bray. The darkness was getting more and more solid, and she felt about ready to collapse.

YoH and me bothy Kit said in her head. She could feel the fatigue in the thought, and Nita looked around at the other wizards and saw that they were suffering, too. Some of them had to be helped along by others, and not because of injuries. And far down the floodplain, a long line of darkness hugged the ground, coming slowly toward them. It was bigger than all three of the previous forces that had attacked them put together.

Oh nOy Nita thought. / can^t. And neither can a lot of the rest of us...

"There never was any counting them, even in the old days/* Tualha said. "It seems nothing has changed.'*

There was an awful silence. Many of the wizards looked at each other helplessly, hefted their weapons, and watched the Fomori come. Nita looked over at Johnny, who was off to the side of one small crowd, frowning, with his arms folded.

The ground began to shake.

The stone, Kit said silently, immediately doing the smartest thing: He looked up and around to make sure no tree or rock was likely to fall on him, and then he sat down. Nita followed suit. All around them, the earth groaned alarmingly as it was held still where they were but encouraged to move, and move violently, half a mile away. Down by that advancing line of darkness, trees toppled over and huge boulders of Wicklow granite rolled down the hillsides toward the ranks of the Fomori. They broke, screaming and running in all directions. It did them little good. One of the hillsides shrugged itself up and up until it fell over on the Fomori vanguard. Behind it, the rest milled about in confusion between the two ridges that paralleled the open ground where it sloped gently toward Bray.

The thunder of the quaking ground suddenly became a roar. Nita clutched at the earth as a single

Tir na nOg

awful shock went through it—not one of the rippling waves they had been feeUng, but a concussion hke two huge rocks being struck together.

Toward Bray, the horde of dark Fomori was abruptly missing from the ground. Nothing could be seen but smoke and dust rising in the gloom.

"Let's go," Johnny said quietly, and started forward.

No one had much to say as they passed the great smoking chasm that had been a green meadow between two hills. One of the hills was flat now; the other had great cracks in it, and from far down among the rock-tumble in the chasm, as the wizards passed slowly by it, faint cries could be heard. Nita shuddered as she followed Kit; they had to squeeze their way along the side of the meadow—or what was left of it. The ground tilted dangerously toward the chasm. The riders of the Sidhe paced casually along the air above the huge smoking hole, but it occurred to Nita that the wizards might have a slightly harder time of it if they had to leave the area suddenly.

The gloom about them grew, and Nita's tiredness got worse and worse, so that it was almost as much as she could do just to drag herself along. Only the sight of Kit in front of her, doggedly putting foot in front of foot, kept her doing the same. At least they're leaving us alone now, she thought. Or maybe there are none of them left.

We hope. Kit said silently. Hang in, Meets.

Looky Johnny's stopped up at the top of that hill there.

They went up after him, paused at the hillcrest and looked down over where Bray would have been had they been in the real world. In this Otherworld, they beheld a great flowery plain, but the darkness that lay over everything had shut the flowers' eyes. The plain was a featureless place, flat as heartbreak, right up to where Bray Head should have been visible—but a wall of black cloud rose there, shutting out the sight.

Nita squinted along the coastline, looking for some sight of the sea. That wall of blackness prevented her, though. Is it clouds^ or some other kind of storm? Why isn't it moving?

But it was not cloud, as Nita had thought. There were shapes pushing through in the darkness. It was a Hne of dark ships—but ships Uke none she had ever imagined before, ships with hulls the size of mountains, with sails Uke thunder-heads. She could see the chains of pallid lightning that held them to the shore. This was the black wizardry that would drag this alternate Ireland from its place in the sea up into the regions of eternal darkness and cold, into another ice age perhaps. What would happen to the real Ireland, and the rest of the world after it, Nita had no idea.

And under that wall of darkness...

Nita*s mind was dulled with that awful weariness, and at first she thought she was looking at a

Tit na nOg

hill standing between them and the sea. Funny about that, she thought. That almost looks like a sort of squashed head, there. But no head could be that ugly. It had huge tu4sted Hps and a face that looked as if someone had purposely malformed it. It looked like a sculptor's model of a gargoyle's head, all squashed down, the nose pushed out of place. One eye squinted away to nothing; the other was abnormally huge, bulging, the Hd a thin, warty skin over 11 The smashed face sat on the great rounded shoulders of a crouching shape, with great flabby arms and thighs and a gross bulging belly—all the size of a hill. Face and body together combined into an expression of sheer spite, of long-cherished grudges and self-satisfied immobihr)^ The look of it made Nita feel a httle sick.

And then she saw it breathe.

And breathe again.

Loathing, that was almost all she could feel. She was afraid, too, but her fear seemed to take too much energ^^ So this is Balor,

It was not the w^ay she had expected the Lone One to appear. Always before she had seen It as young and dynamic, dangerous, actively evil. Not this crouching, lethargic horror, this lump of inertia, of blindness and old, unexamined hates. Before, when confronted by the rogue Power that wizards fight, she had always wanted to fight It, too, or else run away in sheer terror. This made

her simply want to sneak away somewhere and throw up.

But this was what they had to get rid of; this was going to destroy this island, and then the world.

It's really grosSy came the thought from Kit, tired too, but not as tired as she was. They'd better get rid of it quick.

Nita agreed with him. Off to one side she saw Johnny, looking almost too tired for words. But Johnny's back was straight yet. "Lone One," he said, his voice calm and clear, "greeting and defiance, as always. You come as usual in the shape you think we'll recognize least. But this one of our hauntings we know too well, and we intend to see the back of it. Your creatures are defeated. Two choices are before you now: Leave of your own will or be driven out by force. Choose now!"

There was no answer, just that low, thick breathing, unhurried, untroubled.

"Ronan," Johnny said quietly. "The spear."

Ronan moved up, but he looked uneasy. The spear seemed heavy in his hands, and Johnny looked at him sharply. "What's the matter?" he said.

"It— I don't know. It's not ready."

Johnny looked at Ronan with some concern, and then said, "Well enough. Anne—"

Nita's aunt came up, carrying Fragarach, which looked dulled and tired. She glanced at Johnny,

Tir na nOg

looking slightly confused. Johnny shook his head.

"Don't ask me," he said. "I think we've got to play this by ear. Do what you did before."

She held up Fragarach and said the last word of the spell of release. The wind began to blow again, but there was a tentative feel to it this time, almost uncertain. The gross, motionless figure did nothing, said nothing. The wind rose and rose, but there was still that feeling of a hollowness at the heart of it; and when it fell on Balor at last, there was no destroying blast, no removal. It might have been any other wind blowing on a hill, with as much result. It died away at last, with a moan, and left Fragarach dark.

"Doris," Johnny said.

Doris came up holding the cup. She spoke the word of release and tilted the cup downward. The blue-green Hght rose and flowed out of it, washing toward Balor. But it lost momentum and soaked into the muddy ground around the Balor-hill and was swallowed up. Afterward the cup was paUid and cold, just a thing of gold and silver, indistinct in the shadows.

"All right," Johnny said, sounding, for the first time since Nita had met him, annoyed. "Ronan, ready or not, you'd better use that thing."

Ronan looked unnerved, but he lifted the spear. The fires twisted and writhed in the metal of its head. Ronan leaned back, balanced the spear, and threw.

The spear flew like an arrow, struck Balor—

—and bounced, and fell like a dead thing; then, after a moment, it leaped into the air and flew, whining, back to Ronan's hand.

Silence. The wizards looked at each other.

And the laughter started. It was very low, hardly distinguishable as laughter at all at first. It sounded as if the ground should have trembled with it, and with malice, and amusement. It^s in-vulnerable, Nita thought. It's not fair. He could be stoppedy the last time, Lugh put that spear right through His eye. Nothing should be able to stop the spear —

Another sound began, a shadow of the first: rocks grating against rocks, a low tortured rumbling that grew louder and louder. With it, the earth really did start to tremble. People fell over in all directions, tried to find their footing, lost it, and fell again. Nita was one of them; when she got up, she noticed a particular feeling of insecurity, as if something she had been depending on had suddenly vanished.

Johnny was standing up again, having fallen himself. He looked at Nita's aunt in shock and said, "That was the stone going. The linkage to it is dead."

Nita's aunt looked at the shadows down by the seashore and said softly, *'Then there*s nothing to prevent... that'^

Johnny shook his head. "And what happens here..."

Nita swallowed.

Tir na nOg

The groaning of the earth subsided; many who had fallen managed to get back on their feet. But there was no relief, for unchanged before them squatted the huge, dark, immobile form with its spiteful, pleased look. A soft protesting noise of distress and anger went up all around.

"It*s enjoying this," Kit muttered. ''We've lost, and It knows it, and It's prolonging it ior fun.''

"That's as much fun as it's going to have, then,'* came a sudden small voice: Tualha. She struggled out of the backpack and jumped to the ground, then climbed hurriedly onto a nearby stone. She panted a Httle, paused, and then her Httle voice rang out in that sick silence, louder than Nita had ever heard it before:

See the great power of Balor, lord of the Fomor! See the ranks of his unconquerable army! See how they parade in their pride before him! See how they trample the earth of Eriu!

Nita stared at first, wondering what Tualha was up to. But the irony and sarcasm in the kitten's small voice got thicker and thicker, and she stared at Balor in wide-eyed amusement, the way Nita had seen her stare at captive bugs.

Is it not the way of his coming in power? His splendor is very great; he bows down all

resistance! Never was a better way for the conqueror to come

here; May all who follow him fare just the same way!

See how the children and beasts flee before him, And their elders, just hoary old men and women, With their few bits of rusty ironmongery. And a crock and a stone, that's all they have with them!

Can it really be so, what we see before us— or is it a trick of the Plains of Tethra, where everything seems otherwise than it is, and night might be day, if one's will was in it?

Is it truly what we see, the mighty conqueror, with his armies ranged and his ships all ready? Or something much less, just a misconception, a fakery made of lying and shadows?

No army here, just some shattered stonework, some poor bruised goblins, all running away? No ships at all, but just the old darkness, the kind that used to scare children at bedtime?

And no mighty lord, no mastering horror, just a bad dream left over from crazier times, a poor ghost, wailing for what's lost forever? Some run-down spook complaining about hard times,

and what he can't keep? Can it be that mortals are too strong for him even here, on his own

ground? —that accountants and farmers, housewives and

shopkeepers, and children and cats are even too mighty?

Tir na nOg

Then all hail the ragged lord of the Fomor, a power downthrown, a poor weak specter that ought to take himself off to the West Country and haunt some castle for American tourists!

Be off somewhere and beg your bread honestly, and don't come around our doors with your

threats, you shabby has-been! Just slouch yourself off, crooked old sloth-pile: Show some initiative!

Get up and—

The voice that spoke then made the earth shake again, and a violent pain went right through Nita at the sound of it, as if she had been stabbed to the heart with something not only cold, but actively hateful.

"Let me see this chatterer who makes such a clever noise," the voice said, hugely, slowly, with infinite malice.

Tualha stood her ground. "Get up and do something useful, if you dare—"

It got up.

The terrified screams of many of the wizards made this seem to take much longer than it did; seconds dragging out to minutes of horror as the huge shape began to tear itself up out of the ground, bulking up against the darkening sky. Not just the ugly warped man-shape rose, but a steed for it as well—black as rotting earth, eyes filled

with the decaying light of marshfire, fanged, tal-oned, breathing corruption. Above it, its rider rose, and Nita heard Its breathing and knew her old enemy again, knew by sight the One that she had been desperately afraid would catch her on the night of the wolves. Its pack was gathering to It out of the shadows now, ready to hunt the wizards* souls out into everlasting night and tear them to shreds like coursed hares, screaming. In the pack's longing thoughts, dangerously close to becoming real in this Otherworld, the shrieks could be heard, the blood could be smelled already. But at the moment she could do nothing but look at Balor's dark face, and see his bitter smile. As yet, though, no glance fired from his eye. The Balor-shape still bound It to that shape's rules.

Lugh put the spear right through Its eye^ Nita thought abruptly. That's it! It has to open Its eye first —

Here it comeSy Kit said to Nita. This had better work!

Off to one side, Ronan was holding the spear. It was immobile no longer; it was shaking in his hands, its point leaning toward the terrible dark shape before them, the fires writhing in its point. "Not yet," Nita said under her breath, "Ronan, not yet!"

She knew he couldn't hear her; even if he could, Nita didn't know if the being he was becoming would recognize her as someone it might be useful

Tir na nOg

to listen to. Ronan was wrestling with the spear, holding it back as it pulled and strained in his hands.

A bare sUt of light opened in the dark face of the bulk before them, like the first sliver of the sun coming up over a hill. It hit Nita in the eyes and face like thrown acid, searing. She cried out, fell down and crouched in on herself, trying to make herself as small as possible, as the light hit her all over and burned her. All around her she could hear the screams of others going down, and right next to her, on top of her, she thought, the sound and feel of Kit crying out hoarsely and rolling over in agony. It was worse than almost anything she could remember, worse than the time the dentist was drilling and the novocaine wore off and he couldn't give her any more. The pain scraped down her nerves and burned in her bones, and no writhing or crying helped at all. The tears ran out and mixed with the mud that her face was grinding into.

But at the same time, something m her refused to have anything to do with all this, and was embarrassed, and angry—the same kind of anger that had awakened in her while she was fighting and liking it. Shaking her head in that anger, Nita pushed herself up on her hands and knees, even though it felt like she would die doing it, and squinted ahead of them. Through the mud and her tears of pain she could just make out Ronan, still struggling with the spear. Farther ahead, the dark-

ness was broken only by that awful sliver of evil light, getting wider now as Balor's eye opened.

^'And if it had opened all the way^ all Ireland would have burned up in that one flashy"^ she heard Tualha half singing, half saying. But it has to be open enough for him to get a clean shot. If he screws it up again^ it'll all have been for nothing. Ronan, Ronan, don't let it go yet!

Tualha yowled and fell off the stone onto Nita. She scooped the kitten up, fumbled for her backpack, couldn't reach it, and stowed Tualha, writhing, inside her shirt, where her clawing made little difference against the storm of pain Nita was already feeling. It could be fought, but not much longer; she could feel the onslaught of the light increasing, its power building. Soon it would be ready. Beside her, Kit stirred and bumped up against her. "Come on," she moaned, grabbed him by one arm and tried to get him up at least to his hands and knees. "Come on. Oh, God, Kit, RonanV'

She looked over and saw that Balor's eye was open enough. But Ronan was still holding the spear, despite its struggles. It was roaring now, a desperate noise, trying to get loose. What's the matter? Nita thought. "Ronan!"

He was nothing but a silhouette against that light, writhing himself, kept on his feet by the Power that had been dwelling in hini more and more since they came here. "Ronan, let it goV she cried. "Kat, he has to—he won't—"

Tir na nOg

Their minds fell together, as they had before. That reassuring presence: frightened, as she was, but also perturbed, looking for an answer. What's the matter with him? she heard Kit think. With me, Meets. ROMAN!

Their minds hit him together, fell into his. Only for a second, for something larger than both of them was fighting for control, and losing. Ronan was holding that Power off, and he had only one thought, all fear and horror: // / let it go now, if once I throw the spear, I become the Power, become Lugh, become the Champion. Mever mortal again —

Make him do it. Kit cried, frantic, to the Other who hstened. He's going to get the whole world killed!

Mo! It doesn't work that way! Nita was equally frantic. He has to do it himself! Ronan —and she gulped— go on!

Silence—

—and then Ronan lifted the spear. It shouted triumph as Ronan leaned back, and then it leaped out of his hands, roaring like the shock wave of a nuclear explosion, trailing lightning and a wild wind behind it as it went. That terrible eye opened wide in shock as a fire more terrible than its own hurtled at it. In the instant of the eye's opening the pain increased a hundred times over. Nita screamed and fell—

—and then came the piercing. Nothing alive on that field failed to feel it, for everything aUve had

entropy in its bones; all cries went up together as the essence of all burning ate the darkness to its heart, and however briefly, to each of theirs. It was painful, but a terrible relief: terrible because the mortals present knew that, once they returned to the real world, that small personal darkness would be back with them again.

Something else, though, did not find it a reHef; something that had almost nothing but entropy about it. The scream of the Lone Power in Its shape as Balor went up, and up, and would have torn the sky if the sky were made of anything more solid than air. It took a long time to die away.

The pain was gone at least. Nita got to her knees and looked around her, blinded no longer, though her ears were ringing. Kit was just getting up next to her. She helped him up and hugged him. "Are you all right?"

"I'll live,'' he said, sounding dazed, and hugging back. "Where's Ronan?"

He was standing not too far away, looking confused. The spear was back in his hand again, but quiet now, not straining to go anywhere. Ronan was leaning on it, panting, his forehead against the shaft of it, so he did not see the tall shadow rising up over him, towering higher and higher; the immense shape of a woman dressed in black, but with light flickering in the folds of the darkness like a promise, and long dark hair stirring in the wind that had begun to come down from the

Tir na nOg

heights, blowing the blackness of the clouds out over the sea, so that high up the sky began to show again, dark blue, with, here and there, a star.

Against the growing Hght and the clean darkness, that woman raised her arms, and her voice went up into the silence like thunder. ''Let the hosts and the royal heights of Ireland hear it,'' the Morrigan cried, and even Ronan looked up now in terror and wonder, "and all its chief rivers and invers, and every rock and tree; victory over the Fomori, and they never again to be in this land! Peace up to the skies, the skies down to the earth, the earth under the skies; power to every one!'*

The wizards and the Sidhe shouted approval. The wind rose and took the clouds away, and the Morrigan's great shape bent sideways in that wind and dissipated Uke a mist, though Nita particularly noticed how her eyes seemed to dwell on Ronan before they vanished completely.

You knoWy Kit said in Nita's head, it's funny, but She looks kind of like Biddy ...

Nita shook her head, and she and Kit went over to Ronan. He was looking up at the sky, still leaning on the spear. But when he looked down at last, and saw them coming, he straightened up sHghtly and smiled. Nita was very reHeved; his abstracted, inhuman look was gone completely.

"The spear came back," he said to Nita, sounding very bemused. "By itself.'*

"You put too much EngHsh on it," she said, and grinned.

He winced slightly. "Ooh. No puns, please." He looked ahead of him. The great bulk that had been Balor was nothing but a hill now; there was only the vaguest shape about it that suggested that awful bloated bulk. Grass grew on it, and as they looked a rabbit hopped out of cover from under a thornbush growing on it and began to graze.

"I didn't dare let it go,'' Ronan said.

Nita nodded. "I know. But you're OK—aren't you?"

He looked at her. "//e'5 still in there, if that's what you mean."

Kit shook his head. "I think you may be stuck with Him," he said. "But remember which side He's on. I think He'll behave...if you do. If you're lucky, you'll never hear from Him again.'*

"And if I'm not lucky?" Ronan said.

" *Those who serve the Powers,' " said the small voice from down by their feet, " 'themselves become the Powers.' It's usually the way."

"You," Nita said, picking up Tualha. "I didn't know you knew language like that—that last bit."

"I got carried away," Tualha said, her ears going flat.

"Not good technique for a bard," Kit said. Tualha scowled at him, and he laughed and began scratching behind her ears until finally she gave up and purred.

All around them the light was growing. Nita looked up and around, watching the clouds retreating and the brightness growing still, though

Tir na n Og

there was no sun now, but a soft violet evening all around them. Evemhing was beginning to bum with a certaint}' surpassing an>ahing Nita had seen even in the duns of the Sidhe.

Beside her, one of the wizards, the handsome woman with the dark hair and the Viking axe, said with a chuckle, "Ah... the Celtic tw^iUght." But Nita knew a joke when she heard one, and also knew that excellent clarity dra\^^g itself about them; she had seen it before. All around them, the wizards gathered there began to shine in that Hght, seeming more perfectly themselves than ever before; the Sidhe, already almost too fair to bear, began to acquire a calmer beaut\% more settled, older, deeper.

Johnny was standing by the Queen's steed. He looked up at her now and said, "Well, madam, you asked me a question once. Would your world ever draw closer to Timeheart and end your exile? And I could give you only the answer that the bards gave us long ago. The Champion must come wixh His spear, and the world of your desire be lost." He laughed softly. "But then the fulfillment of a prophecy rarely looks like our images of it. Will this do?''

She bowed her head *TTiis will do. Senior. Do swifdy take your people home, for shortly this world will perfect itself beyond their abiHty to bear it... at least, just yet. And we..." She looked toward the sunset, and said, "We will prepare for the dawn,"

Johnny looked at Nita's aunt. ''We've got a dawn of our own waiting for us/' he said. **Do the honors?"

She Ufted Fragarach. With Balor's power passed, it burned like a star in her hands, and the other Treasures blazed in answer as the wind rose in the east and blew into the opening gap in the air before her. The dark outline of Castle Matrix grew in the early morning of their own world, and the song of a single early blackbird drifted through it.

As one, the People of the Hill turned toward that thin, sweet music. But then one by one they looked toward the light slowly growing in their own northeastern sky; sunrise following hard on the heels of sunset, as was normal in this part of the world in the heart of summer. The splendor of morning in a world growing ever nearer to Timehean began to swell in the sky, blinding, glorious—

The wizards looked around them with regret and moved through the doorway in the air. Nita and Kit and Tualha, followed by Ronan, were near the rear of the group; they turned, there in the parking lot of Castle Matrix, and looked through the gateway back into Tir na nOg.

"I am sorr}%" Nita's aunt said softly to Johnny, "to have to leave our dead there. Another world, so far away..."

Johnny looked sorrowful as well—but there was a strange edge of thoughtfulness to the look.

Tir na nOg

an expression of mystery, almost of joy. 'Tes, but... look what's happening to the place. It won't be just another world for long... It's being drawn into the very center of things. Can you really be dead if you're in Timeheart?" he asked. "Can anything}''

In the northeast, over the sea, a line of light, blinding, brighter than a sun, broke over the water. The Spear Luin in Ronan's hands flamed at the touch of that Hght on its steel. All that country on the other side of the gateway flushed with a Ught more powerful, seemingly more soHd than the sohd things it fell on, and burned, transfigured—

The gateway closed.

"So," Johnny said, turning away. "Little by little, we make the Oath come true..."

Nita and Kit and Ronan looked at each other. Behind them the blackbird sang again—and they heard the young wizard in the leather jacket sigh and say, "Oh, well. What's for breakfast?"

They went to find out.

"Now that things have quieted down somewhat," Johnny was saying to Nita's aunt two days later in her kitchen, "the ChaUce goes back to the museum, obviously. And the stone naturally stays where it is. But Fragarach..."

"You take it," Aunt Annie said. 'The neighbors would talk if they saw something like that in here. You've got a castle... Hang it on the wall there someplace."

I

Johnny chuckled. Nita pulled the newspaper in front of him toward her, also moving Tualha, who was dozing on the paper, and put the teapot down. STRANGE OCCURRENCES END? asked the Wicklow People, in large, somewhat relieved letters. It had indeed quieted down a lot, all over the world. "The spear," Johnny said, "will stay with Ronan, naturally."

"/ wouldn't try to take it away from him," Kit said from the living room, where he was playing with the teletext functions of the TV set. "It*d probably eat me alive."

"Quite." He chuckled. "And I see that we're losing you two."

"My mom," Nita said, "says they can change my flight home after all." She grinned slightly. "So I go home over the weekend. Not that it hasn't been fun... but every wizard knows her own patch of ground best." And she smiled at Ronan.

He smiled back and said nothing that the others could hear.

"Well, you come back anytime," her aunt said, and grabbed her and hugged her with one arm. "She always does the dishes," she said to Johnny. "And without wizardry, even."

"Impressive," Johnny said. "But there was something else I was meaning to tell you—" He sipped his tea. "Oh, that was it. I'd say the odd things aren't quite done happening yet."

"Oh?" Everyone at the table looked at him.

"No. I was out for a walk after things settled

Tir na nOg

down last night, and I saw the strangest thing. A party of cats carrying a Httle coffin. I stopped to watch them go by, and one of them said to me, *This is Magrath. Magrath na Chualainn is dead.' And they walked off—*'

Tualha's eyes flew open at that. "What?" she cried. "What? Did you say Magrath?"

"Why, uh, yes—" Johnny said, sounding uncertain and concerned. "If it's a relative, Tm—"

"Relative, never mind that, what relative! Great Powers about us, if Magrath is dead, then Fm the Queen of the CatsV

She leaped off the table and tore into the Hving room. There was a brief sound of scrabbling, and then from the hving room. Kit said, "Uh, Annie, your cat just went up the chimney..."

There was a moment of silence in the kitchen. "Ahem," Nita's aunt said to her after a breath or two. "Welcome to Ireland."

"Are you sure you don't want to stay another couple of weeks?" Johnny asked.

Nita smiled at him and went out to the trailer to start packing.

A Small Glossary

Amadaun (pronounced AM-ah-dawn)*: Irish word for "fool." In Irish legend, the Amadaun was the fool or court jester of a court of the Sidhe: sometimes employed as a messenger and often as an adviser. Though a servant of the King or Queen of the faery-court, the Amadaun was a dangerous one—he could kill a mortal with a casual blow or a word, sometimes even with a thought. Like mortal court jesters, the Amadaun was often thought to be the repository of unusual wisdom and could be prophetic.

Balle atha Cliath (pronounced BAL-ly uh-CLEE-uh): DubHn. "The City of the Ford of the Reed Hurdles," the pre-Viking name of the city: The "hurdles" were barriers woven of reeds and staked out in the river to catch salmon. The name is older than Dubh linn, "the Black Pool," which was the Vikings' nickname for the city. Both the ford and the pool are on the river Liffey.

Baler: The King of the Fomori, also known as Balor of the Evil Eye, variously described as an archdemon, a fallen god, or an avatar of the Lone Power, depending on who is telling his story. One version says that Balor began as a mortal Fomor, the son of their king, but he passed too close to a place where his father's

* All pronunciations of Irish words are approximate.

A Small Glossary

druids were making a cauldron full of death-magic and the fumes of the evil potion got into his eye. After that, the eye would destroy or strike dead whatever Balor looked at. Whether he started out as a mortal or not, the form of Balor that went up against the Tuatha de Danaan was described as "huge as a hill," and his eyelid so huge and heavy over the deadly eye that it took four men with forked sticks to lift the lid so that it could look at his enemies and destroy them. Lugh killed him by throwing the Spear of Destiny at that eye when it was still in the process of opening, before it could destroy the Tuatha. See also Fomor(i).

Ban-draoia (pronounced ban-DROY-uh): A female sorcerer or wizard. Originally "she-druid."

Ban-gall (ban-GALL): Gall-woman. Possibly an insult, depending on who says it and how they feel about gallain (i.e., anyone not of Gaelic extraction).

Blow-in: A foreigner who settles in Ireland and is presumed to be likely to leave suddenly (no matter how long he's been there); not seen as being seriously attached to the place as it really is but "in love" with some romanticized and inaccurate version of it.

Cuchullain (pronounced cuh-HULL-in): The young hero of Ulster (later, part of Northern Ireland). Son of the Power Lugh and a mortal woman, Dechtire: raised by Dechtire and her husband, Sualtim. The boy was originally called Setanta. After (as a child) accidentally killing a watchdog belonging to a northern lord named Culann, Setanta volunteered to take the watchdog's place and acquired the nickname cu Chullain, "the Hound of Culann" (later, because of this, he was also called "the Hound of Ulster"). When Cuchullain was a teenager and considered old enough to go to war, his father, Lugh, appeared to him and gave him the sword Fragarach. He married Emer, described (as usual) as the most beautiful woman in Ire-

land, and also (not so usually) as a woman so wise that there were very few people except for Cuchullain who could always understand what she was talking about. Cuchullain fought in many battles against monsters and evil powers—and against warriors from the southern three parts of ancient Ireland—and finally died in battle against the Morrigan, who was his great enemy and had been trying to kill him almost since his birth. Emer died soon afterward, though some at the time felt that she might actually have been a queen of the Sidhe who had been "passing" as a mortal for love of Cuchullain, and who passed on to Tir na nOg after her husband's death. See also Fragarach.

Cup: The "Cauldron of Rebirth.'* Not specifically named in Irish, though in Welsh called Pair Cadeni: one of the Four Treasures of Ireland, identified over many years with various chalices (including the Ardagh Chalice in the National Museum) and even with the Holy Grail. Water was its element: It could heal the sick and (some said, in the right hands) even raise the dead. It could also produce food enough to feed great multitudes with whatever food they liked best, so that "no one ever went from it unsatisfied."

Draoiceacht (pronounced DROY-ki'cht): Wizardry. In its original usage, "druid-craft."

Drew: A stone monster of the Fomori, similar to the Scandinavian troll.

Dun (rhymes with "put"): Used interchangeably in early times for a castle, fortified house, or other strong place. The word persists in many Irish place names, such as Diin Laoghaire.

Faery: One of the inhabitants of the Otherworlds, in this case particularly Tir na nOg, or something that has to do with them. The word is also used by some writers to mean the place itself. Originally derived

A Small Glossary

from the Latin fatae or "fates," faery means the Powers that involve Themseh'es in the destinies of Hv-ing things. Unfortunately the term has been corrupted by various stor}tellers, so that it now summons up ludicrous and unreaHstic imager}' of tiny flying beings who ride butterflies, Uve in flowers, etc., ad nauseam. True faery^ is beautiful, but extremely dangerous; the casualt}^ rate of those who interact willingly with it is high, even among wizards.

Fomor(i) (foe-MOR-ee): The early monster people of Ireland. No specific time is assigned to their coming. In the old stories they are treated more as a recurring plague that is repeatedly defeated and then reasserts itself after a period of peace and recovery. Both evil-intentioned humans and various kinds of monsters are included in the term, including pookas, drows, lind-worms, and other supernatural creatures. It usually required magic as well as physical force to kill them.

Fool, the. See Amadaun.

Forth: An ancient or prehistoric hill-fort, also a small hill presumed to be the former site of a hill-fort (whether it actually was or not). Irish tradition in the second half of this millennium often assumed fonhs to have been built by the Sidhe. Many country people assumed that the Good People were still Uving in them and treated their local forths with caution or avoided them entirely.

Fragarach (pronounced FRAG-uh-rack): One of the Four Treasures of Ireland—the Sword of the Air, forged by one or another of the gods (or Powers That Be) in the ancient time, and given to Cuchullain by Lugh. It later passed to Conall of the Hundred Battles, and then was taken out of the world and held in trust by the Sidhe, in the understanding that mortals might need it later. Fragarach was said to have power over the winds when in hands that knew how to use it properly.

Garda: The Garda Siochona (pronounced GAR-da shi-KOH-na) or Civil Guards. The Irish equivalent of police. Found as Garda (one policeman) or ban-Garda (policewoman), though the latter is no longer used as an official title for policewomen.

Gardai (pronounced Gar-DEE): Plural of Garda,

Lia Fail (pronounced LEE-uh FOYLE): The Stone of Destiny, one of the Four Treasures of Ireland, originally supposed to be located near the Hill of Tara in County Meath, now sometimes identified with a different stone near Armagh. Legend had it that the stone would shout aloud when the rightful High King of Ireland stood on it at his elevation to the throne. Its element was earth: Some stories claimed that if the Lia Fail were ever removed from Ireland, the island would sink into the sea.

Lugh (pronounced loo): A god of ancient Ireland, identified with that particular member of the Powers That Be who holds the position of the One's Champion— the great warrior against the Lone Power, sometimes identified in other cultures with divine or semi-divine figures like Athene, Thor, and Saint Michael the Archangel. Lugh led the gods' fight against Balor by helping forge the Spear of Destiny, which he used to destroy Balor at the Battle of Moytura. Lugh was secretly the father of Cuchullain, having earlier caught away his mother, Dechtire, into Tir na nOg to live with him. He also appears in Welsh mythology as the young sun god Llew.

Pooka (originally plica): An Irish demon that tends to manifest as an evil-looking goat or (more recently) as a small black horse that entices people to ride on its back and then throws itself and its rider into a lake or river, where the rider always drowns. There are also reports of pookas appearing as menacing-looking black dogs, which tend to attack lonely travelers at

A Small Glossary

crossroads in the middle of the n^t. Pookas can sometimes be merely mischievous—misleading or frightening travelers—but are more often deadly.

Rath (rhymes with "auriior"): A hill-fort. Sometimes the term includes wiMitever buildings (halls, towers, etc.) are built into or on the rath.

Stdbe (piononnced shee): The faery people of Ireland. A shoft Tcraoa of Daoine Sidhe, the People of the Hob. SomcrimCT (most inaccurately) confused with dves. Usually considered to be the Tuatha de Danaan, the original children of the goddess Danu, one of the mocher-goddesses of Ireland; or descendants of those childien. Some legends identify them with weak-mindfld bBen angels, too good to be damned, but too fallible for heaven. Considered by wizards to be descendants of those erf the Fofwers That Be who could not bear to leave the place They had built under the instruction of the One. They are deathless except by iricdence, and are expert in some forms of wizardry, cspeciaDy music, shapechange, illusion, and the manipulation of time. They are alw^ays referred to by the Imh by euphemistic names like "the Good Folk," •^le Good People of the Parish," "the Gentry," or other nicknames meant to avoid offending them by using their real names directly. (In Irish magical tradition, as elsewhere in the world, to name a name dixectly is to control, or attempt to control, the thing named.)

Spear of Destiny: Also known as "the Spear Luin" (ohginaUy luisne, "flaming, glaring") and as the Gae Bo^ (under which name CuchuUain was supposed to hxwc used it briefly). One of the Four Treasures of Iidand, it was forged originally by Lugh for use against Balor of the Evil Eye. Its element was fire, and it was so dangerously hot that it had to be kept point-down in a huge barrel of water so that it could

not burn down the place where it was being kept. It never missed the target it was thrown at, infalHbly destroyed the target, and always returned to the hand that had thrown it.

Stone. See Lia Fail.

Sword. See Fragarach.

Taoiseach (pronounced TEE-shock): The prime minister of Ireland. Leader of the political party presently in power. Has legislative and political powers somewhat Uke those of the president of the United States or the prime minister of the United Kingdom. By contrast, the presidency of Ireland is largely a ceremonial position and is considered to be above politics.

Tir na nOg (pronounced TEER na-NOHG): The Land of Youth (or of the Ever-Young), the alternate universe or other-Ireland inhabited by the Sidhe. Time runs at a different rate in this universe, or rather entropy does: Experience continues unabated while bodily aging proceeds at an infinitesimal fraction of its usual speed, if at all. Humans who venture there frequently experience untoward side effects on attempting to return to universes with different time/ entropy rates. See the legend of the hero Oisin for an example.

\

Turn the page for an exciting peek at

The

Wizard's Dilemma

The fifth book in the Young Wizards series

Saturday Morning and Afternoon

Sleeping in turned out to be an idle fantasy. Kit rolled over just after dawn, feeling muzzy and wondering what had managed to jolt him out of a peculiar dream, when suddenly he realized what it was. A cold wet nose had been stuck into his ear.

"Ohh, Ponch ...'' Kit rolled over and tried to hide his head under the pillow. This was a futile gesture. The nose followed him, and then the tongue.

Finally he had no choice but to get up. Kit sat up in bed, rubbing his eyes, while Ponch jumped up and washed the back of Kit's neck as if he hadn't a worry in the world. Kit, for his own part, ached as if someone had run him over lightly with a truck, but this was a normal side effect of doing a large, complex wizardry; it would pass.

"Awright, awright,'* Kit muttered, trying to push Ponch away. He glanced at the clock on his dresser— Ten after six?!.. . What have I done to deserve this? —and

Saturday Morning and Afternoon

then looked over at the desk His manual sat where he had left it, last thing. Closing it, finally getting ready to turn in, he had felt the covers fizz, had opened the book to the back page, and had seen Nita's response,

Fine.

He got up, went over to the desk, and opened the manual again. Nothing had been added since. Nita was plainly too pissed off even to yell at him. But Tom had been pretty definite about letting her be if she was working on some other piece of business. Okay, Let her get on zvith it.

He shut the manual and went to root around in his dresser for jeans and a polo shirt. Ponch was jumping for joy around him, his tongue loUing out and making him look unusually idiotic. "What're you so excited about?" Kit asked in the Speech.

"Out, we're gonna go out, aren't we?* Ponch said in a string of muffled woofs and whines. "We're gonna go there again, you can go with me, this is great, let's go out!" And Ponch abruptly sat down and Hcked his chops. "I'm hungry-," he said.

There, .., Kit thought, and shuddered. But now that the experience was half a day behind him, he was feeling a httle less freaked out by it, and more curious about what had happened.

He put his head out his bedroom door. It was quiet; nobody in his house got up this early on a Saturday, unless it was his dad, who was an occasional surf-casting nut and would sometimes head out before dawn to fish the flood tide do^vTi at Point Lookout. No sign of that happening today, though.

*'Okay,'' he said to Ponch. ^'You can have your breakfast, and then I want a shower...and then we'll go out. After I take care of something."

Ponch spun several times in a tight circle and then launched himself out into the hall and down the stairs.

Kit went after him, fed him, and then went back upstairs to take a shower and make his plans. When he came downstairs, Ponch was waiting at the side door to be let out.

**In a minute,** Kit said. "Don't / get something to eat, too?**

"Oh."

"Yeah, *oh.' You big wacko." Kit grabbed a quart of milk out of the fridge and drank about half of it, then opened one of the nearby cupboards and found a couple of the awful muesli-based breakfast bars that his sister Uked. He stuck them in his pocket and then went to the write-on bulletin board stuck to the front of the fridge. The pen, as usual, wasn't in the clip where it belonged; Kit found it behind the sink. On the board he wrote: gone out ON BUSINESS, back later. This was code, which Kit's family now understood. To Ponch he said, "You go do what you have to first... I have something to get ready."

Kit let the dog out and locked the door behind them. Then he and Ponch went out into the backyard. It wasn't nearly as tidy or decorative as Nita's. Kit's father wasn't concerned about it except as somewhere to sit outside on weekends, and so while the lawn got mowed regularly, the back of the yard was a jungle of sassafras saplings and blackberry bushes. Into this

Saturday Morning and Afternoon

little xmderbrush forest Ponch vanished while Kit sat down on a creaking old wooden lounger and opened his manual.

He knew in a general way what he wanted—a spell that would keep him connected to Ponch in mind, letting him share the dog's perceptions. It also needed to be something that would keep them within a few yards of each other, so that if physical contact became important. Kit could have it in a hurry. He paged through the manual, looking for one particular section and finding it: Bindings, ligationSy and cinctures —wizardries that dealt with holding energy or matter in place, in check, or in alignment with something else. Simplex, multiplex. .. Here's one. First-degree complex aelysis. . .proof strength in m-dynes... to the minus four... The original formula for the spell. Kit saw, had called for fish's breath, women's beards, and various other hard-to-find ingredients. But over many years the formula had been refined so that all you needed to build it now were knowledge, intention, a basic understanding of para-physics, and the right words in the Speech.

Yeahy this is what I need. "All right," Kit said softly in the Speech. "This is a beta-class short-term interlocution." He pronounced the first few sentences, and the spell started to build itself in the air in front of him—a twining and growing chain of light, word linking to word in a structure like a chain of DNA, but with three main strands instead of two.

After a couple of minutes he was finished and the structure nearly complete. Kit plucked it out of the air, tested it between his hands. It looked faintly golden in

the early morning light, and felt at least as strong as a steel chain would, though in his hands it was as light and fine as so much spun silk.

Not had. Kit thought. But there was still one thing missing. The place down at one end of the spell where his own name and personal information went was now full; Kit had pasted it in from the wizardry he and S'reee had just done. But as for Ponch...

It embarrassed him to have to turn to his dog, who'd now returned from the bushes and was sitting and watching Kit with great interest. "Ponch,'' he said, **I can't believe I've never asked you this before. But what's your name?"

The dog laughed at him. "You just said it."

"But Grrarhah down the street uses a Cyene name."

"If the people you lived with named you Tinker-bell," Ponch said in a surprisingly dry voice, "so would yoH.'^

Kit had to grin at that. "I don't mind the name you gave me," Ponch said. "I use that. It says who I am." He stuck his nose in Kit's ear again and started to wash it.

"Euuuu, Ponch!" Kit pushed him away...but not very hard.

"Okay, look, give it a rest," Kit said. "I have to finish something here."

"Let me see."

Kit showed him the wizardry. As Ponch watched. Kit pronounced the fifteen or sixteen syllables of the Speech that wound themselves into the visible version of Ponch's name, containing details like his age and his breed (itself a tightly braided set of links with about

SaUirddgy Mammg andJ^temoon

ten stranck mvcJvedX Foodi nosed at the k^^ alive WToii li^ as he did sa Thefe's the oJlai;* Kit said, loopii^ the end of die q>dl throu^ the wizard's knot he had tied there, then holdii^ the wide loop iqiL llie siosilar kx)p at the other end, made iq> of lot's name and persooal iufotn ia tioffi , woold go around his wrist.

Fofidi slqpped his head throu^ the wider of the two loops, dien shook himsd£ The loop tightened down.

niiat fed okagr?* Kit said. *Not too tight?*

Ifs fine. Let's ga*

'C^bgr** Kit said, and stood iqpu He slqqped hts wrist throogli the odier loop and pnnoonced die six wofds mat got the envnonmfntal and tradnng functions of die wizaidry goii^ die parts diat would smqp them back here if anyduc^ life threatening luqppened. Hie *diain* flidoered, diowii^ diat the added fnnrfions were wQckii^ *R^it. Show me how.*

Tike this—•

Punch todk no more than a stqp fCHward, and without a moment's hesitation that darkness slammed »-ktitfy^ down aroimd them agaiiL This time at least Kir was sore he had air arovmd him arid Pondi, aiid he had oagfgqoation routines ready to kick in if their bo£es were aEEected fay aoy kind of parafysis. Nonethdess, Kit still couldn't move, couldn't see arq^thir^

Qrcoddhe?

Kit wooU have blinked if he cooU havi^ CMT squinted. Often eriou^ befwe^ in very dark {daces, he'd had the dlusion diat he could see a very faunt li^ when diere was actually nothii^ there. This was Uke diat—yet

i

somehow different, not as diffuse. He could just make out a tiny glint of light, far away there in the dark, distant as a star....

It faded. Or maybe it wasn't truly there at all. Oh well

Ponch?

Here I am.

And abruptly Kit really could see something, though he still couldn't move. Down just out of range of his direct vision, though still perceptible as a dim glow, he could tell that the "leash" was there, the long chain structure of the wizardry glinting with life as the power ran up and down it. It was unusual to be able to see it doing that, instead of as a steady glow; there was something odd about the flow of time here. Maybe that was the cause of the illusion of breathlessness.

Kit tried to speak out loud but again found that he couldn't. It didn't matter; the leash wizardry would carry his thoughts to Ponch. What do we do now? Kit said silently.

Be somewhere.

Kit normally would have thought that that was im-avoidable. Now he wasn't so sure. Welly where did you have in mind?

Here.

And something appeared before them. It was hard to make out the distance at first, imtil Kit saw what the thing was: a small shape, pale gray against that darkness, except for a whiter imderbelly.

It was a squirrel.

This was so peculiar that even if he hadn't been

Saturday Morning and Afternoon

frozen in place. Kit still wouldn't have done much but stand and stare. There it was, just a squirrel, sitting up on its hind legs and looking at them with that expression of interest-but-not-fear you get from a squirrel that knows you can't possibly get near it in time to do anything about it

Okay, Kit said in his mind, completely confused Now what?

Shhh.

The instruction amused Kit. He wasn't exactly used to his dog telling him what to do. But suddenly, a Httle farther away, there was another squirrel, rooting around in the grass, looking for something: a nut. Kit supposed.

And another squirrel... and then another. They were all doing different things, but each of them existed absolutely by itself, as if spotlighted on a dark stage. Next to him, Ponch shifted from foot to foot, whimpering in growing excitement

There were more squirrels every moment... ten of them, twenty, fifty. But then something else started to happen. Not only squirrels, but other things began to appear. Trees, at first / guess that makes sense; where there are squirrels, there are always trees. They were im-usually broad of trunk, astonishingly tall, with tremendous canopies of leaves. And slowly, underneath them, grass began to roll out and away into what built itself into a genuine landscape—grass patched with sunHght, wavering with the shadows of branches. The sky, where it could be seen, came last, the usual creamy blue sky of a suburban area near a large city, spreading itself gradually up from horizon to zenith, as if a curtain were

being lifted. Finally, there was the sun, and Kit felt a breeze begin to blow.

Ponch made a noise halfway between a whine and a bark and leaped forward, dragging Kit out of immobility, as he tore off toward the nearest squirrel. The whole landscape now instantly came alive around them like a Uve-action version of a cartoon: squirrels running in every direction, and some of them rocketing up the trees, all of them in frantic motion—especially the one that Ponch was chasing as he dragged Kit along. This was an experience Kit had had many, many times before in the local park, and all he could do now was try not to fall flat on his face as he was pulled along at top speed.

Kit laughed, finding that his voice worked again. Briefly he considered just letting Ponch off the spell leash. But then that struck Kit as a bad idea. He still had no sense of where they were, or what the rules of this place were. Better just tell the spell to extend as far as it needs tOy so he can run.

It took a few seconds to change the loci-of-effect and extensibiUty variables—longer than it normally would have taken, but then. Kit thought he wasn't doing badly for someone who was being hauled along through a forest at what felt Uke about thirty miles an hour. Finally Kit was able to extend the leash, then slowed down from the run until he was standing there in the bright sun between two huge trees, watching his dog go tearing off across the beautiful grass, barking his head off with delight.

He's found Squirrel Worlds Kit thought, and had to

Saturday Morning and Afternoon

laugh. There was seemingly infinite running room, there was an endless supply of squirrels, and there were trees for the squirrels to run up, because there had to be some challenge about this for it to be fun. He^s found dog heaven. Or maybe Ponch heaven...

Ponch was far off among the trees now. Kit sat down on the grass to watch him. This space had some strange qualities, for despite the increased distance. Kit's view of Ponch was still as clear and sharp as if he were looking at him through a telescope. Ponch was closing on the squirrel he'd been chasing. As Kit watched, the squirrel just made it to the trunk of a nearby tree and went up it like a shot. Ponch danced briefly around on his hind legs at the bottom of the tree, barking his head off, then spotted another squirrel and went off after that one, instead.

Maybe this isn't exactly Ponch heaven after all. Kit thought. Could this be the dog version of a computer game? For there didn't seem to be instant wish fulfillment here. Ponch still wasn't catching the squirrels; he was mostly chasing them.

Kit watched this go on for a while, as his dog galloped around over about fifty acres of perfect parkland, littered with endless intriguing targets. The question is, where is thisf Somewhere inside his mind? Or is it an actual place? Though it's a weird one. Their entry here hadn't been anything like a normal worldgating. Normally you stepped through a gate, whether natural or constructed, and found another place waiting there, complete. Or sometimes, as he'd seen happen in Ireland over the summer, that other place came sweeping

over you, briefly pushing aside the one where you*d been standing earlier.

But this was different. It's as if Ponch was making this world, one piece at a time...

He gazed down at the grass. Every blade was perfect, each slightly different from every other. Kit shook his head in wonder, looked up and saw Ponch still romping across the grass. There was always another squirrel to chase, and Kit noticed with amusement that the ones that weren't being chased were actually following Ponch, though always at a discreet distance. So he won't be distracted? When Ponch managed to pursue one closely enough that it actually had to run up a tree, there were always others within range when he was ready for them.

How is he doing this? Kit wondered. "Ponch?**

Ponch let off a volley of frustrated barks at the squirrel he was chasing, which had gone halfway up one of the massive tree boles and was now clinging to it head down and chattering at him. Kit couldn't make out specific Skioroin words at this point, but the tone was certainly offensive. Ponch barked at the squirrel more loudly. "Yeah, okay, get over it,** Kit yelled. "There are about five thousand more like him out there! Can you give it a rest so we can have a few words, please?**

Ponch came galloping back to Kit a few seconds later. "Isn*t it great, do you like it, do you want to chase some, I can make some more for you.. .**

"Sit down. Your tongue's gonna fall off if it waves around much more than that," Kit said.

Ponch sat down beside him and leaned on Kit in a

Saturday Morning and Afternoon

companionable manner, looking entirely satisfied with life, and panting energetically.

'Took,"" Kit said. "How are you doing this?'*

"I don't know."

**You must know a little,"' Kit said. ^'You told me yesterday, 'You're not there xmtil you do something.' What did you do?"

"I wanted you."

"Yes, but that was the first time."

"That's what I did."

Kit sighed and put his head down on his knees, thinking. "This," he said, "what you did just now. How did you do this? Where did all these squirrels come from?"

"I want squirrels."

"Yeah, and boy, have you got them," said Kit, looking around him in amusement. The two of them were completely surrounded by squirrels, an ever growing crowd of them, all sitting up on their little hind legs and staring at Ponch, all intent and quiet... as if someone in a whimsical mood had swapped them for the seagulls in The Birds. "Where did they all come from?"

Ponch sat quiet for a moment, and stopped panting as a look of intense concentration came over his face. Then he looked at Kit and said, "I wanted them here."

Suddenly Kit got it. The way Ponch used wanted was not the way it would have been used in Cyene; it was the form of the word used in the Speech. And in the wizardly language, the verb was not passive. The closest equivalent in English would be willed; in the Speech, the word impUes not just desire but creation.

^'You made them," Kit said.

"I wanted them to be here. And here they are.** The dog jumped up and began to bounce for sheer joy. "Isn't it gre^r?!"

Kit rubbed his nose and wondered about that *" What happens when you catch them?** he asked, to buy himself time.

*"! shake them around a lot," Ponch said, **and then Fm sorry for them."

Kit grinned, for this was more or less the way things went in the real world. But then he paused, surprised. He'd slipped and spoken to Ponch in EngUsh, but the dog had understood him.

"Are you able to understand me when Tm not using the Speech?" Kit asked.

Ponch looked amused. "Only here. I made it so I would always know what you're saying."

"Wow," Kit said. He looked around him again at the patient squirrels. "Have you made anything else?"

"Lots of things. Why don't you make something?"

"Uh...," Kit said, and stopped. The ramifications of this were beginning to sink in, and he wanted to make some preparations. "Not right this minute. Look, you wanna go see Tom and Carl?"

Ponch began to boimce around again. "Dog biscuits!"

"Yeah, probably they'll give you some. And if they have a spare clue for me to chew on, that wouldn't hurt, either." Kit got up. "You done with these guys?"

"Sure. They wait for me. Even if they didn't, I can always make more."

"Okay. Let's go home-"

Saturday Morning and Afternoon

Ponch acquired a look of concentration. A second later, the landscape went out, as if a light had simply been turned off behind it, and Kit felt a tug on the leash. He followed it—

—and they stepped out again into early morning in Kit's backyard: birdsong, dew, the sound of a single station wagon going down the street in front of the house as the newspaper guy threw the morning paper into people's driveways...

Kit took % deep breath of the morning air and relaxed. From above them came an annoyed chattering noise. Ponch wheeled around and began dancing on his hi^d legs and barking.

^Didn't yo& just have enough of those?''. Kit said. "Shut up; you're going to wake up the whole neighborhood! Come on... We need to go see Tom.'^

.#

HiN

^'^

*1^^

^T^^-^

This book made available by the Internet Archive.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Table of Contents

Pages

Back Cover