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"Rise and shine!"
Dairine groaned and buried her head in the pillows. There came approximately 30 seconds of blessed silence, then she heard Nita's voice again. "Up, I mean it! We're going to be late, otherwise. Saving the universe just doesn't cut it as a reason to get out of school."
"Not even if I get Dad to write me a note?"
Nita snickered. "Not even. We promised Millman we'd be back today, and promises..."
"Yeah, yeah," muttered Dairine. "Wizards and promises. Okay, I'm up."
Nita looked disbelievingly at her.
"Have it your way. I will be up. Soon."
"Good. I don't want to send your bed to Pluto again."
"Don't you dare! It still creaks from the last time you did that!"
"Does not."
"Does so."
A voice from downstairs floated up. "Breakfast in 10 minutes. Anyone later than that will get what the little piggy got."
Dairine sprang out of bed. "Hey—Ronan's cooking breakfast?"
"Yep," said Nita. "Dad had to leave early for work, and I guess Ronan's either still jet-lagged or doesn't trust my cooking, because he was up early and offered to make breakfast. A proper one, which I guess he just doesn't think cereal out of a box doesn't counts as."
Breakfast was much better than cereal out of a box—eggs, mushrooms, grilled tomatoes (Dairine looked dubiously at those, but ate them), and toast.
"Everything for a proper Irish breakfast but the beans," Nita said happily.
"Should I have made beans?" asked Ronan. "I didn't see them in the cupboard."
"No, no beans. The ones you get here just aren't the same as the ones you find in Ireland."
"This is great," said Dairine, "but if we're going to get to school on time, we need to leave now."
Nita looked at the clock on the kitchen wall, and yelped. "Now is right! Ronan, are you going to be okay for today? When are you planning to head back home?"
Ronan sighed. "I'm not sure. We've finished what I was here for—"
"Yeah, saving the universe," said Dairine.
"Will you give it a rest already with the whole 'saving the universe' thing?" said Nita.
"—but I just have this feeling that I'm not meant to go back home yet. And I'm not sure what to do, anyroad, when I go back home."
Dairine sympathized, but didn't know what to say. Losing the One's Avatar, however much of a relief it might be in some ways, had to leave a huge hole in one's, well, being.
For Dairine, school was school, like always. Boring because it was too slow, but interesting material nevertheless. Her teachers had long ago started giving her extra reading, and didn't mind if she did it in class, as long as she wasn't too obvious about it.
Lunch was the school's version of chiliburgers, which she suspected owed much of their bulk to ketchup and textured vegetable protein, but when they came around offering seconds, she took one anyway.
After lunch was recess. Dairine couldn't wait until she got to high school. When she'd been younger, recess had too often been a battlefield, with the in kids and the out kids, and a certain amount of violence back and forth among each, but now that she was in middle school, the level of physical violence had dropped, to be replaced by verbal nastiness and cliques. She looked around. Over there were the jocks, playing some sort of pickup game involving several balls. And there were the usual gaggle of giggling girls talking about the latest American Idol hero or whoever. In the far corner were—huh!—a bunch of gothy types doing something in a circle. Something that if she had been doing it, would have been preparations for a spell. But Dairine knew there weren't any other wizards in her school.
She wandered closer. Several of the girls she knew vaguely, including Catriona Benson, who appeared to be the one in charge. Last year, Catriona had been just plain Catherine, but this year she had decided that she was Cat, or Catriona, and had managed to be firm enough about it that even her teachers had made the switch. Along with the name change had come dyed black hair, black eyeliner, and a total obsession with the Twilight books. That was why Dairine knew her at all; she'd tried to discuss science fiction, fantasy, and Harry Potter with her, but all Cat wanted to talk about was vampires—Southern vampires, Dracula-type vampires, and most especially those damned sparkly Twilight vampires.
So what were they trying to do? And did they really think they could accomplish it during the 15 minutes allotted for recess? Suddenly, she felt a twinge of something. It looked like a bunch of goth wannabes, but something or someone was paying attention. What were they chanting? It was something about bringing down power and—uh oh—offering themselves as a vessel. There was no such things as vampires, on Earth, at least—Dairine had checked her manual just to be sure after her last chat with Cat—but there were things that could come when one made that kind of ill-conceived offering. What the hell is going on here? thought Dairine. I thought this was just play-acting, but if there's something real happening, I need to check up on it. Pronto.
And there was the end-of-recess bell. Dairine tried to look as if she were paying no attention to the goths, while listening intently to what Cat was saying. "Okay, I knew we wouldn't have time now; this was just a practice run. Meet you at Meyers Park after school? Say 5 pm?" There was a chorus of demurrals—"I can't; I've got soccer practice" "Gotta baby-sit" and a vague "Sorry, I already have plans"—and then Cat's voice again: "Fine; I'll do it myself. I know this is going to work, and you'll be sorry you missed it."
So she had a reprieve, and a good thing, too. Millman would kill her if she skipped out on class after just getting back from having missed a couple of weeks, even if she was all caught up with her schoolwork. "It's an important social environment as well as an intellectual one," he had said.
Afternoon classes dragged on interminably, but eventually school let out, and Dairine ran for home.
"Neets! Are you there?" she yelled, as she headed for the kitchen and the cookie jar.
Instead of Nita's voice, she heard Ronan's. "Nita and Kit were here already. They grabbed something to eat, then headed out again. What's up?
"Not sure, but something is going on at Meyers Park this afternoon. Or at least Cat's going to be trying something. Or she thinks she is."
Ronan held up a hand. "Hey, slow down. Who's this Cat person, and what's she planning on doing? Or what does she think she's doing?"
"I don't know," Dairine admitted. "She's in a couple of my classes, and she's seriously into Twilight and vampires and the whole goth thing. But what's important is that at recess, it looked like she was doing some sort of ritual. Which normally wouldn't matter, but I felt something. Someone's paying attention to her."
"Is she a wizard?" Ronan had that peering expression on his face that indicated he was checking his version of the manual. "I don't see her listed as one. Not in this area, at least."
"She can't be. I'm the only one in the school, unless the manual has been holding out on me." She pulled her own manual, which these days looked like a MacBook Air, out of its otherspace pocket. "Spot, can you tell me anything I should know about Catriona Benson?"
The hard drive whirred briefly—strictly for appearance's sake, Dairine was sure—then Spot said "Seeking authorization." Another brief pause, then "Catriona Benson. Failed wizardry ordeal 2/18/2009."
"Poor lass," said Ronan. "To have wizardry and lose it..."
"Nita said if you lose your wizardry, it's like the adults during the Pullulus. You just forget that there ever was such a thing as wizardry. She said Tom said you'd have a nameless sorrow at the base of your soul, but I'm not sure what that does. What happened?" That last was addressed to Spot, and Dairine was pretty sure Ronan had been asking the same thing.
"I apparently don't need to know that for whatever I'm supposed to do," said Ronan.
"None of your business," said Spot firmly.
"Guess I don't, either," said Dairine. "So what do we need to know? She was a wizard, if briefly, and now she isn't. Maybe that explains all the Twilight stuff. Some part of her knows there's more than the mundane world, even if the conscious part of her doesn't. And she keeps reaching for magic. Not to mention the utter hottitude of Robert Pattinson."
Ronan stared at her.
"Hey, a girl notices these things! Even"—she looked down at herself—"if the girl in question hasn't had many developments in that area yet. I mean, I look at you, too. Or I would, if you weren't you." Dairine realized that there had been developments, though. A year ago, Ronan had been off her radar except as a fellow wizard. Now he had a certain distracting quality.
She wrenched her mind back to the issue at hand. "So Cat is looking for power, or help, or direction, or something. And if wizardry is out, we know who's happy to step in the gap."
Ronan winced. "Right. Him."
"The Lone Power, yeah. I wonder if that's what I felt this afternoon. It didn't feel that way, though. More neutral, if you know what I mean."
"Not a clue."
"Well, it didn't feel like the Lone Power, anyway."
"Even so, it's just the sort of situation where he'd be happy to interfere," said Ronan. "So what's she planning to do?" He sighed. "She reminds me of me."
"What do you mean?"
He sighed again. "I'm not sure where to go from here. In the long term, I mean. While I was the One's Champion, that was who I was and what I did. But now it's free of me—or me of it—and I have to figure out what to do with the rest of my life. My older brother's already working in Da's shop, and he's happy there. I never wanted to work there, which is fine with Da and Ian—the place makes enough to support our family, but if Ian marries his girl, that's two families. I don't know if I want to go on to Uni, but I don't know what to do if I don't. It's a shame I can't make a living as a wizard for hire."
"Have spells, will travel?" said Dairine, and they laughed.
"I have to go home sometime, I'm just not sure when."
"Do I need to lecture you? You know, Cat is really nothing like you. You do have wizardry, and she doesn't. You're almost grown, and she's a, an, unformed larva."
Ronan snickered. "So what do goth larvae grow into?"
"Let's find out. I just hope it's not a nasty wasp." They headed for the park.
Meyers Park was about a mile's walk from Dairine's house. If she'd been alone, she'd have taken her bicycle, but there wasn't a spare one for Ronan, so they walked. The park wasn't one that Dairine went to all that often, but it was a pleasant area of greenery and trees, with a children's playground on the far end. Not that long ago, you wouldn't have minded having a shot on the merry-go-round, a voice in Dairine's head said, and she had to acknowledge the truth of that.
Dairine looked around. Cat had said she was going to start her ritual at 5 pm, and it was about 15 minutes before that.
"Do you see her?" asked Ronan.
"Not yet. Oh wait—I think that's her over there." Yes, it was her, and she was drawing and chanting something. "Uh-oh. She said she was going to do it at 5, but that was when she was scheduling with the rest of her group. I think she started early. I don't feel anything, but it looks like she's trying whatever she was planning."
"Does it matter?"
"How should I know? I don't even know what, exactly, she's trying to do."
"Well, let's head over there." They walked over, and reached her just as she appeared to be finishing whatever it was she had been doing. Cat stood up, raised her arms over her head, and looked around hopefully, then caught sight of Ronan and Dairine.
She gasped. "It worked!" she said in an exalted voice.
"What did?" asked Ronan.
"You! I asked for a teacher, a mentor in the ways of magic, and just as I finished, you appeared." She caught sight of Dairine, who'd been lagging a bit behind. "Is he your mentor as well?" She turned back to Ronan. "How should I address you? Should I call you 'Master'? I can kneel for you, if that is your desire."
Dairine sneaked a look at Ronan's face. He was doing a good job of not snickering, but Dairine could see that he was in danger of losing it, so she stepped in. "No," she said to Cat, "he's not my mentor. This is Ronan, and we're just friends. He's visiting from Ireland."
"Ireland!" Cat breathed. It was clear that visions of leprechauns and pixies were dancing in her head. Or, Dairine thought, trying to be fair, maybe she knows enough to think he's one of the daoine sídhe. Dairine had had some experience with those fair immortal folk—just enough to know that it was safer all around to stay well clear of them.
Ronan finally managed to pull himself together enough to answer Cat. "As she said. I'm not anyone's mentor, or teacher, or whatever. I'm just visiting from Ireland."
"But you did come when I called. You are a magician or wizard of some sort, aren't you?"
Oh, no, thought Dairine. Wizards weren't supposed to lie, and especially they weren't supposed to deny their wizardry. That could lead, over time, to losing it. Magic didn't live in the disbelieving heart. But what was Ronan supposed to say to Cat?
"Uh," was what he managed. He looked intrigued, though. With a visible effort, he put on a serious face, and continued. "So tell me; why were you looking for a magic teacher?"
Cat's face changed from her previous exalted expression to something more serious. "I've never told anyone this, but I guess it's what you need to know." She took a deep breath.
"Last year, something happened to me. I don't know if you remember, Dairine, but I was out of school for a week or so."
Dairine nodded; she remembered. That sort of thing wasn't all that unusual, but Cat—though it had been Cathy then—had been so close-mouthed about it that rumors had started. Some people said that she'd gotten pregnant and had an abortion, others that she'd been in the hospital for some unnamed ailment. Cat had refused to talk about it, and eventually people moved on to the next thing to wonder about.
"What happened was that I was in an automobile accident. It's all sort of blurry, which is odd, because I wasn't touched. But what I remember was that I was in a situation where I could get hit by the car, or someone else was going to get hit by the car. And I let the other person get hit. I'm not sure if I pushed him or what, and I haven't been able to find out."
Probably, Dairine thought, because that's not exactly how it happened. But she has to be remembering failing her Ordeal, however it did happen.
"I was out of school for a week because even though people kept telling me it wasn't my fault, I knew it was, and I couldn't stop crying. Then my parents thought I was depressed, and started dragging me to all sorts of doctors. They want me to take these pills, and I hate them. They don't make me feel better, they just make me feel different and worse. And that's why I tried this spell, even though I wasn't really sure anything would happen. Because I couldn't think of anything else to try, and I just wanted to curl up and die. Except I didn't really want to. And so I found you instead. If you're who the spell called, at least."
"Perhaps I am the one you were meant to find?" came another voice.
Omigod, it's the White Witch from Narnia, was Dairine's first thought. The woman striding into the clearing didn't look much like Tilda Swinton, but she looked remarkably like Dairine's idea of what Jadis had looked like in the Pauline Baynes illustrations in her Narnia books. And wearing—good grief—all black, with sparkles here and there. She looked like what every goth girl would want to look like when she grew up. This can't be good.
"Who the bloody hell are you?" said Ronan. The woman ignored him, addressing herself to Cat.
"I can teach you in the ways of power, if you are willing to walk the path I lay out for you," she said.
Of course, thought Dairine. Looking for a mentor, failed her ordeal, and desperate for magic. Of course the Lone Power would want to recruit her. She addressed her thought to the woman. Are you who I think you are?
Mostly not, actually, came the answer back. She does most of this for herself. I just provide a bit of, well, call it energy. But you don't get to say anything to the girl. She gets to make the choice for herself.
But, thought Dairine to herself, she already made the wrong choice once! How can she do it right this time? But she knew better. One wrong choice didn't doom one forever. If it did, how could the Lone One ever be redeemed?
Ronan straightened, and took a deep breath. "I can't teach you magic. And I can't give you magic if you don't have it already. But neither can she."
"That's not exactly true," said the woman, "and you know it."
"Do you know each other?" asked Cat. "This is getting too strange."
"All right," said Ronan. "Magic can't be taught that way, but she can give you something that looks like it. But the cost would be, well, call it your soul. Is that something you're willing to pay? Because that's the price she'd charge for it if you choose her path."
"So," said Cat, "my options are magic with her or none with you?" Dairine boggled a bit. Where had all this logical working-out come from? Ten minutes ago, she'd been offering to kneel at the feet of a total stranger.
"Or," said another voice, "there's always what's behind Door Number Three." The voice had come from a large white pig that hadn't been there a second ago, Dairine was quite sure.
"What is the meaning of life?" Ronan asked, with remarkable aplomb, under the circumstances.
"That's right, you weren't really in any shape to ask anything of the sort the last time I saw you," said the Transcendent Pig. "I don't suppose you'd take 42 for an answer?"
"Not unless Douglas Adams was correct all along," Ronan said.
"Well, he had some remarkable insights," said the Pig, "but I'm not sure that was one of them."
"And what are you doing here?" asked Dairine.
"Oh, I'm just here to observe."
"You like to watch, don't you?" said the woman.
I can't keep thinking of her as the woman, thought Dairine. Does she have a name? Of course she does. She isn't an avatar of the Lone One, just someone shadowed by him. It had to be a real person in order to give Cat a real choice.
"It's what I do," said the Pig placidly.
"What the hell is going on here?" Cat burst out. "I know I was looking for magic, and a teacher, but I'm quite sure that a talking pig was not part of the deal." But there was a yearning look in her face that said that this was the world she wanted. Or wanted back, Dairine thought.
"Just like you said earlier," Dairine said. "Choices."
"The good guys, or power and evil," said Ronan.
"You may call it evil," said the woman. "I, on the other hand, prefer to think of it as simply getting my own way. By the way, dear, my name is something I prefer to reserve at the moment, but you can call me Lady Heather."
Dairine rolled her eyes, and even Cat looked a bit dubious at that. Truth in advertising, Dairine supposed.
"And," continued Lady Heather, "here's a minor example of the sort of thing I can do. And that you might be able to do someday." She pointed at a volunteer oak sapling, and said "Watch!" The sapling was only a few feet tall, and had probably grown up from some amnesic squirrel's forgotten stash. No doubt the grounds-keepers had missed uprooting it the last time they came around. Lady Heather made a gesture with her hand, and muttered something. The leaves on the tree shriveled and fell off, then the trunk thinned, shivered, and fell over in a cloud of dust.
Cat was open-mouthed. This was just the sort of thing she'd had in mind when she thought of magic, Dairine suspected. Point to Lady Heather.
"Impressive," said Ronan. "But do you ever make things, or just destroy them?" And honors even, thought Dairine hopefully.
"And what about him?" Cat asked, pointing at the Transcendent Pig. Dairine was impressed that she hadn't done a total freak-out. Magical mentors were one thing, but talking pigs were quite another.
"That's the Transcendent Pig," Dairine said. "He goes around making oracular statements and generally being unhelpful, but I think he's one of the good guys."
"Oh, I am," said the Pig. "But there are rules, and I follow them. And in this case, I think I'm here to enforce them. Catriona Benson"—Cat looked startled that the Pig knew her full name—"you have been provided with enough information to make your choice. Do so now."
"I don't even get a chance to go home and think about it?"
"Would you have had a chance to do so had you only been provided with one option?"
"No, I suppose not," Cat admitted. "Okay, so let's see if I've got this straight. If I choose Ronan, you don't promise anything, and I don't necessarily get to go to Ireland, but I have the dubious satisfaction of knowing that I'm choosing the forces of good."
"Something like that," Ronan said. He opened his mouth to say more, but at a look from the Pig, he closed it again.
"And if I choose Lady Heather, I have to follow her rules, and probably give some of my power to her at least in the beginning—if this is anything like the stories I've read, at least—but I'll get the magic that I've always dreamed of."
Lady Heather smiled.
"And you"—she looked at the Pig—"are some sort of magical umpire."
"In this time and place, at this moment, yes."
"If you're transcendent, does that mean you can be in other times and places, at the same time?"
"I don't usually answer such questions for free—but if I'm in other times and places, what can 'at the same time' possibly mean?" The Pig looked, if it were possible to interpret a pig's expression, smug.
Cat shook her head—not in negation, but as if to clear it. "Whatever." She looked at Lady Heather, sighed, looked again, then walked over to Ronan. "I told you what happened to me last year. It's still fuzzy, but the way I felt afterwards wasn't, and never has been. Back then, I decided was that I was never going to do anything like that again. If I was ever in a 'it's him or me' situation, I'd choose him and not me, because I couldn't stand feeling that way again. And I'm pretty sure that if I chose you"—she looked at Lady Heather—"I'd be in those situations pretty soon. Because everything you said, even though it wasn't much, showed that you care more about power than about people. And I don't want to do that again."
Redemption, of a sort, thought Dairine. That's what this was all about. And I'd better not saying anything, because if I do, it'll sound like the end of an after-school special. Plus, I am not going to start crying.
"Is that okay?" Cat finished rather lamely.
Ronan beamed at her. "Yes," he said. "Definitely. Even if I'm not sure what to do next."
Cat looked rather dubiously at Lady Heather and the Transcendent Pig.
Lady Heather smiled, rather nastily. "What, you expect me to gnash my teeth and wring my hands and make silly threats? It doesn't work that way. You've made your choice, and your only punishment is that you have to live with it. Or live without it, as the case may be." She looked around, nodded, and walked away.
"Who was she?" whispered Dairine to Ronan.
"No idea," he whispered back. "She must be local, but she's not a wizard. Something else that the Lone Power cooked up, I suppose." He looked at the Transcendent Pig. "What next?"
The Pig said, "I don't tell people what to do. Not even if they ask nicely. Especially if they ask nicely, in fact. But I think you're doing fine." And with that, he softly and silently vanished away.
Cat was looking a little sniffly, but determined. "So what happens now?"
"Well," said Ronan, "once things are a bit more settled, there are some stories we can tell you, I'm pretty sure, if you're interested."
Cat nodded vigorously.
Community, thought Dairine. That's what we can offer. Dad and Kit's family don't have magic, but they know all about it, and they benefit from it. If getting alien shopping channels counts at benefiting, that is. And Cat can have that.
"In the meantime," continued Ronan, "how about if you come home with Dairine and me and have dinner with us? There are some people we'd like to introduce you to."
"Let me call to make sure my parents say it's okay, but yes, I'd like to," said Cat.
As Cat was pulling out her phone, Dairine said, "And I've got this friend with a curling iron that I know you're going to want to meet..."