A Wizard Abroad

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 enquiry. 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 reasons or no reason, and upset the people who happened to see it. And if they happened to believe 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-grey eyes. “Did you hear the church bells, earlier?"

"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", an English general 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 churches - ours was one - and got himself quite a name for unnecessary cruelty." Aunt Annie looked out the kitchen window, into the near-dark, watching the apple trees out the back move slightly in the wind. "I think what you heard was, well, a reminder of some soldiers of his, 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 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 particularly, well, "ghostly". No going "Ooooooo" or trying to scare anyone."

"That's right," her aunt said, sounding relieved. "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 beefburgers," her aunt said, getting up, "and some chicken…"

Nita got up to help, and to poke 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 cookers and refrigerators sold here were like that, for on the drive in she had kept getting a feeling that everything was a bit 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. "So have you got other ghosts," Nita said, "or are those all?"

"Nope, that's it." Her aunt chuckled a bit 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. "There's a lot of history in Ireland," Aunt Annie said. "A lot of bad experiences and bad feelings. It's a problem sometimes." She came up with a spatula. "Do you want onions?"

"Yes, please," Nita said. Her aunt came up with a knife and handed it to Nita, then found an onion in a bin by the door and put it on the worktop. "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 lived in the States, one in Ireland. Nita had met her two male cousins a couple of years ago, when she was very young, and only dimly remembered Todd and Alec as big, dark-haired, booming shapes that gave her endless piggyback rides.

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

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

“We don't have set mealtimes," Aunt Annie said. 'My staff come in and 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 cooker, which was suddenly littered with cats of various colours, “who are hungry whether they've just eaten or not."

Nita laughed and bent down to scratch the cats: the black-and-white cat again, and a marmalade-coloured cat with golden eyes, and 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've 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 liberate something for you later… "

They sat looking thoughtful - since almost everything that thinks can recognize and understand the Speech - then one by one got up and strolled off. Big Paws went last, looking thoughtfully at Nita as he did so. Her aunt had found the mustard, and noticed the exodus. “Huh," she said. “I guess they don't like the smell of the onions."

“It's pretty strong," Nita said, 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 fox hunt?" 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 we have to have the vet in to certify them fit, and then the farrier is coming in tomorrow afternoon 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… I'm still pretty tired."

“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 eating, and cleared the table. “If you want to watch TV late, you're going to be out of luck," her aunt said. “All but one of the TV stations shut down around midnight, and the one that's left mostly just shows old films. But if you feel inclined, go ahead."

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

'That's fine. You make yourself completely at home." Her aunt looked at Nita with an expression that had some of Big Paws' look about it. “It must have been a bit of a wrench, just being shipped off like 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 light 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 hospitality by helping out in the kitchen: her aunt hated washing-up more than 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 caravan, and it was dim. She paused outside the door. Even now, past midnight, the sky wasn't completely black. Nevertheless, it was blanketed with stars, much brighter than she was used to seeing them through the light pollution of the New York suburbs. And there was no sound here but the faintest breath of wind. Even the dual carriageway a mile away made no noise at all. It was as if everyone in this part of the country had gone to bed 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 the street had streetlights on all night, this utter darkness was a shock.

But the stars, 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 been one thing worth seeing here.

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

Once she had them she headed out across the concrete yard again, making for the log fence that separated the land immediately around Aunt Annie's house from the fields beyond it. The closest field was planted with something called oilseed rape -tall green plants with flowers at the top so extremely yellow that they had made Nita's eyes hurt to look at them in the sunshine that morning when she had arrived. The field beyond that was clean pasture, grassland being left fallow for 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 climbed one of the fenceposts 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 centre 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. “Canidae," she said under her breath. “Here we go."

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 mathrara," 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 meters away. Normally she would never have heard it, except that her ears were sharpened by sitting in this total silence. The noise stopped.

“Mathrara," 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-nose shape come towards 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 glinted in his eyes and silvered his fur, giving him enough of an outline for her to see him.

“So," the fox said.

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

“We wouldn't say "mathrara" here. "Madreen rua", that would be it." And Nita chuckled, for 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. There's a hunt coming through here in a few days."

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

“That's as may be," Nita said. “But if I were you, I'd 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 silently, a panting sound. “They've 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 with a thoughtful look. “So then," it 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 the more clever the animal was, and the more or less used it was to human beings. Pets like cats and dogs tended to have more fully humanized personalities, and could easily be got 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 had less to talk about. Wilder animals had more to say, but it was often more difficult to understand them, the message being coloured with hostility or fear, or plain old bewilderment. The fox lived on the fringes of human life, 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 own responsibilities for the evening. A wizard had a duty to prevent unnecessary pain, and fox-hunting 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 them 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?

I'm chewing, Kit said.

Oh no, you're eating dinner!

It's not such a fascinating experience that I can't spare a few minutes 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 said.

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

Bored with me already, Kit said. I 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. Look, she said, I'm worn out. I'll talk to you more in the morning.

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

Will 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; perhaps a mile away, another answered it.

Nita smiled to herself and headed for the caravan.

As she had thought, she wasn't able to stay up very late that night. She tried to watch some television, and as her aunt had warned her, only one channel of the six available was working, showing some old film that didn't interest her. So she turned it off and went back to the caravan again to read. Not before, on the sly, opening a small can of cat food and parceling 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 back to bed and slept some more. The 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 caravan. When she woke up, everything was quite still. It was early morning - how early she couldn't tell any more 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 seven o'clock in the morning.

She got up and dressed in yesterday's clothes, slipped into the house, had a quick shower, dressed again in clean clothes this time, 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 earlier. One was Joe, the stable manager, a tall lean young man with a grin so wide that Nita thought his face was in danger of cracking. Another was Derval, the head riding instructor, 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. “You 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 bread crock for the loaf. “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 worktop, as were 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 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 Bray 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 any place 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's got a bad habit of biting."

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

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

“Uh, maybe tomorrow," Nita said. She had been put up on a horse once, several years ago on holiday, and had immediately fallen off it. This had coloured 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 free 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 in 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 again. There was a pathway past the back of her caravan 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 concreted area with two or three large brown, metal-sided, barnlike buildings arranged in a loose triangle around it. The field on the right-hand side as she faced it was full of horse-jumping paraphernalia, jumps and stiles; all around the edge of it ran a big track covered with wood shavings and chips for the horses to run on. Further down and on her right was the stabling barn, and beyond it what Derval had referred to as 'the riding school', a big covered building that had nothing in it 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 particularly at the horse in number five, who was a big handsome black horse. But he had a bad look in his eye, and when (since there was no human around to hear) she greeted him in the Speech, he eyed her coldly, laid his ears back and snorted, "Clear off, little girl, or I'll 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 asking 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 barn was an extremely large pile of hay, kept under cover there so that the rain couldn't get at it, and the horses could be given it easily. Nita was standing for a moment looking at it, when something small and black, a rock she thought, fell down from the top of it. It tumbled down the hay, and even though Nita sidestepped, the falling black thing fell crookedly, and landed on top of one of her trainers.

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 in the act of scampering away after a windblown straw, stopped so suddenly that it fell over forwards. Nita restrained herself mightily from laughing. It 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, then?"

"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?"

“I'm 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 yet. “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've lost me," said Nita. “Anyway, I'm not a big ale fan…"

The kitten looked at Nita as if she was a very dun bulb indeed. “It's going to get really 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 up towards the field where the jumping equipment was. There was no-one out there at the moment.

The kitten stopped several times in her run to crouch down, her little behind waggling, and pounce on a bug, or leaf, or stalk of grass, or blown bit of hay; and she always missed. Nita was having trouble controlling her reaction to this, but if there was one thing a wizard had practice in being, it was polite: so she managed. A little dusty whirlwind passed them by as they went between the riding school and the stable block, and Tualha paused to let it go by. “Good day," she said.

“You usually talk to wind?" Nita said, 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 on to the fencepost, 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 little young to be a bard?" she said.

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

'Well, no, I'm fourteen.”

“And that's what percentage of your lifespan?"

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

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

Nita flushed briefly. Whatever a ban-draioa might be, maths had never been one of her favorite things. “And you of Spanish blood," Tualha said, “but 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. History had never been a favorite with her either, but she was beginning to suspect that 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 said dryly.

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 as round 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 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, there 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 Fomor. The monster people," Tualha said in obvious annoyance at Nita's blank look;”the ones who were here before. 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 there and dug rivers and planted forests; and they met the Fomor 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 after: the Fir Bolg. They brought new beasts and birds into the land, and there was song in the air and life in the waters."

“When did the cats get here?" Nita said.

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

“I think so." Nita resolved to have a look at her manual later, though, if as Tualha said all this information was in there. It might have been in a form that made sense to a cat at this point, 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 Fomor 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 Dana, the Cup and Stone and Sword and Spear they had brought with them when they first came there from the Four Oldest Cities. Seven years he reforged those treasures with the power that was in him. Then the 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 list 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. “You 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."

"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 any more: 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 clever. And no offence, but I prefer clever. Not sure what you prefer, Shonaiula ni Cealodhain," she muttered, and scuttered off.

Nita chuckled a little, then got up and made her way back the way Tualha had gone, through the area between the riding school and the stables. As she went she noticed 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 a chestnut horse out.

In the concreted yard, she found the source of the burning. There was a small pickup truck out there, and a square steel box about half a meter square had been unloaded from it. It's a forge, Nita thought, as the little 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 lawnmower.

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 standing by it went around to one side of the portable forge and applied a blowtorch to an aperture there. How about that, Nita thought. Portable horseshoeing. . .

Nita went down to have a look as the chestnut horse was led up to the forge to be reshod. The woman standing by the forge had to be about sixty. She was of medium height, with short close-cropped white hair and little wire-rimmed glasses, 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 them Nita had heard so far: in fact, she sounded like an American who had been here for a long time. "Ah, you again," she said to the chestnut as the groom led it up and fastened its reins to a loop on the back of the pickup 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 relieved that no-one was in a position to offer her any tea.

The farrier held up her hands in apology: they were covered with honest 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. "You 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 like a nail-puller, she went around the horse's hoof loosening the nails and prising them up one by one, and then 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 blonde groom who had been handling the chestnut,"that he won't be needing the surgical shoes any more; the hoofs cleared up."

Nita was surprised. "Surgical horseshoes?" she said.

"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 straight - he hurt his 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.

"This one's in the hunt?" Nita said.

Biddy nodded. "He belongs to Jim McAllister up on the Hill. Jim's a great one for a mad ride, though I don't think he cares about the fox at the end of it." She rooted around in the forge, stirring and rearranging the coals in it. Nita peered into the opening of it.

"Lava rocks?" she said.

"Oh aye, like in the barbecues. They work as well as charcoal unless you're doing drop forging or some such."

She turned her attention back to the hoof, scraping its edges a bit more. Then Biddy picked up the tongs again. "Here we go, now," she said, and took hold of the hoof again. With her free hand she plucked the horseshoe out of the furnace and slapped it hard against the hoof, exactly where 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, completely untroubled. After dunking the shoe into a bucket of cold water, she dropped the tongs, then took a hammer out of another belt loop, reached into a pocket for nails, and began fitting the shoe, tapping the nails in with great skill, each nail halfway in with one tap, all the way in with the next.

Nita watched Biddy do Tango's other three 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 Greystones, she thought. Aunt Annie had told her that the bike was out 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 familiar to go to, and no-one familiar to go with. Being at loose ends was not a sensation she was very used to: but she didn't feel quite bold enough at the moment to just go charging off into a strange town.

I wouldn't mind if Kit were here, though…

Nita 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 barber-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, you could see the ocean. Nita 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, it was just a flat silvery expanse, dull and pewter-coloured. Nita smelled smoke again, and idly half-turned to look over her shoulder, towards the farrier's furnace.

And was rather 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 the farm buildings, 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 this 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 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 outwards in 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 hold 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 cliathánach," Tualha said. "Sideways, 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, a bit irritable with the shock of everything. It was part of a wizard's most basic knowledge that the physical world coexisted with hundreds of thousands of others, both like it and very unlike. No amount of merely physical travel would get you into any of them. The right wizardry, though, and 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, // I go on call in Ireland, I go on call, and that's it. It was not 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 that 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 run here: Europe had its own Senior structures. Alone, and with a problem that she didn't understand. . .She was going to have to catch up on her reading.

Tualha crouched and leaped at a bit of ash that the wind sailed past her. She missed it. Nita sighed. "How do we get back?" she said.

"You haven't done this before?" Tualha said. "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 grey 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 slightly peeling paint. "But indeed," Tualha said, "it's as I told you. Something must change. Get about it, before it gets about us."

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 in, a green double-decker that stopped at the end of her aunt's road, and climbed up to the second floor of the bus. There was no-one at all there, so she went straight forward to take the seat right at the front, its window looking directly forwards and four meters down on to the ground. It was interesting to ride along little country lanes and look right down on to 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 in the wizard's manual on Ireland was quite lengthy. This was not a surprise to her, since at the moment the section on the United States was quite short… most likely since she wasn't there. The 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 little suspicious of Tualha's numbers. The things she had discussed as happening four hundred thousand years before had apparently actually happened four hundred million years before. This didn't surprise Nita either; she remembered Aunt

Annie saying yesterday that as far as she knew, the only times cats were concerned about were their mealtimes.

In any case, the manual told her of the formation of Ireland, some four hundred million years earlier; of the pushing up of the great chain of mountains that it shared with Newfoundland, and with the Pyrenees. A hundred and fifty million years later, the continental plate on which Ireland stood began to move so that the great island that had been both England and Ireland was flooded and split, and the ice came down and tore at it.

It just explained the science of it, of course. A wizard knows to look further than mere science for explanations. The world was made, and none of these things happen by accident. It was made by the Powers: not created in some abstract sense, but made, stone by stone, as an artist makes, or a cook, or a craftsman - with interest and care. The One, the only name that 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 misjudgement? A miscalculation? Nita thought not. She thought she saw here the interference of her old enemy, the Lone Power, the one which (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 Builders, had not seen, or suspected, the flaws inserted in their building by the Lone Power's working. So Ireland had come undone several times, and had had to be patched. Indeed, the top part of it had only 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.

So then. Two or three attempts to make, frustrated two or three times by the Lone Power, and then, as Tualha said, the One had become impatient. Or maybe impatience was an inaccurate emotion to attribute to the Power that conceived the whole universe at its beginning, and through to its end. The One's great intent, along with that of the wizards and the Powers that Be, who do Its will, is to preserve energy - to keep things running for as long as they can be made to run, with what's available… and not to waste unnecessarily. Building here was being actively hindered. So a new group of Makers came into the world to shape Ireland: greater powers, more senior, more central, than those who had worked here before. They would set it right.

They tried. Nita saw, between the telling of the manual and what Tualha told her, that just as the One had scaled up 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 gave her 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 carved and choked; and the ice rose and fell. The battle went on here 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 of the Long Reach. She thought she knew this particular Power. She had met it once or twice. A young warrior, fierce, kindly, a little humorous, liable 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 Its virtue into the great Treasures that the Tuatha had brought from the Four Cities.

Then he and the Tuatha had gone out with those weapons against Balor of the Evil Eye. Who was he? Nita thought. Was he the Lone Power Itself? Or some unfortunate creature that It corrupted and inhabited? That, too, was a favorite tactic. It didn't matter. Balor had held the humans of the island, and his twisted creatures the Fomori, and the other, lesser powers, in great terror for thousands of years. But then came the second battle, as Tualha had said, and all that had changed. War came from Heaven to Earth with a vengeance. The Champion, in the form of Lugh, struck Balor down.

Nita turned another page over and saw why Tualha had laughed at her so. Certainly it was laughable, the idea that anyone could just throw out ten of the senior Powers that Be. But something had happened. After putting down Balor, they had got busy with the job of 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 commoner 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 more of heroes and the One, it indicated that the Powers which had made that place had gone away, well-satisfied with their work. In some places in the world, though, the satisfaction was never quite complete - places like Greece and Rome. Their Makers loved them too much to leave for a long time, though finally they let go. But there were still a few places in the world where the Powers had never let go. This was one of them.

I bet this is why Ireland has so much trouble, one way and another, Nita thought. The Powers won't move out and let the new tenants be there by themselves. Us. . .For like most other wizards, Nita knew quite well that the good Powers might indeed be good, but that didn't make them safe. Even the best of the Powers that Be could be blunted by too much commerce with humans and physical reality.

Nita read that the Tuatha, as the Irish had come to call them, had never left. And when the human people, the 'Milesians', came at last, they 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 solider, realer; and the physical, if it was wise, would stay out of the way of what was older, stronger, harder, by far.

They had gone sideways, had the Tuatha. They could not bear to leave Ireland, and so they had gone just one over - or two, or five. It was still Ireland, but it was also a little bit closer to the far side of Reality, where, as Nita knew, lay Timeheart. She had been there several times, for brief periods. It looked different ways, 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 was, regardless of your viewpoint on it, was that place, that other universe or dimension, 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 that universe near Timeheart that looked most like Ireland. But much coming and going had forged a link, broadening the road from a little track into a highway that it was easy to stumble on to. 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 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 you could just stop: at least, Nita couldn't. And as for her. . .

Well, she had gone sideways, and it hadn't hurt her… but then she was a wizard, and apt to such things. If something like that started happening to ordinary 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 listed. There was an address for a senior wizard as well, with an asterisk and a note saying, "Consult in case of emergency."

Well then, Nita thought, if they've put me on my own on this one, I suppose 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.

It was not a very big town, its main street about half the length of the main street at home; and as usual, everything continued to look small and cramped and a little worn-out by her 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 was not the money to spend on a lot of 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 there that said Leabhlair poblachta, public library. She grinned a bit. Finding libraries had never been one of her problems.

The library was two buildings - one older, which had been a schoolhouse once, a big square granite-built building, very solid and dependable-looking, all on one storey; and the newer annexe, built in the same stone but 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, so many poets: humour, cartoon books, all kinds of neat things. And structurally the language looked, and occasionally sounded, very 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 seen in the manual. Mostly she found confirmation for Tualha's version - the terrible eye of Balor that burnt 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.

And then there were the stories of the saints. When they 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 religion. Bridget's stories in particular were interesting, though there was confusion over whether the person they were happening to 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 mended broken things and fed people, and 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 digestion came up to be considered seriously, since she hadn't had any breakfast. It was partly out of cowardice; she had woken up 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. I'm really no safer here, though, she thought as she stepped out of the library, looking up and down the little street which ran parallel to Bray's main street. This calm-looking landscape with its little terraced houses ranged across the way, and the van unloading groceries for the supermarket around the corner, and the people 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 little row of wattled huts that the Romans came visiting once, and never left - their bones and coins had been found down by Bray Head: or the great eighteenth-century spa where people from Britain came for their holidays, promenading up and down the fine seafront. No, there was nowhere she could go to get away from things.

She went up to the main street and looked around for somewhere to get something to eat. There were some tea shops, but at the moment she felt like she had had enough tea for a lifetime. Instead, near the bridge over the Dargle, there was a place 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 her for the little while she was going to be here.

She got herself a Coke and settled down to wait for her chicken to be ready, gazing idly over at the kids sitting at the other table. They were stealing glances back at her, boys and girls together: a little casual, a little shy, a little hostile. In that way, they looked almost exactly like almost everyone she knew at home. They did dress differently. Black seemed to be a big favorite here, and a kind of heavy boots 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 little out of place in her quilted bodywarmer and her faded blue jeans, but she grinned back at the other kids and paid attention to her Coke again.

A couple of minutes later, two of them came over to her. She looked up amiably enough. One of them was a boy, very tall, with very shaggy dark hair, a long nose, with 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 marvelously 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 beaten-up leather jacket over it: black again, black jeans and those big heavy boots which Nita was becoming rather envious of.

"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. "You want to 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.

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

Nita looked at her hair, looked 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," they 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 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 films six months earlier than everyone else. "Uh," Nita said finally, "my parents don't let me go and see all that many films. I have to keep my schoolwork up 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 took the bus in 'for the crack', she said. Nita blinked a bit 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 said, 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 just a dance that various pubs or hotels did once or twice a week. Several of them were no-alcohol kids' discos, highly thought of by this group, who went off into 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."

"Her 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 sort of 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.

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

"I know!" said Majella. "Her parents sent her away to separate them because they were - ahem!" And she shook her hand in a gesture intended to be slightly rude and slightly 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!" they said, and began ragging her shamelessly, explaining what a privilege it was that she should be among them, and telling 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 loads," said Nita.

They chatted about this and that for a long while. Nita found herself oddly interested by 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 they 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. 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 agreement with him, or if they disagreed, to keep fairly quiet about this: Nita noticed this particularly, and suspected that they had felt the edge of his temper once or twice. She grinned a little to herself, thinking that he would have a slightly hotter time of it if he tried it on her. She rather hoped Ronan 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 there. Eventually, though, everybody had to leave for one reason or another: buses to catch, people to meet. One by one they said goodbye to Nita, and headed off, Ronan last of them. "Don't get lost looking for leprechauns, now, Miss Yank," he shouted to her over his shoulder as he made his way off down Bray's main street.

She snickered and turned away, looking at the number forty-five bus pulling up across the street, and thought, Naah… Ill walk home. It was only eight miles, up the promontory of Bray Head and down the other side, through extremely pretty countryside.

It was a long, easy walk down, taking her about an hour to get down to Greystones. She strolled down into the town. It was a more villagey-looking street than Bray's, and smaller: a couple of banks, a couple of food shops, two small restaurants, a newsagents where you could get magazines and cards and sweets. Various other small shops… a dry cleaners. And that was it. After that, the town was surrounded by big old houses, and estates of smaller ones. And then the fields began again - in fact, they began almost as soon as you had left the town. Nita strolled by the tiny golf course, looked down to Greystones' south beach beyond it; walked past a cow with a blank expression, chewing its cud. "Dai," she said to it. It blinked at her and kept chewing.

The road climbed again, winding a bit, up through Killincarrig. Everything has names here, Nita thought. Ifs amazing. Every piece of ground… Aunt Annie was right. I really must get a map out. There may be one in the manual …

There was. She consulted it as she went up the road. At the top of the road, another crossed it at a T-junction: she turned left. That way led towards Kilquade and Kilcoole and Newcastle with its little church.

This road climbed and dipped over a little bridge that crossed a dry river; up 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, towards 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 quite small; some were larger, though.

The road dipped and broadened, curving around in front of St 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 circular pulley to make it go. 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. Well behind her, she could see Little Sugarloaf, which she had passed on her walk. And just beyond it, Great Sugarloaf, a very perfect cone, standing up straight, a sort of russet and green colour this time of year; for in this heat, the bracken was beginning to go brown already. I wonder, she thought. Sideways…

She had done it without wizardry yesterday. 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 earlier in the year, much earlier. I wonder, she thought. How far can you take it? Do you 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 does it look like for them, for the Sidhe?

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 other hills nearby all had shadows cast away from it. Nita was not entirely sure she didn't see something moving in some of those shadows. But for the moment, all she could see clearly was the light, 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 again, plain granite mountain, with its head scraped bare. She let a long breath out and went walking again, back up to the last hill that would lead her up to her aunt's drive. "That simple," 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. She missed the earliest part of the operation, having been reading late again that night, and chatting with Kit. He hadn't been able to throw much light on anything, except that he missed her. "Kit," she said, "I 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 parents the other day."

"How are they?"

"They're fine… they're going to call you tonight. They said they were going to give you a couple of days to get yourself acclimatized before they bothered you."

"Fine by me," Nita said. "I've 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."

"Hm?"

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

"Yeah, well, it can't be that bad, Kit. Look, you come back as easily as you go. . ."

"I hope you do," 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 was having things to tell him that he hadn't actually participated in. "How's Dairine?" she said.

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

"Oh no, not again," Nita said. "Sometimes I think she should be unlisted. She's never going to have any peace, at least not while she's in breakthrough… and maybe not later."

They chatted on a bit, and then it trailed off.

Nita was thinking about this in the morning as she got her breakfast. The kitchen was in havoc. A lot 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 was several cups of tea, taking no less than half an hour, during which whatever interesting local news there was was passed on. 'A quick cup of tea' might happen at any hour of the day or night, include any number of people, male or female, and always turned into a raging gossip session with hilarious laughter and recriminations. You could hear some terrific gossip if you hung around them, or so Nita was learning.

Finally the kitchen began to clear out a bit. The people who were in the hunt were splendidly dressed, all red coats and black caps and beige riding breeches and black shiny boots. They were discussing the course they would ride - a difficult one, from Calary Upper behind Great Sugarloaf, down through various farmers' lands, straight down to Newcastle. The thing that was bemusing them was that, suddenly, there were no reports of foxes anywhere. Nita smiled again to herself as she heard the discussion in the kitchen that morning. Everyone was excessively bemused about 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.

"Well, that's all we'll see of them," said 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 neither," 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 were around. Then she talked herself out of it. She would put a towel down outside, and lie out 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 so it was, about two-fifteen, that 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 caravan, and went to lean on the fence by the back field and see what she could see. She almost missed the first horseman to go by, far away, about a half mile across the field, actually; thundering through the pasture, one horseman 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 over the hill; and a horn going tarantara! And the riders, halloing 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 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 good time.

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

Dinnertime that evening was replaced by a marathon 'little cup of tea', as the grooms from the stables got together with the stablemanager and the instructors. 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 came back in from the caravan, having had enough of the horsy talk about eight, and helped her aunt do the washing-up, or at least rinse the dishes 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?"

"I'm going to have a little walk first."

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

"Right."

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

She wandered out into the pasture, into the total dark and the quiet, and just stood there and listened. It was the first time she had really felt relaxed since she had come here. 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. It 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 lyoos some time.

But that howl came shuddering out of the night, and several others behind it; followed by yips and barks. And hooves. She heard hooves: not many sets, but just one this time, a long way off. One rider, one horse, galloping. What in the worlds. . .?

She strained to see in the moonlight. It was difficult to see; through this thin cloud, the moon was only at first quarter, and it was hard to see anything but a vague soft bloom of light over the cropland, black where it struck trees and hedgerows, the dimmest silver where it struck anything else. The sound got louder, the hooves; and the howls got louder too.

Hurriedly she said the first six 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 slid off. One word would release it if she needed it - and she had a feeling she would.

In the dark, not too far away, she 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, and didn't have time to do any one of them from scratch. She didn't have her manual. She could just begin to see the faint silvering of moonlight on the big thing galloping towards 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 that she knew was only two meters high. The top of the post came just below the creature's shoulder. A great, massive four-footed shape, sprinting towards her. Not a horse, not with those antlers, two meters across at least; not with that skull more than a meter long; belling, desperate, trumpeting, 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; the old Irish elk, extinct since the ice came down.

It went by her like a piece of storm, the breath like a blast of fog out of it as it went. It shook the ground as it ran, and its feet went deep into the soft pasture, spurning up great sods of grass. It flew on past and gave her never a look. Belling, 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 more than a meter 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 on the head of one or another thrown up to howl as it ran. A faint mist of light clung to them that had nothing to do with the mist on the field, or the moonlight. Their teeth were longer than a normal wolfs; their feet were bigger, their claws were longer. Their tails were shorter, their heads were heavier and more brutish. They were dire-wolves, the wolves of the Stone Age or earlier, Canis lupus dims.

It suddenly occurred to Nita that there would be someone following behind this pack, as there had been this morning… that single set of hoofbeats, growing louder as the rider strove to break through into this world, behind his pack. And she didn't want to meet that rider.

The wolves tore towards her. There were about twenty of them. More than half of them held the main course that they had been running, on the elk's track: the rest saw or scented her, she had no idea which, and angled towards 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, one she was very reluctant to use; but she had no weapon-spell handy that was less dangerous, and frankly was more willing to see the wolves dead than herself. If they can be killed at all. Are they even real…?

She 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 glance of fangs trying desperately to break through to her -failing for the moment, failing. . .

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

That was when the hooves came down and broke the wolfs head, and kicked its body aside, and smashed its spine into the ground. There was an immediate flurry of other wolves fastening themselves to the great dark shape that was rearing above Nita, smashing at more of them with its hooves. It had bought her the second she needed; she remembered the nineteenth word. She said it.

The sound that followed was not one that she much enjoyed, but the spell worked, even though the shield hadn't. These creatures were flesh and blood enough that when you suddenly took all the cell membranes from between their cells, the result was quite effective. It rained blood briefly. Nita looked at another of the wolves near her, said the nineteenth word. It 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 near her but a sickly, black, wet patch in the field, gleaming dully in the moonlight… and the elk, the Irish elk, standing with its head down, panting, looking at her out of 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.

He, 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 went that she was smeared with. "Here," she said, and began reading the quickest of the healing spells, a forced adhesion that caused the damaged tissue to at least hold together long enough for the knitting process to start. The spell was little more than wizardly superglue, 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 leapt away, galloping across the field. Nita stood there, panting, and wondering. 'Get out of here.' Where is 'here' any more? That broke through from 'sideways'.

She stood for a moment, listening. The sound of hoofbeats was fading: both the elk's, and whatever had been chasing it. She was relieved, though still concerned for the elk. The silence reasserted itself, deep and whole. 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 the morning, she thought. I suppose the book has some washing spells… But she couldn't push the bigger problem out of her mind.

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

We're in deep, deep trouble…

The chasm was deeper and wider than it looked. Is this happening in the real world? Nita thought, and paused for a moment to try to see with double vision, as she had seen 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. 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 loud enough 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…?"

Aunt Annie's mouth opened and shut, and then she said, "When I get my hands on Ed… I'm going to rip 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 in 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 and 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 the 'real world'. Broad streets, airy; shade, the sound of running water, stone as fluidly formed as if it had been clay once, or flesh - all paused in mid-movement, possibly to move again some day. There were echoes of thatched houses, and of old castles, and of 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, sharper, 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 real… 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 said.

"To talk to the people who live here," said Aunt Annie. "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 looked sidewise 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. . ." I

"I just bet," said Aunt Annie. "The Area Supervisor. 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 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 under 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. Not 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; the throne itself was empty. Aunt Annie walked straight towards the throne, 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 spelling. She headed out after her aunt.

Aunt Annie stopped about three meters 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, Amadaun of the People of the Hill in Cualann. And to you, lady of this forth."

The lady bowed her head. "To you also, Aoine ni Cealodhain, 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 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, Aoine," said the lady.

"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, and 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 favour in some of the Fifth House."

"If you mean that some of the nonhuman species think humans were a silly 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. One after another of us it threw off, in its way, having been taught to do so by the Lone One, and 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 wake up 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 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 taken place. 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 much as possible. Meanwhile, 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. "The "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 hunt the other night. If your carelessness let that happen, I think you owe me a favour one of these days."

There were shocked looks at her boldness, and Aunt Annie looked at her sideways. But there was a wry smile from the Amadaun. "Our people have long known that a favour 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 Amadaun 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 sideways in shock, and met his eyes, and found no relief there: the time was there too.

"Should you need help," he said, "name that name."

"Thank you," Nita said, trying to get some of her composure back. “I'll 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 came. The sunlight looked thin and wan when they came out, when it should have looked golden; everything seemed a little unreal, a little fake, now.

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."

"I'm 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 liked 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; I'm a little too close to mortality for their liking. But anyway," her aunt looked at Nita, "I can't believe it. You're a wizard!"

"At times I find it hard to believe myself," Nita 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 have 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 parents. I was never able to tell your grandma and grandpa."

"Listen, even when they know, it doesn't always run smoothly. 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 longer than there even were American wizards. And don't forget that at home you're working in a relatively clean environment; the magic of the Amerind wizards was of a much more naturalistic kind. There was practically no overlay, since it 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 is the beginning of it: August the 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 people hear these weird stories, they discount them. But we'll get the wizards together and talk to them. Meanwhile, 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't."

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

As she turned the corner, she froze in surprise: the caravan shifted slightly as she looked at it. Someone was in there. She paused and tried to see through the window before coming any closer. Inside, someone bent forward into the light: a shadow moved. . .

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

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 idiot, 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 fool."

She withheld comment for the moment. "Oh?"

"Well, I mean, you promised your parents that you wouldn't come back to see me. But I never said anything of the kind. No-one asked me. So I said to my mum, "I have to go out for a while, I'll be back for dinner." And she said, "Fine, have a nice time… "

"Dynamite! Come and see my aunt."

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

"Ah." Her aunt blinked. "Haifa second, then, and I'll feed him too."

Nita snickered and sat him 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.

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

"Dai stihó," said Kit.

"Slán," 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 listen," Nita's aunt said then, 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 mum 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, sounding momentarily aggrieved. "Are we 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. "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 preqis 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 that are going to be a problem."

"Yeah. They said that the second one was "dormant", the third one was "unusable" and the fourth one 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 said, sitting bolt upright as she felt him starting to casually 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. "You're not kidding. How do you get around here?"

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

"Well, let's go and 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 riding, OK? Her aunt nodded and went right on with her conversation about spell structure.

They were out for a long time. Part of it was Kit rubbernecking at the scenery while they 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. They had to take shelter from several of these showers, and when they finally got down to the dual carriageway again, they found hailstones as big as marbles lying around 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 crossbar, or the other way around. At the moment Kit was walking the bike beside her, looking around appreciatively. "This is great," he said. "I guess if you had to be sent somewhere, this is as good a place as any."

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

He coloured somewhat. "Yeah, well."

Nita grinned. "Listen, how's Dairine getting on?"

"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 really busy about now." Nita shook her head. The oppressive, thunderstorm-about-to-happen feeling had not stopped. She was still prickling, but not so violently as she had been that morning.

"Here it comes," Kit said, looking up at one thundercloud that they had watched drifting halfway between them and the sea as they turned down the Kilquade road. Almost immediately as he said it, Nita saw the bolt of lightning lance down and strike one of the hills behind the farm. Silently she started counting seconds, and had barely got to 'two' before the crack of thunder washed over them. “A little too close," said Kit. "Let's get inside."

They headed down the drive in a hurry, and came out into the gravel yard in front of the house. Nita 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 on in the air, and didn't want to stand around outside waiting for it, after all she'd been through that day.

"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 towards the farmyard, between the buildings. "There's something going on down there," he said. "Something alive."

"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 bolt this time. She went after him, muttering to herself. The problem was that 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 live 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 what?

He looked into the farmyard and shook his head, and gestured. "That," he said.

Nita looked. There was nothing in the farmyard but Biddy the farrier's pickup truck, with its forge on the back. "That?"

"It's not the truck," Kit said. "Not the truck itself. That's a little more awake than usual, but nothing really strange. It's the thing in the back. That box. What is that?"

"It's a forge, a portable forge," Nita said, mystified. "She's the lady who comes and puts the horses' shoes on."

Right then, Biddy herself came out of the hay barn, in the act of shrugging into a waterproof jacket. She looked up at the sky, pausing for a moment; then headed towards the truck.

"Uh oh," Kit said, looking up too, with a panicked expression. And a second later, the lightning came down.

That was only the first thing that happened. As Kit said 'uh oh', Nita had felt the potential building in the air become suddenly unbearable, not just a prickling but a pain all over her. It was a matter of a second, even with her brains as tired as they were from spelling, to put a shield spell up around herself and Kit. She saw Biddy look up; she saw the lightning lance down at the truck. The breath went right out of Nita in horror, for there was no way, no way, she could 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 stopped. And went away. There was not even a thunderclap.

And Biddy stood there, looking up at the sky, and glanced around, as if looking to see whether anyone had been watching. Then 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 drive. He barely noticed; he was watching the truck. "Who is that?" he said.

"I told you, that's the lady who puts the horseshoes on. Biddy."

"She's a wizard!"

"She's not. She can't be," Nita said. It just didn't feel right. "That wasn't a wizardry. Wizards can hide. But the magic 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 I can feel."

"I don't know," Nita said. "Things are getting weird around here…"

"Getting"!" Kit started to laugh, then sobered and looked thoughtful. "Are 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. "You're on."

They talked until nearly midnight. The last thin Kit said was, "You been meeting a lot of people around here? Kids, I mean?"

"Some. They're OK."

"Are they nice to you?"

Nita thought of Ronan, and immediately flushed hot. How was she supposed to explain this to Kit Explain what? some part of her mind demanded. Heaven only knows what he 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, “They're saying that I had got you in trouble."

She burst out laughing. "No wonder you jumped in there when Aunt Annie questioned you. Kit, who cares what they think? Idiots." She punched him “Go on home, it's your dinnertime."

“Oh, blast, I forgot!" He got up hurriedly an started riffling through his manual.

“Don't forget the overlays!" Nita said. “You leave them out of your calculations, you'll wind up in th middle of the Atlantic."

“So? We have friends there." He found the page he was looking for.

“Küüüt!" Nita said, annoyed, until he looked í her. “Just be careful."

He nodded, and started reading the transposition spell under his breath. At the very end of it, on th last word, he looked back up at her.

“Don't be late tomorrow," Nita said quietly.

He nodded, and grinned, and the air slammed int the space where he had been.

Nita went to bed.

The next morning, when Nita came into the kitchen, Aunt Annie was sitting at the kitchen table with a cordless 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 caravan. Aunt Annie sighed and picked it up. Nita went off 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?"

"Oh, yes, it's not like bars in the States." She started dialing another number. "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." Aunt Annie chuckled, then, and said to 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 in?" Nita said. "Driving?"

"No, we'll take the train in," 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." Aunt Annie smiled at her. "I think I owe you that much, after the other night…"

Nita grinned back 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 that far out, as yet

- and stood on the platform, looking out towards Greystones' south beach. Dogs ran and barked, and there were even a few people in the water - which astonished Nita, since it was some of the coldest water she had ever tried to swim in and bounced out of with her teeth chattering. Most of the people were out in the sun on the sand, turning very pink.

Nita looked towards the big orange-and-black diesel train that was pulling in.

"Take one of the right-hand seats," Aunt Annie 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, someone riding a horse at the 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?"

"Confidentiality," her aunt said. "I wasn't "out" to you yet. The manual senses such things." She looked at Nita thoughtfully. "I suppose I really should have anticipated it," she said. "My kids came out nonwizardly, after all. But anyway, I was looking at the manual this morning… You've been busy."

"You got that in one," Nita said.

Aunt Annie smiled. "Not unusual. Things quieten down, though, after you get to be my age. I remember when I got mine: I had about three years when I hardly had a moment to myself. Then things got calm when I went off to college."

"Did you have a partner?"

The train went abruptly darkish, lit 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 shocked 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, upset. 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 said.

"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 half-built 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 Dublin 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 through the orange-tiled exterior, beneath the skylights and down the escalator, and went 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 seemed not to have been repaved in a hundred years, or maybe two, right next to broad streets roaring with traffic and alive with lights and people shopping; old, old churches caught in the middle of shiny new shopping centres; shouting, cheerfully messy street markets in the shadow of big department stores.

“It takes a little while to get used to," her aunt said, as they crossed the street south of O'Connell Bridge and headed down 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 by the Dáil, the Irish houses of parliament, and 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 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 it 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 it might be able to glow by itself.

“The Ardagh Chalice," her aunt said softly. Nita looked at it; not just with the eyes, but with a wizard's senses, and looked as hard as she could. The Chalice was more than half a meter high and a third of a meter 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 ornamentation on the sides. They were spell diagrams in a very antique style, and though they looked simple, that was merely an illusion created by the extreme skill of whoever had designed them. They were subtle, and potentially of huge power; but they were 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 any more, 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 work out how. Come and see the Sword."

They went up a flight of stairs, through another room or two. The room they finally stopped in was full of ancient gold work: tores and stickpins and necklaces and bracelets of gold, beads and bangles, carved plates of gold linked together. "It 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, 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, like a memory impressed on matter by a mind now gone: like the ghosts in Aunt Annie's back garden, a tape still replaying and very faintly to be heard. But there was no vigour in it, only recollection: wistful, mournful, feeble… "It might have been the real Sword once," Nita said. "But it's almost forgotten. It's not nearly as much there as the Cup. I don't think you could wake this one 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 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 any more in a universe that had no suitable envelope for it, and it passed out entirely."

Nita rather thought that it had passed. Spears were symbols of the element of Fire, and fire was the most uncontainable of the five, next to plasma. Nita began to worry. Three of the Treasures would not be enough, to judge from what the Sidhe had hinted. But she had no 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 centre at St 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 Liffey at the Halfpenny Bridge's graceful curve, 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 in O'Connell Street by the statue of the goddess of the River Liffey, relaxing in her stone bath, and were grateful for the spray, for it was hotter that afternoon than it had been all summer. Mothers put their little children in the fountain, and they splashed happily, and the patrolling Gardai smiled and looked the other way.

About seven o'clock, Aunt Annie said, "Dinner?" Nita agreed happily, and they went off to have a pizza in a little restaurant in South Anne Street. Then they went off westward in the city, to the pub where that night's meeting would take place. The Long Hall was a handsome place, fronted in beveled glass and stained glass, all arranged so that people standing inside, in front of the windows, couldn't quite be seen from outside. Above, the glass 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. They walked in, and Nita gazed admiringly at the huge polished hardwood bar, and the antique mirrors, reaching three meters up from the back of the bar to the ceiling, on the wall behind it. 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 a hundred conversations.

"We're in the back room. Hi, Jack," said Aunt Annie to one of the men behind the bar. He was busy filling a glass with the 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 have 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, shouting.

"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 wizards' meeting - how are you going to keep the ordinary 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. Non wizards hit it and decide they don't feel like going back there after all - on normal nights, Jack just takes the spell finial 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. Jack makes anything wizardly come out sounding like an argument about football. Nice scrambler - took him a while to write. But he's one of our best writers. If you need a custom spell in this part of the world, it's Jack you come 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 said, looking around her in astonishment. She had never been in such a large gathering of her own before.

“Oh yes. All that could come at short notice, of course. Relax for a while; we can't do anything until Doris and Johnny get here."

So Nita drank her Coke and listened 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 got much worse now: she heard about twenty more 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 very open, friendly people, which to Nita seemed a little 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 were. 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 newsfilm Nita had seen of taped-off, shattered buildings, and the people with ski masks and rifles.

There was a slight commotion at the door as Mrs Smyth came in under 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 listeners, and caused the person who had asked the question to be genially pummelled.

Behind Mrs Smyth, someone else came in; a short man in a long overcoat and tartan 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 Western 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 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 (as he took his coat off) a tracksuit. He didn't look very old. He had a fierce-looking moustache, and his eyes were very cool; he looked 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-lines.

Doris and Johnny were got 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 we've 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."

There were some heads turned at this, and some murmuring under breath among the assembled wizards. "I know that wasn't the way it was announced," Johnny said, "but we turn out to have less time for this discussion than was originally thought when we organized this meeting via the phone tree last night and this morning. We have had serious transitional leakages all over the island, with some sympathetic transitionals on 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."

More stirring at this. "Anyway," Johnny said, "I want to thank those of you who were in the middle of other assignments 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, Nita."

Nita flushed fiercely, and hoped it didn't show too much in the pub's dimmish light. She stood up.

"Nita has been reassigned here temporarily courtesy of North American Regional. She has blood affinities with this area, and was recently involved in the New York incursion and the Hudson Canyon intervention in June, and more recently, with the Reconfiguration; Dairine Callahan is her sister."

There was a stir at this. Nita nodded, smiled a little uncertainly at Johnny; he gestured her to sit down. "We're glad to have you," he said. "Bear with us: we do things a little 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."

Huh, Nita thought, sitting down. And, 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.

"Over the past four nights we've had "sideways" leakages in twenty-three out of twenty-six counties," Johnny said, "and how Monaghan, Wexford and Westmeath were missed is a mystery to us, especially since Westmeath contains the Hill of Tara. In the twenty-three counties, about ninety wizards have experienced timeslides, live remembrances of the so-called "mythological" period, "solid" 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 reality, including physical attacks on occasion. Some of these incursions have required timeline patching to keep innocent bystanders from thinking they'd lost their minds - or actually losing them. One of us met Cuchullain hi warp spasm, which is enough to turn anyone's hair: that it happened in the middle of the big shopping centre in Tallaght didn't help, either. The Brown Bull of Cooley was seen crossing the dual carriageway north of Shannon; it wandered down on to 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."

More stirring over this, and some anxious looks. Johnny made quiet-down gestures. “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 politicians say. But how long it can hold matters so stable is a good question. Much of its old virtue is gone, as you all 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,

"these transitional leakages - are we sure that something else isn't causing them? Something European?"

Johnny shook his head. "I'd prefer to blame Local Europe myself, Morgan, but we're out of luck on this one. All indications point back at us."

"Then what are we going to do?"

Johnny looked grim. "We're going to have to recreate Moytura, I think. Unless someone else can think of something better."

Half the room started muttering to the other half. Johnny waited for it to settle down.

"Recreate Moytura with what?" said the young wizard Nita had been talking to, the young guy in the leather jacket.

"Good question," Johnny said. "Two of the Four Treasures are still with us. The Stone is awake again, re-ensouled. The "souls" of the other three Treasures are still in the world, or the Worlds, somewhere. We are going to have to recall them to suitable physical 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.

Relative silence fell for a few moments. "Who does the "going into battle" bit?" said another voice from somewhere against the back wall.

"Lacking one of the Powers that Be, probably Doris and I to lead," Johnny said. "And all of you we can get together in one place."

"Where are you going to get "suitable envelopes", then?" said another voice.

"In most cases, we'll try to use the old ones," Doris said. "They've worked before: with a little coercion, they may work again… The Lia Fail is awake; the Ardagh Chalice, we think we can reawaken."

"Don't you think the museum will miss it?" said the young wizard in the leather jacket.

Doris smiled slightly. "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 Chalice to show it off at a politicians' dinner party, I think we might take the loan of it for a night or so and not feel too guilty afterwards. But it all 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 Alison?"

"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 afterwards. 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 judgement 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 relative quiet. The room settled a little. "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 moustache, "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 went 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 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 realities, will superimpose themselves on this one… inextricably."

“For how long?" said 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 moustache again. “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. Nita noticed that her Coke was long gone, and she was very thirsty.

"I'll get you another," 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 like 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, if possible, even more attractive than he had previously. 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 is, 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 peculiarly 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 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 sip of his orange-and-lemon drink. "I got timeslid," he said.

Nita shrugged slightly. "We bought a timeslide 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? Well, it stopped being Vevay Road. It was just a dirt track with some thatched huts down near the school, 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 live on Long Island," Nita said. "We get high-force gales on the Great South Bay, when the hurricanes come through."

"Well, this storm was driving inland," Ronan said, "between the rain and the spray, there was almost no difference between being in the water and 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 their bones. "They were going to try to set up a colony, weren't they?" she said.

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 little boat and all, in that sea. One of the lifeboats couldn't have stood it, let alone that little 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 became it. Control was barely the word for it. It became as much 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 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, would have done it and lived… maybe. It was a good question whether his head would ever be entirely right again.

But here sat Ronan, still blushing slightly, and said, "It wasn't much of it I had to take, just the sea around Bray Head. They 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 slide 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 Guards. 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?"

"Too right 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 there; 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 the 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 did you call it?"

"A St Clements. 'Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clements. . .' “ He burst out laughing at Nita's uncomprehending look. “Don't know that one, I take it. Not in the 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, and got up, feeling 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 and 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. But "Them"?"

"I mean, it was them who sent me on assignment. Wasn't it?"

Johnny smiled very slightly, 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 turtle-neck. "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 little 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 again. "But why can't this be handled locally? Why do we need blow-ins?"

Nita went red too, with annoyance. She thought of about six different cutting things to say, and kept her mouth shut on them all.

But 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? 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 littlest 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 politicians. Better apologize to her before she turns you into a soggy beermat," Johnny said, patted Nita on the shoulder, and moved on.

“TIME NOW, GENTLEMEN, TIME NOW. TAKE THOSE GLASSES AWAY, CHARLIE!" Jack was shouting from the front of the pub. Nita did her best to keep her face still. She had gone quite hot and tight inside, and was holding on to 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 would 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. . ."

"Of course you didn't," she said. And shut herself 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 stupid little 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 drink 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 tissue."

Nita gasped and choked and took the tissue 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: then remembered where she was, and in rapid succession first shoved the sodden tissue down the neck of his turtleneck, and while Ronan was fumbling for it, knocked his glass sideways with her elbow. "Oops," she said in utter innocence, as it 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 lifted 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 beermat. 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. "Doris is waiting. Ronan, do you need a lift 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 work it out. "Keep your pants dry," she said to him, trying desperately to keep her face straight, and losing it again. Gratefully she followed Mrs Smyth and Aunt Annie out, grinning to herself.

Blow-ins. Huh.

She grinned all the way home… and wasn't quite sure why.

There it lay in the middle of the kitchen table, along with old Lotto tickets and a tea-stained copy of the Bray People, on top of the placemats, next to a plastic biscuit 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 worktop, 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 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, be careful of 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 ordinary 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 great… 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 little.

"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 little 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 and see!"

"Wait a minute!" 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 like a wet firework!" She looked around hurriedly. "Crikey, I 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 muttered three words, and vanished.

The air went whoomfinto where he had been: not the usual explosion. Nita smiled slightly, considering that Kit had been as impressed by Johnny's expertise as she had.

Outside, car doors slammed. "Here, let me get that for you, Doris," Johnny's voice said.

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's voice, 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 down 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 said.

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 Moon?!"

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 great." 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 little, and leaned against the worktop, waiting for the kettle to boil. "It has its downside - you wouldn't believe the 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 light of the Chalice - or rather the light of what was inside it. It was sitting on its pillowcase, the bowl of it half a meter across, 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 Chalice at a moment's notice. The burning came from the blue-white light filling it, a light that was liquid and was still trembling slightly from having been moved. It shone through the metal as if it were glass, and through everything else it touched.

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 some time 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 down to the kitchen.

The three older wizards were sitting around the kitchen table, waiting for the teapot to finish brewing. "I have a message for you from the Queen," she said. Johnny looked at her questioningly, and Nita repeated the message.

He smiled very slightly, and it was a sad look. "She is asking," he said, "whether there is 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 Timeheart, 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 said.

He 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 limiter to the binding on the Cup that'll make it at least safe for the Sword to be here with it. But the Sword will need its own binding."

Doris poured the tea out. "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 and the original Sword awake again. The Cup is not the original, but 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 is 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 millions of years, so has the basic - "selfness" - of matter. You see how the resouled Treasures make everything around them look somewhat shabby and poor. 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 like trying to hold a burning coal in a Kleenex. 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 of 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 it before or not."

“Off the Earth, then," Nita said.

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," and he smoothed his hair back 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 uncontaminated 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 and get Kit," she said. “Fifteen or twenty minutes be long enough?"

"Fine."

She looked at her aunt. She nodded. "The overlay buffer is still in place. Go ahead."

Nita said the transport spell quickly in her 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 much 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 boulder into the crude likeness of a human face, for the bemusement of future lunar photographic surveys. The Sword was laid 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. "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. "You 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 hot and punched him again, much harder, so that in the low gravity he fell sideways 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 I'm going to itch all night."

"Serves you right. Eavesdropper!"

"Still," he said, and looked thoughtful. "He's sharp, your boyfriend Ronan. Why shouldn't they make another one?"

"Because they don't know how. Whaddaya mean, 'my boyfriend'?" 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 and 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 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 not far from the far side of 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; and a hanging sign 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's gone out," Nita said.

Kit shook his head and went slowly to the truck, and 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 believe you didn't feel it the first tune," Kit said.

"Different specialties, different sensitivities," said Nita. "Besides, I never touched it. But look at that."

She nodded at Fragarach. The dusk was falling 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 yourself, she thought. Now what was the wording? She didn't move; just watched Biddy head over towards her. "Elder sister," Nita said, “in the One's name, honour 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 her 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 any more, unless it gets used."

"It knows you," Kit said. "I can feel that. It just about shouts that it knows you." There was 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 on,” 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 after 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 lived somewhere you've never been!"

Biddy looked faintly shocked. Then she leaned back again, and she too laughed a little, and fell silent afterwards, 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, laying 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 believe 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 yourself 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 on to 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 came bringing the Treasures from the Four Cities," Kit said. "Those are just parts of Timeheart, aren't they. And you were one of the ones who had made the Treasures in the first place."

"I was the Smith of Falias," 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 Ildanach," 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."

"Your anvil 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 said, 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, otherwise, 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 well." 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, for ever. 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 forgework, 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 beginning 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 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."

"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 All-Crafted."

"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 and 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 favour of plan-making.

"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 moustache. "Don't tell me you're thinking of pinching some ur-matter from Timeheart, either, because it won't work. That matter is structured differently from the way matter was at the beginning of Time in this universe."

"Timeslide, then," Kit said.

Johnny shook his head. "We would need a wizard with enough power to drive that kind of a slide 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 dinnertime. 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 technicalities, so that we can work on the spelling proper."

"Hmm," Aunt Annie said. She went to the door. “ Tualha! Kitty kitty kitty! Tuna!"

The kitchen immediately began to fill with meowing cats. "Do you really think this will work, Shaun?" Doris said.

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 catflap clattered as Tualha scrambled in through it. She stood there, very small and black, with her small tail pointing straight up in the air, and said, "Mew."

Nita burst out laughing. "Oh, come on, 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. 'Tuna," she said to Nita's aunt. “And then cream, please."

Aunt 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 lifted 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, oh bard, the forging of the Spear Luin."

Tualha began washing behind one ear. "The Spear of Victory itself came from the city Finias; Arias the poet-smith 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 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 likeness was that of a human, but gross and misformed, and one eye squinted away almost to nothing for the hugeness and horribleness 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 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 meatloaf 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 Go van 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 the All-Skilled, 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 all-crafted, is what they nicknamed him. Then they started their plan to drive out 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, licking some cream off her whiskers, "Lugh went off in private for a long time with Go van the Smith; they took counsel and made a plan, and Lugh had the Spear of Victory brought to him. In secret Lugh and Go van laboured 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 meatloaf shape again. "Then, when they were done, Lugh returned to the great rath of the Tuatha 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. He 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 he 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 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: ten years old, small, skinny and bright-eyed, with a shock of red hair, wearing shorts and trainers 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 bemusement. "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 anything, went out the catflap in a hurry.

Nita looked over at Kit and said, "Any problems?"

"Nothing significant," he said. "She'd had her dinner, so we have a few hours."

"You've briefed her?"

"I know what you're trying to do, more or less," Dairine said, reaching out to take a biscuit from the fresh packet 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 meteoric," 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, beginning to understand. "From the nucleus of a star?" Johnny said.

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 centre 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 said to 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 untoward 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 several parts of it that she did understand, the power-control parameters and the description of the matter that would be conducted down the timeslide, 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 it 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. " 'Forged fire into it'," she said. "That spell would certainly produce that result. Shaun?"

Johnny was looking very thoughtful. "If the other end of the slide 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 shortly. If I were you, I'd take the chance you've got. I can do this now, but whether I'll 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 Senior."

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 said.

"I should think so. Let's meet at Matrix around seven. 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. "Worth it to see the expression on your face when I outlined that spell. What a look! I thought you were going to. . ."

"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 Mum and Dad?"

Dairine shrugged. "Mum keeps going on about "her baby". Dad looks depressed all the time. They're fine." Then she chuckled. "They'll never try a stunt like this on you again."

"Oh?"

"Uh huh. I heard them arguing about it the other day. Went on for about an hour, and finally Mum 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.' "

"All right," Nita said softly. "When can I. . ." She was about to say go home, 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, I'm on assignment… I'd have to see it through anyway. "Never mind," she said again. "Did you tell them where you were going?"

"What, and get them all upset again? No way. Mum hasn't worked 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 seven in the evening here?"

"Two in the afternoon."

"That's fine," 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.

"Hey, pretty slick," Kit said.

Nita laughed to herself for a second. "Look," she said, “you'd better get back too. Your parents 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. “I'll 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 goodnights 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. "Hang loose."

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 washing-up liquid.

Nita went and had 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 little wiped out afterwards. 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 up 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, listening. Far off on a hill, a sheep went baa. There was a faint hint of light about the far northeastern horizon, an indication that the sun was already thinking about coming up again, and would do so in a couple of hours. If it's like this now, 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 little path around the edge of the castle towards where the drystone wall ran. The sound of water came chuckling softly up the riverbed beneath it, and the clanging continued, louder.

It was quite dark. She made a small wizard-light to help her go. It sprang out of the air by her, a small silver spark, and lit her way down the rough stone steps that went down towards the water.

The clanging paused, then resumed again. 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 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, like 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 to one side, shining. Its light 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 clang-tink, clang-tink, doubled with the rebound of the hammered ingot on the anvil; a sound like a heartbeat, but metallic. Biddy's shirtsleeves were rolled up, and 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 parents 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 any more at this point," said Johnny. "Also I wouldn't like to put all my eggs in one basket. Some of us won't come back from this intervention, and the newer talents like Dairine may be needed for other defences 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 been hammered out into a flat now. As she watched, Biddy paused and picked up the hot steel in her tongs, shoving it back into the 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?" she said to Johnny.

He sighed and leaned back. "I think we have to make our move tomorrow. May as well be: it's Lughnasád. 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 said. "We can't wait for the poetry of them to be perfect. 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 realized that she had already done this many, many times. This would strengthen the metal and give it a better edge. "When does the "forging in the fierce spirit" bit start?" Nita said.

Johnny laughed. "Oh, the re-ensoulment? As soon as Biddy's done. 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 timeless-ness. 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 any more, 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 not? You must have seen how certain images, personifications, 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 keep resurfacing."

Nita looked at the steel, cooling now on the anvil as Biddy rested for a moment. "How much more do you need to fold it?"

Biddy shook her head. "It's had enough. I've done it about thirty times, which means there are about three hundred thousand layers in there already."

"It's not the hardness of the steel itself that's going to make it useful as a weapon," Johnny said, "but you're right; something useful should be beautiful, 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 right up. The length of metal got hotter and hotter, reaching that buttercup-yellow shade again and getting brighter still. She watched the colour critically. "About seven hundred degrees," Biddy said then. "That's all it needs. Kit, you want to move out of the way."

Kit hopped down and went sideways hurriedly as Biddy plucked the steel out of the fire and came past him. It was radiating such heat that Nita could feel it clear across the room by the door. But Biddy seemed not to mind it. To Nita's surprise, Biddy headed not to the water-trough, but straight for the Chalice.

"Straight in," Johnny 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 water-light in the Cup - and in, and in, and in, far past the point where it should have come out the bottom of the Chalice, if the Chalice had been any ordinary kind of vessel. She held the metal there. A roar and a bubbling went up, and the light of the Chalice 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 of it. 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 Timeheart that's really being attacked. It's true, we have some limited success 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 out 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."

She had been filing at the length of metal while they talked. The bar was now looking much more like a spearblade and less like a long, flat piece of metal. She was tapering it so that it came to a long, narrow point, then gracefully curved in again. The steel shone, glinting the way Fragarach did - as if it lay in sunshine that the rest of them couldn't see.

Biddy kept working on it, 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 said.

"They'll be coming in this afternoon," Johnny said. "Wizards on active assignment… some just along for the ride, but they live 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 said.

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 saw the way Johnny had written Biddy's name in the circle, and the way it had seemed to cut off short. . .

"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 once. 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 planning 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 I would give myself back to the One sooner. . .”

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 you are going to be held to the promise nonetheless. Or you hold to it…

“And now," Nita said, “ you're making that way 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 living 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: and they never shirked 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. "Refuse this making," Nita said, "and you'll be part of the destruction of your first one. 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 messed it up. "Sorry," she said,"sorry, never mind, forget I said anything. . ." She went out of the forge hurriedly, feeling completely hopeless and ineffective. Kit came along after her.

He said nothing to her until they were about halfway up to the house. "Sounding 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 Ronan? 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 finished, 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, any more.

Kit punched her lightly in the arm a couple of times and said nothing.

They went back up to the quiet room 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 time?" Nita said, 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. "Don't know if I like it."

Nita knew what he meant. "Maybe this is more what it's like for grownups," she said. "I guess this is what it'll be like when we're older. If we survive it."

"You think we might not?" said 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 little."

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 don't know."

“Timeheart?"

"I suppose." She shook her head. "I mean, you know it's going to happen some day… 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…"

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…

When she woke up again, it was 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-spiralling 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 pre-dawn 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 all over everything, mist clinging low, running along the ground, hanging in wisps and tatters from bushes, hovering over trees.

The top of the dry wall was just visible. Nita and Kit paused by it and looked down to the forge; there was no-one there. Out in the field, Nita said. That way. . .

They turned and made their way through the dew-wet grass, quietly, towards the shadow that lay beneath a nearby oak tree. Ahead of them they heard voices, 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. Struck down into the centre of the circle, on a long shaft, was the Spear. The shaft was very plain: some pale wood - ashwood, maybe. The blade of the Spear, almost a meter long, had been socketed into it 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 second, Johnny at the third. The fourth was wrapped in shadow - tall, thin, wearing a long, dark cloak. Only above the thrown-back hood did anything show: a faint gleam of silver hair, cropped short. Nita swallowed at the sight of it, 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 it 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.

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. Leaned, ever so slightly, eastward; leaned like 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. Not making it itself. But the sound was 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. The mind heard it - 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. . .

She looked at Kit, and with him put her back up against the tree.

The sense of pressure got stronger. And benevolence: that was the strange part. What was coming definitely meant well… maybe a little 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 on to the tree as she felt that down-pressing force trying to tamper with her, with the cells of her body, her mind. They resisted, in their dumb way, and so did she, thinking, Leave me the way I am! Leave me alone! I know you want. . .I 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 bodied, not chained by entropy and the other forces that worked 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. The metal began to glow, the same cherry-red that Nita had seen in the furnace, getting hotter and realer-looking - more solid and concrete and real than anything in this world should look, as that power pressed down into it.

Expressions were visible now in this light, 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 towards white, almost the colour of the star it had come from. White now, that blinding colour of plasma new-plucked from the core. But not just metal any more. Awake, alive, alert and looking; 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 light of the sun was coming 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, something 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 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. Those lines 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 a 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 over 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 Lughnasád. This evening we move."

She 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 him. It considered Ronan to be just such a lost object, recovered after a long time, that which completes.

She turned away and did her best to keep her thoughts to herself.

All that day, cars came and went at Matrix: people being dropped off, coming to stay, other people heading out to pick up more people from the train station. The house got full. All the wizards that Nita had seen in the Long Hall were there, and many that she had never seen before. The gravel parking lot in front got full, and people started parking in 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 a lot of the conversations… the kind of talk meant to keep people from noticing that they themselves were nervous.

The nerves were not just among the less senior wizards, and there were other worries as well. 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 said to 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 has 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, "It sees the dross in us… and wants to see it burned away, and us made perfect, now. 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 Johhny had said about some weapons being able to speak. She knew what this one wanted.

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 slightly. "Sorry. I usually think of Him as a Her - that's how we saw. . ."

"Her?" Ronan sounded outraged, as if this were 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 like 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. "Doesn't make Them any less effective on the job."

They wandered off into the field a little way, absently. Nita looked at the scorched place on the ground and veered aside from it.

"He's in there, all right," Ronan said. He sounded like a man admitting he had cancer. "I hear this other voice - not my own. . .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 the throat, the tears. "Why me?" he said 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 gave 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 slightly. "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?"

"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 bloody Saint 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 what it says. Power will not live long in the unwilling heart. Goes for the Powers, too, I think. But 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 I 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 lines at last. 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 looked away from her, towards the castle. After a moment he headed off that way.

Nita stood and watched him go. A few moments later, Kit said from behind her, "He's a hard case." Nita nodded. "It's a real pain," she said softly.

"What happens if he's right?"

"Just hope he saves everybody in the meantime,"

Kit said.

They went back to being with the many new arrivals. By three o'clock, there were some three hundred wizards there; by eight there were perhaps another two hundred, from all over. “What are all those things they're carrying?" Kit said to Aunt Annie, during one quiet moment outside.

"Johnny told everybody to come armed," Nita's 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 eggbeater. Another one, a dark-haired sprightly lady that Nita had seen in the Long Hall, had a Viking axe of great beauty and age, and 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-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 her claws in. "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 bemusement. "What would you do in a battle?" he said.

"I would make poems and satires on the enemy," Tualha said,"the way 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 flexed her claws.

'. . .you'd give them cat-scratch fever," Kit said, and laughed. "Remind me to stay on your good side."

Tualha started scrambling into Nita's rucksack again. "Anne, 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 towards the wizard who was calling her.

"Listen," Kit said, "I was supposed to tell you. Johnny wants people to start coming into the big hall," he said, “as many of us as can fit, anyway."

Not everyone 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 bright, and his sharp voice echoed there as he stood in the centre of the floor, his arms folded.

"We're about ready to go," Johnny said, when the assembled wizards got quiet. "I take it you're all as ready as you can be." The crowd shifted slightly. "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 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," and he smiled now,"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 like. 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 take them out. The One is watching. If we go down in this battle, let's do it correctly. Don't get carried away in the excitement of things; remember your Oaths. No destruction that's not necessary." He paused. "One last thing. Most of us will never have 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 dependants, or responsibilities which 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 worldgate 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."

There was a great silence at this. 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. He turned to Nita's aunt. "Let's open the gate. Anne? This was always one of your specialties. You want to do the honors?" He reached over to the table and handed Nita's aunt the Sword Fragarach.

She took it. A breath of wind went through the hall; the hangings whispered and rustled among themselves. Then Aunt Annie laid it over her shoulder and headed up the narrow spiral stairway to the top of the castle.

The wizards in the hall began to empty out into the graveled parking lot at the 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 forces that a wizard could feel but not see. She paused out there 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 trainers and a baggy sweatshirt, lifting up the Sword Fragarach in 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 spelling, not tonight. The barriers between things were worn too thin already. A wind sprang up behind them; light 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 jacket, which was flapping around him like 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; 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 the brightness control down on a TV. Everything went vague and soft. The effect swept towards them rapidly, swallowing the edges of the horizon, and then passed over, roiling like a thundercloud. The wind dropped off as it passed.

Everything had gone subdued, quieted; that warm light of sunset now a dull, livid sort of light. The only bright thing to be seen was Fragarach, which had its own ideas about light 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?" said one of the wizards.

"East, towards the sea, and the dawn. Always towards the East. Don't let yourselves get turned around."

Kit looked around. "There are a lot more trees here than there were before…"

"Yeah." The only thing that was about the same was Matrix, which surprised her. She had thought it would take some other shape here, as Sugarloaf had. But it looked like itself; no change. The cars in the parking lot 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-looking place, but there was now 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. "They're under attack." So will we be, 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.

Off to one side, Nita caught sight of Aunt Annie, carrying Fragarach. Some way ahead of them, too, they saw Doris Smyth 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 and 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 like a pole wrapped in canvas. Except that she knew perfectly well that it wasn't a pole, since she got the clear feeling that from inside the wrappings, something was looking at her hard. I think he'll stop fighting it, Johnny had said.

"Come on," she said to Kit.

They made their way over to Ronan. "You OK?" Nita said.

Ronan looked at her. "What a daft question. Why shouldn't I be OK?"

"The, uh. . ." Nita almost didn't like to say its name in front of it. "Your friend there. Don't you have trouble carrying it? Johnny was having a really hard time."

"No. Should I? Is the wrapping coming undone?"

"Oh no," Nita said. "Never mind… " But she remembered what Johnny had said about burdens, and cardinal virtues. Either Ronan was just not very sensitive… But no. It couldn't be that. She particularly noticed, though, a slightly glazed look in Ronan's eyes, as if he was seeing something else than the rest of them were seeing; an abstracted expression. Could the Spear make it easier for the person it wanted to carry it, by dulling or numbing their own sense of it?

Or was it something else…?

She 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 it 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 winged and big went by, 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 shuddered, and all its leaves fell off it on the spot. The crow laughed harshly. It was one of the grey-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 their eyes out and going straight through their skulls. There was muttering among the crowd as they 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 scratchy, cawing voice; and it was a woman's voice as well, and a nasty one, rich with wicked humour 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! You've been picking up road-kills 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.

"She loves to stir up troubles and wars," he said to Kit. "But she can be good, too. She's one of the Powers that can go either way without warning." Nita shivered a little: she saw more than the recitation of myth in his 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…

"Well she doesn't look very friendly at the moment," Kit muttered. "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 seeing already things that had taken them half an hour to reach in the car. She was just pointing Three Rock Mountain out to Kit when they heard the first shouts of surprise from the wizards at the front; and then the first wave of the Fomori hit them.

They ran out 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 horselike creatures, but fanged like 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 line of the Fomori smashed in among the leading wizards, and battle broke out.

The wizards counterattacked; spells were shouted, 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 fairly quickly under the onslaught of the wizards; many of those not directly attacked turned and ran away 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 disbelief. "That can't be the best they've got."

"I hope you're wrong," she muttered.

There were a few moments of confusion while the wizards sorted themselves out.

"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 over time that this 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 shook her head. 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," he said. "We'll see to them later… we can't wait. Come on."

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 cinema, to help her see where to put her feet. Meanwhile, she might not be armed with anything concrete, but she had the spell ready that she had used on the drows in Bray. It hadn't functioned too well there, but here, to judge by the reactions of the drows to the wizardries used against them in the skirmish just past, it would work just fine. "You got anything ready to hit things with?" Nita said to 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 crowd was heading downhill now, on a path paralleling the way the road would have run in the real world, down on to the little twisty ridge of Kilmolin and then further down into Enniskerry village. As they came down there seemed to be some confusion among the front ranks; they were milling around, and the wizards behind 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, he'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 Nita and Kit stood, they 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 back, 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 down into the press.

Nita looked at Kit and said, "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 their function 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 you were embarrassed afterwards. She did it to Kit once, knocking him right over, and was mortified.

The other problem was the screaming. At the time it didn't bother her particularly; later on she found herself wondering whether she had been watching much too much television. It all seemed remote, like something in the crowd scene from a film. Nita remembered one moment with particular clarity, of seeing a drow come at her, and saying the spell that had not worked in Main Street in Bray, and seeing the spell then work entirely too well as the thing exploded in fragments and splinters of stone that bled hot, and splattered her with ichor that burnt like drops of lava. Her wizard's shield took most of it, but a few drops got through, probably because she was distracted, and burnt right through her clothes to the skin.

She wasn't able to keep track of what Kit was doing; but for those strange few minutes, she didn't really care. She had her hands full. The screaming sounds from all sides got louder, as beasts of the Fomor kind came at wizards to savage them, sometimes missing, sometimes succeeding. Nita killed another drow, and stumbled over something, someone, she saw in shock as she recovered her balance. A young man's body, mangled like something out of a horror film. She staggered away, shaking all over with exertion and fear. One wizard went by her staggering and white-faced with shock and blood loss, one arm so badly torn that it seemed barely to be hanging by a string from the shoulder. Another wizard, a young woman in jeans and a sweatshirt, hurried to help, and carried him away. What happens to him now? Nita thought, in one lull when the fighting seemed to be happening somewhere else, and she had lost sight of Kit. What 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 five percent of the whole group, had been hurt, and were sitting or lying down on the ground while others tended to them. She didn't feel so wonderful herself; she sat down to rest on a log under the eaves of the forest, gasping for air, while Tualha put her head out of the rucksack and looked around. She tried hard not to look at the fifteen or twenty dark shapes on the ground, wizards who were not being tended.

After a little while, Kit found her. His clothes were spattered with burn-holes, apparently from the same kind of hot lava-blood that lived in the drows, and he was limping as he came towards 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 twisted it."

"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."

She nodded; she had always had a knack for the mending and healing spells for either animate or inanimate objects. Spells for the living always required the wizard's own blood, but there was no shortage of that; Nita had bashed herself pretty thoroughly while getting 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 that drow up 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 sheer exertion of the battle. "It'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, you any good at finding people? There's quite a crowd down there."

“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 they found her, and Tualha had been right; she was with Doris Smyth, and it was the blue-green fire of the Cup that gave their presence away. 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 neither 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 another hurt wizard who was being brought over.

Nita looked over at Kit; his expression was wry, and a little sad. He motioned Nita over to one side, where her aunt was looking nearly as pale as Doris. “You OK, Aunt Annie?" Nita said, anxious.

Her aunt nodded. "What about you?"

Nita's aunt was wearing an understandably preoccupied expression. She was looking off down the hillside, towards 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. It gave Nita a bad feeling just looking at it.

"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 at 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.

"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 like that. Too many people got killed." It was then that Nita noticed the tears running down his face, incongruous when taken together with his calm voice. "I think we're going to have to play our aces a little early," Johnny continued.

Nita's aunt hefted Fragarach. Or was it the sword itself that lifted eagerly in her hand? Nita had a hard time telling the difference. "If we use them too early," her aunt said slowly, "we won't have them for later. You've seen the way wizardry is behaving here."

"That's precisely the problem. First of all, these three Treasures were never much good against Balor the last time. And secondly, 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 Fragarach up. "Shaun, we speak so lightly of "re-ensouling" these things. The trouble is, it worked. There's a soul in this, and an intelligence and a will - one much 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. "It's a good question which is going to be the tool and which the user. I don't know how much of me is going to be left afterwards; even now I can feel it pushing, pushing at my mind all the time. I don't know if you get the same sense down 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 around 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 experience, she thought. But he has the power.

Not as much, 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 hear each other thinking that much any more: but evidently this otherworld had more effects than on merely active wizardry.

And the shout went up from down the slope. Nita saw the mass of dark forms come charging down at the wizards, 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 line 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 louder, a chorus of voices in the trees, uncertain at first, then threatening themselves, long howls of rage; and the wind rose and rose, bending 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 were 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, further down 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 wood after them like matchsticks. The Fomori were almost at the bottom of the hill now, into the little dell where Enniskerry village would have stood. There was no bridge over the Glencree River, in this world; they would have to ford it. The wizards and the relentless wind pushed them 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, that Nita recognized; and the sound of hooves, like glass ringing on metal. Nita looked up and saw what few mortals have seen and lived afterward: the Sluagh Ron, the Dark Ride of the Sidhe. In our time the People of the Hills leave their anger at home when they ride - their day is done, and their angers are a matter of the songs their bards sing to while away the endless afternoon. But that afternoon was broken, now, and the legendary 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 fire that flickers around the faery hills on haunted nights. Their horses burnt bright and dark as stormclouds with the sun behind them as they came galloping down the air. There was no more chance of telling how many of the 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 wild hair flying, on a steed like night, and the Fool on one 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 southward side. 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. Wailing the Fomori went, and the press of riders and the darkness borne on the wind hid them from sight.

After what seemed a very long while, the wind died down, leaving the riders standing 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 darnped-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 foraying; and since our world seems like 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 draoiceacht, 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.