The Wizard's Dilemma, New Millennium Edition Read online

  Young Wizards

  New Millennium Edition

  Book 5:

  The Wizard’s Dilemma

  Diane Duane

  Errantry Press

  A division of

  The Owl Springs Partnership

  County Wicklow

  Republic of Ireland

  Copyright page

  The Wizard's Dilemma

  New Millennium Edition

  Original edition copyright © 2001 by Diane Duane

  Revised edition copyright © 2012 by Diane Duane

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to the following address:

  Donald Maass Literary Agency

  Suite 801, 121 West 27th Street

  New York, NY 10001

  USA

  Publication history

  Harcourt Trade Publishers hardcover, 2001

  Harcourt Trade Publishers / Magic Carpet Books mass-market paperback, 2002

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Trade Publishers ebook edition, 2010

  Errantry Press international ebook edition, 2011

  Errantry Press New Millennium ebook edition, 2013

  Publisher’s note:

  This 2013 Errantry Press New Millennium ebook edition is derived from the text of the 2011 International Edition ebook. It has been extensively revised and augmented to bring it into line with the new timeline established in the New Millennium Edition of So You Want to Be a Wizard and its subsequent volumes.

  Dedication

  For Jason Gamble, the favorite nephew,

  and

  for Sam’s friend’s daughter…

  both members of the next generation

  Rubrics

  The revelation of some uneasy secrets

  would move most anything, even pigs and fishes,

  to lift their heads and speak: and at such times

  it furthers one to cross the great dark water

  and learn the truth its silent shadows hide.

  In the wet, reedy evening, birdsong echoes,

  old calling young, eventually answered;

  while another stands in the dark and calls its fellow,

  hearing for answer only the ancient silence

  in which tears fall, under a moon near-full.

  The lead horse breaks the traces and goes astray

  to cry its clarion challenge harsh at heaven.

  Understandably. But can it understand in time

  the danger that dogs immoderate success?…

  —hexagram 61: “a wind troubles the waters”

  If Time has a heart,

  it is because other hearts stop.

  —Book of Night with Moon 9.v.IX

  Time fix

  Late September, 2009

  1: Friday Afternoon

  “Honey, have you seen your sister?”

  “She’s on Jupiter, Mom.”

  There was no immediate response to this piece of news. Sitting at a dining-room table covered with notebooks, a few schoolbooks, and one book that had less to do with school than the others, Nita Callahan glanced over her shoulder just in time to catch sight of her mother looking at the ceiling with an expression that said, What have I done to deserve this?

  Nita turned her head back to what looked like her homework, so that her mother wouldn’t see her smile. “Well, yeah, not on Jupiter; it’s hard to do that …She’s on Europa.”

  Her mother came around and sat down in the chair opposite Nita at the table, looking faintly concerned. “She’s not trying to create life again or something, is she?”

  “Huh? Oh, no. It was there already. There was just some kind of problem.”

  The look on her mother’s face was difficult to decipher. “What kind?”

  “Not too sure,” Nita said. She’d read the mission statement that had appeared in her copy of the wizard’s manual shortly after Dairine left, but the fine print had made little sense—that probably being why she or some other wizard had not been sent to deal with the trouble, and Dairine had. “It’s kind of hard to understand what single-celled organisms consider a problem.” She made an amused face. “But it looks like Dairine’s the answer to it.”

  “All right.” Her mom leaned back in the chair and stretched. “When’ll she be back?”

  “She didn’t say. But there’s a limit to how much air you can carry with you on one of these jaunts if you’re also going to have energy to spare to actually get anything done,” Nita said. “Probably a couple of hours.”

  “Okay … We don’t have to have a sit-down dinner tonight. Everyone can fend for themselves. Your dad won’t mind; he’s up to his elbows in shrubs right now, anyway.” The buzz of the hedge trimmer could still be heard as Nita’s dad worked his way around the house. “No rush about the food shopping; we can take care of that later. Is Kit coming over?”

  Nita carefully turned the notebook page she’d been working on. “Uh, no. I have to go out and see him in a little while, though …Someone’s meeting us to finish up a project. Probably it’ll take us an hour or two, so don’t wait for me. I’ll heat something up when I get home.”

  “Okay.” Her mother got up and went into the kitchen, where she started opening cupboards and peering into them. Nita looked after her with mild concern when she heard her mom’s tired sigh. For the past month or so, her mom had been alternating between stripping and refinishing all the furniture in the house and leading several different projects for the local PTA—the biggest of them being the effort to get a new playground built near the local primary school. It seemed to Nita that her mother was always either elbow deep in steel wool and stain, or out of the house on errands, so often that she didn’t have a lot of spare time for anything else.

  After a moment Nita heaved a sigh. No point in trying to weasel around it, though, she thought. I’ve got problems of my own.

  Kit…

  But it’s not his fault…

  Is it?

  Nita was still recovering from an overly eventful summer vacation in Ireland, one her parents had organized to give Nita a little time away from Kit, and from wizardry. Of course this hadn’t worked. A wizard’s work can happen anywhere; just changing continents couldn’t have stopped Nita from being involved in it any more than changing planets could have. As for Kit, he’d found ways to be with Nita regardless—which turned out to have been a good thing. Nita had been extremely relieved to get home, certain that everything would then get back to normal.

  Trouble is, someone changed the location of “normal” and didn’t bother sending me a map,Nita thought. For one thing, she’d just started ninth grade, and to her surprise was finding the work harder than she’d expected. She was used to coasting through her subjects without too much strain, so this was an annoyance. Worse yet, Kit wasn’t having any trouble at all, which Nita also found annoying for reasons she couldn’t begin to explain. And the two of them weren’t seeing as much of each other at school as they previously had. Kit, in a new and different accelerated-study track with other kids doing “better than their grade,” was spending a lot of time coaching some of the other kids in his group in history and civics. That was fine with her, but Nita disliked the way some of her classmates, who knew she was best friends with Kit, would go out of their way to remind her, whenever they got a chance, how well Kit was doing.

  Like they’re fooling anybody, she thought. They’re nosing around
to see if he and I are doing something else… and they can’t understand why we’re not.

  Nita frowned. Life had been simpler when she’d merely been getting beaten up every week. In its own way, the endless sniping gossip—the whispering behind hands, the covert tweets and texts and IMs about cliques and boys and clothes and dates—was more annoying than any number of bruises. The pressure to be like everyone else— to do the same stuff and think the same things—just grew. And if you took a stance, the gossip might be driven underground… but never very far.

  Nita sighed. Nowadays she kept running into problems for which wizardry either wasn’t an answer, or else was the wrong one. And even when it was the right answer, it never seemed to be a simple one anymore.

  As in the case of this project, for example. Nita looked down at the three notebook pages full of writing in front of her. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was turning into a disaster. Nita knew that wizards weren’t assigned to projects they had no hope of completing. But she also knew that the Powers That Be weren’t going to come swooping in to save her if she messed up an intervention. She was expected to handle it. That was what wizards were for … since the Powers couldn’t be everywhere Themselves.

  This left Nita staring again at her original problem: how to explain to Kit why the solution he was suggesting to their present wizardly project was not going to work. He’s so wrong about this, she thought. I can’t believe he doesn’t see it. I keep explaining it and explaining it, and he keeps not getting it. She sighed again. I guess I just have to keep trying. This isn’t the kind of thing you can just give up on.

  Her mother plopped down beside Nita again with a pad of Post-it notes and peeled one off, sticking it to the table and starting to jot things down on it. “The sticky stuff on those is getting old,” Nita said, turning to a clean page in her notebook. “It doesn’t stick real well anymore.”

  “I noticed,” her mother said absently, repositioning the note. “Milk, rye bread—”

  “No seeds.”

  “Your dad likes caraway, honey. Humor him.”

  “Can’t you just get me one of the little loaves without the seeds, Mom?”

  Her mother gave her a sidelong look. “Can’t you just… you know…” She attempted to twitch her nose in the manner of a famous TV “witch” of years past, and failed to do anything much except look like a rabbit.

  Nita rolled her eyes. “Probably I could,” she said, “but the trouble is, that bread was made with the seeds, and it thinks they belong there.”

  “Bread thinks? What about?”

  “Uh, well, it— See, when you combine the yeast with the flour, the yeasts—” Nita suddenly realized that if this went on much longer, she was going to wind up explaining some of the weirder facts of life to her mother, and she wasn’t sure that either she or her mother was ready. “Mom, the wizardry would just be a real pain to write. Probably simpler just to take the seeds out with my fingers.”

  Her mother raised her eyebrows, let out a breath, and made a note. “Small loaf of nonseeded rye for daughter whose delicate aesthetic sensibilities are offended by picking a few seeds out of a slice of bread.”

  “Mom, picking them out doesn’t help. The taste is still there!”

  “Scouring pads. Chicken breasts.” Her mom gnawed reflectively on the cap of the pen. “Shampoo, aspirin, soup—”

  “Not the cream-of-chemical kind, Mom!”

  “Half a dozen cans of nonchemical soup for the budding gourmet.” Her mother looked vague for a moment, then glanced over at what Nita was writing. She squinted a little. “Either I really do need reading glasses or you’re doing math at a much higher level than I thought.”

  Nita sighed. “No, Mom, it’s the Speech. It has some expressions in common with calculus, but they’re—”

  “What about your homework?”

  “I finished it at school so I wouldn’t keep getting interrupted in the middle of it, like I am here!”

  “Oh dear,” her mother said, peeling off another note and starting to write on it. “No seedless rye for you.”

  Nita immediately felt embarrassed. “Mom, sorry—”

  “We all have stress, honey, but we don’t have to snap at each other.”

  The back door creaked open, and Nita’s father came in and went to the sink.

  Nita’s mother glanced up. “Harry, I thought you said you were going to oil that thing. It’s driving me nuts.”

  “We’re out of oil,” Nita’s father said as he washed his hands.

  “Oil,” her mother said, and jotted it down on the sticky note. “What else?”

  Her father picked up a dish towel and stood behind her mother’s chair, looking down at the shopping list. “Lint?” he said.

  This time her mother squinted at the notepaper. “That’s ‘list.’”

  “Could have fooled me.”

  Nita’s mom bent closer to the paper. “I see your point. I guess I really should go see the optometrist.”

  “Or maybe you should stop using the computer to write everything,” her dad said, going to hang up the towel. “Your handwriting’s going to pot.”

  “So’s yours, sweetheart.”

  “I know. That’s how I can tell what’s happening to yours.” Her father opened the refrigerator, gazed inside, and said, “Beer.”

  “Oh, now wait a minute. You said—”

  “I lost ten pounds last month. The diet’s working. After a hard day in the shop, can’t I even have a cold beer? Just one?”

  Nita put her head down over her notebook and concentrated on not snickering.

  “We’ll discuss that later. Oh, by the way, new sneakers for you,” her mother said, giving her father a severe look, “before your old ones get up and start running around by themselves, without either of our daughters being involved.”

  “Oh, come on, Betty, they’re not that bad!”

  “You put your head in our closet, take a sniff, and tell me that again. Assuming you make it out of there alive… If you can even tell anymore. I think all those flowers you work with are killing your sense of smell—”

  “You don’t complain about them when I bring home roses.”

  “It counts for more when somebody brings roses home if he’s not also the florist!”

  Nita’s dad laughed and started to sing in off-key imitation of Neil Diamond, “Youuu don’t bring me floooooowerrrs…,” as he headed for the back bedroom.

  Nita’s mom raised her eyebrows. “Harold Edward Callahan,” she said as she turned her attention back to her list making, “you are potentially shortening your lifespan…”

  The only answer was louder singing, in a key that her father favored but few other human beings could have recognized. Nita hid her smile until her mother was sufficiently distracted, and then went back to her own business, making a few more notes on the clean page. After some minutes of not being able to think of anything to add, she finally closed the notebook and pushed it away. She’d done as much with the spell as she could do on paper. The rest of it was going to have to wait to be tested out in the real world.

  She sighed as she picked up her copy of the wizard’s manual and dropped it on top of her notebook. Her mother glanced over at her. “Finished?”

  “In a moment. The manual’s acquiring what I just did.”

  Her mother raised her eyebrows. “Doesn’t it go the other way around? I thought you got the spells out of the book in the first place.”

  “Not all of them. Sometimes you have to build something completely new if there’s no precedent spell to help you along. Then when you test the new spell out and it works okay, the manual picks it up and makes it available for other wizards to use. Tons of what’s in here originally came from other wizards, over a lot of years.” She gave the wizard’s manual a little nudge. “Some wizards don’t do anything much but write spells and construct custom wizardries. Tom, for example.”

  “Really,” Nita’s mother said, looking down at her grocery
list again. “I thought he wrote things for TV.”

  “He does that, too. Even wizards have to pay the bills,” Nita said. She got up and stretched. “Mom, I should get going.”

  Her mother gave her a thoughtful look. “You know what I’m going to say…”

  “‘Be careful.’ It’s okay, Mom. This spell isn’t anything dangerous.”

  “I’ve heard that one before.”

  “No, seriously. It’s just taking out the garbage, this one.”

  Her mother’s expression went suddenly wicked. “While we’re on the subject—”

  “It’s Dairine’s turn today,” Nita said hurriedly, shrugging into the denim jacket she’d left over the chair earlier. “See ya later, Mom…” She kissed her mom, grabbed the manual from on top of her notebook, and headed out the door.

  In the backyard, she paused to look around. Long shadows trailed from various dusty lawn furniture; it was only six-thirty, but the sun was low. The summer had been short for her in some ways—half of it lost to the trip to Ireland and the rush of events that had followed. Now it seemed as if, within barely a finger-snap of summer, the fall was well under way. All around her, with a wizard’s ear Nita could hear the murmur of the birches and maples beginning to relax toward the winter’s long rest, leaning against the earth and waiting with mild expectation for the brief brilliant fireworks of leaf-turn; the long lazy conversation of foliage moving in wind beginning to slow as the foliage started getting ready to let go and the hectic immediacy of summer wound down.

  She leaned against the trunk of the rowan tree in the middle of the backyard and looked up through the down-drooping branches with their stalks of slender oval leaves, the green of them slowly browning now, the dulled color only pointing up the many heavy clusters of glowing BB-sized fruit that glinted scarlet from every branch in the late, brassy light. “Nice berries this year, Liused,” Nita said.