Interim Errantry 2: On Ordeal

by Diane Duane

  There’s plenty of Irish wizards, Pidge said, sure there are. But you know whose translation’s going to be the best? Yours. So you’d best be getting on with it.

  Tomorrow, Ronan said, leaning back. Maybe the next day.

  Take your time, Pidge said, waving him half a wave, and heading for the door.

  Ronan closed his eyes as he went, but then—catching something odd, a shiver of light—opened them again. Huh, he thought. Fancy that. Wings.

  At first he thought it was just a visual pun. “Pidge,” after all. But the wings, the more he looked at them, didn’t seem to have anything to do with pigeons. He’d seen the like of them before, over Bray Head: the sharp-winged hunters, the falcons—fastest birds anywhere, piercing-eyed, deadly to whatever they hunted.

  Without warning the half-seen image of the sharp wings blurred away into light, and Ronan found it hard to look at them. A few seconds later his visitor was out the door, and Ronan could just barely see the radiance of them against the wall outside in the hallway as the door sighed closed.

  Never mind, Ronan thought, and let himself sink back into the pillow again, closing his eyes in utter satisfaction. This, thought Ireland’s newest wizard, is going to be brilliant.

  ***

  Wizardry kind of took your mind off the more immediate issues in your life, sometimes: that was one of the first things Ronan found out as he entered into his practice. He quickly became—to no surprise whatsoever among those who could read Manual excerpts in the aftermath of his Ordeal—something of a go-to guy where water and its issues were involved, though the Knowledge (as he took to referring to it) let him know fairly quickly that that didn’t have to be his specialty unless he wanted it to be.

  Because he decided that for the time being it was wisest to keep his wizardry under cover, Ronan wound up enrolling in an increasing number of activities at school that gave him excuses to be away from home without actually having to participate in the whole session of whatever-the-activity-was. Some of these activities he actually found he liked, and others (like making the first-string hurley team) he’d liked already. So he was busy a lot of the time, juggling the business of dealing with coastline issues and away games without anyone noticing what was going on.

  And if there were times when his dreams went dark green in their depths and he seemed to be looking up at flickering light far above while something else walked around in his body and looked out of his eyes, Ronan wasn’t overly bothered. Eventually these experiences tapered off as (he began to suspect) curiosity elsewhere was satisfied. It was the sign of a debt being paid off in a normal way—or, at least, normal for wizardry.

  It took Ronan a good while to realize that he was so busy being a wizard, he’d hardly noticed his life turning itself around. But then (one senior wizard told him later) lives are like ocean liners, some ways. “It takes a long time to turn the boat, unless you really want to mess up the heads of everybody inside it...”

  He found that he no longer had time for the argy-bargy-with-other-kids crap he’d previously (and near-unconsciously) courted at school because it was a way to keep from being bored, and so sort of stopped being where he’d get involved with it… so that things almost accidentally started to look brighter. Because they started looking brighter, his classes started to seem more interesting to him, and his general performance in them started to improve—not that he really put those facts together for a good while, as he was too busy.

  His principal, and those of his teachers who looked hard enough to notice, started to get a sense from watching Ronan that something had happened to him: that he was carrying himself, lately, like someone who’d been through events that had left him both more sensitive to what was going on with other people and less sensitive to their attempts to get at him—almost an air of “Are you kidding? I’ve seen worse.” The principal, in particular, nodded to himself after noticing this, and removed Ronan Nolan—at least provisionally—from his interior list of matters requiring his concern.

  Ronan didn’t really notice this. He was too busy realizing, almost as an afterthought, that things were getting better at home… most especially since his Nan was starting to get better.

  It happened so slowly, so incrementally, that Ronan didn’t really connect the dots until a lot later. But after he was in the hospital, he had to do respiratory therapy for a few days after his Ordeal (because it was made plain to him by the Senior who “accidentally” ran across him in the respiratory suite at the hospital, the first day after, that it was generally stupid for new wizards to attempt medical wizardries on themselves)—anyway, his Mam met up at the receptionist’s desk with a lady doctor from the geriatric medicine side, completely by accident, and they got to talking (because they had a common friend in one of his Mam’s church-based charity groups), and they wound up talking about Ronan’s Nan, and the lady doctor started asking his Mam questions about some symptom or other his Nan was showing, or not showing—

  That was all Ronan could make of it later when he tried to get the whole story out of his Mam. And to be fair, she was a bit confused about some of the details herself. But the upshot of it all was that she wound up making some appointments for his Nan over at the hospital, and she went over there in an ambulance (which she found very exciting, they tooted the siren for her a couple of times and made her day) and had a bunch of blood tests done, and then they changed her medication. There was a lot of talk about inhibitors of some kind that Ronan didn’t even slightly understand, but after a couple of weeks his Nan started—just sort of coming back into focus again. It was going to take more time, the new doctor said, for them to maybe do something about her legs—there were waiting lists and all. But now when she looked at you she saw you, all the time, and what that did to Ronan’s head, just by itself, was worth everything.

  It took him quite a while to start putting the various pieces of the puzzle together. For a good while all he had was a general sort of sense that the Universe was trying to make things up to him somehow. His area Senior, Mrs. Smyth, just nodded a bit when he told her about this, and she said, “You wouldn’t be the first to think they saw that kind of thing start happening after their Ordeal, Ronan. Of course the Powers see Themselves as in debt to us, and try to make amends for the pains we’re caused. But there’s always more to it than that. The general principle is, ‘All is done for each.’ And for all that there’s a great many of us in the ‘each’ category, there’s also more than we can comprehend of ‘all’.”

  It wasn’t until a few years later, when he met a not-particularly-Irish-regardless-of-her-name wizard by the name of Nita Callahan, that Ronan was unexpectedly introduced to the concept that he was not entirely alone in his head. It wasn’t until the events of the Third Battle of Moytura were over for some months that he really finished getting his head wrapped around the finer points of the concept. And it was not until the events that surrounded the discovery of the Pullulus, and the strange and terrible fight on the world called Rashah that ushered in a new aeon of the Worlds’ histories, that Ronan began to understand why so many things had needed to be kept secret, not just from him but from the being he had been hosting inside him.

  It took a while for him to recover from those events, as he wound up having to recover from injuries far more serious than anything that had happened to him off Bray Head. The physical part of the recovery was the least of his issues— that was handled, by experts using wizardry, within a matter of hours. But the mind takes longer than the body to recover from the kind of injury he’d suffered, and for a good while Ronan found the absence of what had become over time a familiar, if peculiar companionship, to be as strange and unsettling as its presence had originally been.

  Ronan found it useful sometimes to go over to the cliff walk and listen to the water—which increasingly often had a lot to say to him—and just let his mind wander a bit; he slept better after such a stroll. One evening he went up the cliff walk and stood for a good while up above the shouting sur
f (the tide was coming in and there was a storm brewing out Holyhead way), just breathing the scent of salt and the iodine-and-tarnished-copper smell of seaweed, and then descended back into the orange sodium-lighted night at the edge of Bray. He didn’t have a lot of homework to do that night, so there wasn’t much to do but finish that (math again, increasingly a pleasure) and then watch some TV and talk to some people online, and finally head up the stairs and say good night to his Nan.

  He got undressed and flopped down into his bed, pleasantly tired, with the sea still whispering in his ears, and read until he was tired, and then turned the light off and lay there gazing in an unfocused sort of way at the orangey streetlights through the blinds, until sleep came for him.

  He had no sense of how long it took for the light to change quality from the brassy town light into that more silvery and sourceless radiance that filled all the air as he sat out on the sidewalk wall. For a change, he had company there.

  First of all: will you forgive me?

  For what? You were saving the fecking universe.

  It’s true that much rode on it. Very much. …But still, even though you gave consent… it was an indignity: a wrong done to you. And I ask your pardon. We ask your pardon.

  So now you, you guys I mean, owe me one? That’s what you’re trying to say?

  Yes.

  And I go about calling in that favor… how?

  A shrug. You call for it. You’ll know when you need to. And we won’t be small-minded about the response. Just… choose your time, all right? Be very sure you need it when you do.

  A long pause, starting out amazed and then turning exasperated. Oh God. Do you even hear yourself?

  What?

  You’re already telling me that something big’s gonna come up that I’ll need it for. And not to waste this One that you owe me before I really need it. I cannot believe you guys, you’re so transparent.

  A longish pause at the other end. Maybe I meant to do that.

  Ronan starts laughing, because now it’s just too silly. Oh come on now. Level with me. You lived in my head for all that while, can we not just be straight with each other? Honestly.

  Well. All right. Your modes of perception are… unusual. But they seem to get the job done, by and large.

  That is the most bargain basement version of ‘can’t either confirm or deny’ I’ve ever heard. Never mind… not gonna press you. But as for the rest of it, the way we used to be… that’s it? It’s all over now?

  Well. Can it ever be wholly over? By your courtesy, I was a part of you for a long time. The door swings both ways. Or to put it another way… there’s always going to be some bleed-over. Of traits, of habits…

  Good ones, you think? Ronan said. Your handwriting, seriously, if I can help you out with that it’s no problem, because yours? It was awful. And if you’re going to show that kind of thing to other people, at least you should get a better pen.

  Laughter. No, not showing that to anybody else. Only to you. In this generation, in this world, there won’t be need for another to bear the burden you bore… as long as the weather stays set fair.

  And will it, you think?

  For the short term, I’d say so.

  Ronan laughed down his nose, knowing what ‘the short term’ looked like for his former houseguest. Just as well, then. So… we’re good?

  We’re good.

  Well, thanks, then.

  Thank you. Always.

  …Then nothing more until that older and endless light dissolved into morning; until Ronan woke up and got showered and dressed and had his breakfast, and then went upstairs again to say goodbye to his Nan, who was looking thoughtfully at a TV that wasn’t on.

  “You okay?” Ronan said.

  “Fine,” she said. “He says it’s going to be nice.”

  “Yeah,” Ronan said, “he does.” He kissed her and headed downstairs again, and knew—regardless of minor bumps in the road ahead—that one way or another, that was going to be true.

  From the same author

  Other books by Diane Duane:

  The Young Wizards novels :

  So You Want to Be a Wizard

  Deep Wizardry

  High Wizardry

  A Wizard Abroad

  The Wizard’s Dilemma

  A Wizard Alone

  Wizard’s Holiday

  Wizards at War

  A Wizard of Mars

  Games Wizards Play

  Interstitial works in the YW universe:

  Interim Errantry

  Stand-alone fantasy:

  Raetian Tales: A Wind from the South

  Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses

  Works set in the Middle Kingdoms universe:

  The Door Into Fire

  The Door Into Shadow

  The Door Into Sunset

  Works in the Star Trek TM universe:

  The Wounded Sky

  My Enemy, My Ally

  Spock’s World

  Doctor’s Orders

  Dark Mirror

  Intellivore

  The “Rihannsu” sequence:

  Swordhunt

  Honor Blade

  The Empty Chair

  For more information about DD’s other books

  and short fiction, and her work in comics,

  computer games, TV and film,

  please visit DianeDuane.com

  Version info

  IE:OO ebook edition v2.08 (27 July 2017)

  Minor textual and formatting corrections