Dairine shook her head, causing herself to swing a little. “Naaah,” she said, “but I’d sooner”—she started pumping, so as to swing harder—“fall off the swing — than fall out the window — in the middle of the night!”
Nita went first cold, then hot. She glanced at the windows to see if anyone was looking out. They weren’t. “Did you tell?” she hissed.
“I — don’t tell anybody — anything,” Dairine said, in time with her swinging. This was true enough. When Dairine had needed glasses, when she’d started getting beaten up at school, and when she was exposed to German measles, nobody had heard about it from her.
“Y’like him, huh?” Dairine said.
Nita glared at Dairine, opened her mouth to start shouting, then remembered the open windows.
“Yeah, I like him,” Nita said, and turned red at having to make the admission. The problem was, there was no lying to Dairine. She always found out the truth sooner or later and made your life unbearable for having tried to hide it from her.
“You messing around?” Dairine said.
“Dairiiiiiiiine!” Nita said, quietly, but with murder in it. “No, we are not Kessing around!”
“Okay. I just wondered. You going swimming?”
“No,” Nita said, snapping the strap of her bathing suit very obviously at her sister, “I thought I’d go skiing. Wake up, lamebrain.”
Dairine grinned at Nita upside down. “Kit went west,” she said.
“Thanks,” Nita said, and headed out of the yard. “Tell Mom and Dad I’ll be back for supper.”
“Be careful,” Dairine called after Nita, in a perfect imitation of their mother. Nita made a face.
“And watch out for sharks!” Dairine added at the top of her lungs.
“Oh, great,” Nita said to herself, wondering if her mom or dad had heard She took off at a dead run in case they had.
She found Kit waiting about a mile down the beach, playing fetch with Ponch to tire him out, as he’d told her he was going to. “Otherwise he gets crazy if I go away. This way he’ll just lie down and sack out.” And sure enough, after some initial barking and dancing around Nita when she arrived, Ponch flopped panting on the sand beside them where they sat talking and finally rolled over on one side and began to snore.
They grinned at each other and headed out into the water. It was unnerving at first, to swim straight out into the ocean, past the breakers and the rollers, past the place where the bottom fell away, and to just keep going as if they never intended to come back. Nita had uncomfortable thoughts about undertow and how it might feel to drown. But just when she was at her twitchiest, she saw a long floppy fin tip up out of the water. S’reee was lolling there in the wavewash, her long pale barnacled belly upward.
The night before, when S’reee had been injured and immobile, it had been hard to tell much of anything about her. Now Nita was struck by the size of her — S’reee was at least forty feet from the tips of her flukes to her pointy nose. And last night she had been a wheezing hulk. Now she was all grace, floating and gliding and rolling like some absurd, fat, slim-winged bird — for her long swimming fins looked more like wings than anything else.
“Did you sleep well?” she sang at them, a weird cheerful crescendo like something out of a happy synthesizer. “I slept wonderfully. And I ate well too. I think I may get back most of the weight I lost yesterday.”
Kit looked at the healed place, treading water. “What do you eat?”
“Krill, mostly. The littlest things that live in the water, like little shrimp. But some fish too. The blues are running, and the little ones are good. Of they have been until now…” She sighed, spraying water out her blowhole. “That’s in the story I have to tell you. Come on, we’ll go out to one of the Made Rocks.”
They took hold of her dorsal fin, and she towed them. The “Made Rock” turned out to be an old square fishing platform about three miles south of Tiana Beach: wooden pilings topped by wooden slats covered with tarred canvas and with bland-faced seagulls. Most of the gulls immediately took off and began flying around and screaming about the humans sitting on their spot, despite Nita’s and Kit’s polite apologies. Some of the other gulls were less annoyed, especially after they found out the visitors were wizards. Later on, whenever Nita thought of her first real conversation with S’reee, what she remembered best were the two seagulls who insisted on sitting in her lap the whole time. They were heavy, and not housebroken.
“I guess the best place to start,” S’reee said when Nita and Kit were settled, “is with what you already know, that there’s been trouble for wizards on the land lately. The trouble’s been felt in the sea too. Out here we’ve been having quakes on the sea floor much more often than we should be having them — severe ones. And some other old problems have been getting worse. The dirt they throw into the water from the High and Dry, especially: there’s more of it than ever—“
“ ‘The High and Dry’?”
“The place with all the high things on it.”
“Oh,” Kit said. “New York City. Manhattan, actually.”
“The water close to it is getting so foul, the fish can’t breathe it for many thousands of lengths out. Those that can are mostly sick. And many more of the boats-that-eat-whales have been out here recently. The past few months, there’s been a great slaughter—“
Nita frowned at the thought of other creatures suffering what S’reee had been through. She had heard all the stories about the hungry people in Japan, but at the moment she found herself thinking that there had to be something else to eat.
“Things have not been good,” S’reee said. “I know less about the troubles on land, but the Sea tells us that the land wizards have been troubled of late, that there was some great strife of powers on the High and Dry. We saw the Moon go out one night—“
“So did we,” Kit said. There was fear in his eyes at the memory, and pride in his voice. “We were in Manhattan when it happened.”
“We were part of it,” Nita said. She still didn’t know all of how she felt about what had happened. But she would never forget reading from the book that kept the world as it should be, the Book of Night with Moon, while around her and Kit the buildings of Manhattan wavered like a dream about to break — and beyond a barrier of trees brought to life, and battling statues, the personification of all darkness and fear, the Lone Power, fought to get at them and destroy them.
S’reee looked at them somberly from one eye. “It’s true then what the mhnuu used to tell me, that there are no accidents. You’ve met the Power that created death in the beginning and was cast out for it. All these things— the lost Moon, that night, and the earthquakes, and the fouled water, and the whale-eating ships — they’re all Its doing, one way or another.”
Kit and Nita nodded. “It took a defeat in that battle you two were in,” S’reee said. “It’s angry, and the problems we’ve been having are symptoms of that anger. So we have to bind It, make It less harmful, as the first sea people bound It a long time ago. Then things will be quiet again for a while.”
“Bind It how?” Nita said.
“No, wait a minute,” Kit said. “You said something about the Sea telling you things—“
S’reee looked surprised for a moment. “Oh, I forgot that you do it differently. You work your wizardry with the aid of those things you carry—“
“Our books.”
“Right. The whales who are wizards get their wizardry from the Sea. The water speaks to you when you’re ready, and offers you the Ordeal. Then if you pass it, the Heart of the Sea speaks whenever you need to hear it and tells you what you need to know.”