The boy looked at her uncertainly, as if trying to place her. "Hi."
Nita wasn't sure quite where to begin. But the marks on the ground, and the willow wand, seemed to confirm that a power spell was in progress. "Uh," she said, "I, uh, I don't see the oak leaves. Or the string,"
The boy's dark eyes widened. "So that's how you got through!" "Through what?"
"I put a binding spell around the edges of this place," he said. "I've tried this spell once or twice before, but people kept showing up just as I was getting busy, and I couldn't finish."
Nita suddenly recognized him, "You're the one they were calling crazy last week."
The boy's eyes narrowed again. He looked annoyed. "Uh, yeah. A couple of the eighth graders found me last Monday. They were shooting up the woods with BB guns, and there I was working.
And they couldn't figure out what I was doing, so at lunch the next day they said—"
"I know what they said." It had been a badly rhymed song about the kid who played with himself in the woods, because no one else would play with him. She remembered feeling vaguely sorry for the kid, whoever he was; boys could be as bad as girls sometimes.
"1 thought I blew the binding too," he said. "You surprised me."
"Maybe you can't bind another wizard out," Nita said. That was it, she thought. If he's not one—
"Uhh… I guess not." He paused. "I'm Kit," he said then. "Christopher, really, but I hate Christopher."
"Nita," she said. "It's short for Juanita. I hate that too. Listen — the trees are mad at you." Kit stared at her. "The trees?"
"Uh, mostly this one." She looked up into the branches of the shag-larch, which were trembling with more force than the wind could lend them. "See, the trees do — I don't know, it's artwork, sort of, with their fallen leaves — and you started doing your power schematic all over their work, and, uh—"
"Trees?" Kit said, "Rocks I knew about, I talked to a rock last week — or it talked to me, actually — though it wasn't talking, really… " He looked up at the tree. "Well, hey, I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't know. I'll try to put things back the way I found them. But I might as well not have bothered with the spell," he said, looking again at Nita. "It got caught, it's not work-ing. You know anything about this?"
He gestured at the diagram he had drawn on the cleared ground, and Nita went to crouch down by it. The pattern was one she had seen in her book, a basic design of interlocking circles and woven parallelograms. There were symbols drawn inside the angles and outside the curves, some of them letters or words in the Roman alphabet, some of them the graceful characters of the wizardly Speech. "I just got my book yesterday," she said. "I doubt I'll be much help. What were you trying to get? The power part of it I can see." She glanced up and found Kit looking with somber interest at her black eye. "I'm getting tired of being beat up just because I have a Spanish ac-cent," he said. "I was going to attract enough power to me so that the big kids would just leave me alone and not start anything. An 'aura,' the book called it. But the spell got stuck a couple of steps in, and when I checked the book it said that I was missing an clement." He looked questioningly at Nita. "Maybe you're it?"
"Uhh—" She shook her head. "I don't know. I was looking for a spell for something different. Someone beat me up and stole my best pen. It was a space pen, the kind the astronauts have, and it writes on anything, and I always took all my tests with it and I always pass when I use it, and I want it back." She stopped, then added, "And I guess I wouldn't mind if they didn't beat me up any more either."
"We could make a finding spell and tie it into this one," Kit said. "Yeah? Well, we better put these needles back first." "Yeah."
Kit stuck the willow wand in his back pocket as he and Nita worked to push the larch's needles back over the cleared ground. "Where'd you get your book?" Nita said. 'In the city, about a month ago. My mother and father went out antique hunting, there's this one part of Second Avenue where all the little shops are and one place had this box of secondhand books, and I stopped to look at them because I always look at old books — and this one caught my eye. My "and, actually. I was going after a
Tom Swift book underneath it and it Pinched me… "
Nita chuckled. "Mine snagged me in the library," she said. "I don't know... I didn't want Joanne — she's the one who beat me up — I didn't want her to get my pen, but I'm glad she didn't get this" She pulled her copy of the book out of her jacket as Kit straightened up beside her. She looked over at him. "Does it work?" she demanded. "Does it really work?"
Kit stood there for a moment, looking at the replaced needles. "I fixed my dog's nose," he said. "A wasp stung him and I made it go down right away. And I talked to the rock." He looked up at Nita again. "C'mon," he said. "There's a place in the middle where the ground is bare. Let's see what happens."
Together they walked to the center of the hollow, where the pine trees made a circle open to the sky and the ground was bare dirt. Kit pulled out his willow wand and began drawing the diagram again. "This one I know by heart," he said. "I've started it so many times. Well, this time for sure."
He got his book out of his back pocket and consulted it, beginning to write symbols into the diagram. "Would you look and see if there's anything else we need for a finding spell?"
"Sure." Nita found the necessary section in the index of her book and checked it. "Just an image of the thing to be found," she said. "I have to make it while you're spelling. Kit, do you know why this works? Leaves, pieces of string, designs on the ground. It doesn't make sense."
Kit kept drawing. "There's a chapter on advanced theory in there, but I couldn't get through it all the way. The magic is supposed to have something to do with interrupting space—"
"Huh?"
"Listen, that's all I could get out of it. There was this one phrase that kept turning up, 'temporospatial claudication.' I think that's how you say it. It's something like, space isn't really empty, it folds around things — or words— and if you put the right things in the right place and do the right things with them, and say the right things in the Speech, magic happens. Where's the string?"
"This one with all the knots in it?" Nita reached down and picked it up. "Must have fallen out of my pocket. Stand on this end, okay?" He dropped one end of the string into the middle of the diagram, and Nita stepped onto it. Kit walked around her and the diagram with its using the end of the string to trace a circle. Just before he came to the place where he had started, he used the willow wand to make a sort of figure-eight mark—a "wizards' knot," the book had called it—and closed the circle with it. Kit tugged at the string as he stood up, Nita let it go, and Kit coiled it and put it away. "You've got to do this part yourself," Kit said. "I can't write your name for you—each person in a spelling does their own. There's a table in there with all the symbols in it—" Nita scuffed some pages aside and found it, a long list of English letters and numbers, and symbols in the Speech. She got down to look at Kit's name, so that she could see how to write hers, and group by group began to puzzle the symbols out. "Your birthday's August twenty-fifth?" "Uh huh."
Nita looked at the symbol for the year. "They skipped you a couple grades, huh?"
"Yeah. It's rotten," Kit said, sounding entirely too cheerful as he said it. Nita knew that tone of voice—it was the one in which she usually answered loanne back, while trying to hide her own fear of what was sure to happen next. "It wouldn't be so bad if they were my age," Kit went on, looking over Nita's shoulder and speaking absently. "But they keep saying things like 'If you're so smart, 'ow come you talk so funny?' " His imitation of their imitation of his accent was precise and bitter. "They make me sick. Trouble is, they outweigh me." Nita nodded and started to draw her name on the ground, using the substitutions and symbols that appeared in her manual. Some of them were simple and brief; some of them were almost more complex than she believed possible, crazy amalgams of curls and twists and angles like those an insane stenographer might produce. She did her best to reproduce them, and tied all the symbols together, fastening them into a circle with the same wizards' knot that Kit had used on the outer circle and on his own name.