The Rirhait was doing something Dairine herself had done often enough: shifting a little from foot to foot to check the gravity, to see if he needed to adjust his wizardry to compensate. In the Rirhait’s case, this produced an effect something like a spectator wave. All the while he looked around with his own version of an expression Dairine had worn, herself, often enough—that first glance in which you try to get your bearings in an alien environment as quickly as possible, getting the scale of things, while trying not to look as if you’re completely freaked out. How she would tell if a Rirhait was freaked out, Dairine wasn’t sure. For the moment, the best approach was to keep it from getting that way to start with.
“Dai stihó!” she said right away in the Speech, to give her guest something to fix on. “Are you Sker’ret?”
“That’s me,” the Rirhait said after a moment. “And you’d be Darren?”
“Dairine,” she said. “Maybe you want to move over—” But the Rirhait was already pouring himself out of the circle and over toward Dairine. She looked curiously down at him as he came: He reminded her strangely of a favorite pull toy she’d had when she was about four.
“Were you waiting long?” he said.
“No,” Dairine said. “How was the trip at your end?”
“The usual,” Sker’ret said. “You hurry to get to the gating facility and then you sit around and wait forever.”
Dairine had to laugh. Sker’ret looked up at her with all its eyes, in shock.
“Sorry?” he said.
“No,” she said, “it’s all right. I was laughing. That’s a happy sound.”
“Thanks, I was wondering,” Sker’ret said. “I thought you had something in your throat.”
The air in front of them trembled. There was another, even more demure explosion of air and sound, more a pop! than anything else. And there stood a tree.
Except he wasn’t a tree. “Dai stihó!” Dairine said, and was delighted to see the branches of the tree shiver in unison and look at her with all their berries.
“Dai!” the tree said.
“I hope you’ll forgive me,” Dairine said, “but your name’s kind of a mouthful for me. Will Filif be all right?”
“We use that at home,” Filif said. His voice was absolutely the rustling of wind in leaves. Dairine wondered how he did it, because all she could see were needles, which wouldn’t rustle terribly well.
The tree part of Filif seemed fine; Dairine cast a glance down at his roots and saw that they were shrouded in a kind of portable haze. She recognized this instantly as a decency field, used by some wizards to conceal a part of themselves that they didn’t feel it appropriate to show to other people, either of their own species or another one.
“How was your trip?” Dairine said. “Is there anything you need right now?”
“No, I’m fine,” Filif said. There was a diffident sound to his voice that made Dairine wonder whether this was strictly the truth—but he was using the Speech, so it couldn’t be a lie.
“Good,” she said. “We’ll go in, in a little while, and get you guys settled in. You have your pup tents all setup?”
“Oh, yes,” the two said in unison.
Dairine looked around her. “Speaking of which, where’s our third guy?”
Filif and Sker’ret looked at each other. “We weren’t early, were we?” Sker’ret said.
“No,” Dairine said. “Roshaun of the multiple names seems to be—”
BANG!
The wind blew Dairine’s hair back, and a tall figure imploded into the space in the middle of the circle of leaves. He was nearly as tall as Dairine’s dad and was dressed in what even Dairine, the consummate T-shirt and baggy pants fan, was willing to describe as “splendid robes.” He was wearing an undertunic and hose and boots in some golden fabric or substance. There was an overtunic or long jacket in scarlet, all embroidered over in gold; and he was wearing gauntlets of gold, and a strange sort of scarf of gold over the outer jacket. And there was a fillet of gold bound around his head, but it was a more reddish gold, which wonderfully set off all that hair, which, it turned out, went right down his back and was long enough for him to sit on. There he stood, looking around imperiously at all of them, his thumbs hooked in the broad golden belt under the overtunic.
Dairine’s first thought, which she couldn’t control, was, Noisy arrival. Sloppy technique.
Her second thought was, Maybe it’s something cultural, dressing up so fancy. But the back of her mind answered instantly and without reason: Yeah, sure. He’s showing off. And why?
The new arrival looked around.
“And where is the welcoming committee?” he said.
Dairine didn’t know quite what she’d been expecting from the final arrival, but this wasn’t it. “Dai stihó,” she said after a moment.
That tall, blond figure turned his attention to her, and Dairine abruptly felt so
short, so insignificant, so very minor. However, the feeling immediately kicked her into a most profound state of annoyance. “Yes,” he said after a moment, “may you also go well. And you would be?”
“You’re the newcomer,” Dairine said, “and I am your host. It’s for you to introduce yourself.” Where this made-up rule had come from, she had no idea, but she felt disinclined to make things easy for this guy.
He stood there and continued to look down at Dairine, way down, as if from some inaccessible mountain peak. “I,” he said, “am Roshaun ke Nelaid am Seriv am Teliuyve am Meseph am Veliz am Teriaunst am det Wellakhit.” And he looked at her as if he expected her to know what it meant.
“Pleased to meet you, cousin,” Dairine said, feeling that it was just barely true and desperately hoping that at some point it would be more so. But at the moment she was having all kinds of doubts. “I’m Dairine Callahan. Welcome to Earth.”
Roshaun looked around at the scrubby wooded surroundings with those green, green eyes. “This is perhaps a public park?” he said.
“No,” Dairine said. “It’s part of the property that belongs to our house. We use this area for coming and going on business, because our planet is sevarfrith.”
The Rirhait and the Demisiv each nodded or twitched briefly. Sevarfrith was a syllabic acronym for several words in the Speech that, taken together, meant “a world where wizardry must be conducted under cover.” There were numerous longer forms of the acronym that indicated the general or specific reason for the restriction, but the simple version often was used as shorthand. Dairine knew that this information would have been in the visitors’ own orientation packs, but it seemed like a good time to mention it.
“That’s a shame for you, isn’t it?” the Rirhait said. “I’m sorry about your trouble.”
“It’s okay,” Dairine said. “It’s more of a logistical problem than anything else. You get used to it after a while. The best thing to do is treat it as if it’s a game. For the first day or so, while you guys are getting used to being here, I’ve taken the liberty of setting up a wizardry around the perimeter so that the people who live in the immediate vicinity won’t see anything, in case somebody’s visual overlay slips. If you look around, you can see it—I’ve left the perimeter visually active for anyone who uses the Speech.” She gestured around her, indicating the paired lines of blue green light that ran around the backyard from the left rear corner of the house, down the property line and above the chain-link fence, right around the back of the property, where they were standing, and up the right side toward the garage. “Inside that, you’re safe in your own shape. At night, though, there may be some leakage of light from inside the space, and we can’t be certain that some of the neighbors might not be able to see you; so it’s better to be careful.”