A Wizard Abroad, New Millennium Edition Read Free Page A

sighed. “Yeah. We don’t fight nearly as much as we used to. In fact, it’s been real quiet, that way. Not sure it’s normal.”

    “Oh, right,” Kit said, and laughed, “the way we’re  normal? Is it just me, or are we starting to sound like our folks?”

    Nita had to laugh too. “You may have something there.”

    But then the amusement went out of her, because all the comfortable familiarity between them was about to be seriously interfered with.. “Kit, this really, really sucks. Who’m I going to have to talk to in Ireland?” She kicked one of the moon rocks in front of her and watched it bounce lazily downslope. “I miss you already and I haven’t even left!”

    “Hey, c’mon,” he said, and nudged her shoulder with his. “You’ll get through it.” And he gave her a slightly evil grin. “Who knows, maybe you’ll meet some guy over there—”

    “Don’t joke,” Nita said, irritable. “I don’t care about meeting ‘some guy over there.’ Don’t even know if they speak the same language.”

    “Your aunt does.”

    “My aunt’s American,” Nita said.

    “Oh, come on, it’s not like they don’t speak English over there,” Kit said. “Otherwise why would all these big companies have factories and stuff all over the country? It can’t all be just Irish-speakers.” He looked at Nita with a concerned expression. “Come on, Neets. Life’s handing you lemons, so set up a lemonade stand. You can see a new place, you can probably meet some of their wizards. They’ll be in the manual directory... Give it a chance!” He picked up a rock too, turning it over in his hands. “Where are you going to be, exactly? Dublin? Or somewhere else?”

    “That’s all there is,” Nita said grimly. “Dublin, and everywhere else. Which is filled with potato fields and cow pastures as far as the eye can see.”

    “Saw that in the manual, did you?” Kit said. Nita rolled her eyes at him. “You haven’t done any research at all , have you.”

    Nita snorted, for Kit could be incredibly pedantic; sometimes it came off as funny, but this was not one of those times. “No. I just really haven’t felt like it, okay? Because I’m seriously pissed off about this whole thing.”

    “I was looking at the Ireland chapter in the History of Wizardry section of the manual a couple of months ago,” Kit said. “There’s a lot of interesting junk going on over there…”

    “Kit, I don’t care what kind of junk is going on over there! I go on over  here. This is where I do my work. I’m half of a team. What use am I without the rest?” Nita kicked another moon rock, watched it bounce away.

    “Oh, I don’t know. You might be good for something. Scrubbing floors...doing the dishes...”

    She turned to glare at him, though at the same time Nita felt guilty about it: he really was trying to cheer her up. “Not just trash talk, but sexist trash talk?” She laughed at him, though the laugh was kind of edgy. “You’re a dead wizard walking.”

    “Had to get your attention somehow. Getting you mad is always good for stopping the self-pity…”

    Which was why it really was going to be a pain in the butt to be away from him for a month and a half. Nita ran her hands through her hair in resigned annoyance. “Look, fine, you’ve made your point. I’ll do some research. But right now, what're we going to do about the trees? We’ve got to get this cleared up before I go. No point in wasting all this work.”

    Kit leaned back. “I think we can get them to do another session tomorrow. The part of the negotiation about the roots was doing pretty well. I guess if we can get Aras to loosen up a little about the seedling acorns, Uriv might concede a couple of points regarding the percentage of sunlight.”

    “Yeah…” Nita said. “And if they don’t see the sense of this pretty quick, we can always threaten to uproot the whole lot of them and plant them about three miles apart. They’ve been