Free A Wizard Abroad, New Millennium Edition by Diane Duane Page A

kind of thing was interesting enough, once.  Maybe I’ll go down to Greystones,  she thought. Aunt Annie had told her that the bike was out in the shed behind the riding school, if she wanted to use it and no one else had it.  Or maybe I won’t.  It was strange, having nowhere familiar to go, and no one familiar to go with. Being at loose ends was not a sensation she was very used to: but she didn’t feel quite bold enough at the moment to just go charging off into a strange town.  I wouldn’t mind if Kit was here, though...

    Nita wandered back the way she’d come, back to the field where the jumping equipment lay around. She climbed over the fence and walked out into the field to look at it all; the odd barber-striped poles, the jumps and steps and stiles, some painted with brand names or names of local shops.

    The wind began to rise. From this field, which stood at the top of a gentle rise, you could see the ocean. Nita stood there and gazed at it for a while. The brightness it had worn this morning, under full sunlight, was gone. Now, with the sun behind a cloud, it was just a flat silvery expanse, dull and pewter-colored. Nita smelled smoke again, and idly half-turned to look over her shoulder, toward the farrier’s furnace…

    But it wasn’t there. Neither was anything else that had been around her. The farm was gone.

    The contour of the land was still there—the way it had trended gently downhill past the farm buildings, and then up again toward the N11 dual carriageway and the hills on its far side. But there were no buildings, no houses that she could see. The road was gone. Or not gone: reduced to a rutted dirt track. And the smoke—

    Nita looked around her in great confusion. There was a pillar of black smoke rising up off to one side, blown westward by the rising wind off the sea. Very faintly in this silence she could hear cries, shouts. Something white over there was burning. It was the little white church down the road, St. Patrick’s of Kilquade, with its one bell. She stood there in astonishment, hearing the cries on the wind, and then a terrible metallic note, made faint by the distance: the one bell blowing in the wind, then shattering with heat and the fall of the tower that housed it. A silence followed the noise... then faint laughter, and the sound of glass exploding outward in the force of the fire.

    And a voice spoke, down by her feet. “Yes, they’ve been restless of late, those ghosts,” said Tualha, looking where Nita looked, at the smoke. “I thought I might find you here. It’s as I said, Shonaiula ní Cealodháin. The wind blows, and things get blown along in it. Bards and wizards alike. Why would you be here, otherwise? But better to be the wind than the straw, when the Carrion-Crow is on the wing. It always takes  draiocht  to set such situations to rights.”

    Nita gulped and tried to get hold of herself. This was a wizardry, but not one of a kind she had ever experienced. Worldgating, travel between planets or dimensions, that she knew. But those required extensive and specific spelling. Nothing of the sort had happened here. She had simply turned around...and been here.

    “Where are we?” she said softly. “How’d we get here?”

    “You went cliathánach,” Tualha said. “‘Sideways,’ as I did. True, it’s not usually so easy. But that’s an indication that things are in the wind indeed.”

    “Sideways,” Nita breathed. “Into the past—”

    “Or the future,” Tualha said, “or the never-was. All those are here, inherent in the now. You know that.”

    “Of course I know it,” Nita said. It was part of a wizard’s most basic knowledge that the physical world coexisted with hundreds of thousands of others, both like it and very unlike. No amount of merely physical travel would get you into any of them. But with the right wizardry, you didn’t have to move more than a step. “It shouldn’t be anything like this easy, though,” she