Duane, Diane - Young Wizards 07 - Wizard's Holiday by Duane Diane

Author:Duane, Diane
Language: eng
Format: epub

* * * *

Taking in the Sights

“Dad?” Nita said.

“I can hear you fine, honey,” Nita’s dad said. “Whatever Tom did to the phone, you don’t have to shout. How are you?”

“I’m fine! Everything’s fine.”

Nita was sitting on the beach with her manual in her lap, while a hundred yards away Kit and Ponch were running along the pink sand, racing. Ponch was winning—this not even the new venue could change. The sun was up, and warm already; the wind was just strong enough to take the sun’s heat away, but not so strong as to chill; the waves slipped up and down the beach, whispering.

“What’s it like?” said her dad’s voice from the manual.

Nita laughed. “Like the Hamptons,” she said. “Except they don’t have money here.”

There was a pause at her dad’s end. “That takes a stretch of the imagination,”

he said, sounding somewhat dry, for the resorts and wealthy residential communities of the Hamptons, out at the end of Long Island, were (in the Callahan household, at least) often described by the head of the household as a place where people had

“more money than sense.” “No money, huh? What do they use instead?”

“It’s a barter economy, but with exceptions. For things that are hard to get locally, they have other ways of dealing with getting stuff around. But when the dust settles, everybody here seems to have what they need. And that’s good, because the people here are really, really nice.”

“How’s the family you’re with?”

“They’re the best,” Nita said. “They remind me of us.”

Her dad chuckled. “No higher praise, I guess...A barter economy. Are they farmers, then?”

“No. Well, they have sheep,” Nita said, looking back toward the grassland. “If sheep fly...” From where she sat, she could see yet another of Kuwilin’s small flocks of flying sheep landing, while the first flock he’d been feeding took off. A scatter of feed, a flurry of golden wings, and off they went, and another little flock wheeled down out of that blue, blue sky to take their place. It was like feeding pigeons, except that the effect would have been unfortunate if the sheep had tried to land on you the same way pigeons did.

Nita laughed again as exactly that thing started to happen to Quelt’s tapi, who waved the sheep off with a weary familiarity. “But you haven’t been just sitting there looking at sheep, I hope.”

“Oh, no,” Nita said. “We’ve been doing tourist things. The stuff that nobody here does unless they have visitors.”

Her father laughed. “They have that there, too?”

“Oh, yeah. We went to the Cities to do an errand for Quelt’s mom.”

“Which city?”

“The Cities. It’s just what they call it...Don’t ask me why. As if they were interchangeable.”

“They are,” Kit said, running past. “Modular. They put them where they need them.” Ponch ran past him with a stick of ironwood in his mouth; Kit threw Nita a resigned glance and trotted off after him.

“But they’re really pretty,” Nita said. “It’s as if they did New York, but in pink and peach and cream colors.

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