So You Want to Be a Wizard, New Millennium Edition Read Online Free PDF

usual. A blaze of undying morning lay over everything, bushes and trees cast light instead of shadow, and she could see the wind. Standing in the ivy under her window, she turned her eyes up to the silver-glowing sky to get used to the brilliance. How about that, she said. The back yard’s here, too. …Next to her, the lesser brilliance that gazed up at that same sky shrugged slightly. Of course, it said. This is Timeheart, after all. Yes, Nita said anxiously as they passed across the yard and out into the bright shadow of the steel and crystal towers, but did I do right? Her companion shrugged again. Go find out, it said, and glanced up again. Nita wasn’t sure she wanted to follow the glance. Once she had looked up and seen— I dreamed you were gone, she said suddenly. The magic stayed, but you went away. She hurt inside, enough to cry, but her companion flickered with laughter. No one ever goes away forever, it said. Especially not here. Nita looked up, then, into the bright morning and the brighter shadows. The day went on and on and would not end, the sky blazed now like molten silver….
    The Sun on her face woke Nita up. Someone, her mother probably, had come in late last night to cover her up and take the dishes away. She turned over slowly, stiff but not in too much pain, and felt the hardness under her pillow. Nita sat up and pulled the book out, felt around for her glasses on the bedside table, and then remembered they weren’t there. The book fell open in her hand at the listing for the wizards in the New York metropolitan area, which Nita had glanced at the afternoon before. Now she squinted down to read the first column of names, and her breath caught…not just because once again she found she didn’t need to squint, but at the sight of what she read there on the page.
     
    CALLAHAN, Juanita L. 
243 E. Clinton Ave. 
Hempstead, NY 11575 
(516) 555-6786 
(novice, pre-rating)
     
    Her mouth fell open. She shut it. I’m going to be a wizard! she thought. 
    Nita got up and got dressed in a hurry.

Preliminary Exercises
     
    She did her chores that morning and got out of the house with the book as fast as she could, heading for one of her secret places in the woods. If weird things start happening, she thought, no one’ll see them there. I can’t believe it, this is so great, I’m going to get that pen back! And then… Even though she had no idea what “then” looked like, Nita couldn’t bring herself to care.
    Behind the high school around the corner from Nita’s house was a large tract of undeveloped woodland, the usual Long Island combination of scrub oak, white pine, and sassafras. Nita detoured around the school, pausing to scramble over a couple of chain-link fences. There was a path on the other side; after a few minutes she turned off it to pick her way carefully through low underbrush and among fallen logs and tree stumps. Then came a solid wall of clumped sassafras and twining wild blackberry bushes. It looked totally impassable, and the blackberries threatened Nita with their thorns, but she turned sideways and pushed through the wall of greenery undaunted.
    She emerged into a glade walled all around with blackberry and gooseberry and pine, sheltered by the overhanging branches of several trees. One, a large crabapple, stood near the edge of the glade, and there was a flattish half-buried boulder at the base of its trunk. Here she could be sure no one was watching.
    Nita sat down on the rock with a sigh, put her back up against the tree, and spent a few moments getting comfortable—then opened the book and started to read.

    *

    She found herself not merely reading, after a while, but studying: cramming the facts into her head with that particular mental stomp she used when she knew she was going to have to learn something by heart. The things the book was telling her now were not vague and abstract, as the initial discussion of theory had been, but straightforward as the repair manual