She had seen Nita (then six years old) go away to kindergarten for the first time, and at the end of the day come back crying because she hadn't known the answers to some of the questions the teacher asked her. Nita's crying had upset Dairine more than anything else in her short life. It had instantly become plain to Dairine's three– year-old mind that the world was a dangerous place if you didn't know things, a place that would make you unhappy if it could. Right there she decided that she was not going to be one of the unhappy ones. So she got smart. She started out by working to keep her ears and eyes open, noticing everything; not surprisingly, Dairine's senses became abnor-mally sharp, and stayed that way. She found out how to read by the time she was four . . . just how, she never remembered: but at five she was already working her way through the encyclopedias her parents had bought for Nita. The first time they caught her at it—reading aloud to herself from a Britan-nica article on taxonomy, and sounding out the longer words—her mom and dad were shocked, though for a long time Dairine couldn't understand why. It had never occurred to her that you could use what you knew, use even the knowing itself, to make people feel things . . . perhaps even to make them do things. For fear of her parents being upset, and maybe stopping her, until she was s 'x or so she kept her reading out of their sight as much as she could. The thought of being kept away from books terrified her. Most of what moved Dairine was sheer delight of learning, the great openness of the world that reading offered her, even though she herself wasn't free to explore the world yet. But there was also that obscure certainty, buried under the months and 344 SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL WIZARD years since the decision, that the sure way to make the world work for you was to know everything. Dairine sat home and busied herself with conquer-ing the world.