At that point Dairine began to shut their words out. She promised to keep their secret for the time being, and to cover for them the best she could. But inside she was all one great frustrated cry of rage: Why them, why them find not me! Days later, when the cry ebbed, the frustration gave way to blunt, stubborn determination. /'// have it. I will. She had gone into Nita's room, found her wizard's manual, and opened it-The last time she'd held it it had looked like a well– worn kid's book from the library and, when she'd borrowed it, had read like one. Now the excitement, the exultation, flared up in Dairine again; for instead of a story she foundHIGHWIZARDRY 347pages and pages of an Arabic-looking script she couldn't read . . . and near the front, many that she could, in English. She skimmed them, turning pages swiftly. The pages were full of warnings and cautions, phrases about the wizard's responsibility to help slow down the death of the universe, paragraphs about the price each wizard paid for his new power, and about the terrible Ordeal-quest that lay before every novice who took the Wizards' Oath: sections about old strengths that moved among the worlds, not all of them friendly. But these Dairine scorned as she'd scorned Nita's cautions. The parts that spoke of a limitless universe full of life and of wizards to guard it, of "the Billion Homeworlds," "the hundred mil-lion species of humanity," those parts stayed with her, filled her mind with images of strangeness and glory and adventure until she was drowning in her own thought of unnumbered stars. I can do it, she thought. I can take care of myself. I'm not afraid. I'll matter, I'll be something. . . .She flipped through the English section to its end, finding there one page, with a single block of type set small and neat.
