June smiled but her gaze was troubled.
Danny was in a daze as he made his way down the stairs and out into the courtyard. He wasn’t sure what, but something had changed up there on that rooftop and somehow he knew the world would never be the same.
He approached the Bull Pen cautiously. It didn’t look any different tonight than it had on any other night. The whitewashed sides shone silver in the moonlight and warm yellow light leaked out of the cracks around the door. But as he got closer he felt a tingling on his skin and the hairs on his arms and legs rose.
The feeling got stronger as he got closer. When he reached for the door there was a resistance like moving his hand through water. The latch was hard to work and the door was very hard to open. When he stepped through something pressed against his face and he couldn’t breathe. Then he was through the door and everything was normal again.
“Where the hell have you been?” Jerry demanded as Danny came in.
“Just out.”
He looked at him suspiciously.
“You were out screwing around, weren’t you?”
Danny just grinned.
“Dammit, we’re here to do a job, not get laid by the locals. If you can’t keep your mind on what you’re doing, then you don’t belong here. Is that clear?”
Around them the other programmers were bent to their work, studiously ignoring Jerry and Danny.
“Yes, sir.” Danny said meekly.
“I don’t care what you do between sunrise and sunset or who you do it with. Men, women or underage goats, it doesn’t matter. But between sunset and sunrise your ass belongs to me and you’ll have it in here working. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then get the hell over there and get it to work.”
Danny’s ears burned, but somehow the dressing down didn’t sting as much. For perhaps the first time in his life, Danny knew that somebody really cared what happened to him.
As Danny took his seat Jerry shook his head and muttered under his breath before turning back to the routine he had been analyzing with Cindy Naismith.
“Are you sure that little punk’s nineteen?” she asked. “He acts more like thirteen.”
“He has a California driver’s license that says he’s nineteen.” He looked at her. “He been bothering you?”
“No, nothing like that. At least not me any more than everyone else. But what the hell is he doing here?”
“Moira wanted him. Not my idea. Wouldn’t be the first time the customer stuck a dud on a project team.”
“Yeah, but usually they’re the project manager’s girlfriend or something.”
“His work’s not bad.”
“No,” Cindy admitted. “He likes to hack an easy out and he hates doing grunt work, but he’s bright and he seems to take to this kind of programming.”
“Let’s just hope his love life lets him get some work done,” Jerry grumbled. “We’ve just doubled our number of programmer hours and we still can’t afford to waste any of them.”
The sun was just breaking over the distant mountains when the spell quit and the world jerked back to normal for the team. Most of them took it as a signal to stretch, yawn and head for bed. Mike and Larry stayed at their desks, deep in their work even after so many hours. Judith left with the rest, but she wasn’t ready for bed yet. Every day at dawn dragon riders left the Capital on patrol. This was the perfect opportunity to see the dragons.
The aeries were in the cliff beneath the castle. Judith was nearly trembling with excitement as she made her way down the long flights of stairs cut into the rock. All her life she had dreamed about dragons, unicorns and other magical creatures and now she could see them close up. Maybe she could even get one of the dragon riders to take her for a ride. A handsome dragon rider.
In her mind’s eye she was already soaring over the castle on dragon back when she reached the portal into the aerie. The two guardsmen on duty recognized her as one of the foreign wizards, which meant she was of the Mighty, after a fashion, and thus allowed to go nearly anywhere. It never occurred to them that she did not know what she was doing when she nodded to them and strode out onto the floor of the aerie.