"Are you ready?"' the dolphin said. They were about fifty yards from the trouble."Ready to what?" Kit asked, and started fumbling for his manual. Nita started to do the same—and then had an idea, and blessed her mother for having watched Jaws on TV so many times. "Kit, forget it! Remember a couple months ago and those guys who tried to beat you up? The freeze spell?" "Yeah. . . .""Do it, do it big. I'll feed you power!" She pounded the dolphin on the side. "Go beach! Tell your buddies to beach too!" "But—""Go do it!" She let go of the dolphin's fin and dropped into the water, swallowing hard as she saw another fin, of the wrong shape entirely, begin to circle in on her and Kit. "Kit, get the water working again!"It took a precious second; and the next one—one of the longer seconds of Nita's life—for her and Kit to clamber up out of the "liquid" water onto the "solid." They made it and grabbed one another for both physical and moral support, as that fin kept coming. "The other spell set?" Nita gasped. "Yeah—now!"The usual immobility of a working spell came down on them both, with something added—a sense of being not one person alone, but part of a one that was somehow bigger than even Nita and Kit together could be. Inside that sudden oneness, she felt the "freeze" spell waiting like a phone number with all but one digit dialed. Kit said the one word in the Speech that set the spell free, the "last digit," then gripped Nita's hand hard. Nita did her part, quickly saying the three most dangerous words in all wizardry—the words that give all of a wizard's power over into another s hands. She felt it going from her, felt Kit shaking as he wound her power, her trust, into the spell. And then she took all her fright, and her anger at theDEEP WIZARDRY 177sharks, and her pity for the poor wailing bulk on the sand, and let Kit have those too.
