Soon Kit and S'reee and the beach were gone. Even the book was gone, though she was reading from it. She was surrounded by the roaring of green Wa ter around her, and the smell of blood and fear, and shadows in the water, Pursuing her. She swam for her life, and kept reading.No wound can be healed, the book said, unless the pain of its inflicting is ull y experienced. There was nothing to do but read, and flee, wailing terror-°n g and grief– song into the water, until the first pain came, the sick, cold180 SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL WIZARDsharpness in her side. Nita knew she was sagging, knew Kit was holding her up from behind. But all that was far away.The second pain came, the fierce mouths ripping and worrying at her till she couldn't go forward any more, only flail and thrash in an agony of help-lessness and revulsion— —and then the third pain hit, and Nita lost control of everything and started to fall down as the white fire blew up in her side. But the words were speaking her now, as they do in the more powerful wizardries. Though in-wardly Nita screamed and cried for release, it did her no good. Her own power was loose, doing what she had told it to, and the wizardry wouldn't let her go until it was done. When it was, finally, it dropped her on her face in the sand, and she felt Kit go down with her, trying to keep her from breaking something. Eventually the world came back. Nita found herself sitting on the sand, feeling wobbly, but not hurting anywhere. She looked up at S'reee's side. New gray skin covered the wound, paler than the rest of the whale, but unbroken. There was still a crater there, but no blood flowed; and many of the smaller shark bites were completely gone, as were the burns from the harpoon's rope where it had gotten tangled around S'reee's flukes. "Wow," Nita said. She lifted her left hand and looked at it. The place where Hotshot had bitten her was just a little oval of pink puncture marks, all healed.
