Shelay back against the pillows and let her breath out at the thought of the dream.It s just me , she thought. She hated to describe it any further, for the next line of explanation would have been,Since Mom   And she refused to blame her mother for it; her mom now had nothing further to do with pain. It was Nita s own pain that made her nights so awful. The shrink at school, the counselor at the hospital, both told her the same thing:  Grief takes time. The pain discharges in a lot of different ways, in old repeated patterns, weird symbolic images, mental unrest. Try to stop it, and it just takes longer. Let it take its own time; let it go at its own speed.

Like I have a choice, Nita thought bitterly. She could have used wizardry to combat the sleep disturbances, but the manual had told her plainly that this would be counterproductive. Easing others  pain is one thing; willfully trying to avoid experiencing one s own is another, and has its own price, too high for the intelligent wizard to pay. It was smarter to let the hurt discharge naturally, without interfering.

But these commonsense counsels were still no comfort in the middle of the night, when she was alone in the dark. All Nita could do was wipe her face repeatedly, dry her eyes on the pillow, and hope to fall asleep eventually. Lacking that, she d lie there and wait for dawn.

Nita lay there, almost seeing the eyes hidden in the exaggerated colors and shadows of the painted face, and squeezed her own eyes shut.It s just my pain in

disguise, she thought.Pain expressed as a symbol, one step away from the reality .