“I could ask the dedicates at the Air Temple. They keep birds.” Slowly, a bit at a time, she got to her feet and tucked the covered nest into the corner of her elbow.
Looking down at his student, Niko grinned. “Actually, try Rosethorn. She often finds nestlings in her garden. She’s even raised a few.”
Tris stared at him. She was terrified of Rosethorn. The auburn-haired woman had a sharp tongue and a quick temper.
“Do you want to be running to the Air dormitory every hour? Rosethorn will know what to do. I still doubt it will live—”
“He.”
“Tris, no one will be able to tell until it’s ready to mate what sex it is.”
“Then it might as well be a he as an it,” she told him stubbornly. “Its are dead things. Shes and hes are alive.”
“Oh, very well. I haven’t time to argue. If you insist on trying to save it—him—”
“I do.” Tris gulped, thinking of what lay ahead. “I hope Rosethorn will help me.”
“She will. She likes birds much more than she likes people. Let’s go, then. You need to feed and settle him, and I need to go to Pirate’s Point.”
Steadying her new charge with her free hand, Tris followed Niko down the stairs.
3
If Tris had looked across the thousand feet of water that separated the island from the land, she would have seen three people on the rocky slope below Winding Circle’s walls. One of them was Daja, dressed as she had been at breakfast, in her lightest brown cotton breeches and shirt, with a crimson mourning band around her left arm. With her, in the red habit of a Fire dedicate, was her teacher, the smith-mage Frostpine, and his white-clad novice, Kirel.
Frostpine was black like Daja, his skin a few shades darker than hers. What hair he still possessed grew in a lion’s mane around a shiny bald crown; his beard sprouted wildly from his chin. The sleeves of his habit were rolled up and secured with ties, revealing a pair of arms that rippled with wiry muscle and big, strong hands. Kirel was half a head taller, white-skinned and blue-eyed, with long, fair hair. Big-bellied and heavy-armed, he was the kind of young man who looked as if he belonged in armor with a two-handed sword slung across his back. Before they had left the cottage, Daja had made sure Kirel was slathered with ointment to keep him from burning in the sun; a bottle of the stuff was in one of the baskets on the mule that the men had brought with them.
“Take off your shoes, and get on your hands and knees,” Frostpine told her. “The more of you that’s in contact with the ground, the better.”
She thought he was crazy, but she obeyed, placing her sandals to the side. Out here, the sun beat down like a hammer. She was already sweating enough that the drops tickled as they rolled down her cheeks and back.
For a moment she thought she saw a fishing boat at the corner of her eye, off Crescent Island. When she took a quick glance, there was nothing to be seen.
“Remember what we did once, hiding lumps of different metal under cloth?” he asked.
Daja nodded. “You made me guess what was under the cloths, and I knew what metals they were because of my magic.”
The mage’s hair bounced as he nodded. “Do the same thing now. Search under you for any trace of metal. Not raw metal, but metal that’s been handled, and worked.”
Sweat dripped into the dirt from her face. “It’s too hot.”
“Too hot?” he cried, white teeth flashing in a broad grin. “Child, we are black! Black people are made for heat, to thrive in it—just as pallid boys like Kirel are made for snow and frost.”
Kirel halted. He had been walking a hundred yards away, holding a long metal divining rod out in front of him. “I hate snow,” he retorted calmly. “And if you weren’t crazy, Frostpine, you’d hate this weather as much as I do.” Reaching up, he tied back his hair with the braids that hung on either side of his face.
Daja covered her grin with her hand. She loved working with these two. They were as relaxed and cheerful as the men of her own family had been, joking about work as they got it done.
Frostpine shook his head. “Shurri and Hakoi,” he muttered, calling on the goddess and god of fire, “defend me from people who don’t know how to have fun. Let’s give it a try, Daja.”
With a nod, she put her hands palm-down on the raw earth. For some reason trying to smell metal helped her to find it, so she sniffed deeply. Was that a trace of …?
She inhaled again and yelped as the scents of copper, iron, silver, and gold flooded her nose. Eyes watering, she sneezed and kept sneezing. A hand gently pushed her aside; a handkerchief was tucked into her fingers. Three more bursts pushed themselves out of her lungs, making her wonder if it was possible to suffocate while sneezing.
The earth quivered under her, then shifted. Her throat closed with terror: earthquake! Her sneezes halted abruptly as she thrust herself backward. The last shake had been just ten days ago. Were they about to get another?
Small dirt clods rolled downslope. Wiping her eyes, she saw Frostpine standing where she had knelt. His arms were stretched out, his hands parallel to the ground. He shook them, gently, as if he sifted ore through a screen. Below him, the patch of ground shook, gently, in the same motion.
Daja sighed with relief. It wasn’t a fresh quake or tremor, but magic, pulling something out of the ground. The dirt began to take on a strange, meshlike pattern. Kneeling, Frostpine dug his fingers into the earth.
“Will you get that corner?” he asked, pointing to the edge of the patterned dirt. “It’s a wire net.”
Going to the spot he’d indicated, she dug her fingers down about an inch, until they passed through a metal web. “Got it,” she told him.
“When I count to three. One—two—three.”
They dragged the net from the ground: a large piece three feet long and four feet wide. Daja blinked. The net was a shimmer of the metals she’d smelled, twined into fine wires and knotted like cord. At half of the spots where the wire threads met, a tiny mirror was set. The whole piece fell over her fingers as if made of water.
“What on earth is it for?” she demanded.
Kirel walked over to them, holding three or four smaller pieces of net. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“Has either of you wondered why, in the last four hundred years, no pirates have ever attacked Winding Circle?” asked Frostpine.
“I am—I was a Trader.” Daja swallowed hard. She’d almost said “I am a Trader,” but that part of her life was over. “We didn’t think about how kaq could or couldn’t defend themselves.” Sandry would frown at her for using the word kaq. Like many words the Traders used to describe non-Traders, it was not flattering.
“I lived in north Lairan,” added Kirel. “We didn’t know anyone could fight in ships.” He grinned and winked at Daja.
“Time was this net covered the entire bluff, from the harbor wall”—Frostpine pointed right, where the protective wall stretched from Bit to the cliff—”to where the Emel River empties into the sea. There’s more in the earth in front of the walls, too, a mile-wide belt that wraps around all of Winding Circle. Whenever the Dedicate Council thought there might be pirates or land-raiders in the area, they woke the spell-net like this.” The man hummed a weird tune.
Daja and Kirel gasped. The net that Daja and Frostpine held vanished. Only the open sea lay between them—or were they high in the air, over the sea? Daja still felt metal cutting into her fingers, but made no connection between that and the distant view of—
She could not be seeing Dupan Island. Nidra was eight days from here, off the coast of Hatar. Still, she ought to know it. She’d sailed from the island’s harbor just five months ago….
It wasn’t just the view. She could smell land, sea, and normal ship-smells like tar and wet rope. The deck rocked under her feet, and one of her cousins was scrambling up the mast, whistling.
She blinked, and she held a metal net in her hands. Kirel rocked back dizzily. “I was climbing Blacktooth Mountain,” he
whispered.
Daja dropped the net and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. She’d been on Third Ship Kisubo, whose crew was also her family. They were gone, shipwrecked and drowned in a late winter storm not long after leaving Nidra.
“I’m sorry,” Frostpine said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “I can’t control what people see or feel when the spell-net is woken. It’s powerful, though, as you’ve learned. Pirates have spent days in the same place, until they were too weak to avoid capture when the spell was released. And this is the first time I’ve been on the wrong side of the net when the spell is worked.”
Daja shrugged. “It was just the sneezing that made my eyes water,” she lied. “But listen, my friends and I were up and down this bluff all the time, before the quake. We never saw anything like this.”
“You weren’t supposed to,” replied the mage. “It works only when triggered. And it’s worked so long, and so well, that most of the Council had forgotten until I reminded them that it might have been damaged when the bluff dropped into the sea. We’re to find as much of it as we can, and bring it in for repairs.” He sighed. “If most of it’s in pieces like that”—he nodded to Kirel’s small pile—”then we’ll need more help.”
“Have there been omens of pirates?” asked Kirel, worried.
“Who needs omens?” asked Frostpine. “We had an earthquake. Everyone’s defenses are in a mess. What pirate would want to lose an opportunity like this?”
As briskly as any housewife, Frostpine took the large piece of net and brought the ends together, folding it up like a blanket. Daja helped, thinking over what he’d said. Once the net was folded into a neat bundle, the man loaded it into the empty basket on the mule. Kirel added a stack of smaller pieces and went back to combing his part of the ground. Daja went to a clear spot several yards away from where she’d discovered her first piece of the net and knelt.
Something tugged at the corner of her eye. Was that a fishing boat? It had a three-cornered sail, at least. She turned her head to look straight at it.
The sea was empty. There was no boat in sight.
Sandry was just finished with the dishes when Lark returned from the loomhouses. “Was Tris right?” asked the girl.
Lark nodded. “I just can’t understand how Water Temple supervision is so lax that a novice could empty four storerooms, but—Oh, that’s the Water-folk for you. All froth and bubble, and they get diverted by the tiniest stone in their paths.” She shook her head. “Worse, Dedicate Vetiver tells me that her two best weavers suffered broken bones and broken looms in the quake, and the others are still turning out cloth and blankets for the countryside. She’ll put one more weaver to bandages, but they still need us.”
“I’ll do all I can, of course,” Sandry replied, “but you know I can’t weave. You haven’t had the chance to teach me yet.”
“That’s all right,” Lark told her with a sigh. “What we have to do won’t exactly involve weaving. And bless Mila and the Green Man both that you’re so strong, as young as you are. We could never do this otherwise. Come on. Leave Little Bear with Briar.”
She led Sandry across the spiral road between Discipline and the two great loomhouses. Entering one through an open door, they came to a small workshop, apart from those rooms where Sandry could hear the clack of a dozen weavers at work. In this chamber a strange assortment of things had been set up. A few rolls of bandages had been placed on two long tables; more rolls filled a large basket on the floor. Other baskets held giant spools of linen thread. A comfortable chair was placed beside each long table. The shutters were thrown open to catch what breeze the day might send their way. A pair of novices sat on a bench next to the door, to run errands.
Lark sent them to the kitchens at Winding Circle’s hub for tea. Once they were gone, she took Sandry’s hands in hers.
“What I’m going to ask is strange, but you can handle it.” She took a deep breath. “I will teach you how to weave properly, when I can. What we do today is not real weaving. It may look like it, but it’s a cheat. If you rely on magic without learning to do ordinary weaving properly, there will come a day when your great magics won’t hold—magic can’t teach you how to weave right. The novice always has gaps, loose threads, or places that are too tightly packed in her cloth, and all those things weaken the spells you include in the work. Do you understand?”
“Of course I do,” replied Sandry. “I don’t want to take shortcuts. I want to learn to weave well.”
Lark smiled and cupped one of Sandry’s cheeks with her hand. “That’s why you’d be so good at weaving—you care for the work, not just the magic.” She looked around. “Magic, though, is what we need today—and magic worked fast, which isn’t what I want you to learn about magic, either, now that I think of it.” She began to open up a roll of bandage linen, pulling until the narrow cloth was stretched across a third of the length of one table. “You see those spools of linen thread? Bring some here. Put them in a row across the cloth you already have. Take the loose ends and draw them until they hang over the far end of your work surface.”
Sandry obeyed. Watching Lark, who did the same thing at the other table, she arranged spools end to end across the narrow part of the bandage, so the thread followed the length of the cloth and went on past it, all the way to the end of the table and over.
“If you’re trying to strengthen a wall against destruction, or bring a company of people together, this is a way to do it,” explained Lark, coming over to check what she had done. “We weave magic, and get the stone, or the hearts of the people, to follow it. Here we guide the thread to continue the original pattern of the cloth, like a vine growing along a trellis. We grow new cloth from the stump of the old.” She deftly put spools of thread on either side of first the bandage, then the long, bare threads. “These will be your weft. They’ll run through the warp threads to produce a whole cloth.”
Sandry frowned, turning these ideas over in her mind. “Could Briar and Rosethorn manage it? They grow plants on trellises. Flax and cotton both come from plants—I bet they could do this, too, if you end up needing more help.”
Lark started to reply and stopped. Then she grinned. “If things get desperate, that’s exactly what I’ll do.”
“Can’t the other weavers try this?”
Lark shook her head. “Not all of them are mages. Even for the ones who are, this takes a different way of thinking about magic from what they’re used to. Your ideas about magic aren’t set as yet. For you it expresses itself through weaving cloth as easily as through putting a spell on the cloth once it’s made. This kind of thing also takes a very strong mage.”
The novices returned with their tea and a tray of cakes, fruit, and cheese: Dedicate Gorse, in charge of Winding Circle’s kitchens, was sure that anyone who left his domain empty-handed would starve to death in short order. Lark sipped her tea, nodded, then told the novices to sit on their bench and be quiet.
Looking at what seemed like a half-ordered tangle of threads running north and east, Sandry winced. “I don’t know if I can do it.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll place the magical patterns within you. Clear your mind, and let the power follow the pattern steadily. Don’t clutch at it, and don’t let it run unchecked, or you’ll have lumpy cloth. Watch the pattern as you work with it, so you can do it on your own later.”
Sandry looked at her teacher and friend, her blue eyes deeply troubled. “Are you sure I can do it?”
Lark smiled. “It would surprise you, the things I know you can do. Now, clear your mind.”
Sandry took a deep breath, fixing her mind on her lungs and nothing else, holding her breath as she counted to seven. Lark put the girl’s hands flat where the spooled threads overlapped already-woven cloth and covered Sandry’s fingers with her own. When Sandry exhaled to a count of seven, Lark joined her, to breathe and hold and release as she did. The sounds of beating looms and weavers’ chatter faded; the scents of lint, oregano, and Ibrian broom flowers vanished; ev
en their awareness of the intense heat faded. Sandry dropped into that calm with pleasure, knowing that she approached the source of her magic.
Lark was with her, holding what felt like a glowing net. If Sandry looked at it closely, it shifted under her gaze: first it seemed made of needles, then of cool liquid, then of simple thread. Lark pressed it into her hands and her mind, where it sank deep into the girl. Gently Lark nudged her attention toward the materials under their hands. Unwoven threads began to wriggle and crawl, like tiny snakes. The long threads that stretched over the seemingly endless wooden table vanished into already-woven cloth. Peering more closely, Sandry could see new threads crawl along old ones like roses on a trellis. When they reached open, unwoven air, the other spools of thread waited to snag them. Together all of the threads began to dance, weaving in and out.
Now she saw where the feeling of needles and healing liquid came from. Visions of wounds—cuts, gashes, round holes—rose from the pattern to fill her mind and run through her fingers. The cloth she wove must weave flesh, too, closing painful openings with threads of new muscle and skin. Where something had destroyed, her bandage would build new, healthy growth.
You’re all set. Lark’s voice rang in her mind. Make sure they keep to the pattern in the bandage we started with. One hundred threads to the square inch. A simple tabby weave: in-out, in-out, for just the width of the cloth, and back again. It’s all right if you’re slow at first. Just keep control of it like you would if you were riding a frisky horse.