Sandry's Book

  Briefly they looked as they always did, scudding across the sky like fat guild leaders who were late for important appointments. Then he saw a wisp put out a small bloom of gray, then another, and a third. Before it left the range of his vision, the wisp had blown itself into a medium-sized cloud and was working on turning itself into a tall thunderhead.

  “How do they do that?” He picked a new cloud. “It’s like they create themselves.”

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “Maybe Niko will tell me.”

  “Why are they gray?”

  “They have rain in them. We’ll have a storm in another hour or so.”

  “How do you know?”

  There was no answer.

  “I don’t see how a girl can know about storms.”

  She didn’t reply, but neither did she get up and leave. He was startled to realize that he didn’t want her to. She actually wasn’t much trouble—for a merchant girl.

  From its room atop the Hub, the clock sounded a deep note. The midday rest was over.

  “Boy!” an imperious voice called from below.

  There was a rustle of thatch. Tris crawled over the peak in the roof, bound for the trapdoor. “I was just getting comfortable,” she complained.

  “Then why leave?” he asked sensibly.

  “Because I’m supposed to see Niko, remember?”

  “Boy, I know you’re up there!” Briar peered over the roof’s edge. Rosethorn stood in the path, where she could see him. Raising a hand, she beckoned with an evil grin. “Come down. You’re going to help me prepare for this storm!”

  He blinked. But that was work—

  Maybe she’ll tell me the names of things, he thought.

  He paused, not wanting to seem too eager, and thought of a grievance. “Briar!” he yelled at her.

  “What?” called Rosethorn.

  “My name is Briar! Not ‘boy,’ Briar!”

  “I know perfectly well what your name is, boy. Come on—I want to finish before it starts to rain!”

  “It’s Briar,” he muttered, and followed Tris down into the house.

  7

  For a moment, Sandry thought she would cry. The wool that she started to card after lunch was now a snarled mess. The process was simple. She’d done it as recently as a year ago: lay a clump of fleece on each card, then drag the teeth on one card through the wool on the other. The metal teeth groomed the clumps into fine, even strips of wool, to be coiled into rolags. Instead, her fiber escaped the cards, or yanked free of the teeth, or decided to cling to her. Had it still been attached to sheep, she would have suspected them of frisking. Worse, the air was close, hot, and sticky—everywhere that wool touched her skin, she itched.

  She’d thought that Lark couldn’t hear her over the clack of the loom, but the moment she sniffed, the woman stopped her work. “What’s the matter?”

  “It won’t come right,” Sandry replied, trying not to whine. “It’s worse than ever, and it clings to everything! Why is it being so bad today?”

  “Bring it here.”

  The girl obeyed, offering the messy cards to Lark.

  “Mila preserve us, you look like you’ve grown a fur coat.”

  “When I try to pick it off, it just goes somewhere else.” Sandry frowned at the ivory-colored tufts on her dress and hands.

  “It just likes you too much. You have to teach it to mind you.” Lark pinched her fingers together and pulled them back. Instantly the wool on Sandry stood on end, like dogs begging for a treat. An eerie prickling told the girl that the fibers on her cheeks were doing the same thing. “What I expected,” the woman said. “Take a deep breath—”

  Eyes closed, Sandry obeyed. Automatically she breathed as Niko had taught them that morning, counting to herself. Lark said quietly, “Pinch your fingers together over your dress, without touching it, then pull them away from you. Pinch with your mind as well.”

  With my mind? the girl thought, startled.

  But surely that was the same as imagining herself as a tight thread. She made her mind into grasping fingers and pinched with them, then opened an eye to see what had happened. A third of the wool fibers stood, wavering. The rest lay flat on her dress, crawling away from the spot that Lark had called them to.

  “Really want it, Sandry. There should be nothing you want more just now.”

  Sandry closed her eyes and wanted her mind to work with her fingers, to pull the fibers away from her dress. She peeked again. Now all of the wool had gone flat.

  Lark chuckled. “Maybe you should order it, like most nobles order servants.”

  Just thinking of that made the girl smile grimly. She’d definitely seen enough of that kind of noble before! She snapped out her hand, as if she were Liesa fa Nadlen banishing Daja from the dining hall.

  “We need to work on your control,” she heard Lark say.

  Sandry’s eyes popped open. The bits of wool that had clung to her so hard had now jumped to Lark and were huddled together on the dedicate’s breast. Lark was grinning.

  “I’m sorry!” cried Sandry. “I didn’t—well—”

  Lark patted her hand. “Don’t frighten it. Wool hairs want to come together.” She tried to pull the fibers off her clothes, without success. They were trying to weave themselves into her habit. “I’ll need your help, since you are the one who did this,” she told Sandry. “But gently.”

  The girl took up the pattern of breaths, until she was calm. There had been something, when she had dismissed the wool, a feeling that was odd and yet familiar. She found it inside and used it to gently call the fibers.

  Softness tickled her palm: the wool now formed a small pile in her hand.

  “There you go,” Lark said approvingly as thunder rolled outside. “Now. Let me show you a charm that will keep it out of your face and off your dress.”

  Niko came for Tris when the storm was just beginning to make itself heard. She was pacing the main room nervously, wanting badly to go outside before the winds swept over the walls. When she saw Niko opening the small gate, she ran out to him.

  “Put this on,” he ordered, tossing her a long, oiled cape like the one he wore. Once it was settled on her shoulders, he gave her a broad-brimmed hat to tie under her chin. The winds gusted through Winding Circle, tearing at curtains and clothes. In the gardens, dedicates and novices hurried to finish their work and get inside as the man and the girl walked briskly to the south gate.

  Once outside Winding Circle, they picked their way down the cliff path and entered the cave. Small drops were already lashing the air. On the rocks below, the sea boomed, the waves foaming under the whip of the wind.

  As she pushed back her hat, Tris squinted into the gloom. Lightning flared in long strips out to sea, throwing the world into relief. Curtains of rain parted. People had lit the beacons in the harbor lighthouses; they shone a warning to storm-caught ships and boats to steer away from the rocky islands just off Summersea.

  “Watch the lightning. Concentrate on it. Think about it,” Niko yelled over a crash of thunder.

  “What is it? Lightning, I mean?” Tris yelled back.

  “Power builds in the sky and ground in a storm. The power in the ground strives to meet that which is in the clouds. When they connect, lightning shows the path the power takes. Never forget, all power must go somewhere once there’s enough of it.” Thunder growled around them, as if in agreement. “Thunder is air along the path. It heats so fast that the air booms like a drum.” The roar of thunder faded. More quietly he said, “Now that you know what lightning is, concentrate! Try to feel where the next bolt will strike—feel for power building up.”

  “What if it decides to come after me?”

  “It won’t. Magic only attracts lightning when it’s meant to, thank the gods, or those with magical power wouldn’t live to be mages. Where will the next bolt strike?”

  She watched the lightning pick its way across the sea, approaching the harbor islands. “I can’t tell. It just goes any old wh
ere.”

  “Try!” He almost had to scream to be heard over a thunder-blast. “It’s connected to you—feel for it!” His words rang clearly in the pause between cracks of thunder.

  “Ouch,” she grumbled, rubbing the ear he’d been yelling into.

  “Stop ducking the lesson. Tris, there’s only so much that I, or anyone, can teach you. To control the power that makes your life so hard, you must be able to grasp it at any time, in any place. Let nothing stop you from bearing down, understand? Or do you want to kill someone, one day, and only find out afterward that you didn’t mean to?”

  She stared up at him, terrified. Lit by flickers of lightning, his eyes pits of shadow in his craggy face, he looked eerie. It was as if he knew all the dark places in her heart.

  Lightning blazed. A single broad strip lanced into a tree on the peak of the rock that was Bit Island, and a hundred burning fragments flew through the air. Tris’s gleeful shout was drowned in a thunder-crash that shivered her bones.

  “A good thing it only struck a tree, and that tree alone on a rocky peak,” Niko said when they could hear again. “Lightning creates hundreds of wildfires every year, burning acres of forest and croplands. It kills people and animals, too. It’s a dangerous toy—keep that in mind.”

  “If it’s so dangerous, why not push the storms out to sea—or better yet, stop them cold? I mean, I’d miss them, but wouldn’t that be easier for most people?”

  “Oh, no!” he said instantly. “Easy perhaps for the people, but it would mean death or madness for a mage.” He waited for a growl of thunder to end before he went on. “Nature has her own power. Tempting as it is, mages should never tinker with Nature, not in a storm, or in an earthquake, or with the tides. She may allow it for a time, but eventually she always loses her temper. The results can be—devastating. Trust me.” He sighed. “Even the greatest mages have their limit—and Nature is it.”

  “But—aboard ship—those knots. The captain said mimanders tie the wind in those knots. Isn’t that meddling with Nature?”

  Niko smiled thinly. “Mimanders who specialize in winds spend their lives learning nothing else—those who survive apprenticeship, anyway. Just one in ten lives to be a journeyman, you know. As masters they coax the winds into thinking that the curves of the knot are the open lanes of air where they usually travel. Are you prepared to spend ten years or more learning to be a simple puff of air? Learning only that, and nothing else, and that only if you live?”

  Tris stared out at the white-capped waves. The storm was moving on, the roll of thunder growing more distant. There has to be a quicker way, Tris thought. If I was a mage, I’d get Nature to do my bidding. They’d call me “Storm-Killer,” and I would be famous all over the world.

  Niko tugged her ear gently. “Let’s try the exercise again. Breathe in….”

  When Daja entered Frostpine’s forge, the fire was banked. Only Kirel was there, up to his elbows in clay as he shaped molds.

  She hesitated. “I—was looking for Dedicate Frostpine?”

  “Just walk around to the other side of this building. He’s a goldsmith today.”

  Curious, Daja asked, “Shouldn’t you be with him?”

  Kirel grinned. “I’m only his apprentice for iron—he doesn’t have an apprentice for his work in gold. Though he did mention he thought someone might come by to help him.”

  Daja thanked him and circled the building. Looking through the door on the opposite side, she saw Frostpine. He stood at a counter with his back to her, in front of one of three upright metal rectangles. A series of holes were punched through each, in sizes that ranged from nearly a third of an inch across in the left-most plate, to a pinpoint in the right-most.

  Using flat-ended tongs, he gripped a tongue of metal that protruded through the hole in the middle of the central plate. Lifting a foot to brace himself against the counter, he began to pull. Slowly, fraction by fraction, he drew gold wire from the hole.

  “Daja—will you do me a favor?” he asked, voice strained.

  She started. How did he know she was there again? “Um—what do you need?” She propped the staff beside the door and went to him.

  “On the other side of this plate, there’s a coil of wire. Straighten it as I pull?”

  She found the coil and picked it up: it was barely warm gold, and coarse to her touch. Obediently, she opened a loop of it until a straight length fed into the metal plate. “What is all this?” she asked.

  “I’m drawing gold wire.” Lowering his foot, Frostpine continued to back up, without faltering. “Precious metals—they’re soft, compared to iron. By greasing the wire with beeswax—dragging it through smaller and smaller holes—it gets thinner, and longer.”

  “It looks hard,” she said, as the last of the gold fed through the plate. Frostpine turned his face away as the wire popped free. To Daja’s horror, it snapped like a whip—if the man hadn’t turned away, the flying end might have lashed his face.

  Frostpine gathered the new wire and took it to the counter. First he rubbed cold beeswax over its length, then wound it into a coil. Choosing a smaller hole in the plate, he thrust the wire’s pointed end into it. “It looks hard because I’m not putting my whole self into it. If I did—”

  He closed his eyes and took a long breath. Briefly he held it, then let it go, slowly. Daja’s skin prickled. Something even warmer than the summer air gathered in the room, to wind itself around the smith. Each piece of metal in the shop seemed to burn with inner fire. Something in her answered, timidly.

  The man breathed as Niko had taught the children, then strode to the front of the plate to seize the wire’s point with his tongs. This time he didn’t brace himself, he only pulled, backing up. The metal flowed through the plate slowly first, then faster, as if half liquid. Frostpine didn’t turn away when the end popped out; he lifted his hand. The free end of the wire leaped into it.

  “Physically, it’s easier this way.” He gathered the new, thinner wire. “But it burns up my strength here”—he touched his chest—”and here.” He patted his head. “I’d hate to get a nasty surprise and have nothing to fight it with.” Examining the metal, he frowned. “This needs the fire again.” He crossed the room, entering a small cubicle. Heat rippled through the open door; inside was a small forge. The only light came from its fire.

  He placed the gold coil on the coals with tongs. Another, thicker length of wire was already there. This he lifted out.

  “See that red color? Your gold is just hot enough to be worked.” Carrying the wire out of the cubicle, he put it on an anvil and turned it several times, as if he turned sausages in a frying pan. “The anvil draws the heat out. Any questions?”

  She blinked. “Umm—no, sir.”

  “Then here.” He rubbed beeswax on the new wire, then fed one narrow end through a hole in one of the plates. “The flat metal pieces are properly called ‘drawplates,’ since this way of making wire is called ‘drawing.’” Taking Daja’s arm, he placed his tongs in her hand and folded her fingers around them. “These are draw-tongs—the flattened ends make it easier to grip the metal. Draw the wire.”

  She stared at the tool. “How?”

  “Take a deep breath—” She did it as he raised his hand before her face. “Clear your mind. Let your breath out. Now, grab that end with your tongs, shut your eyes, and call the metal to you. When it feels right—mind that, it must feel right, not look right—start pulling. Don’t stop. If you do, that makes a weak spot in the wire. Keep going till it’s all the way through.”

  “I call it?”

  Frostpine grinned, white teeth flashing. “Come, Trader girl. You know gold, surely? You’ve held it, seen it in different forms. Think of gold in your innermost heart, and call it to you. Don’t forget to pull on the wire as you call.”

  Thunder boomed outside.

  Nervous, she walked to the front of the plate and gripped the wire’s end in her pincers. Call metal to her? It was metal, not a living thing—

/>   Once, when she was small, she had crept into a goldsmith’s shop. It was dark inside. Only the smith was visible, her body outlined in forge fire. With tongs she had lifted a bottle from the coals. Turning until she held the bottle over a mold, she had tilted it. Living fire poured out in a yellow-white stream that sparkled and glittered as it fell.

  Daja, eyes closed, called the memory of that flow, her arms straining. The metal fought her at first. She called it again in her heart. Slowly—a little at a time—that remembered gold turned away from the mold in her mind’s eye and reached out to her.

  Catching her foot, she opened her eyes. She stood a yard from the drawplate. Her tongs gripped a wire three times longer than the piece that she had started with.

  With a gasp, she dropped tongs and wire to the ground. “I’m sorry—I muffed it! I didn’t take it through all the way. I weakened your gold,” she said. Even her arms and knees felt weak and loose, trembling after so much effort. Had it taken an effort? Thunder boomed, almost overhead. She sat on the floor, hard.

  “Don’t worry—that was just an experiment. Drink this.” He put a stone cup filled with liquid under her nose. “It will put you to rights.”

  It tasted like water with mint leaves crushed into it. She drank it all and found that she could get to her feet.

  “You have a talent for this,” Frostpine told her. “And any fool can see you love metalwork. Would you like to learn smithcraft? Come here, say, in the afternoon, after the rest period? I’d like to have the teaching of you.”

  “Can I?” she whispered. “No one will beat me, or lock me in my room, or make me do extra chores for being with lugsha? You’ll let me learn?”

  “It’s more than just my letting you, Daja,” Frostpine said, tweaking one of her braids. “I waited for years for someone who loves it as I do to come along.”