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“It’s holding,” she whispered. “And the protection outside is still there.”
For a long moment none of them said a word. They listened, or prayed, or wept silently, not wanting the others to know. There was no trace of light in their refuge. Every sound was important, a promise that they might die yet, just as the feeling of someone else’s side, or foot, or tail meant they were still alive.
“Y’know, Bag, I woulda swore you didn’t have a scared bone in your body,” Briar croaked at last.
“Well, now you know,” replied Sandry. “I’m scared of the dark.”
“Just now I couldn’t argue,” Briar told her. In spite of her fear, Sandry grinned. “Is it because of you being in that cellar, the first time you did magic?”
She nodded, then remembered that no one could see. “I—I’m sorry. I’ll try to do better, but—” In spite of herself, she sniffed, lips trembling. “This is even worse than it was there. I had a little more room, for one thing.”
“But they found you,” Briar pointed out. “You were all right then.”
“No,” whispered Sandry. “They had to blindfold me. The light hurt so much that I screamed. For a long time I didn’t want to do anything, not eat, not work, not breathe. I got better in most ways, but—I hate the dark. I have to have a lamp by my bed at night.”
“I don’t want to upset anyone,” Tris said, fighting to sound calm. She was grateful they couldn’t see each other: what she felt in the earth around them was making her sweat. “The stones are talking. I can’t explain, so you just have to believe me. Something very big and bad is coming at us from a long ways off. Can we—”
“Another quake?” interrupted Briar.
“Mostly a quake,” Tris replied. “And—maybe this is odd, but—it feels like there’s magic all wound up in it. We have some time, but it’s coming. Daja, I’m not sure the thing you did for us will hold.”
13
For a moment none of them spoke. It was overwhelming news.
“We’d better do something fast,” Daja said. “It’s that or die. Tris, can you try anything with what’s coming? Can you turn it around, or stop it? No, forget I said to stop it. I know you can’t.”
“All that power has to go somewhere,” Tris replied. “And there’s magic in what’s coming—that complicates things. I don’t know what I’m doing with my own magic, let alone someone else’s.”
Daja sighed. “Look, we must try. I’ll find metal—”
“Maybe I can get plants to help us,” said Briar.
Three sets of lungs inhaled. Briar let his mind branch through the earth, feeling a million traces of green in the distance. He strained to reach them and failed. Daja found traces of iron, copper, and lead scattered through the soil. She called them together, hoping to make a metal cage around her box. They shuddered, wanting to obey but unable to.
Daja opened her eyes, gasping. “I need heat,” she said. “I can’t shape metals till I run them through a forge. Where do I find such heat, or control it?”
“Fire the coal?” Briar asked.
Tris was ill. Tension grew in the stones as the wave of strange force thundered their way. Her stomach was protesting. I can’t throw up now! she thought fiercely. “Don’t burn the coal, unless you want us to go with it!” she snapped. “We can’t use real fire. Below, where volcanoes are born—it’s heat. It’s the essence of fire. Daja, if you control that heat—if you keep it off the coal—”
“My box—our protection. It’s outside the coal right on top of us, so that’s safe. I can keep it from the rest of the coal in this ground—I hope,” replied Daja, coughing. She inhaled and sent her magic out with her exhale, reaching for the heat that Tris had described. Soon she came back. “I can’t,” she told them, trying not to think of time running out. “My reach won’t go that far.”
Tris sighed. “Mine can, but I don’t know anything about iron.”
“I need to reach far, too,” Briar said. “I’m just missing the plants’ roots.” In spite of himself, his voice quivered. He was getting scared. “I wish there was a way we could combine this fancy magic stuff.”
Sandry had listened, shame and terror filling her mind. She was letting her friends down, sitting by useless when they were in danger. It had been the same when Pirisi was killed. Would she let that happen again? Couldn’t she help?
Daja and Briar both needed Tris, and Tris needed strength. What a tangle of knots! she thought.
She gasped. “Waitwaitwait! I think—I think—” She grubbed in her workbag, digging past rolags, scissors, skeins of finished yarn—
A packet met her fingers. She pulled the contents out: her first spun thread. She hooked a finger around the shaft of her spindle and dragged it out as well.
“Are you still thinking?” Daja inquired.
“We need to help each other, right?” She put the spindle down and gripped the thread. “I have a way to make us stronger. Daja, I’m passing you a string with four lumps in it. Take the first lump, hold it, and put some of you in it—your magic, your memories, I don’t care what as long as it’s yours, understand?”
“I think so,” Daja said. A hand gripped her arm, and a coil of thread was pressed into her fingers. She found a lump close to the end and hung onto it.
“Give the long end to Tris, who does the same thing with the second lump. Keep it in your hand! Briar gets the third lump; I’ll get the last. When part of you is in it, ask the gods’ blessing, and give it back to me. Quick, now!”
Daja gave her lump the memory of red-hot iron lying in her unprotected hands. The excitement of walking in a storm as winds and rain lashed her went into Tris’s knot. Briar gave it the feeling of green things twining around his arms and legs. The four of them on the roof, talking as clouds bloomed overhead, was Sandry’s contribution. Four pairs of lips murmured a prayer to a favorite god.
Briar eased Little Bear onto his lap, where the pup curled up obediently. “Don’t you make water on me,” the boy ordered. Little Bear sneezed and thumped Briar’s ankle with a wagging tail.
Quickly Sandry took the thread and fixed it to her spindle as her leader, just as she had been taught. She had no rolags to prepare, not for the kind of spinning she had in mind. “Join hands,” she told the others. “Actually, Briar and Daja, grab my knees. I need both hands if I’m to spin our magic.”
“Work fast,” Tris warned. “Can’t you hear the stones?” She could hear them, shrieking with the first touch of the trouble that thundered down on them from miles away. The noise made her teeth ache and her nose and eyes run.
“Everybody, breathe,” Daja ordered. She closed her eyes and inhaled, holding Tris’s left hand in her right and resting her left hand on Sandry’s knee. Tris gripped Daja’s hand and Briar’s, while the boy rested his right hand on Sandry’s left knee.
Without knowing it, Sandry spoke magically, not aloud. I’m going to spin, she explained. She placed her drop spindle in the tiny clear space at the middle of their hollow. Fibers by themselves are weak—so are we. Spin them together, and they become strong. I think the spindle will bring our powers together and strengthen us.
Do it, thought Tris urgently. Now the others could sense a distant wave in the earth, rushing to swamp them. Sandry gripped the spindle-shaft. With a snap of the fingers, she twirled it to the right.
Now that her magic was focused, the spindle was as visible to Sandry as if she worked on the spiral road at noon; so were the bits of her friends that they had put into her lumpy thread. Gently she touched Briar with a magical hand and drew out a slim green fiber. From Tris she drew a blue one, the color of deep, fresh water. Daja’s was the reddish orange of a hot coal fire. Her own was the honey color of undyed silk and flax. Feeding them all between her thumb and index finger of her hand, she connected them to her leader.
There was no time to stand and work or to halt and wind new thread around the shaft of the spindle. She wrapped the magic around the long shaft as it whirled, with a sil
ent apology to Lark for not doing this correctly. As Tris had reminded her, time was running out. She gave the spindle another twirl and focused on her work.
As the spindle turned, Daja reached again for the iron ore. She felt it in her magic’s grip instantly, as Tris connected her to a molten river far, far below. Carefully, making sure that she used only as much iron and heat as she could control, Daja brought them together. The ore shimmered and began to melt.
Briar, his range much broader now, reached to the earth’s surface. There a beacon of green fire called to him, giving his power the strength to leap across a band of open air and through dead wood and glazed clay. He tangled himself in the roots of his shakkan.
The miniature tree was rich with magic—each wrinkle, twig, and leaf soaked in it—as well as the strength of each person who cared for it, whether that person had been a mage or not. Storing that power over its long life, pressing it into its small form, the shakkan had made it grow. Now it offered its magic to Briar.
With that power in his voice, he called to the roots of every living plant he could sense, trees and grass, bushes, weeds, flowers, herbs. The roots came to his call, stretching through the special soils and drainage layers that lay under Winding Circle, finding gaps in the interwoven pipes and magics that protected the temple, until they found the hollow where their friend Briar sat.
Sandry joined him. Together they wove the roots loosely around the suraku, Sandry working with the thin, stringlike tendrils, Briar with the heavier tree-roots. That done, the boy wrapped the shakkan’s magic around root and rootlet, protecting them from the molten streams of iron, copper, and lead that Daja made.
The heat she brought to her metals baked into Daja’s skin, drying and cracking it; her sweat burned in the cracks. A tremor struck the hollow, rocking. Heat, sting, movement: once more she was on a raft in the middle of the ocean, foodless, waterless, the last of her family alive. A whirlpool dragged at her, trying to pull her in.
All around her magical suraku, she found mats of woven plant roots. Now what? She dared not burn them with her liquid metals. There had to be a way to work her iron, lead, and copper into their shell, without killing Briar’s friends.
Through the roots, she saw light: the spindle, whirling as it pulled magic from the four shapes. It reminded her of the wire threads Frostpine spun—
Wire threads. Wire. Her magical fingers reached into the pool where her liquid metals combined, taking just a pinch of fluid between thumb and forefinger. For a drawplate, she used her other magical hand, thumb and forefinger overlapping to form a tiny opening. She fed liquid metal through the opening, then gripped it and drew.
This way I don’t trip over my own feet, she thought, once she was done. Nearby was a crack in the ground that contained seawater. She didn’t even know if this three-metal wire could be made outside magic, any more than she knew if a saltwater bath was good for it. Instead she logged a prayer to Trader Koma and Bookkeeper Oti and plunged her creation into the water. It boiled off in a flash, and the wire took on shifting colors and shadows. Tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth, Daja too began to weave.
Heat flared: the roaring earth warmed up. Sandry could smell her friends’ sweat. Watching Tris shove a wave of settling earth so it yanked the fresh heat away from them, Sandry grabbed a drift of warmth for herself and let her spindle drive it deep into the earth. Tris herded still more heat ahead of her until it burst through pinholes at the bottom of the sea, fueling plumes of steam.
The land shrieked as it twisted and bucked in a fresh earthquake. None of them heard their own cries as their hollow shelter wrenched. The pain of crushed rock and soil ground into Tris. She thought that her skull was being crushed between millstones; her eyes and nose ran. She began to cough.
“You don’t sound good, merchant girl,” whispered Daja when things quieted.
“Dust,” Tris replied faintly.
“Briar, it’s the coal,” Daja said. “Help me press it some more.”
Both of them forced their minds, and their magic, against the slab over Daja’s head, using the power that Sandry continued to spin for them. Their own strength was beginning to give out. As the thread that she drew from her friends went pale, Sandry poured more of herself into the spin. Grabbing more heat from the soil, she forced it to become power and slammed it into her spindle. “You’re going to work,” she said grimly. “You’re going to work, or I’ll know why.”
“Spoken like a noble,” gasped Briar.
The new magic that she gave them was raw stuff that boiled in their veins. With it Daja and the boy hammered the coal until it had no more dust to shed.
“Brace yourselves!” cried Tris. A new earthquake was almost on top of them. “Gods help us, I don’t think we can ride this one out!”
Sandry twirled her spindle as the ground bellowed in fury. The plants, metal, and box that sheltered them all groaned; even the shakkan was strained past its limit. Airways closed. Stone heated up.
The coal over Daja’s head begin to burn. “Tris!” she cried, losing the power to speak mind-to-mind. “We need water here!”
The spindle faltered. The threads that connected them began to fade in Sandry’s magical vision. The shakkan started to draw away from Briar—he clung to it with all his strength. Tris broke the others’ grip on her hands, scrabbling for the water she sensed just outside her reach.
Strength roared into the spindle and out along the roots, wires, and suraku. Power that everyone could see flowed into the thread that Sandry had made, turning it from thin cord into heavy rope. The new magic cupped the hollow, drawing in around it as a fisherman’s net closed around his catch. White fire, waterlike, streamed over the burning coal and doused it.
The earth still grumbled, but now it was the sound of rocks being crushed into each other. The hollow was moving through the ground. Little Bear whimpered and crawled into Daja’s lap.
“Sandry?” asked Briar.
“We’re all right,” she whispered. “I just don’t know—”
They stopped moving.
Daja’s suraku evaporated. Dim voices reached their ears. Through a chink in the rock, Tris saw a patch of light gray. The new magic vanished; the spindle fell on its side with a clatter. Slowly, nervously, Briar and Daja let go of Sandry.
“No, idiot! You’ll kill the roots!” A sharp, familiar voice penetrated the hollow. “Let me!”
“Then get it done, woman!”
“Rosethorn?” whispered Briar, voice cracking. Root by root, he felt his plants draw away from the hollow under his teacher’s gentle touch.
Frostpine, thought Daja, and sighed.
“Safe?” whispered Sandry, lips trembling. “We’re safe?”
They couldn’t see it, but they felt it. Power entered their hollow, weaving to form a net under the coal. With a spattering of loose dirt, the roof of their hollow began to rise.
“Carefully,” Tris heard Moonstream order. “We don’t want accidents at this point.”
Daja leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. Tears of exhaustion and relief trickled down her cheeks.
Blinking, the children shaded their eyes against the flickering torchlight behind the ring of faces that looked down at them. They were in the heartfire chamber of the Hub. Moonstream was there, hands tucked into her wide sleeves. So too were Niko, Lark, Rosethorn, and Frostpine. The children knew few of the other initiates who had helped bring them from the earth, except for one.
“Dedicate Gorse!” croaked Briar. “Have you got anything to eat?”
None of the four made an easy recovery from the earthquake. In addition to the same weakness that had kept Tris in bed after her experiment with tides, they were bruised from head to toe. Sandry’s hands were crossed by red welts, as if she had tried to spin a hot wire.
At first they slept an entire day in one of the temple’s infirmaries. Waking briefly, they swallowed clear soup, then slept. It was night when they woke for the second time. The healers gav
e them fruit juices and herbal teas, making them drink every drop before allowing them to sleep again.
Tris woke around dawn. Niko helped her into a chair, while Lark placed her spectacles on her nose. By the time she had eaten a bowl of thin gruel, Briar, Sandry, and Daja were awake. Even Briar didn’t object to the gruel. It tasted wonderful. None of them left as much as a spoonful for Little Bear, whose ivory curls had been washed and combed while they slept.
“We took damage,” Lark explained, once all four had eaten. “It would be a miracle if we hadn’t. Most of our people are in Summersea, though—that’s where it hit hardest. Rosethorn and Frostpine are bringing survivors out of the ruins still, and it’s been three days.”
“Someone tried to stop the quake in Ragat, didn’t they?” Tris’s voice was little more than a croak.
“No, no, they didn’t try to stop it,” Niko protested, his voice very dry. “They knew it was folly to stop a quake. Honored Huath and the Wave Circle mages wanted to trap it. They thought they could store it, as you might store power in a crystal, or a shakkan, for use later.”
Little Bear yapped, sensing Briar’s sudden anger.
Sandry blinked several times. “I could have sworn you just said they wanted to trap an earthquake.”
“It gets better,” Lark said, brushing the tangles from Sandry’s hair. “As it bounced around the crystals they used to trap it, the quake got stronger. Finally it broke out of the holding spells and went in every direction.”
“Is this Huath going to get in trouble?” Sandry wanted to know, eyes blazing. “If the temples don’t do something—”
“Huath is dead,” Niko told her. “Him, and all of Wave Circle Temple.”
Tris and Sandry made the gods-circle on their chest. Daja, about to spit on the floor with contempt, saw Lark watching and changed her mind. Briar thought, Better that Huath than us.
Yes, chorused the girls, without realizing they’d all spoken magically.
They felt well enough to visit the privy, though afterward all of them felt like a fresh nap. “Is this going to happen every time we use big magic?” Briar demanded, collapsing onto his cot.
