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“He’s got the barrier salted with mage-traps.” That was Niko. “He really likes to use other mages’ power in his work, this Enahar.”
The four looked at each other and moved closer together, for comfort.
“What of the navy?” Lark wanted to know.
“No word, the duke says,” Moonstream told them. “They may come, they may not. You need to evacuate the children. We can take them to Summersea through the hidden ways. A load of the worst sick and injured are going at noon.”
“No!” cried Sandry, eyes blazing. “Absolutely not!”
Tris and Daja shushed her. From below Niko called, “What’s going on up there?”
Briar went to the door. “We’re just frisking like little captive lambkins.”
There was a crack of laughter from downstairs: Skyfire, perhaps.
“Frisk quietly,” Rosethorn ordered.
Briar stepped back into the room.
“They are not sending me to my uncle!” Sandry thrust her chin out as far as it would go. “I won’t leave!”
“Is that what ‘evacuating’ means?” the boy inquired.
“That’s what it means,” Daja replied.
Tris’s face was dead white. Small lightnings crackled all over her hair and dress. Winds stirred in every corner of the room. “They can’t send me away again. They can’t.”
Another boom-stone exploded in midair. Tris flinched.
“It’ll get you away from that,” pointed out Daja.
“And what’ll be here when we come back?” Briar wanted to know.
None of them could answer.
“Pirates killed my favorite cousin. Now they’re going to drive me from the only place I ever felt welcome,” Tris said very softly. “I’m done with being pushed around by the likes of them!” Going to the window, she sat on the ledge, and swung her legs outside. She would go up on the wall, she decided, and throw lightning at them until it killed her.
Sandry lunged and grabbed her. The lightnings prickled, but didn’t hurt.
“Let me go!” snarled Tris, fighting. Daja came over to help.
“Listen to me. Listen!” Sandry talked low and fast, trying to hold Tris’s attention. “You want to fight back, and that makes perfect sense, but you can’t do it by yourself. Haven’t we all been hurt? This is our home, too, the best we’ve ever had.” Tris was still trying to wriggle out of their hold. “You need our help. Listen to me, are you listening?”
The roar of a boom-stone shook the rafters.
“Let me go,” panted Tris.
“She’s right,” Daja insisted, dragging her inside. “Listen to her.”
All three girls tumbled onto the floor with a thud. Sandry’s and Daja’s hair fought to rise out of their braids.
Briar listened at the door. The adults seemed to be too deep into their talk to pay attention to them. “We won’t be allowed on the wall,” he pointed out.
“We don’t need their permission,” Sandry replied. She had given up on reasoning with Tris and was now sitting on the redhead’s stomach. “Remember the other night? How we protected ourselves at the north gate? I can do that. I can keep anyone from touching us. I don’t want to go! If the pirates took this place—if they hurt Lark—”
She looked away, blinking eyes that stung. The lightnings had slowed down, but now they climbed on her and Daja just as they did on Tris.
Must be more light than heat, Briar thought, looking at the girls. And isn’t that just as well? Or Tris’d cook anyone who came near her.
“I don’t think I could bear it, if Winding Circle fell,” murmured Daja. “I can be a bellows and blow people away from us. Or—or I think—I think …” She halted, turning something over in her mind.
“Let me up,” said Tris. “I won’t climb out the window.”
“Promise?” asked Sandry.
“Promise.”
Sandry and Daja rose to their feet. Little Bear got in a few licks before Tris could stand and take her face away from his tongue.
Briar eyed Tris suspiciously. He didn’t like the stubborn set of her mouth. Her lightnings seemed thicker; so did her hair. “You look like a bush,” he informed her.
Tris grumbled. Seizing a long scarf, she wrapped it around her head and tied it tightly. Past the cloth her curls still rose to fan out, but at least she didn’t look so odd.
“What about their magic barrier?” she asked, sitting on the bed. “You heard Skyfire.”
“We can ram through,” Daja said. “They’re always telling us how much stronger we are when we hook up. I wish we had the string, though.”
“You sure we need it?” Briar inquired. “We did all right at north gate. Maybe we just thought we had to touch it.”
“I have to use the privy,” Tris announced. “I had too much juice.”
“If they’ll let you down there,” Briar said.
Tris smoothed her skirts. Her lightnings had faded. “I have to go. I’ll be right back. Don’t make plans without me. I want to get these—jishen.” She brushed past him and trotted downstairs.
“If Sandry protects us, and if I get near the ships, well …” Daja mused.
“Tell us,” Sandry urged.
“When Frostpine and I did the harbor chain, he made the chain rise in the air. I’m pretty sure I remember how.” It was one of many things burned into her mind when they had magicked the chain so hard and so fast. “I think I can get metal to pull out of whatever it’s attached to, in a small area. Maybe even drag nails from their moorings.”
“I’ll find something to do,” said Briar. “There’s always getting seaweed to foul their oars. And if Coppercurls can use her lightning, we might be able to make these turd-eaters back off.”
They discussed their plans for a few more minutes. Briar was the first to realize that, for someone who promised to be right back, Tris was taking a very long time.
“Wait here,” he told the other two. He swung out of the window, letting himself drop to the pillows on the roof of Rosethorn’s shop, where Tris had planned to fall. He landed with little more than a bump, just as another boom-stone exploded. Carefully he dropped to the ground. They waited nervously as he trotted around to the privy. Within moments he was back, scowling furiously.
She’s gone! he mouthed.
“Help me down,” Sandry told Daja, tucking her skirts between her knees. She sat on the windowsill and swung her legs outside. Daja lowered her as much as she could until Sandry was able to drop lightly to the workshop roof. On her jump to the ground, Briar was there to catch her.
Daja wasn’t about to risk the thump the adults would hear if she dropped. Running into the attic, she got a coil of rope. With a few quick twists, she secured one end to Tris’s bed. Clinging to the rope, she lowered herself to the ground.
“Where would she go?” Briar asked when Daja arrived. They trotted away from the house, coming out of the gardens and onto the grassy strip on the inside of the wall. “There’s sentries all over the wall.”
From the cottage behind them, they heard the first bark. Little Bear did not like to be left behind.
“Maybe she’ll keep them off with lightning, or the wind,” Daja said. “You know how she is. They might not know the lightning she wears doesn’t hurt.”
“Wait,” Sandry told them. She closed her eyes and held out her hand, palm-up, wriggling her fingers. “I feel your thread, Daja, and Briar’s …” She closed her hand and opened her eyes. “She’s headed for the south wall, for certain.” As they began to run again, she added, “Maybe the lightning only just tickles us because, well—”
“Her magic bleeds into ours,” said Briar. “So maybe it thinks we’re part of her? I hope she thinks of that before she scorches anyone who isn’t part of her.”
“When I catch her, I am going to give her a pounding,” threatened Daja. “She is the most aggravating girl I ever met—apart from you,” she told Sandry.
“How long before they see we’re gone?” asked Briar.
“Not too, if Little Bear keeps it up.” They ran faster.
Tris did not run—she was too fat, and it would be silly to reach the wall too winded to climb to the top. She walked quickly; her friends might just follow. Tramping through the grass beside the wall, she worked her feelings to a fever pitch. Emotions were the key to her power to damage things, weren’t they? She remembered her parents’ faces when they told a perfect stranger at Stone Circle Temple that they no longer wanted her. She remembered Uraelle taking her books when the chores weren’t done as well as she demanded, and dormitory girls taunting her about her looks. She remembered Winding Circle boys who called her “fatty” and made pig noises at her.
The winds came to her, whipping her clothes and wrestling the lightning for her hair. They tugged her this way and that as she mounted the stairs a few hundred yards from the south gate.
“Get out of here!” cried a guard, running toward her. “It’s not safe!”
A billow of wind struck his chest, knocking him down. “Stay back,” Tris warned. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
He got up and advanced. She sent the wind at him again, strengthening it. It pinned him to the wall. Glancing to either side, Tris saw more guards take notice. They were coming to their comrade’s help. Behind them, further down the wall, mages were looking to see what the trouble was.
She had to keep everyone off her. Using winds on them cost her little; she only needed a dab of magic to send them where she wanted, since the winds were already here. Working them was distracting, though, and she couldn’t afford distractions.
Once Niko had told the four that, when things were difficult, they could open their minds and let the magic guide them. Tris did so now, looking to see how she could work uninterrupted.
The image of a circle bloomed against her closed eyelids. Rosethorn and Lark had created magical circles before, to keep magic in. Who was to say they couldn’t be used to keep people out?
She dragged her fingers through her hair, collecting a palmful of sparks. A quick glance around told her the mages were now advancing with the guards. Swiftly she worked the sparks with her free hand, ignoring the needlelike pricks the bits of lightning gave her as she shaped them. Pointing to the walkway before her with the hand that held the ball of sparks, Tris began to turn, drawing a circle of lightning. Its fire streamed down, burning where she placed it, until she closed the circle. She was now fully enclosed, with a good two feet of room on either side. Twitching her fingers, she raised the fiery circle until it made a wall over five feet high at her back and sides. Before her lay the top of the wall and the cove. Now she could get to work.
Tris grabbed two fistfuls of wind. She twisted them around each other, following the lessons taught by Lark and Sandry: spinning made weak fibers into strong thread. Finished, she backed up to the inner edge of her lightning-circle and stood her wind-thread at its center. Grimly, she twirled her finger clockwise. The wind began to whirl.
Bit by bit it drew in pieces of other winds, growing taller and wider. When it was of a size to crowd Tris out of the circle, she sent it into the air and let it touch down in the blanket of thorns on the other side of the wall. Twigs and sticks fought their way up the growing funnel as it ate vines, becoming a thorny kind of armor.
Once Tris had fought, and failed, to make a water-funnel do as she wanted, and it had been only ten feet tall. Now when her cyclone towered thirty feet in the air, higher than the wall on which she stood, she urged it up, out of the brambles. Making shooing motions with her hands, she sent it forward.
The moment it entered the sea, the funnel turned into a waterspout. It widened and continued to grow as it bore down on the pirate fleet. Ten yards or so from the closest galley, the waterspout struck the pirates’ magical barrier and stopped.
“Aymery,” she growled to make herself angrier, and slammed her creation forward. It sprayed against the glasslike wall, grinding at it. “Aymery, and the carpenters, and your poor slaves.” Again and again she threw her creation at the barrier, without result.
“Now you know why you need us.” Sandry walked through the lightning-wall to stare reproachfully at Tris. “You should have waited.”
Soldiers and mages clustered at a respectful distance from Tris’s fiery hideout. It was easy for the other three to see who had gone closest to it: their hair stood on end. Daja nodded gravely to them as she and Briar followed Sandry through the lightning.
Tris stared at them, baffled. “It didn’t hurt you?”
“It stings,” said Daja, rubbing her arms.
Briar took a place at Tris’s side. “You can’t pound pirates without us,” he told her. “It wouldn’t be as much fun.”
“They’ll know we’re gone soon,” pointed out Sandry. All four knew who “they” were. “We need more than this circle to keep them from stopping us.”
“This was the best I could do.” Tris sent more winds out to help the waterspout and smiled as the funnel got longer and fatter still.
“But we can do better,” Sandry informed her. “Why not take this circle up, and I’ll weave us a new one?”
“New one first,” said Daja. “Then break the old one. Otherwise those guards outside will grab us.”
Sandry nodded. Laying her palms flat against the lightning barrier, ignoring the pain as its fire bit into her skin, she searched her mind for the wall that had kept them safe at the north gate. Thread by thread she wove it against the lightning’s surface, her magic shuttling faster than the eye could follow. Her barrier rose around the four, holding the same shape as the lightning wall.
When it was complete, she took her hands away. “It’ll be stronger when we join,” she told her companions.
Tris closed her eyes, calling to her original protection. The lightning poured over Sandry’s wall in a stream of white heat to pool in the redhead’s cupped palms. When she had retrieved all of it, she rolled it into a fiery ball and put it on the wall in front of them.
Closing their eyes, the four joined as they had once done in the middle of an earthquake, to become one. Daja was not sure that she liked such closeness. Briar felt the same way. Sandry brushed them with soothing warmth, reminding them that it was just for the moment, then turned her attention to the moon-pale wall that she had built. Touching it with their strength, she made it blaze.
Let’s get to it, Tris said.
Not so fast, replied Daja. Weren’t you listening? There are mage-traps in the barrier. If we attack it, let’s make sure we don’t strike one.
We don’t even know what they look like, Sandry argued.
Just look at it, Briar told her. We’ve been seeing magic for days. Let’s find out if we can spot differences in the stuff.
Leaving their bodies on the wall, the four went to the magical shield. Sandry hunted for changes in its weave, Tris for storm centers, Daja for rust spots. From his long experience in climbing garden and house walls, Briar knew better than to trust his eyes: Bags always paid extra for spells to hide other spells. Flinging his mind forward, the ex-thief went over the silvery wall an inch at a time, poking it with a finger.
Here, he said at last. And here, and here.
We don’t have to look more, Tris pointed out. If we hit the barrier in the middle of those spots, we might break through.
Let your waterspout spin us together, Daja suggested. To make us stronger. When we come out through the top, we’ll fly at that place.
Briar left a dab of green fire to mark their target. The four drifted to the top lip of the waterspout as it whirled before the pirates’ barrier.
Looking at the funnel, Briar said approvingly, You’ve got a monster this time, Coppercurls.
Let’s go! Tris cried and let herself fall into the outside of the spout. The others followed, wrapping themselves around her. The floods that whipped along the funnel’s sides grabbed them, twirling them around and around as wind and water carried them down to the sea. They could feel themselves being wound ever more tightly into one being
.
Daja felt heat as well, the heat of a forge-fire, warming them, making them blend together easily. How much more of their power would leak between them if they survived this? There was no chance to really consider it—they rushed madly into the pointed end of the funnel and were sucked inside. Now the current bore them up through the spout, speeding them along.
Just a bit more, thought Tris as they neared the top. A little more, a little …
They shot out of the spout’s top and slammed into the barrier at eyeblink speed. Something before them gave. The barrier’s magic no longer felt like a smooth and solid whole.
Again, decreed Sandry.
They returned to the waterspout, soaring into its outside current and letting it yank them down. It, too, was spinning faster, twirling the four wildly. They felt powerful and furious. Shooting out of the top, they leaped away to arrow at the green spot Briar had left for them.
The whole barrier shattered like glass. In raced the waterspout. It fell on a galley in the first rank of the fleet. Chunks of wood flew as it gnawed the port oars. The four broke apart, ready to get to work.
Briar looked back. There were bare, charred patches on the shore where battlefire had roasted the brambles that he and Rosethorn had worked so hard to grow. Now a single longboat was drawn up on the blackened slope, its load of pirates already ashore. They were throwing skins of battlefire onto the remaining thorns and setting them ablaze, making room for even more invaders to land. A pair of men who glinted with magic shielded them from the spells of Winding Circle’s defenders.
The boy glanced at the top of the wall. There was the glow of Sandry’s protective barrier, with the four’s real bodies just visible through a notch in the stone. Most of the soldiers and mages who had encircled them were gone, manning the walls and catapults against the pirates laboring on the beach. He couldn’t find Skyfire’s shock of red hair, but it was a long trot from Discipline to south gate. The general would be there soon, he had no doubt. Skyfire was needed; in the cove seven more longboats filled with armed pirates and their protector-mages waited for room enough to land.
