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Since the castle walls were thick, the walkway behind the battlements was a broad one, with guardsmen posted at every hundred feet. From here Yarrun’s companions could see an orange glow to the north.
Just like the walls at Winding Circle, these were pierced with deep notches. Yarrun and his guests took positions in them, to be granted a complete view of the night-black ground below, the cluster of huts inside their log wall, and the fire. It was as the boy had said. One house was burning to the ground, while the thatched roof of the house beside it was in flames. Behind them a small barn had also caught fire, upper and lower stories alike. Wide gardens lay between the barn and the wall. They were half-burned, the eager flames seeking every scrap left from the harvest. Everyone drew back to see how Yarrun planned to handle matters.
He turned to Niko, the distant flames reflected in his large eyes. “The courtesy of our craft dictates that I first offer you the chance to douse the flames.”
Daja frowned. There was a sting in Yarrun’s voice that she didn’t like.
“I can’t,” Niko said quietly.
“Indeed? You are so famous that one would have thought dousing a simple village fire would be an easy matter for you. Are you sure—?” Yarrun asked, raising one eyebrow.
“Quite sure.” Niko’s voice was cold.
The fire-mage opened the leather bag and rummaged inside it. “Then, if I may,” he said, drawing out a clenched fist. Walking up to the notch in the battlement, he threw a spray of some kind of powder into the air. Slowly it drifted away from the wall.
Shaping signs with his fingers on the air, Yarrun began to speak in a language the four didn’t know. His powder sparkled in the air and sped toward the village below. Yarrun’s voice rose, until he spoke three final words in a shout that made Lark cover her ears.
The village fires—the houses, the barn, the gardens—went out. There was not so much as a single glowing ember visible to anyone’s eyes. Yarrun slumped against the wall. None of those watching him had any urge to speak, but from below they could hear the distant sound of cheers.
At last the fire-mage straightened. He passed a trembling hand over a face now covered with sweat. Daja thought his brown eyes were larger and wetter than ever. The grin he favored them with seemed half-crazy.
“You were helpless, Niklaren Goldeye!” he remarked, his voice as harsh as a crow’s. “You, a member of the governing board of the university, and famous all around the Pebbled Sea! But I did it. The fire obeyed me.”
Niko met the other man’s eyes calmly. “You are to be congratulated.”
Yarrun sighed. “I only serve the lady of Gold Ridge.” He rubbed his eyes. “I had best remain for a while to make sure no pockets are burning in someone else’s thatch. This kind of thing is easier under the sun, when I can see the smoke.”
“I don’t understand,” said Briar. “You can see fire better at night.”
Yarrun’s lips twitched in a false smile. “By the time we see flames, the structure is most likely doomed. Smoke is the earliest sign there is a fire in the offing. But please, don’t linger on my account.” He rubbed his hands. “The night grows cold.”
It was a dismissal and they all knew it. Briar growled under his breath, resenting Yarrun’s attitude. Sandry tugged him along as they followed their teachers into the watchtower.
“He didn’t ask you if you could put it out,” Lark murmured to Frostpine as they began to descend the stairs.
“I couldn’t, not at this range,” Frostpine replied. “We smiths like our fires up close.” He glanced back at Daja with a wink; she grinned.
“Niko, what was the matter with him?” Lark asked. “He wasn’t very polite.”
“I’ve seen it before,” Niko said wearily. “Some get renown whether they feel they deserve it or not. Others who feel they should be famed labor in obscurity. It’s—Rosethorn?”
Rosethorn had stopped just short of the ground floor exit. “I’ll catch up to you later. I need to talk with him.” Gathering the skirts of her habit in one hand, she began to climb the stairs again. The four young people stood back to let her by.
“These academic mages,” said Lark as she, Niko, and Frostpine walked out of the tower. “How can you stand to work among them?”
“I do it as little as possible,” the four heard Niko reply as the door swung shut. They were still inside the tower. In the stairwell they could hear the echo of Rosethorn’s trotting climb and the creak as she opened the walkway door.
Sandry opened the door to the main courtyard and looked out. Niko and the other two adults were halfway across the yard, heads together as they talked. They seemed to have forgotten their students.
“I wonder what Rosethorn has to say to him?” muttered Briar. “She had that look on her face.”
“What look?” Daja inquired softly.
“The one that means she’s seen you do something really dumb and she means to pin your ears back,” Rosethorn’s student answered drily.
Sandry looked back at her friends. She was still holding the door open.
Daja shook her head. Carefully Sandry let the door swing shut.
Not a word was said as the four began to climb back up the stairs. All of them were careful to walk on the outsides of their feet, making as little noise as they possibly could. When they reached the top step, Briar slipped into the lead. Gently, not making even the tiniest sound, he opened the walkway door a crack.
Rosethorn’s voice drifted through on the breeze. “—said there hasn’t been a forest fire since—”
“It’s been thirty years,” Yarrun interrupted, sounding as clear as if he stood inside the tower. “My father and I labored for that. Grassfires are one thing. At least they are over quickly, and they renew the land. The forest fires were impossible—costly to the fa Juzons and all under their care. My father and I banned them.”
“Banned them,” Rosethorn repeated, her voice flat.
Uh-oh, Briar said through their magic. I think it’s about to get interesting.
Rosethorn lowered her voice. The wind picked at the immense house banners that hung over the castle gate, making them flap noisily.
Tris, mind-called Sandry fix it.
The redhead tugged a handful of air as it drifted through the crack; Briar shaped it into a tree-limb that kept the door partly open. Daja gripped one silver-glittering branch and drew it out like wire, shoving it behind her so the strand of air would continue to blow past the four of them and down the stairs. The flow strengthened as Tris pulled more of the outer air through the door. Daja crossed her fingers in the hope that Rosethorn—who was often wise to their tricks—wouldn’t notice the small breeze that blew steadily across her face and into the tower.
“Do you know why there are fires in woods and fields?” Rosethorn’s voice was clear again, although she fought to keep it to a whisper. “Did it occur to you they might provide a service?”
“Fire serves humankind, my dear young woman,” said Yarrun, his voice cold and clipped. “Beyond that, it is a symptom of chaos, disorder. Destruction.”
“Don’t patronize me. I am not ‘your dear’ anything.”
I love it when she talks mean, Briar told his companions. Their grins were all as wicked as his own. They knew Rosethorn’s prickles very well and respected them. It was always a treat to see some unfortunate draw her wrath.
“Do not take that tone with me. If you have nothing constructive to say—”
“Deduce something for me, university mage—”
“You Living Circle types are all alike. There is no order anywhere; there is only instinct, and currents, and movement without meaning or structure. Yours is simply a way to avoid study and research—”
“You said it yourself: grassfires renew the land. Everything grows back even better than before the fire, isn’t that so? Did it never once occur to you or your father that woodlands need fire in the same way?”
“I did not spend the day in the saddle to be lectured by a c
hanting religious!”
“This valley is a deathtrap.” Rosethorn’s voice was tight with rage. She took a deep breath. “Fires—small, fast ones—scour the ground of mast.”
Mast? Daja asked the others silently.
Junk, replied Briar. Dead wood, saplings, dead leaves, and nuts.
Rosethorn was still talking. “Normally an inch or two of that trash burns off fast. The bark on mature trees is thick enough that they survive with only a mild scorching. But now? With no fires for thirty years? The mast is at least a foot thick in most places. Normally it would be wet, damp enough to discourage fire, but you’ve had three years of drought. It’s dry as tinder, your saplings are tall enough that fire in their crowns can now leap to the unprotected crowns of the big trees, and everyone here believes you can stop such a fire.”
“I can.”
“And if you can’t?”
“I have yet to fail, Dedicate Rosethorn. I am very good at my work.”
“You have been good at crushing spot fires and warding off lightning strokes. Now you are breeding a firestorm. That won’t be so easy to halt.”
“And I say you underestimate my power at this!”
“Talk to one of my students about fiddling with nature when it gets in motion. She’s still alive to talk about it, but it was a near thing.”
“A child—”
A hard thumb and forefinger gripped one of Tris’s ears. Niko had come up on them from behind, and he did not look pleased. “That’s enough,” he whispered. “I want that door closed, and then I want all four of you to come with me.”
Tris released the branch of air. Briar called the wood of the door to the wood of the frame, until they came together and the latch caught. Without giving up his grip on Tris’s ear, Niko led the four out of the tower and back to their rooms. When they came in, Little Bear jumped up barking.
Niko deposited Tris in a chair. “Sit,” he told the three remaining young people.
There was a couch next to Tris that could hold all three of them. Settling on it, they meekly folded their hands on their laps. Niko scowled at Little Bear, who fled into one of the bedchambers.
The man paced, hands in his pockets, heavy brows knit in the blackest frown they had ever seen on his face. His mouth was drawn down tight, the lines around it pulled deep.
“The fault is mine,” he said at last. “I never had students so young before. It simply did not occur to me that you would not understand the manners or the common sense that goes with magecraft.” He stopped to glare at the four.
“I confess, had I not been so interested in the way your powers combine, I would have called you to book before this,” he continued. “Certainly I knew there were other occasions when you eavesdropped on conversations not meant for your ears.”
Tris stared at her blue cotton-covered lap.
“Magic is not a toy,” Niko continued. “It is not a convenience. It is a precious thing. It is not for use in getting around your elders. I don’t believe I realized until we began this trip how often you children call on it when it would be every bit as easy to do things physically instead. You are so strong that you have never learned that you cannot, cannot throw magic about like water. That a day will come when you will need every dram of magic you possess, and you will have weakened it to eavesdrop, and play, and do chores that are otherwise boring.”
He smoothed his hair back from his face. “As of this moment, none of you are to use magic without one of your teachers to watch you. I mean this. If I suspect you dealt in power without supervision, I will see it on you—you know that I can—and it will go the worse for you.”
He examined them all again. None of them would meet his eyes. “This wasteful use of magic will stop before any of us is one day older. Now, go to bed. I am really quite disappointed in all of you.”
4
The castle’s farrier was glad to lend his portable forge to Daja the next day. The girl wouldn’t have minded working on horseshoes for him, but the farrier had an apprentice, and his smithy was a small one, with no room to spare. Instead Frostpine placed Daja in a little-used courtyard between the castle keep and the outermost wall. As Briar, Tris, and Sandry carried in baskets of charcoal taken from the farrier’s supplies, Frostpine gave Daja a fresh bundle of iron rods and left her to the work of making nails.
Yesterday’s bundle of iron rods she set against the wall, next to her staff. The iron vine had put out a number of leaves overnight, while the rods that formed its trunk grew thinner and thinner. Little Bear curled up next to it and settled his long frame for a nap. Tris’s starling, Shriek, after eating part of a wheat roll and a few insects for breakfast, perched on one of the vine’s branches and chattered to local starlings as they flew by.
As he placed his basket of charcoal near the others, Briar sighed with relief. Looking the vine over, he said, “I think you have to plant it in metal-bearing earth, if it’s to grow. It has to get new metal from somewhere.”
“All I want is to keep it in good condition until I get every copper crescent out of Tenth Caravan Idaram that I can,” Daja replied. Drawing a heated rod from her fire, she slid it into the nail header. “After that it can wilt, for all of me.” Twisting fiercely, she broke off the rod.
“That’s not nice, is it?” Briar asked the vine, running his hands over the trunk. “She doesn’t appreciate what a beauty you are, is all. She’s used to iron being dead.”
“Iron isn’t dead!” protested Daja. A stroke of the hammer put a head on the nail; another tap sent the finished piece into her water bucket. “It’s just not the same as plants!”
They all turned at the sound of clumsy steps. It was the Trader Polyam coming through the arch that opened onto the main courtyard. Everyone’s jaw dropped. The part in her hair, down the center of her scalp, was traced in bright yellow paint of some kind: it ended in a dripping mark on her forehead. Her one good eye was lined in the same color; so too were her mouth, nostrils, and both ears, scarred and unscarred alike. Her neck, wrists, and ankles all sported chains decorated with small wooden charms. Each charm was painted with an odd design in bright yellow. Yellow thread was wrapped around the top of her staff; more yellow thread bound one legging to her wooden limb. Even her toenails and fingernails had been tinted yellow. The color almost seemed to glow, even on the bumps and dents of her scarred face and in the shadow of her ruined eye.
“What happened to you?” asked Briar.
“Trader Koma protect me,” whispered Daja, forgetting that she had just wrapped her fingers around a rod that was still heating in the fire. “You’re qunsuanen.” She had heard of the qunsua ceremony, its use and intent. Never before had she seen it done—though she knew it when she laid eyes on the results.
“What do you call that shade of yellow?” Sandry inquired. “It’s so vivid.”
Polyam stared at her for a moment, as if she didn’t believe what the girl had asked, then made a face. “I call it yellow.” She looked straight at Daja. “Are you happy?” she demanded. “I can now talk to you. I can deal with you. I can even bargain with you. And I will never, ever, acquire enough zokin to erase this from the books of the caravan.”
“I don’t get it,” said Briar. “What’s koo-soo—what’s zokin? And the other thing?”
Polyam looked away. Obviously she wasn’t about to explain.
“I never heard of the koon-soo thing,” remarked Sandry “but zokin is the credit listed against your name in the ledgers of your people. Pirisi—my old nurse—was a Trader,” she explained to Polyam. “Pirisi said there are two kinds of zokin, the kind that’s your actual savings in coin, your part of the ship’s—”
“Or caravan’s,” Daja added.
Sandry grinned at her. “Or caravan’s profits. The other kind of zokin is, well, honor, or personal standing. Is that the kind you mean?”
Polyam stared at her. “It’s not right, a kaq knowing so much of our ways.”
“She’s not a kaq,” Daja said flatly,
staring at the woman. “She is my saati.” The word meant a non-Trader friend who was as dear as family. “So are Briar and Tris—and our teachers.”
“As for qunsuanen—koon-soo-ah-nen,” Daja repeated slowly, for her friends, “it’s, I don’t know, she’s been cleansed.” She felt a little sorry for Polyam. The Traders might as well have named her a plague carrier, to say she was specially privileged to deal with trangshi. “All the paint, all the runes on the charms, are to keep my trangshi luck from sticking to her. When they go, she has to follow the caravan for ten days, wash in every stream and pond and river they find. The mimanders will pray over her and do ritual purifications—”
“As they did all last night,” snapped Polyam. She hopped over to the iron vine to take a better look at it. “So let’s deal and get it over with. A gold maja and two gold astrels, take it or leave it, trangshi.”
The word was like a slap in the face. You’d think being qunsuanen would sweeten her, thought Daja, breathless with anger. No such luck!
Flame roared out of the forge, shaping a column nearly ten feet high.
“Tris!” yelled Briar, Sandry and Daja. Shriek, grooming his feathers, let out several ear-smarting whistles.
Tris closed her eyes and took a deep breath. The fire sank to its earlier level. Daja went to it to see how her iron rods had fared in the extra heat. They were useless—if she made these into nails, once they were cold they would break at the first blow of a hammer.
“You know, we may be kaqs, but at least our manners are good,” snapped Tris, glaring at Polyam. “Yours could stand a polishing.”
“I’m a wirok,” Polyam replied, returning the glare with her one good eye. “All I do is spend money among lugsha—that’s artisans—”
