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Polyam smiled. “Talk needs food, or the talkers weaken.” She took lids from the dishes, putting them aside. The plates were laden with things like cold vine leaves stuffed with rice, onion, garlic, and mint, tiny pickled onions, pastries filled with chicken or eggplant and spices, apricots stuffed with almond-rosewater paste, and small fruit tartlets. Last but not least, she saw almond and orange cakes. All were traditional foods among Traders, in caravans and ships alike, and Daja had not tasted any of them in months.
Looking at her knees, she bit down on her lower lip until she had beaten the urge to cry. If Polyam saw emotion, she would know that Daja was sensitive about Trader food, and she would have the advantage when they bargained. At last the girl took up the threadbare linen napkin Polyam had supplied and spread it over her crossed legs. “I really shouldn’t,” she said, as good manners dictated.
Polyam was very carefully staring at the table. “It is a poor effort, I know, but my mother’s sister would be shamed to tears if I returned this uneaten.”
Daja picked up one of each thing, arranging the food on her plate. When she finished her choices, Polyam followed suit. Carefully Daja lifted a tiny pickled onion to her lips and bit down, savoring the tart juice and the vegetable’s crispness.
Little Bear whined. Daja glanced at him: he was still in the same position at the edge of the dropcloth, but his tail waved slowly. He whined again.
Something made her look past him. Briar and Tris watched her with nearly the same expression on their faces as the dog. Sandry was too well-behaved to be caught staring. Lark’s back was to them as she helped Sandry to pull the sticks and threads of the new loom taut.
Daja looked at Briar and Tris again; her face twitched. Polyam twisted so she could see what was going on. Tris cut furiously at aloe leaves as the boy stirred bubbling seaweed.
“It would be kaq’s manners not to share,” Polyam muttered. “Will you join us?” she invited the others. Briar walked over immediately. Little Bear sat up, tail thumping.
“This is very kind of you,” Lark said as she and Tris came to sit with them. Sandry joined them once she’d rolled up the loom.
“The people bargaining in Deadman’s District never shared,” admitted Briar, his mouth full of pastry. “They’d let us watch, though.”
“Let us say I have a soft spot for dogs, then,” replied Polyam, scratching Little Bear behind the ears. “And children.”
“Your mother’s sister must have enough zirok in Oti Bookkeeper’s ledgers for the next three generations, if she cooks like this for a trade,” said Daja. “Even my clan leader didn’t cook so well.”
“The head of your clan had to cook?” Tris wanted to know. “Why not make someone else do it?”
“Traders prize cooking as highly as the ability to negotiate better prices,” said Lark. “That’s why formal bargaining includes gifts of food, isn’t it, Polyam? People let down their guard if they’re well-fed.”
Polyam made a face. “It’s not right that a kaq knows so much of Tsaw’ha ways,” she muttered. To Daja she added, “Or that you are teaching them our ways.”
“I was taught your ways by other Traders, when I was just a sprightly young thing,” said Lark.
“She was an acrobat,” Daja told Polyam.
“And a dancer,” added Sandry.
“And she passed the tambourine for coins after they performed,” Tris put in.
“I learned what I know traveling with my parents and my nurse,” remarked Sandry.
“Then where are they now, your mother and father?” Polyam wanted to know, her eye bright with curiosity. “Would they be happy to see their child in the dirt, associating with commoners?”
“They’re dead,” Sandry replied flatly, tracing the embroidery on a cushion with her finger. “Both of them, in the smallpox epidemic in Hatar last fall.”
“When the gods balance the books, mortals weep,” Polyam said gravely. “I am sorry for your loss.”
Sandry looked at her, small round chin thrust out stubbornly. “Besides, Uncle likes my friends. And he doesn’t seem to mind dirt.”
“Gods know we rode through enough of it these last two weeks,” muttered Tris.
“What of you, boy?” Polyam asked Briar. “Where did you learn Tsaw’ha things?”
“In Hajra, in Sotat,” replied the boy, taking another stuffed vine leaf.
“Don’t look at me,” Tris said hurriedly. “My family never associated with anyone other than fellow merchants.”
“You all live in the same house, at a Living Circle temple city?” inquired the Trader.
The four nodded.
“And you are all xurdin?” she continued, using the word for mage.
“Niko found us,” explained Sandry. “Niklaren Goldeye. Daja was shipwrecked, and he found her; I was hidden from a mob in a cellar in Hatar. Briar was being sentenced to—” She blinked, trying to remember her friend’s one-time destination.
“The docks,” he said. When Polyam looked at him, he showed her his X tattoos. “Caught thieving three times—but don’t worry. Anyone that nicks Trader—Tsaw’ha—” he changed the word with a mocking grin—”things gets bad magic on them.”
“And Tris was at another Living Circle temple,” Sandry finished. She didn’t add that Tris’s family had given her away, being too frightened to keep her. Even now Tris hated to hear it mentioned. “Niko saw our magic, that no one else knew we had, and brought us to Lark and Rosethorn—”
“And Frostpine,” interrupted Daja.
Sandry beamed at her. “I wasn’t going to forget him. How could I? They had magic like ours,” she told Polyam. “Well, and he brought me there partly because Duke Vedris is my great-uncle.”
“It’s quite a story,” admitted Lark. “And it grows every day.” She grinned. “Sometimes it’s very tiring to be a part of it.”
“Ack!” cried Briar. Now that the food was nearly gone, he realized his current pot of what he called “oil stew” might burn. Getting up, he ran over to tend it.
“So you were Blue Traders?” Polyam asked Daja.
Seeing Tris open her mouth to ask for an explanation of the term, Daja quickly said, “Those who travel the seas and rivers are Blue Traders. The ones who ride snow or sand are called White Traders.” Answering Polyam, she added, “Blue Traders, on the Pebbled Sea.”
“Speaking of snow, Polyam, didn’t you come here from the north? How were the passes? Is autumn there as late as it is here?” Lark wanted to know.
Polyam refilled Daja’s teacup. “Not in the Namornese Mountains,” she replied. “But the closer we came to here, the more shrunken the snow and ice-fields on all but the highest mountains.”
“Maybe you know what I saw,” said Daja. “There was a river of ice, I swear it! In the higher mountains, about ten or fifteen miles—” She looked around, trying to guess directions from the sun. She pointed. “Southwest. It ended in a barren valley—”
“It looked more scraped than barren,” Briar called from his table.
Polyam and Lark traded amused glances. “You have never seen a glacier before?” inquired the Trader.
“A glacier? A real one?” asked Tris, eager. “Where? Could I see it?”
“There is a small one, probably the one she means,” Polyam replied. “The Dalburz—it flows out of the Feyzi ice cap in Gansar.”
“But this looks like a river, except there are cracks in it,” protested Daja.
“That’s what a glacier is,” Tris informed her. “A river of ice that grows and shrinks, depending on the weather. Lark, phase can I see it?”
“We’ll have to ask Niko,” said the dedicate, getting to her feet and gracefully dusting off her behind. “Now, why don’t we go back to work, so Daja and Polyam can bargain? Now that the ice is broken, so to speak,” she added with an impish smile.
“Oh, all right,” grumbled Tris, struggling to rise.
“Thank you for the blessing and the bounty of food,” Lark told Polyam in Tra
dertalk, with a bow. She drew Tris away, translating what she’d just said. Sandry followed, after a small, polite curtsey to Polyam. Little Bear resettled himself, this time for a proper nap.
For a moment the Trader said nothing, twisting so she could look at Daja’s friends as they settled to their tasks. When she turned back to Daja, there was no way for the girl to guess what thoughts were behind that scarred and yellow-marked face. “They say the ice caps from which the glaciers spring are miles deep,” Polyam remarked. “I have a feeling that your story is much the same—I see only the tiniest part of what is there, for you and for all of them.” She hesitated, then added, “When we have finished our bargain, I will add a packet of tea. I know it cannot be found.”
The offer was a startling one. Their unique tea blend was one of the few things Traders did not include in business deals: while artisans, lugsha, might taste it in a bargaining session, they could not buy it.
At the mention of the reason they were there, both of them looked at the iron vine and the copper plate beside it. Daja gasped. Somehow, a rod in the trunk of the vine had separated from the others, to plunge one end into the plate. The metal around the iron looked soft and crumpled, as if the rod sucked the copper into the vine. On a branch near that rod and the plate, a tiny copper bud had appeared.
Daja got up and walked over to inspect her creation. Gently she turned it—and the plate—over. The thin piece of iron merged with the plate as if they were melted together, and copper striped the iron all the way back to the vine’s trunk. Freeing the plate would be a chore, if it could be done at all. Ought she to ask Rosethorn for help?
“I’m dreadfully sorry,” Daja told Polyam as the Trader joined her. “I had no idea this would happen. None at all.”
Polyam stared at plate and vine, rubbing her scarred ear. “Two gold majas,” she said at last. “Even gilav Chandrisa won’t argue, not when she sees this. And it seems I must find another token to give you, since I will be getting this one back in another form.”
“Please,” Daja said, putting a hand on the woman’s arm. “A token isn’t necessary.”
Polyam’s smile was wry. “First I am lectured in proper bargaining by your friends, then you tell me to ignore it. If we are to do this, let it be done correctly.”
“Besides,” Tris remarked from her seat near Briar, her gray eyes sharp behind her spectacles, “the more unusual this purchase is, the better you look to your caravan.”
“That one could almost be Tsaw’ha,” Polyam muttered.
Daja grinned. “Her family is a merchant house in Capchen,” she explained.
“She’s from that House Chandler? Then I should watch her.” Polyam gave Daja a half-bow. “I must take my news back to the caravan, and find another token. Don’t worry about the furnishings—someone will come for them. I have a feeling they won’t expect me to clean up after this.” With a nod to Lark and the other young people, she left the courtyard.
Soon after Polyam’s departure, Lark called Daja, Briar, and Tris over. Sandry now sat cross-legged on the ground. Her loom was stretched out, anchored at one end by a strap around a table-leg and on the other by the strap around Sandry’s waist.
“What we need to do,” Lark explained, “is map the paths your magic has taken. Remember the thread you were given yesterday? Sandry will weave it here, calling a pattern from the threads themselves, rather than working her pattern out beforehand.”
Briar fished the bobbin of silk from his pocket. It was grimy. “They’re all the same color,” he protested as Daja and Tris produced their bobbins. Daja’s was dirtier than his, smutched with soot; Tris’s was sticky with aloe sap. “How will she tell which is which?”
“Magic colors the threads as part of the spell,” said Lark. “And there’s something you should know. While she does this, Sandry will need your magic.”
“All of it,” added Sandry. “You won’t be able to use any.”
“For how long?” Tris wanted to know. She didn’t like the idea of her power not being there if she needed it.
“For a day or so,” replied Lark. “Once we see how the magics have mixed, Sandry has to separate them again so each of you will have your own power back, and completely under control.”
Lark drew his bobbin from Briar’s fingers. Daja handed over hers. Tris had to think about it for a minute, before she too surrendered her thread.
Once Lark had all four bobbins, including Sandry’s, she put them beside the backstrap loom and drew four new bobbins laden with thread from her pocket. “Carry these until we ask for them,” she instructed, giving one to each of the four. “After Sandry maps the problem, she has to weave it right again. That’s when we’ll need fresh silk that’s attuned to you.”
The four young people tucked the new bobbins into their pockets. Sandry then gathered up the bobbins that Lark had put beside her. Taking the ends of all four threads, she twisted them together and began to wind them onto a shuttle.
“Lark, why aren’t you doing this?” inquired Tris. “Is this the kind of thing a new weaver ought to be doing? No offense,” she added to Sandry, who only grinned.
“Except that this particular new weaver has already spun magic, if you recall,” said Lark. “I’ve never done such a thing. I can’t manipulate someone else’s power. And though I’ve woven maps on a loom, it’s been for something physical—searching for the location of a lost child, once, or finding out where robbers had their lair. In tracing things of power, I would be helpless.”
Daja, Briar, and Tris thought this over. Sandry continued to wind thread onto her shuttle.
Lark fiddled with a piece of scarlet thread, then continued. “The mages I’ve known either shape a physical thing to carry their power or they just wield magic as part of their own bodies. I can place a spell of invisibility in a cloak as I weave; Niko sees magic with his real eyes. Rosethorn’s power grows with her plants. Frostpine builds in spells as he works metal. And most of the time that’s how you all do magic—most of the time, but not always. We know Daja put magic onto iron so thoroughly that she changed its nature. Tris sprouts lightning—she doesn’t need to wait for a storm. Sandry was able to spin a thing that did not exist in the physical world, your magics. Briar—”
“Me, I just cook things in the ground,” said the boy glumly.
“Where did the fire to cook with come from?” Lark wanted to know. “Like Tris, you sprouted it.” She hugged him around the shoulders with one arm and let him go. “We should have done this mapping weeks ago, the moment we knew that Sandry had combined your magics during the earthquake.”
“But then the pirates came,” said Tris.
Lark nodded. “And then we were cleaning up in Winding Circle and Summersea, and then the duke wished us to go north with him. Well, I don’t believe we can put it off anymore. This may not be the best time or place, but it has to be done. Are you nearly ready?” she asked Sandry.
The girl nodded. Almost all of the thread from the bobbins was now wrapped around her shuttle.
Lark went to the archway. As the young people took seats near Sandry, Lark hooked one end of the crimson thread she’d been toying with on the right side of the arch. Her lips moved while she drew the rest of the thread across the opening, as if to bar it. Using her thumb, she pressed the free end of the thread to the opposite side, where it stuck. She put her palms together and rested her hands against her forehead, as if she prayed. To the eyes of the four, the archway thread began to glow, then burn with a fierce, white light. Lark sighed and returned to them, settling cross-legged onto the ground.
“That should spare us any interruptions. Now. Close your eyes,” she ordered. The four obeyed. “As you meditate, pass a thread of your power to Sandry. She will add it to her weaving. Once you know she has it firmly in hand, you can go about your tasks.”
“Is this going to hurt?” Tris wanted to know. “I’ll hate it if it hurts.”
“You’ll feel a tug,” replied Lark. “It shouldn’t hu
rt.”
I wish she hadn’t said “shouldn’t,” Tris grumbled magically to the other three.
Oh, hush, Sandry retorted.
“Breathe in,” commanded Lark.
Counting to seven as they inhaled, the four closed their eyes. Each time they did this exercise, it got easier to track their powers to their sources and to gather them up. Reaching into her magic, Daja obtained a pinch of it. Slowly and steadily she drew it as a wire, twirling it a bit to make it as thin as silk. Tris grabbed a miniature lightning bolt, one that trailed a cord that ended in the blaze of her power. Briar teased out a vine, the thinnest, most threadlike tendril. With her own power wound, one end trailing, around a bright thing that looked like a distaff at her center, Sandry waited for her friends to give her what she needed. She took Briar’s first and joined it to her thread. Next came Daja’s, then Tris’s. Gently she twirled the four cords until they melted together to create a single length.
They felt Lark now as a shimmering presence that offered the shuttle to Sandry. As Sandry wound their power onto the shuttle, Daja, Briar, and Tris retreated into their own bodies and senses, coming out into the real world again. Even with their physical eyes open and all their senses returned, they felt the gentle tug as Sandry drew their magic away.
“Lakik’s teeth, I’m burning!” growled Briar. He meant the pot of oil he’d left on the fire. He dashed to rescue it.
Daja built a new fire in her forge. Once it was burning nicely, she picked up five thin iron rods and set them to heat.
Tris returned to her pile of aloe leaves. When she lifted her knife, she saw her fingers were trembling. She didn’t like the sensation of her magic being pulled from her one little bit. It startled her to realize how much she’d come to take that blaze of power inside her for granted. Not even half a year had gone by since she’d first grasped it; now she wanted it more than anything else in the world.
Gritting her teeth, she picked up a leaf and began to cut.
