Cold Fire (24 page)

Daja shuddered. “Give me credit for some sense.” She grimaced: her thighs were aching after a long skating session and her climb to Jossaryk House.

“You’ve gotten so good at this!” Nia exclaimed as they glided into the boat basin.

“I had a good teacher,” Daja said. “Speaking of that, how go your studies? I saw you were reading about wood magic the other night.”

Nia beamed at Daja. “Isn’t it fascinating? Arnen gave it to me. He assigns me pages to memorize at home and I recite back to him first thing in the morning. That way I work on the physical part at the shop during the day and do book learning at home.”

“So you like him,” Daja remarked, pleased. It seemed her conversation with Arnen at the Mages’ Society gathering had borne fruit.

“He’s really clever, once you can get him to talk. If it’s just the two of us, he chatters like Jory, but bring in someone else, and he barely speaks.” Nia shook her head, smiling. “At first I thought he was a snob,” she admitted. “But he’s just shy. And I’m learning a lot from him.”

They meditated, changed clothes, and met the family at supper. Afterward Daja joined them in the book room, accepting Kol’s challenge to a game of chess. As they played, the twins lay on their bellies, Jory in front of the hearth, Nia behind her. Their lips moved as they memorized information from small, leather-bound mage books. Matazi worked at needlepoint. One of the family’s dogs lay stretched out between the twins, while the largest of the household cats draped herself across Daja’s feet.

The quiet shattered as Frostpine swept in, carrying a drift of outdoor cold with him. He went immediately to one of the big chairs beside the hearth and fell into it. Jory scrambled to her feet and left the room.

Frostpine glanced at the fire: the logs, which had been crackling peacefully, roared into active flame. Daja set three more chunks of wood on the blaze. As she brushed off her hands, she looked at her teacher and raised her eyebrows. “Done,” he replied to her silent question. “Arrested, the whole pack enjoying the governor’s hospitality. They don’t have heat in the cells, either. Though I doubt they’ll be there long enough to really suffer. The governor wants this ended.”

“Now that it’s done, will you let us know what’s kept you out until all hours?” Matazi asked, choosing a fresh length of scarlet silk for her work. “Or is it still secret?”

“Check and mate,” Kol told Daja. She grinned and shook her head. She had a long way to go before she mastered chess.

“I’ll tell you later,” Frostpine said with a nod at the twins. “For now, you may rejoice that I am among you again.”

Daja rolled her eyes. “If you’re going to be saucy, I’m going upstairs,” she told her teacher. She relented enough to kiss his cheek. “Congratulations,” she whispered. “Good work for an old man.”

She was preparing the washes she would need to set the gloves on the iron forms when one of the maids knocked on her door. “Excuse me, Viymese Daja, but Ravvot Ladradun is here and asks if he might see you. He says he knows he is late-he just came from his business-but asks if you would grant him the courtesy.”

Daja corked the bottle she was about to empty into a bowl. “That’s fine. Show him up, please.”

“Viymese!” the maid cried, shocked. “A man, in your bedroom? The impropriety!”

Daja raised her brows and waited for the woman to remember she was not exactly a Kugisko maiden. Mages weren’t held to the rules of merchant propriety, even young ones. Tris had once remarked crossly that people thought mages had the morals of cats.

The maid looked down. “Viymese, forgive me,” she said “I’ll bring Ravvot Ladradun right away.”

Daja picked up a few things and moved her tools around, though it wasn’t necessary. She always kept her room neat. She also lit more candles. As she put down the taper she’d used to light them, the maid showed Ben in.

“Shall I bring tea, Ravvot?” she asked him. “Cider, pastry?”

“Nothing, thank you,” Ben replied. “I won’t stay long.”

The maid curtsied and left the room, leaving the door open an inch. Daja noticed; her mouth twitched with a smile. It seemed the Bancanor servants meant to look out for her reputation even if she didn’t. Her amusement faded when she looked at Ben-he seemed weary. Part of that was fire and candlelight. They cast his face in sharp relief, making its lines deeper, his expression harder.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come earlier,” he confessed without looking at her. “I wanted to make sure you were all right before this, but the fire wasn’t out till dawn on Moonsday. I was helping with the victims until almost noon on Starsday. Someone did tell me you and your teacher were fine.” He looked at her with concern. “You are, aren’t you?”

“Yes, of course we are,” Daja said hurriedly, in the grip of a sudden wild thought. “Ben, who hates you this much?”

He looked at her, his face oddly still. “Why do you say that?”

Daja sat on her workstool to work the idea out aloud. “You told me you saw it on your way home. I bet if you’d gone home you could have watched it from your upstairs windows. I have to think maybe these fires are being set to hurt you. To, I don’t know, destroy your name in the city, to make people think your firefighting ideas don’t work. Maybe even to drag you into danger.”

“Daja, that’s a tremendous leap of logic,” he murmured. He sat in one of her fireside chairs.

“I’m not so sure. Well, I’m a mage, and they teach us not to believe in coincidences, you see. You’ve met this person, that’s my guess. Can you recall meeting someone who just seemed evil to you? Someone who made your skin crawl? Some you crossed?”

“Evil?” he asked.

“Only an evil person would harm others to get at someone else,” Daja said flatly.

Ben ran his fingers through his thinning curls. “You honestly believe there are people who are either good or evil?” he asked. “How old are you?”

“Fourteen,” she said, frowning. “What has my age to do with this?”

Ben shook his head. “This is the second time I’ve heard you talk like a young person. Usually I forget you aren’t my age. People aren’t that simple, Daja.”

“Of course he’s evil,” she said, impatient with typical adult shillyshallying. “Look at what he does. Or maybe it’s a she-” She stopped, abruptly. Morrachane? His own mother? Teraud’s wife had said she whipped her servants… no. Morrachane Ladradun would never do something that would mean crawling into houses or walking icy, windswept clifftop roads.

So involved was she in thinking, then discarding, the possibility, that she had missed the start of what Ben said now. “-someone tired of being ignored, tired of others trampling on him. Perhaps some rich person treated him with contempt. At least, with Jossaryk House, people will know he did something that no one will forget. He would be less, less evil and more-besieged.”

Daja stared at him. “It sounds like you’re on his side.”

“I’m exhausted, Daja, I can’t think straight.” Ben smiled ruefully. “Mother insisted I work late on the books to make up for my time at the fire. As if numbers are more important than lives… I’ll consider what you’ve said. I certainly have enemies, people who don’t want to hear what I tell them, but I doubt very much that any of them would kill innocents.” He got up and walked over to her worktable, where the living metal gloves stood on their iron bases. In the flickering candle-and firelight they seemed to move.

“They need more work. Try them on if you like,” Daja suggested.

Ben picked one up, weighing it in his hand. “Do I roll up my sleeves?”

Daja shook her head, the beaded ends of her many braids slapping her cheeks lightly. “They’re made so you can yank them on in a hurry. They’ll be a little big even now, because I made allowance for your coat.”

Ben slid on first one glove, then the other.

“I need a few more days to finish,” Daja admitted as she watched Ben adjust the fit. “My control over my magic’s still weak, after Jossaryk House.”

“Was it hard, walking in there?” Ben wanted to know. He turned his hands back and forth, fascinated by the play of light on their mirrored surfaces.

“Fire walking, no,” Daja said, eyeing the gloves. The metal’s edges had blended seamlessly, so it looked as if she had simply poured it over the forms. “But holding it back, with the wind driving it? That took all I had. Actually, I didn’t think I had that much.” And it wasn’t enough, she thought, her eyes stinging at the memory of the baby who had died on her back.

“Why hold it?” Ben opened and closed each glove hand. “Why not just tell it to stop? To go out?”

“That works with tiny fires, not big ones.” She grimaced as she saw the outline of hinges when he made a fist. She had to fix that. The gloves worked, but as a craftswoman she wanted them to look like cloth, and the bulge of iron hinges ruined it. “As long as there was fuel, that fire wanted it. The wind gave it strength. The more it ate and the harder the wind blew, the stronger it got. I wish I could’ve sent it somewhere else or put it out, but I couldn’t.”

Ben picked up one of the hearth pokers, then one of Daja’s rods. The gloves grasped the thin rod as easily as the heavy poker. Daja watched as he twisted his hands to and fro. Hinging the wrists had been the most difficult part. They had turned out well.

“Doing a whole suit will be hard,” she said with regret. “It’ll need an iron scaffolding, almost, with hinges and ball and socket joints. It’ll be heavy. I’ll need all winter to grow enough living metal, and there’s iron and brass to buy. And I haven’t worked out how you’ll see and breathe yet.”

He stood in front of the hearth fire, moving his arms inside the gloves. Now he looked at her sidelong. “Are you giving up on me, Daja?”

She frowned, half distracted by planning. “Of course not! I’m just saying it’s going to take lots of work.”

“People do give up on me,” he said quietly, looking at the gloves. “At first they think I’m fine. They admire how hard I work, how I try to teach others, prevent as much harm as I can… . But then they say I don’t know how to enjoy myself, that I don’t spend enough time with people. Then it’s I’m obsessed, and they’re busy. They find other, easier companions.” He slid off a glove and angled it so the light of a branch of candles illuminated the inside. He peered at it. “It wouldn’t surprise me if you decided this thing was just too much effort.”

His words confused her. What was he talking about? She had meant only to explain the project would take months, not weeks: he needed that suit. Ben seemed to mean something else, something that made her uncomfortable, though she couldn’t say why. “No. I just don’t think you should look for results until spring.” Daja sat again on her workstool. “Did Heluda Salt talk to you? About Jossaryk House.”

About to put down the glove he held, Ben fumbled and nearly dropped it. He put it on the table and held the second glove up to the light. His hands were shaking.

“They won’t break if you drop them,” Daja pointed out. “They’re up to a lot of work. They won’t be of use to you otherwise.”

“They’re just so lovely it’s hard to think of them as strong,” Ben replied. He continued his inspection. “You talked with Heluda Salt?”

“She and Frostpine were working on something.” She wasn’t sure if she could tell him more than that, even if the counterfeiters were captured. “And I met her at the Mages’ Society party. She hadn’t seen the report about the boardinghouse fire, the one you told the mages was set. Did you tell them? I couldn’t remember if you had or if you hadn’t gotten a chance.”

“I pity this firesetter,” Ben said, smiling at Daja. “If Heluda Salt takes an interest, he should hang himself now, or he’ll surely burn later.”

“Is she good?” Daja asked.

“She’s one of the best in the whole empire,” Ben told her. “Certificate and advanced certificate from the university at Lightsbridge, crown honors by the basketload-I’m impressed.” Reluctantly he put the second glove on the table. “When will these be ready?”

“I should be done by Firesday.” Daja looked Ben over, making rough estimates of his height, shoulder breadth, waist, legs, and arms. “Should I bring them to your warehouse Sunsday afternoon?”

“Actually, Watersday is better. Come to the house in the afternoon, around one,” Ben suggested.

Daja murmured, “Watersday is fine.” She grabbed a slate and began to write down numbers. Only the major weight-bearing struts of the iron form need be heavy. Perhaps she needn’t use thin iron rods to support the metal at all, but wire cables or even chain mesh…

“I’d best go,” she heard Ben say.

She nodded absently. “The maid will let you out.” She glanced at his head. If she hung the weight from his shoulders, she might create a helm that was also a long sack, a cloaklike bag filled with air. That would solve the breathing problem, if only for short periods. What about living metal coated over a fine mesh? There was still the vision problem to settle, but the suit appeared to be emerging from a tangle of half thoughts and problems.

“You won’t let me down, will you, Daja?” he asked.

She smiled quickly at him, still lost in her plans. He would understand her liking for him was true when she created his suit. He just didn’t know that mages above all understood what it was like to be obsessed. She was as fixed on her magic-most of the people she cared about were as fixed on their magicas he was on fire. “I try not to let my friends down,” she told him.

When she thought to look up from her notes again, he was gone. She didn’t remember that he hadn’t said if he’d talked to the magistrate’s mages.

Over the next two days Daja continued her staff classes with Jory, who began to grasp the idea of waiting emptiness that would open the door to her power. When breakfast was over Daja continued work on her gift jewelry and on her plans for the living metal suit. As the days ended she would go for a nice, long skate to air out her mind.

The first day she timed her return to meet Nia under Everall Bridge as the younger girl came home from Master Camoc’s. The next day she reached Bancanor House as Morrachane dropped Nia off. It seemed that she had “just happened” to be driving past Camoc’s as Nia left for the day.

“I feel so sorry for her,” Nia confided as she and Daja climbed the stairs to the schoolroom. They stood aside as the two youngest Bancanors, free to play outside after their lessons, raced by yelling at the tops of their lungs. Their harassed nursemaid followed, murmuring apologies as she tried to catch her charges.