Cold Fire (4 page)

“What’ll be worse is when the magic-finder works out the magic Nia has and sends her back to you for instruction.” Frostpine seemed to need to ensure that each of his fingernails was clean. “I doubt it would help her confidence in you to know you needed someone else to explain what to teach her.”

Daja sat bolt upright. “I’m not teaching anybody. And I’m not letting a strange mage tell me anything.”

“That much is my fault,” Frostpine said, putting yet another log on the fire. He held out his hand and raised it an inch in the air. Flames spread over the fresh wood in a leap, making it burn quickly. “I didn’t think we’d have to deal with this for years, but the gods like to make a man feel unprepared, so the wisewomen say.”

Daja drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair. “Stop dancing around it,” she said. “I hate it when you take a year to walk a mile.”

“As the discoverer of their magic, you have to teach them,” Frostpine explained. “I did mention the rules, when you got the medallion. Part of the price you pay for it”-he pointed to the spot on her chest where it lay under her clothes-“is that when you find a new mage, you serve in a teacher’s place until a proper one of the same kind of power is found. Sandry wrote you, didn’t she? To say she had a student?”

Daja nodded slowly. “I thought she was being silly, telling me she had to make spells up for this Paeon, or however he calls himself, because there aren’t any other lone dance-mages. And I’m as bad off as she is-I don’t know anything about cooking for Jory, or whatever Nia has. I can’t do it!”

“Don’t panic,” Frostpine said firmly. “Cook-mages, at least, are as common as salt. Magic-sniffers who can see and identify ambient magic aren’t common, but the Mages’ Society keeps a list of those who can do it. Chances are, once you know what kind of magic Nia has, you’ll be able to find a teacher with her magic as easily as you’ll be able to find a cook-mage for Jory. In the meantime, start teaching them to meditate. If Jory ‘s magic is popping out without her knowledge, Nia’s can’t be far behind. They need to learn to control it sooner rather than later.”

The hall clock chimed. It was time to change clothes for supper. Daja levered herself out of her chair. “I have to do all this?” she asked, pleading with him. “Run all over the city for magic-sniffers and teachers and all?”

“Since you don’t want to make a testing device of your own to tell you what Nia has, I suppose you do,” Frostpine replied. “And you must tell Kol and Matazi. They’ll be pleased.”

“Would you be?” Daja asked, shoving her hands into her breeches pockets.

“Now there’s an odd question,” Frostpine said. He had returned to walking the false coins over and under his fingers. “Aren’t you happy you’re a mage?”

“Sometimes,” Daja said as she went to the door. In her mind’s eye she saw herself, adrift in a wash of ship wreckage, straining to reach a floating box filled with life-giving supplies. “And then remember that I learned about my power after my entire family drowned and I got declared an outcast. I wonder sometimes if magic really is a good thing.”

Frostpine looked up at her with a smile. “Well, it was a good thing for me that you came along,” he said. “That should count for something.”

Daja went back to her room, feeling decidedly grumpy. For one thing, changing clothes for the evening meal was the kind of folly practiced by people who had too many clothes they didn’t have to wash. Since it was the custom in wealthy houses Daja changed her garments, but it chafed her spirit.

More than nice clothes, though, Frostpine’s information irked her. It was bad enough that she must teach-she was busy, after all. Just going to a mage she didn’t know to find out what exactly she must teach was somehow worse. She felt as if she had been challenged to do something, and had failed.

The magical testing methods Frostpine had mentioned involved seeing. She had studied something of the kind a couple of years ago. Tris’s teacher, Niko, whose specialty was seeing-magic of all kinds and who taught the four general magic, decided they ought to know how to scry, or to see things that took place in the past, the present, and sometimes the future. Those mages with any talent for it easily saw the present in their scrying devices. Some even glimpsed the past. Occasionally they saw bits of the future, but because the future changed from moment to moment as the present did, those bits were rarely useful.

So Niko had given the four of them a choice of crystals, mirrors, even bowls, which showed images when filled with water or oil. He then tried to teach them different ways to call visions to their chosen devices. Tris was the only one who could do it every time, but she had trouble seeing anything that interested her. Scrying was such a will-o’-the-wisp magic that Briar and Sandry had given up in disgust. The best luck that Daja ever had with it was when she looked for things in a small bowl of her living metal: that was how she had discovered that a kitchen boy was taking Frostpine’s tools. It wasn’t reliable: one bump of the bowl and the image was gone, never to be recaptured. In the end she had discarded the metal she’d used in the bowl. It continued to flicker with images long after she gave up scrying, and she couldn’t use the metal for anything else.

Daja stopped changing into supper clothes halfway and sat at her worktable, pulling a slate and a piece of chalk toward her. What if she created a living metal mirror? That would be more stable than a bowl; she could use it over and over. She could take what Niko had taught them and shape the mirror to reflect a precise image of someone’s magic. She scribbled hurried notes. If she remembered everything properly, she had all she would need in this room.

Excited-she would show Frostpine!-she opened the trunk at the foot of her bed. It was covered in leather and secured with leather straps, with the emblem of Daja’s own House Kisubo burned into every side. This was a suraku, a survival box that seafarers packed with food and water against the possibility of shipwreck. The contents of this one had kept Daja alive until Niko had found her. It was her chief treasure and all that remained of her drowned family, so it was only natural that she turn it into her mage’s kit. Inside the copper-lined box she kept magical tools, herbs, oils, and metal samples in small bottles and jars, corked, sealed, and tucked into padded trays. Daja selected tiny vials of mercury and of saffron oil, a slender hollow glass tube, a silver disk as wide as her hand was long, and an engraving tool. These she placed on her worktable.

Next she opened the big jar that took up half of the suraku’s, interior. Its contents gleamed the bright silvery gold of brass. She had started filling it with excess pieces of the metal that continued to grow on her left hand. Later, as she found uses for it, she added brass scraps and drops of her own blood to the jar’s contents: within a day the scraps would soften and blend, giving her a good-sized container of living metal whenever she needed it. Living metal creations had made her rich at fourteen: it was good she’d found a way to create more without having to wait for it to grow out of her flesh. Now she took a bowl and dipped it full, then set it on the table.

Beside the door was her Trader’s staff. The wood was five feet of solid ebony, capped in brass on the top end and iron on the butt. On the cap she had engraved or inlaid signs in wire, telling her story to anyone who read Trader symbols. Here was her survival of the sinking of her family’s ship; her time as an outcast; her rescue of a Trader caravan during a forest fire; the end of her outcast status; and her present life as a mage with whom Traders could buy and sell in honor.

It was also very useful for defending herself, as Traders had done for centuries, and for creating circles of protection. Extending her power through the ebony, Daja drew a circle around her worktable, leaving herself plenty of room. Once done, she leaned her staff against her chair and closed her eyes, sliding into the core of her power. She raised a barrier until she was enclosed in a silvery bubble that would allow no scrap of her power to leak out. In her second year as a mage, she had learned the hard way that an incomplete circle resulted in the most interesting kinds of damage wherever her power met someone else’s magic.

Her protective globe completed, she opened her eyes and smiled. She liked to be enveloped by her magic. As a very young girl she’d had a favorite blanket that made her feel warm and safe. Her protections seemed much like the blanket, though she had never told anyone that.

Now she was ready. Daja sat down and reached for her silver disk.

Leaving her room with her completed mirror in hand, Daja heard her belly complain. Passing the hall clock downstairs, she saw why: it was two hours after supper. The family and Frostpine would be in the book room.

When she walked in, everyone turned to stare at her. Of the four Bancanor children only the twins were present, Nia tatting lace, Jory reading a book on the hearth. Frostpine, Kolborn Bancanor, and his wife Matazidah, or Matazi, were all there, Frostpine as close to the fire as he could manage. Kol and Matazi were in their favorite chairs near a table where a tea service already sat.

“Daja, we missed you at supper,” Matazi said, ringing the bell for a maid. “You must be starving.” She was a beauty who never seemed aware of her looks, a quality she had passed on to the twins. Her skin, the color of coffee well lightened with cream, was perfect; her eyes large and dark over a slim nose, and reddened lips, the lower slightly fuller than the upper. She wore her handfuls of dark, crinkly hair pinned up in coils, accented by the topaz drops that hung in her ears. She was dressed in Namornese fashion in a long, sleeveless tunic dress of cinnamon-colored wool with embroidered lilies around the hem and tiny gold buttons that went from collarbone to shoe. Under it Matazi wore a cream-colored undergown with full sleeves and a band collar, trimmed with gold ribbon. Daja fixed the details of her outfit in her mind: Sandry always liked to hear about the latest fashions, and the entire city looked to Matazi for colors and styles.

When a maid answered the bell, Matazi asked her to bring a tray for Daja. The maid bobbed a curtsey and left as Nia offered tea to Daja. With an inner sigh, Daja accepted. Even after three months in Namorn, two in this house, she still was not used to the idea of tea served in a glass cup with a wrought silver base.

“More tea, Frostpine?” Matazi inquired. He passed his glass to her and got a full one in return. From a dish on the table at his side he took a lump of sugar, set it in front of his teeth, and drank his tea by straining it through the sugar. Daja watched him do it with a shudder. He liked to practice the customs of the country they were in, and the Namornese drank their tea either that way or by straining it through a mouthful of cherry preserves. Daja didn’t care if it was rude not to follow the custom: she hadn’t eaten the baked sheep’s head in Karang, either.

Jory bounced up to a sitting position. “Were you doing something magical, Daja? Frostpine said you were doing something magical. He said he could tell.”

Daja sat down hard in a cushioned chair, clutching her tea glass to keep it from splashing. Suddenly her knees had gone watery. Her work had taken more out of her than she’d expected-missing supper hadn’t helped. “Yes, I was,” she told Jory. “And of course Frostpine could tell. He’s my teacher.” Holding her glass with both hands to steady it, she drank her tea. By the time she finished, the maid arrived with a large supper tray. As she caught a whiff of its contents, her stomach gave a growl that everyone could hear.

“Daja can tell you what she did after she eats,” Kol Bancanor told Jory as the maid put dishes and utensils on a small table beside Daja’s chair. Daja wasn’t about to argue. She started with the soup, spooning it up eagerly.

“I hear you had a fire in the alley today,” Frostpine remarked.

“A small affair. We’ve grown very casual about these things, thanks to Ben Ladradun. He’s drilled all Kadasep Island in what to do,” said Kol. He was a tall, broad-shouldered, easygoing man with a lean face and very sharp blue eyes. He wore his brown-blonde hair combed straight back. He dressed well because Matazi, a former seamstress, saw to it, but there was little trim on his plain brown wool coat and breeches or on his white, full-sleeved shirt. His boots were polished to a glossy finish, to the credit of the bootboy, not because Kol took an interest. He told Frostpine, “Three years ago, four, maybe five houses would have caught from that one mishap. Now our people walk around clapping one another on the back and saying ‘That wasn’t so bad.’”

“So this fellow, Ben-?” asked Frostpine.

“Bennat Ladradun,” Kol supplied.

“Ladradun did the island a favor,” remarked Frostpine.

Kol nodded. “Other islands, too. Over the last two years he’s been training firefighters and getting the island councils to clean up obvious fire hazards.”

“It was a wonderful thing, to draw out of such devastation,” Matazi said, sipping her tea. Daja had been relieved to see that the mistress of Bancanor House drank tea like a normal person, without sweet stuff smeared all over her teeth. “Only think, he lost his home, his wife, and his children. They feared for his sanity. He was absolutely shattered. And then off he goes to Godsforge-“

Frostpine raised his heavy brows. “The fire-mage?”

Kol nodded. “Ben studied with him for two years. Then he came back to Ladradun House like a man on fire, if you’ll excuse the expression. He talked, wheedled, bullied, all to get funds and firefighters to train. He’s changing how we approach fires. Other Namornese cities send people here to study his methods.” He shook his head. “Awe-inspiring. Heroic, even without the people he’s saved with his own two hands. If he sees smoke, he’s there as fast as he can move.”

Daja listened as she ate. For the thousandth time she wondered what these three were like when they had first become friends. Kol and Frostpine had roomed together for three years in the capital of Bihan, studying the goldsmith’s craft. They had met the beautiful seamstress at the same time, and Kol had courted and married her after her affair with Frostpine ended. Only on their arrival in Namorn did Matazi learn that the copper-counting student she had married was the heir to one of the wealthiest merchant families in Namorn. Through that and the years that followed they had stayed in touch with Frostpine, and convinced him and his student to stay with them over their winter in the north.