Daja's Book (6 page)

Tris noticed Yarrun's stare and glared at him.

“Something for you?” she demanded.

“That will make enough burn ointment for an army!” he snapped.

Briar put his jar down and wrapped the cheesecloth around lumps of aloe, squeezing out every bit of oil. Only when he'd finished did he look at the older man. “Dedicate Rosethorn thinks it might be needed.” His gray-green eyes sparkled with mischief. “Me, I've learned she's nearly always right.”

“I am sure your experience is vast, boy—certainly I, with thirty years as a mage, and ten years' study before that, cannot hope to equal it.” Yarrun's voice shook with fury. “You—and your teacher!—are wasting your time!” He stalked out of the courtyard.

“People around here think well of themselves,” murmured Daja, striking off a nail.

“We'll fix that,” remarked Briar.

“Rosethorn
is
perfectly capable of taking care of herself,” Lark reminded them. “Sandry, wait. You're winding too tightly.” Going over to the girl, she explained how pulling too hard made the stakes on which Sandry wound her thread lean inward. Sandry nodded, then picked up a mallet and pounded the stakes into a straight line again. If Lark hadn't caught her mistake, she would have finished with a weaving that was shorter on the top than at the bottom.

Daja went to the bellows and gave it a quick pump, watching as strands of fire streamed into the air. They twisted to form a straight trunk, then spread in branches to either side, just as the iron vine had the day before.

They called to her. Reaching almost to the bed of coals, she gripped a pinch of the blue heart-flame in her right thumb and forefinger. Steadily she pulled it up as if she drew thin wire. Starting about an inch above the branching section of fire, she began to weave the blue flame in and out between the orange stems. It was the kind of pattern that Sandry had woven hundreds of times over the summer, the kind of work Daja once used to make a wire net. Reaching the leftmost branch, she doubled back and wove in the other direction. Inside she felt steady and clear, as
smooth as a glassy sea with no hint of a breeze to ruffle it. The fire made sense, handled this way. The blue mixed with the orange where they met, providing a small blue spot at every joining, like the heart of a candleflame.

To and fro Daja walked, drawing her blue fire-thread with her, passing it gently through the orange strands. At last she could go no further. She had reached the ends of the orange stems. While she might have pulled them even higher and woven more, she felt a little odd—light-headed, with hot, dry eyes. With her left index finger and thumb she pinched each loose end of fire into the horizontal blue thread until they formed a seamless blend. Unlike her fire grid of the day before, this was far more tightly woven, with gaps less than the width of her little finger between the fiery lengths. The square's brightness dazzled her eyes. Feeling along its base, she encountered the main stem and pinched it off. The fire weaving came free in her hands.

The moment it was flat on her palms, she knew she'd have to put it down. It was much too hot, not to mention too bright. With a sigh of regret, she laid it on the fire.

The fire went out. The weaving blazed against coals gone dead.

“What did you do?” whispered Briar, awed. He, Lark, and the two other girls were peering around Daja.

She glared at him. “Why are you forever asking hard questions?”

He smiled. “Sooner or later you'll have to be able to answer
one
.”

Daja shoved him, grinning.

Tris bent perilously close to the woven fire, her long nose just inches from it, her gray eyes squinted nearly shut. “Why did the fire go out?” she asked plaintively. Her eyes watered. “You put this thing on the fire, and it went out, but why? Magic in it?”

“Fire needs air to burn,” Niko said, walking over to the forge.

Yarrun was with him. Everyone made way for the two men, who inspected the bright square. “My guess is that your weaving—it is a weaving?” Niko looked at Daja, who nodded. “Your weaving appears to have blocked the air from reaching the coals.” He reached out to touch it, but got no closer than a foot. Wincing, he pulled his hand back. “How did this come about?”

“I don't know,” whispered Daja, holding her fingers out over the square. Its heat pressed on her skin. “It's just that lately it seems like the fire wants me to do things with it. It
wants
me to shape it. So I do what it wants.”

“And yet it's not really fire in and of itself,” Niko pointed out. “It appears to burn, yet does so without needing fuel. I suspect it doesn't even need air, unlike your fire.” He squinted at the weaving, and the four knew that he was examining Daja's creation with his
own power. “It appears to feed on magic, but without destroying it.”

Yarrun, who had been pale, was turning a mottled beet color. “This—this is the Great Square of King Zuhayar the Magnificent. The Great Square, but—it cannot be done in fire or in pure magic. Inks, metals, etched in glass … I have seen all of these, but …” He seemed to be fighting to breathe. “Where are your protective circles? Or runes? What magic can you work if there are no runes to confine the effects or to guide the power of the raising? Niklaren Goldeye, is this your teaching? Magic without direction, without the correct procedures—how can it even exist?”

Lark firmly steered Yarrun to a bench and sat him down. “Get hold of yourself,” she ordered, black eyes flashing. “And stop yelling. You don't look at all well. When was the last time you saw a healer of any kind?”

“I don't need a healer!” he cried. “I need explanations! This—this isn't magic!” He pointed at the forge with a trembling hand. “I don't know what it is, but even you Living Circle mages understand there is a proper way to do things, and a Great Square made in fire is not it!”

“Is he always this excitable?” Briar asked Niko, who continued to study Daja's creation.

“He acts like magic's all about rules,” added Daja, shooting a glare at Yarrun. Lark had wet down her pocket handkerchief and was putting it across the
man's forehead. Yarrun leaned against the wall behind him and closed his eyes. His chest continued to heave; they could see he was talking fast, but at least he had lowered his voice.

“That is the thing about magic,” said Niko, smoothing his thick mustache. “It means something different to everyone. The fire
wants
you to shape it, you say?”

Daja nodded.

“What's this Great Square he's talking about?” Tris wanted to know.

“It is a talisman,” said Niko. “One generally used to draw things like fortune, wisdom, and the like.”

“Goldeye! Are you teaching them by guess and the gods?” Yarrun demanded shrilly.

Niko turned. “Their magic follows no instructional guidelines, or any of the patterns described in
The Encyclopedia of Wisdom
,” he said tartly. “My instinct is that to ground them now in matters of runes, protective rites, and formulas would be to restrict the growth of their power.”

“Of course it will restrict them!” cried Yarrun, lunging to his feet. Lark's handkerchief fell into the dirt. “Without order to their learning, how will they be tested? How evaluated, how licensed? How will they teach? Even the mages of the Living Circle meet proper requirements to be granted journeyman status, and then an initiate's robe!”

Lark thrust Yarrun back down on the bench and
put her own body squarely between him and his view of the young people and Niko. “
Enough
,” she told him firmly. Lowering her voice, she continued to talk to him.

“Don't let him upset you,” Niko told the four softly. “He's old and he's frightened.”

“
You're
as old as him, and
you
aren't scared of us,” Briar pointed out.

Niko glared at him. “Thank you oh so much,” he retorted waspishly.

“It's not like I mean anything by it,” protested Briar. “Nothing bad, anyway.”

Lurching to his feet, Yarrun pushed Lark out of his way and stomped over to Niko. “I'm beginning to think those tales I heard of the last few months at Summersea are true!”“ he cried. “If these four young people are running wild, I'm not in the least surprised to hear they caused an earthquake!”

“That's not true!” cried San dry, clenching her hands into fists.

Yarrun scowled at her. “I doubt that you caused a
true
earthquake—not four
children
,” he said with awful emphasis. “Credulous people have plainly blown the entire story out of proportion as it traveled north. But certainly you appear to be running amok—”

Niko swept past Yarrun, one lean arm snaking around the other man's shoulders. “I had no idea that the tales that reached Gold Ridge were so dramatic,”
he said, talking calmly as he forced Yarrun to keep up with him. “Let's find someplace quiet, and I'll give you the facts of the matter.”

Lark was cross for one of the few times that her charges could remember. “Ignore him,” she told them firmly, once Niko had led him away. “He thinks the whole world should be ordered as he expects it. Thank heavens Niko got away from the university before they made him into someone like that.”

Everyone got back to work without much talk—Yarrun had unsettled them all. Finding that her grid worked as well as a fire to heat her rods, Daja continued to use it: for one thing, it didn't add more smoke to the haze-filled air. Briar finished straining aloe from oil and began to heat the oil and wax to blend them. Tris worked through the basket of aloe leaves, cutting out the moist centers. Sandry finished winding her thread onto the stakes. She and Lark had just transferred the threads to the various long sticks that would serve her as a portable loom when the castle servants brought their midday meal.

T
he midday they got was very different from the sumptuous meal of the night before: hard cheese, cold sausages, bread, and buttermilk. “There's no good complaining to me,” the manservant who brought it announced, though no one had said a word. “It's the same fare we all have, though her ladyship would dine better, if she joined my lady and the other gentry in the lesser dining hall.”

Sandry shook her head and smiled. “I'll eat with my friends, thank you. Tell her ladyship you couldn't find me, if she asks.”

A hint of a smile twitched the man's lips. He bowed to Sandry and left them all to their meal.

“I
hate
buttermilk,” complained Tris once they were alone. “And the water here tastes
awful
.”

“The bread is stale,” added Daja.

“Drought fare,” Lark said. “They need to save all they can for the winter. Things will be worse come spring, if they don't get help from outside.”

“So fix the drought,” Briar said, nudging Tris. “If you can't, who can?”

She made a face at him. “For something that big—something to cover this whole valley? I have to have something to work with, Master Know-It-All. I need wet in the ground, and there isn't any.” The girl shivered. “I feel all thin and scraped, it's so dry.”

“We passed a lake on our way here,” Daja pointed out.

“Did you see how low it was? The lake hasn't enough water to make a difference, and I'd kill whatever's still alive in there. No, thank you!” said Tris forcefully.

“Uncle will help, won't he?” Sandry wanted to know. “He can send grain north, and meat—”

“He'll do what he can,” said Lark. “That
is
why he made this trip. The problem is that Gold Ridge isn't the only valley in trouble. The duke's treasury has limits. His purse must stretch to cover all of north Emelan. And the meat and grain merchants can't afford to make loans—they need coin themselves, if they're to buy trade goods come spring.”

“Can these northerners even repay a loan?” asked Tris, who took an interest in such things.

“That's going to be a problem,” Lark admitted. “Last year, before the drought got so bad, they pledged the saffron crop and the output of the copper mines. This year the crop has failed.”

“The mines are failing too,” Daja said gloomily. “I heard some of the men talking about it.”

“This is too depressing,” Briar said firmly as he finished his meal. “At least we'll be well out of it, back at Winding Circle. I heard the duke tell Lady Inoulia he wants to be home before the snows fall.”

“There has to be
something
we can do.” Sandry looked at the plate on her lap. She'd barely nibbled its contents. Briar leaned over and helped himself to her sausage.

“We're mages,” Lark said gently. “We do what we can, but some problems are too big to fix.”

“Then I wish I weren't a mage,” Sandry replied, her voice low and stubborn. “What good is magic, if you can't use it to help people?”

There was little any of them could say to that. Briar and Tris exchanged looks. They weren't sure they
wanted
to help people for nothing, but there was no way they would admit as much to Sandry.

Not long after he'd returned to work, Briar felt the mildest of cramps. He was shocked, then amused at
his shock. How long had it been since he'd eaten food that hadn't agreed with him? Four months? It seemed like four years since his trial and sentencing in Sotat and his trip north to Winding Circle with a stranger called Niko. Only two nights before his trial he'd spent part of the night groaning over a slit-trench, because the chunk of goat meat he'd stolen and devoured had been about a week too old.

There was no sense in complaining—was he a bleater, to whine because the grease in the sausages was off? Instead he excused himself to Lark and the girls and went in search of a privy. A laundrymaid pointed him in the right direction, to another small courtyard where a latrine was set into the outer wall.

Coming out of it, he found Daja kneeling on the ground in the middle of the courtyard. “What're you doing?” he asked.

“Well, I
was
going to use that privy,” she replied absently. “I think the grease they cooked the sausages in had turned.”

“I noticed,” he said wryly.

“But I felt this warm spot….”

He looked at her. She was wearing shoes; he was barefoot. “I didn't feel any warm spots.” He walked over to her and put a foot on the patch of ground beside her hands. “It doesn't feel hot, honest.”

She shook her head, making her braids dance. “It's there, just a little way down—”

Silver light blazed around her palms. She and Briar flinched.

“What happened?” demanded the boy. Now the ground turned warm under his toes. “What did you do?”

“I didn't
do
anything,” Daja protested, sweating. “It just leaped out of me!” Still on her knees, she backed away. The earth was quivering. Something hot was coming up.

The ground where she had been cracked. Steam shot out in a hot, sulfur-smelling cloud, followed by a jet of
very
hot water. Both of them yelped when droplets hit their skins. Warm mist rolled through the courtyard, as heavy as any fog.

A small, dirty hand wrapped around Daja's wrist.
C'mon
, Briar ordered.
Let's go, before we're seen here
!

Since she couldn't think of anything else to do, she obeyed. Once out of the pocket of steam, they saw they were both covered with mud splatters.

“Cleanup?” she suggested. “Otherwise we look guilty.”

Briar nodded, and they dashed for the baths. In the outermost chamber at the foot of the stairs, troughs filled with heated water from the springs awaited those who just needed a quick wash. Both of them scrubbed their arms, legs, and faces, then did their best to remove the stains from their clothes.

“Where'd it come from?” asked Briar, drying his
face and hands on a rough towel. “If you pulled that squirter out of the pipes down here and they're broke, we're in deep dung. And not just with Niko, either.”

“I don't know where it came from,” she hissed, keeping an eye on the slumbering attendant across the room. “I haven't anything to do with water!”

“No more than Sandry does vines, or I do lightning. Come on, feel around. Maybe we can fix the plumbing if you cracked it!”

Daja glared at him, still rubbing her arms dry, then glanced at the attendant. The woman was snoring.

“You need kettledrums to wake
her
,” said Briar.

As if in agreement, the woman snorted and turned away from them on her stool. Now comfortably wedged into her corner, she looked as if she might not stir until the supper bell was rung.

Daja took a deep breath, counting to seven, as she was trained. Briar joined in, closing his eyes as he took up the rhythm. There was her magic, and his, the edges blended together in spots. She let awareness spread, testing for heat where it shouldn't be, or for breaks in the smooth tiles that covered the floor and walls. Metal rang in all her senses: the fixtures in the baths and the pipes. Riding on magic, she and Briar threaded their way through the ground until they found the broad pool of mineral-laden water from which the baths were supplied. They drifted around
the immense underground rock chamber the water had shaped for itself.

There Briar split away to let his magic run over the walls. Daja found herself drawn to one of the many springs that fed the pool and dropped through that. She thrust along its length, exploring the walls, discovering a multitude of tiny outlets that bled into the mountains that cupped Gold Ridge Valley.

Sudden heat—much hotter than that of forge or springs, hotter than anything she'd felt in her life—wrapped around her and squeezed. She tried to shout, or thought she did, writhing against that breathless hold. Three months ago she had needed Tris's help to reach the liquid rock that ran far below Winding Circle. Even then they weren't able to touch the lava itself: Tris had called its heat up to where Daja could use it. Now the earth's lifeblood of molten rock and metal had her and didn't want to let her go.

She fought. Heat poured over her, making her edges go cherry red, then start to melt.

A square of blazing white light popped into existence and wrapped itself around her, forcing the lava back. The fire-weaving she had made just hours before was saving her life—or at least, her magical self. Niko was right, Daja thought crazily it doesn't seem to need any air to burn!

Spying a crack in the rock overhead, Daja shot out of her protective blanket, arrowing straight for the
exit. The moment she was free of it, the weaving collapsed, swamped by measureless heat.

Daja zipped through a crack in the earth and into a pocket of water. She was too frightened to stop and get her bearings, or to call for Briar. Escape was the only thing on her mind. Surely there ought to be a way out in this web of seams and cracks, some vent that would take her into open air.

She found it. Coolness washed over her, the gentleness of deep shade: she soared free of the ground. Below her another hot spring bubbled, pool after pool of mineral-rich water and cooking mud. It was cupped in masses of granite. The trees were all pines, which meant she was high up indeed.

For long moments she drifted, letting the cool air ooze through her magical self. Am I the luckiest girl in Emelan or not? she thought. I'd've cooked for certain, if not for a thing I made by accident—by accident!—this morning.

If it
was
by accident, she thought again. I did something almost like it yesterday, just to have some light.

I wonder if squares like those could be, well, magical shields. I'd have to try them out, though—tinker with them, like Frostpine does with gadgets. What uses might they have?

She gave up such thinking after a while. This was something best talked over with her teacher.

Daja rose higher in the air until she could see an
entire complex of pools and mudpots. Where was all this, anyway? Curious, she flowed over the granite rim of the area around the springs and up a smaller hill, where a herd of shaggy white animals grazed. She stopped to look at them, baffled. Never before had she seen such creatures, though they looked much like
very
large, very shaggy white goats. Thin black horns punctuated the top of their long faces.

You look like a collection of grandfathers, she thought, amused.

Reaching the hilltop, she found she was at the edge of a cliff. Below was a rocky valley. A small river cut it in two along its length.

Cold air drifted by. She looked for the source, and quivered with astonishment. Near her end of the valley lay an immense, jagged ribbon of ice. The valley seemed to continue on under it; the mountains that hemmed the valley also limited that frozen river. It stretched back into those mountains as far as she could see. She tried to guess how deep the center of the ribbon went before it reached the valley floor. It must have been hundreds of feet thick.

Now she heard sounds under the whistle of the wind, an abundance of creaks, groans, and snaps. They rose from the deep cracks in the ice-river's surface, as if the ice either moved or had thousands of residents inside, hammering away. Its depths glinted cool blue. Its surface was filthy, covered with scattered rock and dirt.

What could it be? she wondered. And why did it make so much noise?

Daj'?
sounded in her mind. Briar's magical voice was thin and distant.
This is no time to go frisking off! Where are you?

I have no idea
, she replied.
I think I took the wrong way out
.

Wait
—
I'll catch up
, the boy ordered.

She looked at the iceless end of the valley. Where was Gold Ridge castle? For that matter, where were the farms and trees? If the land below had ever supported people, it did so no longer. Brush and reeds grew on the banks of the small river that trickled from the end of the ice-ribbon and lay more thickly on the sides of the valley, but it was all short growth, not very old. A herd of elk grazed in the distance as calmly as if it were full night. These animals weren't used to being hunted.

If she couldn't see the castle, she ought to know at least where Tris and Sandry were. She could certainly feel Briar's approach. Concentrating, she searched for a sign of the other two girls' magic.

There it was, miles away, and hidden behind a granite ridge. Their power was a glow on that horizon, shining through a layer of smoke.

The grassfires were closer to the castle than they'd been the day before.

That old buzzard Yarrun better do what he says he
can, Daja thought grimly. I'd as soon
not
be grilled like sausage for a giant's supper.

Where
is
this place?
Briar demanded, popping from the hot springs to halt beside her.
You're
miles
from Gold Ridge
!

I
know, she said.
Look at that
!

Briar disappeared so quickly she thought he'd evaporated like water in the sun. He'd jumped over to the icy ribbon and was drifting across its surface, visible just as a silver glimmer to her magical vision.

I don't want to go there
, she told him.
It's cold. It won't like me
!

It's just
ice, he protested.

And ice and smiths are supposed to mix?
she demanded, ghosting down the cliff face.
I'll freeze and go all brittle and break
.

Have you ever seen anything like it?
he asked, his voice filled with wonder. He seeped into a deep blue crack.

I liked the hot springs better
, she said. The cold ate into her, making her feel sluggish and heavy.