He looked at the broom and at the dustcloth. “You do?”
Tris went to Briar. “Here.” She ran the cloth over a table, carefully doing the corners. Aunt Uraelle, who had kept her for three years, always checked her dusting, making her do it all over if she missed a spot. “Do flat surfaces this way. When the rag gets dirty, shake it out the window. Now you. There’s a shelf.”
The shelf that she pointed to held a few small objects. Briar nervously poked at the spaces between them with his cloth.
“No!” cried Tris. “You have to pick them up, and dust them, and do the shelf under them! Honestly, you’d think you never dusted in your life!”
“I haven’t.” Who’d guess that people did things to keep their homes clean—or that they’d want clean homes in the first place? he thought.
“Me neither,” called Sandry from the washtub.
Tris pushed her spectacles up on her nose. “But—”
“We had servants,” explained the other girl.
Briar shrugged. “I didn’t have a house. Maybe my dam had a room, but she died years ago. The Thief-Lord wasn’t what you’d call a bear for housekeeping.”
“Mila bless us!” Tris said. “Well, then, watch me.” Carefully she lifted the vase that Briar had tried to work around and dusted it. “See? And before you put it back—” She briskly ran the cloth over the spot where the vase had been, then returned it to its former position. Handing the cloth to the boy, she pointed to the dog statuette that was next on the shelf. “Now you.”
Once he was dusting well enough to suit her, she went to the dishes that Sandry had washed and began to rinse and dry them. Shaking her head, she muttered to the other girl, “No house! As well as live among savages!”
“We had fine tunnels underground,” Briar remarked. His back was to them as he dusted, so he couldn’t see Tris’s glare. “If you didn’t mind rats. My mate Slug, he trained a rat to bite the toes of merchant folk. You should’ve seen them jump! Smart rat, eh?”
“I don’t think it’s funny!” Tris told Sandry, who giggled helplessly. After that, Tris kept her opinions about Briar’s upbringing to herself.
The boy grinned and set about dusting the window ledges.
That morning Niko held their class in meditation at Discipline. Before they started, Lark and Rosethorn did an odd thing: they walked a circle around the cottage, Lark going clockwise, Rosethorn counterclockwise. Lark carried a ball of white yarn, letting it unroll until the yarn reached all the way around the house. At the front door, where she had started, she tied the ends together so that it made a closed circle. Rosethorn carried a basket of dried herbs with her and trickled a stream of them in her wake as she walked her own circle. When she finished, the dried leaves and stems formed another O that enclosed the cottage. Only then did she and Lark join everyone else in the main room.
“Why did you do that?” Sandry wanted to know.
“It’s to keep magic from leaking in as we meditate,” replied Niko.
Rosethorn muttered, “Or from leaking out.”
“Everyone,” Niko said, frowning at her, “breathe and count. One, two, three …”
The dedicates sat on the floor and performed the breathing exercise with the rest of them. Today it seemed easier for the children to bring their minds to a pinpoint of concentration. Niko looked genuinely pleased when they finished and told them they had made real progress.
Going outside, Lark untied her yarn and rolled it up. Rosethorn followed. Scuffing her foot through the line of herbs in several places, she broke her circle.
During midday, Lark gave Daja a scarlet armband and a scarlet headband, to show that she was a Trader in mourning. Watching Daja put them on, Sandry looked at her black clothes. Her own mourning was not suited to housework or to carding and spinning wool. Even after she’d used Lark’s wool-drawing charm, her overdress last night still had a fuzzy white coat.
She finished washing the midday dishes, then climbed the stairs. Her boxes were neatly stacked in an attic corner. Opening them, she found her old, everyday summer gowns—a rose muslin and two blue ones, two brown linen dresses, and undergowns in white or undyed cotton and linen. These were the things she had worn last year, plain clothes for traveling in. For a moment she hugged them, breathing in the sweet pea sachet that Pirisi had always tucked into her boxes.
Wiping a hand over her watering eyes—“So much dust up here,” she muttered—she stripped off her black cambric overgown. The rose muslin went on in its place, and she sighed with relief. Light as the cambric had been, this was much more comfortable.
Once she was finished with her things, she looked around. The doors to Tris’s and Daja’s rooms were open—where had they gone? She didn’t think they’d left the cottage.
Turning, she saw a ladder that led through an open trapdoor in the roof. She climbed it and found the other two girls seated on the thatch. “It’s still wet from the storm, isn’t it?” she inquired.
Tris patted the canvas that she had brought to sit on. “Though if it keeps this hot, it’ll be dry by tomorrow.” Lying back, she linked her hands behind her neck.
Daja stood by the chimney, one arm around it as if it were a mast. Shading her eyes, she inspected Winding Circle. “Actually, this is a nice view,” she remarked. “This whole place is built like a bowl. It’s almost the same as the Amphitheater of Heroes in—”
“Zakdin, Hatar.” Sandry made a face.
Tris moved over, offering her a place on the canvas. The noble took it.
“Only there’s no buildings or trees there,” Daja went on.
Quietly Sandry told her, “There isn’t an amphitheater anymore, either. After the smallpox epidemic, they took all the bodies into it, then burned the whole thing. It was only made of wood.”
Hurriedly Tris drew a gods-circle on her chest. “That’s horrible,” she remarked with a shudder.
Sandry tugged a straw out of the thatch. “When Niko and I left, the King was saying he’d rebuild it in marble.”
“It should look nice,” Daja said with approval. “White or black marble, did he say?”
Sandry’s gloom lifted. “I forgot to ask,” she replied with a tiny smile. “I still wasn’t talking very much then.”
“Speaking of you talking—” Daja came to share the canvas with them. “That novice won’t forget you pulled rank on him in front of Crane and everyone. Just like the girls from your old dormitory won’t forget.”
Tris opened a sleepy gray eye. “She did odd things in her old dormitory too?”
“She took up for me,” explained the Trader.
“Remind me to write them a note saying that I apologize,” Sandry replied, tossing her braids back over her shoulders.
Daja shook her head. “Why get in the middle? Briar stole that tree, and it was costly. Minimum I ever saw a shakkan priced for was ten silver astrels.”
Tris clicked her tongue against her teeth, impressed.
“I had to help,” Sandry replied flatly. “He’s one of us.”
Daja blinked. “Is there an ‘us’?”
Sandry looked surprised. “Certainly! Didn’t that thing this morning convince you?”
“I try not to let fights convince me of anything.” Daja lay back.
“And I wasn’t in it, not really,” objected Tris.
“Oh, stop.” Sandry gave her a friendly push. “Why did you go to help, if you didn’t care if they got him?”
Tris blushed scarlet and held her tongue, not wanting to say that she’d half-hoped to see him in real trouble. Should she tell the others that he was at the foot of the ladder now, listening? The warm air that rose through the trapdoor from the house below carried the sound of his breathing to her sensitive ears.
“You’re getting ahead of yourself,” Daja said, yawning. “I don’t want to be an ‘us’ with a bunch of kaqs.”
“Or I with a Trader and a noble and a thief,” remarked Tris sleepily.
“You’ll see,” retorted Sa
ndry. “I know what I’m talking about.”
From atop the Hub, the bell tolled the end of the rest period. Tris heard Briar tiptoe out of the attic as the girls got to their feet. Folding her canvas, she thought, At least he’ll have the decency to pretend he didn’t hear any of that.
“What are you and Niko doing today?” asked Sandry, descending the ladder. “Pass the cloth to me.”
Tris obeyed. “We’re going down to the cove,” she explained, climbing into the attic once Sandry had gotten off the ladder. “He mentioned something about learning tides. And I get to practice my meditation some more.”
“Good luck,” Sandry replied.
“Thanks,” Tris said, her voice very dry. “I’ll probably need it.”
Fretting, Briar watched as Rosethorn lifted his tree from the counter in her workroom. She cupped its small, round pot in her hands, dirt-stained fingers probing the openings in the bottom and testing each bump in the glaze.
“Why are there holes?” he asked, unable to keep still. “Won’t the dirt fall out?”
“They let water drain through as it does in the ground. You put screens over the holes to keep dirt in. Now hush.” Closing her eyes, Rosethorn ran her fingers over the earth in the pot, then over the surface twists that were part of the shakkan’s roots.
Briar’s nose itched. The scent in that room, of black earth, herbs, and flowers, of rain on hot stones, filled his ears and nose, tickling his eyes, pressing on his skin. Opening his mouth, he breathed deep to taste it. Something within him replied to its call, adding moss, briars, and young, twining plants to the feeling in the air.
Fingers tweaked his nose. “Ow!” He rubbed the abused spot.
“Don’t do that,” Rosethorn said, not unkindly. “You’ve gotten them all excited.”
“Gotten who?” He looked to see if his shakkan was all right. To his surprise, there were fresh green buds on some twigs. Glancing around, he saw new leaves on the plants by the windows.
“You know better,” Rosethorn told the miniature tree. “You know very well you can’t keep most of those.”
“You talk like it understands,” Briar complained.
Rosethorn’s eyes laughed at him. “It does understand. After a hundred and forty-six years, it knows more about how it must grow and not grow than we do.”
Taking his hand, she put it on the shakkan’s trunk. A tickling like fire shot through him, making him wish he could roll in gravel and scratch like a dog. He yelped and pulled away. The tickling faded.
“You felt unrestrained growth, the dark side of the Green Man,” Rosethorn said. “If you let that go, the whole plant is weakened. It’s in such a hurry to throw out new twigs that it doesn’t take the time to build them strong. We have to cut off most of this new growth, then clip a few branches and roots. What’s left will be hardier, and longer lived.”
He grabbed the pot and hugged it to his chest. “You’re going to cut it?”
The tree protested: he was bending its twigs. Briar held it away from him.
“Cutting shapes a shakkan. It scratches the itches. Put it on the counter.”
He did as she ordered, warily.
“More than anything else, it needs a new pot. Even Crane should have seen this one is no good.”
That at least made sense. “A bigger one, right?” asked Briar, scratching his itching knuckles. “That one’s too small for a tree.”
“No—a flatter and broader one.”
Gently he touched one of the branches he’d bent, stroking the wood. “But it won’t have room to grow.”
“It’s not supposed to grow, not like you mean. It’s how you fit a mature tree of a century or more into a pot in the first place. Hm.” She thought for a moment, arms crossed, foot tapping.
Briar put his left palm on the tree’s trunk and closed his eyes. He could feel something inside the living wood, like soft fire. He prodded it toward the cold spots that were the shakkan’s withered branches, where its fire was somehow blocked. The fire tried to obey, but the dead areas were too strong.
“I need you to go to the potters’,” Rosethorn said. “And—you’re sweating. Are you all right?”
Dazed, Briar let go of the shakkan and wiped his forehead on his arm. “I’m fine. I was just—thinking.”
“Hmpf.” She looked unconvinced. Pointing to a stack of slates and a box of white lumps beside them, she ordered, “Two slates and a piece of chalk.”
Briar got them. Using the chalk, Rosethorn sketched a long rectangle with holes at each end, then a short rectangle, both on one slate. He guessed that these were for the dish that she needed, though he couldn’t read the writing she put next to each drawing.
As she wrote on the other slate, he rested his fingers on the shakkan’s trunk again. Before he’d itched with raw new growth. Next, he’d felt its pulse. This time he found patience, the slow and steady wait over years in sun and cloud. Eyes closed, he breathed deep of the heavy, green smell that filled the workroom once again. His nerves steadied.
“You need to keep your shakkan outdoors, but close to you. A shelf on your front window will do nicely.” Rosethorn gave him the slates. “This one for Dedicate Watergrass at the potters’, this for Dedicate Lancewood at the carpenters’. Wait for their reply, then come back. I’m not trimming this shakkan—you are.”
Briar gulped, and fled.
All afternoon Sandry labored to spin thread. Carefully she nursed her spindle, usually remembering to twirl it again before it spun in the wrong direction and undid all her work. Her attention—as much as she could spare from the spindle—was locked on her fingers as she tried to feed only small amounts of wool to the thread. There was just one more thing she wanted to do, if only to see whether she had dreamed her last days in the cellar or not.
Taking a deep breath, she tried to think only of calling light into her thread. The turning of the spindle, like a flat top at the end of a string, drew her eye, making her drowsy. She imagined bits pulling free of the sun’s rays, coming to tangle in the wool, twisting to form a thread that was both fiber and light. Here was a glowing patch; another bit of light winked from the work just coming from her fingers. It was time to stop and wind nearly two feet of gleaming thread onto the shaft—
When triumph at her success flooded her mind, the light in her thread flared, blinding her. The wool in her rolag, uneven in the middle, parted. The thread dropped through her fingers. Down fell the spindle, whirling counterclockwise, undoing all her work. Every bit of light in it went dark.
Lark, who was putting a new web of thread on her floor loom, saw the girl cover her face with her hands. “You need a rest,” she told Sandry. “Go outside. Look at the colors you see, and the flowers, and the people. It will go better if you relax.”
“I feel so stupid!” Sandry collected what had once been nearly two feet of light-thread; now it was pieces of carded wool that unspun themselves where they lay. “I know children spin well—why can’t I?”
“Perhaps children practice for longer than a week before they expect to have a proper thread,” suggested Lark. “And they don’t try to work magic at the same time.”
“But I did the magic once before!” cried the girl.
“When you had nothing else to think about. The hammering we heard earlier didn’t help my concentration, either. You’ve been at this too long, anyway. It’s important to rest.” Lark smiled. “Go out, Sandry. The wool can’t run away.”
The girl obeyed, walking onto the slab of rock that served the cottage as a doorstep. Her ears rang; her muscles felt weak and unused. Glumly she looked for the source of all the hammering so close to Lark’s workroom. She didn’t have to look far. There was a shelf of bright, new wood on Briar’s windowsill.
Briar himself walked around the corner of the house, his stolen tree in his hands. Carefully, lovingly, he placed it on the shelf.
Somehow, the shakkan seemed different from the plant he’d stolen earlier. Curious, Sandry got to her feet. Bria
r flinched—he hadn’t seen her there—and turned his face away when she came over to look at his prize.
“Hello,” Sandry told him. The shakkan sported a new pot, a wide, shallow tray with a cool green finish. There were fresh cuts where branches had been clipped off and painted over with tan liquid. The twigs all looked too short, and it took a minute for her to see why: the buds had been removed.
“What did you do to it?” When he turned, she saw tear-tracks on his gold-brown cheeks. “Why were you crying?” Digging in her pocket, she produced one of her black-bordered handkerchiefs.
“I’m not crying,” he growled, and swiped the back of his hand under one eye. Startled, he realized wetness was there. “Pruning hurt us,” he muttered.
“Take it.” Sandry thrust the handkerchief under his nose, thinking, At least it doesn’t pain me when the thread goes to pieces. “Was it a bad hurt, like when someone kicks you, or a good one, like when a healer sets a broken bone?”
He shifted the tree slightly, wanting it to receive a perfect mix of sun and shade. “Never had a healer.” He scoured his cheeks with the fine white cloth. “I guess it was a good hurt, like when I lost my baby teeth.” He offered the handkerchief back to her, and saw the stains and dirt his fingers had left. “It’s a mess. I’m sorry.”
“Keep it,” Sandry replied. “The Hataran lady who bought my mourning clothes got so many handkerchiefs, I think she expected me to cry for years. Can I touch the tree?”
He glanced at her, then at his shakkan. “Don’t hurt it or scare it.”
Gently, she ran a finger along the trunk. Two of the larger branches were loosely wrapped in metal spirals. “What’s this wire for?”
“It helps the tree grow in the shape you want, Rosethorn said.” He scuffed a bare foot—he’d misplaced his uncomfortable new shoes somewhere—on the ground. “Listen, um, thank you for—earlier.” The words were hard to say. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“Of course I did. Maybe you’ll do something for me one day.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” he advised, sounding more like his normal self.