“Can’t it wait until tomorrow?” he asked.
“Now is better,” said Daja firmly.
“Time to face the music,” Lark told Niko with a grin. He shrugged and dismounted.
“I believe I’ll take your horse to the stables,” volunteered Rosethorn. “Since you’re staying here with the kids.”
“Coward,” Niko told her. He walked into the cottage and the children followed, Little Bear trotting in the center of their group.
Inside, Niko called up magical light to fill the main room. “You have something to say to me?” he asked, sitting on a chair.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Tris’s voice was harsh with tiredness and emotion. “If you’d even hinted—”
“You, my dear, were adamant that you had no magic. I think that it was the only way that you could bear your family turning you out, if you thought there was something dreadful and alien that was wrong with you.” In the even glow of his light, Niko’s eyes were like black gems. “I feared that if you learned the truth too soon you would reject it, and keep rejecting it.”
“What about me?” Daja asked. “And Sandry, and Briar? Nobody told us, either.”
Niko sighed. “All four of you have endured a very difficult year, in one way or another. My reasoning was the same as it was for Tris; I preferred that you grow into knowing your power, instead of having it thrust on you, to keep from damaging your spirits any more than they’ve been. Were you all that surprised to hear it today?”
“Yes,” growled Briar.
Daja looked at her hands again and remembered Kirel telling Frostpine, “You’re a great mage, perhaps the greatest smith-mage in the world.” “Why didn’t our people know?” she asked. “Why didn’t the mimanders pick me out?”
“Why didn’t that magic-tester know?” asked Tris. She sank to the floor and gathered the puppy into her lap. “He was supposed to be the best in all Capchen.”
“I think I understand a little. We don’t do things like normal mages, do we?” Sandry inquired. “None of us made our toys move when we were small, I bet. Or made pictures for people to see in a fire, or made things glow?” She looked at the others as she said it, trying to see the answers in their faces. “Those are the usual mageborn things. I never did any of them.”
Briar shook his head.
“We’re tested for it when we turn four,” murmured Daja. “They found no magic in me.”
“It isn’t their fault,” Niko said crisply. “Even I had to look very deeply to see the power that’s in each of you, and my specialty is finding things—and people—that are hidden. That’s why I brought you here instead of to the university. There are more mages in Winding Circle whose power speaks through workaday things, plain things, as yours does.”
“So our power isn’t that big or important,” grumbled Tris.
Niko sighed. “It is greater than you think. There is weather, or threadcraft”—he pointed to Sandry—“or metal work, or growing plants”—he pointed to Daja and Briar in turn—“everywhere in the world. People cannot live without any of these things. They may not like it, but they can live without the products of traditional magery, such as love potions and seeing the future.”
“Kirel said Frostpine might be the greatest smith-mage in the world,” Daja said. “That sounds important to me.”
“It is—and Frostpine has searched for twenty long years for a student who shares his gift,” replied Niko. “Any more questions?”
The four were silent. The long day had caught up with them all, and suddenly no magic in the world seemed as good to them as their own beds.
“Then I will see you in the morning.” Niko levered himself to his feet. “It’s time for you to get to work, now that you know what we’re dealing with.”
11
The next day Discipline’s residents grumpily returned to their schedule. All of the humans felt the lack of sleep and the overexcitement from the day before. Only Little Bear, making himself at home—and learning that certain important dog acts were not to be done inside Discipline—was lively that morning.
For Daja the hours until afternoon crawled. She rushed through the dishes, even helping Briar to dry them in her hurry. When Sandry asked Niko why Lark and Rosethorn once again walked a thread-and-herb circle around the cottage, Daja thought she would scream with frustration; she just wanted to get meditation over with. She fidgeted as Niko explained that the circles were only needed until the four mastered the mind-gathering-in exercise. Once they were able to keep their undisciplined power from spilling all over Winding Circle, there would be no more need for magic to contain them as they meditated.
Tris gasped. “You mean ‘Discipline’—this house—doesn’t mean punishment?”
“Well, it can be taken as punishment,” said Niko, with an eye on the restless Daja. “But more importantly, discipline is what you are here to learn.”
That Daja heard. “Sorry,” she mumbled, dark cheeks going red with shame. She did try harder to calm down after that.
Finally the Hub clock sounded the end of the rest period. Daja nearly flew down the road to the smithies. Breathless and drawn by the music of hammering, she walked into Frostpine’s iron forge. Kirel, at work shaping a red-hot strip of metal, nodded.
Frostpine waved the girl over to where he lounged against the long counter. “I understand you had a lively day at the market,” he remarked with a smile.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked, panting. “You knew I have magic.”
He smoothed his beard with a broad hand. “Learning to work metal is more important,” he said flatly. When Daja blinked at him, not understanding, the smith began to pace. “This—odd power that I have, that you have, it’s not like that of university mages. They draw a design on the ground, mumble a few words, and get results. Not us. Our magic only works as well as the things it passes through. If you can’t bring a forge fire to white heat with a bellows, or work an iron bar so that it won’t break on impact, or melt down ores without removing the dross—” He shrugged. “The magic is only as strong as your fire or metal. It’s only as pure as the ore you melt down. Before you become a mage, you must be a smith. You must work metal and magic together.” He stopped and blinked. “I made a speech, didn’t I?”
For a moment, she didn’t understand what he’d said last. His words had sounded a note so deep inside Daja that her bones still rang with it.
Frostpine cupped her face in his hands. “Daja?”
She took a deep breath. “I want to learn. I want to learn everything.”
He smiled at her. “I knew that.” Releasing her, he pointed at the counter. On it was placed a line of cloth-covered lumps. “Come tell me what these are.” When she reached for a cloth, he stopped her. “Before you look.”
“You mean with magic.”
“Use anything except sight. These are common metals, ones you’ve seen and handled in some form. It should be easy.” He drew his hand away.
Daja stepped up to the counter. What was she supposed to do? Nervously, one eye on Frostpine in case he objected, she put her left hand on the first lump, and took a deep breath—then another—then a third.
Did it have a smell? Bending, she sniffed the air over the cloth. The scent was barely present, an acid sharpness. Carefully she rubbed her fingers over the lump and inhaled that tang again. What was that country, in the southwest? They had dropped anchor for two scant days, before her mother decided that there were too many warring tribes for safe trading. She couldn’t remember the name, but she had helped to log the copper jewelry they got in those two days.
“Copper?” she asked Frostpine.
“That doesn’t sound like you’re sure.”
It had been her first landfall with the ship, and the jewelry was beautiful. Her mother had worn a brooch from that cargo until the ship went down.
“I’m sure,” she told him.
Frostpine lifted off the cloth. “Very good,” he said as Daja touched the blobby
piece of raw copper. “Next.” He pointed to the second lump.
She touched it and knew right away, though she couldn’t say how. “Gold.”
He uncovered three small nuggets. “Not surprising, after you drew gold wire.”
Daja picked the nuggets up. They almost sang against her fingers, as if she clutched sunlight. Smiling, she put them down.
Frostpine pointed to the next lump. “And—?”
She smelled the air over it; she pressed her fingers all over the cloth. She knew it, but not by itself. “I give up,” she said at last. “It makes me crazy, because I ought to know, and I don’t.”
“Perhaps you’re getting tired,” suggested Frostpine. “Try that one. If it doesn’t work, you can rest.”
She placed a limp hand on the cloth, feeling like a dolt. She ought to know what each and every thing he showed her was. She ought to!
Forcing those thoughts from her mind, she concentrated on the thing under her hand. It was worked metal; she knew that from the shape, smooth and slightly curved. Her fingers detected bumps that formed a design.
Of course she knew it! She’d handled and stowed plenty of bronze aboard ship. It was marvelous stuff. This bit in particular seemed to hang, glowing, in her mind. Absorbed, she closed her eyes, exploring it with her thoughts. Part of bronze was copper—not only had she learned that years ago, but now she felt the copper in this piece. Moreover, the rest, that part which wasn’t copper, was—tin. In trading classes, she’d learned that bronze was a mix of copper and tin.
She’d felt tin recently.
Daja jerked the cloth off the metal she couldn’t identify before. A small pile of heavy black lumps met her eyes. “It’s tin,” she told Frostpine, gleeful. “Because it’s copper and tin that make bronze!”
Frostpine grinned. “Daja, we are going to have fun together,” he promised.
“Can I play too?” asked a forlorn voice. Unnoticed by them, Kirel had finished the piece he worked on and had come over to watch. He smiled ruefully at his master and at Daja. “I’ll be good.”
That evening, after supper and baths, the residents of Discipline made themselves comfortable in the main room. Little Bear, his belly round with the meal of scraps he had gulped, sprawled on the floor and slept, paws twitching as he dreamed. Bringing her new spindle and the rolags she had prepared that afternoon, Sandry took a chair beside Lark, who did her own spinning while helping the girl with hers. Briar had four plants that he had yanked from the ground by mistake, thinking they were weeds. Rosethorn ordered him to memorize them by sight and scent, and never pluck them again. She herself sat at the table, writing in a ledger. Niko was next to her, writing letters.
Like Briar, Daja had memorizing to do. Frostpine had given her drawings of several types of hammer, each with a written description of its use, to learn within the week. Tris had a library book, one that described the early lives of five great mages.
For a while the only indoor sounds were the scratch of pens, the rustle of paper, and Sandry’s mutterings when thread unwound or a rolag came apart. More noise drifted through open doors and windows: the soft chime as the Hub clock sounded every fifteen minutes or its deeper tones as it called the hour, the muted laughter and clatter as people went by on the spiral road, the night songs of crickets and peepers.
With nearly three feet of freshly spun thread—lumpy, too thick in some places and too thin in others—wound on her spindle, Sandry took a break. Rolling her head on her neck, as she often saw Lark do, she got up and walked around. Returning from a look outside, she discovered that Briar was toying with some stray pieces of wool. He twisted it in his fingers.
“What are you doing?” she asked as he added another tuft of wool to his string. “Your magic’s with plants.” If he didn’t hold down the piece he’d already twirled, it did not just unwind—it sprang apart. When he reached for the tufts he’d collected from her earlier mistakes, they puffed into balls or blew out of his fingers.
“But that spinning looks interesting,” he replied, grabbing more bits of wool. “Relaxing, like.”
Rosethorn looked up from her ledger. “Learning to spin isn’t a bad idea,” she commented thoughtfully. “We need a lot of string for our work. Forget wool and silk, though. Those are from sheep, or little worms. People like us are better off with cotton and flax.” Rosethorn grinned. “They come from plants.”
“Sandry, will you teach me?” asked the boy, still trying to get his tufts under control. “If I can find this other stuff to spin?”
“I’m only learning myself,” she pointed out. “And not very well.”
“I’ll teach you.” Lark wound almost a yard of thin, fine thread onto her spindle. “Sandry’s coming along nicely—”
“I am?” asked the girl, eyes bright.
“You’re learning to control magic and thread, and very well. Briar, you should learn straight spinning, no magic involved. And I should warn you, cotton and flax are harder to work with than wool.”
“Will you teach me the spell you used on my waterspout?” asked Tris.
“It wasn’t a spell,” replied Lark. “I had no time to think of one.”
“Then how’d you do it?” Tris demanded, puzzled.
Lark glanced at Niko, who put down his pen.
“Like yesterday,” he said carefully, picking his words, “we see times when a mage doesn’t know—or doesn’t have time to think up—the right spell. When that happens, open your mind. Think of the objects and processes that you’re comfortable with. That might be a spindle, waves, blows on an anvil, the growth of trees. Lark undid a waterspout. She had no spell for it, but she let her magic speak through her, and it worked.”
Tris shivered. “It’s that simple? Magic’s that simple?”
His thick black eyebrows snapped together in a frown. “Magic is never simple, Trisana. Working it this way has its dangers. It’s crude and sloppy. It burns up power faster than the magic that you take time with and use with control.”
“It didn’t hurt Lark,” Briar objected. “Did it?” he asked her.
Lark smiled. “You learn better ways to handle it as you study.”
“I don’t want you trying experiments with it,” Niko said forbiddingly. “Magic is not your toy. I tell you this only because you might end up in a situation where you are forced to act fast.” He returned to his letter.
After a moment, when it was clear that he was done talking, Tris asked Lark, “Would you teach me spinning anyway? Just in case?”
“If you want to learn, I’ll teach you,” replied Lark. “Daja? Are you interested?”
“If it doesn’t get into my time with Frostpine.”
“I wouldn’t dream of taking you from him.” Lark stared into the distance, thoughtfully. “This time of day will be good for lessons, I think. And once you get the hang of it, the work is soothing.”
“I give up,” Briar announced with a sigh, putting his wool aside. “I hope I do better with plants for spinning.”
“Having a spindle helps.” Sandry crouched beside him, peering at a patch of wool on his shirt front. Pinching her fingers together, she pulled her hand toward her. “Come on,” she ordered the wool. “Don’t make me get stern with you.”
“Hey! That tickles!” Briar cried as the fibers on his shirt wriggled.
“You can’t feel the wool,” she retorted.
“I can feel what you’re doing to it, and it tickles.”
“Hold still,” she ordered. Again she pinched her fingers together and drew them toward her. The loose fibers slowly pulled themselves together into a bunch.
The girl frowned. She almost had it. How had it worked the other day? The feeling had been a familiar one. Searching her memory, she had it: when her power did what she asked, it felt the same as if she had set a hard embroidery stitch and her needle had darted through the cloth to lock it down perfectly.
Taking a breath, she found that same feeling inside, pinched, and pulled. The wool drifted over th
e gap between her and Briar and landed on the hand she had beckoned with. Sandry looked at it and beamed.
“Good,” said Briar. He didn’t realize that she had just done her first piece of deliberate magic. “Now can you get this bit on my britches?”
After that, their lives took on a pattern. Meditation, taught by Niko, came after morning chores. Sometimes they worked in the cottage, but he also took them onto the wall around Winding Circle, to the cave in the cliff, even to the garrets of the loomhouses, where the beat of working looms drummed through the timbers. Individual lessons filled the afternoons. In the evenings, the four read, studied, or worked at spinning. Lark was always present for that. At least one of the other teachers would come, to spin their own projects—Frostpine spun wire from silver, gold, or copper threads—or tell stories, or teach something new. Those lessons weren’t always magical: as the Willow Moon waned, Lark taught them all, even Tris, how to do handstands. In the month of Hawthorn Moon, Rosethorn showed them how to make a lotion to prevent sunburn. By then, the children needed it.
Midsummer was on its way; by the end of Willow Moon, the weather turned hot, and most adults preferred to stay indoors and nap after midday. If they weren’t fighting—and fights often came up between Tris, Briar, and Daja—the four lazed on their home’s thatched roof, wearing broad-brimmed hats and sunburn ointment. Little Bear, denied the chance to follow them onto the thatch, waited below, looking mournful and abandoned.
Their teachers worked them hard. Rosethorn guided Briar in what he felt was an endless round of weeding, weeding, weeding. “It’s early summer,” she said when he complained. “Of course it’s weeding, weeding, weeding.”
As they worked, she told him about each plant—whether it was a flower, weed, fruit, or vegetable; how he could recognize it, what uses it had in medicine, cookery, and magic, if any. He was expected to memorize it all for those times when, out of nowhere, she would ask him to find a certain plant and tell her about it.
“I wake in the night muttering stuff like ‘fennel,’” Briar complained one day on the roof. “‘None in the vegetable garden—most vegetables hate it. As a tea it is given babies to relieve colic.’ What’s colic, please?”