“She noticed,” muttered Tris, following her outside.
The ground stilled almost immediately, but Winding Circle’s residents stayed outside for a while, in case there were more shakes. Many were fearful: it was the first good-sized tremor in over a year. Was it a warning of a larger quake to come?
Tris yawned. Her sickness gone with the shaking ground, she thought the others’ fear was silly. Except for broken crockery and the ruined pine wardrobe, there was little damage—not enough for the fuss that was being made of it, in her opinion. She was also sure there wouldn’t be a bigger shake that day, though she couldn’t have said how she knew.
Looking around, she saw that Staghorn was huddled with the other two dedicates who supervised the main girls’ dormitory, talking rapidly and watching Tris. Straining her ears, the redhead heard, “knew it was coming.”
That was enough. She’d heard people say such things about her dozens of times before. Next would come, “We/I don’t want her living here.” Book in hand, Tris walked toward the rear of the garden. Out of sight of the dedicates, she climbed over the short fence and escaped to Winding Circle’s biggest library.
In the girls’ main dormitory, two weeks after her first meal with Sandry, Daja decided to take a late evening walk before the dedicates called everyone inside for the night. She walked a great deal these days, feeling trapped inside Winding Circle’s twelve-foot-thick walls. She wished she were aboard a sturdy little ship bound southwest, through the Long Strait and the Bight of Fire, into the vast stretch of the Endless Ocean. In recent years word had come of islands in the Endless, filled with strange animals and copper-skinned natives. She would like to see them.
She did not like to see her staff, leaning against the wall between bed and nightstand. Its brass cap gleamed like gold, throwing back her distorted reflection. She was sick of it and of everything it represented.
Leaving it there, she went outside. The sun was below the walls that circled the temple community, leaving shadows to gather inside. She took her bearings. There was the tower the locals called the Hub, dead center in Winding Circle, pointing to a clear sky.
Daja set out, picking her way through the multitude of small gardens that were fitted between every building inside the walls. Though she was trying to think of other things, she couldn’t make herself forget that Winding Circle’s smithies were just a short walk away. For a moment, she thought she felt the heat of forge fires on her skin and smelled the tang of iron and brass.
It had always been an embarrassment to her family, her interest in metalwork. To be interested in it still, while they slept under the waves, seemed disloyal.
She was trying so hard not to think of the smithies that she didn’t know she had company until a hoarse voice growled, “Grab the stinking Trader!”
Daja spun, paying attention now, but too late. Rough arms grabbed her and dragged her between a gardener’s shed and one of the laundries. More hands tried to cover her mouth. She yanked her head away and kicked out with her feet. She hit something hard, and a voice—a boy’s, she thought—yelped.
“Kaq!” she snarled, furious as much with herself as with them. How could she have been so careless?! “Too afraid for a real fight—”
“Shut her up!” someone urged, a girl. She was another resident of the dormitory where Daja slept. “If they hear—”
“Nobody wants you here, Trader!” panted the one who had grabbed her from behind. Daja flailed, trying to yank herself free. “You stink up our air—”
She kicked something else, something soft. Somebody began to vomit.
Light flared, brighter than even sunlight in these shadows: Niko stood in the opening between the buildings and the road, his upraised hand glowing. He had a companion—the assured, worldly woman who was the Dedicate Superior in charge of Winding Circle, Moonstream.
Daja’s attackers—three girls and two boys—ran. Daja herself stumbled and fell when the boy who had been hanging on to her let go.
Hands as dark as her own helped her to her feet. Daja found herself looking into Moonstream’s wise brown eyes. “Are you hurt?” the older woman asked. Her voice was clear, low, and kind.
“Just my pride,” Daja muttered. “I was stupid, and kaqs got me.”
“I’d hoped our boarders were more open-minded about Traders. I’m disappointed that I was so wrong.” Now that she was certain Daja was uninjured, Moonstream’s voice was dry and emotionless. She tucked her hands into her sleeves and looked up at Niko. “Perhaps the girls’ dormitory isn’t the best place for Daja. I’d like her to feel she’s safe where she lives.”
“Discipline, then?” Niko suggested. “No, it’s not punishment,” he hastened to assure Daja. “It’s the name of a much smaller cottage, near the Earth temple.”
“You’ll move there first thing tomorrow,” Moonstream said. She laid a cool, dry palm against Daja’s cheek. The girl smelled a hint of cinnamon on the dedicate’s skin. “Do you think you’ll be bothered tonight?”
Daja shook her head. Trouble at night came only as talk. The dedicates who looked after the girls checked the beds too often for any blows to be struck.
“Discipline will suit you better, Daja.” Niko put an arm around her shoulders. “You’ll have your own room, for one. Privacy can be a blessing in itself.”
I’m condemned to spend the rest of my life among kaqs, the girl thought sadly, returning to the dormitory. There aren’t any blessings left for me.
As she opened the outer door, she heard Moonstream say, “Now—I want to find the ones who did this.”
The only problem with lairing under his bed, as Briar discovered on his third night in the boys’ dormitory, was that there were no really secure exits. Back home, no one could have sneaked up on him as the other boys did now, blocking him on two sides of the bed as they dragged him out through the third. In Sotat, he would have been down a tunnel and into the mazes of the sewers before they’d blocked his main entrance.
He’d been so busy examining the plants he’d stolen that day that he hadn’t heard them come up. I’m gonna deserve my ouches, he thought, gray-green eyes giving no sign of his feelings. Letting a bunch of dung-footed gawps nab me!
Two of them lifted him, gripping him by the arms. The fatty loudmouth from three beds down stood in front of him, hand on one hip. He shoved the first finger of the other hand into Briar’s face. “You stole my cloak-pin, gallows-bait!” he cried. “I want it back!”
Briar knew the pin that was meant; the boy had showed it to everyone the day before. “Me?” demanded the street rat, horrified. “Nick that piece of flash? There’s no pump worth his Bags as would pay more’n a few copper pennies for it!”
“Liar!” cried his accuser. “It cost me two silver crescents!”
Briar lifted his eyebrows. “Silver-gilt paint, tin, and a glass pearl? Then you was nicked, and nicked proper.”
Two of the other boys upended the small clothes chest at the foot of the bed, spilling its contents on the floor. Someone else dragged everything out of Briar’s den and scrabbled through the green bits that Briar had just been examining. “Look at this!” he said, laughing. “Did someone tell you dead plants are valuable, street scum?”
“Here’s wickedness.” One of the pair searching his clothes chest held up two of the knives that Briar had picked up on his journey to Winding Circle.
“Planning to murder us in our sleep and rob us all?” The leader’s finger stabbed forward, poking Briar rudely in the nose.
Quick as a flash, Briar lunged forward and bit down on the accusing finger. His victim screamed as he hung on. The pair holding him twisted his arms up behind his back. Briar got rid of one, kicking his knee till the boy collapsed. Releasing the leader’s finger, Briar smashed the other boy hanging onto him with the back of his skull. His victim fell back, his nose bleeding.
Dropping, Briar rolled away from the boys, one hand going to an ankle-sheath, the other going to one in an armpit. Lurching to his fe
et, he showed them his blades.
“Back up, bleaters, ‘less you want more mouth than you got,” he snarled.
Softness, like clouds, wrapped around his arms, pinning them to his sides. He couldn’t see it, but he felt it as it flowed down his legs. When it tightened, it snapped his feet together, knocking him off-balance. He fought it as he dropped, without result.
A foot rolled him over. He quieted, seeing who stood over him: a pair of dedicates. Both wore the yellow habit of the Air temple, which ran the dormitory, but the hem of the woman’s robe was lined in black.
“I knew what would happen when they let that guttersnipe in!” The male dedicate hauled Briar up by his shirt. “You’re out of this dormitory. If I have my way, you’re out of Winding Circle altogether.”
“What’ve you done to me?” Briar snarled as the woman tried to pry his knives from his fingers.
She smiled. “Don’t like the Shackles of Air, lad?” she asked. “Never saw this kind of magic before?”
Briar went still. Magic? But that’s fakery! he thought, shocked. Then he looked down at his body. Fakery he couldn’t see had glued his legs together and his arms to his sides. When the woman tugged again, he released his knives. The time to fight was over.
“He stole my cloak-pin!” cried his original accuser.
“It cost me three silver astrels!” If his friends noticed the change in price, they kept quiet about it.
Briar sighed. “And I told you, I won’t lower myself. There’s the bleater that nicked it.” He nodded toward the boy who had made fun of his plants. “It’s under his pillow.”
The boy he’d accused flinched. Two boys went to his bed and lifted his pillow. There was the stolen pin, as well as a few small treasures belonging to the other boys.
“He put them there!” cried the real thief. “He—he knew we were on his trail, and—and he put them on my bed!”
“Will you swear to that before a truthsayer?” asked the female dedicate. “One of the best is here visiting Honored Moonstream. I’d love to see the spells he uses.”
The thief swallowed hard and shook his head.
“Whatever else, I want him out of here,” the man holding Briar snapped. He shook the boy hard. “Knives have no place in a boys’ dormitory!”
“Depends on the dormitory,” muttered Briar. The invisible bonds around his legs vanished, and the two dedicates steered him roughly toward the door.
Tris Chandler leaned on the windowsill in Winding Circle’s administration building, glaring at the clouds. Through the closed door of the Dedicate Superior’s office, she heard Staghorn’s whine. The dedicate wanted her out of the girls’ dormitory.
Here I go again, Tris thought angrily. We don’t want you—move along.
Storm clouds rolled by, heavy with rain and thunder. Lightning danced in them, growing as it skipped from curve to curve, gaining strength with each bounce. She could almost smell its pale, cold scent;the hairs on her arms prickled with its closeness….
Crrracckkk!
The bolt struck ten feet away, crisping a sapling tree. The girl’s ears rang; every hair on her head stood upright. In the office, Staghorn shrieked in terror.
Tris smiled.
“Are you all right, Tris?” a light, familiar, male voice asked loudly. “You were looking right at it.”
Trying to get her wiry red curls to flatten, Tris ignored Niko.
“It’s curious to see lightning hit a small tree where there are tall ones, or buildings, at hand,” he added now.
Tris pushed her spectacles higher on her long nose and turned to glare at her former traveling companion. She had to lean back to do it; he was a foot and a half taller than her own four feet four inches. “What have buildings and trees to do with it?” she demanded.
“Lightning strikes what’s nearest the clouds,” he replied.
“Does it strike the Hub?” she asked, looking at the high tower next door to Administration.
“It has, but the Hub’s protected. There’s a rod on the clock tower, attached to a wire that runs into the ground. The lightning is drawn to the rod first, and the wire takes its fire into the soil, where it dies. Except, it seems, on a day like today, when the lightning was invited to strike elsewhere.”
“Is that Niko I hear?” Honored Moonstream opened her door and looked out. Her plum-dark lips smiled a welcome; her brown eyes sparkled. “Come in here—I need you.”
Tris turned back to the window.
A hand—warm, solid, almost comforting—rested on her shoulder. Before she could shrug off both it and the comfort, Niko said, “Mages have a very wise rule: before all else, do no harm.”
Before she could think of a reply, Niko entered the Dedicate Superior’s office and closed the door.
The outer door banged; two more guests rushed in. One was a pale, sweating dedicate in the blue habit of the Water temple. Tris knew she was in charge of Pearl Cup, where the wealthy girls lived. Her companion was Tris’s own age. “Sit there, away from the window,” the dedicate told her charge. “I don’t want lightning to hit you until after you’re not my problem anymore—my lady. Gods bless us, that was close!” She thrust her companion onto a bench against the wall, then swept into the office without knocking. “Honored Moonstream, I’ve had enough!” she cried, and slammed the door.
“Did you see that lightning?” The new girl was excited more than scared. “My hair stood on end. I thought she was going to take flight!” If the dedicate’s words had upset her, it didn’t show. “I’ve never been so close to it!”
Tris looked the stranger over. A merchant at heart, like the rest of her family, she knew that the other girl’s outfit—a sleeveless black overdress with tightly fitted bodice and jet buttons, a white lawn undergown with puffy sleeves—was costly. Every inch of the newcomer, from the sheer, black veil over light brown braids, to the gold embroidery on neat kid slippers, proclaimed old blood and old money.
Without a word, Tris turned back to the window. This noble would learn her mistake soon enough. She would be ashamed to remember she had spoken to a merchant girl. “It’s only lightning,” she replied.
The girl came over. “Oh, look, that poor tree got fried.” She leaned through the casement eagerly. The band that secured her veil slipped, making the black silk puff on top of her hair.
Tris smiled wryly.
The stranger turned her head. Sky-blue eyes met her gray ones. Instantly the other girl’s hand went to her veil. “They never stay on straight.” She yanked it off. “And no mirror to fix it with. I hate veils anyway.”
The office door opened. Moonstream walked out, followed by the dedicates who had brought the girls there. “You two are not fitting into the dormitories.” The Honored Dedicate smiled, inviting them to share her amusement. “I am told that, if you were to stay, the other girls will be demoralized. Very well. Today you move to Discipline cottage. It’s by the north gate. I think you’ll both do better there.” She looked at the dedicates. “Pack their things and send them to Discipline. Niko, will you escort Lady Sandrilene and Trisana to their new home?”
The man stepped out of her office. He looked the girls over, smoothing his mustache. “I never thought they would end up at Discipline—I’d thought the school would be enough, once they settled down.” He spoke softly, as if he were thinking aloud.
Moonstream sighed. “Niko …”
“I tried to settle. Honestly, I did.” Sandry’s bright eyes were fixed on Niko. “Would I do better at this other place?”
The dedicate in charge of her dormitory sniffed disdainfully.
“I don’t want to settle in,” muttered Tris.
Niko grinned at the Dedicate Superior. “It’s my pleasure to take them to Discipline,” he said.
4
Niko led them along the spiral road that gave Winding Circle its name, walking its broad loops instead of cutting across them on the many straight paths available. Sandry talked to him, walking backward part of the time so s
he could watch his face. “How long have you been here? I wish you’d told me you were back. It’s nice to see you.”
Niko smiled. “I’m happy to see you, too. You look well.”
Sandry grinned and nearly tripped on the raised border of the road. Tris caught her, letting go as soon as she regained her balance.
“Thank you!” Sandry told her cheerfully. “Sometimes I get so busy talking I forget—are you all right?”
Tris had stopped in the middle of the road. Red-faced a moment ago, she was now gray-white. “Steady her,” Niko said quietly, grabbing one of Tris’s arms. Sandry obeyed.
Beneath them, like a giant turning in his sleep, the earth rolled and went calm. All three of them staggered.
Niko frowned. “Another tremor! That’s how many since the spring equinox? Five?”
“Six,” growled Tris. Her face went crimson when he looked at her. She yanked away from him and Sandry.
“Do you want to tell me about it?” he asked. “I don’t recall you having spells like this on our way here.”
“No, I don’t want to talk about it,” snapped Tris. “I don’t talk to anyone about anything anymore!” She wiped her sweaty face on the sleeve of her ugly wool gown.
Sandry noticed that Niko, about to say more to Tris, looked at her and seemed to change his mind. “I hope these tremors aren’t a sign of a big quake to come,” he said calmly, and urged them forward.
The girls shivered and drew the gods-circle on their chests for protection.
Leaving the road before they reached the temple’s north entrance, Niko opened a small gate and led them down a path to a stone cottage. Framed by gardens, the house was neat and clean, the roof well-thatched, the shutters and door painted dark green. On either side of the main building, the whitewashed stone supported additions. One was built of solid wood pierced by windows. The other was a wooden frame with sheer cloth screening its open sides.
“Wonderful!” Sandry peered at that addition, curious. The cloth was thin enough for light to enter, but no insects. “I wonder how it’s woven?”