There was a thunk, a sound like a cleaver biting into uncooked beef. Then came a choking gasp. Briar made a face. He’d heard people stabbed when he was a street thief. “The woman’s dead,” he muttered.
Tris gasped.
“If we leave her in the open they’ll find her!” That was Whiner. “They’ll know something’s—”
“Stow it,” snarled Gruff Man softly. “Once we’re clear, the mage’ll light the cord and—”
Something roared and thumped at the same time; light blazed across the sky. The four children flinched and stared out over the water. The Pirate’s Point lighthouse was a pillar of fire. Closer to home, just a mile away, the watchtower that capped Bit Island was a blazing ruin.
The dog, startled out of his nap, began to bark furiously.
2
Finished with his porridge, Briar yawned. He was exhausted. The four had been kept on the wall for another hour after the towers had exploded, answering the questions of first the dedicate guards, then their superiors, then the four’s main teacher, Niklaren Goldeye, and Moonstream, the Honored Dedicate who ran Winding Circle. It meant they had gotten very little sleep by the time the temple’s great clock summoned everyone to the new day’s work.
Beside him, pale gray eyes half-open, Tris patted her remaining porridge with her spoon. She had managed to pin up her mass of wiry red curls, but they were already struggling free of their restraints. She had gotten even less sleep than Briar. Tired as she was, the image of those spouting flames had stayed in her mind, keeping her awake for a long time. From the way the adults had talked the night before, they had no idea of what caused the explosions.
Across from Tris, Daja Kisubo toyed with a plump braid. She didn’t care about how rested she was, or about the explosions. She wanted to start the day’s chores. With those finished, she could go to her teacher, the smith-mage Frostpine, for another lesson in working metal. Today he was to beat gold into thin sheets, and she looked forward to that. She had very good feelings toward gold—not for its value, as her Trader-kin liked it, but for its friendliness and its willingness to forgive mistakes as she handled it.
Next to her, Sandry neatly folded her napkin and placed it beside her bowl. As always, she sat with her back perfectly straight, her lively eyes examining her friends. Daja had to be thinking about smithcraft, Sandry decided. The only time Daja ever looked dreamy-eyed, as some girls did when they thought of a special boy, was when she considered tools and metal and fire. Briar, of course, wanted more sleep. Two months wasn’t enough to turn a night-hunting thief into a daytime gardener. And Tris, frowning into half a bowl of cereal, what was she thinking of? Tris was always asking questions about things. She had asked a great many of them last night and gotten no answers. Perhaps that was why she scowled at her porridge.
“I once saw explosions like that,” Sandry remarked, fingering the small pouch hanging on a chain around her neck. “A shed with some barrels of flour caught fire, and they blew up. The shopkeeper told my parents that if you bottle up flour and then fire it, that’s what happens.”
Tris glared at her with ice-gray eyes. “Flour blew up two stone watchtowers?”
“If you had enough of it?” Briar covered a yawn.
Sitting next to Sandry, their puppy whined.
“You’d think we never fed you, Little Bear.” At the head of the table, Lark ran a hand through her own glossy curls.
“He’s a growing boy, aren’t you?” Sandry gave the pup’s ears a scratch.
“That’s what scares me,” Lark and Daja said together. They smiled at each other.
Sandry grinned ruefully. Little Bear had been small enough to fit in her lap when they had gotten him. Now he could sprawl over her lap and Daja’s and still prop his chin on someone else’s leg.
“Where’s Rosethorn?” Briar demanded.
“Water Temple,” was Lark’s reply. “They still have her brewing cough syrups.” She got to her feet, shaking out her green habit. “She says you know what to do today—”
“Weeding,” was his gloomy reply. “Because in summer it’s always weeding, weeding, weeding.”
Lark smiled. “Well, at least there isn’t as much as there was yesterday, then.”
Briar snorted, half laughing.
“Dedicate Willowwater has asked me to meet her at the loomhouses,” Lark continued. “Why a Water dedicate wants to see me at an Earth Temple building—”
Tris pushed her bowl away. “She’s out of bandages, or almost out,” she mumbled. “Some novice wasn’t keeping track of the stores.” When she realized she heard nothing but silence, she looked around. Lark and her friends watched her with fascination. “I heard it, all right?”
“How come we didn’t hear it, then?” Briar demanded.
“I was by myself,” retorted Tris. “It was before we went out. Maybe you have to be close to me for it to work.”
Lark tucked one of the girl’s tumbling red curls behind a hairpin. “Sometimes I think we haven’t even begun to see your gifts, Tris. We—”
Little Bear erupted in a series of ear-piercing yaps. Scrambling, he raced out the front door.
“It’s someone he knows,” Briar announced. “See? His tail wags him.”
“No, Little Bear, do not jump on me,” a familiar, brisk voice commanded. “No! I said, no! That’s a good—now don’t start again.”
A lean white man with long silver-and-black hair that hung loose around his shoulders entered the house, pointing down at Little Bear. The pup half walked, half wriggled behind him, whimpering happily. He knew there was no way that Niklaren Goldeye would let him jump up and wash his face, but Little Bear still hoped for a chance to show affection.
“Good morning, everyone,” the man said.
Tris ran to him and tugged on one of his spotless white linen sleeves. “Niko, did you find out how the towers were destroyed?”
“Tris, do not wrinkle my shirt,” Niko ordered. “Let go.” His tone was stern, but his black eyes, set deep underneath thick dark brows, were kind. “As it happens, I am here on just that errand. Lark, I’m sorry, but I need her to come with me right away.”
“She has chores,” Briar pointed out. “Same as all of us.”
“Washing dishes,” added Daja.
Niko shook his head. “It really must be now, and I require Tris. We have to look into the destruction of the watchtowers. We may even be gone for midday.”
Tris held very still, fingers crossed, praying to go.
“I’ll wash and dry,” Sandry offered, “if she’ll do the same for me another time.”
Lark put her slim brown hands on her hips. “Is that good enough for you two?” she asked Daja and Briar.
Daja shrugged. “Sounds fine.”
The boy scuffed a foot on the ground and scowled. “I don’t know,” he replied sullenly. “It don’t seem right.”
Tris glared at him.
He looked up and grinned broadly. “I gotta stop teasing you,” he remarked. “It’s too easy. There’s no sport in it.”
Tris stuck her tongue out at him, then ran upstairs for her shoes.
“I’d finish the chores soon,” Niko told Daja. “Frostpine has a special task of his own. I saw him at the main dining hall—once he’s settled a few things, he’ll be up here.”
Daja got up quickly and began to stack the bowls.
An hour and too many stairs later, Tris and Niko stood before what had been the Bit Island watchtower. The walls, which had once soared forty feet in the air, were now two and three feet tall and pierced with gaps. Only the edges of the ground-level flooring were left; the boards were gone, leaving the cellar open to the elements. All of the inner stones were soot-streaked, their surfaces chipped and cracked. Tris noted splashes of crimson where Niko had said the Duke’s men had found bodies earlier. An odd smell lingered in the air: a sharp, smoky odor, charred wood, a hint of burned flesh. Touching a blackened chunk of rock, she got soot on her fingers. Sniffing them, she blinked.
The smell was in the soot.
Niko crouched at the cellar’s edge, staring into it as he smoothed his bushy mustache. In spite of their hot climb, he looked cool and elegant. He made a sharp contrast to his red-faced, sweating pupil, clad in an ill-fitting green muslin dress.
Tris fumbled to re-pin her curls up and out of her way. “It looks like the tower shattered, doesn’t it? But how? A mage?” she asked.
Niko looked up at her. For a moment, she wasn’t certain he’d heard the question. Then his dark eyes softened. He caught a hairpin that leaped from her hand. “I should have made you wear a hat.”
“It would be in the ocean by now. What did this?”
He sighed. “No one should be able to work destructive magic here. The magic protections were in the foundation. This—whatever it was—destroyed even those spells. See how the stones spray outward from here? The force pushed them away from itself.”
Tris crouched beside him, interested. “Where were the protection spells?”
“You can’t see them?” he asked. “They’re all around—what’s left of them.”
She wiped her face on her sleeve. “You see magic, not me.”
He stared at her, shocked. “But it’s easy. I haven’t taught you how?”
Hot and itchy as she was, she had to smile. “Well, last week we were picking up after that earthquake. Two weeks before the quake you were running everywhere, trying to find the source of all the disaster omens the seers were getting. Before that, we studied tides and stars.” She flapped her skirts to give herself a little cool air. “No—I don’t believe we ever worked on seeing magic.”
“Really, I had meant to be organized in your studies,” he muttered. “Unfortunately, events have swept us along … and for now, I still don’t have time for that particular lesson.” He thought for a moment, then stuck out a hand. “Give me your spectacles.”
Tris shrank back. “I need them.”
“It’s just for a moment.”
Slowly she took them off and passed them over. Now she couldn’t even see what he drew on the inner surface of the lenses with his finger.
At last a breeze swept by, ruffling her hair. Three curls promptly jumped out of the pins holding them, and voices came to her ears:
“My boy, I had begun to think that something had gone amiss.” The voice was a man’s, cold, almost metallic.
“Forgive me, my lord. This is the first moment I’ve been sure of my privacy. I’m in place.” Another male voice, and one that was somehow familiar. Not very familiar, like Frostpine’s or Niko’s, but it was a voice she’d heard before. Youthful, sure of itself …
“We are not yet ready to move. Await instructions,” the cold voice ordered. “Do your part, and your debt will be paid.”
The breeze was gone, and the voices with it. The sound was replaced by something that cheeped faintly, a real noise, not one plucked from the air by some weird power inside her. She looked around. Was there a bird up here?
Niko yanked out his handkerchief and gave her lenses a going-over. “Don’t you ever clean these?”
“Of course I do!” She snatched the spectacles when he offered them, and shoved them onto her nose. “Now what?”
“Don’t look directly at that heap of stones,” he ordered. “Look at them out of the corner of your vision.”
Obediently, she turned her head, putting the rocks at the edge of her left eye—nothing. She twisted her head at different angles, without results. Niko made a choked noise that could have been a laugh, or a sneeze. She glared at him.
Silver flickered at the edges of her lenses. With a gasp, she turned to stare. The silver vanished. Slowly she looked up, staring at a cloud as it wandered overhead.
There, at the edges of things, was a glimmer of moon-pale light.
Soon she had the trick of it: to look at everything in general, and nothing in particular. With her eyes just slightly unfocused, she could see flickering bits of light everywhere on the rocks around them, symbols and pieces of letters. “How long will this last?” she wanted to know. “The magic on my specs?”
“As long as you have those lenses,” he replied. “Just remind me to teach you how it’s done before you get new ones.”
Something cheeped again. Tris peered for its source. Was she hearing things?
“Remember I said I needed your help?” he asked, getting to his feet. “To find out what happened, I need to see into the past. It’s one of the great spells—if I do it alone, I’ll be so drained I won’t be able to move afterward, let alone go to Pirate’s Point. If you would lend me some of your magic, it will be easier.”
She blinked at him. “What must I do?” She had lent some of her power to Sandry once, but she had no idea how it had happened.
“I’ll call it forth, as long as you agree to let me do it. Not just in words, Trisana. You must agree from within. You have to trust me.”
She looked up into his eyes, set in their heavy fringe of black lashes. Trust him? He was her teacher. He had seen inside her and told her she wasn’t crazy—after her family had said for years that she was. Because of him, she lived where she was wanted; she could ride the winds. “Sure, Niko.”
He took her hand. Immediately she felt something, a tug, or a twist. Through her spectacles, she saw a thread of light run through her fingers and into his, where it joined a river of fire inside him. The air tightened. Still holding onto her, Niko picked his way around the tower, one hand held palm-out in front of him. Pearly threads spun away from his fingertips, passing through air and stone around and ahead of him. Once he and Tris had come full-circle around the hole in the ground, they stopped. The threads continued to flow over the land until they covered the entire hilltop like dew-wet spiderwebs.
When he released her, she could still see the thread that connected them. It followed Niko as he stepped to the edge of the cellar, drew his belt-knife, and made a cut on both palms. “Any time you need to give a spell extra strength, seal it with blood,” he explained casually, as if it hadn’t been his own flesh he’d gouged. “Since we are mages of principle, we use our own. Some have been known to use the blood of others, willing or not.” He watched as crimson droplets fell into the gaping cellar. “Should I ever hear of you indulging in such practices, Trisana, you will regret the day you met me.”
Tris had one hand over her mouth. She didn’t like blood, and there was something about Niko’s coolly cutting into himself that made her stomach roll. “You don’t have to worry about me, Niko,” she told him once her belly settled. “Honest.”
He smiled grimly. “I trust not.” Taking a deep breath—Tris felt her own lungs expand—he closed his eyes.
A flickering image appeared in front, around, and in some spots even through him. In it, the tower was whole. Two men in hats and cloaks walked into the picture. They carried something large and heavy, wrapped in canvas. A door opened in the tower’s base, and a woman in a guard’s uniform beckoned them inside.
“It’s Whiner and Gruff Man and the Drinker!” cried Tris. “It has to be!” The night before, she and the others had told Niko about the conversation they’d heard on the wall.
The vision wavered, breaking up: Niko was shaking. Tris glared at the glowing line that still ran from her to him, until it thickened and shone more brightly. He took a deep breath and stood straighter; the tower reappeared. The men walked out of it, the uniformed woman behind them. The men’s burden was gone, but one of them carried the free end of a cord that led back inside. He put it down and helped his companion kill the guard. They didn’t see a burst of fire that set the cord ablaze. The flame ate its way along the cord and into the tower as they dropped their victim on the ground and argued. Then came the blast. For a moment Tris thought she could see the tower come apart, stone by stone, each piece etched in fire.
The image vanished. Tris closed in as Niko staggered and put an arm around his waist. Helping her teacher over to a large rock, she got him to sit.
“What wa
s that?” she asked him, when he was settled.
He fumbled for his water canteen and drank from it thirstily. He needed both hands to steady it.
“I don’t know,” he replied at last, passing the canteen to her. “I’ve never seen—or heard—of anything like it, not in all of my fifty-three years.”
They rested for a while, talking. At last Niko got to his feet. “I don’t think I could work that spell again, but I should look at Pirate’s Point anyway,” he said. “Let’s go.”
She was following him to the stairs when she heard the same cheeping sound that had caught her ear before. Now it was close by and growing faint rapidly.
“Wait,” she called. Carefully she searched the tumbles of rock on her left. In a niche made by stones gleaming with traces of magic, she found a birds’ nest. One chick was still alive—she’d been hearing its peeping cries. It shared the nest with a dead brother or sister.
“A starling, I think,” Niko said, looking over her shoulder. “They sometimes have a second brood in midsummer. The parents are probably dead, if they nested here. This one will die soon.”
Tris looked at the nestling. That’s not right, she thought, digging for her pocket handkerchief. He didn’t ask to have his home destroyed. Kneeling, she flattened the linen square on a rock and reached for the nest.
“Tris, think a moment,” ordered Niko crisply. “You can’t save it.”
“Why not?” With a gentleness that she rarely showed to people, she eased both hands under the wad of twined grass stems.
“Because it’s nearly dead now. See how young it is? It barely has pinfeathers. If it lives, it will need warmth and hourly care. It isn’t ready to survive on its own.”
“Then I’ll help. I’ll feed him—I’ll do whatever I must.” Resting her hands on the cloth, she drew them away gently, until nest and occupant rested on the handkerchief. “It’s not his fault his parents got killed.”
Niko sighed, and offered his own pocket handkerchief. “You can return to Winding Circle. As I said, even with your help, I can’t work a second timespell at Pirate’s Point. If the site looks like this, though”—his wave took in the sooty wreckage all around them—”I think we can guess what happened. Hold the nestling up.” He opened his water canteen and carefully poured a tiny amount of liquid into his palm. Gently and precisely, using his fingers as a slide, he rolled a few drops of water at a time into the bird’s open beak as Tris raised the nest for him. When the chick closed its mouth and sank back, Niko told Tris, “Now cover it. Keep it warm and out of drafts—I know that much. For the rest—”