“Good. Listen to me: I’ve been asked to do something dangerous.” Crouching before her, he gathered her hands in his. “There’s a masking spell stretched from the Emel Peninsula east, past Astrel Island and Duke’s Citadel. We’re nearly certain it’s covering a large pirate fleet. His Grace wants me to renew and strengthen the spells on the chain that blocks the harbor mouth now, which means working right under the pirates’ noses. I could use your help, but only if you understand the risks. We’ll be covered by powerful magical shields, but it’s one thing to know you’re safe in your mind, and another to know it in your belly.”
“Think about this, Daja,” Lark said, her usually cheerful voice husky with sleep and worry. “You’ll be in a boat—you won’t be able to run away if the fleet attacks. You won’t be able to change your mind once you’re out there.”
Daja looked into Frostpine’s bright, dark eyes. “What kind of shields do we have?”
“A chunk of the spell-net we dug up yesterday. Think about this a minute, girl. I’ll die before I’ll let anything happen to you, but if you’re afraid, I want to know it now.”
She stared through the open door to Lark’s workroom. A year ago, Third Ship Kisubo was about to put to sea out of Hajur when Fifth Ship Kisubo limped into the harbor. She had just survived a pirate attack with tattered sails and a charred aftercastle. One mast had been sheared off in the middle. When they lowered the gangplank—when the crew of Third Ship Kisubo had gathered on the dock to help—the first one to disembark from Fifth Ship was Uncle Tiwolu. His sweat-streaked ebony face was sorrow-twisted. In his arms he carried the bloody corpse of Aunt Zayda, the ship’s captain, riddled with jishen arrows.
Taking a deep breath, Daja nodded. “I’ll do it.”
Rising, Frostpine tugged her to her feet. “Let’s go.” He took a haversack from the table and slung it onto his back. “Our escort’s waiting outside.”
Daja kissed Lark on the cheek, then looked at Rosethorn. The auburn-haired dedicate glared at her. “There’s no need to get emotional,” she informed Daja tartly. “I’ll see you in a few hours.”
Daja grinned. She had expected no other response from Rosethorn. “In a few hours,” she promised, and followed Frostpine out of the cottage. A ten-squad of the Duke’s Guard, armored in black leather jerkins and helmets stitched with black-enameled metal rings, waited for them. One of them held the reins of a riderless horse; the rest were already mounted.
“She’s with you?” The speaker was a short, stocky woman with the twin yellow arrowheads that marked her as a sergeant on her helmet.
Frostpine nodded and swung himself into the saddle, distributing his habit so it didn’t get twisted under him. He then reached an arm down to Daja. When she grabbed it, he lifted her up behind him, ignoring her squeak of dismay. She found her bottom was resting on a hard roll of cloth. “You’ve got my pack?” Frostpine asked the man next to them. The soldier patted one of his saddlebags.
“North gate,” the sergeant ordered, and nudged her steed into motion. As Frostpine’s horse lurched under them, Daja cringed and wrapped both arms around her teacher’s waist. When they switched to a trot, Daja buried her face in Frostpine’s habit and prayed to Koma, for protection from pirates, and to her ancestors, for protection from land-perils like horseback riding. She only knew they had passed through the north gate by the clanging echo of hooves in the tunnel through the wall.
“Listen to me,” Frostpine said quietly. “Are you listening?”
“Yes,” Daja replied. “I’m just not looking.”
“You don’t need to look. Here’s our plan. You’ll sense for weakness in the metal—do you remember how?”
“Yes.” She had learned that earlier in the summer.
“Once we’re at the chain—it’s two chains, actually—our boat will take us along it link by link, from the Tombstone to the Harbormaster’s tower,” Frostpine went on. “If you find a weak spot, tell me—even if it seems unimportant. I’ll strengthen it as I strengthen the spells on the chain.” Reaching back, he patted her knee. “I wish I didn’t have to do this with you, but—”
“I’m the only other one with smith-magic at Winding Circle.” She took her face out of his clothes so he could hear her soft voice. “I’m the only one who can feel things like you do.”
“If things go wrong, I may need to draw on your power,” he added. “It may take both of us to finish the job.”
“Serious magic,” breathed Daja.
“As serious as anything you or I have ever done.”
When they turned off the road to Summersea to follow a steep track downhill to the harbor, Daja hid her face again. Finally they stopped; she could hear the welcome sound of waves slapping rock. When Frostpine dismounted, she opened her eyes to see they were on the southeast side of Bit Island, inside the harbor wall. Torches had been planted in the sand to cast light on a waiting longboat, crewed by men and women in the dun jerkins and breeches of the ducal navy. Daja slid off the horse and ran for the boat, blushing crimson at the soldiers’ laughs. Once aboard, she planted herself quite solidly on the middle bench.
“We need to work on your riding,” Frostpine remarked as he pulled the hard cloth bundle off his horse.
“We need do no such thing,” she muttered in Tradertalk. “I’ll just walk.”
“Walking carries no freight, and a freightless Trader is a poor one,” he replied in the same language, opening the cloth. From it he drew a long roll of silvery mesh. Its mirrors and wire glinted in the torchlight.
Carefully the guards climbed into the longboat. Five had brought long spears. They seated themselves among the sailors and braced their weapons between their knees and feet. Once they were settled, Frostpine passed the metal net aboard the boat. The sailors opened it to its full length and width, then fastened it overhead, using the spears to hold it like a canopy. Once it was secure, other guards took crossbrows and quivers from their saddles and boarded, leaving one of their number to look after their mounts.
Daja was shifted to the port rail, one bench away from the prow. Frostpine was on the same side, two benches behind her, the pack that a guard had carried for him between his knees. When everyone was in place, the guards with spears angled them outward, stretching the metal net canopy until it covered the boat.
“I won’t activate the spell until we’re at the chain,” Frostpine told everyone. “But keep this in mind: once I have, don’t look overhead. It would prove very unsettling, take my word for it.”
Daja nodded hard. She could vouch for how unsettling the spell-net could be!
“Once we’re in sight of the chain, no talking except in whispers,” ordered the sergeant, placing her crossbow on her lap. “And be miserly with those!” Everyone nodded. Living near the sea all their lives, they knew how sound carried over open water.
The coxswain nodded to the pair of sailors who stood outside the boat, ankle-deep in the gentle harbor surf. Grunting, they pushed the boat into deeper water and hopped in. The coxswain whistled softly, and the oars went up; a second whistle, and they bit into the water.
Daja felt better already.
Bit and Crescent Islands passed on the left like shadows. Seeing trees on the islands, Daja realized that it was almost fully light. She huddled down, feeling uncomfortably visible, even with the bulk of the island and the thick harbor wall between them and the menace at sea. There were no glimpses of it to be had; the wall kept it from view.
When they hit larger waves off Maja Island, a strained voice said, “How much longer?”
It was Frostpine. A sailor hooked a hand through the belt on his habit, allowing the dedicate to lean over the side. Taking deep breaths, Frostpine locked one hand on the bench, the other on the rail, gripping them so hard that his knuckles turned white.
Daja had a smile under her hand. “I’d’ve thought you sailed better,” she whispered.
“I don’t. I need faults, to accent my excellence—otherwise—” He gulped. “I would b
e too wonderful to live with.” He gasped and made a dreadful noise deep in his throat.
“Lucky girl, to have so modest a teacher,” joked a guard softly.
“He thinks it’s bad now,” the sergeant whispered, grinning. “He ought to be outside the harbor. That’s where the real sea beats. This here is like boating in my washtub.”
They came out to Maja Island’s lee. Ahead in the gray morning light was the harbor’s mouth, an opening fifteen hundred yards wide. On the west it was guarded by the rising bulk of the Harbormaster’s tower, on the east by the granite lump and smaller tower of the Tombstone. Beyond them, lightning flickered against a mass of black clouds.
Daja gasped.
“It’s a fake,” the coxswain told her, clipped voice mild. “Mage-work.”
Daja tried to relax. If it was a fake, it was a convincing fake of a ship-killer storm.
Something at the foot of the Harbormaster’s tower flickered in the corner of her eye. She frowned and made herself look dead ahead. There, in her side vision, a galley-shaped billow of silvery fire rocked in the lee of the huge tower, inside the wall. Another such shape—a galley spelled to invisibility—lay off the Tombstone. These had to be the duke’s ships, Daja realized, shielded by magic and serving as an extra, secret guard at the harbor mouth. It wasn’t just the enemy outside who believed in hiding in plain sight.
Carefully rising, Frostpine touched the net and hummed a snatch of music. Daja looked away as white fire rippled along the strands of the metal web, calling its many embedded spells to life. A soldier moaned; he’d looked at their canopy. A sailor reached out and yanked his chin, forcing him to take his eyes from it.
Quietly, oars barely splashing, they coasted to the mouth of the harbor. The chain, hidden far below in peacetime, was up.
Daja sighed with admiration. Calling the thing across the entrance a chain was misleading. It resembled a ladder. A pair of chains thirty feet apart formed the sides, and whole logs formed its rungs. The chains were fastened to metal collars on the logs to keep the metal links out of the sea. The ends of the logs were sharp points. Any ship that tried to break the chain would ram itself. And even if a ship somehow broke one of the metal strands, the other would still hold the logs together.
“It’s beautiful,” she whispered. Brown eyes glowing, she looked around at the mute granite of the Tombstone and at the huge, solid Harbormaster’s tower. From there her gaze moved to the broad stone wall that stretched from the Harbormaster’s to Astrel Island, just like the walls that connected Astrel to the Arsenal and those that connected the eastern harbor islands. “No wonder this is the safest anchorage on the Pebbled Sea.”
“Nice and homelike,” quipped a seaman in a whisper.
“Bows,” came the sergeant’s hushed command. The soldiers readied their crossbows, sliding bolts into the notches.
Daja watched the storm. Now she could see the thing was motionless, dead in the water. The lightning that flashed over its long front followed the same tracks, time after time, each ripple and jag the same. Any lingering fear she had that this was a real storm dried up.
As they drew close to the double chain, Daja shivered with awe. Each iron link was two inches thick, nearly a foot long, and inlaid with spell-letters in different metals, each of them a magical working to prevent rust, breakage, trickery, or accident. In its way, it was every bit as complicated and thorough as the spell-net. This was magic of the oldest and strongest kind. If I study for years, she thought, will I have a tenth of the knowledge it took to create these things?
Frostpine rummaged in the pack. He drew out a bottle of oil, breaking the seal on the cork.
“We brought no boathooks,” whispered the coxswain. “How do we pass under the inside chain—?”
Daja looked back at her teacher. Frostpine held a finger to his lips, and signaled for the oarsmen to bring them up to the first length of metal. When they were just a few feet away, Frostpine closed his eyes and smiled.
She wasn’t sure that the seamen felt it, but she did: a thin shiver in the air. Someone gasped. The immense metal links that lay between them and the outer chain rose into the air: a yard, two yards. They ghosted under it, oars flat to their sides—no one dared look up to see if their canopy so much as touched it. Daja heard a clink of metal as the chain lowered itself again.
Frostpine sighed. When she looked back, he was rubbing oil into his hands. Pointing to the outer chain, he made shooing motions at Daja: she was to get to work. Once she was within reach, Daja leaned forward and grasped the first oversized link. With a deep breath, she cleared her mind of questions and let her magic flow. Link by link she explored the metal between the Tombstone and the first log, hunting for any crack or speck of rust that would make it shatter if the enemy tried to ram it.
Her power reached as far as the first log. Glancing back at Frostpine, she nodded. His wrists and hands gleamed with the powerfully scented oil from his bottle. She’d seen him make it several days ago for use on the metal fittings of the temple gates. A mixture of rosemary, rose geranium, and cypress oils, it was steeped in protective spells. It cast a magical glow in her mind that warmed her and made her feel brave.
Frostpine went over the chain that she had just checked, rubbing oiled hands over every link. When they reached the first log, the oarsmen rowed them back to the inner chain. As they approached, it rose again, lowering itself once they were through. When it was back in place, Daja examined it with her own magic, and Frostpine followed her power with his. Once that section was done, the sailors rowed them around the first log and brought them back to the inner chain, where they did it all again.
They were a third of the way across when someone poked her shoulder and pointed. Still within her own magic, Daja looked at the stalled mass of the illusion-storm. Two strange boxes bobbed in the water before it, one on a course that led straight to their boat, the other a thousand feet away, bound for the Harbormaster’s massive tower. They were wood, painted dead black. Something about them made Daja feel very nervous. There was a gleam of spell-letters written under that paint. She didn’t like the way that, every time she tried to give the nearest one a good look, her vision skittered off it like a raindrop on glass. And wasn’t that a familiar sensation? One from an azigazi the day before, perhaps?
“Debris from what’s on the other side?” suggested the coxswain.
“They go against the current,” whispered a soldier. “Movin’ right at us, too.”
“Coming at the chain. That’s what it wants.” The sergeant’s voice was barely audible.
“Daja,” murmured Frostpine, “breathe in. Deep breath. Deep, deep breath. You’re—a bellows. Blow that thing away from us.”
A bellows?
Well, if Frostpine said she could be it, then she would. Those boxes might be harmless, but she didn’t think so.
She thought of the bellows in his forge. It was so easy to handle that even a child could pump up enough of a blaze to melt iron. She breathed in. Her lungs were that powerful, able to draw in air and force it out with the strength of the gale. Her ribs were the metal fittings. All around she felt the warmth of the forge. Open, open, open, she thought as heat flooded her veins. The magic was in her, the magic of the forge. It had taken her over while she worked on the chain, with Frostpine so strong behind her. It had taken her, and now she would work it like hot gold.
Daja leaned over the side, not realizing a guard clutched her waistband to keep her aboard. One last little breath and blow, slow and strong, sending a hard stream of air at the box. It fought her, the puny thing, just like it fought the current, trying to keep to its course.
An oily hand gripped her shoulder: Frostpine had moved up right behind her. She forgot herself, forgot the danger, as her nose filled with the sharp scents of rosemary, rose geranium, and cypress. She filled her lungs with magic.
Leaning forward again, she clamped her chest muscles down hard and fast, slamming the magic out.
The box snap
ped from its course like a pit from a cherry, flying across over a thousand feet of sea to strike its mate. Both spun crazily in the water. As the guard and Frostpine pulled her back, the boxes thumped against the curved stone base of the Harbormaster’s tower.
They vanished in a fireball. An invisible hand pressed them down, pressing the water with them. Something leaned on her eyes and ears. A thundering roar flashed through every bone she had. Caught between the logs of the chain, they might have been driven into them or crushed. Daja blew hard, staying a bellows long enough to keep them from being smashed. A shower of rock splinters and water fell through the spell-net canopy, cutting and drenching them. A splinter opened the skin on her right cheek.
When the smoke began to clear, she saw that some force had taken a giant bite from the curved base of the Harbormaster’s tower.
In her mind, Tris, Sandry, and Briar were suddenly awake and clamoring. What—? Daja, where—?
Not now! she snapped. Outside the harbor the illusion-storm shivered. Light rippled all across its dark edges.
“I need to work through you,” Frostpine told Daja hurriedly. “May I? I don’t believe we should stay much longer.”
The storm clouds were fading. Daja nodded to her teacher. “Do what you must.”
Oily hands gripped hers. White fire raced through her bones, knocking her head back on her neck. Magic blazed around student and teacher in a widening arc, until it struck both chains. Down the chains the power raced, making them blaze. Daja would have screamed by then; she knew Frostpine would have screamed, but their throats had locked tight.
Someone poured a canteen full of water on them.
Gasping, teacher and student let go of each other.
“You can stop,” the sergeant rasped, putting her head close to theirs. “The whole thing’s shining like noon at midnight. Get us out of here,” she ordered the coxswain.
Daja tried to gasp quietly. An ugly headache was starting to hammer the back of her skull. Looking at Frostpine, she could see he was not much better off than she was.