Circle Opens #03: Cold Fire Page 13

  Daja grinned. “Smith apprentices get nails,” she said. “I used to think they start you on boring things so you’ll be half-crazy by the time they show you anything real. We have meditation in the morning, first thing. Don’t forget.”

  Nia’s eyes fell. “No, I won’t.” She reapplied herself to her buttons.

  “Don’t make plans for Sunsday night,” Frostpine told Daja. “We’re invited to the Kugisko Mages’ Society’s first winter festival. Our fellow mages would like to make our acquaintance.”

  Daja grimaced. She hated parties. “How can I say no to the Kugisko mages?” With a nod to everyone, she went up to her room by the servants’ stair, to keep out of Kol’s mother’s way.

  In the morning Jory awaited her in the schoolroom, staff in hand, her breath steaming on the air as she bounced eagerly. Nia was absent.

  “Where is she?” Daja asked.

  “I don’t know,” replied Jory with a shrug. “Do we need her? She’s just going to jump anyway, she won’t really hit.”

  “You both have to learn to meditate,” Daja reminded her, leaning her broom-handle staff against the wall. “Refusal isn’t a choice you get.” She had an uncomfortable feeling that she knew what she had to do. The prospect made her grumpy. She had come to Namorn to learn, not to teach. “Tell me where to find her.”

  Jory shrugged again. “By the time I got dressed she was gone.”

  Daja crossed her arms over her chest. “You know where she is.”

  Jory shook her head.

  “You’re not fooling me,” Daja told the younger girl. “Nia knew where you were, the other day.”

  “She’s the only one who can do that,” Jory said blithely. “I can’t.”

  Daja sighed. She supposed that closing ranks against outsiders did well for the twins. “Don’t lie to me again,” she recommended. “I’ve been lied to by an expert. Compared to Briar, you’re as obvious as a cow in a mud puddle.”

  Jory set her mouth stubbornly.

  It was too early for a contest of wills. “All right,” Daja said. She went to the hearth, which had yet to be cleaned, picked up a piece of charcoal, then beckoned Jory close to one of the walls. “Face that wall and hold your staff in the high block position,” she ordered.

  Jory obeyed. Daja adjusted the girl’s hands, the angle of her staff, and her stance. Once they met Daja’s requirements, she used the charcoal to mark the positions of the upper and lower end of the staff on the wall and the placement of Jory’s feet on the floor. Moving the girl an arm’s length to the side, she marked the correct positions for the middle block on the wall and the floor, then marked them for the low block.

  “The housekeeper will have a fit when she sees those,” Jory said, more interested than sullen now.

  “Send her to me. Your hands in the right position?” Daja checked the placement of Jory’s hands on her staff. “Hold it just like that.” She yanked up heat from the roaring kitchen fire two stories below through her body and into her hand. Then she pinched the staff with her thumb and forefinger, burning the wood to show Jory where to grip. The girl yelped when she felt the heat and saw the wood char, but she held still.

  Daja returned her borrowed warmth to the kitchen, but kept enough to answer a question. He hand was still hot enough to burn cloth, if not wood. She laid it over one of Jory’s hands. The girl smiled. “That’s warm!” she exclaimed. “Do the other one?”

  Daja folded her hand around Jory’s cold fingers and summoned more heat, enough to boil water. Jory grinned.

  “Well, you’ll never need potholders,” Daja remarked. “Have you ever lifted a hot kettle with your hands?”

  “Are you joking?” asked the girl. “Nobody lets me do anything that might scar my hands. Grandmother even gets cross if she sees me wash vegetables — she says my hands will get chapped, and nobody will believe I come from a good home.”

  Daja smiled. “Well, my hand is hot enough to burn, and all you noticed was that it was warm. You can pick up hot pots without fear. I can’t speak for what will happen to your skin when you wash things. Now, I want you to practice ten high blocks with your staff, feet and hands on the marks. Then ten middle blocks, then ten low. When you’re done, if I’m not back, start over and keep practicing. I’m going to find Nia.” She went to the door.

  “But I thought you would teach me fighting with this!” cried Jory. “I don’t want to sit in a circle and think of nothing and try not to scratch any itches. I hate that!”

  “Practice your blocks,” Daja said firmly. “Over and over, with everything just as we marked it.”

  “How can I learn anything like that?” Jory complained.

  “By repeating basic movements over and over, you learn them throughout your body. That’s the first step. Get moving. We’ll talk about meditation some more after Nia joins us.”

  Jory moved into high block position. “You won’t find her.”

  “And adults say young people these days don’t know anything,” Daja retorted, shaking her head. “If only those adults knew that you, Jorality Bancanor, know everything, why, they’d hope for the future.”

  Daja had thought it might come to this, which was why she had her new scrying mirror in her belt pouch. She took it out and cleared her mind of everything, even the sounds Jory made as she practiced high blocks. Daja recalled her sense of Nia, then breathed onto the mirror. Her breath condensed on the metal, then slowly evaporated. When it was clear again, Daja saw Nia in the wood room where she had originally found their staffs.

  Tucking the mirror into her pouch, Daja trotted downstairs.

  She found Nia yawning as she inspected a handful of wooden buttons. They dropped from the girl’s fingers when Daja walked in. “I won’t do it!” Nia cried. She knelt, scrambling for the wooden rounds. “That isn’t meditating! Nobody ever talks about hitting when they meditate!”

  “Then they haven’t met Dedicate Skyfire,” Daja said, picking up a button that rested against her foot. “You can’t decide you hate it after just one try.”

  “Yes, I can,” Nia said, her chin thrust out mulishly as she glared up at Daja. “I hated it even before we were done. I’m not Jory! She always gets excited, and she starts hitting, and she’s always sorry after, but that doesn’t make my fingers not hurt, and I liked the other way, the sitting and counting — why are you looking at me like that?”

  “I just wanted to see how long you would make that sentence last,” Daja admitted. “I honestly don’t think you meant to stop before breakfast.”

  Nia stared at Daja for a long moment, plainly baffled. Finally she said, “You aren’t really like anyone else, are you?”

  Daja smiled. “I am, but I don’t think you’d be comfortable around the people I’m like.” She sobered again. She knew where this was leading, and her own heart was in rebellion. She wanted more time to herself, not less, to work on Ben’s gloves and maybe even a suit for him to firewalk in. It’s not like I wanted to be a teacher, she told herself.

  “Children in Capchen want the same things you do,” her Aunt Hulweme used to say. “They can have them, because they’re only kaqs. Our children don’t get the things kaqs get, so now you decide. Are you a Trader, or are you a kaq?”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to try the staff?” Daja asked, though she knew the answer. “It’s like dancing lessons, only different.”

  Nia’s eyes filled with tears. “I’m sorry I’m a coward,” she said, and sniffed.

  Daja sighed. “You’re not a coward,” she told her second student gently. “You just don’t know what you’re brave at.”

  “I’m a coward,” Nia insisted, tears running down her cheeks. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “Jory says I’m always squeaking and jumping, I always hide, I don’t argue …”

  It bothered Daja to talk so long to a kneeling girl. She knelt and helped to gather buttons. “The bravest person I know is afraid of the dark. She sleeps with a night lamp always, but if her friends are threatened? She s
uddenly thinks she’s a bear twelve feet tall and attacks whoever scared her friends. There are all kinds of courage. You’ll find yours.” She felt a sigh rise in her chest and swallowed it. Nia felt bad enough: Daja would not let the girl think that she was unhappy to teach her. “Though looking for courage when Jory gets worked up doesn’t seem useful. We’ll go back to the meditation we tried first.”

  Nia stopped gathering buttons and frowned. “But Jory. She wiggles until I just want to scream.”

  “I’ll use this hour of the day for Jory’s meditation,” Daja said, offering Nia a handful of buttons. “You and I will meditate the hour before supper.”

  “And I can breathe, and count, and sit, and not get hit with things?” Nia asked, suspicious. “We’ll be quiet?”

  “Quiet as mice,” Daja said. Remembering her first nights sleeping aboard her family’s ship, she corrected herself: “Quieter, actually.”

  With Nia reassured, Daja left to rejoin Jory. She glanced into the kitchen on her way to the back stair. The main hearth fire roared, sending heat throughout the house. Anyussa was rolling out dough for the dumplings called pirozhi as Frostpine stirred a pot of buckwheat kasha cooked with milk and spices. Anyussa laughed at something he said and looked at him in a decidedly flirtatious manner.

  Daja smiled and walked on. She liked the brisk, irritable cook much better, knowing that Anyussa had it in her to like Frostpine.

  “Well?” Jory demanded when Daja reached the schoolroom. “You couldn’t find her, could you? I didn’t think you would.” Her hair was popping out of its braid; her cheeks were red, testimony that she had been exercising.

  “Nia and I made other arrangements,” said Daja as she picked up her own broom-handle staff. “We’ll meditate in the afternoons. You and I will go on meeting here at this hour.”

  “How does learning to fight with a staff help me get my magic under control?” asked Jory nervously as Daja spun her light staff hand over hand, moving out into the center of the room.

  “We’ve got all winter to thrash it out,” Daja told her. “See, the idea is, you get so used to those three blocks and those three strikes that your body will move, but your mind will be free. Then it doesn’t matter if someone tries to hit you. You’ll be at your center, within your spirit and your magic. That’s when you start to learn control, where you pull your magic in or let it out as you need. But for now —” She struck high at Jory, who blocked just in time. Daja went immediately to the middle strike, then the low strike, slowly enough that the girl saw the blows coming and blocked them. They continued to trade blocks and strikes, so preoccupied that when the clock chimed the first hour of the day, both jumped.

  “Right here, tomorrow,” Daja said. Jory nodded and ran to dress for the outdoors. She was due to leave for Blackfly Bog in half an hour.

  Daja leaned on her broom-handle staff, barely winded. It would take longer to teach Jory to grip her magic this way, but she knew they now steered the right course. She also knew she was right to give the twins separate lessons, though she was less happy about that. Still, they were both good girls and they did want to learn. Daja could appreciate that. And she had liked trading blows with Jory. She missed her practices at the temple, and Jory had a natural talent for it. Maybe once the younger girl learned to control her power, she might also like to study more combat techniques. That was something Daja could look forward to.

  After breakfast she spent the morning in her room, working on her fireproof gloves. First she molded living metal as southern bakers shaped flatbread, tossing rounds from hand to hand until they reached the proper thickness. As she worked the stuff, she sent her magic through it, calling on the power of its birth. Then she had dragged a forest fire through her flesh, which had included a hand covered by the molten brass cap of her staff. This metal would be able to endure fires that intense. She also imagined how Ben would use the living metal gloves — to knock burning debris aside as he had at the fire when they’d met, to lift flaming beams out of his way, to grasp hot metal to shift it. She filled the living metal with her idea of Ben as she’d first seen him, laden with two boys he’d carried from an inferno just in time. When she finished, these gloves would happily do whatever Ben asked of them.

  Once she set a piece of living metal on a glove form, she carried the form to the window and stuck it outside. The wind blew hard off the Syth, trying to yank her creation from her grasp without success. With the living metal strip cold enough to hold to the iron form, not drip through the openings between the rods, Daja added the next strip, molding it in place and pressing its edges against the cold section until they blended seamlessly. Then she took the form back to the window.

  She finished one glove by the time the clock struck noon, and went down to take her meal with the kitchen staff. About to return upstairs, she realized she needed physical activity. Handling living metal was more an exercise of power than work for her body. She went into the slush room and looked outside. People had been moving snow all day after the two-foot-deep fall during the night, the Bancanor servants among them. Not only were the paths around the house clear, but the ice of the boat basin was too.

  Daja looked out under the street bridge, where the boat basin opened on the canal. Convict work gangs were hard at work, smoothing the broad strip of ice. Skaters used the ice they had cleared.

  If I want to skate the canal, I have to practice, Daja told herself. She went to the slush room and put on her outdoor clothes, then went to the boat basin to skate.

  When she returned to her room, she felt ten feet tall. She had learned how to turn while still in motion, and she had not fallen once. While she had been telling Jory that her body had to learn movements so well that she didn’t have to think about them, Daja’s own body had done a bit of learning of its own.

  She felt so good that work on the second glove went even more quickly than it had that morning. She finished just as the maids came upstairs to light the lamps. Nia would be home from Camoc’s soon.

  With both forms covered, Daja tied heavy cords to their inner iron frames, opened one of her windows, and hung the forms outside. The night’s cold would set the liquid metal. In the morning she’d remove the iron forms and complete the magic that would keep the gloves in that shape forever.

  Pleased with her day’s work, Daja leaned out the open window. Snow lay thick on the rooftops, in heaps on either side of Blyth Street and Prospect Canal, but there was less than she’d seen that morning or even at midday. People who lived with heavy snows found plenty of ways to handle it, Daja had learned. Servants worked almost as long and as hard as convicts to clear courtyards and walks so that nothing kept their wealthy masters and mistresses from the day’s business. Convicts labored on snow removal in huge crews, shivering in rags and shackles. Daja felt no pity for them. They were criminals and deserved their lot.

  She scooped up a handful of snow: it melted almost instantly. She had raised her personal heat the moment she’d opened the shutters. Daja let it drain back through her until her skin held only normal warmth. This time when she gathered snow, it didn’t melt away before she could eat it. She loved the taste of clean, crisp snow.

  She was working on her jewelry when she heard the clatter of footsteps on the back stair. “Daja!” Nia cried. “I’m home!”

  Daja put her work aside, collected her Trader’s staff, and joined her student. “How did it go today?” she asked as she and Nia climbed to the schoolroom.

  Nia held up a cloth bag. Wooden rods in three shades — pale oak, chestnut, and ebony — poked out of it. “More buttons,” she said. “By the time I’m done, no one will have to make any more for decades. Maybe even a century.”

  “That’s how I felt about nails,” Daja told her as she opened the schoolroom door. “It’s amazing how many of such things people use though.”

  Nia shed her bag and coat and sat on the floor. As Daja drew the circle around them with her staff, she realized she was glad to have this quiet girl to hersel
f for a while. Smiling, she took her own place and enclosed them in a bubble of magic.

  In the morning, after a round of staff practice with Jory and a good breakfast, Daja returned to her room and brought her gloves in from outside. Carefully she slipped her fingers between the living metal and the iron forms, then worked the forms out of their gleaming yellow sheaths.

  At last she set the iron aside and put her creations on. The gloves were much too big, of course, since they were made to Ben’s measure. The cold inside the metal made her flesh ache.

  She took the gloves off rather than call heat to warm her arms. She didn’t want heat near the gloves yet. First she had to embed signs in metal around the cuffs, runes shaped from lead for stability and copper for flexibility. Then she would cover the gloves inside and out with a liquid spelled for more flexibility and stability, and for strength. Only when that was done could they be safely warmed.

  Dreaming of fire suits as she wondered how in the Trader’s name she would create that much living metal, Daja set the gloves upright on their bases. They looked like golden hands grasping for the next rung of an invisible ladder. She went to her suraku and collected her materials. On her way back to her worktable she froze. The gloves were collapsing in on themselves, returning to their original, thick syrup consistency.

  “Pavao!” cried Daja. “Pavao, pavao, pavao!” With all her work and with the magic she had used in their shaping, they should have kept that form for a day at least! Their collapse, while still ice-cold, meant that gloves of living metal alone would never work. She had to put them on a hard metal frame. It meant hinges at every joint and complex hinges at the wrists to allow side-to-side motion as well as up and down. With a solid metal frame her finished creations would be far heavier than she had planned. If gloves couldn’t exist on their own, a whole suit of living metal would be a nightmare. A heavy nightmare.

  She put down her metals and oils and kicked her chair in frustration. White-hot pain burst through her booted toes. She hopped on one foot, softly cursing in Tradertalk, Imperial, Hatarese, and Pajunna, until she realized she was being a fool. She slumped into her chair to nurse her wounded foot.