Circle Opens #03: Cold Fire Read online

  Bennat laughed and offered his hand. “I enjoyed talking with you, Daja Kisubo. I hope we can do it again.”

  Daja took his hand. “Thank you, Ravvot Ladradun. It’s nice to talk to someone who doesn’t just think a fire’s for use or putting out.”

  “Call me Ben,” he told her. “And I know what you mean. To most people fire’s a means to an end, or it’s a monster. They don’t realize it has moods just like the Syth, or the skies.”

  “No, they don’t,” agreed Daja.

  They stood in the frozen alley for a moment, smiling at each other, sharing that understanding of fire and its shapes. Then Ben sighed. “I really should go home,” he said. “Mother will have fits when she sees my clothes. What can you do?” He wandered down the alley toward Ladradun House, hands thrust once more in his coat pockets.

  Daja watched him go. She had thought that once children were grown, they didn’t have to worry about a parent’s wrath. Maybe it was different when the grown child came to live under a parent’s roof once again.

  The wind threw a fistful of sleet into her face. She turned and hurried back to Bancanor House.

  2

  On her return to Bancanor House, Daja went to Frost-pine’s room and knocked on the door. Invited in, she found her teacher beside his fire, seated so close to it that the snow-damp hem of his red wool habit steamed gently. He was a tall black man in his late forties, lean and ropy with muscle, full-lipped and eagle-nosed. His bald crown gleamed in the firelight. Daja often thought that it was sheer defiance of his baldness that made Frostpine grow long, wild, bushy hair on the sides of his head: today he had pulled it back and tied it with a thong. The discipline he’d forced onto this hair emphasized his equally wild and bushy beard.

  Frostpine had gold coins in each hand when she came in. He walked them through his long fingers, turning them over as they traveled. “Close the door, you’re letting in a draft,” he ordered, tossing a coin to Daja. “I just got back from riding and I’m cold.”

  “You’ll set yourself on fire if you move any closer to the hearth,” she informed him as she took the chair beside his.

  “Then I’ll die warm,” Frostpine said, glum-faced. “What do you think of that?” He pointed to the coin Daja held.

  “What must I think?” she asked, holding it in her palm. “It’s an argib.” She named the standard coin of the empire. “A gold argib, with that awful portrait of the empress on the front.”

  “It’s a fake,” he said.

  Daja was indignant. “And wouldn’t I tell —” she began to say.

  Frostpine leaned over and traced a sign on the coin she held. Daja immediately knew she held a brass counterfeit. “You never taught me how to do that,” she accused him. “How could I not know it was false?”

  “Because you weren’t thinking about the possibility of a counterfeit, and because it’s the best such spell I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Thank Hakkoi of the Fire and the Forge that the chief of the magistrate’s mages guessed something was wrong and asked me to take a closer look. It took me two hours to sort through the illusions on it.”

  Daja whistled, impressed. “Faking gold so even I couldn’t tell it wasn’t real? That’s serious.”

  “The governor wants me to work on this along with Heluda — Heluda Salt, the magistrate’s mage who called me in.” Frostpine sighed. “We have to see not only who’s doing this, but how many fakes are in circulation. And we have to do it quietly.”

  “I should think so!” Daja was born a Trader, a people whose many clans bought, transported, and sold goods over a large part of the world. Trader babies got wooden teething toys carved like the main coins for the countries where their families traded. For ten years Daja’s life had been about trade and money. She knew what happened when people found that the coins on which they depended were false. Currency would plummet. No one would buy or sell anything in gold, perhaps not even in copper or silver, until it was proved that no more fakes remained. Such a crisis could result in a government’s fall, or even in war, as well as instant poverty for entire populations. “What about the silver argib?” Daja asked.

  “Safe,” Frostpine said. “Whoever did this concentrated on gold — this method would never work on silver. We may have caught the counterfeit early enough to make a difference. I went through half of what’s in the governor’s treasury, and only found ten fakes so far. We need to catch who’s doing it, of course. And any friends he may have. You might not see much of me for a while.”

  “You’re sure you can catch him?” Daja asked.

  Frostpine smiled. “I handle enough of his fakes and I’ll sniff him out like a hound.”

  “You said that when someone was filching your tools back home,” she said ruthlessly. “It took you all winter to find him.”

  Frostpine’s dark eyes flashed. “I didn’t know I was looking for a child,” he said tartly. “I suspected dark plots by — oh, you have no respect for me.”

  Daja grinned. “I have plenty of respect for you. Truly. I swear it.”

  Frostpine slouched in his chair. “Time was when students didn’t mock their teachers. They did as they were told and said, ‘Yes sir,’ and ‘No, sir.’ ”

  “That nobleman in Olart who wanted you as his teacher — he was respectful,” Daja said innocently. “He ‘sir-ed’ you across the realm and back. You called him a, a ‘cake-mouthed ninny dressed as a peahen.’ And you told him memorizing runes and chants did not make him a smith-mage. We had to sleep in someone’s barn that night.”

  “Is it my fault he disliked criticism?” Frostpine wanted to know. He put another log on the fire.

  As he returned to his chair Daja said, “About students and teachers … I think Jory has cook magic.”

  Frostpine raised heavy brows. “You think?”

  Daja shrugged. “I was in the kitchen while she was making a sauce. Anyussa said it was lumpy. When she got distracted, Jory did some” — Daja twiddled her fingers to indicate magic — “on it, and the next time Anyussa checked, no lumps. I saw the magic pass from Jory into the pot. And she sees the spells in that kitchen, though she just thinks it’s flashes of light at the corner of her eyes.”

  “She’s an ambient mage?” Frostpine asked.

  “Has to be,” Daja replied. “She and Nia told me they were tested by magic-sniffers twice, and they didn’t find a thing.”

  “Well, if one twin has magic, both do.” Frostpine stretched his booted feet toward the fire. “That’s always the case with twins. The power takes different paths — it seems to be shaped by their personalities and what happens in their lives. Have you a sense for what Nia’s magic might be?”

  Daja shook her head. “I have no idea.”

  Frostpine smoothed his beard. “Then you need a testing device. Something to help you find out the kind and the strength of magic a person might have,” he said. “There are all varieties — mirrors, globes, crystals. I knew a paint-mage who spelled a clear oil so that when the one she tested put his hand to canvas, a picture of his power, or her power, grew out of it. Beautiful work,” he remarked, and sighed. “I was consumed with envy.”

  “So let Kol and Matazi just take Nia to a magic-sniffer and tell him to look harder,” Daja replied. “I have projects of my own to do.” Living metal gloves for a hero, one who didn’t have magic to shield him, she thought but didn’t say.

  Frostpine inspected his nails. “I suppose we could get a magic-finder and explain things.” His voice was suspiciously mild. “Things like the Bancanors heard Nia has power, but the discovering-mage couldn’t tell them what it is.”

  Daja glared at him. “You’re needling me,” she accused.

  “What’ll be worse is when the magic-finder works out the magic Nia has and sends her back to you for instruction.” Frostpine seemed to need to ensure that each of his fingernails was clean. “I doubt it would help her confidence in you to know you needed someone else to explain what to teach her.”

  Daja sat bolt up
right. “I’m not teaching anybody. And I’m not letting a strange mage tell me anything.”

  “That much is my fault,” Frostpine said, putting yet another log on the fire. He held out his hand and raised it an inch in the air. Flames spread over the fresh wood in a leap, making it burn quickly. “I didn’t think we’d have to deal with this for years, but the gods like to make a man feel unprepared, so the wisewomen say.”

  Daja drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair. “Stop dancing around it,” she said. “I hate it when you take a year to walk a mile.”

  “As the discoverer of their magic, you have to teach them,” Frostpine explained. “I did mention the rules, when you got the medallion. Part of the price you pay for it” — he pointed to the spot on her chest where it lay under her clothes — “is that when you find a new mage, you serve in a teacher’s place until a proper one of the same kind of power is found. Sandry wrote you, didn’t she? To say she had a student?”

  Daja nodded slowly. “I thought she was being silly, telling me she had to make spells up for this Pacon, or however he calls himself, because there aren’t any other lone dance-mages. And I’m as bad off as she is — I don’t know anything about cooking for Jory, or whatever Nia has. I can’t do it!”

  “Don’t panic,” Frostpine said firmly. “Cook-mages, at least, are as common as salt. Magic-sniffers who can see and identify ambient magic aren’t common, but the Mages’ Society keeps a list of those who can do it. Chances are, once you know what kind of magic Nia has, you’ll be able to find a teacher with her magic as easily as you’ll be able to find a cook-mage for Jory. In the meantime, start teaching them to meditate. If Jory’s magic is popping out without her knowledge, Nia’s can’t be far behind. They need to learn to control it sooner rather than later.”

  The hall clock chimed. It was time to change clothes for supper. Daja levered herself out of her chair. “I have to do all this?” she asked, pleading with him. “Run all over the city for magic-sniffers and teachers and all?”

  “Since you don’t want to make a testing device of your own to tell you what Nia has, I suppose you do,” Frostpine replied. “And you must tell Kol and Matazi. They’ll be pleased.”

  “Would you be?” Daja asked, shoving her hands into her breeches pockets.

  “Now there’s an odd question,” Frostpine said. He had returned to walking the false coins over and under his fingers. “Aren’t you happy you’re a mage?”

  “Sometimes,” Daja said as she went to the door. In her mind’s eye she saw herself, adrift in a wash of ship wreckage, straining to reach a floating box filled with life-giving supplies. “And then remember that I learned about my power after my entire family drowned and I got declared an outcast. I wonder sometimes if magic really is a good thing.”

  Frostpine looked up at her with a smile. “Well, it was a good thing for me that you came along,” he said. “That should count for something.”

  Daja went back to her room, feeling decidedly grumpy. For one thing, changing clothes for the evening meal was the kind of folly practiced by people who had too many clothes they didn’t have to wash. Since it was the custom in wealthy houses Daja changed her garments, but it chafed her spirit.

  More than the clothes, though, Frostpine’s information irked her. It was bad enough that she must teach — she was busy, after all. Just going to a mage she didn’t know to find out what exactly she must teach was somehow worse. She felt as if she had been challenged to do something, and had failed.

  The magical testing methods Frostpine had mentioned involved seeing. She had studied something of the kind a couple of years ago. Tris’s teacher, Niko, whose specialty was seeing-magic of all kinds and who taught the four general magic, decided they ought to know how to scry, or to see things that took place in the past, the present, and sometimes the future. Those mages with any talent for it easily saw the present in their scrying devices. Some even glimpsed the past. Occasionally they saw bits of the future, but because the future changed from moment to moment as the present did, those bits were rarely useful.

  So Niko had given the four of them a choice of crystals, mirrors, even bowls, which showed images when filled with water or oil. He then tried to teach them different ways to call visions to their chosen devices. Tris was the only one who could do it every time, but she had trouble seeing anything that interested her. Scrying was such a will-o’-the-wisp magic that Briar and Sandry had given up in disgust. The best luck that Daja ever had with it was when she looked for things in a small bowl of her living metal: that was how she had discovered that a kitchen boy was taking Frostpine’s tools. It wasn’t reliable: one bump of the bowl and the image was gone, never to be recaptured. In the end she had discarded the metal she’d used in the bowl. It continued to flicker with images long after she gave up scrying, and she couldn’t use the metal for anything else.

  Daja stopped changing into supper clothes halfway and sat at her worktable, pulling a slate and a piece of chalk toward her. What if she created a living metal mirror? That would be more stable than a bowl; she could use it over and over. She could take what Niko had taught them and shape the mirror to reflect a precise image of someone’s magic. She scribbled hurried notes. If she remembered everything properly, she had all she would need in this room.

  Excited—she would show Frostpine! — she opened the trunk at the foot of her bed. It was covered in leather and secured with leather straps, with the emblem of Daja’s own House Kisubo burned into every side. This was a suraku, a survival box that seafarers packed with food and water against the possibility of shipwreck. The contents of this one had kept Daja alive until Niko had found her. It was her chief treasure and all that remained of her drowned family, so it was only natural that she turn it into her mage’s kit. Inside the copper-lined box she kept magical tools, herbs, oils, and metal samples in small bottles and jars, corked, sealed, and tucked into padded trays. Daja selected tiny vials of mercury and of saffron oil, a slender hollow glass tube, a silver disk as wide as her hand was long, and an engraving tool. These she placed on her worktable.

  Next she opened the big jar that took up half of the suraku’s interior. Its contents gleamed the bright silvery gold of brass. She had started filling it with excess pieces of the metal that continued to grow on her left hand. Later, as she found uses for it, she added brass scraps and drops of her own blood to the jar’s contents: within a day the scraps would soften and blend, giving her a good-sized container of living metal whenever she needed it. Living metal creations had made her rich at fourteen: it was good she’d found a way to create more without having to wait for it to grow out of her flesh. Now she took a bowl and dipped it full, then set it on the table.

  Beside the door was her Trader’s staff. The wood was five feet of solid ebony, capped in brass on the top end and iron on the butt. On the cap she had engraved or inlaid signs in wire, telling her story to anyone who read Trader symbols. Here was her survival of the sinking of her family’s ship; her time as an outcast; her rescue of a Trader caravan during a forest fire; the end of her outcast status; and her present life as a mage with whom Traders could buy and sell in honor.

  It was also very useful for defending herself, as Traders had done for centuries, and for creating circles of protection. Extending her power through the ebony, Daja drew a circle around her worktable, leaving herself plenty of room. Once done, she leaned her staff against her chair and closed her eyes, sliding into the core of her power. She raised a barrier until she was enclosed in a silvery bubble that would allow no scrap of her power to leak out. In her second year as a mage, she had learned the hard way that an incomplete circle resulted in the most interesting kinds of damage wherever her power met someone else’s magic.

  Her protective globe completed, she opened her eyes and smiled. She liked to be enveloped by her magic. As a very young girl she’d had a favorite blanket that made her feel warm and safe. Her protections seemed much like the blanket, though she had never told a
nyone that.

  Now she was ready. Daja sat down and reached for her silver disk.

  Leaving her room with her completed mirror in hand, Daja heard her belly complain. Passing the hall clock downstairs, she saw why: it was two hours after supper. The family and Frostpine would be in the book room.

  When she walked in, everyone turned to stare at her. Of the four Bancanor children only the twins were present, Nia tatting lace, Jory reading a book on the hearth. Frostpine, Kolborn Bancanor, and his wife Matazidah, or Matazi, were all there, Frostpine as close to the fire as he could manage. Kol and Matazi were in their favorite chairs near a table where a tea service already sat.

  “Daja, we missed you at supper,” Matazi said, ringing the bell for a maid. “You must be starving.” She was a beauty who never seemed aware of her looks, a quality she had passed on to the twins. Her skin, the color of coffee well lightened with cream, was perfect; her eyes large and dark over a slim nose, and reddened lips, the lower slightly fuller than the upper. She wore her handfuls of dark, crinkly hair pinned up in coils, accented by the topaz drops that hung in her ears. She was dressed in Namornese fashion in a long, sleeveless tunic dress of cinnamon-colored wool with embroidered lilies around the hem and tiny gold buttons that went from collarbone to shoe. Under it Matazi wore a cream-colored undergown with full sleeves and a band collar, trimmed with gold ribbon. Daja fixed the details of her outfit in her mind: Sandry always liked to hear about the latest fashions, and the entire city looked to Matazi for colors and styles.

  When a maid answered the bell, Matazi asked her to bring a tray for Daja. The maid bobbed a curtsey and left as Nia offered tea to Daja. With an inner sigh, Daja accepted. Even after three months in Namorn, two in this house, she still was not used to the idea of tea served in a glass cup with a wrought silver base.