Sandry's Book Read online

  “Don’t fret,” the smith replied, thrusting the metal that he worked back into the forge fire. “This lady helped me.” Going to the water barrel, he lifted out a dipper full of liquid and drank it all. The second dipper he poured over his head; the third went down his throat. “What’s your name, youngster?” he inquired.

  “Daja.”

  “Well, Daja, would you mind standing by to mop my fevered brow? Then my friend here can put three more bars in the forge to heat, and check our coal supply—”

  “Hakoi scorch me, the coal!” cried the youth, and ran outside.

  His master winked at Daja. “You may have gathered that I’m Frostpine. That was Kirel, my apprentice.”

  She ducked her head to hide the grin until, peering at him, she saw that he grinned, too. She took the handkerchief that he offered her. Frostpine shook the water from his hair and beard, much as a dog might, then drew a cherry-red piece of metal from the fire.

  Tris was half-drowsing on her bed when someone banged on her door and opened it. With a shriek, she sat up. “How dare—” Her throat seized on the rest. It wasn’t the thief-boy, as she expected, but Niko.

  “Come on. Let’s take a walk. It’s time to sort a few things out.”

  She scowled at him. “I don’t want to.”

  “Now, Trisana.”

  There was a hint of steel in that clipped voice, and more than a hint of it in the man’s black eyes. Dared she refuse? Traveling with him, she had to obey, but now? He wasn’t temple—he was a guest. Could she ignore the fact that he was a guest who worked for the temple and spoke comfortably with Honored Moonstream?

  “Did you ask Lark? Maybe she wants me to learn the house rules—”

  “Lark has already given permission. Up, young lady.”

  Grumpily she descended the stairs behind him. She was not beaten yet, however. Seeing Lark in the weaving room, she put her head in and said, “Lark, Niko wants to take me somewhere.”

  Lark was sorting through skeins of colored thread. “That’s right, Tris. Obey Niko as you would Rosethorn or me,” she replied, her mind plainly somewhere else.

  Niko grinned at Tris wickedly. “Good try. Come on now.”

  Once on the spiral road, he walked so quickly that his gray over-robe flapped behind him—Tris struggled to keep up. They left the temple city through the south gate. Crossing the flat expanse of road that lay between the wall and the cliff, they reached the grass fringe on the far side. When Niko stepped off the cliff’s rim, Tris squeaked.

  He looked back at her. “There’s a path,” he told her, amused. “Come on.”

  Gingerly, she obeyed. There was a track of sorts, twisting down through tumbled rock, earth, and stunted trees. She scrambled along, catching her skirt on roots. The man stopped on a broad ledge just two hundred yards above the rocky shore. A cave opened onto it, stretching back into the cliff. Tris couldn’t see the cavern’s rear wall.

  “This will do.” Niko sat cross-legged just inside the cave’s mouth. He patted the ground next to him. “Have a seat.”

  She mopped her sweaty face on her sleeve. “Why?”

  “Because I ask. Because you don’t have anything else to do just now. I’d actually meant to talk to you when we traveled together, but—I forget what distracted me.”

  “You found out the captain had been to the Strait of Dragons,” she said patiently. “You wanted them to tell you about it.” She’d enjoyed those tales herself. “And right after I got here, you had to leave again, in a great hurry.”

  “That’s right—I had the vision that Third Ship Kisubo was about to put to sea. Well, nothing’s going to interrupt now. Sit, please.”

  Grudgingly, she obeyed.

  He looked at her and sighed. “I wish that by now you could trust me.”

  She looked out through the cave entrance, at the clouds. “Everyone I ever trusted sent me away,” she said flatly.

  For a while he said nothing. Tris, glancing at him, saw a look of pity that made her blush with embarrassment. At last he reached over, squeezed her fingers, and let go. “Then I will just have to hope that you change your mind someday. In the meantime, you’re going to learn meditation.”

  “Why?” she demanded. “The others don’t have to.”

  “They start tomorrow. As for you, why now?” His eyes held hers; she tried to look away, and couldn’t. “Things happen when you get angry, Tris. First hail, now lightning—if you don’t learn to control yourself, you will kill someone.”

  She felt like there wasn’t enough air to breathe. Was he saying she was possessed by a spirit, or not entirely human, as they’d thought back in Capchen? There were people who attracted spirits they couldn’t control—every child knew those stories. She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life in a cage. “How do you know?”

  “Do you know we mages choose the name we bear, once we are trained?”

  She shook her head.

  “We do. My last name is ‘Goldeye.’ It means that I see things that are hidden to most people. That’s how I know. And I tell you this. If you learn to meditate—if you learn to control your mind—you will be able to keep things from happening when you are upset.”

  She tore her glance away from his and clenched her hands. A chance to stop people blaming her for what she couldn’t help? “What do I do?” she croaked.

  “Can you breathe with the sound of the waves? Breathe in as they arrive, hold the breath as they strike, breathe out as they go?”

  She listened to the sea boom as it struck the rocks below. She drew a long breath; hearing the ocean always had a relaxing effect on her. When the next wave hit, she let her breath run out, following the water as it fell back. Her wind caught in her chest. She cleared her throat.

  “Relax,” Niko whispered, his voice part of the next wave. It caught her up, lifting her as it struck the shore, then ran out as the sea retreated. Her mind slipped easily under a new swell of water. When it came in, she came with it, breathing in slowly, filling every nook and cranny of her lungs with new air.

  “Waves are the voice of tides. Tides are life,” murmured Niko. “They bring new food for shore creatures, and take ships out to sea. They are the ocean’s pulse, and our own heartbeat.”

  Tris’s eyelids fluttered; her mind rode with the new wave. It struck the rocks with a crash, covering barnacles and mussels. She held her breath for the impact, then let it sigh out with the sea as the water fell away.

  “They carry the winds,” whispered Niko.

  She rose to the back of a new wave as the breeze combed her hair and filled her nose with the sea’s tangy odor. When the wave shattered against the rocks, she raced on with the air, rolling up the cliff-side to flow over the top of the bluff and the road. Plowing head on into the wall at Winding Circle, she ran up that.

  “Breathe out,” Niko told her.

  Tris was locked on the wind’s rush that was so vivid in her mind. Her body heard Niko and released the air that it clung to. Her lungs filled again, as the wind/Tris leaped into the sky over the temple city. Here she was buffeted by new kinds of air. It rose from the gardens, rippled over forges and ovens, puffed in the beat of looms, stuttered over the surface of wet clay.

  “Feel how you are right now? Like a wind yourself, your wings passing over the circle of the walls?” Niko’s voice filtered through her thoughts. “Pull your wings in on yourself. Instead of being a wave of air, draw yourself in until you’re a rope of it. Breathe in, and pull in.”

  It was like gathering the sides of her cape when they were flung out and wrapping them in around her. When she breathed out, she gathered more folds of herself under the outstretched fingers of her mind and pulled them in. She shrank into a rope, feeling pressures from the temple’s warm spots under her narrow length.

  Opening her real eyes, Tris yelped: Niko shone with a blinding white radiance that left dark spots on her vision, as if she’d stared at the sun. Her cry pulled in too much air, and her lungs protested. For a brief
moment she felt her mind fling itself out wide again. Then her sense of being anything but Tris was gone.

  Niko patted her on the back while she coughed long and hard. As she got herself under control, he offered her a drink from the canteen that swung at his waist. “There, now, wasn’t that fun?” he asked. “We’ll keep practicing that, until you limit the area that your mind covers without having to think about it.”

  He has a strange idea of fun, Tris thought, and drank greedily.

  When Lark asked him if he would mind taking a note to Dedicate Gorse at the kitchens of the Hub, Briar was happy to oblige her. It gave him the chance to cross the gardens that lay between most buildings on his way, to look at what grew there and breathe in scents. It was also a chance to visit the kitchens and a dedicate famous for giving treats to visitors.

  The way led down a gentle slope. At the center of the shallow bowl that held Winding Circle, the tower of the Hub rose like the stem of a top. Briar stopped to inspect it, as he’d done on his arrival some days ago, wondering if it would be worth the trouble to burgle it. As always, he decided not to. What he told himself was that too many people worked in the Hub day and night. It was true, and helped him to keep denying that he was done with the nicking life.

  It was true that someone was always in the tower. Below the giant clock at its crown were rooms where magic was worked, or so Niko had said. He took that as he did all of Niko’s mentions of magic, with a shrug. For Briar, the real magic of the Hub was in the bottom two floors, where enchanting smells flowed through open kitchen windows.

  Reaching the tower, Briar inhaled the mingled odors of stew, bread, spices, and charcoal. Then, mouth watering, he carried Lark’s note inside.

  When he left, two pastries stuffed with honey and nuts rested in his belly, and he carried a string bag with another twelve pastries for Discipline. Now, for a little while, his time was his own.

  “Where is the greenhouse?” he asked a novice who labored in a small rose garden. The girl pointed to the path that ran arrow-straight from the Hub to the east gate. Whistling, Briar took it and walked right into a shaft of light that nearly blinded him. Blinking, he shielded his eyes to find its source. It was a clear building over a story in height.

  Pulse hammering, he trotted up to it. As Rosethorn had said, it was real glass, held up by wooden beams. Inside, the air steamed; water condensed on the inner walls and ran in drops like rain, blurring the images of the plants, bushes, and trees that grew there.

  How did it work? Where did the water come from? Could this Crane fellow really grow fruit and vegetables out of season in there? Awed, he walked down one side of the building, staring through the wall. Dedicates in yellow habits tended the plants, so fixed on their work they did not see the boy staring in at them. Briar wished, more than anything, he could enter. He could pretend to be lost….

  As he rounded the corner, stepping into the gap between the greenhouse and a stable that stood against the east wall, something pulled at his heart. He moistened his lips. Suddenly they were dry to the point of cracking. He felt brittle and squeezed.

  Frowning, he placed a hand flat on the glass. There, to the right—the sadness came from that direction. Carefully he walked along, keeping his fingers on the glass. When his palm itched, he stopped. On the other side of the glass stood a tree little more than a foot high. But for its size, it looked like one of the low, spread-branched pines that grew on cliffs along the coast. He squinted, trying to get a better look through misted glass. Some of its twigs were brown.

  “Here—what are you doing?” The speaker was a tall, lean man with lank, black hair and a thin, suspicious face. He wore the yellow habit of the Air temple with a black stripe on the hem, the same garment worn by the woman who’d wrapped Briar up in his old dormitory. His companions, a man and a woman, wore plain yellow, without the stripe. “Boys aren’t permitted back here.” He sounded bored, but his brown eyes were alert.

  Briar glanced at the stable. “But horses are?”

  The woman growled, “Mind your tongue, boy! This is Dedicate Crane, first dedicate of the Air temple, that you’re speaking to!”

  Crane raised a hand to silence her. “Where are you housed?” he asked, looking down a very long nose at Briar. “Have you permission to creep around?”

  The boy offered the iron token that Lark had given him, to show that he was allowed to wander. Crane shoved it under the woman’s nose. “Look—it’s from Discipline. Rosethorn!” He no longer seemed bored. “Are you her spy, boy? Out to steal cuttings for that patch of scrub she calls a garden? And where did you get those pastries?”

  Briar could see that Dedicate Crane was determined to think the worst. Snatching the token from the man’s fingers, he ran, leaving the greenhouse, and the sad tree, behind.

  Soon after Lark had gone on an errand to the loomhouses, Sandry gave in to temptation and went into the dedicate’s workroom. Poking around, she found baskets of fleece that had yet to be combed and prepared for spinning. Sandry knelt beside them and lifted out a hank of wool. When she touched it, strands rose on end. Wool fiber and thread always moved when she was near; she had no idea why. It certainly didn’t follow anyone else that she saw handling it.

  “That’s merino wool,” Lark said.

  Sandry yelped. The wool twisted in her hands and trapped her fingers.

  Lark knelt beside her. “It’s my favorite, but I don’t use it to teach someone just learning to spin. The fibers are very short, which makes it hard to work with.”

  Sandry tried to scrape the suddenly contrary fibers off her hand, but they refused to come away.

  “It normally isn’t disobedient—it must like you. Enough,” Lark ordered. Sandry didn’t think that Lark meant her. “Let go.” She dragged her fingers across the girl’s palms. The wool followed her, shaping itself into a neat strip.

  “It’s a kind of magic,” Lark murmured. “Look how fine each hair is. Pick one out—just one.” She offered the strip to Sandry. Carefully the girl grasped a single hair and drew it away from the others. “Now pull it apart.”

  Sandry obeyed. With just a quick tug, the hair snapped.

  “By itself, it’s weak. There’s little work you can do with it.” Lark smiled. “Put it back with its friends, and things change.”

  Sandry reached over and pulled away a few more hairs.

  “Roll them together,” Lark said. “Twist them, as you would yarn. Now try to pull them apart.”

  Sandry obeyed. The twisted thread held, no matter how hard she tugged its ends. “I wish I could spin. I wish I could make things stronger. Instead I’m always told nobles don’t spin or weave,” she whispered. “They say needlework is all I should want to do, and then they tell me I do too much of that.”

  “Why were you taken up before Honored Moonstream?” the woman inquired gently. “Why were you sent here?”

  Sandry blushed and looked down. “I kept sneaking off to the loomhouses.”

  Lark drew a bobbin from the pocket of her habit and pulled an end of thread free. When she let it go, the thread stretched, snakelike, toward her, then to Sandry. When Lark held the bobbin out to the girl, the thread fought to work itself free of its anchor. It twined around Sandry’s fingers when she reached for the bobbin.

  “Silk likes you, too,” Lark said. “That’s unusual. Silk likes few people.”

  Half-hypnotized by the thread’s movement, the girl said, “I was—in a dark place, once. My lamps were going out, but I had all this silk embroidery thread.” Part of her was shocked to hear the story come out—she had told it to no one, not even to Niko, during their long journey to Summersea. “I thought that I’d called light into the silk.” She sighed. “It was probably just a dream, though.”

  Lark wrapped her brown hands around the girl’s white ones. “Do you want to learn how to spin?”

  “I would love to,” replied Sandry.

  “Do you know how to prepare wool for it?” Lark asked.

  Sandry no
dded. “Pirisi, my—nurse—taught me how, when I was little. She hasn’t—hadn’t—let me do it for a long time. She said I was getting to be a lady.”

  Gently Lark smoothed Sandry’s hair. “Then find me a basket of rolags, if you please, and a drop spindle. One with no leader on it, or thread.”

  Next to the uncombed wool was a straw basket with a cloth lining. It was filled with the long rolls of combed wool called rolags. Sandry picked it up and offered it to Lark, then found a spindle that had no yarn or thread on it. Bare, it looked like a child’s top with much too long a stem.

  When Sandry took it to Lark, the woman asked, “Do you know the names of the parts?”

  The girl shook her head. “All the ones I ever saw were being used, and I got scolded for asking.”

  “You won’t be scolded for asking questions here.” Lark pulled the wooden disk off the stem. “This is the whorl.” In her other hand she held up the stick. “Here’s the shaft. The whorl fits on the short end like this.” She thrust the pointed end of the shaft through the hole in the whorl. Putting the complete spindle on the floor, she gripped the long stem and twirled it, as if she played with a top. Like the toy, the spindle whirled on its point. “With spinning, you learn how to control the spindle and how to feed your wool to it at a steady rate. That’s why you see even five-year-old children spinning; it’s easy enough, once you learn how.

  “I’ll show you how to place the leader yarn and how to store your spun thread later. Right now, there’s something I need to see.” She drew a piece of yarn from a pocket. In a series of quick movements, Lark fixed it around whorl and shaft, and tied it in place. “This string is your leader, the thing that makes the thread happen.” She held out a hand. “Give me a rolag.”

  Sandry took one of the specially prepared bunches of wool from a basket and put it in Lark’s outstretched palm.

  “Watch,” Lark ordered. Overlapping the end of the wool with the end of the leader yarn, she gave the spindle a gentle twist. As it turned, Sandry could see the yarn, and the fibers attached to it, twirl until the loose fibers wound themselves into a tight string. Her grip on leader and wool just tight enough to keep everything from dropping from her fingers, Lark allowed the spindle to fall slowly to the floor, hanging from the new thread. A bit at a time, she let new fibers from the rolag get caught in the twirling thread, until they were thread as well.