Circle Of Magic - Tris's Story Part 4

Tris only stared at the woman. Since coming to Discipline she had feared Rosethorn's sharp temper and sharper tongue. Lark and Rosethorn were the best of friends, and Briar loved his teacher, but Tris couldn't begin to guess why. Was this the face of Rosethorn that Lark and Briar saw, when no one else was looking?

"H-how do you know so much about birds?" she stammered. "Do - do you have magic with them?"

Rosethorn eased her fingers under the nestling, who shrieked at the invasion, then lowered him into the fresh nest. "Don't ever squeeze them. Their bones, even their beaks, are very soft yet."

"I'll remember."

"Not everyone who loves a thing has magic with it, you know," Rosethorn said, dipping a finger in the milk. "Very good - exactly the right heat. Get that clean reed.

Do what I did with the potion - give him just a drop or two at a time."

Hands shaking, Tris put one end of the reed into the milk, closed the free end with a- fingertip, and raised it. Taking her finger off the opening, she watched as all of the milk poured out. Trying again, she lifted her finger quickly, then closed the opening again. Now she controlled how much liquid came out, and could deliver it as drops, instead of a flood. Filling the reed a third time, she peered into the nest.

The youngster was cheeping. Was he louder? She prayed to Asaia, G.o.ddess of air and birds, and let two drops fall into the open beak. Startled, the nestling closed its mouth and swayed. He lifted his head and cheeped for more.

As Tris fed the nestling, Rosethorn said, "Gardeners -farmers - learn about birds, if only so they can tell which ones eat the crops, and which don't. I started with nestlings when I was your age, on my da's farm. All right, that's enough. He'll sleep for a while, but you'd better get ready to heat another batch of milk."

"Every fifteen minutes?" Tris wondered how she could do anything else if she had to see to her charge.

"Until he's stronger. If he improves, we can go to every half-hour this afternoon. If he keeps improving, in a day or so, you can wait a whole hour."

Tris gulped. "How will I sleep?"

"Goose! Do sparrows and crows race everywhere at night? Chicks sleep with the sun.

Come here." She went to the door that opened on the garden, and beckoned to Tris.

"See that bird sitting on the roof of the well?"

Tris saw him, a handsome brown-black fellow who ruffled his chin feathers as he whistled loudly. He looked to be about the length of her hand, with yellow legs and a sharp-looking beak. When he turned, his feathers gleamed in the sun, and showed off a mult.i.tude of tiny specks.

"Starlings. They're called that because they look like a field of stars. Insect-eaters - clowns. They imitate other birds - a lot of the local ones cry like seagulls. They form the big flocks you see swirling around at day's end. I have a soft spot for starlings."

The starling on the well said "Gaak," and flew away.

"Come on," said Rosethorn. "We have to fix things so you can keep this youngster warm at night."

When he left Dedicate Gorse's kitchen realm in the Hub tower, Briar carried a loaded basket on one arm, and a meat turnover to help him survive the long minutes until midday. If Rosethorn hadn't been willing to teach him the mysteries of plants, he would have been perfectly content to labour for Gorse - hot as the kitchens were in the summer - for the rest of his life.

When he was thinking of other things - the Bit Island tower, Tris's bird - he forgot that it was no longer important to hide when he had food. It had only been two months since he was a half-starved street boy. Looking for a dark corner in which to eat his turnover safely, he found a niche in the round chamber at the centre of the Hub. The room was a plain, shadowy circle wrapped around a beautifully-carved wooden screen that reached through the ceiling. Inside that wooden tube, a stair ran up as high as the great clock at the Hub's peak, and down to the secret room called Heartfire, far underground. The wooden screen also enclosed a dumbwaiter, shelves on rope cables that carried messages from the seers in the far-seeing" and far-hearing rooms in the upper levels down to this level. When he'd come through on his way to the kitchens, two runners had been sitting on the floor, ready to carry any messages from the upper storeys. They were gone now. Briar tucked himself into his niche and happily bit into his snack.

Something rustled in the wooden stairwell. Rats, he thought, putting a hand on a little dagger tucked inside his shirt. Back in Hajra, his old home, rats would try to take a meal, if a kid didn't look like he could hang on to it.

Wood clacked. Gears moved, and Briar heard the rumble of the dumbwaiter. Just messages coming down, he thought, scornful of his jumpiness. As if Gorse would let rats near his kitchen!

There was another sound, under the rattle. Briar knew the scuff of a foot on wooden floors. He drew even further into the shadows.

The door in the screen opened a hair at a time. Briar caught a noseful of cinnamon scent, and bit down a sneeze. Though he doubted any thief would have the sauce to operate here in Winding Circle, he knew professional thieves used cinnamon oil to baffle tracker-mages. It was expensive stuff. Beneath the cinnamon's peppery tickle he found another scent, one that was honeyed and slow: poppy.

Three weeks ago, Rosethorn had started to teach him magical uses for the oils in her workshop. "If you want to waste poppy oil, don't use it for medicine," she'd said then. "Use it for invisibility. It does more good as medicine, though."

Silvery light flickered. Someone drifted out of the stairwell, closing its door without a sound. Briar squinted; the light glimmered all over a blur that pa.s.sed between the stair and the outer door. It traced a man's shape.

Rich man, he thought as the blur left the tower. Rich enough to afford cinnamon and poppy oils. Unless it's a student, raiding his master's oil stores. Two months wasn't long enough to erase his old ways, but it had taught him student mages were always trying something they shouldn't. Winding Circle had more than its share of mage students, too, of every nationality.

Putting down his basket, he went to the stairwell and opened it, eyeing the steps and the dumbwaiter ropes. The cinnamon odour was stronger here; he found spots of oil on the inner doork.n.o.b, and on the wheels that raised and lowered the wooden boxes for messages. Shaking his head, he closed the door and fetched his basket from the corner where he'd left it. Students playing with their magic, he decided. Who would try invisibility spells in the Hub in the middle of the day?

And how else could he have seen the person within the spell, unless it was a student who didn't quite have it right? Back in Deadman's District, he'd never seen the Thief- Lord pa.s.s invisible among his subjects, listening to their secrets and their plots against him. The Thief-Lord had always worked with the best spells money could buy.

The Hub clock struck the midday hour. He'd best get back home, so Tris could give her bird a little solid food.

The hide-and-seek ship was making Daja crazy. There it was at the corner of her eye whenever she looked up from her work, but if she stared straight at it, she saw only the Pebbled Sea, gla.s.sy and hazy with the day's heat. Ever since Tris had pa.s.sed by on her way home, the ship seemed to hang out there, daring her to look quick and catch it. By the time the Hub clock chimed the end of the midday rest period, she felt as if she'd glanced up as often as she felt through the ground for more pieces of spell- net.

"Is something wrong?" asked Kirel. Frostpine had left them, questing for more of the net further down the cove. "You twitch like sand fleas are eating you."

"I've got an azigazi at the corner of my eye," she told him crossly, wiping her forehead. "It's as bad as sand fleas!"

"A - what did you say?"

"I'm sorry." He couldn't help being a kaq - a non-Trader, ignorant by birth - though she often forgot he was, because she liked him so much. "Azigazi. It's a vision, a false sighting. Out at sea they come when it's hot. White Traders say they get them in snow and sand fields. You see things that aren't real."

"A miracle, or a vision. Azigazi" He turned the word over in his mouth, as if he tasted it. "Could it be a mage thing?" He brought the water flask to her.

Daja drank gratefully. "Thank you. I don't know. There's plenty of mage things I never heard of."

"Where do you see it?"

She pointed to the open sea. "I keep thinking there's a ship out there, a plain old felucca-"

" 'A plain old' what?"

Poor Kirel was a landsman. "A felucca. It's a small sailing-ship with lateen - triangle - sails. There's plenty in the harbour - the commonest ships around, for fishing or courier service or small cargo loads. But whenever I look straight at this felucca, there's nothing."

"Are you sure you see it in the first place?" He shaded his eyes, peering at the water between Summersea's islands and the hills of the Emel Peninsula.

"It's clear enough to know what kind of ship it is," she reminded him.

"Oh." For a moment Kirel gazed out to sea, thinking. Suddenly he looked around for their teacher. "Frostpine!"

The man waved, and jogged back to them. "What is it?"

"I've been seeing an azigazi all day," Daja explained. "At least, I don't think it's real.

It's a plain felucca, after all, no reason for me not to see one if it really exists. They're common to these waters. But every time I look straight at the thing, it's gone."

Frostpine's dark eyes flashed. "Sense for it, as you sense for the metal in the net. Cast your magic out to sea. If it's a real ship, it's got metal on it."

She tried. Closing her eyes, she listened, and smelled. All that came to her mind was seawater - restless, treacherous stuff ready to grab the unwary.

"It's just water" she told Frostpine, almost whining. She knew she sounded like a baby, but really, what did he expect? The sea was the sea, not metal!

"Ack," he muttered, "you're being difficult." Standing behind her, he reached around and clasped her hands in his. "Remember how Sandry was able to spin a magic cord from your inner self? Well, throw your cord out to me."

She tried to find the cord, but his touch was distracting her. It was easy to give a cord to Sandry, who was giving and soft, like well-woven cloth. Frostpine, though, was metal from top to toe. His metal rang where it touched hers, or rattled. Not cord, then, but wire, she thought. Taking a deep breath, reaching inside, she drew out a shimmering wire, and pa.s.sed it to him.

"Good enough," he said. She felt his power bend, and spring. He towed her magic forwards, intertwined with his. Now she felt metal pa.s.s under and beside her as their power flew outward: pieces of chain, a metal-bound chest, a discarded anchor, all of it rusting on the ocean floor. They slowed; Frostpine sprang forward again. Their power swept further out...

It had to be a ship. What else held nails and metal straps in quite that way, as if she saw a vessel stripped of its wood? Wincing, she realized that she saw weapons, too: a number of swords and knives that no innocent fishing-boat should carry, and cl.u.s.ters of metal arrowheads.

Exhaling the breath in his own lungs, Frostpine ran back to the sh.o.r.e, taking Daja gently along. When she opened her eyes, she staggered.

Frostpine caught her. "You two load the pieces of net we've found, and bring them inside the walls," he ordered Kirell. "Don't dawdle. I'm telling them to close the gates."

Daja grabbed Frostpine's arm before he could go. "It's just one ship-"

He patted her cheek gently. "If his business were honest, youngster, he wouldn't be hidden, would he? That's a pirate's scout vessel, or I'm a dancing-girl. Help Kirel, and come in with him."

"Even if it's a scout, the main pirate fleet's nowhere near,

surely?" Picking up a stack of net-pieces, she loaded them into one of the mule's baskets.

"Not yet," Kirel replied, filling the other basket. "They might be waiting for dark."

"How long have you been sensing this azigazi?" Frostpine asked.

"Since - I don't know," Daja said, genuinely scared. Pirate tales had given her nightmares since she was a ground-pounding baby, too little to sail in the family ships. "It was at least an hour before midday."

"I'll wager they don't know we've spotted them. Don't look so frightened," Frostpine said with a grin. "You've given us warning, that's all. And next time, pay more attention to your azigazis!"

CHAPTER FIVE.

Once they'd eaten midday, Rosethorn gave Briar inside tasks, filling small bottles with different syrups and muslin bags with blends of dried herbs. While he got to work, Rosethorn showed Tris how to make a paste of the finely ground beef and hardboiled egg yolks Briar had carried up from the kitchens. Rolling the paste into tiny b.a.l.l.s, Tris fed them to the nestling at the end of a thin bit of wood. The bird would get those, and a few drops of water, alternately with the milk-and-honey mixture. The dedicate also helped Tris set up a special burner, a metal box that held a candle, to heat small amounts of goat's milk and honey as they were needed. Once the rest period was over, Rosethorn decided that the nestling could be fed every half hour, instead of every fifteen minutes. Loading a basket with the bottles and bags that Briar had filled, she told him to prepare a bushel basket of willow bark strips for tea, and left.

Once she was gone, Tris went upstairs for some books she was supposed to be reading. Bundling her hair under a kerchief, and shedding her shoes and stockings, she returned to the workshop, prepared for a long afternoon. Rosethorn had set her up in front of a window that gave a good view of the Hub clock. Briar, tearing small pieces of bark to shreds, was close enough to be company without making Tris feel crowded. She felt relaxed for the first time in hours.

"She's not so bad, is she?" Briar asked when they'd been silent for a while. "I mean, she's not sweet, like Lark, but she has her good side."

"You must be the only person in all Winding Circle who would say that," remarked Tris drowsily. Taking off her spectacles, she leaned her hand on her chin, gazing out the window through half-lidded eyes. It was a relief not to have light flickering on the edges of her vision.

Did Niko see this way all the time? Didn't his eyes get tired? There was magic everywhere in Winding Circle, she'd found - in the South Gate where it pierced the twelve-foot-thick wall, in the stones of the spiral road through the temple community, in windows and doors. It blazed along the entire length of the Hub, and from the Water and Fire temples, as well as shining from the mages and their students she had pa.s.sed. Most interesting, to her point of view, it gleamed throughout Discipline, and blazed in this workshop - she wondered what she might see in Lark's workroom. All this time, she hadn't thought Lark and Rosethorn were as powerful as Niko, an acknowledged great mage. She had a.s.sumed that their magics were smaller, because they were centred around such ordinary things.

Maybe she needed to think again.

Soft cheeps came from the nest. Glancing at the clock, the girl realized that it was time to feed her charge goat's milk and honey. Placing her spectacles on her nose, she took the cover from the nest.

"Ugly little peep," Briar remarked, watching over her shoulder as she dripped liquid into the gaping beak. "What're those spiky things?"

"Rosethorn says they're pin-feathers. Once he fledges -once he gets real feathers - he'll grow up pretty fast."

Turning to find a wet cloth to mop up spilled milk, she was struck by a blaze of silver light that flared out from a fat, leather-bound book. Tris flinched, covering her eyes.

Hands steadied her on the stool. "Careful - you almost fell off. What's got into you, anyway? You've been a-flinch and a-twitch since you got back."

Tris sighed. Finding the cloth, she wiped away her mess, and covered her charge.

"Niko did this thing to my specs," she told him, and explained about her new ability to see magic. "It takes getting used to. I suppose I will, eventually. Niko doesn't twitch all the time."

"So - if you see this - light, is it?"

"Mostly it's like there's a silver veil over things, or they have silver marks. Then there are the ones that shine like lamps. Big ones. Like the Hub - and not just the seeing and hearing places. The whole tower, clock to kitchens."

"And all of that light's magic."

"That's what Niko told me."

Briar thought about this, tapping the counter-top with a reed.

"You'll wake my bird." Tris took the reed away.

"We heard what you heard last night," Briar remarked abruptly.

"Yes." She looked up at him, waiting. He scowled, not liking the direction his thoughts took him in.

"So maybe, because Her Highness spun us together, we pick up each other's magic.

And we don't always have to be close together for it to spread."