Tris's Book

by Tamora Pierce

  “Warn someone—” croaked Tris, swaying. “Where’s Aymery?”

  “We told Lark and Niko,” replied Sandry, hiding her face as a pirate killed a novice close by.

  “Aymery?” Tris asked Briar.

  He shook his head. If she hadn’t seen, he didn’t want to be the one to tell—

  The air filled with a powerful glow that made even their magical barrier turn dim, leaving no shadows, no area where mischief would be worked unseen, no place to run. That was Niko. Frostpine and Lark revealed their presence when cloaks, necklaces, bracelets all came to life, twining around pirate arms and legs, tripping and wrapping, hobbling. Swords jumped into the air on their own, to come down hilt-first on pirate heads. Within seconds, the invaders were disarmed and surrendering, their hands in the air. The attack was over.

  Lark, Frostpine, and Niko approached the barrier, and the children let it down. “Are you all right?” Lark demanded. “What happened? How did you come here? Where—”

  Tris looked around frantically. She’d seen her cousin knocked flying after he’d punched her, right before she’d blacked out.

  Aymery lay near a giant tree that had lost all its leaves. Moaning, she went to him, streaming tiny lightnings as she ran, making the air hiss as she passed. Putting her ear by his open mouth, trying to hear him breathe, she rested a hand in the middle of a huge soggy patch just under his breastbone. It came away almost black in the over-brilliant light that Niko had made, black and rippling with tiny sparks. Speechless with horror, she stared at her cousin’s face. He stared back, dark eyes wide and unblinking, looking not so much terrified as surprised.

  Tris began to rock, small bits of lightning jumping from her to him. She wanted him to wake up. She wanted him to stop scaring her. “How dare you hit me!” she cried, and pummeled him.

  No one wanted to touch her. Even Niko was reluctant to venture near the fiery darts that played around Tris. Sandry was just as afraid as anyone else: Tris was scary now. She was also in pain. Afraid or not, Sandry couldn’t let that continue. Making herself take first one step, then another, she approached her friend. Steeling herself to actually put a hand on Tris’s shoulder was a little harder, but she did it.

  The lightnings played around her hand, tickling her skin. Her hair struggled to rise out of its braids.

  Tris looked up at Sandry, her eyes red and puffy. Then she took a deep breath and held it. Releasing it, she breathed in again. The lightnings faded, then vanished. With a sight of relief, Sandry put both arms around her friend.

  “It was for money,” Tris muttered into Sandry’s nightgown. “He said they enslaved him, but he didn’t seem to mind. He was going to let people die for … for gold.”

  Daja and Briar heard this as they came over. “That’s what jishen do,” said Daja grimly.

  Sandry and Briar tugged Tris to her feet and turned her away from Aymery’s body. “Let’s go home,” Sandry whispered.

  “I think it’s for the best,” Niko said quietly. “There’s a lot of sorting-out to be done here.” He had come over to talk to them by himself. Lark was helping wounded dedicates to the temple steps; Frostpine and a dedicate in red were rounding up all of the prisoners. “I’ll speak with you later—Moonstream and Skyfire, too, in all likelihood. For now, you should go. We need to get this gate repaired,” he said loudly, walking toward the dedicate working with Frostpine.

  Daja tugged on Tris’s arm. “Leave him,” she said, meaning Aymery. “He would have made slaves of us all.”

  Tris shook her off gently. Kneeling, she unclasped the earring from her cousin’s flesh. Then she let her friends lead her home.

  Even there, she had little peace for the next two hours. The four had to explain matters to their teachers and to the dedicate who had been in charge of the north gate guard. From the dedicate-guard they learned that the spell-net that protected the temple walls had been left inactive on the north road, so nearly fifty villagers could reach Winding Circle. Now the guards suspected that the villagers were dead or enslaved by the pirates, who had come ashore and made their way around Winding Circle’s protections to seize just this chance.

  The story was told again, after a groggy Moonstream and Skyfire examined Aymery’s belongings. By then, Tris had heard Briar tell of Aymery’s death. The mist that she had blown out of the northern part of Winding Circle had returned. When she heard the clock tower’s fog-muffled bells strike two in the morning, she retreated to her room to sleep.

  11

  The starling woke Tris, squalling for breakfast. The people in Discipline were still asleep as she staggered down to warm milk and honey for her bird. Little Bear, hardly able to walk in a straight line after his drugged supper, had to be let outside. Tris waited until he came back, then closed the door against the fog that still clung to everything.

  An hour later, Tris lurched downstairs again to feed the nestling meat-and-egg-paste balls and water. She began to think she would have done better to drown him. Any worries she had about making him ill through ignorance had evaporated. No dying creature possessed such lungs.

  When he woke her for a third time, she gave up. She cleaned her teeth and dressed, then went to heat his goat’s milk and honey. There were signs that someone else had been up, made tea, drunk it, and gone. Sticking her head into Lark’s workroom, she saw that both Lark and Niko were missing—the chair-bed and the pallet on the floor were empty.

  Stopping now and then to feel Aymery’s earring, tucked into a skirt pocket, Tris drew water from the well and set it to boil. She washed the juice and tea cups left by their after-midnight visitors, started the porridge, put more tea-water on, and dusted the main room. She lost herself in small chores, keeping grief at bay as well as she could.

  At last she made herself enter the room he had borrowed from Sandry. Moonstream had taken his magical possessions and journal for examination, but his clothes and books were still there. Like Briar, she could see that Aymery spared no expense on himself. No wonder he’d had debts—debts the pirate mage had used to get him into his power. What was his name? Enahar? He had bought a Chandler like a toy, used him until he tired of it, then thrown the toy away. She reflected on these things, rubbing the earring with her thumb.

  “Merchant girl, you have got to pull yourself in and stop this foolishness,” Daja said from behind her.

  Tris stared at her. “Foolishness?” she asked numbly.

  Daja pointed. “Your dress is starting to smoke. There’s sparks jumping all over you.”

  Tris looked down. There were scorch marks on her clothes. “I’m all right,” she said, and went to check the porridge.

  Daja leaned back when she passed. “All right as compared to what?”

  “Let me be,” Tris advised, stirring the pot. “My feelings are none of your affair.”

  Daja fixed tea. “They are if you burn this house down around our ears.”

  “I’m not going to do that,” said Tris grimly, the ends of her hair gleaming with tiny sparks. “If I burn anything, it’s going to be pirates.”

  “Wonderful. How?”

  “I’ll think of something.”

  Daja crossed her arms over her chest, staring at the other girl. “Well, if you think of something, I might help. Might.”

  “Help what?” Yawning widely, Rosethorn came out of her room, shutting the door behind her. “Is there any tea from last night?”

  “There’s fresh—it just has to steep a little more,” said Daja. Rosethorn nodded and lurched out the back door to the privy.

  Taking her spoon from the pot, Tris faced into the draft that blew in through the open door and sniffed. The wind had risen and changed, coming now out of the south. It was prodding the fog. Reaching out with her mind, she found a tiny bit of magic in it, something as faint as the scent in a long-dried rose. “Wind’s turning,” she whispered. “It’ll blow off the fog.”

  Daja frowned. She didn’t like the sound of that.

  “It’s almost like there’s
magic in it, but it feels really strange,” Tris added.

  There were no odd sparks playing over Tris’s skin or hair now, no small lightning bolts playing across the spaces between her fingers. Hesitantly, Daja rested a hand on the other girl’s shoulder, expecting a shock. She was relieved when it didn’t come.

  The contact brought their magics together. She saw what Tris meant. She could even guess the explanation. “I think maybe some people untied a bijili-knot,” she whispered. “One that mimanders tied south winds into. It feels like mimander-work, anyway.”

  “So you Traders really will sell to anyone, won’t you?” growled Tris, yanking out of Daja’s hold. “Even filthy jishen.”

  “I don’t hear you when you cluck like a kaq,” Daja replied coolly. “And I doubt it. Dealing with pirates gets you executed by your own crew. I bet they took the bijili from Traders they killed.”

  Tris started to argue, then let the harsh words go. Daja was probably right. Why pay money when you can take from the dead?

  A screech burst out of the covered nest on the table. Her charge was ready to eat again. Rosethorn, coming back from the privy, stuffed her fingers into her ears and retreated to her room.

  No one kept the schedule that morning, but the chores got done. When Briar had finished the breakfast dishes, Rosethorn took him to view the greenery around the north gate, with an eye to fixing the damage from the hailstorm. She was careful not to look at Tris when she mentioned it, but the girl blushed and shrunk in on herself anyway. In daylight, she could see bruises on everyone, even herself, marking the areas they hadn’t been able to protect from the tumbling ice-chips.

  “I didn’t mean to create hail,” she muttered to Daja and Frostpine as she settled at the table. They were putting out the things they would need to work on the spell-net: coils of wire, bits of mirror with metal loops on the back, pieces of the old spell-net, pliers.

  “It did a good thing,” Frostpine pointed out. “It slowed the pirates down and helped those who were drugged to wake up. It probably saved our people’s lives, and yours. See how this works, Daja? Use the wire to create new squares of net. Start with the edges of the old net and build out from it. For the plain joinings, where you aren’t putting a mirror, just twist the strands around each other three times. Where you want to put a mirror—” He showed her how to do it, giving two metal strands one twist around each other, threading one through the loop on back of each mirror, and giving them another twist.

  “I have to inspect the gate,” he said when it was clear that Daja had gotten the knack of net-mending. “They’ll need all new metal work for that, I’m afraid. You girls stay put,” he added as Sandry emerged from Lark’s workshop, carrying her small loom. “Don’t leave this cottage for any reason, unless it’s with permission from an adult.” Frostpine picked up the toolbox that Kirel had sent over the day before. Smiling ruefully, he told Tris, “About your hail. I’m not saying it would be terrible if you could learn—once you got a wind or a storm going—how to send it someplace in particular. Seems to me that if air and water get all stirred up when you do, they might want to listen to you as well. You just have to be firm with them.” He waved and left the cottage.

  Tris slumped on the table, her chin on her hands, staring into space as Daja and Sandry worked. “Easy for him to say,” she commented.

  “I’ve seen him call a rope of forge-fire over to reheat small pieces of metal,” Daja remarked. “It’s much the same, only he already has to have a fire burning. You get winds to come out of nowhere.”

  Being firm with winds and such, Tris thought, walking over to the stone jars where things like flour and spices were kept. What’s the point?

  It’s worth a try, argued another part of herself. Anything is better than thinking about Aymery and that awful soggy patch on his chest.

  Using a tiny spoon, she carried flour back to the table and dumped it in a heap in front of her chair. “Don’t watch,” she told the other girls. “It’ll probably go wrong.” Daja and Sandry nodded and worked at their tasks.

  Sitting, Tris propped her chin on her hands, looking at the flour. Taking a deep breath, she searched the air for a breeze and found one, jumping in and out of the cottage at the back door. She snatched a pinch of it and pulled it over to the table. Feeling it wriggle eel-like in her magical grip, she squeezed until it went still, then placed it over the flour.

  Reaching out with one finger, she stirred her captured breeze. It began to spin.

  Keep going, Tris ordered it, and gave her finger another twirl.

  The breeze reached into the flour, drawing it up as it spun. Now it could be seen, a thin cone of white that whirled like a top, its point set firmly in a shrinking mound of flour. At last Tris flicked all of her fingers at it, pushing it across her end of the table, away from Daja and Sandry, until it reached the edge. With a twitch of the hand, Tris called it back. It spun in front of her briefly, then collapsed, leaving a spray of powder as its remains.

  “Maybe a bigger wind holds the shape longer?” Tris asked, thinking aloud. Reaching out, she found a larger breeze and called it. She worked up a sweat, making flour whirlwinds, but she also kept them on the table, away from her friends. That was a start, at least. She finally stopped fooling with the air when her nestling informed her—informed everyone—that he was ready for another meal.

  An hour after midday Tris checked the fog. It was almost gone, shredded by the winds from the cove. Her fingers had rediscovered Aymery’s earring in her pocket and were rolling it around and around in her hand. Magic ought to be simple, she thought. You create an illusion, and it ought to last until you uncreate it. You call up fog, and it should stay where you want it until you don’t need it anymore.

  But anyone can play with magic, can’t they? If they can’t undo the fog, they can turn up something to blow it away. They’ll use battlefire to kill the wall of thorns, once they can see to launch it again, and they’ll use boom-stones to destroy the spell-net, taking the protections off the rest of Winding Circle. And then they’ll come in.

  “Start killing,” the ugly pirate had said. That was what awaited them—that or slavery.

  “I wish I could do it like you,” Daja told Sandry in disgust as Tris returned. The Trader put her pliers down. “It would be so easy.” Taking lengths of wire, she laid them on the table in straight lines and began to weave a fresh strand through them, under one wire and over the next, as Sandry giggled. She did four rows that way, until she had a neat checkerboard of copper, silver, and gold strands on the table before her.

  “Wait,” Tris said as Daja was about to sweep the design away. “Wait a moment.” Frowning, she sat back and held up her hand. Thinking about Aymery had upset her again. The lightning had come back; she could see it flicker as her hair fluffed up. Now a spark shimmered between her thumb and forefinger, growing larger under her stare. It drifted left. The moment it touched her forefinger, it jumped to her thumb, leaving a bright trail behind it. The trail flickered, rippled, and stayed. A miniature lightning bolt now played between Tris’s fingers.

  She walked around the table to stand in front of Daja’s work, not seeing that Daja moved away from her. Bending down, Tris held the tiny bolt over the point where a wire passed under another.

  “Strike,” murmured Tris, drawing on her magic. She pointed, just as she had with the small whirlwinds. The lightning was more difficult to handle; it kept trying to jump free of her control.

  “Strike,” she ordered, forcing her power onto the small strip.

  The bolt flared and lashed so fast that none of them could trace its path. It struck the table, leaving a deep scorch mark.

  Tris bit her lower lip and called up a new flake of lightning. This one was quicker to grow from its seed-spark. “Strike,” she ordered, focusing her mind on the join of two wires.

  It struck. A nearby piece of mirror cracked and blackened.

  “Tris—” Daja said.

  Sandry put her hand on Daja’s ar
m, hushing her. Tris called a third bit of lightning out of the sparks that rippled over her hair. “Strike.” She bore down even harder with her mind, her will, and her magic.

  The strip reached across the space between her hand and the crossed wires. For a breath it hovered as if it were unsure. Then it leaped, arrowing into the space where the wires touched. There was a crackle and a smell of hot copper. Tris moved back with a sigh as Daja bent in to look.

  “Oti, log this,” Daja whispered to the Trader goddess. The pair of wires were fused as neatly as if she had pressed hot iron against them. Sandry clapped.

  All of her sparks had died in her glee over her success, but Tris had an idea. In making them big enough to act like real lightning bolts, she had gotten a better sense of her power and theirs. Tasting lightning, she knew it to the marrow of her bones and could summon more. She did so three more times, melting Daja’s wires together in three more places, so they formed without Daja twisting them together.

  Lark, Frostpine, Briar, and Rosethorn returned as the girls were starting a late midday. Everyone was glad to sit and eat. The adults passed on the information that the north gate was closed and being rebuilt, while the spell-nets now hid Winding Circle in the north as well as the east and west. There would be no more attacks from that direction, or so everyone had to hope. No one mentioned what would happen if the pirates were able to blast the buried spell-nets to pieces with boom-stones.

  Niko arrived as they were finishing. To everyone’s surprise and delight, Dedicate Gorse was with him. The stocky kitchen dedicate had brought a batch of fried sweet cakes for them to try out and fresh ground meat and egg yolks for the nestling. He watched as Tris prepared the balls of meat-and-egg paste and even tried his hand at stuffing two into the starling’s maw.

  “If we’re ready?” Niko asked when the bird had settled to sleep again.

  Gorse looked up at him and nodded.

  “Children, I want each of you to stand behind your teacher,” Niko said. “We’re going to conduct some experiments.” He placed a leather bag the size of a cabbage on the table.