Circle Opens #03: Cold Fire

by Tamora Pierce

  In the slush room she donned coat, scarves, gloves, and even a wool cap so she wouldn’t be tempted to use her magic to warm herself. Picking up her skates, she went down to the basin.

  “Doesn’t do his duty,” she growled as she buckled her left skate. “Idles with riffraff. Bangs away with rough tools. That woman’s mouth is so sour she could pickle lemons in it!” She yanked the straps on her right skate so hard they pinched her foot even through her boot. Cursing in Tradertalk, she loosened the strap. “How someone like Ben came from that bitter old shoe of a female …”

  She stood and thrust herself away from the bench. Unfortunately she did so a little too hard. Across the basin she shot, right into its snowy sides. She pushed herself out of the snow, her face hot with embarrassment. No one was present to witness her humiliation, but she still said aloud, “I meant to do that.”

  It was like meditation, she realized as she steadied herself on the ice once more. She couldn’t think about anything but skating when she skated. She closed her eyes and took deep breaths, thrusting Morrachane from her mind. When her thoughts were filled only with skating, she began again.

  Nia joined her after a while. Morrachane had gone home. “You don’t like her, do you?” Nia called from the bench.

  Daja was practicing turns. “I don’t need to like her.”

  “I feel bad. She’s so dreadful to everyone else, and so kind to Jory and me.” Nia stood and glided across the ice.

  “That’s what Jory said,” admitted Daja.

  “I don’t understand it,” Nia told her, going into a tight, quick spin. As she slowed she added, “I used to think all the stories about her were just lies from jealous people. Then — then I saw her thrash a beggar with her driver’s carriage whip one day. How can she be so loving to us, and so horrible to the rest of the world? What would make a person grow up that way?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Daja. “I’ve never seen anyone like her. My Aunt Hulweme was mean to everyone, no exceptions. Great navigator, but a dreadful person. I’m just glad Ben isn’t like his mother.”

  “The whole city’s glad,” Nia assured her. She grabbed Daja’s hands. “Come on. Let’s go try the ice in the canal.”

  “Oh, no,” Daja said, trying to pull free. “No, no, no!”

  “Yes,” replied Nia. “Come on. You can do this.”

  Much to Daja’s surprise, Nia was right. They skated carefully from Bancanor House north to the tip of Kadasep and back. Daja fell only once, where a patch of ice was pitted. Both girls returned to Bancanor House flushed with victory.

  Their good feelings carried over into Nia’s meditation after they went inside. The younger girl entered the breathing pattern with confidence. Daja watched as her power slid over her skin to coat it in a glowing layer. The emptier Nia’s thoughts, the fewer occasions when her power flared away from her skin. She was close to the point where she would be able to handle her power as she did wood.

  “Did Camoc give you work for today?” Daja asked as they left the schoolroom.

  Nia shook her head. “I asked if I could borrow a book on magic for hard wood, and he grunted. I think it meant yes. He knew I took it, anyway. I read some this morning — I hid it in my hymnbook.” She smiled. “Papa saw me, but he didn’t say anything. I think he gets bored in temple, too.”

  Daja shook her head as they separated to dress for supper. After she ate, Daja spent the evening in the book room with the family. She went to bed feeling as if she’d accomplished a great deal that day, despite Morrachane. She was silly to let the woman irritate her, she decided as she crawled under her covers. Morrachane was a sad creature, hated by most, not understanding what a prize she had in Ben. She was to be pitied, not fought.

  It was nearly dark when Ben left the warehouse, a rough wool coat and felt boots over his clothes. He wrapped scarves around his head, hiding all of his face but his eyes, and carried his device and a lantern in a basket. Unnoticed he joined the stream of servants returning to their masters’ homes, their heads bent against the hard wind that blew off the Syth. Ben appreciated the wind: protecting his face from it, he also disguised his height.

  Ever since he had begun training firefighters, he had walked over every inch of most Kugiskan islands, through courtyards and alleys, past middens and wells, around outbuildings and along the tops of walls. He had descended into cellars and climbed into garrets and towers. He knew those islands, including Alakut, better than those who had lived there for centuries.

  With that knowledge, he had his pick of sites at which to test his lone Alakut Island brigade — footmen and shop assistants who skipped training a third of the time, to run their masters’ errands or simply because they forgot. They needed sharpening up. For this test he had chosen a confectioner’s shop on Hollyskyt Way. It was near enough to Ladradun House that his brigade would immediately send for him when the fire started, but not so near that it might draw suspicion on him.

  Hollyskyt Way was nearly deserted. The families who ran its exclusive shops weren’t deemed good enough to live on Alakut: their businesses were closed for Watersday. There was a houseguest the confectioner didn’t know about, a beggar who crept into the cellar to sleep. But she came well after dark, when there was no chance she would be seen.

  Ben had seen her, of course. He’d watched the place for two months before making his decision. Now he used her tight-fitting entrance to the shop, feeling his servant’s garb catch and pull on its edges. He would lose bits of thread that a magistrates’ mage might use to trace the wearer, but that was no problem. He would leave his outer clothes and anything he’d carried behind to burn: mages couldn’t use tracking spells on items cleansed by fire. Ben smiled as he dropped to the cellar floor, envisioning those mages like frustrated bloodhounds, looking for a trail that only doubled back on itself.

  He lit the lantern and went upstairs, where he set his device in the pantry and lit the fuse. He propped the door open to feed his blaze air, and set empty sacks and jars of olive oil nearby to serve as fuel when the device set the room on fire. He left his basket there as well.

  Outside the shop, he removed his coat, scarves, and boots and thrust them into the cellar, making sure his other clothes didn’t catch on the edges of the opening. Last of all he blew out his lantern and threw that into the cellar. This area was directly under the pantry: the cloth would be ash, the lantern molten tin by the time the magistrate’s mages arrived.

  Then he hurried home to be his mother’s browbeaten son until his summons arrived. While she fed him her endless scolds and insults, he imagined the shop as it started to burn. Imagination got him through supper and her usual Watersday speech, that it was his fault, his inattention, his stupidity that had gotten her grandchildren killed. He endured it. Some days he wondered if she was right. Tonight he did not: his thoughts were on his test. Once she finished, she ordered him to bed, so he wouldn’t waste candles. Ben obeyed. He always did.

  The truth was, Morrachane was an inconvenient convenience. In return for service as her verbal whipping boy — he’d put a stop to her real whippings a month before he married — she gave him a place to stay. If he lived alone, there would be a house to manage and servants to oversee, endless boring details that took precious time from his reason to live. He gave his mother his work at the business and someone to blame; she saw to his daily needs. And one day he would repay her for every time she made him wonder if indeed it was his fault that his wife and children were dead.

  Going to bed posed certain problems. He’d planned to be reading in his nightshirt when they came, until he realized he had no urge to freeze as he fought a blaze in nightclothes. He set out his things as if he prepared them to wear the next day. He could stuff them on over his nightshirt, perhaps leave the end of the shirt trailing outside his breeches. That decided, he got into his bed and opened a book, Godsforge’s Types of Burn and Burn Healing. It was nearly impossible to read. Soon they would come. Soon, soon …

  But the clo
ck kept striking. No one came. He didn’t dare go to the garret window that would give him a view of Alakut. If they came while he was there, it would be hard to explain why he watched a fire instead of racing to it.

  So Ben waited through a sleepless night. Some of his Alakut brigade arrived in the morning, long after it was over.

  “We thought we could handle it,” whined the head footman from Lubozny House. “We’ve trained for weeks —”

  “Three,” Ben interrupted coldly. “When you bothered to come. You didn’t know enough to put out a brush fire in a park, let alone a shop. “Anyone hurt?”

  “A woman who slept in the cellar — she was fried black. And two of us,” said an undercook from the Gemcutters’ Guildhall. The cook was a big woman, one of the few who came to every training session. “The healers said they breathed smoke. We got them at the Alakut Infirmary….”

  Ben yanked on his coat. “Smoke! Were you wearing masks? When I told you smoke is as deadly as fire?” Some glared at him as if it were his fault that they hadn’t remembered about smoke.

  Ben flung open his door and strode out into the glare of the morning sun on snow. At least his so-called firefighters had brought a large sleigh. They tumbled into it after him and raced to the infirmary, arriving in time for Ben to hold one smoke-stricken man’s hands as he died. As his last breath escaped the man’s lips, Ben felt a joy so intense that it made him weep. The healers, even the fire brigade, looked properly sober and admiring. They think it’s grief, Ben thought, trembling as he fought laughter.

  What he’d felt just now was almost too intense to bear. He’d made the rules. He’d told them, they hadn’t listened, and two people had paid the price, this fellow and the beggar woman. The fire had killed them for him. He had turned it loose as mages commanded the winds to rescue becalmed ships, and the fire had given him its greatest gift — the power over human life.

  The destruction of wood and glass and porcelain was nothing to this, Ben thought. Look at them, after their complaints over the drills and schedule. Let one die — let one of them struggle to breathe until the struggle was too much — and suddenly Ben had their attention. Here was why Kugisko had treated him callously. The stakes weren’t high enough.

  Gently he freed himself from the man’s grip. “I’ll look at my other firefighter,” he informed the healers. “And then that beggar. What was she doing there? And then I need to see Alakut council. One of you tell them I will meet them in the council hall, by midday.”

  Healers and brigade trainees alike, they scrambled to do as he ordered. It was amazing, the way dead people changed things.

  The joy was less powerful with the second firefighter: the healers said he would live, though his lungs would never be the same. The beggar woman, though … again he felt that overpowering thrill. He had done this — Bennat Ladradun, his mother’s scapegoat, ignored by the coin counters of the island councils. They would heed him now, wouldn’t they?

  He rested a hand on the dead beggar’s charcoaled ankle, knowing the picture he made, solemn-faced, eyes bright with tears. The firefighters watched him with awe as they fought to keep from vomiting at the dreadful smell of burned flesh.

  He drew his hand away, pretending not to notice the black flakes that clung to his palm. “Such a price to pay,” he murmured shaking his head. “Maybe we could not have saved this poor creature, but we might have saved our own people.”

  They stood back to let him pass, like a noble, like a king. It was the best morning of his life.

  By the third hour of the afternoon, his world was bleak again. The Alakut council had argued, expressed regret, and refused him more funds to train a second brigade, though he explained that one was not enough for the whole island. His brigade, they said, had done poorly at this first challenge. They had to wait and see. They would insist that those who were supposed to learn the skills attended training more often.

  Ben managed to contain his rage until he reached the warehouse. There, when no one could see or hear, he slammed his hands against the walls. Only fire respected him. The Alakut council, it seemed, required a special lesson. He feared that it would be a frightful one, but they had to learn that fire exacted a frightful price.

  10

  Sunsday night Daja and Frostpine stood on a broad gallery from which two staircases led to the meeting hall of the Mages’ Society of Kugisko. They held glasses of mulled cider as they watched the activity below. Kugisko’s mages, dressed in assorted finery, gathered in clusters and broke apart, greeting colleagues. Daja, too, wore her best, a Trader-style knee-length coat and leggings in gold-brown damask trimmed with black braid. No one put on elegant leather slippers when they had to walk to and from sleighs as snow fell, so Daja wore polished Kugiskan boots with gold spirals stamped around the rim. Frostpine, as always, wore his Fire-red habit over his layers of non-Temple clothes, but no one could ignore Frostpine, even in this gaudy crowd. Light glittered from gems and crystals or shimmered over velvets and brocade. Mages who were not priests or religious dedicates, Daja had found, tended to peacock in dress and ornaments.

  Masters were accompanied by those students they deemed worthy. The students, their clothes good but plain, struggled to hide awe. Already Daja had seen Camoc, Arnen, and two more young mages she recognized from Camoc’s shop, as well as the carpentry- and cooking-mages she had met.

  “I don’t see Olennika Potcracker,” Daja remarked to Frostpine. “I wanted you to meet her.”

  “Potcracker once told me she cooks for parties — she doesn’t go to them,” a harsh female voice said behind them. “She’s also referred publicly to some of our richer members as parasites. I doubt they’d welcome her.”

  Daja and Frostpine turned to face the speaker. She was in her early fifties, two inches shorter than Daja, with pale, weathered skin and crows’ feet wrinkles around small, dark eyes. Her no-nonsense lips were thin and wind-chapped, her nose a sharp angle thrust straight down from her forehead. Like many older native Kugiskan women she had dyed her hair blonde so many times that it looked like straw. In contrast to her plain looks, she wore a black silk undergown and a sleeveless maroon velvet overgown, both decorated with gold embroideries. The buttons down the front of the overgown were small gold nuggets. She wore a sheer black veil and a round maroon velvet cap over the ragged twists of her hair.

  She continued, “I personally think Potcracker is overgenerous. After all, there are creatures that feed on real parasites, so the real ones do some good. Our wealthier members feed no one but themselves.”

  “I bless Shurri and Hakkoi for keeping my nature sunny, unlike yours,” Frostpine told the woman, naming the fire gods to whom he had dedicated his life. To Daja he said, “Anyone connected with magistrates sees too much of the bad side of things.”

  “You can hide from it in your pretty temples,” the woman said. She measured Daja with thoughtful eyes. “We don’t.”

  “That’s why I prefer the pretty temples,” retorted Frostpine. “Viymese Heluda Salt, this is my student and friend, Viymese Daja Kisubo. Heluda’s the mage I’ve been working with lately.”

  “I’m honored, Viymese Salt,” Daja told the older woman politely. “I hope the investigation goes well.”

  “We’re close,” said Frostpine.

  “Don’t say that until we have the naliz in irons,” Heluda advised him. She offered Daja a hand gloved in black lace. A smile softened her firm mouth, though her eyes remained wary. Daja had a feeling that Heluda Salt remained watchful even in her sleep. “I hear many good things about you,” she told Daja.

  “Then you can’t have been talking to him,” Daja said, giving the older woman’s hand a squeeze and letting go. “He only ever gives me a hard time.”

  “But it’s for your own good,” Frostpine said, inspecting the room below again. “I force myself, so you will be strong.”

  Heluda jerked her head at Frostpine. “Was he always impossible, or has the cold he moans about so often done this to him?”
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br />   Daja shrugged: she too could be as wary as a magistrate’s mage. “I wouldn’t know. He likes to keep me confused.”

  In the air below, five golden swirls rose, coming together in a whirlwind beneath the huge chandelier. They sparkled as they whirled and spread, until they formed a soaring palace in midair. The watchers applauded. Slowly the illusion faded until only a handful of specks glittered in the air. These vanished, one by one. The last shimmered, faded, then blazed into flaming orange glory as a sun. Then it too winked out.

  “It’s a Society tradition,” Heluda explained to the two southerners. “The illusionists compete all winter, and the Society votes a winner at the last meeting, in the spring. A waste of magic, but nobody listens to me.”

  “If you earned your living making old men look young and fat women look thin, I should think just doing something pretty would be a relief,” Frostpine commented. “Let them have their fun.”

  For a time they watched the crowd, Heluda naming some of Kugisko’s mages and what they did. Daja leaned on the stone rail, listening to her and to bits of conversation that rose from people below.

  “— and I said, why not give up doing love potions? If you have to keep moving so jealous husbands and lovers won’t catch you —”

  “— undersold me by five gold argibs. Five! I told him, do that again, and I’ll go to the Fair Practices Council —”

  A handful of mage-students descended on the tables where food was laid out. Some looked like this was their first solid meal of the week. Daja was grateful that Frostpine was a great believer in the theory that well-fed students worked harder. Many teachers weren’t.

  “— now that he’s got a noble protector, he can afford pearls instead of moonstones for his money-drawing spells.”

  “His protector’s wife isn’t complaining either, not when her husband’s out making money until all hours!” The two who discussed that topic laughed in a knowing way. Daja hated them. Was this what the meditation, work, and study were for, to make rich men richer and supply material for smutty jokes?