Circle Opens #03: Cold Fire

by Tamora Pierce

  “I did all I could.” That voice was tearful, female, coming from the stair to Daja’s left. “I tried to call rain to put it out, but I couldn’t fight the snow. It — it froze. It coated everything like glass.” The speaker sniffled.

  A male voice murmured something.

  “I told them the dangers, that I couldn’t warm it enough to rain, but they ordered me to do it. Just trying half-killed me. My head still hurts. My landlord wants me out because the district’s angry at me. A man in the crowd broke his leg on the ice.” The woman’s voice quavered. “And this beggar woman, who always blessed me when I gave her a copper? She was sleeping there after the shopkeeper left, and — and — Griantein shrive me, she burned. They brought her out….” The woman began to sob.

  Daja swallowed hard. A fire. They were talking about another fire. She wanted to ask, but it would take more courage than she had to face the weeping mage. A hand gloved in black lace rested on her arm. “A confectioners’ shop on Hollyskyt Way, last night. Alakut Island,” Heluda clarified, when Daja frowned, not knowing the street name. “Just on the other side of Pozkit Bridge. Lucky for the confectioner that he wasn’t good enough to live on Alakut, just to sell his sweets there.”

  Daja frowned. If she remembered correctly, that was near Ladradun House.

  “It could have been worse, then,” Frostpine said. He appeared to be absorbed by the view, but it was like him to have heard everything.

  “Was Ben Ladradun there?” Daja asked, trying not to seem worried. Frostpine glanced at her with a brief frown, then returned to his survey of the assembled mages.

  “No, or things might have gone better,” replied Heluda. “Two of the firefighters breathed in smoke. One won’t ever have healthy lungs again. The other died this morning. And it was stupidly done, stupidly. They didn’t even think to send for Ladradun, where he lives maybe ten minutes’ run away, on the other side of Pozkit Bridge. He only started training them three weeks ago. They should have known they couldn’t manage yet. He would have reminded them of the danger from smoke, at least.”

  Daja’s cider was cold, but it wasn’t the cider that made her sad. Ben wouldn’t blame the novice firefighters — he would blame himself for not being there. There was no convincing someone like him that he couldn’t fix everything. It would be worse because the fire had been nearby.

  “No one can be everywhere all of the time,” Frostpine said quietly, as if he knew what she thought. “He’s a grown man; he’ll realize that.”

  “Yes, but he takes fires so personally,” Daja pointed out. “He’s got this idea in his head …”

  Heluda cleared her throat. “I was talking to the Alakut magistrate’s mages before I got here. They believe this fire may have been set. They’re going to work their investigation spells as soon as the site cools — tomorrow, probably.”

  Goosebumps rippled along Daja’s flesh. “Ben and I think the Shopgirl District boardinghouse fire was set too,” she said. “Maybe they’re connected.”

  Heluda raised her brows. “The Shopgirl fire was set? This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

  “But Ben reported it,” Daja said. “Or I thought he did.” She couldn’t remember his exact words. Had he said he’d done it, or that he would do it?

  “Then chances are the report’s buried on my desk,” Heluda replied with a shrug. “I get copies of reports from all the city districts to review — it’s hard to keep up, particularly with a major investigation of my own underway.” She turned a large, jeweled ring on her finger. “Have you or Ravvot Ladradun any ideas on who set that fire?”

  Daja shook her head. “I don’t know why someone would do such a thing in a city that’s mostly wood.”

  “Oh, there are dozens of reasons to set fires,” Heluda said. “The worst we had, a man who’d quarreled with his woman blocked the exits to the Weaver’s Guildhall and set it on fire. Two hundred and forty people died so he could tell a journeyman weaver he was angry. I’ll send word to the Lord Magistrate’s office to have someone look at the Shopgirl site as well as the confectioner’s shop. An experienced magistrate’s mage will be able to tell if they were set.”

  Daja raised her eyebrows, wondering if Heluda didn’t believe her.

  “Just as well to put your own people on it,” Frostpine commented. “Your mages see the whole city, not just individual islands. They’ll know if there have been suspicious fires elsewhere in Kugisko.”

  “Hey! Frostpine!” called a tall man below. Over his gray velvet tunic he wore the sapphire-studded chain of the head of the Mages’ Society. “Stop monopolizing all the beautiful women. Bring them down so we get a chance!”

  Frostpine grinned. He led Daja and Heluda down the stairs opposite to those where the woman had been crying.

  “The thing about Master Northice?” Heluda murmured in Daja’s ear as they descended. “He honestly believes that we’re beautiful. That’s why he gets reelected to head the society every year. He sees the beautiful everywhere.” She smiled ruefully. “I wish I still could.”

  In addition to the Society head, Camoc Oakborn met them on the ground floor. He kissed the magistrate’s mage on the cheek. “Heldy, you look grand,” he told her, eyes twinkling.

  She actually smiled up at him; Daja had begun to wonder if Heluda could smile. “As you are handsome,” she told Camoc. “Do you know —”

  She’d turned to Daja, but Camoc was already offering Daja his hand. “I’ve met Viymese Daja,” he told Heluda. He looked at Frostpine and raised his brows.

  Daja performed the introductions. “This is my teacher, Dedicate Initiate Frostpine of Winding Circle temple,” she said formally. “Frostpine, this is Viymese Camoc Oakborn, Nia’s teacher.”

  Frostpine took Camoc’s hand briefly. “Of course. I’m glad to meet you.”

  “It’s good to have you here, Dedicate Frostpine,” Camoc said. “You honor Kugisko with your visit.”

  “It’s been interesting,” Frostpine said casually. “I wanted Daja to get some experience of other smiths’ — and other mages’ — ways of doing things, if only so she can see mine is best.”

  Camoc actually laughed at that. Even Heluda smiled. “Have you met Dedicate Initiate Crane there at Winding Circle?” asked Camoc. “We went to Lightsbridge together.”

  Listening to the men talk of Crane and other mages they knew as Heluda added her own comments, Daja thought that she could almost like Camoc this way. If only she felt better about how he dealt with Nia.

  She looked until she saw Camoc’s student Arnen at the supper tables, in a group of other student mages. They were eating and talking. Daja walked over to them, taking a couple of anise horn cookies as she waited for Arnen to notice her.

  Finally someone told Arnen, “You have a shadow,” and snickered.

  Daja looked at the speaker — a young man with the pale skin and fair hair of a western Namornese. Was his remark an insult?

  Arnen turned and saw her. “Viymese Daja, good evening,” he said.

  “If you have a moment, I was just wondering how Nia’s lessons go,” Daja replied. “She says the workshop’s very busy.”

  Arnen nodded, his gold earring winking in the candlelight. “We get frantic days, particularly as Longnight approaches,” he said. “But she’s no trouble, if that’s what you mean.”

  That didn’t sound like anything Daja wanted to hear. “How is she at her studies?” she asked. “Learning runes, oils that work best with wood, and so on.”

  “Next she’ll tell you how to set a peg in a floor, Arnen,” remarked the pale young man. “Or how to smooth a chair leg. Little girl,” he said to Daja, “whatever tricks you learned down south, you are interrupting adults here. You speak when you’re spoken to.”

  Daja wrapped her right hand around her left. The brass under her palm heated along with her temper. She disliked being sneered at by a jumped-up kaq with a maggot’s complexion. Since she refused to lose her temper with an idiot, Daja instead remarked. “The basics
of mage-teaching are the same whatever one’s discipline.”

  “Shut up, Eoban,” said a young woman in the group. “Didn’t your mother teach you guest-manners?”

  “She’s not my guest, is she?” demanded the fair-haired Eoban. “She’s just another southerner, come to take the bread from working mages’ mouths.”

  Daja sighed. “Might I speak to you away from the watchman’s clapper?” she asked Arnen. A clapper was two flat pieces of wood on a cord, a noisemaker. “I can’t hear over its racket.”

  Eoban pushed her lightly on the chest, forcing her back a step. “Back to your straw hut, wench,” he snapped.

  Daja looked at him as she thought for a moment, fiddling with a braid. All three of her foster-siblings argued inside her head — not truly, but they’d had so many discussions like this that she knew what they would say. Briar would punch Eoban or wrap him in vines. Sandry would treat Eoban to noble’s scorn for a commoner who’d touched her friend. Tris would go so white-hot with fury that she would literally have to find cold water to stand in, so she could nurse a rage headache as water seethed and boiled around her.

  Daja simply reached into her tunic jacket and drew out her medallion. She held it up so Eoban would clearly see that she wore the insignia of an accredited mage.

  As a student, he possessed no such insignia.

  “I have things to do just now,” she said quietly, “or I would teach you manners. But I’m busy. You’ll have to wait. Touch me again, I won’t make you wait long.” When she saw him gulp, she turned her back on him and looked at Arnen. “We were talking about Nia.”

  His eyes flicked to her medallion. Daja had shown it to Camoc, not to him, though she thought Camoc would have mentioned it to him. Arnen met Daja’s eyes again. “We started on basic tools today, fixing them and putting edges on the cutting ones,” he told her. “She knows a lot for a girl of her background — she says the carpenters who worked around Bancanor House explained things to her.” He smiled, a glint of warmth in his eyes. “She doesn’t complain as much as I did over tools. I mean to start her on basic runes next week. She works hard. She really wants to learn, and I can see she’s picking up the meditation skills she needs.”

  Daja folded her arms over her chest, inspecting Arnen — really inspecting him — for the first time. There was someone here she hadn’t seen when Camoc had introduced them. She had noted the young man’s artistry, but did not think about what kind of person he was. She’d believed he was like most top mage-students, always running behind the master, with no minds of their own. Now she wondered if she had misjudged those students too. “Will you mind if I check on her now and then?” she asked.

  “Master Camoc takes his midday at home and works on papers there for two or three hours,” Arnen said. “The shop’s at its quietest then.”

  Daja smiled. Her opinion of Arnen rose another notch. He’d realized her misgivings were with Camoc. “I’ll keep that in mind,” she promised.

  An hour later, Daja saw that Frostpine was struggling to hide yawns. She sent a runner for the sleigh Kol and Matazi had ordered them to take. Their driver was in the kitchens, eating and drinking with other servants who drove those mages who could afford them.

  Together she and their driver bundled Frostpine in fur throws and blankets, with hot bricks under his feet, before the driver set the horses forward. Frostpine immediately disappeared under the rug. Daja reached into the earth for warmth, as far as she could, but North Fortress Island was at the Syth’s edge. Its icy water made a powerful extra barrier to the heat under the islands. Daja could punch through the water in the canals and even the Upatka River, but here the Syth’s size and natural magic was much stronger than she was.

  At least the snow had stopped for the moment. Three fresh inches lay on the road that led across North Fortress Island. It hissed under the runners and muffled the horses’ hooves.

  Daja worked a hand through Frostpine’s cocoon until she found his arm. Through their magic she said, I don’t see why they built the Mage Society Hall all the way at the western tip of North Fortress.

  Kugiskan mages were infamous for experiments once, Frostpine replied. The idea was to get them as far from the city as possible without actually throwing them out.

  Maybe these northerners are smarter than I thought, Daja said. She could feel his body shake with laughter through his cocoon.

  The wind picked up sharply as the sleigh raced across Schoolman Bridge onto Odaga Island. Most of the artisans and servant families who served the wealthy of Kadasep and Alakut Islands lived here. Their wooden houses were dark, shuttered against the snow and the wind off the Syth. Only the brass-backed lanterns on Mage Road were lit. No one stayed up late on Odaga, not when they rose at servants’ dawn, the cold gray hour before sunrise.

  Daja saw pinpricks of light on Kadasep Island, across an intersection of canals from Odaga. More winked along the rocky cliff that was the north point of Alakut Island. A bigger light bloomed next to them, one that grew even brighter as the sleigh approached Bolle Bridge.

  Daja yanked at Frostpine’s wrappings. His head shot up out of his cocoon like an irate turtle from its shell. “Girl, what are you doing to me? We aren’t there yet….”

  His eyes followed Daja’s pointing finger to the fire on Alakut Island. It blazed from a house at the peak of the cliff.

  Frostpine lunged forward and tapped their driver’s shoulder. “Look!”

  The man turned his eyes from his horses to Alakut. “Sythuthan!” he cursed. “That’s Olaksan Jossaryk’s house!”

  Daja and Frostpine gauged the fire. Neither of them spoke for a moment. Then Frostpine told the driver, “You’d better take us there. We might be able to help.”

  The man glanced back, as if he had a mind to argue. If he did, he changed it, and turned the horses not down the road to Pozkit Bridge, but onto a steeper one that climbed the heights of Alakut. Daja stared at the blaze as they approached it, a strange, idiot thought repeating itself over and over: real or set? real or set? as if a fire deliberately started were any less deadly than those with natural causes.

  Frostpine scrambled free of his blankets; Daja grabbed his wrist and threaded warmth through his veins until they were three houses downhill of the blaze. There the driver halted the sleigh.

  “This is as close as I can get,” he said, apologetic. Other sleighs blocked the street; a crowd had formed ahead. “I have to stay with the horses,” he added, even more apologetic.

  “You should go back —” Frostpine began as he clambered out of the sleigh.

  “The master and the mistress would kill me,” the driver said, his voice flat. “Take some of them lap robes. They’ll be needed.”

  Frostpine and Daja each grabbed an armful of quilts and fur rugs, then headed up the street. People stood in the road watching, coats thrown on over nightclothes, belongings thrust into pillow slips, sheets turned into bundles. Servants ranged around the houses on either side of the Jossaryk home and on the opposite side of the street, watching for deadly, floating embers ushered along by the bitter wind. Others formed rough lines to sand piles in kitchen courtyards, passing full buckets to those who fought the blaze. Sand was safer: it didn’t freeze to slippery ice. People helped others — wrapped in sheets or blankets, sobbing, soot-marked — through the tangle of sleighs and gawkers into houses farther down the road.

  Onlookers moved away from Frostpine’s scarlet habit, hardly noticing Daja in his wake. Once the pair entered the main courtyard of the sprawling Jossaryk House — it was nearly a palace — they stopped, panting, and measured what they saw.

  The parts of the house that wrapped around the outer edges of the courtyard were one-story extensions. They led to two-story sections that attached to the three-story main house. These extensions would include servants’ quarters, storerooms, coops, stables, dairy, and all the other workaday parts that supported the elegant building. They were not yet on fire. Behind those additions the ornately carved and pain
ted main house was half in flames. The hard wind off the Syth struck the rock cliff on which it sat and raced upward, picking up speed and strength until it blasted over the cliff’s edge against the face of the house. The fire that burned along the roof’s peak stretched toward courtyard and street, thrust almost horizontal by the wind. There would be no saving the house, only the people.

  Firefighters stood on the wall around the place with buckets, ready to shout an alarm if they saw clumps of fire blown toward other homes. Men and women hidden under sodden blankets streamed in and out of the extensions, returning with those who were still inside.

  “Get the gawkers out of here!” Daja heard a clear voice order over the roar of wind and fire. “Take the victims inside — they’ll freeze in this wind. Tell the neighbors to open their homes — if they balk, come to me!”

  Ben stood in the courtyard in the gap between the extensions. The wind whipped the curls that escaped his fur hat; his coat was half-buttoned; one pant-leg hung outside his boot. He directed those who left the buildings with people in their arms. For a moment Daja wondered how he’d known to come, before she realized he probably saw the fire from his house.

  Frostpine and Daja went to Ben. “Where can we help?” asked Frostpine. “Tell us what’s left to be done.”

  Ben looked them over. For a moment Daja thought he was angry, or perhaps just vexed. She wondered why, trying to put herself in his shoes. He must be thinking about how to put the most people to the best use. Frostpine and Daja were just two more elements to worry about.

  “Do you firewalk like her?” Ben demanded.

  Frostpine nodded.

  “There’s a servants’ dormitory on the second floor of this extension,” Ben raised his voice over the roar of the flames, “near the main body of the house.” He pointed to the upper story of the longest extension, the one to Daja’s left. “We’re still trying to get them out, but people are afraid to get too close.”

  “Can’t blame them for that,” Frostpine shouted. The wind tossed his hair and beard wildly, turning him into some dark, mysterious figure, more a wind spirit than a man.