Circle Opens #03: Cold Fire

by Tamora Pierce

  It was snowing lightly as Daja skated north along Prospect, keeping well to the side. Daredevils raced down the middle of the canals. So did robbers and pickpockets: those good skaters looked to winter as their bounty season. Daja didn’t think she could move in the fast traffic in the center. She envied the speeders and liked to watch how they did it, half crouched, skates flashing, swerving around bumpy or uneven areas in the ice. She envied them, but she wasn’t about to copy them. Sometimes she had to use her Trader staff to keep herself upright.

  Still, she had improved. She negotiated the turn into Mite Canal with no accidents, and slid to a halt at the hired sleigh stands a quarter of a mile north of Pozkit Bridge. Her skates hung over her shoulder, staff in hand, she climbed up to the street. Hollyskyt Way met Jossaryk Place, the road Daja and Frostpine had followed across Alakut on their way to the fire. The sleigh stand was probably the one where the firesetter left one pair of boots to burn.

  She knew where she was going now, and she didn’t turn back. She had changed in the smoke, and the fear, and the dark. The change wasn’t to her magic. It would recover with meditation and rest, more quickly than her spirit would. If she was to make sense of that night and those deaths, if she was ever going to understand the kind of person who would sentence fifty people to death by burning, she ought to see the final result for herself.

  Daja walked down Hollyskyt until she found the rising street that followed the edge of the cliff. The sign read FORTRESS VIEW ROAD. It showed little signs of winter use. Daja huddled deeper inside her coat and scarves — she would rather brave the Syth’s wind than tap her ability to warm herself for now — and hiked up the steep road.

  No blast of lake wind caught her as she walked. The air was cold and still. “Oh, now you’re as nice as a kitten,” she told it as she toiled upward. “Back when it would have saved lives, you blew your worst.”

  Her mother always said it wasn’t polite to mock other people’s gods, and Sythuthan was a notorious trickster. He was not likely to appreciate being scolded. Daja shut up.

  Wall after wall showed her blank faces as she passed the homes of the wealthy. As she approached the summit, Daja found the damage left by fire and the people who fought it. The road was churned and frozen into peaks and dips that made the footing tricky. Once more she used her staff to brace herself. Soot marked the walls of Jossaryk’s neighbors. Then she reached Jossaryk House itself. The gate stood open. The wall was intact: the wind had blown so hard that the fire never turned this way. Daja took a breath, resettled her grip on her staff, and walked through the gate.

  She had expected to see part of the house — foolish, given the fury of the blaze and the wind. Instead she found no house, its cellars exposed, everything a blackened mess. No wall stood higher than a foot. The ruin stretched before her, complete all the way out to the courtyard where she and Frostpine had collapsed.

  How did mages like Heluda do it? How could they tell where this had started, where the evil took root? Daja was a mage, and she couldn’t tell. Looking hard, she noticed that the largest section of wall remaining was the front. It was that hard wind, which had thrust the fire into the rest of the house before it had completely devoured the front wall. Against the base of that fragment she saw a huge, old-fashioned hourglass, its brass parts melted to globs, the sand within turned to blackened glass from the heat. Ten yards to her left she saw three whole burned cow skeletons — the staff really did keep meat here in the winter.

  Walking around the outer rim of the house filled her with awe for the power of fire. All that remained were parts of things: charred clothes embedded in frozen mud, melted jewelry, a set of false teeth in enamel over metal, more animal bones. The dead were gone by now.

  At last she reached the rear wall and its empty gate. Firefighters had removed the wooden doors from their hinges to give easy passage to the street. There Daja turned to stare at the black ruin, leaning on her Trader staff.

  In Sandry’s last letter, she had written Daja that she’d been forced to kill three murderers before they escaped a trap set for them and killed again. Reading, Daja had thought she could never do such a thing. Now, as she looked at Jossaryk House, she wasn’t so sure. Could she kill the one who had done this? Who was she to say what punishment was right? Anyone who used fire this way must be mad beyond question, mad and pitiful. Even if his madness came to evil, he shouldn’t be killed for something he couldn’t help, only locked up forever.

  Another part of her disagreed. What if he escaped his keepers and set more fires? More people would die. And why did she think he was mad? Madmen didn’t burn anything mages could use to track them. Madmen wet themselves and talked to the air. They claimed to be gods and rocked in corners. They didn’t come and go unnoticed. They didn’t watch what they’d done.

  That was a new idea, one she didn’t like. Did he watch? How could he?

  And yet, if she had taken such care on a project, wouldn’t she want to see it through?

  That was evil. It was evil of the worst kind. Such evil would show on his face. The mages would find him. There was no way he could escape capture. Then he would get the traditional penalty for firesetters: burning. His evil would be cleansed. Probably right now the magistrate’s mages spoke to people who had seen someone so empty of good it had frightened them.

  With that thought to comfort her, Daja hiked back down to Mite Canal. She hoped she would see this firesetter before they burned him, so she would know pure evil if she saw it again.

  On the canal she skated faster than she had before, staff tucked into the crook of one arm, trying to leave the bad thoughts in her wake. She drew closer to the canal’s center: slower skaters on the edge eyed her nervously as she passed. She almost came to grief, swooping around the rim of Kadasep into Prospect Canal, but quick shoves of her staff against the ice kept her away from those making the same turn. As Bancanor House drew closer on her right, she saw a familiar person skating toward her. Daja couldn’t see her face at this distance, but she knew Nia’s bright hat and scarves as well as she knew her own. Daja raised two fingers to her lips and blew the earsplitting whistle that Briar had spent an afternoon teaching her, then slid past Bancanor House to meet her waving student. Other skaters grimaced or made rude comments that Daja ignored.

  Nia was giggling as Daja reached her. “I see you’re feeling better,” she commented as Daja turned and skated with her. “Only please, don’t let Jory hear you do that, or she’ll want to learn, too.”

  Daja shuddered. “Give me credit for some sense.” She grimaced: her thighs were aching after a long skating session and her climb to Jossaryk House.

  “You’ve gotten so good at this!” Nia exclaimed as they glided into the boat basin.

  “I had a good teacher,” Daja said. “Speaking of that, how go your studies? I saw you were reading about wood magic the other night.”

  Nia beamed at Daja. “Isn’t it fascinating? Arnen gave it to me. He assigns me pages to memorize at home and I recite back to him first thing in the morning. That way I work on the physical part at the shop during the day and do book learning at home.”

  “So you like him,” Daja remarked, pleased. It seemed her conversation with Arnen at the Mages’ Society gathering had borne fruit.

  “He’s really clever, once you can get him to talk. If it’s just the two of us, he chatters like Jory, but bring in someone else, and he barely speaks.” Nia shook her head, smiling. “At first I thought he was a snob,” she admitted. “But he’s just shy. And I’m learning a lot from him.”

  They meditated, changed clothes, and met the family at supper. Afterward Daja joined them in the book room, accepting Kol’s challenge to a game of chess. As they played, the twins lay on their bellies, Jory in front of the hearth, Nia behind her. Their lips moved as they memorized information from small, leather-bound mage books. Matazi worked at needlepoint. One of the family’s dogs lay stretched out between the twins, while the largest of the household cats draped herself
across Daja’s feet.

  The quiet shattered as Frostpine swept in, carrying a drift of outdoor cold with him. He went immediately to one of the big chairs beside the hearth and fell into it. Jory scrambled to her feet and left the room.

  Frostpine glanced at the fire: the logs, which had been crackling peacefully, roared into active flame. Daja set three more chunks of wood on the blaze. As she brushed off her hands, she looked at her teacher and raised her eyebrows.

  “Done,” he replied to her silent question. “Arrested, the whole pack enjoying the governor’s hospitality. They don’t have heat in the cells, either. Though I doubt they’ll be there long enough to really suffer. The governor wants this ended.”

  “Now that it’s done, will you let us know what’s kept you out until all hours?” Matazi asked, choosing a fresh length of scarlet silk for her work. “Or is it still secret?”

  “Check and mate,” Kol told Daja. She grinned and shook her head. She had a long way to go before she mastered chess.

  “I’ll tell you later,” Frostpine said with a nod at the twins. “For now, you may rejoice that I am among you again.”

  Daja rolled her eyes. “If you’re going to be saucy, I’m going upstairs,” she told her teacher. She relented enough to kiss his cheek. “Congratulations,” she whispered. “Good work for an old man.”

  She was preparing the washes she would need to set the gloves on the iron forms when one of the maids knocked on her door. “Excuse me, Viymese Daja, but Ravvot Ladradun is here and asks if he might see you. He says he knows he is late — he just came from his business — but asks if you would grant him the courtesy.”

  Daja corked the bottle she was about to empty into a bowl. “That’s fine. Show him up, please.”

  “Viymese!” the maid cried, shocked. “A man, in your bedroom? The impropriety!”

  Daja raised her brows and waited for the woman to remember she was not exactly a Kugisko maiden. Mages weren’t held to the rules of merchant propriety, even young ones. Tris had once remarked crossly that people thought mages had the morals of cats.

  The maid looked down. “Viymese, forgive me,” she said. “I’ll bring Ravvot Ladradun right away.”

  Daja picked up a few things and moved her tools around, though it wasn’t necessary. She always kept her room neat. She also lit more candles. As she put down the taper she’d used to light them, the maid showed Ben in.

  “Shall I bring tea, Ravvot?” she asked him. “Cider, pastry?”

  “Nothing, thank you,” Ben replied. “I won’t stay long.”

  The maid curtsied and left the room, leaving the door open an inch. Daja noticed; her mouth twitched with a smile. It seemed the Bancanor servants meant to look out for her reputation even if she didn’t. Her amusement faded when she looked at Ben — he seemed weary. Part of that was fire and candlelight. They cast his face in sharp relief, making its lines deeper, his expression harder.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t come earlier,” he confessed without looking at her. “I wanted to make sure you were all right before this, but the fire wasn’t out till dawn on Moonsday. I was helping with the victims until almost noon on Starsday. Someone did tell me you and your teacher were fine.” He looked at her with concern. “You are, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, of course we are,” Daja said hurriedly, in the grip of a sudden wild thought. “Ben, who hates you this much?”

  He looked at her, his face oddly still. “Why do you say that?”

  Daja sat on her workstool to work the idea out aloud. “You told me you saw it on your way home. I bet if you’d gone home you could have watched it from your upstairs windows. I have to think maybe these fires are being set to hurt you. To, I don’t know, destroy your name in the city, to make people think your firefighting ideas don’t work. Maybe even to drag you into danger.”

  “Daja, that’s a tremendous leap of logic,” he murmured. He sat in one of her fireside chairs.

  “I’m not so sure. Well, I’m a mage, and they teach us not to believe in coincidences, you see. You’ve met this person, that’s my guess. Can you recall meeting someone who just seemed evil to you? Someone who made your skin crawl? Some you crossed?”

  “Evil?” he asked.

  “Only an evil person would harm others to get at someone else,” Daja said flatly.

  Ben ran his fingers through his thinning curls. “You honestly believe there are people who are either good or evil?” he asked. “How old are you?”

  “Fourteen,” she said, frowning. “What has my age to do with this?”

  Ben shook his head. “This is the second time I’ve heard you talk like a young person. Usually I forget you aren’t my age. People aren’t that simple, Daja.”

  “Of course he’s evil,” she said, impatient with typical adult shillyshallying. “Look at what he does. Or maybe it’s a she —” She stopped, abruptly. Morrachane? His own mother? Teraud’s wife had said she whipped her servants … no. Morrachane Ladradun would never do something that would mean crawling into houses or walking icy, windswept clifftop roads.

  So involved was she in thinking, then discarding, the possibility, that she had missed the start of what Ben said now. “— someone tired of being ignored, tired of others trampling on him. Perhaps some rich person treated him with contempt. At least, with Jossaryk House, people will know he did something that no one will forget. He would be less, less evil and more — besieged.”

  Daja stared at him. “It sounds like you’re on his side.”

  “I’m exhausted, Daja, I can’t think straight.” Ben smiled ruefully. “Mother insisted I work late on the books to make up for my time at the fire. As if numbers are more important than lives … I’ll consider what you’ve said. I certainly have enemies, people who don’t want to hear what I tell them, but I doubt very much that any of them would kill innocents.” He got up and walked over to her worktable, where the living metal gloves stood on their iron bases. In the flickering candle- and firelight they seemed to move.

  “They need more work. Try them on if you like,” Daja suggested.

  Ben picked one up, weighing it in his hand. “Do I roll up my sleeves?”

  Daja shook her head, the beaded ends of her many braids slapping her cheeks lightly. “They’re made so you can yank them on in a hurry. They’ll be a little big even now, because I made allowance for your coat.”

  Ben slid on first one glove, then the other.

  “I need a few more days to finish,” Daja admitted as she watched Ben adjust the fit. “My control over my magic’s still weak, after Jossaryk House.”

  “Was it hard, walking in there?” Ben wanted to know. He turned his hands back and forth, fascinated by the play of light on their mirrored surfaces.

  “Fire walking, no,” Daja said, eyeing the gloves. The metal’s edges had blended seamlessly, so it looked as if she had simply poured it over the forms. “But holding it back, with the wind driving it? That took all I had. Actually, I didn’t think I had that much.” And it wasn’t enough, she thought, her eyes stinging at the memory of the baby who had died on her back.

  “Why hold it?” Ben opened and closed each glove hand. “Why not just tell it to stop? To go out?”

  “That works with tiny fires, not big ones.” She grimaced as she saw the outline of hinges when he made a fist. She had to fix that. The gloves worked, but as a craftswoman she wanted them to look like cloth, and the bulge of iron hinges ruined it. “As long as there was fuel, that fire wanted it. The wind gave it strength. The more it ate and the harder the wind blew, the stronger it got. I wish I could have sent it somewhere else or put it out, but I couldn’t.”

  Ben picked up one of the hearth pokers, then one of Daja’s rods. The gloves grasped the thin rod as easily as the heavy poker. Daja watched as he twisted his hands to and fro. Hinging the wrists had been the most difficult part. They had turned out well.

  “Doing a whole suit will be hard,” she said with regret. “It’ll need an iron scaffolding, a
lmost, with hinges and ball and socket joints. It’ll be heavy. I’ll need all winter to grow enough living metal, and there’s iron and brass to buy. And I haven’t worked out how you’ll see and breathe yet.”

  He stood in front of the hearth fire, moving his arms inside the gloves. Now he looked at her sidelong. “Are you giving up on me, Daja?”

  She frowned, half distracted by planning. “Of course not! I’m just saying it’s going to take lots of work.”

  “People do give up on me,” he said quietly, looking at the gloves. “At first they think I’m fine. They admire how hard I work, how I try to teach others, prevent as much harm as I can…. But then they say I don’t know how to enjoy myself, that I don’t spend enough time with people. Then it’s I’m obsessed, and they’re busy. They find other, easier companions.” He slid off a glove and angled it so the light of a branch of candles illuminated the inside. He peered at it. “It wouldn’t surprise me if you decided this thing was just too much effort.”

  His words confused her. What was he talking about? She had meant only to explain the project would take months, not weeks: he needed that suit. Ben seemed to mean something else, something that made her uncomfortable, though she couldn’t say why. “No. I just don’t think you should look for results until spring.” Daja sat again on her workstool. “Did Heluda Salt talk to you? About Jossaryk House.”

  About to put down the glove he held, Ben fumbled and nearly dropped it. He put it on the table and held the second glove up to the light. His hands were shaking.

  “They won’t break if you drop them,” Daja pointed out. “They’re up to a lot of work. They won’t be of use to you otherwise.”

  “They’re just so lovely it’s hard to think of them as strong,” Ben replied. He continued his inspection. “You talked with Heluda Salt?”

  “She and Frostpine were working on something.” She wasn’t sure if she could tell him more than that, even if the counterfeiters were captured. “And I met her at the Mages’ Society party. She hadn’t seen the report about the boardinghouse fire, the one you told the mages was set. Did you tell them? I couldn’t remember if you had or if you hadn’t gotten a chance.”