Circle Opens #03: Cold Fire

by Tamora Pierce

  “I am a Trader and proud of it,” she reminded him. “We know that some accounts are written in blood and can be paid only in that. You have blood debts to settle.”

  “I owe no one anything,” he snapped. “I did them a favor. I slaved to teach them how serious fire was. When they were too stupid to learn, I gave them lessons that would stick.” He seized his pack, and ran the few steps to the canal, balancing on his skates. Daja let him reach the ice. She even let him set the pack on his shoulders. He was three yards away when she sent heat into his skates. They immediately sank an inch deep into the ice: Ben went sprawling. Daja walked toward him, trying not to slip as ice melted around her own bare feet.

  Ben scrambled onto his knees and lunged up again. This time she sent a harder burst of heat into the metal skates, fusing them together. Down Ben fell. When he pushed himself up to see what had happened, she reached for the power in the living metal gloves and smacked her palms together. The gloves fused, shackling Ben’s arms from fingertip to elbow.

  He fell again, then rolled onto his side to stare at her as she approached. The wig was falling off: he’d cut his red curls short to make it fit better. “Daja, please,” Ben said. He’d gone dead white, the shadows cast by the great fire rippling over his pale skin. “You can’t do this. You’re my friend.”

  There was nothing she could say to that. Instead she looked toward the hospital — they weren’t that far from the soup kitchen dock. People were still there. She took out her mirror and fed it enough heat to make it shine brightly. Raising it, she flashed it at the crowd.

  “Do you know what happens if I’m accused of deliberately setting fires?” he asked, as if he thought she still might believe his innocence. “Do you? They’ll burn me alive.”

  Someone in the crowd waved a torch overhead, once, twice. Daja responded with two quick flashes of her mirror. A sleigh turned from the dock and drove toward them.

  Daja looked at Ben. “I know they will,” she told him. “And I will be there, to pay off my account to you.”

  Kugiskans wasted no time in bringing an arsonist to trial, not one who had killed over 150 people and injured hundreds more. Four weeks after the destruction of Yorgiry’s Hospital, Daja stood before three magistrates and a packed hearing room to tell of her friendship with Bennat Ladradun, from their first encounter to their last meeting on the ice off Blackfly Bog. She listened as Heluda spoke of her discovery of the garret workroom where Ben had created his devices, and heard the tales of people at the hospital, bathhouse, and Jossaryk House.

  Throughout it all Ben sat in an iron cage, built to protect him from the vengeance of those he had harmed. He stared blankly at his hands without ever looking at anyone.

  No one doubted how the magistrates would decide, and they surprised no one: execution by fire. Namornese law dictated that a criminal’s execution take place on the site of his greatest crime. The healers and directors of the hospital refused to allow it: as worshippers of Yorgiry they would permit no murder, even one approved by the state, on ground just reconsecrated to life. Bennat Ladradun would burn to death the week before Longnight, at the Airgi Island bathhouse.

  Nia insisted on going with Daja, though her lips trembled as she announced it: she felt that someone ought to witness for Morrachane. Daja went because she had promised Ben she would face what she had done by capturing him. Frostpine came without saying why. He didn’t need to; Daja knew he’d come to help her. Room had been saved for them at the front of the execution ground. When they arrived, they found their space was shared by Olennika Potcracker and Jory, the councils of the islands who had suffered Ben’s fires, and the families of the slain. Heluda and the magistrates’ mages, wearing black coats with gold and silver trim, stood at a right angle to their group. Before them was the stake, its large base of stacked wood and kindling topped by a platform. Opposite Daja’s group, on the far side of the stake, waited the governor, the city council, and the officials who served the courts and the lawkeepers.

  Beyond those three banks of witnesses stood the crowds: those who had come to see justice, or just to watch a horrible spectacle. They were oddly quiet as they waited.

  Soon they heard the beat of a drum, somber and hard. Up the stairs that led to the canal came the execution party. Ben, in a rough sacking robe, was flanked by the black-robed priests of Vrohain, who oversaw every execution, and their attendant lawkeepers. A condemned prisoner could have a priest of his own faith, but Ben had chosen none. He stared at the ground as he shuffled forward. The loudest sounds were the drum, the flap of cloth in the hard wind, and the clank of the shackles secured to Ben’s wrists, ankles, and neck.

  The priests helped him up the steps to the platform. They chained him to the stake, then climbed down. Ben stared across the sea of people as if his thoughts were years away.

  The drum went silent. A herald read Ben’s name, his crimes, and his sentence. Then the priests of Vrohain brought their torches. They thrust them between gaps in the logs into oil-soaked kindling. The kindling blazed.

  For a long time nothing changed. Ben stood expressionless. Below him the logs caught, and began to burn. They gave off little smoke, Daja realized: he would not be allowed to suffocate before the fire reached his flesh.

  His image quivered as her eyes filled with tears. She suddenly remembered the Ben she had known at first, a rare non-mage who understood fire as she did, someone as eager and alive as any member of her foster-family.

  Ben shifted, suddenly, as if he were uncomfortable. He lifted first one foot, then the other. The first darts of flame slid through the boards of the platform. Daja’s eyes spilled over and continued to spill. This was the law he’d broken, the death he’d given so many. Surely it was right, to give him that same death?

  Suddenly flames ran up his sacking robe. Ben flinched aside, trying to crush the fire out on the pillar. His shackles were too tight. His face worked. In a moment he would scream.

  She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t. She didn’t care about the law. Daja jammed her power deep into the ground, past bedrock, into the white-hot flow of molten rock and metal below. She summoned a single, overpowering, burst of heat and threw it all into the fire. Let the Namornese punish her, she thought. She couldn’t watch him slowly burn to death.

  Then she saw it. The silver fire of directed magic roared out of Frostpine and Olennika. It rushed in a silver thread from Jory. Logs, platform, man, and stake turned into an immense, roaring column of flame that shot thirty feet into the air. For a moment it was so hot Daja’s face felt tight; she smelled burned hair close by. The column lasted only a breath of time. Then it vanished, out of fuel. A few black flakes drifted over the spot where Kugisko had decreed Ben would die. Smoke rose in discouraged wisps from the freshly charred ground where the stake had been.

  Daja looked at Heluda Salt, defiant, expecting the mage to be furious. Instead Heluda stood with a hand over her eyes, shaking her head. Daja couldn’t be sure if Heluda was disappointed or resigned. After a moment it occurred to her Heluda might be both.

  Someone in the governor’s party was more than disappointed or resigned. A man who wore the gold sunburst of a commander on his silver-trimmed black lawkeeper’s coat advanced toward Daja’s side of the square, his face dark with rage. He beckoned to a group of lawkeepers. “I want —” he began furiously.

  Heluda stepped in front of him and put her hand on his chest. She said something; no one heard what it was. The lawkeeper commander glared down at her and opened his mouth. No sound emerged from it; she spoke again, quietly.

  Frostpine tugged on Daja’s arm. “Let’s go,” he said, beckoning to Nia, Olennika, and Jory. “Heluda will settle him. It’s not like their cursed sentence wasn’t carried out.”

  Five months later, word came to Bancanor House that the southern mountain passes were open. A week after that, Heluda, Kol, and Matazi accompanied Frostpine, Daja, their mounts, and three packhorses across Bazniuz Island and over Kyrsty Bridge, all the way to
the construction site for Yorgiry’s new hospital and soup kitchen. While building had only started a month before, carpenters and masons risking the occasional late snow or ice storm to begin the new project, preparations had been underway all winter. Matazi and Kol had been in the forefront of the fund-raising, with donations from their own fortune so large they had shamed fellow rich Kugiskans into granting large sums. Less wealthy families of the merchant and laboring classes had donated cloth, pottery, cooking gear, herbs and oil for medicines, even food. Daja had sold plenty of jewelry and given the money to the new hospital. She, Frostpine, and Teraud had labored all winter on bolts, door latches, hooks, and endless supplies of nails, as had many other smiths. Carpenters set aside wood; weavers made blankets and sheets; herbalists and healers compiled medicines by the vatload.

  Now the travelers, Kol, and Matazi sat on their horses, looking at the busy scene before them. Masons labored in cellars and on ground floor hearths as carpenters framed the inner wards and outer walls. The soup kitchen was in business already. Olennika presided over a line of cauldrons from which exquisite smells drifted. Jory, wearing a single plain gown like her teacher, her skirts and petticoats hanging just an inch below her knees, dumped an armload of chopped turnips into a kettle and walked over to them, her calf-high boots squelching ankle-deep into black mud with each step.

  “You’re supposed to use those board walkways, you know,” her father pointed out. “That’s why they laid them down, after all. It’s not called Blackfly Bog for nothing.”

  “Oh, Papa, it takes forever to get anywhere that way,” Jory complained. She stopped beside Daja’s horse, a hand on Daja’s booted ankle. They had said their important goodbyes while trading staff blows that morning, but Daja had wanted to see her in her element, in the life she was making for herself. To Daja Jory said, “You betrayed me. You turned my meditation over to her.” She pointed an accusing finger at Heluda Salt, who only grinned wolfishly down at her.

  “And she can give you a fight with a staff,” Daja told her cheerfully. “She’ll keep you humble.” Trader, log it, she thought, I’m starting to talk like Frostpine.

  Jory grinned back, teeth flashing against creamy brown skin. “I have Olennika for that,” she said. “I don’t think I can stand two humbling teachers.”

  “All I know is, you’ll need them,” retorted Daja.

  “Come back soon,” Jory said quietly. “We’ll really miss you.” She glanced at the top of a frame wall: Nia straddled it. She was dressed like her twin in a short gown and boots, except that her sensible dress was maroon, and Jory’s was blue. As Arnen, seated opposite Nia, drilled openings through two connected beams, Nia thrust pegs into them and hammered them in. Without looking away from her work, she raised her mallet and waved it, then drove the latest peg home. Two weeks after Arnen got his mages’ certificate, he had opened his own shop, taking over Nia’s meditation as well as her carpentry instruction with Camoc’s and Nia’s approval.

  “I’ll come back when I can,” promised Daja. She had said her goodbyes to Nia as well, talking with her until late the night before.

  “And Nia will write,” said Jory. “She’s better at it than I am.”

  Olennika’s voice echoed over the clatter of hammers on wood, nails, and stone. “If they aren’t going to dismount and help, tell them to go away, Jorality.” She had a crow-harshness to her tone now, a lasting reminder of the night when she had kept her part of the hospital safe until everyone who could escape was gone. “Those flatbreads won’t put themselves to bake!”

  Jory looked at the bundled-up Frostpine. “When he comes out of his cocoon, tell him I said goodbye,” she said cheekily. She trudged back to Olennika through the mud, ignoring the plank paths.

  “You can come out,” Matazi told Frostpine. He sat in multiple layers of habits and clothes, a heavy fur hat on his bald crown, two pairs of gloves on his hands. “Breathe some air,” urged Matazi. “It’s good for you.”

  Frostpine swiveled his head to glare at her from his layers like an irate owl. “That air is cold, wet, and moving,” he informed her.

  “That’s the green wind of the Syth,” Kol said with a smile. “Smell it. Damp earth, growing things — spring is on its way.”

  “On its way, maybe. Here, no,” grumbled Frostpine. “I love you both dearly, but I am going to find some real spring. The kind that’s actually warm.”

  Matazi leaned over and kissed Daja’s cheek. Kol rode over to do the same. “Thank you for our girls,” Kol told her. “For setting them on their proper road.”

  Daja smiled shyly at both of them. “That’s what Traders do — we find roads, and we follow them. Trader and Bookkeeper keep your balances high and your debts low.”

  She looked at Heluda, who said, “If the two of you ever get tired of this smithing nonsense, I could make fair magistrate’s mages of you.”

  Daja chuckled and shook her head. “I think the smithing nonsense is in our blood.” She reached across the gap between them and poked Frostpine with the end of her Trader’s staff. “Come on, old owl,” she told him. “I’ll find you the way to springtime.”

  “Gods be thanked,” Frostpine replied with feeling. They set their horses forward on the road south.

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  The Circle Opens quartet, Shatterglass

  Tharios, capital of the city-state of Tharios

  On the Ithocot Sea

  The short, plump redhead walked out of the house that belonged to her hostess and looked around, her air that of someone about to embark on a grand adventure. She shook out her pale blue cotton dress and petticoats, then wrapped a collection of breezes around her chubby person as someone else might drape the folds of a shawl before she went to market. The breezes came obediently to her call, having become so much a part of her in the girl’s travels that they no longer rebelled. They spun around her black cotton stockings and sensible leather shoes, raced along the folds of skirt and petticoats, slid along the girl’s arms and over her sunburned, long-nosed face. They swept over the spectacles that shielded intense gray eyes framed by long, gold lashes, and twined themselves over and along her head. They followed the paths of her double handful of copper braids, all pinned neatly to her scalp in a series of rings that left no end visible. Only two long, thin braids were allowed to hang free. They framed either side of her stubborn face.

  With her breezes placed to her satisfaction, guardians against the intense southern heat, the girl whistled. The big, shaggy white dog that was busily marking the corners of the house whuffed at her.

  “Come on, Little Bear,” ordered Trisana Chandler, known to her friends as Tris. “It’s not really your house anyway.”

  The dog fell in step beside the girl, tongue lolling in cheerful good humor. His white curls, recently washed, bounced with his trot; his long, plumed tail was a proud banner. He was a big animal, his head on a level with Tris’s breastbone. Despite his size, he wore the air of an easy-to-please puppy as effortlessly as the girl wore her breezes.

  Tris strode down the flagstone path and out through the university gates without so much as a backward glance at the glory of white stucco and marble that crowned the hill above the house. She thought that the university, called Heskalifos, was fine, in its own right, and its high point — the soaring tower known as Phakomathen — was pretty, but there were perfectly good universities in the north. She was on her way to see the true glory of Tharios, its glassmakers. Let her teacher, Niko, join their hostess, Jumshida, and many other learned mages and apprentices in their long-winded, long-lasting presentations on the nature of any and all vision magics. Tris, on the other hand, was interested in the kind of visual magic wrought by someone who held a blowpipe that bore molten glass on its end.

  At one of the many side entrances to the grounds of Heskalifos, Tris halted and scowled. Had Jumshida said to turn left or go straight once she was outside the university enclosure?

  A girl
her own age stood nearby at a loading dock, emptying the contents of a trash barrel into the back of a cart. The muscles of her arms stood out like steel cables. Though she was clearly female, she wore her hair cut off at one length at ear level, and the knee-length tunic worn by Tharian men. She was also extremely dirty.

  “Excuse me,” Tris called to her. “Do you know the way to Achaya Square?”

  The girl picked up the second barrel in a row of them and dumped its contents into her cart.

  Tris cleared her throat and raised her voice. “I said, can you tell me the way to Achaya Square?”

  The girl flicked her eyes toward Tris, then away. She dumped her empty barrel next to the others, and picked up a full one.

  Well, thought Tris. She can hear me; she’s just being rude. She stalked over to the cart. “Don’t you people believe in courtesy to visitors?” she demanded crossly. “Or are all you Tharians so convinced that the world began here that you can’t be bothered to be polite?”

  Though the barrel she had taken to the cart was still half full, the girl set it down and fixed her gaze on Tris’s toes. “You shenosi,” she said quietly, using the Tharian word for foreigners. “Don’t they have guidebooks where you come from?”

  Tris’s scowl deepened. She was not particularly a patient girl. “I asked a simple question. And you can look at me if you’re going to be snippy.”

  “Oh, it’s a simple enough question,” replied the girl, still soft-voiced, her eyes fixed on Tris’s no-nonsense shoes. “As simple as the way is if you just follow that long beak of yours. And I’ll give you some information for nothing, since you’re obviously too ignorant to live. You don’t talk to prathmuni, and prathmuni don’t talk to you. Prathmuni don’t exist.”

  “What are prathmuni?” demanded Tris. She chose not to take offense at the remark about her nose. It was not her best feature and never had been.