Magic Steps

by Tamora Pierce

  She bowed her head, ashamed of her anger, but a fact was a fact. Qasam Rokat was dead. She’d like to keep her uncle from following him out of life.

  “What of the Guardsmen with Rokat?” the duke wanted to know.

  “Guryil broke his leg when his mare dropped on him,” replied the Provost’s Guard. “He’s in your infirmary now. His partner, Lebua, is with him. Our people are taking their story.”

  The duke stood. Sandry got to her feet, fighting to push her heavy chair back.

  “My dear,” Vedris began, “there is really no need for you to—” He met her eyes and smiled ruefully. “Forgive me. I forgot who I was talking to. I become like poor Rokat, trying to shelter you when you do not want such care.” To the messenger he said, “My servants will give you food and a mount for your return. Tell my lady provost I appreciate the prompt notification.”

  The messenger bowed her thanks.

  The walk to the infirmary was a brisk one. Sandry wanted to protest the pace, but the bleak look in her uncle’s eyes discouraged her. I can’t coddle him forever, she thought as she trotted to keep up. He’ll just get impatient and overdo.

  Knowing that, it was still hard not to protest. She couldn’t forget how he’d looked when, only six weeks ago, she got word that he’d collapsed in his library. When she had reached him, the duke was in bed, his face ash gray and pain-twisted. He looked old and half-dead. It had taken all her strength to bind his spirit to his body until the healers could do their work. She never, ever wanted to see him like that again.

  As if he felt her worry, the duke slowed near the infirmary door and waited for her to catch up. “I’ll be all right,” he murmured as a guard opened the door for them. “And I promise I will eat as soon as we’re done here.”

  The injured Guryil lay in a curtained alcove at the rear of the small infirmary. A healer sat with him, one hand on his wrist, the other on a leg braced with splints. To Sandry’s magical vision the healer’s power was a cool silvery blaze that ran through the Guardsman. It flickered in the broken leg, as if the magic fought something there.

  “Guryil has broken that leg several times,” remarked a short, stocky man who watched from the curtain’s edge. “He’s built up a resistance to healing.” The speaker was only a handful of inches taller than Sandry, with curly white-and-gray hair cropped short, a salt-and-pepper mustache, and full, dark eyes. He spoke with a crisp Namornese accent, and wore the uniform of the Provost’s Guard. His insignia was two yellow concentric circles surrounded by a rayed circle, which meant he was a colonel. The fastenings and trim on his uniform were all white: he was a mage.

  “I am told his mount fell,” remarked the duke quietly.

  “Collapsed, poor beast,” the stocky man replied. “Tendons cut in the right fore and hind legs.”

  “I swear, I saw nothing!” cried the young man beside the bed. He, too, wore the uniform of the Duke’s Guards, and he clung desperately to Guryil’s free hand. “Not a midget, not a child — Gury’s too good to let anyone get close like that, and they didn’t use confusion balls on us, just Rokat’s bodyguards!”

  “Confusion balls?” Sandry whispered to the duke.

  The stocky man heard and replied, “Clever devices. Mix spells for addlement and visions, throw in a drug to give the horse the staggers, and stitch them in a ball. Throw it at a man’s chest, it bursts, and you’ve got him and his horse useless for three or five minutes, depending.”

  “They are illegal,” said the duke coldly.

  The mage shrugged. “Of course they’re illegal — they’re for the one purpose, aren’t they? More importantly, they cost. Our killers have full moneybags.”

  The duke went to the Guardsman who sat beside Guryil. “Tell me what happened.” He gave a flask to the young man — and where did Uncle get that? wondered Sandry — who opened it and took a long drink.

  She squinted at the Guardsman as he returned the duke’s flask and began to talk. There was something, not in him but on his sleeve, like a brush of ash, something that felt alien. She wanted to go closer to look, but he was far too nervous. His full lips trembled as he talked and his eyes flicked repeatedly to the man on the bed.

  “Guryil is the solid partner,” the harrier-mage murmured. “Guardsman Lebua is superb with a blade and a quick thinker, but he needs a calm hand on the rein.”

  Sandry nodded, and took a better look at Guryil. He was brown to Lebua’s black, a few years older, with long, crinkled hair mussed from lying on a pillow. The healer seemed to ease his pain if not mend his leg. The lines in Guryil’s face were not so sharp, his body more relaxed, than when she arrived.

  A shadowy smear lay on Guryil’s splinted leg, a long stripe from his thigh to his foot. The healer’s magic flickered in the flesh under it, like a candle shining through dirty glass.

  “What is that?” Sandry whispered, staring.

  “What is what?” asked the mage.

  “The shadow on his leg. You can see the healing through it.”

  “Seeing, is it?” The harrier-mage fumbled at a ribbon around his neck. A glass round set in a copper rim hung from it. He raised it to one eye and walked closer to Guryil, leaning over him.

  The healer glared at him. “Do you mind?” he asked. “This is hard enough without you meddling.”

  The mage returned to Sandry. “It’s a shadow, all right,” he said, tapping his palm with the glass. Sandry glanced at it, and caught the glint of vision-spells written into lens and rim. Niko had spelled Tris’s spectacles that way four years ago, before first Tris and then the rest of them developed the uncommon ability to see magic on their own.

  “Who are you, please?” Sandy asked the mage.

  He bowed. “Wulfric Snaptrap at your service, my lady.”

  “Wulfric pain-in-the-rump,” muttered the healer.

  “Now, if you’d just let me talk to him—” said Wulfric.

  “He was in pain. He’s in less pain now, but I want him in no pain. Then you can muddle his poor head with questions,” replied the healer.

  “I wonder …” murmured Sandry, thinking aloud. “Could something fight your power? Another magic?”

  “Something you may not recognize,” Wulfric added. “I certainly don’t.”

  The healer glared at them. “If it’s a magic I haven’t seen before, how would I know if I were fighting it?” he demanded. “I admit, Gury here should be resistant to healing, but not like this. The more I pour in, the less it helps.”

  Sandry opened her mouth, then closed it. She wasn’t sure that either of these men would let her do something.

  “Speak up, my dear,” the duke said from his seat beside Lebua.

  “Master healer, might I try something?” she inquired. The longer she looked at that shadow, the queasier it made her feel. She wanted it off the injured Gury and his partner Lebua as well.

  The healer raised his brows. “What did you have in mind, my lady?”

  She stepped forward. “Take your magic out of him. All of it.” Guryil’s eyes flew open. “I’m sorry, Guardsman,” Sandry told him, “but I really think this must be done.”

  Guryil nodded reluctantly.

  The healer laid his hands on the broken leg. Sandry watched as all of his magic flowed out of his patient and back into him. Guryil whimpered, and sweat poured off his forehead. His pain had returned.

  Sandry rested her hands against his foot, her fingers just missing the shadow. She closed her eyes and fell into the heart of her magic. Swiftly she collected what she needed, sorting her power into a thousand hair-fine strands.

  She opened her eyes. Looking through her power, she could see the healer’s magic, Wulfric’s blaze — accented by bright spots that were the spelled tools he carried — and the glow from the steady-heart charm the duke’s healer had made for Vedris. Against all that brightness, the shadow was still just a thin layer of grime.

  She spread her fingers on Guryil’s foot, and carefully slipped a thread under that layer. The fee
l of it against her magic made her skin creep. She had to get every shred of it.

  Once her thread was under the shadow, she let it grow until she saw it emerge from under the darkness at Gury’s thigh. She chose more threads, running them under the smear. Once she had a solid layer of vertical strands, she paid out a fresh thread along the bottom of the strip, at right angles to her vertical ones. The new thread became the smear’s lower border. She thrust it then, setting it flying in and out among the vertical threads, weaving tight and fast. This was easy; she sometimes thought she’d spent most of the last four years weaving pure magic.

  She felt it when her moving thread hit empty air. Now her woven power lay solidly between that shadow and the injured man. She held her left hand over it and called the free end of the thread back to her. It came, folding the magical cloth in half. She looped her thread around it three times, tying the whole into a tight bundle. Only then did she let her thread break.

  “Here,” Wulfric said. “I carry these in my kit, just in case.” He held up a silk bag that gleamed with signs to enclose and protect. “I’d thought to scrape it off, once you showed it to me. I’ve got a little spatula that might have done the job.”

  “I was afraid to miss any.” Sandry dumped the bundle into his sack, then called all the power that was hers back into herself. It came away clean — she made certain of that. When she nodded to Wulfric, he tied the silk bag shut. “Go ahead,” Sandry told the healer.

  He was already hovering. Now he sat and poured his power into Gury. The man sighed; his head fell back on his pillow. The healer looked at Sandry, shocked. “I could feel the difference! Nice work, my lady, very nice.”

  Sandry blushed. “There’s some of that stuff on his partner, too,” she told Wulfric. He nodded, and they went over to Lebua. Gathering the darkness on him went quickly.

  As soon as Wulfric had that second piece of shadow in one of his protected bags, he told Sandry and the duke, “I’m off to play with this. I’ll let you know what I find.” He strode briskly out of the infirmary.

  “What an odd man,” Sandry remarked, wiping her forehead on her sleeve. The duke frowned, watching her, then offered his arm. Sandry let him walk her out into the cool night air. A gentle mist was falling. When Sandry turned her face up to it, Duke Vedris paused.

  “He is the best of the provost’s mages,” he said, his velvety voice easy on her ears. “He knows more about the spells used to commit and study crime than anyone else alive. If he can’t pick apart what you found, then it must be rare indeed. You could do with supper, I think. So could I.”

  Sandry nodded, and they returned to the duke’s residence. She would have to wash her hands before she ate. Maybe a scrubbing would erase the sense that she had touched something dreadful in handling those smears.

  The next morning Pasco arrived after breakfast. When Sandry met him in the great entrance hall, the boy had the look of a hunted fawn. “This place is so big,” he told Sandry, bowing jerkily. “Don’t you get lost, my lady? Should I be here?”

  She looked him over. Gone were the sandals, breeches, and worn shirt of the last two days — at Zahra Acalon’s command, Sandry guessed. Now he was dressed in what had to be his best clothes: neat brown cotton breeches, a spotless yellow linen shirt, and a thigh-length brown coat that he wore unbuttoned. His feet were neatly shod.

  “Don’t be silly,” she informed him. “Yes, you should be here. I told you to be here. No, I never get lost. Let’s find someplace quiet.” She led him upstairs and opened a door to one of the sitting rooms. A pair of maids had rolled up the carpets and were busily scrubbing the floor. They started to get up, but Sandry shook her head at them and closed the door. “By the way, Pasco, you look nice.”

  “Mama said I couldn’t come here in normal clothes,” he explained as they walked down the hall. “She even scrubbed me behind the ears, and me twelve years old! Does his grace really need so many rooms?”

  Sandry opened another door, to find it was one of the side entrances to the chancellory. Scribes turned to stare at her. She closed the door. “His grace’s officials need the rooms,” she told Pasco severely. “We’d better go outside.” And I had better think of someplace else for us to meet, she realized. Pasco just isn’t comfortable here.

  A stair led them out into the gardens. They found a seat on a stone bench that was tucked out of the day’s brisk wind. Sandry perched crosswise on it and drew her legs up in a tailor’s seat under her skirts. She pointed sternly to the bare spot on the bench in front of her. Pasco sat. “Do you remember how we meditate?” she wanted to know.

  “You have to ward us,” he said, mischief in his eyes.

  Sandry drew herself up and got off the bench with great dignity. “So you do remember yesterday’s lesson, at least a bit.” Let him think she had meant it as a test. He didn’t need to know that mentally she was yelling at herself for almost forgetting such an important thing.

  She had to calm down to place the thread circle and enclose them in her power. By the time she rejoined him on the bench, she had to admit that, since she did ward them before his magic could spill, it was funny. Not that she would tell him so, but she thought that the duke might laugh at the tale.

  “What next?” she asked.

  “I close my eyes and breathe and count and think of nothing,” he replied promptly. “Even if I’m bored.”

  “Very good,” she approved. “And today I want you to imagine you’re fitting yourself into something small—”

  “Like what?”

  Sandry tried to remember how Niko had explained it to them. Briar had chosen a carved wooden rose, Sandry a drop spindle, Daja a smith’s hammer. Tris had never said what she had imagined. “Well, it could be one of the rocks here—”

  “Why ever would I want to fit into a rock?”

  “Then maybe something you use at home,” Sandry told him, trying to be patient. “A candle holder, or a baton. Anything, as long as it’s small. You have to learn to pull all your power within your skin, so it won’t escape you.”

  He remembered the pattern of counting and breathing, which pleased her. Getting him to empty his mind remained a struggle. She had to wonder if she and her friends hadn’t needed meditation to harness their power. The first time they had tried fitting their minds into something small, they had done it easily. Pasco pretended to try, then complained that it was too hard. He had to scratch; he fidgeted. She called his attention back to meditation. At last, the Citadel’s giant clock struck the hour, completely destroying the mood.

  Sandry got stiffy to her feet and took up her warding. “Will you at least think of something to fit into?” she asked.

  “I’ll try, my lady,” he told her. His look made her think he might agree, but he wouldn’t do it. What would make this exasperating boy learn the things he needed to?

  Lark had suggested bribes. Busily Sandry shook out her skirts, driving the wrinkles from the cloth. “Pasco,” she said craftily, “the sooner you learn to pull in your magic, the sooner you can dance without surprises. You might want to think about that. And if you learn to control your breathing, you’ll be able to dance longer.” Guiding him out of the courtyard, she asked, “Do you know Fletcher’s Circle?”

  He frowned. “Between Spicer Street and Fountain Street, off Bowyer Lane?”

  “That’s it,” Sandry replied as they entered the castle. Fletcher’s Circle was closer to East District than to Duke’s Citadel; she would have to travel longer to get there, which was just as well. The easier things were for Pasco, the less chance that he would try to skip his lessons. “There’s an eating-house—” she began.

  “The Crooked Crow,” he said promptly as they walked into the front hall.

  “Yes. Let’s meet there tomorrow at this same hour.” That would give her time to ride with her uncle and have breakfast before she had to meet him.

  Pasco nodded. “May I go now?”

  “Fletcher’s Circle — don’t keep me waiting,” she add
ed. “Yes, go.”

  He trotted out of the residence, his step light. Sandry ran to the door and called after him, “No dancing!” Pasco, halfway across the courtyard, waved at her and kept going.

  She sighed and drooped against the heavy door. I am not a teacher, she told herself for the dozenth time. I am much too young. And it’s so hard!

  “Excuse me, my lady.” It was one of the maids. “You’ve guests. I took the liberty of putting them in the rose sitting room.”

  Sandry thanked the woman. Who might have come to see her? When she entered the room the maid had spoken of, she found Lark and a stranger.

  Lark beamed at her. “Sandry, Lady Sandrilene fa Toren, this is Yazmín Hebet.” Yazmín curtsied deeply.

  Sandry almost gogled, but caught herself in time: it was unladylike. Instead she returned the curtsy. Yazmín Hebet was the most famous dancer around the Pebbled Sea, where the troupes she belonged to had toured for years. Because she danced in public festivals as well as in the castles of the rich, she was popular with all classes of people. Everyone talked of the great Yazmín, from the clothes she wore to the men she was supposed to be involved with.

  “This is an honor,” Sandry told her. To Lark she said reproachfully, “I didn’t know you were friends with the dancer Yazmín. All you ever said was you had a friend with that name.”

  Lark grinned. “I assumed you knew most of my friends outside the temple are performers.”

  Yazmín smiled. She was pretty, with a tiny nose, large brown eyes, and a small, pointed chin. A mole on one smooth cheek accented a broad mouth with a full lower lip. She wore her tumbled mass of brown hair pinned up, with artful curls left to frame her face. When she spoke, her voice squeaked a little, as if she’d spent years raising it. “I’m honored,” she told Sandry. “Lark’s told me so much about you. She says you’re the only mage she’s ever known who can spin magic.”

  Sandry blushed. “It was spin magic or die, the first time I tried it,” she explained. “I was just lucky I figured out how in time. Please, sit down. What can I do for you?”

  “Lark says you have a student who’s a dance-mage,” replied Yazmín, arranging her skirts as she sat. “He needs a teacher?”