Magic Steps

by Tamora Pierce

  She was beginning to see one forehead when the female voice said, “Take the unmagic off us or I’ll cut you up, you ungrateful ratbirth.”

  “Suit yourself,” replied the high voice, now a little slurred.

  Four people appeared at the heart of the net. One, hidden by two standing adults, was struggling wildly. Of the two who kept still, one was a man, brown-haired, brown-eyed, dressed in the plain breeches, shirt, and boots worn by many commoners. Sandry recognized him vaguely from the fight in Jamar Rokat’s countinghouse. On his back was a frame like those that woodcutters used to carry their wares. Empty straps dangled from it. He bent over a smaller person on the floor — their mage, thought Sandry uneasily — grabbed him by the arm, and pulled him upright.

  Looking at the mage, Sandry realized why she had thought he was sunk into a pool of unmagic that day at Rokat House. He had no legs. His coarse breeches were folded and pinned around stumps that ended at mid-thigh. He clutched the dragonsalt pouch tightly with both hands. He was dark-haired and sallow, terribly thin.

  He’s Pasco’s age, thought Sandry in horror. She hadn’t realized that at their first meeting.

  “Show yourself,” growled the other standing adult. “I know there are mages here.” It was a woman, big-hipped, black-haired, dressed in the same anonymous clothing as the man. Her back was to Sandry. Now she turned, revealing the fourth member of the group. “Too bad your kitchen sentry couldn’t keep his hands off the cake.”

  She held Pasco easily. She had wrapped an arm around his neck, the crook of her elbow under his chin. Now she yanked, pulling the back of Pasco’s head against her shoulder. Her free hand held a dagger to the boy’s unprotected throat. There was a wild look in her black eyes; her grin bared all of her yellowing teeth. She looked like a furious mule.

  “Oh, Pasco,” whispered Sandry. She picked up the spindle that she’d been keeping on her lap and stood, shedding the magical veil that had made her corner of the room seem empty.

  “You?” the man asked scornfully. “You’re barely more than a child yourself! What have you to do with this?”

  He and the woman struggled to yank free of the net’s clinging strands, without success. It held them in place as firmly as if they were glued there.

  Sandry knew better than to tell them Pasco was her student. That would simply give them more power over her than they already had. “Did these people cut off your legs?” she asked the boy on the floor, keeping her voice gentle.

  He looked up at her, and Sandry took a step back. There were not whites to his eyes, no pupils or irises — just nothingness. Unmagic riddled his entire body. Very few spots left were untainted. He was draining into the cords of her net.

  “Pirates done my legs,” he said lazily, his voice slurred with dragonsalt. “Alzena ‘n Nurhar’re my frien’s. They give me this.” He hoisted the drug pouch and frowned. “But they keep takin’ it away. They want my magic like the pirates done.”

  “I’ll bet they do,” whispered Sandry. She turned her eyes on the adults — Alzena and Nurhar, the boy mage had called them. “Surrender,” she told them.

  “I think not,” Alzena said, drawing the knife-point down Pasco’s neck. A thin line of blood followed it as Pasco whimpered. “I can make this killing last.” She shifted her grip on Pasco to hold him more firmly still. “This net here is your doing? You let us go, and he’ll live.”

  Sandry watched Alzena and Nurhar. Both were striped with unmagic. They had worn the spells too long without being cleansed, if they had even known cleansing was necessary. Before long the shadow would devour them as it had this boy.

  If she let them go to save Pasco, who else might they kill before they stopped existing? Would they even keep their word not to kill him? They had to like what they did, surely, to do so much of it.

  Her palms were damp. “I beg you, let him go. He’s nothing to you.”

  “Sure enough,” replied Alzena with that teeth-baring grin. “But he’s something to you, isn’t he? Free us.” Again the dagger trailed down Pasco’s throat, leaving a second cut to ooze blood. Pasco screamed and thrashed against her imprisoning arm. The cry was strangled; she had jerked against his chin, closing his mouth.

  “We don’t want the guards to hear our little talk. And they’re about, aren’t they?” Alzena wanted to know. “Not in earshot, or they’d hear us now, but upstairs, maybe? Downstairs? Free us. We’ll loose the boy once we’re out the gate, and run like lightning.”

  Coldness settled in Sandry’s mind. Everything was very still and clear. Will you really? she thought, weighing their deeds against Alzena’s words. Or will you just keep taking hostages until someone puts an arrow through you? How many will you slaughter before an archer gets a killing shot?

  Pasco’s eyes met hers, pleading. Blood trickled in two streams down his neck. He was her student. She should have known he would try to stay behind and watch.

  “I have to take up the pegs at the corners,” Sandry replied. She didn’t have to pretend to be frightened; her fear was close enough to grasp and use. “Once that’s done, I can roll up the net. Just — please, don’t hurt Pasco. Please don’t.” If she pleaded, she knew, they would think her weak.

  “Don’t beg, wench,” Alzena told her. “It just makes me angry. Get your pox-rotted pegs.” The dagger flicked along the line of Pasco’s jaw, opening a third cut.

  That chilled Sandry to the bone. She went clockwise around the edges of the net, removing the pegs from their sockets with her free hand. The other hand, the one on the side turned away from the captives, held her spindle.

  “This net’s pretty,” the boy mage remarked when she was at the south peg. “I never tried making things with unmagic. No one ever taught me.”

  “Little is known about your magic,” Sandry replied, nearing the last — the north — peg.

  There was a muffled squeal from Pasco. This time Alzena had cut straight across his chest, and not a thin scratch. “Don’t talk!” she ordered. “Just free us!”

  Passing the door to the front hall and the window, Sandry discovered they were not alone. The guards upstairs and someone downstairs must have heard voices talking. People were looking into the dining room, trying to think of ways to stop this. She knew they were asking themselves if they could take the Dihanurs before they hurt Pasco any more, and she knew they could not. Alzena was too fast with her knife.

  Putting the north peg aside, Sandry looked at her student. All he wants is to dance and have fun, she thought.

  Days ago — was it only days? — she had taken a strand of his magic from him and kept it inside her, so she could always find him at need. Now she grasped that thread and sent a rush of her own magic through it, making it rope-strong.

  “Just one more thing, and you’ll be free,” she told her captives. “I have to unspin the magic that’s in my net, otherwise it will keep hold of you.” Picking up the edge of the net, she broke the cord and tacked one end of it to the leader on her spindle.

  “No tricks,” Alzena growled, her voice barely human. “I would be so happy to gut this boy of yours.”

  “No tricks,” agreed Sandry meekly. “I just have to gather the net on the spindle to make it release you. You’ve seen how they work.” Thrusting her power into the spindle, she gave it a quick, hard twirl. It whirled faster than she could hold; she dropped it from a hand that blistered immediately. The knots in the unmagic were falling apart, the force of the spindle twining the net into a single thick rope. It would also spin every single drop of unmagic that was touching the net.

  Sandry watched Alzena. She saw the woman’s eyes widen when she felt the first gentle tug. Before the woman knew she’d been tricked, Sandry yanked hard on the rope that bound her to Pasco. It pulled him out of Alzena’s grip and threw him into the wall. He staggered to his feet, his cuts bleeding.

  The boy mage felt it first. He began to giggle, spreading his arms as the spindle drew on all the nothingness in him, pulling him into the net and windi
ng him up like thread.

  Now Alzena and Nurhar realized they were in trouble. Their still-living flesh, unlike the mage’s, was only veined with nothingness. What was left of their real bodies was being pulled apart. The spindle whirled, its tip smoking against the tiled floor. Now the Dihanurs were dragged across the room, their flesh battling the magic’s pull. It bulged between the strands of darkness that were being drawn from them; the unmagic cut into them like silk threads as it twined onto the spindle.

  Sandry held Alzena’s eyes with hers. She could see when the woman knew what must happen if this were not stopped.

  “Please …” It was Nurhar who asked, not Alzena.

  Sandry shook her head.

  Their bodies exploded in a crimson shower, sending pieces everywhere. The impact slammed Pasco into the wall a second time, covering him and Sandry with blood. He slumped to the floor and vomited helplessly.

  EPILOGUE

  “I’m still not sure I approve of moving in with dancers,” Gran’ther Edoar said. He watched as Pasco loaded a seabag full of clothes into the cart that would carry him to Yazmín’s school. “If your net-dancing can be used to trap rats, and you can direct where and when people look at you, it seems you are better suited to harrier work than we guessed. What can you learn of that from this female?”

  “This is better, Gran’ther.” Though it gave him quivers to argue with the old man, Pasco forced himself to say it. “If I only put my magic to harrying, well—” He hesitated, trying to put into words what he had learned in Durshan Rokat’s dining room. “If I don’t understand my magic, the good and the bad, I’m not a mage at all. I’m just a tool, to be used, like that poor chuff’ the killers were using. Anyone could put their hand to me, and make me work however they want, if they figure out how to control me. That’s not counting the trouble I might get myself into, not knowing what I can do and what I can’t.”

  “Well, at least you’ve learned that much,” commented Halmaedy. She had come to see Pasco’s departure along with Gran’ther and Pasco’s mother.

  Pasco sneered at his oldest sister. To his grandfather and the silent Zahra he said, “Lady Sandry will keep me out of trouble whilst I learn. And the little monster’ll work me so hard I won’t have the strength to get into mischief.”

  “If we can go?” asked the carter, her voice a little too patient, “It’s comin’ on to rain, and I got bundles to deliver, too.”

  Zahra kissed her son’s forehead. “We’ll expect you to supper every Firesday,” she told Pasco sternly. “Come say hello if things bring you to East District.”

  “Mama, it’s not like I’m leaving the city!” cried Pasco, laughing. “I’m just going to Festival Street!”

  “Mind your teachers!” Gran’ther told him as he climbed up beside the carter. “We don’t want to hear of you giving any trouble!”

  Pasco grinned and waved as the cart started forward. He knew very well that between Yazmín and Lady Sandry, he was the one in for trouble.

  Sandry halted on the doorstep at Discipline cottage. A pudgy young man in a novice’s white habit sat at the table, awkwardly fitting together the pieces of a table loom. He stared at her, jaw hanging open.

  She wasn’t quite sure what to say. “Is — is Lark—”

  The young man lurched to his feet and ran to the back of the house. He scrambled up the narrow stair to the garret.

  “Comas, what on earth—” Lark came out of her workshop, a bolt of cloth in her hands. She noticed Sandry in the doorway. “Well! Look at you!” She put the cloth on the table and came to Sandry, hands outstretched. “You had people worried!”

  Sandry nodded, hugging her teacher. For days after that dreadful meeting with the Dihanurs and their mage, she had kept to her rooms at Duke’s Citadel, eating little, thinking a great deal. She’d had to force herself to talk to Pasco a week later. Even then she had done it only because the duke had said the boy thought she was furious with him because he’d been caught.

  Once she had reassured Pasco, it seemed that life would not let her alone. There was Yazmín, who wanted to talk about his training. Lark visited to say that she had been watching Pasco’s lessons at Yazmín’s, but it looked as if the novice weaver she’d mentioned on Sandry’s last visit was indeed a mage. Moreover, he was too shy to deal with more than one or two people at a time. She really needed to concentrate on him, at Discipline. Erdogun had a tantrum with the Residence housekeeper in Sandry’s hearing: he told the woman that he’d gotten very fond of having Lady Sandrilene cover these matters; had servants no minds of their own to use?

  The duke came for advice on matters of taste. What colors were flattering to him, what gifts might please a woman of experience and which were too overpowering, did he look older or younger when he rode in a carriage? That had actually been the first light moment in Sandry’s release from self-hate: the discovery that her hopes for the duke and Yazmín had borne fruit.

  The final spur to her return to the larger world came as three letters in two days, one from Briar, one from Daja, and one from Tris. All were thick; all wanted to know why she hadn’t written. They were full of news about what they did and what they had seen. They brimmed with life. They made her present world look shadowy by comparison, and shadows, Sandry realized at last, were the one thing she did not want in her mind.

  “I’ve been very silly,” she told Lark now.

  “You did a very hard thing, for reasons that everyone agreed were right,” Lark said firmly. “You acted as an adult, and you did it without hate. I’m not sure I could have done it without hating them, after seeing that poor maimed boy.”

  “There’s blood on my hands,” whispered Sandry, looking at them.

  “Good. As long as you feel that way, you won’t become like them, will you?” asked Lark.

  Sandry shook her head. “You never did have sympathy for the glooms. Maybe I should have come back here afterward.”

  Lark put the teakettle on. “Should you?” she asked. “It seems to me it would have been like putting off your fine gowns and donning the dresses you wore when you were six.”

  It was Sandry’s turn to gape, slack jawed, like the boy who had run upstairs. “You think so?”

  Lark laughed. “My dear, you’ve moved into the greater world, whether you wished to or not,” she said. “As a teacher, as a noble. You’ve outgrown Discipline. You’re getting ready to take your place on the adult stage. Pasco was just the beginning.”

  Sandry propped her elbows on the table and rested her chin on her hands. “Remember that day you brought Yazmín to the residence? You knew then I was going to live there permanently, didn’t you? You didn’t seem at all surprised when Uncle said he wanted to start entertaining at this winter with me for hostess.”

  Lark got down three cups, including Sandry’s, and put out honey and a loaf of spice bread. Sandry began to cut up the loaf. “I knew how close you two had become since you went there,” the woman replied. “You would miss each other terribly, if you moved back here, and he might well return to bad habits. And you’re learning a great deal from him, all of it good. Comas,” she called, “if you don’t come down, Sandry and I will eat all the spice bread ourselves.”

  “He’s the new student?” asked Sandry. “He’s a bit odd.”

  “He isn’t odd.” Lark put three plates on the table. “He’s so shy it half-cripples him, poor thing. He agrees with nearly anything he’s told to do, which is how he became a novice in the first place. I’ve got my work cut out for me, to break him of that.”

  “You’ll find a way,” Sandry told her. “You always do.”

  Lark cupped Sandry’s face in her hands. “You and I are not finished, my heart’s own. There is still much we can learn from each other, and you’re the closest thing to a daughter I will ever have.”

  Sandry hugged Lark fiercely. “Then I can come back, if I don’t like living at the Citadel?”

  “Whenever you want,” Lark said firmly. “You can even have you
r old room.”

  Sandry released her and gazed at the stairs. It had given her a pang, to know a stranger was in the rooms she and her friends had shared, but it looked as if this Comas needed Discipline as much as any of them ever had.

  And she knew Lark. If Lark said they were not finished with each other, that Sandry was as good as her own blood, then perhaps Sandry could afford to be generous.

  “Let him have my room,” she heard herself tell Lark. “That way he doesn’t have to run so far to hide.”

  Lark rested a hand on Sandry’s shoulder. “You needn’t do that. You know Daja sleeps mostly at the forge when she’s here at Winding Circle.”

  Sandry nodded. “My room’s got better light for a weaver,” she replied quietly. “And it’s nice, being next to your workshop. I used to listen to you weave, late at night. I bet Comas would like that, too.”

  “Then why don’t you go and tell him yourself?” asked Lark. “He knows you are my student — you can reassure him that you aren’t jealous.”

  Sandry got to her feet. “I have an idea,” she said. “My student is too outgoing, and yours isn’t outgoing enough. We’ll mash them together and teach them as one boy. Then we’ll mix them up a little and make two new boys who are almost perfect. Teachers will come from everywhere to guess our secret.”

  “Mila, don’t let Comas hear you,” said Lark, her eyes dancing. “He might think we could actually do it.”

  Sandry grinned. She walked back to the stairs, and began to climb. There are other mage kids out there, she thought. Some get lucky and get found, like Pasco, or they get shipped to where they could get found, like this Comas. But the pirates found that poor boy, and then the Dihanurs, and they used him up.

  I must keep in mind to watch for other mage kids. And I’ll write Tris, and Briar, and Daja, and tell them. We were lucky. It’s time we spread our luck to others, I think.