The Circle Opens #4: Shatterglass

by Tamora Pierce

  She smiled ruefully. “Well, maybe not,” she said. “Though I can’t vouch for Briar’s manners.”

  Kethlun, steeped in depression, said gloomily, “Splendid. She’s a freak, and I’m a freak. We should be quite happy together.”

  Tris scowled. “Get used to freakishness, my buck,” she informed him. “You have nowhere else to go, and lightning isn’t exactly the most biddable force in nature.”

  Kethlun glared at her, red spots of fury burning on his cheeks. “I never asked for it! Never! I’d give it up if I could!”

  “Well, you can’t,” retorted Tris. “Nobody can. Even the ones who want magic end up hating it sometimes. You have to work your life around it, not the other way around. Join the party and stop whining.”

  “That isn’t kind,” Niko said with gentle reproof.

  Tris lifted her chin. “I’m not a kind person. Everyone says so.”

  “You mean you don’t want people to think you’re kind. You believe they’ll see it as weakness,” retorted Niko.

  “Put yourself in this young man’s shoes,” added Jumshida.

  “I don’t want anyone in my shoes,” Kethlun muttered, his voice slow. “I don’t want to be in my shoes.”

  “Be silent,” Jumshida told him. To Tris she said, “Here is someone who has had this news dropped on him at an age when other mages are completing their studies. He —”

  “I was going to be head of the guild,” Keth interrupted, the slow words falling from his lips like stones. “Even without magic there was talk of me being named Glassmaker to the Imperial Court. You can always have a glass mage engrave signs or bless the sands for imperial work. I almost had enough to pay for a house. I had a good marriage arranged, with a pretty girl I like who doesn’t bore me. Then I had to go for a walk by the Syth. For inspiration.” A harsh noise that might have been a laugh came out of his mouth. “I got all the inspiration I can take.”

  Tris propped her chin on her hands and glared at Keth. Lately she’d begun to think that her greatest flaw was her imagination. Listening to him, imagining herself in his place, she could see how it might have been easier if the lightning had killed him. Instead he was newly born, forced to grow up in weeks, not years, with all his thoughts as a man still in his head. He’d already mentioned the long struggle to make his body and his tongue work. Would she have the patience and determination it must have taken to do that for long, weary months, not knowing if she would succeed?

  “Then we’re stuck with each other,” she told him, not allowing her surge of pity to touch her face or voice. “The sooner we get started, the sooner you can wield your magic, instead of it wielding you.”

  “But first, I’ll tell Cook it’s two for supper, not one,” Jumshida said, getting to her feet. “Niko, we’re expected at Balance Hill at sundown. We must change our clothes.”

  “What’s Balance Hill?” Tris asked.

  “It’s where the Keepers of the Public Good live during their three-year terms of office,” Jumshida explained, walking toward the kitchen. “Our entire conclave has been honored with an invitation to Serenity House.”

  “Better you than me,” said Tris as Niko ran upstairs and Jumshida entered the kitchen. She looked at Keth. “Well.”

  “Well,” he said, looking back at her.

  Tris inspected him. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with strong, wiry muscles. His nose was short, his teeth white and even. His head was blocky, his gaze level, as if he were a rock she was not about to move. She’d noticed his short blonde hair and the blueness of his eyes the day before, just as she had noticed his very large hands. Now she saw the burn marks that stippled his hands, and the way the last two fingers on his left hand stayed curled even when the other fingers and his thumb were straight — another legacy of the lightning strike, like the white spot in his hair, and his magic.

  He dressed like a northerner in a plain white shirt, frayed a little at the shoulder seams, brown homespun trousers, and calf-high boots that had seen a lot of wear. His belt was nicked in spots, his belt purse made of cheap leather, his belt knife a fine one that had seen long use. All in all he looked as if he’d once been more prosperous than he was now. If determination were any indication, though, she would bet he would regain his place in society before much longer.

  “So where do you come from?” he demanded as the cook came out with a tray of food. She set it out on the table, then returned for tableware and plates. “Not around here, anymore than your master Goldeye does.”

  “I was born in Capchen, in Ninver,” Tris said, pouring water into their cups. “To a merchant family. They sent me to Stone Circle Temple when I was ten. That’s where Niko found me and saw my magic.” She wasn’t about to tell this stranger that her family had passed her from relative to relative, each keeping her only until they grew so terrified of the strange things that happened around her that they couldn’t wait to get rid of her. Stone Circle was her family’s way of washing their hands of Tris. “Niko took me to Winding Circle temple in Emelan, where they specialize in ambient mages. Do you know what ambient mages are?”

  “We do have mages in our family,” Keth informed her drily as he cut up a baked chicken and served her. “Sometimes I listened when the big folks talked.”

  “There’s only one person on this earth who’s allowed to pull my tail, and you aren’t him,” Tris retorted.

  “Let me guess. Your foster brother.” He watched as Tris added spiced chickpeas to his plate, then hers.

  “That’s right. He and I and two others lived in this one cottage. We trained with the mages who ran it and other mages around the temple.”

  “And you never went back to your family?” he asked, curious. “You don’t think they’d be proud to have a mage? My parents’ biggest disappointment was that I didn’t have more power than just a seed.”

  “They’d be delighted, I suppose,” Tris replied. “And that’s the only reason they’d be happy to have me back.”

  “Oh.” Keth looked at his plate. “It was that way for a friend of mine, back home. He said he’d never return.” He glanced at her. “But you have family now, your foster family.” Tris nodded. Keth went on, “And you look after each other, and study together.”

  “Lots of studying,” Tris replied with a smile as she helped herself to the seasoned cantaloupe. “We were all in the same basket with our power, you see — none of us knew we had any, even though it was breaking out all over the place. It wasn’t until we learned to meditate that we got any kind of control. That’s where you have to start, too. Meditation, the whole thing. Breathing, clearing your mind, exercises to strengthen your grip on your magic.” She held Chime away from her plate as the dragon tried to inspect it for anything edible.

  “I know how,” Keth told her, then took a bite of chicken.

  Tris pursed her lips. It sounded as if he claimed he could, simply to shut her up. “You know how to meditate. And where, pray, did you learn?”

  Now he looked up into her face. “We all learned it,” he said impatiently. “In the Glassmakers’ Guild. It helps you get control over your breath, so you can blow long and steady and not swallow molten glass. It was the first thing we learned as ’prentices. Well, that and how to tell what’s good charcoal and what’s bad.”

  Tris propped her chin on her hand. “Show me.”

  “Now?” Keth demanded. “I’ve been pounding around Heskalifos all the blessed day.”

  “If you’re to be a mage, you must control your mind — your power — anywhere, at any time, tired or no,” she retorted. “Now.”

  Keth put down his fork with a sigh. He shut his eyes and took a deep breath. Slowly he inhaled as Tris counted silently to seven. He held the breath for the same count, released it for seven, and held for seven. As he continued Tris closed her eyes briefly, concentrating on her vision. When she opened her eyes again, Kethlun’s magic was as plain as day to her sight.

  His breathing and stillness served to calm him, that was cl
ear, but his power was unaffected. It jetted from his skin in erratic flares, fluid like molten glass one moment, crooked like lightning the next. Then the lightning shapes grew, racing over Kethlun like groping hands, splitting into more bolts, until he was nearly covered with light. He opened his eyes and the lightning vanished.

  “Well?” he demanded irritably. “I said I know how.”

  For a moment Tris didn’t reply, stunned by the fiery lacework that had covered him over. Then she remembered to breathe herself. How could Keth hold such beauty and not know it?

  She remembered something Briar had once said while her friends cowered under a tree in the rain. Tris was dancing in a field as lightning flashed and thunder roared overhead. “Not everybody thinks it’s a play-pretty like you do, Coppercurls! Send it on its way so we can go home!”

  “So you can meditate,” she said to Kethlun now. “That saves time. Let me see —”

  She was interrupted by someone banging on the street door. “Open for the arurim!” a man cried. “Open in the name of the law!”

  Little Bear dashed into the hall, barking furiously. Tris leaped after him and seized his collar. The housekeeper passed them both, opening the door only when she saw that Tris had the big dog under control. Tris hung onto her pet with both hands, dragging him back with all her strength as men and women in bright red tunics shouldered past the housekeeper, heavy batons in their hands.

  “What is this?” the servant cried. “We are law-abiding people!”

  “We seek Kethlun Warder,” said a man who wore a sergeant’s black sword border on his tunic sleeves. “We have information that he is present here.”

  “I’m Kethlun Warder,” Keth said. He came to stand by Tris and the nearly hysterical dog. “Why would the arurim look for me?”

  A man stepped through the arurimi’s ranks. He was young, with dark brown skin, kinked black hair cut in a short cap around his head, and sharp brown eyes. Like the men of the arurim he wore a scarlet tunic, but his was topped by a blue mage’s stole bordered in scarlet braid. “Kethlun Warder, is this your work?” The mage held out a round glass ball. Sparks glinted faintly on its surface.

  “It looks like my work,” Kethlun answered slowly. He leaned in to better look inside the ball. “Or rather, it’s like something I made this afternoon, but there was nothing in it then. It was all lightning.”

  “According to a clerk from Mages’ Hall, the lightning cleared to reveal this scene just before he was to leave for the day. He brought it to us,” replied the mage.

  Tris squinted at the ball and frowned. “That woman looks dead.”

  To his sergeant the mage said, “Arrest him.” The arurimi surged forward to grip Keth by the arms.

  “Stop!” cried Tris, outraged. “You can’t march into a private house — can they?” she asked the housekeeper. The woman nodded.

  The arurim mage frowned at Tris in a well-bred way. “I do not answer to children,” he informed her. “Murder was done at the Fifth District Forum. The whole thing looked just as it does here, which means we arrest Kethlun Warder for murder.”

  “But I just blew the globe, I didn’t kill anyone!” protested Keth.

  “Quiet,” growled an arurim as she twisted one of Keth’s arms up behind his back. “You’ll speak when spoken to.”

  Tris looked from the arurimi to their mage to Keth. She had no understanding of what was going on here — she’d been in Tharios less than a week — but she knew what Niko would say her duty was. Briar and her foster mother Lark both had told stories of what happened to defenseless people who were taken away by those who enforced the law.

  “Then I am going with him,” she informed the mage haughtily. “He is my student. You will answer to me should any harm come to him.”

  The mage lost his air of superiority when he goggled at her. “You’re joking,” he said in a less self-important, more matter-of-fact way.

  Tris gave the housekeeper Little Bear’s collar, then reached for the ribbon around her neck. She pulled out the medallion and allowed the arurim mage to see both sides. When he reached for it, she closed her eyes. The moment he touched the medallion to test if it were a proper mage’s token, it threw out a blaze of white light that left everyone but Tris blinking.

  “I don’t joke,” Tris said, her voice flat. “It makes my head hurt. Where are you taking Keth? Who are you, anyway?”

  The mage sighed. “My name is Demakos Nomasdina, arurim dhaskoi at the Elya Street arurimat. That’s where we’re taking this murder suspect, teacher or no teacher. And who are you?”

  “Dhasku Trisana Chandler,” she retorted, giving herself the Tharian title. This superior young man would learn that she could not be pushed around. “And I’m coming with you.” She looked at the housekeeper. “Send someone for Jumshida and Niko. They’ll want to know about this.”

  “Yes, dhasku,” the woman replied with a bow of the head.

  “I hope you are a truthsayer,” Tris informed Nomasdina. She knew how to manage this. She had to keep him on the defensive, and not allow him time to think that she was only fourteen, medallion or not. “Because I doubt that Dhasku Jumshida Dawnspeaker will be happy to learn a guest of hers was abused.” From the looks exchanged by the arurimi and the mage, she knew she’d hit a nerve. She’d hoped that Jumshida’s name and position — that of First Scholar of Mages’ Hall and Second Scholar of Heskalifos — would throw a damper on things. “Or did you not notice whose house this is?”

  The mage reassembled his lofty facial expression. “She may vouch for him at Elya Street,” he informed Tris. “And there are truth spells I can use. First, though, we are going to see the woman he murdered.”

  “I didn’t —” Keth began, only to receive Tris’s elbow in his ribs.

  Before he could ask why she’d poked him, Tris told Dema, her voice as lofty as his, “Then I go with him.” To Chime, who waited on the dining-room table still, she said, “You stay here.”

  First they had gone to the Fifth District Forum, where Keth saw the reality of the image inside the glass ball. Numb all over, voiceless with pity over this unknown yaskedasu, he was only dimly aware of the quarrel between Nomasdina and the priests of the All-Seeing. He overheard snippets. The priests had wanted to take the dead woman away two hours ago, but they had agreed to wait until the arurim dhaskoi confronted Keth with the crime he was thought to have committed. Keth knew he’d disappointed Dhaskoi Nomasdina when he didn’t collapse and shout out his guilt. All he could do, seeing the tumbler’s remains, was address a prayer to Yorgiry, the Namornese goddess of death and mercy, that she grant the dead woman a new, longer life.

  When he could bear to look no longer, he turned away and inspected his surroundings. The arurimi who’d arrested Keth watched him, as intent as dogs looking at a bone just out of their reach. Keth shuddered. If the arurim dhaskoi’s truth spell didn’t work, and such spells were tricky if the caster didn’t originally have the ability to truth read, Keth knew what came next: torture. Unless they had a truthsayer on duty at the arurimat. Somehow he didn’t think the district that included the charity hospital, Khapik, and the slums of Hodenekes spent a great deal of money on truthsayers.

  A small, nail-bitten hand rested on his arm briefly. “They’ll come,” Tris said quietly. “Niko and Jumshida. Nobody’s going to hurt you if we can help it.”

  Keth stared at her, numb. How could she possibly say that? Was she so young that she didn’t know how things worked for outsiders in any city, in any nation? Jumshida was a Tharian; she wouldn’t protest the way things were done.

  “That fellow Nomasdina keeps watching me for some sign of guilt,” he replied at last, feeling he ought to say something. “I suppose I’m going to have to tell him I knew one of the Ghost’s victims.”

  “The Ghost?” Tris repeated with a frown.

  “It’s what the yaskedasi are calling the murderer. Because he seems invisible. A girl disappears, and the next day she’s dead with a yellow veil around her n
eck.”

  “You mean to tell me there’s been more than one killing?” asked Tris.

  Keth looked at the poor dead creature now enclosed in a circle of protective magical fire. “Six, with her.”

  The arurim dhaskoi Nomasdina stamped over to them, a scowl on his dark, lean features. “They can report me to the First Arurim all they want,” he grumbled, more to himself than to Keth or Tris. “I had to give it a try. Let’s go,” he ordered his arurimi. “Elya Street.” To Keth he said, “I have to veil you again.”

  Unlike the first time Dema shielded them, on their approach to the Forum, neither Keth nor Tris protested. As they had walked there, magically hidden inside a circle of arurimi, they had pushed through a crowd of people ripe for murder if they got their hands on the Ghost. Now Tris and Keth huddled inside the guards as the arurimi walked them out through the mob. There were cries of “When will you find the kakosoi?” and “How long does it take to find a killer?” There were other cries, suggestions of what should be done to the murderer when he was caught, bloody and fiery plans.

  “I admire their imagination,” Tris murmured to Keth as the crowd jostled the arurimi and the arurimi jostled her and Keth.

  He looked down at her, startled: though they were invisible to everyone else, they could see each other perfectly well. How could she joke at a time like this? “Th-they might think I did it,” he reminded her, fright making him stammer. “Hard to admire their i-magination wuh-when they wuh-want to do that to m-me.”

  “Oh — sorry,” replied Tris casually. “But are you the killer? This Ghost?”

  Keth started to shout a denial, then remembered he was supposed to be invisible. “No,” he whispered fiercely. “Do I look like a killer to you?”

  “Just for curiosity’s sake, how long have you been student and teacher?” Dema asked. The circle of arurimi broke free of the crowd and marched toward Elya Street, dodging pleasure seekers on their way to Khapik.

  Keth and Tris looked at each other and shrugged. “Two hours?” asked Keth.