The Will of the Empress

2

Duke Vedris, riding into the courtyard followed by his guards, was dismounting when he heard Daja’s familiar voice raised in a bellow. “Tris! That little flying glass monster of yours just stole fish roe pearls!”

A moment later the duke heard Briar shout, “Tris! Tell this creature it cannot roost in my shakkans! Lakik’s teeth, I’d have her guts for string if she had guts!”

From the top of the house, booming on a mad swirl of wind, they heard Tris yell, “I’m meditating up here!”

The duke looked at the sergeant of his guard. “Did you know that the magical rune for discord is the combination of the rune for house and two runes for mage?”

The woman grinned. “I wonder what it would be for a house with three mages?”

“Number 6 Cheeseman Street,” murmured one of the other guards.

The shutters on a third-floor window slammed open, and a red head poked out. “Mila’s blessings! One moment, Your Grace!” Tris called. The shutters closed with a snap.

“Your Grace is lucky,” said the guard who had just spoken. “That one likes you. It could be so much worse for us all if she didn’t.”

The duke frowned briefly at the man. “Tris is sharp-tempered, it’s true, but she is a good friend to those in need.”

The man bowed his head. “Yes, Your Grace.”

Within minutes a manservant had taken charge of the guards and the horses and Tris had settled the duke in the sitting room. “I’d like to speak with the three of you, if I may?” asked Vedris when she had served him tea. “I know you’re busy, but I have a rather large favor to ask.”

Tris curtsied, blushing slightly. “Of course, Your Grace,” she said. “The others are on their way. They just need to tidy up.”

He smiled at her. He had long known that the younger Tris had admired him, as a young girl would admire a polished older man who talked of books with her. From the color on her cheeks it seemed that some of her old feeling still remained. “Did you summon them from here?” he asked. “Sandry told me you had all closed your connections to one another.”

Tris’s blush deepened. “I sent the maid. We’re not who we were, Your Grace,” she explained. “Would you like it if Sandry walked freely in your mind, among all the things you have been and done?”

“Shurri Firesword, I would not!” The very thought gave Vedris gooseflesh.

“They say travel gives you a world of experiences.” Briar came in, still drying his hands. “Well, I have plenty of experiences I wouldn’t share with my worst enemy.”

Vedris raised his eyebrows. “Not even with the girls, who understand you best?” he asked mildly.

Briar grinned. “Particularly not with the girls.”

“I know about the cookmaid,” Tris muttered. “You’re lucky she’s too silly to think you’re serious.”

“What are you worried about?” snapped Briar. “I make sure any girl I go walking with knows I’m not serious.”

“Walking?” asked Daja. She entered the room and kissed the duke on the cheek before she looked at Briar and raised an eyebrow. “Is that what you call it?”

Vedris saw that all three of the young mages frowned, despite their jokes. The discord Sandry had told him about still continued, it seemed. “Please spare me what any of you call it,” Vedris said delicately. At the sound of his voice, they all looked at him. Briar grinned and shrugged, taking a chair. Daja followed suit, while Tris poured out tea for the others.

As she did so, Chime sailed into the room on widespread wings. She dropped the bag of tiny, fish roe pearls in Daja’s lap—one pearl floated in her glass body where a real creature’s stomach would be—and continued on to settle gracefully on the duke’s shoulder. Emitting the musical glass croon that was her purr, Chime rested her head against Vedris’s cheek.

“Like any beautiful creature, you live for worship,” he said affectionately as he stroked her neck with one finger. They had met on Tris’s first visit to Duke’s Citadel after her return home. Vedris never tired of looking at Chime. “I brought you something that will agree with you much better than pearls.” Reaching into his belt purse, he brought out a small packet of parchment and opened it on his silk-clad knee. A small pile of gold dust lay inside it.

“You spoil her, Your Grace,” Tris said as Chime walked once around the duke’s neck, purring, before she walked down his chest to the offered treat. Neatly she began to eat the gold dust as if it were grain. Despite their earlier anger with her, Daja and Briar watched, fascinated, as the dust flowed in a ribbon down Chime’s clear gullet.

Once Chime had finished, she flew to the window seat and curled up on a cushion to nap. Tris settled next to her.

Vedris folded up the empty parchment, satisfied that the interlude with Chime had relaxed these three prickly young adults. “I understand that I am about to ask a great deal. I am certain that you three have had your fill of travel. However, I have been presented with a ... situation. You are aware that Sandrilene inherited considerable estates from her mother in the empire of Namorn.”

“One of her mother’s cousins administers them for her,” said Tris.

“And she’s a clehame—what they call a countess—from her mother’s inheritance there,” added Daja. “The women inherit titles on their own in Namorn.”

“But even without all that, she’s still awful rich.” Briar was watching vines move around the deep scars on one of his palms. “From all the investing and things she does here.”

“Yes, but she has neglected the Namornese side of her affairs. In part the fault is mine,” confessed the duke. “We have tried to play down Sandrilene’s financial situation, your teachers and I. Her magical abilities seemed more important at first. You know what the world is like. Heiresses are normally pawns, unable to live their own lives or to make their own decisions. It is not a life that Sandrilene would enjoy. Here, we have protected her from that.

“But in protecting her, we also kept her from doing her duty to those for whom she is responsible in Namorn,” Vedris continued. “The people on her lands, who farm them and reap the profits for her to live on. Her cousin Ambros has looked after her interests for all of these years, managing them as well as his own lands. I know that it was wrong to encourage Sandrilene to stay here when she has responsibilities elsewhere. Berenene, the empress of Namorn, is also a kinswoman of Sandrilene’s. She has expressed ... displeasure that I made no effort to force Sandrilene to go to her Namornese family.”

Briar tapped a flower on one knuckle, turning it from yellow to blue. “Your Grace, her displeasure—was it military, or money?”

Vedris chuckled. “I have truly missed you three. It is so agreeable to be understood. The threats have been financial. If Sandrilene were to remain in Emelan much longer, Namorn might find other sources of saffron and copper. Certain goods that pass through Emelan would be more highly taxed in Namorn. Those who pay those taxes would be told it would cost less to ship their goods through other countries. Debts owed to banks in Emelan would be repaid more slowly, or frozen. Last year, interest paid on Emelan’s loans to the Namornese empire never reached our banks. Her Imperial Majesty has indicated to me that there are ways to make our friendly relations even less friendly.”

Briar leaned over and spat in the empty hearth. “Imperial language,” he said, his voice quiet but savage. “Imperial double-talk. They speak pretty and sharpen their knives. The Yanjing emperor is just as bad.”

“Then he and the empress must have a wonderful time together,” remarked Daja casually. “They’ve been at war off and on for eight years.”

“It is the language of diplomacy,” said the duke. “I use it myself.”

“I’ll venture a guess,” said Daja, tugging her lower lip. “Sandry found out about the blackmail.”

Nodding, the duke said, “My seneschal let it slip. Sandrilene was quite outraged. She insists on making that visit to Namorn, to satisfy the imperial request so that Emelan—that our people—are no longer inconvenienced on her account.” Vedris leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees. Here comes the difficult part, particularly in light of what I heard on my arrival, he thought. “My next step is troublesome. If I send guards, it would be perceived as an insult. As a suggestion that I do not trust Sandrilene’s relatives to care for her, that I fear for her safety within the empire. A very few guards would not be taken as an insult, but they would be too few to help her, should she need help.”

He stopped to sip his tea and sample one of the pistachio crescent cookies, biding his time. They would guess what he wanted, but they would also want him to say it aloud. They wouldn’t want to seem childishly eager or interested in front of each other. Inwardly, the duke sighed. He liked them all, and hated to see them unhappy. Daja’s homecoming had been a bitter experience, and remained so. Tris had run into the kind of professional jealousy that adults found hard to deal with. Both girls had confided a little to him in their Citadel visits, even if they could not talk about those things with Sandry. He had not spoken much with Briar, but he had with Rosethorn. He had also seen that same haunted look of Briar’s in the eyes of countless soldiers and sailors who had survived battle. Vedris hoped that if he could persuade all three of them to help with his plan, it might heal some of their wounds. The difficulty was that they had never been easy to persuade.

“I would be easier in my mind if one, or two, or even all three of you were to go with Sandry,” he admitted. “Empress Berenene has great mages at her command, but they are all academic mages, drawing their power from themselves and channeling it through learned rites and spells. In my experience, academic mages underestimate ambient mages like you, who draw your power from your surroundings.”

Briar snorted. “You bet they do,” he muttered scornfully.

The duke continued. “They will not expect you to be formidable guards for her. Moreover, you three have lived with more facets of the adult world than Sandrilene has. Daja, I understand that you may feel you have not completely made this place your home, and I shall not hold it against you, should you refuse me. Tris, I know you have plans to attend Lightsbridge next spring—”

“Lightsbridge!” chorused Briar and Daja. The university at Lightsbridge was the rival school of magecraft to Winding Circle. It was a citadel of learning, particularly for academic mages, as Winding Circle tended to specialize in ambient ones. Apparently, thought Vedris, Tris had not shared her plans with her housemates.

“You’ve got your mage medallion,” added Briar. “You don’t need Lightsbridge!”

Tris scowled. “I do if I need a license to practice plain street magic,” she informed him. “Talismans, charms, potions—that kind of thing. Don’t you understand how much people resent us for having medallions? People don’t even usually have a license at eighteen, let alone a medallion. Well, I mean to study at Lightsbridge under another name, an ordinary name, so I can get an ordinary license, so I can earn my living as an ordinary mage!”

“You’re going to lie about who you are?” asked Daja, shocked.

“Niko’s set it up for me,” Tris said shortly, naming her teacher. “I’m going to do it, and that’s final. Unless ...” She looked at Vedris uncertainly.

“After this summer you will be free again to do as you please,” the duke reassured her. “Either Sandrilene will return home, or ...” He looked at his hands. He did not want to speak the possibility aloud, but he owed his young friends honesty. “Sandrilene may feel that her duty requires her to remain in Namorn. In that case, I hope you would feel yourselves under no further obligation, and return to your own lives.” He looked at Briar. “I am most reluctant to ask you, of course. You have come home so recently. I will understand if you refuse. But—forgive me for saying it—Empress Berenene is a famed amateur gardener. With your own reputation having spread in the time you have been away, I suspect she will be quick to admit you above all to her inner circle.”

“Does Sandry speak Namornese?” Daja wanted to know.

Vedris felt hope stir in his chest. “I suspect it is quite rusty. I know Ambros fer Landreg’s reports are in Namornese, so she reads it well.”

Daja nodded. “But I speak it.” She smoothed one hand over the metal that coated the other. “You’re really worried, aren’t you, Your Grace?”

“I know that Sandrilene is capable of extraordinary feats. And they will think the less of her because her magic works through thread,” Vedris replied. “But she is only one mage, and there are ways to deal with mages. She is extraordinarily wealthy in Namorn—I don’t believe you know to what extent. Heiresses are always in great demand. Empress Berenene is a powerful woman who has made it clear that she thinks Sandrilene belongs in her court. Few people tell Her Imperial Majesty no.”

Briar smirked. “Sandry will. Sandry tells everyone no, sooner or later.”

Daja grinned; Tris smiled.

Vedris put down his teacup. “I know you will need time to consider it.”

Tris stared into the distance. “At least Daja and I should go. Two of us will be harder to distract than one.”

Briar made a face. “You need me, too,” he said. “In case all those hot-blooded Namornese noblemen make you girls addled.”

“I have yet to be addled by any man, Briar Moss,” said Daja. “Believe me, a few have tried. Dazed a little, but only because they reminded me of you. I had hoped you were one of a kind.”

“You’ll come?” asked Tris, startled.

“You aren’t the only one who owes His Grace,” Briar informed her. He looked at the duke. “Sir, even if Sandry weren’t our sister, you helped us along a lot, the four years we lived at Discipline. It would be an honor to ease your mind.”

The duke sighed with relief. He hadn’t been sure all of them would be willing, particularly not when they were at odds. “Getting to Namorn will be easy,” he said. “Third Caravan Saralan is here, and will leave for Namorn on the tenth day of Seed Moon. Their guards will protect you on the road. I will cover all of your expenses, and I consider myself to be deeply in your debt.” He smiled at them. “Thank you. I feel more comfortable with this than I have felt since Sandrilene told me she would go.”

The next morning Sandry arrived with her guards and a cart piled with bolts of cloth. Since Tris had gone to do the marketing and Daja was at Winding Circle, the maid fetched Briar.

Briar took one look at Sandry and knew trouble was in the air. Sandry’s bright blue eyes sparkled dangerously, and little red flags of temper marked her cheeks. “We thought you’d be happy to have us along, you wanting togetherness and all, so what’s put pins in your noble rump?” he asked, jamming his hands into his pockets. “And what’s this for? Tents? Or you think we’re too poor to have clothes?”

Sandry glared at him. “I doubt you have court clothes from cloth and stitching that I have done,” replied Sandry. “And I refuse to answer your other, vulgar question.”

As the house’s manservant carried in the first load of cloth, Briar rolled his eyes. “I’ve been vulgar for years and it never bothered you. If you think I’ll put off getting my trees ready for Rosethorn to look after so you can stick pins in me, think again. I don’t have time for fittings.” He turned and went into the house, back to his workroom. He knew Sandry would follow. When she wanted a fight, nothing stopped her from getting it.

While he waited he busied himself with his shakkans, preparing them for the trip to Winding Circle. They grumbled as he checked their leaves, branches, and soil before he set them in their traveling baskets once more. Like Briar, they had looked forward to staying in one place for a while.

“You’ll like it so well with Rosethorn, you won’t even remember me,” he told them with a gentleness he rarely showed to people these days. “And she won’t take you anywhere anytime soon.”

“Then why agree to come, if you didn’t want to?” Sandry demanded from the doorway. She carried a sewing basket in one hand.

Briar didn’t look at her. “Because His Grace asked me to.”

“Oh!” From the sound of her voice, Sandry had just gotten angrier. “So if my uncle asked you to reopen our old connection, you’d do it for him, but not for us.”

Briar closed his eyes, drawing serenity from the very old miniature apple tree under his fingers. Had she been so childish before? “His Grace would never ask something so foolish of us.”

“Foolish!”

Briar turned so he could glare at Sandry. He didn’t want his irritation flooding into his tree. “Look here. It’s one thing to be all happy and friendly and romping in each other’s minds when you’re little, Sandry. Kids think of kid things, and we were kids, for all we were powerful enough and well-taught enough to get our mage medallions.” In his upset he’d slid back to his native street slang, using the word for a young goat to mean a child. “We kept our minds neat and clean and orderly for our magic and it was easy, because we were kids. We’re not kids now. We can control our power because we’re stronger, and that’s nice, because our minds are messy adult minds!”

“You mean your mind is messy,” Sandry retorted, crimson with fury. “You, all well-traveled to distant lands, with your mysterious war and your Yanjing emperor, while you left silly me at home to stay a child!”

Briar took a step forward to glare down into her face. I also forgot how gods-curst aggravating she can be, always poking at a fellow’s sore spots! he thought. “Why does it always have to be so witless personal with you?” he demanded.

Sandry braced her fists on her hips and rose up on the balls of her feet to lessen the five inches of difference in their heights. “Personal? Personal is what I’ve had while my brother and sisters raced all over the world, in case you’ve forgotten, Master Big Britches!”

Briar gaped at her, astonished. “You said you didn’t mind!”

Sandry glared up into his eyes. “I had to say that, idiot. You were going if I liked it or no. All I could do was salvage my pride!”

Now Briar’s temper came to a boil. “That bleating noble’s pride, so much more meaningful than the kind us ground-grubbers get—”

Sandry retorted, “Better than your stiff-rumped street-boy fecklessness that makes fun of anything serious!” She thrust out one hand and shoved him on the chest. Briar rocked back on his heels and grabbed her wrist.

“Well.” Daja stood in the door, arms crossed over her chest. “I can see this will be a splendid trip.”

Embarrassed, Briar turned back to his plants. Sandry shoved out of the room past Daja.

After a long silence, Daja asked, “Does this mean you’re not going?”

Briar, who could feel a hot blush swamp his face from the tip of his nose to the backs of his ears, shook his head.

When he heard no sounds that meant Daja had left his workroom, he mumbled, “Girls. Always getting their skirts in an uproar over a lump in the mattress.”

“But you feel better for yelling at her,” Daja suggested, her voice very dry.

Briar shrugged. He kept his back to Daja so she wouldn’t see the slow smile that spread across his lips. It was good to see that Sandry still had some spice in her.

After a long moment, he heard the sounds of Daja’s retreat from his workroom. “Tell her I’m not wearing fussy embroidery or pointed shoes!” he yelled over his shoulder.

“Tell him I’m putting hoods with the faces sewn shut on all his tunics!” Sandry yelled from somewhere inside the house.

“Tell each other yourselves!” called Daja from somewhere between them.

Briar grinned. For a moment it felt like it had in the old days, back at Discipline cottage. Daja’s house had felt like home.

Briar was smugly pleased to find that, unlike most non-Traders who rode under the protection of Trader caravans, the four were not kept to a separate camp, guarded by the Traders but shut out of Trader conversations and Trader campfires. He tried not to smirk at the non-Traders when he passed their lonely fires. The four would have been forced to join them if not for Daja. Though she had once been a Trader outcast, the same powerful act of magic that had left her with living metal on one hand had also redeemed her name with all Traders, and made her and her friends known and respected by her people. Now Daja carried an ebony staff, its brass cap engraved and inlaid with the symbols of her life’s story, like any Trader’s staff. Now she could do business with Traders, eat with them, talk with them, and travel with them, as could her brother and sisters.

“Those fires look awful lonesome,” Briar confided to Tris their first night on the road.

She was not fooled. “Stop gloating,” she replied.

The people of Third Caravan Saralan soon found there was much of interest about Briar and the girls. The children and quite a few adults were entranced by Chime. They took every free moment to feed the glass dragon and collect the flame- or puddle-shaped bits of glass that Chime produced afterward. The yellow-clad and veiled mimanders—mages—were drawn to the depth and power of the magic that filled the 152-year-old miniature pine shakkan that was Briar’s companion. They consulted Briar about the magic that could be worked with shakkans, while the Trader negotiators began the slow process of bargaining for a long-term contract to buy the trees Briar was prepared to sell. The Traders even negotiated an exchange with Sandry: her embroidery on their own clothes in trade for a chance to examine weaving and embroidery done only within the rare Trader cities. This was the work of very old and very young Traders, who were exempt from the custom that forbade their people from making things. Sandry jumped at the chance: Rarely did a non-Trader so much as glimpse the work, let alone get the time for a close look at it.

Briar, Sandry, and Daja soon found something they could agree on in that first week: Tris had grown very odd. She seemed to flinch each time a fresh breeze blew through the camps and the caravans. Briar thought she would drive him mad, changing the location of her bedroll several times each night. He slept lightly, trying to avoid dreams of fire and blood. Tris woke him when she moved. While Tris didn’t drive others to growl “pesky, jagging, maukie girl” as Briar did, it was almost as if by trying to be quiet and disturb no one, Tris disturbed everyone.

“I left Winding Circle so I could sleep!” he cried their fourth night on the road. “Not so’s I could be jumping every other minute thinking we’re under attack when it’s just you missing your feather bed!”

“That’s why we ride with the caravan, so their guards watch in case of attack,” she replied with heavy and weary sarcasm. “Anyway, since when are you such a cursed light sleeper? The time was that we had to dump buckets of water on you to get you to crack an eyelid.”

“People change,” snarled Briar. “You didn’t used to squeak at every least little thing.” I’m not going to say I can’t even trust Trader guards to know when trouble comes, he thought, moving his bedroll as far from hers as he could manage. Anyone can be taken by surprise. Anyone. You’d think she’d know that, at her age.

It’s enough to make a person stuff her in a baggage wagon, thought Daja gloomily as she cleaned her teeth on their seventh morning out. Today they were to reach the river Erynwhit, which marked the border of Emelan and Gansar. Daja was wondering how she was going to put up with Tris’s behavior all the way to Namorn. She agreed with Briar, particularly since last night Tris had been sleeping, or moving, near Daja’s bedroll.

“Why don’t you see if you can ride in a wagon?” she demanded when Tris twitched one time too many over breakfast. “So you won’t have to keep the rest of us awake all night while you look for a soft spot, or worry about the wicked breeze drying your cheeks all day.”

Tris replied with a cold look that, in earlier years, made Daja want to put her in a keg and nail the top on. It was a look that froze the person who had dared to speak to Tris. We shamed it out of her when she lived with us, thought Daja, glaring back at her sister. I guess she fell into her old, bad ways after we weren’t around. “In the civilized world, people answer other people back,” she told the redhead.

“Daja, it’s too early,” moaned Sandry. She had stayed up late, working on her Namornese with the Traders. For once, Daja saw, Sandry wasn’t her bouncy morning self.

“Certainly too early for those of us who couldn’t get a whole night’s sleep in the first place,” growled Briar as the Traders began to pack the wagons up.

The caravan, even the sleepy four, pulled together and took the slowly descending road before the sun cleared the eastern mountains. Soon they descended to the flat canyon floor the Erynwhit had carved between towering cliff walls. The river spread before them. It was a lazy flat expanse no more than a hundred yards wide and barely three feet deep even at this time of year, when snowmelt should have swollen it enough to cover the whole canyon floor. The ride leader told Daja that, twenty years earlier, this road had been impassable in springtime, until some lord or other built a dam far upstream.

Thanks, whoever you were, she told the unnamed noble silently. Without your dam and this crossing we’d have to ride a hundred miles to the bridge at Lake Bostidan.

On moved the caravan, herd animals, riders, and the first of the wagon groups. Daja was about to enter the water when she saw that Tris had halted her mare in midstream. The mare turned and twisted, fighting Tris’s too-tight grip on the reins.

Daja ground her teeth, then rode over. “Ease up on your horse’s mouth,” Daja growled. “You’re hurting her, you’ll make her hard-mouthed, wrenching her about that way—”

Tris pulled the horse’s head around in an abrupt turn, kicking the mare into a gallop while still in the water. Daja stood in the stirrups to yell, “We taught you how to ride, Oti log it, Trader tax you! A hard-mouthed horse earns less on resale!”

Tris didn’t seem to hear. She galloped her little mare onto a hillock where the road entered the water and drew her to a halt. There, she rose in her stirrups, facing upriver.

Why is she taking her spectacles off? wondered Daja, as vexed with Tris as she had been in years. She looks completely demented, and she’s blind without them—now what?!

Tris ripped off the net that confined her braids, and turned the mare. Setting the horse galloping straight for the river, she grabbed a handful of air and placed it in front of her mouth. “Get ’em across!” she yelled. She had done some trick: Her voice boomed in the canyon. “For your lives, get them across! Move!”

The caravan leaders and the head mimander started to ride back to Tris.

“There is no storm, no flood,” cried the mimander. “You frighten our people—”

Tris stood in her saddle, her gray eyes wild. The ties flew from the thin braids that framed her face. They came undone, laddered with lightning bolts that crawled to her forehead and back over her head. “Are you deaf?” she bellowed. “I didn’t ask for a vote! Move them!” She thrust an arm out. Lightning ran down to fill her palm. It dripped to the ground. Wagon drivers whipped their beasts, wanting to put the river between them and Tris. Herds fled, splashing among the wagons and the riders.

Chime shot into the air. Lightning rose to cling to the dragon, outlining her graceful figure. Down she swooped, harrying the Traders’ dogs and sheep, driving them into the river and keeping them from fleeing downstream. Briar and Sandry charged back into the water, followed by Traders, making sure people rode across instead of fleeing along the river’s length.

I’ll kill Tris when everyone’s safely out, thought Daja, keeping the column tight on the upriver side. For causing such a fuss, for frightening everyone, and why? The mimander said there’s no flash flood coming. His specialty is weather with water—the ride leader told me so when we left Summersea!

She glanced at Tris. The redhead screeched, “Not fast enough!” at the mimander and the caravan leaders. Two long, heavy braids popped free of their ties. These did not crawl with lightning, like the rest of Tris’s braids. They were lightning.

She dragged fistfuls of blazing power from each and squeezed them through the gaps between her fingers, creating about seven strips of lightning in each hand. “Move!” she screamed, and hurled them in the caravan’s wake. Lightning cracked like whips over the heads of horses and mules. It lashed close enough to one herd of sheep to singe wool and to leave scorch marks on the side of a nearby wagon. Daja saw Tris drag on it to keep it from touching the water. Thank the gods for that, she realized. One strike in the water and we all might cook.

Three lightning strips flew at the mimander, the caravan leaders, even Daja herself, nipping at the rumps of their horses. Thunder boomed in the canyon, startling the herds into a run. Animals, Traders, and non-Traders alike decided they’d had enough. They, Sandry, and Briar fled across the river with Tris behind them, just in back of the last wagons.

“Keep going!” Tris screamed, her voice hoarse. Now she used her lightning to goad the caravan’s rear and its front, scaring the horses and the oxen who pulled the wagons until they rushed up the inclining road. The end of the caravan was a scant twenty feet above the canyon floor when a rumbling sound made the cooler-headed riders stop.

Rocks pattered down the cliffs that overlooked the road. Bits of the ledge that overlooked the canyon floor crumbled away from its edge. In the distance they could hear a dull roar.

This time, Tris, clinging to her horse’s mane, didn’t need to speak. Everyone scrambled to move higher on the steep road. They were sixty feet above the riverbed when a wall of tree- and stone-studded water snarled down the canyon to swamp the river flats. It ripped boulders from the ford, ground the road away, and plowed on down into the canyon again. Had they been just a little slower, the savage torrent would have swept them up and carried the remains far downstream.

“But there was no rain, no snowfall, higher in the mountains.” That lone voice belonged to the mimander. Daja did not look at his veiled eyes, out of consideration for his shame. Trader mimanders studied one aspect of magic all their lives. They chose their specialty when they were young, and risked their lives to learn all they could about winds, or the fall of water from the skies, or avalanches, or storms at sea.

How humiliating, she thought. It must look like he missed this coming, even after years of study. He knows this caravan puts its life in his hands.

And how humiliating, to yell at your sister because she doesn’t have time to save over two hundred people and explain herself, too.

Briar looked at the swirling mess below. He blinked. For a moment the trees were bodies: gaudily dressed men, women and children who were missing limbs or heads, their wounds streaking the brown water red. They were joined by the bloated corpses of yaks, goats, even birds, and by the corpses of soldiers. The stench of the rotting dead swamped him.

Not here, he thought, closing his eyes and clenching his teeth. Gansar, not Gyongxe. Peacetime, not war. Not here.

When he opened his eyes, he saw the remains of trees and the bulk of stones. Only the stench of death continued to haunt his nose.

He forced himself to study this flood, the one that was real right now. Already it was clawing at the earthen walls on the far side of the river flats. “You ask me, I think the dam broke upriver, master mimander,” he commented. “It was too old, maybe, or it needed fixing, or something, but some of those rocks look like dressed stone. It wasn’t your fault if that’s so. A dam break isn’t weather.”

Tris, limp along her mare’s neck, nodded briefly.

Daja was looking very sheepish, he saw. She rode over to Tris. “I’m sorry,” Briar heard her mutter. “I should have—”

“Trusted me?” Tris’s reply was muffled, but it clearly stung Daja. “Remembered it’s my favorite thing in all the world to act like a crazy person before strangers, and it would have been nice if my sisters and brother had said, ‘Oh, she’s peculiar, but she’s usually peculiar for a reason’? Go away, Daja. I don’t feel like blushing and accepting your kind apology just now, thanks all the same.”

Daja drew herself up. “All that traveling and all those conferences, and they never taught you how to be gracious.”

“You want Sandry for that. She’s up ahead. Leave me be.”

Briar rode over and touched Daja on the arm. He jerked his head, a sign for her to come aside with him. When she did, he whispered, “Remember? She gets all worked up, and she snaps at the first nice voice she hears. She was probably scared witless. I’ll put on the heavy gloves and gentle her some.” He winked and rode back to Tris, getting her attention by poking her in the arm. “Hey, Coppercurls, nice fireworks,” he said, keeping his voice light. She looked like one of the warrior dedicates right after battle: exhausted, but still not quite sure it was safe to stop fighting. Briar had learned to handle them carefully when they were in that state. “Maybe you ought to do like Chime and eat something so the lighting will come out of you in colors.”

Tris replied with a suggestion that Briar knew would be physically impossible. He grinned. Offering Tris his canteen, he said, “Have some water, and don’t spit it back in my face.”

As Tris obeyed, Briar looked at Daja and shrugged.

Daja smiled reluctantly. That’s right, Daja thought. Tris gets really frightened, and then she bites the heads off of people. I had forgotten.

I wonder what else I’ve forgotten—about Tris. About Sandry, and Briar.

I hope I remember really, really fast.

Sandry was livid. Had she been less aware of what she owed to the people around her, she would have shaken Tris until her teeth rattled. Furious as she was, she still remembered one of her uncle’s most often-repeated lessons: “Never express anger with a friend or a subordinate in public,” Vedris always said. “They might forgive a private expression of anger or a deserved scolding, but they never forget a public humiliation. It is the surest way to destroy a friendship and to create enemies.”

The caravan found a wide cove off the road where they could halt to collect themselves and calm the children and the animals. Sandry then went to give Tris a piece of her mind. The mimander beat her there. He had backed Tris up against a tall stone by the road, his yellow-robed body shielding her from onlookers. Sandry moved to the side of the stone to eavesdrop.

“The world does not appreciate such stunts,” the man told Tris softly but fiercely. “Do you know the harm you could do with such dangerous magic? What if a wagon had rolled, or if animals had fallen? When you scry a thing, you announce it immediately—you do not stage a panic in mid-river! I mean to file a complaint with Winding Circle—”

“They will tell you your complaint has no merit.” Tris’s voice was low and cold. “I did not scry this. As soon as I knew it was coming, I told everyone with the ears to hear. Forgive me if I did not consult you. There was no time.”

“What am I supposed to believe, kaq?” demanded the mimander. He’d used the most insulting term for a non-Trader there was. “Did you see it on the wind, like some fabled mage of old? I suppose you—a child!—expect me to believe that!”

“Go away. Tell your bookkeeper goddess you’d rather question the debt you owe me for your life than consider ways to repay me!” snapped Tris. “On second thought, don’t bother! There’s no coin small enough I’d consider worthwhile exchange for your life!”

Sandry smothered a gasp and pressed herself into a crevice behind the rock that hid her. Is she mad? Sandry wondered, horrified. If she were a Trader he’d have to kill her for so many insults! She said he was questioning his gods for letting him live. Then she told him not to bother repaying her—a Trader, not to repay!—and then she told him his life isn’t worth anything!

Finally the mimander replied, his voice shaking. “I expect no better of a kaq.”

He walked away.

Sandry’s temper blazed again. Tris not only orders us around like the Queen of Everything, but she insults our hosts! I have to remind her she used to have manners!

She yanked herself out of her crevice, shook her riding breeches clean of the leaf-litter that had collected there, look a deep breath, and walked around the rock. Tris had left it, to sit on a fallen tree next to the spring nearby. She patiently held one side of her snood, Chime the other, as her braids twined around each other, forming a snug ball. There was no way to tell now which had carried lightning and which had been lightning. Even the two thin braids that framed her face were neatly done up and tied again.

Sandry halted in front of her. “Never have I given you the right to order me around. Neither have Briar or Daja. And we have certainly not given you the right to throw lightning at us.” Despite her resolve to be firm, her voice quivered.

Tris’s eyes flicked to Sandry dangerously, though Tris’s hold on the snood remained steady as her braids moved and wriggled to fit themselves inside. “Pardon me for not kissing your hand and saying pretty please, since that’s what you’re used to these days,” she replied, acid dripping in her voice. “Had I known I would offend, Clehame,”—she turned Sandry’s Namornese title into an insult—“I would have let everyone die so I wouldn’t inconvenience you.”

“I know you are ever so much more clever and educated than the rest of us, but it’s not as if we are dolts. We did get our medallions at the same time as you. We have something between our ears besides hummus! And if the bond between us were open, there would have been no need for such antics!” replied Sandry, losing her temper in spite of herself.

Tris let go of the snood. With a flap of her wings, Chime leaped on top of her head to keep it in place. If either girl had not been in a rage, they might have thought it funny.

“Did it occur to you that you might not like what is in my head now?” demanded Tris. She hurriedly grabbed a fistful of hairpins and began to pin her net in place. “Or do you think I’ll be easier to control once you’re behind my eyes, Your Ladyship?”

Sandry’s eyes filled with unexpected tears. She felt as if Tris had slapped her. “Do you really think that of me?”

“I don’t know what I think,” growled Tris, taking off her spectacles. “Go away, will you? I have the most vile headache. I just want to be alone.” Chime took flight off of Tris’s head.

“With pleasure,” Sandry replied with all the dignity she had left. “At the rate you’re going, you’ll be a caravan of one, just as alone as you please.”

“I cannot believe you, my lady.” Unknown to the two girls, the caravan’s leader had come over. “She has saved all of our lives with fearsome magic, she is pale and sweating—and you choose to quarrel with her?” To Tris, the woman said, “My wagon is cushioned, with heavy drapes to close out the light, and there is cool mint tea. Will you rest your head there? Briar says he has a headache medicine that may help you.”

Sandry turned and fled. If anything, she felt even smaller than she had when Tris had accused her of wanting to control her. Why didn’t I notice she was ill? she wondered. And why is she being so mean to the three of us? She was that way to strangers when we lived together, but not us. Unless ... of course. We’re strangers.

She stopped, her back to the caravan. Reaching into the small pouch that always hung around her neck, she brought out the thread with its four equally spaced lumps. Sandry turned it around in her fingers, handling each lump, feeling each familiar bit of magic. Maybe we were this cord once, but for now it’s only a symbol, she thought wearily. A symbol of four children. Now we’re four adults who have become strangers. I have to get used to that. I have to get used to it, and think of ways to make us stop being strangers once and for all.

She sighed, and returned the thread circle to its pouch. And how will I do that? I have no notion in the least.