“There.” Polyam had come back to the smithy. This time she brought company, two other Traders: an older woman who wore a gold-trimmed maroon gauze veil on her hair, and a mimander, a Trader mage, robed head to toe in lemon-colored cloth, wearing a face-veil of the same eye-smarting shade. “It is as I told you,” Polyam said to them.
Daja felt her teacher’s power draw back as Frostpine glared at the newcomers. “I don’t mind if you watch, but you must be silent. We don’t need distractions.”
The older woman nodded as regally as any queen; the mimander bowed. All three Traders, including Polyam, leaned on their staffs as they watched.
After a moment, Daja felt Frostpine’s power return to the vine. He was putting forth more effort now. “You know, I expect liveliness from gold,” he murmured to her. “It’s such an agreeable metal, and it takes suggestions a bit too well. But iron? Iron shouldn’t be getting into this kind of mischief—aha!”
No one had to ask why he had exclaimed: the metal vines were shrinking, pulling away from the girls’ captive arms. Tris yanked free. The vines loosened their grip on Daja more reluctantly, but eventually they let her go. She slid out of their hold with a sigh of relief. The moment she was loose, she and Frostpine drew their magic from the iron.
“Now what do you do with it?” Rosethorn wanted to know. “It seems a shame to melt it down.”
The iron tendrils coiled, shrinking away. “I think you scared it,” Tris remarked.
Daja picked up the metal plant. “I don’t know if we could make anything normal with it even if we did melt it down.” She ran her fingers over the corded trunk. “It doesn’t exactly feel like iron now.”
Rosethorn put a hand on one of the branches. A thin iron twig sprouted between two of her fingers. “I think it’s going to keep growing. That’s how it feels to me.”
“You are certain that it will grow?” asked the mimander, his voice slightly muffled by his yellow veil. He walked farther into the smithy, bowed to Rosethorn and Frostpine, and held a yellow-gloved hand over the iron vine. “Yes—I can feel the power. This is like nothing I have known.”
“May we help you, honored mimander?” Frostpine inquired.
The older woman spoke quietly to Polyam, who announced, “Tenth Caravan Idaram will pay, in the coin of Emelan, a gold maja for this thing.”
Daja frowned at the Traders. A gold maja was half a year’s income for a poor family. That was startling enough. What was more startling yet was that she knew Trader custom: that sum had to be the lowest bid the newcomers could think she might accept.
“It must be cleansed of contact with a trangshi,” the mimander remarked to Polyam and the other Trader.
“It was a trangshi that made it,” snapped Rosethorn. Tris beamed at her.
“Even a rat has fur and meat,” Polyam replied, her eyes bright. “A gold maja and a gold astrel. We would offer more, but there is the cost of the herbs and oils for the cleansing to be considered.”
Three hundred silver crescents! Sandry told Daja through their magical tie. It’s a dowry, or new took, or even gold to work with. Maybe you ought to take it?
Think it over, Briar advised. You have something they want. Make ’em pay through the nose. That’s a fine revenge, after how Traders dealt with you.
“It’s not for sale,” Frostpine told Polyam and her companions. “We need to study it before any decision is reached.”
“A gold maja and two gold astrels,” the older woman said. “Not a copper more. The trangshi may have the night to consider it.” She walked away, head high. The mimander hesitated. He might have been looking at Daja, but it was hard for her to tell through the fine yellow veil on his face. Then he, too, followed the older woman. Polyam shifted position to let him goby.
“You needn’t think gilav Chandrisa will go up from that price,” she said to Frostpine. “Hers is the last word in any bargaining.”
What’s a gilav? Tris inquired silently.
Caravan boss, answered Briar. Like the captain of a ship.
Daja looked at her vine. One tendril had wrapped around her finger, catlike. She felt a bubbling emotion in her chest, one that threatened to cut off her breath. They can’t have it two ways, she told herself. Either I don’t exist, or I do. They must want this very badly, to make an offer to a trangshi.
“We Blue Traders have a saying,” she remarked, staring off to Polyam’s side. “When three parties bargain, no one wins. Tenth Caravan Idaram must bargain with me directly. Me. Talk to Daja Kisubo the trangshi, or there will be no talk at all.”
Frostpine grinned and put an arm around her shoulders. Sandry clapped; Briar whistled his approval. Even Rosethorn and Tris smiled.
Polyam shrugged. “Since I heard nothing, I can transmit no offers that are impossible to meet.” Turning, she hobbled off after the other Traders.
Daja tightened her grip on the iron, wishing she could go with them, could return to the kind of life where she had always known the rules.
We’re your people now, Sandry told her in mind-talk.
They threw you out, added Briar. Or were you forgetting?
“Frostpine!” A short man with gray-bristled cheeks stood in the doorway, glaring at them through dark eyes buried in wrinkles. He dressed like a craftsman in a knee-length green tunic, loose brown breeches, and leather slippers; a round white cap covered his hair. “I never bargained for your apprentice doing magic here, all unsupervised.”
“Neither did we,” Frostpine said, walking toward the owner of the forge with Daja in tow. “Daja Kisubo, this is Kahlib ul Hanoh, the village smith.”
Daja hoisted the iron vine into a better grip. Bowing, she nearly fell over, unbalanced by her creation. “Sorry about the magic,” she said, red with embarrassment.
“I hope you didn’t leave any loose—it acts oddly, if it isn’t used in the working,” chided the smith. “I’m not a mage, but I’ve dealt with them enough to know.”
“I think it’s all in the vine,” muttered Daja, looking around. They had learned to see magic over the summer, a useful side effect of their magic coming together. She used that vision now, but the only silver gleam of power she could find was on the mages.
Frostpine clapped her on the shoulder. “Why don’t you go back up to the castle and have a bath?” he suggested. “You look wrung out.”
She was also filthy, Daja realized. Soot from the iron vine streaked her skin and clothes from her neck to her knees. Even for a smith, that was a lot of dirt. “All right,” she said quietly.
“Take that with you,” ordered Kahlib. “I don’t have time to keep an eye on it.”
Daja settled the branching iron in her arms, bowed again to the smith, and trudged out of the forge.
Rosethorn turned to Briar. “Now all the excitement’s over, student of mine, how would you like to see the gold of Gold Ridge?”
Five months ago Briar had been a street-rat and thief: the mention of riches still had power over him. “You want to show me gold?” he asked. “You don’t have any use for it.”
“This kind I do. Come on.” With a polite farewell to Kahlib, Rosethorn drew Briar outside and led the way in the walk up the road to the castle. The dog Little Bear sat in front of the gates, plainly waiting for one of his people to return. When Rosethorn and Briar turned short of the dog’s post, following a lesser road that headed up into the rough ground south of the castle, Little Bear followed them.
Their new road narrowed until it was more of a track, broad enough for two people to ride abreast. Steep and twisty, it led deep into huge rock formations.
“What kind of gold would they keep outside the walls?” Briar demanded, toiling along. He hadn’t thought anything else would be up here—what kept bandits from attacking the castle from behind?
“You’ll see.”
Rosethorn said nothing more, and Briar saved his breath for climbing. At least the view through the breaks in the rocks was pretty or it would have been if so much of the valley b
elow had not been hidden in smoke. When the trail leveled off, Rosethorn stopped for a rest, coughing. Even Little Bear sat, his tongue hanging from the side of his mouth.
“Are you all right?” Briar asked his teacher gruffly. He didn’t want to seem mushy or anything, but sometimes at night he woke up cold and sweating from dreams that something had happened to Rosethorn.
She took a water bottle from her belt and drank, then rubbed the mouthpiece on her sleeve and passed the bottle to him. “Blasted smoke,” she explained after a few breaths. “And the air’s thin this high up. Take a look.” She waved an arm to her right, where the ground dipped. Briar walked over and blinked to make sure he wasn’t seeing things.
Here on the mountain’s edge someone had carved out a pocket valley and terraced it. To the northeast, where the far rim should be, he saw a stone wall, manned by soldiers. So much for anyone sneaking up on the castle from behind, he thought, squinting at the small valley. They would have to come over that wall, which looked difficult.
In the pocket valley, rows and rows of plants stood between irrigation ditches that were almost dry. To Briar’s sorrow, the plants were all sere and brown, dead or dying.
“The gold of Gold Ridge,” Rosethorn commented, sounding better. “Or what’s left of it.”
“How can plants be gold?” he asked.
“These are saffron crocuses. The flowers’ stigmas are worth more than their weight in gold. It takes twenty thousand of them to make up an ounce of saffron.”
Briar whistled soundlessly. Saffron was the most expensive spice in the world and made fortunes for those who dealt in it. The cost of a pound of it would probably feed all of Gold Ridge for a year or two. “Gold is right. What happened—not enough water?” he asked without taking his eyes from the terraces before him.
“What they have they bring up from the castle, but that’s hard water and isn’t very healthy for the plants. Usually water isn’t an issue—saffron doesn’t need much—but the drought has gone on in this part of the country for three years.”
“I wish they had let us know earlier this summer,” said a light, crisp voice nearby. “We might have been able to help.”
Briar jumped. A man walked up to them around a curve in the trail that led into the pocket valley. He was ten inches taller than Briar’s own height of five feet, slender, with long hair streaked black and gray. At fifty-three he was older than Rosethorn by twenty years, with a craggy face and a bushy salt-and-pepper mustache. His eyes were his most interesting feature: black as sloes, they were framed with thick black lashes and set deep under heavy black brows. He was dressed well, in a pale yellow linen shirt, loose brown linen trousers, polished boots, and an open cotton overrobe dyed an exacting shade of bronze.
Little Bear whipped the path with his tail, raising a cloud of dust that made Rosethorn sneeze.
“Niko, you scared me out of a season’s growth!” snapped Briar, angry at himself for not sensing that another person was nearby. “For somebody whose whole life is about seeing things, you go invisible real fast!”
“That was my intent.” Niklaren Goldeye’s smile was half hidden under his mustache. “I know I’ve done well if I can surprise you, Briar.”
The boy sniffed and rubbed his nose on his sleeve. “I was thinking about the plants,” he replied. “Poor things.”
“Come take a closer look,” Rosethorn said, retrieving her water bottle from him. With Little Bear at her side, she led the way into the tiny valley. The man and the boy followed her.
Closer to the terraces and their contents, Briar could see what had grown there: small flowers, not much more than a few inches high. Everything was undersized; he guessed that the leaves and flowers might be somewhat bigger, had they gotten enough water. Stopping by one terrace, he crouched and held an open hand over the ground. It was sandier than the earth in the larger valley below, with good drainage to carry rain away. Gently he ran a dead leaf between two fingers. As if their lives flowed in his own veins, he felt the plants’ struggle to bloom only a week ago. It was too dry; the castle water was too hard with minerals. Without soft rain, these autumn-blooming flowers had given up.
“What are you?” he wondered aloud. “Have you anything left to grow from next spring?” Cupping a hand around the base of one plant, he stretched out his magic.
Something popped behind his eyes; heat pressed his fingertips and jumped away. The crocus he touched collapsed in ashes. White heat flooded from him, enveloping all the plants on that terrace. Under the ground, he felt razor-sharp darts of heat as the still-living bulbs fried. The sandy earth itself warmed. Within the length of a slow breath, every crocus on that terrace was burned, and the soil around the crisped bulbs had run together, half melted.
Briar’s jaw hung open. Little Bear whined and hid behind Rosethorn.
“That was lightning,” Niko said conversationally. “Lightning, where it had no business appearing at all.”
Slowly Briar pulled out a pocket handkerchief and used it to pick up a lump in the dirt. The lightning’s heat had turned parts of the sandy ground into glass.
“I don’t do lightning,” he protested, looking at the sun through the warm glass. The light showed him bits of dirt and plant matter inside the glob. “That’s Tris.”
“Looked like lightning to me,” Rosethorn pointed out.
Briar stared at Niko. “You have to do something about this,” he told the man who had brought him to Rosethorn. “I can’t go around killing plants. I can’t.” Dismayed, he looked at the pocket of earth he had changed. “And how am I ever going to pay for these crocuses?”
Creeping over to him, Little Bear licked one of Briar’s hands.
“Sit,” Rosethorn said, putting a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “You’re white as a sheet.”
He obeyed, settling on the rim of the short stone wall that contained the terrace. “Why couldn’t it have been rain, if I had to give out magic that’s not mine?” he demanded, burying his face in the dog’s fur. “There isn’t a plant mage born that couldn’t use a bit of rain!”
Niko sighed. “Every time I think we have a grip on the things you four must learn, you develop something new.” He ran his fingers through his shoulder-length hair. “None of the student mages at Lightsbridge ever broke out like this.”
“One of the reasons I never wanted to study magic there,” Rosethorn pointed out. “It must be dreadfully tame.”
When Briar looked up, startled at what sounded like a joke, she smiled at him. “It’s not that bad. Those bulbs wouldn’t have made it through the winter—they’re at the end of their four years of growth.” She stared up at the sky, veiled in its smoky haze. “No one’s going to starve because these are finished.”
Briar spat on the ground. “I wish we were home,” he snapped. “I wish we were back in Winding Circle, in our own gardens. Why did we come with the duke, anyway?”
“Because the north’s in trouble,” Niko said. “He made this trip to see who needs help and how much, remember? He’ll require all the aid we can give him to keep these people from starvation when the snows come.”
“We may yet fail,” added Rosethorn. “Winter comes early up here, and it comes hard when it does. We’d better think of something fast.”
By the time she finished the climb up the road from the forge to the castle, Daja was more depressed than she had been in a long time. This was the closest she had come to Traders in months, and they had treated her like dirt. “Like—like trangshi,” she muttered, entering the castle gate. She could have worked all afternoon not caring that she was covered with iron and soot, but the idea of being too disgusting to talk to had sunk into her pores. She doubted a bath would fix that, but it beat trying to peel off her skin, the only other remedy that came to mind. She headed straight for the entrance to the baths that lay off the main courtyard.
Billows of mineral-scented mist wrapped around her as she walked down a few steps into the underground rooms. The mineral odor came from
the water. Unlike the Winding Circle bathhouses, where the water was heated by a furnace, these were filled by a natural hot spring warmed by fires deep within the mountains. Here she could steam the dirt off.
Wrapping the base of her vine in her leather apron to keep it from marking the tiles, Daja propped it against the wall, then went to remove her clothes. Except for a lone attendant, the large chamber was empty. The attendant looked at her oddly as she gave Daja soap, towels, and a scrubbing brush. It seemed no one came here so early in the day. Since she didn’t feel like talking, she was grateful for that.
The water was hot. She lowered herself into it a breath at a time, letting the mineral-rich liquid take her over. At least the metals in it welcomed her. They didn’t think she was trangshi. Even in this form they wanted her to shape them. Welcoming her, they rearranged themselves around her body until she felt better. The water cradled her as the sea had cradled Third Ship Kisubo. Daja closed her eyes and let her barriers down.
In her mind she found her iron vine-tree, magic shimmering in each strand, branch, and twig. The metal shifted slowly, spreading a touch here and a hint there. Barely moving, breathing softly, Daja examined her creation. She could feel bits of Sandry, Tris, and Briar mixed in with her own power, but only because she knew what to look for. The time when it was easy to tell her magic apart from that of her friends was over. In the weeks since Sandry had spun the four of them into one so they might survive an earthquake, Daja’s fire and metal talents had picked up touches of Sandry’s thread-power, Tris’s nature-magic, and Briar’s connection to growing things. The vine was as much Briar as Daja in its ability to grow, but Sandry’s magic had made the rods twist around one another to make a strong trunk. What part of it was Tris’s Daja couldn’t tell yet, but sooner or later she would know.
So Polyam’s gilav wanted to buy it—after it was cleansed. They would even blame her creation because her family had drowned and she had not. Would she sell it? Frostpine would want to keep it until he understood how it had come about. And it wasn’t as if she needed money, not while she lived at Winding Circle. But to have Traders, any Traders, talk to her as one of them again …