Daja was a smith, with intense bonds to fire, but for all that, she was normally slow to anger. Something in what he had said lit the tiniest of sparks. I don't know if he realises it sound like he wants me out of the way, she thought, heat tingling in her cheeks. Or like I can throw myself on my foster-sister's charity. Of course he didn't mean it to sound as if he wants me out of the way. Even if we have been living in each other's pockets for longer than we'd first expected to. We didn't intend to stay so long in Olart, or Capchen, or Anderran. We didn't plan to spend a whole extra year and a half away after Namorn.
'Daja?' Frostpine asked hesitantl.
I can't look at him, she thought. I don't want to cry. I feel all... lost. Funny.
'We should get moving,' she said, nudging her horse into motion. The sky remained cloudless, but now the day felt grey. Her eagerness to go back had faded.
'Daja, please talk to me,' Frostpine said. 'You can stay with me or with Sandry. Frankly, I had expected you would want a house, perhaps even a forge, of your own, since you're of age. Certainly you can afford it. You haven't taken vows of poverty.'
He's smiling at me - I can hear it in his voice, she thought. I should smile back, not worry him. But I feel empty. Lost, like when the Traders declared me outcast because I was the only survivor of that shipwreck. Why didn't Sandry warn me, all those letters she's been writing? She babbled of the duke's health and something or other Lark wove or she embroidered, but wrote no word of not being able to return to Discipline. Of course not. She has family. The duke, and her cousins in Namorn. But me... I'm cast out of my home. If I don't have Winding Circle, what do I have?
Briar and Tris will be in the same basket when they come home, Daja realised. They'll be outcasts, too.
--
Tris poured the tea water, noticing that her hand on the grip of the pot trembled. It's all wrong, she told herself. We should be in Discipline, with the kitchen and the table all in one room, and Lark and Rosethorn... Stop it! she ordered herself tartly. She put down the teapot and slid her fingers behind her spectacles to wipe away tears. When she could see again, Daja had taken charge of the teapot.
'Things change,' Daja said softly. 'We change with them. We sail before the wind. We become adults. As adults, we keep our minds and our secrets hidden, and our wounds. It's safer.'
--
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 seperate 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.
--
Daja was relieved when a footman brought in a plate of trout cooked in wine and began to serve it. It feels so strange to be talking about experience - sex - with them, she realised. I don't see why Briar keeps plunging in. I tried the kissing, and the petting, that time in Gansar, and that other time in Anderran. It just felt... awkward. That one boy smelled of sweat, and the other one had chapped lips. But Briar llikes it. Lark and Rosethorn like it. Frostpine likes it. I wonder if Tris...
She sneaked a look at Tris. The redhead had a book in her lap and was reading it between bites.
Perhaps not, with Tris, Daja thought. You'd have to get her attention first, and she'd probably hit you with a book. She looked up and met Sandry's dancing blue eyes. Sandry had noticed that Tris was reading at the table, too.
Daja grinned. At least some things are still familiar, she thought. And at least Sandry is still Sandry, whether she lives in a marble pile or not.
--
--
'Well, we certainly can't leave you here,' Tris drawled, looking at Zhegorz. 'And Green Man knows potions or oils won't work for long. And you can't wear my spectacles for the scraps of things you see, because my spectacles are specially ground for my bad eyes. It's too bad it isn't a matter of a living metal leg, or living metal gloves... living metal spectacles?'
'Maybe like nets?' suggested Briar. 'To catch visions in?'
'Or sounds. No, that's mad. Perhaps. Let's go see Daja,' Tris said.
'Daja will do something mad?' asked Zhegorz, now thoroughly confused.
Tris sighed. 'Daja can make spell nets out of wire, and she can make a leg that works like a real one. She was even crafting a living metal eye, once. Maybe she can think of something in living metal to help you.'
Briar and Tris were both dozing on Daja's bed as the smith finished the pieces they had decided might serve their crazy man best. Zhegorz himself sat on the floor by the hearth, watching Daja work.
For Zhegorz's ears, Daja had fashioned a pair of small living metal pieces that looked like plump beads pierced by small holes. Once they were done, she wrote a series of magical signs on them under a magnifying lens, using a steel tool with a razor-sharp tip.
'You understand, this will take adjustments,' she told Zhegorz softly. 'Depending on what you want them to do, just speak the name for each sign. Then the pieces should let that much more sound into your ears.' She knelt beside Zhegorz and gently fit one of the living metal pieces into his left ear. Watching as it shaped itself to fill the opening precisely, Daja asked, 'How is that? Comfortable?'
'It's warm,' whispered Zhegorz, looking up at her.
'I'm not going to put cold metal in your ears,' Daja said, a little miffed that he would suspect that of her. Once she checked the fit of the first piece, she gently turned Zhegorz's head and inserted the second. 'There,' she whispered, deliberately speaking more quietly to tet the ability of the pieces to pick up everyday sound. She recited the first lines of her favourite story. 'In the long ago, trader Koma and his bride, Bookkeeper Oti, saw that they had no savings in their account books, no warm memories laid up for the cold times.'
'That's a Trader tale,' Zhegorz said. 'It's about how the Trader and the Bookkeeper created the Tsaw'ha and wrote their names in the great books.'
Daja sat back on her heels. 'On the way to Dancruan you can tell me how you learned Trader stories,' she told him with a smile. 'Not now. I would like to get some sleep tonight.' She reached over to her worktable and carefully picked up her second creation. Tris had sacrificed a pair of spectacles for this piece. Daja had replaced the lenses with circles of living metal hammered as thin as tissue. Once they were fixed over the wire frames, she used her sharp-pointed tool to write in signs to fix the metal in place and cause it to work as she wished it to.
Gingerly, she settled the bridge of Zhegorz's bony nose and hooked the earpieces in place. I really don't know about this, she thought, nibbling her lower lip. I've made plenty of odd things, that's certain, but eyeglass lenses that let someone see normally and not magically? Only Tris would even come up with the idea.
'Can you see me?' she asked.
Zhegorz nodded.
'He'd have to be wrapped in steel not to see you, Daja,' said a grumpy and drowsy Tris from the bed. 'You're a big girl and you're right in front of him. Chime, will you fly around? Zhegorz, can you see Chime?'
Daja watched Zhegorz follow the glass dragon's flight as Chime dived and soared around the wood carvings of teh ceiling. She began to grin, elated. 'I begin to think I can cure dry rot with this stuff,' she said, proudly stroking the living metal on the back of her hand.
'Rosethorn would say pride will trip you on the stairs,' Briar said with a yawn. 'Come on, Zhegorz. We'll give those things a real trial in the morning.'
Daja got to her feet, wincing as her back complained after hours bent over her work. She was stretching when Zhegorz patted her shoulder. 'I'll tell you what they do in the morning. I'm sorry I ever said no-one could see through metal spectacles.' He scuttled out of the room as Daja shook her head over him.
Tris caught her by surprise, swooping in to press a rare kiss on Daja's cheek. 'I know they'll work,' she said. 'Thank you, for him.'
'He's my crazy man, too,' Daja said as Tris hurried from the room.
--
--
At the same time, seeing the way the light struck Rizu's curly lashes, casting their shadow over her eyes, she thought, She's so beautiful. Te question burst out of her before she realised it: 'Why aren't you dancing? You haven't danced all night. And nobody's asked you, even though you're almost as beautiful as the empress.'
Rizu smiled. 'You think so, truly?'
Daja opened her lips to say that of course she thought so, but she didn't get to speak. Instead, Rizu leaned over and kissed her softly, gently, on the mouth.
After a moment, she pulled away. There was a look of worry in her eyes. Her hands were fisted in her skirts.
'Oh,' said Daja when she remembered how to talk. She felt as if the sun had just catapaulted into her mind. Dazzled wth what it showed her, she realised also, Rizu's afraid. She's had enough people tell her no that she's not sure...
Strictly to make Rizu feel better, certainly not because she wanted more of that sunlight spilling into her heart and mind, Daja leaned over and kissed Rizu's mouth all on her own. Then, rather than ruin the quiet between them, Rizu took Daja's hand and led her into the palace by a door that did not open into the Moonlight Hall.
--
After breakfast, he read for a while. Normally he'd expect his sisters to be awake not long after dawn - their lives had made all of them into early risers - but after a gathering like last night, he couldn't blame them for sleeping in. When the ornamented clock in his sitting room chimed the hour before midday, he put his book aside and went in search of Daja.
At first, when he knocked on her door and there was no response right away, he thought she might have gone out. Then he heard female voices, muffled ones.
Maybe the maid will know where she got to, Briar thought, and pounded harder. At last he heard fumbling at the latch. The door opened to reveal Daja wearing only last night's rumpled tunic. 'Sorry,' she mumbled, letting him in. 'I couldn't find a robe.'
Briar smiled at her knowingly and glanced at the open bedroom door. Rizu stood there, wrapping a sheet around herself. Her long curls were free of their pins and dangled to her waist. The sheet only enhanced her buxom figure.
Briar raised his eyebrows at Rizu, then looked at Daja, who scratched at the floor with a bare toe. 'Well, that explains more than it doesn't,' Briar remarked. He told himself, Now I know why I was sure Rizu was never interested in me, or any man. 'Daja, why didn't you say you're a nisamohi?' he asked, using the Tradertalk word for a woman who loved other women. 'What with Lark and Rosethorn, did you think we cared?'
'I didn't know that I was a nisamohi,' Daja whispered, still not looking at him. She shrugged. 'I've been too busy, and there was never anyone...' She looked back at Rizu, who smiled at her with a beautiful light in her eyes.
'I'll go away in a hurry if you've got some of that heavy copper wire,' Briar said. 'The stuff you can just manage to bend around your wrist.'
Daja went over to her mage kit and hunted until she produced the coil of heavy copper wire. 'It's not spelled, so it should act as you want,' she said, handing the wire to Briar with one hand as she pushed him to the door with the other. 'Don't tell Sandry or Tris yet, please,' she added as she let him out. 'It's just... so new.'
'I wouldn't dream of it,' Briar said, but she had already shut and locked the door.
--
Her heart thudded in her chest. It's trying to drown out that question in mind mind. I thought I'd have all summer to work on her before having to ask. I thought we could build something solid in that time, when all we have is something new. I wish we'd had more time to fuse together!
Wishes are toys your mind plays with while pirates sneak up behind. That had been one of her aunt Hulweme's favourite sayings, ghost words from an aunt seven years dead.
Daja shook her head to clear it. I never liked Aunt Hulweme, she thought as she rapped on Rizu's door.
no subject
'Daja?' Frostpine asked hesitantl.
I can't look at him, she thought. I don't want to cry. I feel all... lost. Funny.
'We should get moving,' she said, nudging her horse into motion. The sky remained cloudless, but now the day felt grey. Her eagerness to go back had faded.
'Daja, please talk to me,' Frostpine said. 'You can stay with me or with Sandry. Frankly, I had expected you would want a house, perhaps even a forge, of your own, since you're of age. Certainly you can afford it. You haven't taken vows of poverty.'
He's smiling at me - I can hear it in his voice, she thought. I should smile back, not worry him. But I feel empty. Lost, like when the Traders declared me outcast because I was the only survivor of that shipwreck. Why didn't Sandry warn me, all those letters she's been writing? She babbled of the duke's health and something or other Lark wove or she embroidered, but wrote no word of not being able to return to Discipline. Of course not. She has family. The duke, and her cousins in Namorn. But me... I'm cast out of my home. If I don't have Winding Circle, what do I have?
Briar and Tris will be in the same basket when they come home, Daja realised. They'll be outcasts, too.
--
Tris poured the tea water, noticing that her hand on the grip of the pot trembled. It's all wrong, she told herself. We should be in Discipline, with the kitchen and the table all in one room, and Lark and Rosethorn... Stop it! she ordered herself tartly. She put down the teapot and slid her fingers behind her spectacles to wipe away tears. When she could see again, Daja had taken charge of the teapot.
'Things change,' Daja said softly. 'We change with them. We sail before the wind. We become adults. As adults, we keep our minds and our secrets hidden, and our wounds. It's safer.'
--
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 seperate 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.
--
Daja was relieved when a footman brought in a plate of trout cooked in wine and began to serve it. It feels so strange to be talking about experience - sex - with them, she realised. I don't see why Briar keeps plunging in. I tried the kissing, and the petting, that time in Gansar, and that other time in Anderran. It just felt... awkward. That one boy smelled of sweat, and the other one had chapped lips. But Briar llikes it. Lark and Rosethorn like it. Frostpine likes it. I wonder if Tris...
She sneaked a look at Tris. The redhead had a book in her lap and was reading it between bites.
Perhaps not, with Tris, Daja thought. You'd have to get her attention first, and she'd probably hit you with a book. She looked up and met Sandry's dancing blue eyes. Sandry had noticed that Tris was reading at the table, too.
Daja grinned. At least some things are still familiar, she thought. And at least Sandry is still Sandry, whether she lives in a marble pile or not.
--
--
'Well, we certainly can't leave you here,' Tris drawled, looking at Zhegorz. 'And Green Man knows potions or oils won't work for long. And you can't wear my spectacles for the scraps of things you see, because my spectacles are specially ground for my bad eyes. It's too bad it isn't a matter of a living metal leg, or living metal gloves... living metal spectacles?'
'Maybe like nets?' suggested Briar. 'To catch visions in?'
'Or sounds. No, that's mad. Perhaps. Let's go see Daja,' Tris said.
'Daja will do something mad?' asked Zhegorz, now thoroughly confused.
Tris sighed. 'Daja can make spell nets out of wire, and she can make a leg that works like a real one. She was even crafting a living metal eye, once. Maybe she can think of something in living metal to help you.'
Briar and Tris were both dozing on Daja's bed as the smith finished the pieces they had decided might serve their crazy man best. Zhegorz himself sat on the floor by the hearth, watching Daja work.
For Zhegorz's ears, Daja had fashioned a pair of small living metal pieces that looked like plump beads pierced by small holes. Once they were done, she wrote a series of magical signs on them under a magnifying lens, using a steel tool with a razor-sharp tip.
'You understand, this will take adjustments,' she told Zhegorz softly. 'Depending on what you want them to do, just speak the name for each sign. Then the pieces should let that much more sound into your ears.' She knelt beside Zhegorz and gently fit one of the living metal pieces into his left ear. Watching as it shaped itself to fill the opening precisely, Daja asked, 'How is that? Comfortable?'
'It's warm,' whispered Zhegorz, looking up at her.
'I'm not going to put cold metal in your ears,' Daja said, a little miffed that he would suspect that of her. Once she checked the fit of the first piece, she gently turned Zhegorz's head and inserted the second. 'There,' she whispered, deliberately speaking more quietly to tet the ability of the pieces to pick up everyday sound. She recited the first lines of her favourite story. 'In the long ago, trader Koma and his bride, Bookkeeper Oti, saw that they had no savings in their account books, no warm memories laid up for the cold times.'
'That's a Trader tale,' Zhegorz said. 'It's about how the Trader and the Bookkeeper created the Tsaw'ha and wrote their names in the great books.'
Daja sat back on her heels. 'On the way to Dancruan you can tell me how you learned Trader stories,' she told him with a smile. 'Not now. I would like to get some sleep tonight.' She reached over to her worktable and carefully picked up her second creation. Tris had sacrificed a pair of spectacles for this piece. Daja had replaced the lenses with circles of living metal hammered as thin as tissue. Once they were fixed over the wire frames, she used her sharp-pointed tool to write in signs to fix the metal in place and cause it to work as she wished it to.
Gingerly, she settled the bridge of Zhegorz's bony nose and hooked the earpieces in place. I really don't know about this, she thought, nibbling her lower lip. I've made plenty of odd things, that's certain, but eyeglass lenses that let someone see normally and not magically? Only Tris would even come up with the idea.
'Can you see me?' she asked.
Zhegorz nodded.
'He'd have to be wrapped in steel not to see you, Daja,' said a grumpy and drowsy Tris from the bed. 'You're a big girl and you're right in front of him. Chime, will you fly around? Zhegorz, can you see Chime?'
Daja watched Zhegorz follow the glass dragon's flight as Chime dived and soared around the wood carvings of teh ceiling. She began to grin, elated. 'I begin to think I can cure dry rot with this stuff,' she said, proudly stroking the living metal on the back of her hand.
'Rosethorn would say pride will trip you on the stairs,' Briar said with a yawn. 'Come on, Zhegorz. We'll give those things a real trial in the morning.'
Daja got to her feet, wincing as her back complained after hours bent over her work. She was stretching when Zhegorz patted her shoulder. 'I'll tell you what they do in the morning. I'm sorry I ever said no-one could see through metal spectacles.' He scuttled out of the room as Daja shook her head over him.
Tris caught her by surprise, swooping in to press a rare kiss on Daja's cheek. 'I know they'll work,' she said. 'Thank you, for him.'
'He's my crazy man, too,' Daja said as Tris hurried from the room.
--
--
At the same time, seeing the way the light struck Rizu's curly lashes, casting their shadow over her eyes, she thought, She's so beautiful. Te question burst out of her before she realised it: 'Why aren't you dancing? You haven't danced all night. And nobody's asked you, even though you're almost as beautiful as the empress.'
Rizu smiled. 'You think so, truly?'
Daja opened her lips to say that of course she thought so, but she didn't get to speak. Instead, Rizu leaned over and kissed her softly, gently, on the mouth.
After a moment, she pulled away. There was a look of worry in her eyes. Her hands were fisted in her skirts.
'Oh,' said Daja when she remembered how to talk. She felt as if the sun had just catapaulted into her mind. Dazzled wth what it showed her, she realised also, Rizu's afraid. She's had enough people tell her no that she's not sure...
Strictly to make Rizu feel better, certainly not because she wanted more of that sunlight spilling into her heart and mind, Daja leaned over and kissed Rizu's mouth all on her own. Then, rather than ruin the quiet between them, Rizu took Daja's hand and led her into the palace by a door that did not open into the Moonlight Hall.
--
After breakfast, he read for a while. Normally he'd expect his sisters to be awake not long after dawn - their lives had made all of them into early risers - but after a gathering like last night, he couldn't blame them for sleeping in. When the ornamented clock in his sitting room chimed the hour before midday, he put his book aside and went in search of Daja.
At first, when he knocked on her door and there was no response right away, he thought she might have gone out. Then he heard female voices, muffled ones.
Maybe the maid will know where she got to, Briar thought, and pounded harder. At last he heard fumbling at the latch. The door opened to reveal Daja wearing only last night's rumpled tunic. 'Sorry,' she mumbled, letting him in. 'I couldn't find a robe.'
Briar smiled at her knowingly and glanced at the open bedroom door. Rizu stood there, wrapping a sheet around herself. Her long curls were free of their pins and dangled to her waist. The sheet only enhanced her buxom figure.
Briar raised his eyebrows at Rizu, then looked at Daja, who scratched at the floor with a bare toe. 'Well, that explains more than it doesn't,' Briar remarked. He told himself, Now I know why I was sure Rizu was never interested in me, or any man. 'Daja, why didn't you say you're a nisamohi?' he asked, using the Tradertalk word for a woman who loved other women. 'What with Lark and Rosethorn, did you think we cared?'
'I didn't know that I was a nisamohi,' Daja whispered, still not looking at him. She shrugged. 'I've been too busy, and there was never anyone...' She looked back at Rizu, who smiled at her with a beautiful light in her eyes.
'I'll go away in a hurry if you've got some of that heavy copper wire,' Briar said. 'The stuff you can just manage to bend around your wrist.'
Daja went over to her mage kit and hunted until she produced the coil of heavy copper wire. 'It's not spelled, so it should act as you want,' she said, handing the wire to Briar with one hand as she pushed him to the door with the other. 'Don't tell Sandry or Tris yet, please,' she added as she let him out. 'It's just... so new.'
'I wouldn't dream of it,' Briar said, but she had already shut and locked the door.
--
Her heart thudded in her chest. It's trying to drown out that question in mind mind. I thought I'd have all summer to work on her before having to ask. I thought we could build something solid in that time, when all we have is something new. I wish we'd had more time to fuse together!
Wishes are toys your mind plays with while pirates sneak up behind. That had been one of her aunt Hulweme's favourite sayings, ghost words from an aunt seven years dead.
Daja shook her head to clear it. I never liked Aunt Hulweme, she thought as she rapped on Rizu's door.
'It's open,' she heard her lover call.
Daja bit her lip and entered Rizu's room.