Magic Steps (23 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Please

” It was Nurhar who asked, not Alzena.

Sandry shook her head.

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

He slumped to the floor and vomited helplessly.

“I’m still not sure I approve of moving in with dancers,” Gran’ther Edoar said.

He watched as Pasco loaded a seabag full of clothes into the cart that would carry him to Yasmín’s school. “If your net-dancing can be used to trap rats, and you can direct where and when people look at you, it seems you are better suited to harrier work than we guessed. What can you learn of that from this female?”

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

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

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

“If we can go?” asked the carter, her voice a little too patient, “It’s comin’

on to rain, and I got bundles to deliver, too.”

Zahra kissed her son’s forehead. “We’ll expect you to supper every Firesday,”

she told Pasco sternly. “Come say hello if things bring you to East District.”

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

asked Lark.

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

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

It was Sandry’s turn to gape, slack jawed, like the boy who had run upstairs.

“you think so?”

Lark laughed. “My dear, you’ve moved into the greater world, whether you wished to or not,” she said. “As a teacher, as a noble. You’ve outgrown Discipline.

You’re getting ready to take your place on the adult stage. Pasco was just the beginning.”

Sandy propped her elbows on the table and rester her chin on her hands.

“Remember that day you brought Yazmin to the residence? You knew then I was going to live there permanently, didn’t you? You didn’t seem at all surprised when Uncle said he wanted to start entertaining at this winter with me for hostess.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sandry nodded. “My rooms got better light for a weaver,” she replied quietly.

“And it’s nice, being next to your workshop. I used to listen to you weave, late at night. I bet Comas would like that, too.”

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

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

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

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

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