“Yes I will!” he replied. Really, he thought, just because it took her awhile to master her power doesn’t mean it will be the same for me. I’m an adult. She was — is — a child. Patiently he reminded her, “I can meditate, I know I have magic now. All I need is practice.”
“And if it were just a matter of glass magic, you would probably be right,” she replied. “You’re a journeyman in your guild. I concede your knowledge of glassmaking. But you’ve forgotten that small matter of lightning. It’s tricky. It doesn’t do what you expect. Magic itself is like lightning, only worse.”
“You manage to work it pretty well,” Keth said, frowning at her. For the first time in months he felt that control of his life was within his grasp, and here she was trying to muddle it.
“How do you think I got so fast at throwing up protections?” Tris asked. “And some unusual things happened to help me grip it better than most people ever learn to do. Those things won’t happen for you. Don’t expect to hand Dhaskoi Nomasdina a clear globe this evening.”
“Well, the sooner we start, the sooner we know,” he snapped, impatient. The gall of her, trying to patronize him! “So let’s move, already.”
He stalked out of the house, fuming, without looking to see if she kept up or not. She judged everything by herself and her little friends. Children learned by rote because it would be years before they understood the ideas behind the memorization. He’d seen it over and over with apprentices. Tris had to learn that an adult would learn easily, now that he knew what he dealt with.
Tris let Keth go. Without rushing she put on Chime’s sling and packed a basket of the dragon’s dishes and foods, then beckoned for Chime to hop into the sling. Once the dragon was settled, Tris went into the courtyard and put a leash on Little Bear. After leaving word with the cook about where she would be, she set out along the Street of Glass with her dog, letting him sniff and ornament whatever he wanted to. It was better to let Keth walk his temper off now. He would be in a quieter frame of mind when she reached Touchstone.
She knew what he was thinking. Over and over in these last four years she had seen it: adults always believed they knew more than younger people. Normally this was true, but magecraft always turned the normal world on its head. The rules that governed accounting houses, craft shops, armies, and trade were not the rules of magic, even craft magic. Keth’s problem was not his skill. It was the crazed power that was a combination of air, water, heat, and cold. Lightning never formed or struck the same way twice. Tris understood that, and managed it. It was something Keth would learn, if she could stop him from getting killed in the process.
“I wish Lark were here,” she told Little Bear and Chime as they passed through Labrykas Square. “She can gentle anybody into doing anything. He’d even thank her for it.” Tris sighed. “I’m not good like Lark. I don’t know how to gentle anybody. We don’t have the time for me to step nicely around his being an adult stuck with a teacher who’s a kid.” When most people used that word, it meant “baby goat,” but to Briar, the street urchins of Summersea, and Briar’s foster sisters, “kid” would always mean someone who was not an adult.
Mila of the Grain, give me patience, Tris prayed as she walked around the side of Touchstone Glass. Yanna Healtouch, give me coolness to keep my temper down. Shurri Firesword, don’t strike him with your lightning arrows.
Kethlun had stripped off his shirt, donned a leather apron, and begun to make something. Carefully he worked a lump of liquid glass at the end of his blowpipe. He wasn’t blowing this piece. He used the pipe to hold the glass as he manipulated it with tongs, pulling out long tendrils and flipping them inward at the end. Tris could see that he breathed in the slow, steady count of meditation. In her magical vision his skin flickered with lightning, but it was gentle, a shimmer rather than a blaze. Working glass calmed him. Perhaps she could use that in her teaching.
If he had seen her, he didn’t show it. His big hands and blue eyes were steady as he pulled the glass, thrust the piece back into the furnace to heat, then worked it again. Tris and Chime stayed by the door to watch, silent. Little Bear retreated in boredom to the courtyard.
At last Keth finished. He’d made a pale green octopus, its tentacles neatly arranged to touch its head, as if it had thrown up its arms in shock. He gave it a final examination, his eyes sharp as he inspected the piece, then set it in an annealing oven on the far side of the furnace. Tris knew about this step from her earlier questions to glassmakers. Without a final tempering in the oven, glass would be even more fragile than it already was.
Keth scowled at Tris. “It took you forever to get here. Why didn’t you interrupt me?”
Now that she wouldn’t distract him, Tris came in and took the sling off her back, then set Chime’s food and water dishes in an out-of-the-way corner. The dragon began to feed. Only after Chime was seen to did Tris look at Keth.
“I didn’t want to interrupt,” she replied with a shrug. “I love to watch people work with glass. And you were using the meditation pattern to breathe. Did you feel anything different?”
Keth busied himself cleaning the tools he had used. He was pouring sweat from the heat of the furnace and oven, while Tris remained cool inside her cocoon of breezes. With a couple of flicks of her hands she expanded her breezes until they wound through the shop, freshening the air.
“It, the breathing, it made me feel calmer,” Keth admitted in his slow, careful speech. “I just did it for practice. I’m all right with pulling and molding glass. It’s the blown stuff that gets away from me. Are we going to start? The lessons, for the magic? I want to try to blow a globe before the end of the day.”
Tris bit her lip and counted to one hundred by fives to keep from snapping at him. He needs to learn to listen to me, she thought. When she was calm again, she told him, “Find a comfortable way to sit. I’m going to draw the circle for our meditation.”
“But you only do a circle when there’s a danger of magic getting away,” argued Kethlun. “I was meditating while I worked — I didn’t need any circle. We aren’t doing magic.”
“I am,” retorted Tris, “just by drawing the circle. And if you’re to grip your magic, you’ll have to let it out to work it. You’ll do that inside a circle until I’m convinced you know what you’re doing.”
“Has anybody told you you’re bossy?” demanded Keth.
“All the time,” Tris replied.
“You’ll never catch a husband that way, you know,” he pointed out. “A little sweetening would go a long way.”
She had heard this before. She didn’t like to hear it from him, but she would tell him so later. There was magic to be done now. “If I have to ‘catch’ a man to get a husband, I don’t want one,” she retorted. “Now, sit.” She pointed to a clear space at the center of the floor. To Chime she said, “Stay put.”
First she set her breezes free to roam the city, though not without regret. It would be stifling inside without them, but at best they might distract Keth. At worst, they might carry some of his uncontrolled power into the world to wreak a patch of havoc. It was better to sweat.
Outside Tris walked around the shop to make sure that she could enclose the whole thing in a circle. Once she had, she walked the circle again, laying a stripe of pure magic as she passed. When she reached the place where she had begun, she stepped inside the circle, then closed it. Her eyes shut, Tris summoned her barriers to meet above and below the workshop, enclosing it in a perfect bubble.
Inside, Kethlun sat cross-legged on the floor. “Close your eyes and start to meditate,” she ordered. “Clear your mind of all thought. Ignore me, just meditate.”
“I wish I could ignore you,” grumbled Keth, but he obeyed. Whoever had taught him to meditate had trained him well, Tris observed. His eyelids did not even flutter. His magic cast an uneven, shimmering glow in her sight, flaring and retreating, more active now than it had been while he had focused on making his octopus.
Quietly she assembled
several articles. When she had lined them up behind Keth, she set Chime next to them, motioning for the dragon to stay where she was. She had learned this approach from Daja, who had described her teacher’s way to show her how to get her power to tell her about metals she couldn’t see.
Finished, Tris knelt behind the row of things she had set up at Kethlun’s back. If she remembered her own lessons properly, the idea was to keep her voice soft and her movements quiet, until the teacher’s voice seemed almost like part of the student’s thoughts. As he inhaled she whispered, “Keth, feel for the power that moves in you. Find it in you, find where it runs. Gather it strand by strand to you. Slowly, slowly.”
She repeated it over and over, watching as the silver tracework of magic in his body drew in. Multitudes of glittering pale threads that ran through his muscles came together, their tracks thickening as they merged. Once she judged that he had gripped as much as he could manage, she said, “Let that power flow out behind you. Let it spread there. Let it cover everything behind you. Let it run toward me, let it flow….”
His breath hitched in his throat as his mind fumbled with this new trick. The heavier strands of magic began to pull apart. Tris went silent, waiting. At last Keth found his breathing rhythm and tried again.
Three tries later, the power he’d gathered flowed out to cover Tris and the things that she had set there. It was cool on her skin, as if she were coated in fluid, cold glass. Tris savored the relief from the heat, then drew her thumb and forefinger down a thin braid to coax a grain of lightning from her hair. The spark glimmered on her fingertip as Tris touched it to the first thing she had set at Keth’s back.
“Stay as you are,” she began softly. “Tell me what I’m touching back here.” She had meant to say that she used lightning to point, then changed her mind. His magic would know the difference between lightning and glass. “Find me with your power and tell me what I’m touching.” That should be easy. They had lightning and fire in common, if precious little else.
“Bowl.” Kethlun’s lips barely moved, he was so deep within himself. “Blown glass, green, stylized birds impressed around the sides by tongs.”
“Do you know this because you recognize the piece, or because you feel it with your power?” Tris wanted to know.
“It — it’s there,” he said, his voice agonizingly slow. “In the glass. In its shape. It knows — it knows what it is.”
Tris raised her eyebrows, impressed. Perhaps his glassmaker’s training made it easier for him to know so much about the bowl. She lifted her finger away, still with the spark of lightning on it, and touched the next piece. He identified an undecorated blue glass bottle, a clear vase blown onto a mold of a many-petaled rose, and an overheated piece of cloudy glass that Tris had taken from the cullet, or junk-glass barrel.
The last item at Keth’s back was Chime. She had curled into a cat-style ball to nap.
Tris restored her spark to its braid. “What do I touch now?” she asked. Keth shouldn’t need her to lead him to Chime, not when the dragon was infused with lightning. “There’s one more item behind you.”
Keth fidgeted. He twitched his shoulders, then yelped and tried to scramble away, not remembering that his legs were crossed and that he’d been sitting in that position for quite a while. He pitched forward onto his face, his ankles tangled behind him. After a moment he said grumpily, his nose mashed flat on the beaten earth of the floor, “Chime. That stings.”
“There’s quite a bit of lightning in her, even though she’s so small,” admitted Tris, speaking in her normal volume. “You did really well. I hope you know that.”
“Good. Are we done?”
Tris scowled. She had done the right thing, praising him. He should appreciate it; she didn’t give compliments easily. A more patient part of her whispered that he didn’t know that. She took her own deep breath, counting until her temper settled. Only then did she say, “No. Now you’ll try blowing glass.”
Chime squeaked and scrambled under a bench. Keth rolled over to untangle himself. “About time. He could be killing a yaskedasu right now.”
“Start the meditation breathing as you start your gather,” Tris instructed as he prepared to work.
“You know what a gather is?” he asked, shaking out his shoulders.
“I like to watch glassblowers, and often they let me ask questions,” replied Tris.
“Why?” he asked, checking the crucible to make sure the glass in it was still fit to be worked. “It doesn’t have anything to do with your magic.”
Tris sighed. “Most things don’t have anything to do with my magic,” she said, trying to be patient. “I just like to know about them. I almost never have anything to show for what I do. To me glassmaking, weaving, medicines, metal-smithing, now that’s magical. You make something and it lasts. It isn’t gone in the blink of an eye. And you’ll be able to earn a good living with it.”
He raised his eyebrows. “You won’t?”
“Not like a craft mage can. Not if you don’t want to kill people with lightning. Not if you can only bring rain or winds when you’re sure you’re not stealing them from others who need them. If you don’t want to work that way, it’s hard to make a living as a weather mage,” she explained. She could see he didn’t believe her. Time to get to work, she told herself, and said aloud, “Now, Keth — don’t try to blow a globe this time. Let’s just see what happens.”
He rolled his eyes and sighed, a combination that always made her want to box the ears of the person who did it. “I’ve blown globes since I was an apprentice, Tris,” he told her. “The fishermen of the Syth always need them as floats for their nets. It’s child’s play. Now that I know what the problem is, it’ll be easy.”
Tris nibbled on her lip. He could be right, though she doubted it. “Do as you like, then.”
He stood for a moment, blowpipe in hand, the light from the furnace casting his face into relief. Tris settled on a bench to watch him. She could feel the forces in the shop come together. Lightning flared from his skin more powerfully than it had before. Quickly Tris sent extra power into the protections that enclosed the shop. She did not want any stray magics to come in now, as they had two days ago. His next accident might not be as wonderful as Chime.
Tris breathed with him and waited as he returned to meditation. At last Keth slid his blowpipe into the furnace. The heat didn’t seem to bother him, though Tris had seen journeymen and even guildmasters flinch from it. She removed her spectacles and closed her eyes, sketching the sign for fire on her lids with a finger. When she opened them, Keth and his surroundings were a blur, but the quivering heat of the furnace was as clear as his magic. The heat twined around Keth like an affectionate cat, sinking into his skin and bones.
Tris wiped a thumb over her eyelids and restored her spectacles to their proper resting place. Whether it was due to lightning or his own expanded seed of glass magic, Keth could take higher temperatures than most people. He might even be able to hold fire in his bare hands, Tris thought. She would ask Daja, the smith mage, when she got —
“Home” was the next word of her thought. Tris’s eyes burned with sudden tears. After all this time, she still tricked herself, thinking Discipline cottage was nearby and that Daja, Sandry, and Briar would be there when she returned for the night. But they weren’t. Discipline and Sandry were in Emelan, months of travel to the north. Daja was in Kethlun’s home country of Namorn, even farther north; Briar was on the road to Yanjing in the distant northeast. They were truly scattered and Daja wasn’t here to judge Keth’s magic.
Tris sniffed and locked her attention on her student. Keth brought his gather of molten glass out of the furnace, twirling his blowpipe as he did. His grip on his breathing was shaky.
“Gently,” she murmured, watching the reddish orange glass change color as it began to cool. “Remember the feel of your magic.”
He kept the pipe spinning and carefully blew down its length. Tris saw the lightning blaze of his pow
er show through the pipe. He blew steadily, far longer than she could have managed. When his lungs were empty, Keth reheated the glass as he took in fresh air. The power in his breath was brighter still in the pipe this time. Tris, about to say something, held her tongue. He reheated again, but she knew he’d lost the count of his meditation. This time, when he blew into the pipe, glass-coated lightning darted from the end and dropped to the earth without shattering. Chime dashed under a corner worktable and stayed there.
“Relax,” Tris said as Keth turned beet red with frustration. “Calm down, drink some water, try again.”
“Y-you —!” he began to yell, turning on her. Tris met his eyes with her own, wanting him to see that this was normal, it was to be expected. She knew it was maddening to think a thing through perfectly, only to have it go awry the minute she actually tried to do it.
Whatever he’d meant to say, Keth chose not to say it. Instead he walked around the shop, touching vases, bowls, jars, and suncatchers until he was calm. After that he set another crucible to heat and drank some water.
They were so caught up in their work they didn’t even notice Antonou’s wife had come with Keth’s midday. She couldn’t pass through the magical barrier or catch their attention. At last she fed some chunks of grilled lamb to Little Bear, then went back to her own work.
By late afternoon both student and teacher were sweat-soaked and exhausted. In addition to the glass lightning, Keth had produced a few other mistakes. When the breath caught in Keth’s throat on his second try, droplets of molten glass exploded over the workshop. They glinted in the light of the furnace like dark gems. Next came an egg-shaped blob of black glass, then a lump that sparkled with tiny lightnings. The last failure was a glass coil that burned the toe off one of Keth’s boots. Chime had yet to leave her hiding place.
Tris looked at the glass coil, then at Keth. Knowing she was about to trigger an explosion, she said as gently as she knew how, “This isn’t working. You’re exhausted and probably starving. It’s time to stop for the day.”
The Circle Opens #4: Shatterglass Page 11