Tris found Little Bear’s life force, that of a dozing animal with unhappy dreams. He had to be sleeping in Briar’s room again: her sense of him was nearly overpowered by the magic that radiated from Briar’s shakkan. Over its one-hundred-forty-six-year existence, the miniature tree had been used to store and build upon the magic of its earlier owners; its green strength pressed on her own power. There was a curiously similar feel to the shakkan and to Little Bear, a kind of sadness. They missed Briar.
“We all do,” she muttered crossly, stuffing her feet into thin leather slippers. “Can’t you keep it to yourselves?”
With the stealth of months of practice she left the house, though she wondered why she bothered to be quiet. From the feel of Sandry and Lark, Tris thought that she might bang kettle lids in their ears and they wouldn’t twitch.
Through the back gate she passed, then between the fence and the vineyard. Over the winter she had worn a path in the grass, one that led across a band of open ground. It went straight to the closest stair on the inside of Winding Circle’s thick wall. The rain fell steadily as she climbed, hoisting her skirts to keep from tripping, panting with effort. At least these days no one who saw her puffing was silly enough to yell at her to lose weight. Before she had learned to control her power—and the way it produced hail or lightning when she was vexed—some had teased her, with interesting results.
Learning to control her magic had meant she had to give up rewarding those people who gave cruel advice. She hadn’t liked that, even when Niko pointed out that those she frightened became enemies. Niko is a spoilsport, thought Tris, trying to catch her breath as she stepped onto the top of the wall.
Most nights when she came up here, she walked south to get a view of the harbor islands and the Pebbled Sea beyond. There was no glimpse of the sea tonight; the rain cloaked it. Below and to her right lay the joining of the roads that wrapped around Winding Circle and the granite ridge between the temple and the Mire. The slum and even walled Summersea were gone from view; no light cut through the rain, not even that of the harbor beacons.
“One day—” a quiet voice began.
Tris gasped and jumped. Niko’s approach had taken her by surprise. He steadied the girl with a hand on her shoulder. She could barely see his craggy face under the wide-brimmed hat he’d worn to keep off the wet.
“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said.
“Well, you did,” muttered Tris. “What were you going to say?”
“Only that if you ever get a home of your own, you ought to consider a nice tower, preferably on a cliff. You seem to prefer lookout spots.”
“I’m a weather mage, aren’t I?” she asked. “Of course I like heights.”
“Tell me, weather mage, how long you do expect this storm to last?”
Tris sent her power rolling into the clouds. “A day, maybe two,” she replied, testing the feel of water, heat, and cold in the air. “Hard rain toward dawn, mistylike until ten in the morning, light rain after.”
“Can you make it end? Usher the storm away from here?”
Tris stared at him. “You just asked me to meddle with the weather.”
“Yes.” He evaded her eyes, staring out at the dark landscape.
“But you threatened dire things if I used my power like that. I’m not allowed to muck with nature.”
“This is different.”
“How do you know your telling me to do it won’t turn out as badly as if I did it on my own?” she demanded.
“I don’t,” was the flat reply. “I feel it’s important enough to try, though, or I never would have brought it up.”
That made her nervous. “Please explain,” she said, unusually meek.
Niko sighed. “It seems this disease isn’t carried in the air, which is the only good news we’ve had all week. That leaves human contact, insects or animals, or water. If animals were carriers, we would have noticed sick ones. There are no flies or mosquitoes at this time of year, though we can’t rule out fleas and lice. I believe this thing spreads too quickly to be simply a matter of human contact, though Crane won’t rule that out. The only thing we can try to change—”
“Is water,” said Tris.
“The water in the sewers rises by the hour,” said Niko. “It may already be leaking into the city’s wells. It certainly will do so if the water continues to rise. If we can move this rain along, our outlook would be improved.”
Tris removed her shoes, spectacles, and shawl, handing them to Niko. She climbed into one of the flat-bottomed notches in the top of the wall and turned away from the wind. The storm was at her back, coming from the southeast, bound for the northern mountains. She spread herself in it and let its motion thrust her to its leading edge. The hills around Summersea rolled under her. Rivers, streams, towns, she felt them all as she flowed overhead, bound for the great mountains beyond.
An opposing wind in her face brought her to a halt. Here was a pressure to counter the storm she rode, a whirling mass of air entrenched nearly thirty miles to the north. It would go nowhere; if she insisted, she would regret it. She had met such things before and wouldn’t have cared if she’d had no storm at her back to move along.
She jumped onto the edge of the unmoving northern system. Following its edge west as she sought a gap where she could put her storm, she found none. At last she gave up. Returning to the storm over Winding Circle, she used its power to send her shooting high above the clouds into open air. Safe from her storm’s pull, she turned west again, still looking for a space to move it to. There was nothing she would not have to fight other weather to clear.