“I’ll find Niko,” volunteered Tris.
“Do all of you still have those bobbins of thread I gave you?” Lark wanted to know. All four young people dug into various pockets and produced them. “Very good. Keep them with you.” The woman looked at the loom. “Let’s put this away for now. The emanations are making my teeth hurt.”
“E-ma-na-tions.” Briar sounded the word out. “That’s feelings, right? It’s giving off magical feelings.”
“Right,” said Lark, tweaking his nose. “We’ll make a scholar of you yet.”
Sandry knelt beside her work and cautiously began to roll it up.
Daja was restless. Part of the afternoon was left, but there was no time to start the forge and get any real work done. After prowling the castle for an hour, she returned to their rooms to get a file and the nails she’d completed the day before; at least she could sharpen the points. She actually managed to do a dozen or so before the chore became unbearable. She threw the file across her bedchamber and stomped out again, ignoring Briar and Tris as they looked up from making more burn ointment.
The sight of them carefully straining oil from aloe lent more fuel to Daja’s temper. Didn’t they realize it was make-work? Yarrun wasn’t about to let any fires break out of control!
What she wanted—what she couldn’t have—was the sea. She ought to be there now, at a ship’s rail with the wind in her face, breathing in clean salt air as her vessel leaped forward. How had she gotten trapped in this stupid mountain valley? If she couldn’t be Tsaw’ha, at least she could be home in Winding Circle, where she could stand on the wall and breathe in that wonderful ocean scent.
The wall here would probably smell of fire. Well, that would have to do. Fire at least was her friend, and helped her to do the only important thing the Tsaw’ha hadn’t taken from her. Her mind made up, Daja went looking for the way onto the castle’s outer wall.
“If it’s seeing you want, why not try the lookout tower?” offered a manservant when she asked for directions. “There’s someone up there now, watching the fires, but they don’t mind visitors.”
Hoping the lookout wouldn’t be in a mood for conversation, Daja followed the man’s instructions. There were guards by the door at the base of the tower, but they let her pass without asking her business. She climbed, and climbed, and climbed. Just when she thought that if she climbed any more she would get a nosebleed, she reached the end of the stairs. The door at the top stood open—when she walked through, she stood by a tiny kiosk at the center of a broad platform. Its edges were guarded by a battlement as high as her chest. Made of stone, the battlement was pierced with holes to let the wind pass through. At this height, the wind blew hard.
It vexed her to realize she was nervous about approaching the edge. Hadn’t she done crow’s-nest duty a hundred times on Third Ship Kisubo? She ventured a step from the door, and another. The deck—the floor—was reassuringly firm under her feet.
“It’s not so bad.” Yarrun walked over from the far side of the platform. The wind clawed at his tunic and shirt; his hair was tumbled. “And it’s stood for a century.” He drank deeply from a flask in his hand.
Daja frowned—was he drinking liquor? The last thing anyone needed was a tipsy fire-mage. It was not her place to correct an elder, but with so much in the valley dependent on this one man, the thought of him as a drunkard was not a comforting one.
Her fear of the height evaporated. She walked to the battlement and took in the view. They were above the entire valley, except for the surrounding mountains. The ground was a quilt, its patches sewn from orchards, fields, villages, and pastures. The much-shrunken lake was a puddle in the quilt’s center. Black stripes were laid across the neat squares, showing where grassfires had burned without regard for order. More such stripes blazed orange or glowed orange-black. The threat was still very much present, particularly in the grasslands nearest the castle. Just below, in the northern third of the valley and on each side, moss-green belts of forest grew on land too steep to be farmed. Over everything drifted a pale gray haze of smoke.
“All the locals talk of is the wealth in copper and saffron.” Yarrun had come to stand next to her. “Those trees—they’re wealth, too, in wood and resin and nuts. They could live on such wealth, if they had to. And that woman tells me to let it burn!”
“Rosethorn does know plants,” Daja said cautiously. “That’s her magic.”
“Magic!” he scoffed. “Magic cannot take the place of learning, girl. This mumbling of earth rhythms and of nature is folly. True learning is gained when other people can work their spells as you do and get the same results. And you need learning to properly understand how the world functions. If you rely only on intuition or magic to interpret what you observe, you will think that animals truly are wise, not that they’ve learned if they do a thing it will please you. You will believe that only the proper ceremonies will ensure that the sun rises every day, as the people of the Kurchal Empire once did.” Lifting his bottle, he drank deep.
Daja glanced at it sidelong.
He saw and raised the flask. “I would offer you some, but it wouldn’t be good for you. This is a strong-brewed Yanjing tea, black as coal and treated with stimulants like foxglove. Called as I am this year to work day and night, I find that my tea helps me to keep going.”
“It’s not liquor?” she asked, suspicious.