Niko grinned at Tris wickedly. “Good try. Come on now.”
Once on the spiral road, he walked so quickly that his gray over-robe flapped behind him—Tris struggled to keep up. They left the temple city through the south gate. Crossing the flat expanse of road that lay between the wall and the cliff, they reached the grass fringe on the far side. When Niko stepped off the cliff’s rim, Tris squeaked.
He looked back at her. “There’s a path,” he told her, amused. “Come on.”
Gingerly, she obeyed. There was a track of sorts, twisting down through tumbled rock, earth, and stunted trees. She scrambled along, catching her skirt on roots. The man stopped on a broad ledge just two hundred yards above the rocky shore. A cave opened onto it, stretching back into the cliff. Tris couldn’t see the cavern’s rear wall.
“This will do.” Niko sat cross-legged just inside the cave’s mouth. He patted the ground next to him. “Have a seat.”
She mopped her sweaty face on her sleeve. “Why?”
“Because I ask. Because you don’t have anything else to do just now. I’d actually meant to talk to you when we traveled together, but—I forget what distracted me.”
“You found out the captain had been to the Strait of Dragons,” she said patiently. “You wanted them to tell you about it.” She’d enjoyed those tales herself. “And right after I got here, you had to leave again, in a great hurry.”
“That’s right—I had the vision that Third Ship Kisubo was about to put to sea. Well, nothing’s going to interrupt now. Sit, please.”
Grudgingly, she obeyed.
He looked at her and sighed. “I wish that by now you could trust me.”
She looked out through the cave entrance, at the clouds. “Everyone I ever trusted sent me away,” she said flatly.
For a while he said nothing. Tris, glancing at him, saw a look of pity that made her blush with embarrassment. At last he reached over, squeezed her fingers, and let go. “Then I will just have to hope that you change your mind someday. In the meantime, you’re going to learn meditation.”
“Why?” she demanded. “The others don’t have to.”
“They start tomorrow. As for you, why now?” His eyes held hers; she tried to look away, and couldn’t. “Things happen when you get angry, Tris. First hail, now lightning—if you don’t learn to control yourself, you will kill someone.”
She felt like there wasn’t enough air to breathe. Was he saying she was possessed by a spirit, or not entirely human, as they’d thought back in Capchen? There were people who attracted spirits they couldn’t control—every child knew those stories. She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life in a cage. “How do you know?”
“Do you know we mages choose the name we bear, once we are trained?”
She shook her head.
“We do. My last name is ‘Goldeye.’ It means that I see things that are hidden to most people. That’s how I know. And I tell you this. If you learn to meditate—if you learn to control your mind—you will be able to keep things from happening when you are upset.”
She tore her glance away from his and clenched her hands. A chance to stop people blaming her for what she couldn’t help? “What do I do?” she croaked.
“Can you breathe with the sound of the waves? Breathe in as they arrive, hold the breath as they strike, breathe out as they go?”
She listened to the sea boom as it struck the rocks below. She drew a long breath; hearing the ocean always had a relaxing effect on her. When the next wave hit, she let her breath run out, following the water as it fell back. Her wind caught in her chest. She cleared her throat.
“Relax,” Niko whispered, his voice part of the next wave. It caught her up, lifting her as it struck the shore, then ran out as the sea retreated. Her mind slipped easily under a new swell of water. When it came in, she came with it, breathing in slowly, filling every nook and cranny of her lungs with new air.
“Waves are the voice of tides. Tides are life,” murmured Niko. “They bring new food for shore creatures, and take ships out to sea. They are the ocean’s pulse, and our own heartbeat.”
Tris’s eyelids fluttered; her mind rode with the new wave. It struck the rocks with a crash, covering barnacles and mussels. She held her breath for the impact, then let it sigh out with the sea as the water fell away.
“They carry the winds,” whispered Niko.
She rose to the back of a new wave as the breeze combed her hair and filled her nose with the sea’s tangy odor. When the wave shattered against the rocks, she raced on with the air, rolling up the cliff-side to flow over the top of the bluff and the road. Plowing head on into the wall at Winding Circle, she ran up that.
“Breathe out,” Niko told her.
Tris was locked on the wind’s rush that was so vivid in her mind. Her body heard Niko and released the air that it clung to. Her lungs filled again, as the wind/Tris leaped into the sky over the temple city. Here she was buffeted by new kinds of air. It rose from the gardens, rippled over forges and ovens, puffed in the beat of looms, stuttered over the surface of wet clay.
“Feel how you are right now? Like a wind yourself, your wings passing over the circle of the walls?” Niko’s voice filtered through her thoughts. “Pull your wings in on yourself. Instead of being a wave of air, draw yourself in until you’re a rope of it. Breathe in, and pull in.”