It was like gathering the sides of her cape when they were flung out and wrapping them in around her. When she breathed out, she gathered more folds of herself under the outstretched fingers of her mind and pulled them in. She shrank into a rope, feeling pressures from the temple’s warm spots under her narrow length.
Opening her real eyes, Tris yelped: Niko shone with a blinding white radiance that left dark spots on her vision, as if she’d stared at the sun. Her cry pulled in too much air, and her lungs protested. For a brief moment she felt her mind fling itself out wide again. Then her sense of being anything but Tris was gone.
Niko patted her on the back while she coughed long and hard. As she got herself under control, he offered her a drink from the canteen that swung at his waist. “There, now, wasn’t that fun?” he asked. “We’ll keep practicing that, until you limit the area that your mind covers without having to think about it.”
He has a strange idea of fun, Tris thought, and drank greedily.
When Lark asked him if he would mind taking a note to Dedicate Gorse at the kitchens of the Hub, Briar was happy to oblige her. It gave him the chance to cross the gardens that lay between most buildings on his way, to look at what grew there and breathe in scents. It was also a chance to visit the kitchens and a dedicate famous for giving treats to visitors.
The way led down a gentle slope. At the center of the shallow bowl that held Winding Circle, the tower of the Hub rose like the stem of a top. Briar stopped to inspect it, as he’d done on his arrival some days ago, wondering if it would be worth the trouble to burgle it. As always, he decided not to. What he told himself was that too many people worked in the Hub day and night. It was true, and helped him to keep denying that he was done with the nicking life.
It was true that someone was always in the tower. Below the giant clock at its crown were rooms where magic was worked, or so Niko had said. He took that as he did all of Niko’s mentions of magic, with a shrug. For Briar, the real magic of the Hub was in the bottom two floors, where enchanting smells flowed through open kitchen windows.
Reaching the tower, Briar inhaled the mingled odors of stew, bread, spices, and charcoal. Then, mouth watering, he carried Lark’s note inside.
When he left, two pastries stuffed with honey and nuts rested in his belly, and he carried a string bag with another twelve pastries for Discipline. Now, for a little while, his time was his own.
“Where is the greenhouse?” he asked a novice who labored in a small rose garden. The girl pointed to the path that ran arrow-straight from the Hub to the east gate. Whistling, Briar took it and walked right into a shaft of light that nearly blinded him. Blinking, he shielded his eyes to find its source. It was a clear building over a story in height.
Pulse hammering, he trotted up to it. As Rosethorn had said, it was real glass, held up by wooden beams. Inside, the air steamed; water condensed on the inner walls and ran in drops like rain, blurring the images of the plants, bushes, and trees that grew there.
How did it work? Where did the water come from? Could this Crane fellow really grow fruit and vegetables out of season in there? Awed, he walked down one side of the building, staring through the wall. Dedicates in yellow habits tended the plants, so fixed on their work they did not see the boy staring in at them. Briar wished, more than anything, he could enter. He could pretend to be lost….
As he rounded the corner, stepping into the gap between the greenhouse and a stable that stood against the east wall, something pulled at his heart. He moistened his lips. Suddenly they were dry to the point of cracking. He felt brittle and squeezed.
Frowning, he placed a hand flat on the glass. There, to the right—the sadness came from that direction. Carefully he walked along, keeping his fingers on the glass. When his palm itched, he stopped. On the other side of the glass stood a tree little more than a foot high. But for its size, it looked like one of the low, spread-branched pines that grew on cliffs along the coast. He squinted, trying to get a better look through misted glass. Some of its twigs were brown.
“Here—what are you doing?” The speaker was a tall, lean man with lank, black hair and a thin, suspicious face. He wore the yellow habit of the Air temple with a black stripe on the hem, the same garment worn by the woman who’d wrapped Briar up in his old dormitory. His companions, a man and a woman, wore plain yellow, without the stripe. “Boys aren’t permitted back here.” He sounded bored, but his brown eyes were alert.
Briar glanced at the stable. “But horses are?”
The woman growled, “Mind your tongue, boy! This is Dedicate Crane, first dedicate of the Air temple, that you’re speaking to!”
Crane raised a hand to silence her. “Where are you housed?” he asked, looking down a very long nose at Briar. “Have you permission to creep around?”
The boy offered the iron token that Lark had given him, to show that he was allowed to wander. Crane shoved it under the woman’s nose. “Look—it’s from Discipline. Rosethorn!” He no longer seemed bored. “Are you her spy, boy? Out to steal cuttings for that patch of scrub she calls a garden? And where did you get those pastries?”
Briar could see that Dedicate Crane was determined to think the worst. Snatching the token from the man’s fingers, he ran, leaving the greenhouse, and the sad tree, behind.
Soon after Lark had gone on an errand to the loomhouses, Sandry gave in to temptation and went into the dedicate’s workroom. Poking around, she found baskets of fleece that had yet to be combed and prepared for spinning. Sandry knelt beside them and lifted out a hank of wool. When she touched it, strands rose on end. Wool fiber and thread always moved when she was near; she had no idea why. It certainly didn’t follow anyone else that she saw handling it.