“Ouch,” she grumbled, rubbing the ear he’d been yelling into.
“Stop ducking the lesson. Tris, there’s only so much that I, or anyone, can teach you. To control the power that makes your life so hard, you must be able to grasp it at any time, in any place. Let nothing stop you from bearing down, understand? Or do you want to kill someone, one day, and only find out afterward that you didn’t mean to?”
She stared up at him, terrified. Lit by flickers of lightning, his eyes pits of shadow in his craggy face, he looked eerie. It was as if he knew all the dark places in her heart.
Lightning blazed. A single broad strip lanced into a tree on the peak of the rock that was Bit Island, and a hundred burning fragments flew through the air. Tris’s gleeful shout was drowned in a thunder-crash that shivered her bones.
“A good thing it only struck a tree, and that tree alone on a rocky peak,” Niko said when they could hear again. “Lightning creates hundreds of wildfires every year, burning acres of forest and croplands. It kills people and animals, too. It’s a dangerous toy—keep that in mind.”
“If it’s so dangerous, why not push the storms out to sea—or better yet, stop them cold? I mean, I’d miss them, but wouldn’t that be easier for most people?”
“Oh, no!” he said instantly. “Easy perhaps for the people, but it would mean death or madness for a mage.” He waited for a growl of thunder to end before he went on. “Nature has her own power. Tempting as it is, mages should never tinker with Nature, not in a storm, or in an earthquake, or with the tides. She may allow it for a time, but eventually she always loses her temper. The results can be—devastating. Trust me.” He sighed. “Even the greatest mages have their limit—and Nature is it.”
“But—aboard ship—those knots. The captain said mimanders tie the wind in those knots. Isn’t that meddling with Nature?”
Niko smiled thinly. “Mimanders who specialize in winds spend their lives learning nothing else—those who survive apprenticeship, anyway. Just one in ten lives to be a journeyman, you know. As masters they coax the winds into thinking that the curves of the knot are the open lanes of air where they usually travel. Are you prepared to spend ten years or more learning to be a simple puff of air? Learning only that, and nothing else, and that only if you live?”
Tris stared out at the white-capped waves. The storm was moving on, the roll of thunder growing more distant. There has to be a quicker way, Tris thought. If I was a mage, I’d get Nature to do my bidding. They’d call me “Storm-Killer,” and I would be famous all over the world.
Niko tugged her ear gently. “Let’s try the exercise again. Breathe in….”
When Daja entered Frostpine’s forge, the fire was banked. Only Kirel was there, up to his elbows in clay as he shaped molds.
She hesitated. “I—was looking for Dedicate Frostpine?”
“Just walk around to the other side of this building. He’s a goldsmith today.”
Curious, Daja asked, “Shouldn’t you be with him?”
Kirel grinned. “I’m only his apprentice for iron—he doesn’t have an apprentice for his work in gold. Though he did mention he thought someone might come by to help him.”
Daja thanked him and circled the building. Looking through the door on the opposite side, she saw Frostpine. He stood at a counter with his back to her, in front of one of three upright metal rectangles. A series of holes were punched through each, in sizes that ranged from nearly a third of an inch across in the left-most plate, to a pinpoint in the right-most.
Using flat-ended tongs, he gripped a tongue of metal that protruded through the hole in the middle of the central plate. Lifting a foot to brace himself against the counter, he began to pull. Slowly, fraction by fraction, he drew gold wire from the hole.
“Daja—will you do me a favor?” he asked, voice strained.
She started. How did he know she was there again? “Um—what do you need?” She propped the staff beside the door and went to him.
“On the other side of this plate, there’s a coil of wire. Straighten it as I pull?”
She found the coil and picked it up: it was barely warm gold, and coarse to her touch. Obediently, she opened a loop of it until a straight length fed into the metal plate. “What is all this?” she asked.
“I’m drawing gold wire.” Lowering his foot, Frostpine continued to back up, without faltering. “Precious metals—they’re soft, compared to iron. By greasing the wire with beeswax—dragging it through smaller and smaller holes—it gets thinner, and longer.”
“It looks hard,” she said, as the last of the gold fed through the plate. Frostpine turned his face away as the wire popped free. To Daja’s horror, it snapped like a whip—if the man hadn’t turned away, the flying end might have lashed his face.
Frostpine gathered the new wire and took it to the counter. First he rubbed cold beeswax over its length, then wound it into a coil. Choosing a smaller hole in the plate, he thrust the wire’s pointed end into it. “It looks hard because I’m not putting my whole self into it. If I did—”
He closed his eyes and took a long breath. Briefly he held it, then let it go, slowly. Daja’s skin prickled. Something even warmer than the summer air gathered in the room, to wind itself around the smith. Each piece of metal in the shop seemed to burn with inner fire. Something in her answered, timidly.