Tris sighed. “Mine can, but I don’t know anything about iron.”
“I need to reach far, too,” Briar said. “I’m just missing the plants’ roots.” In spite of himself, his voice quivered. He was getting scared. “I wish there was a way we could combine this fancy magic stuff.”
Sandry had listened, shame and terror filling her mind. She was letting her friends down, sitting by useless when they were in danger. It had been the same when Pirisi was killed. Would she let that happen again? Couldn’t she help?
Daja and Briar both needed Tris, and Tris needed strength. What a tangle of knots! she thought.
She gasped. “Waitwaitwait! I think—I think—” She grubbed in her workbag, digging past rolags, scissors, skeins of finished yarn—
A packet met her fingers. She pulled the contents out: her first spun thread. She hooked a finger around the shaft of her spindle and dragged it out as well.
“Are you still thinking?” Daja inquired.
“We need to help each other, right?” She put the spindle down and gripped the thread. “I have a way to make us stronger. Daja, I’m passing you a string with four lumps in it. Take the first lump, hold it, and put some of you in it—your magic, your memories, I don’t care what as long as it’s yours, understand?”
“I think so,” Daja said. A hand gripped her arm, and a coil of thread was pressed into her fingers. She found a lump close to the end and hung onto it.
“Give the long end to Tris, who does the same thing with the second lump. Keep it in your hand! Briar gets the third lump; I’ll get the last. When part of you is in it, ask the gods’ blessing, and give it back to me. Quick, now!”
Daja gave her lump the memory of red-hot iron lying in her unprotected hands. The excitement of walking in a storm as winds and rain lashed her went into Tris’s knot. Briar gave it the feeling of green things twining around his arms and legs. The four of them on the roof, talking as clouds bloomed overhead, was Sandry’s contribution. Four pairs of lips murmured a prayer to a favorite god.
Briar eased Little Bear onto his lap, where the pup curled up obediently. “Don’t you make water on me,” the boy ordered. Little Bear sneezed and thumped Briar’s ankle with a wagging tail.
Quickly Sandry took the thread and fixed it to her spindle as her leader, just as she had been taught. She had no rolags to prepare, not for the kind of spinning she had in mind. “Join hands,” she told the others. “Actually, Briar and Daja, grab my knees. I need both hands if I’m to spin our magic.”
“Work fast,” Tris warned. “Can’t you hear the stones?” She could hear them, shrieking with the first touch of the trouble that thundered down on them from miles away. The noise made her teeth ache and her nose and eyes run.
“Everybody, breathe,” Daja ordered. She closed her eyes and inhaled, holding Tris’s left hand in her right and resting her left hand on Sandry’s knee. Tris gripped Daja’s hand and Briar’s, while the boy rested his right hand on Sandry’s left knee.
Without knowing it, Sandry spoke magically, not aloud. I’m going to spin, she explained. She placed her drop spindle in the tiny clear space at the middle of their hollow. Fibers by themselves are weak—so are we. Spin them together, and they become strong. I think the spindle will bring our powers together and strengthen us.
Do it, thought Tris urgently. Now the others could sense a distant wave in the earth, rushing to swamp them. Sandry gripped the spindle-shaft. With a snap of the fingers, she twirled it to the right.
Now that her magic was focused, the spindle was as visible to Sandry as if she worked on the spiral road at noon; so were the bits of her friends that they had put into her lumpy thread. Gently she touched Briar with a magical hand and drew out a slim green fiber. From Tris she drew a blue one, the color of deep, fresh water. Daja’s was the reddish orange of a hot coal fire. Her own was the honey color of undyed silk and flax. Feeding them all between her thumb and index finger of her hand, she connected them to her leader.
There was no time to stand and work or to halt and wind new thread around the shaft of the spindle. She wrapped the magic around the long shaft as it whirled, with a silent apology to Lark for not doing this correctly. As Tris had reminded her, time was running out. She gave the spindle another twirl and focused on her work.
As the spindle turned, Daja reached again for the iron ore. She felt it in her magic’s grip instantly, as Tris connected her to a molten river far, far below. Carefully, making sure that she used only as much iron and heat as she could control, Daja brought them together. The ore shimmered and began to melt.
Briar, his range much broader now, reached to the earth’s surface. There a beacon of green fire called to him, giving his power the strength to leap across a band of open air and through dead wood and glazed clay. He tangled himself in the roots of his shakkan.
The miniature tree was rich with magic—each wrinkle, twig, and leaf soaked in it—as well as the strength of each person who cared for it, whether that person had been a mage or not. Storing that power over its long life, pressing it into its small form, the shakkan had made it grow. Now it offered its magic to Briar.
With that power in his voice, he called to the roots of every living plant he could sense, trees and grass, bushes, weeds, flowers, herbs. The roots came to his call, stretching through the special soils and drainage layers that lay under Winding Circle, finding gaps in the interwoven pipes and magics that protected the temple, until they found the hollow where their friend Briar sat.