“I never thought of it like that,” Tris admitted. She began to cough again. “It’s all this smoke, from those grassfires!” she gasped. “I hate it.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Rosethorn said. “Let me give you something for it.”
“I don’t want anything nasty,” Tris croaked, following Rosethorn into the room where she and Lark slept. “I’ll be all right.”
Lark got out her needlework, keeping an eye on Sandry. Briar decided that Little Bear needed to be combed and set about it, while Niko picked up a book. Daja went onto the balcony.
Frostpine sat on the stone railing, his back against a section of wall. He glanced at Daja, nodded, then returned to staring at the valley below. Tris’s starling, Shriek, was asleep on his shoulder, half tucked under some of the man’s hair.
Daja sat nearby and looked at the view. The bands of fire were just a few miles from the lower edge of the forest. Drifts of smoke blew into her face off and on. They didn’t affect her or Frostpine as they clearly did Tris and the others, perhaps because as smith-mages they were used to smoke.
She wasn’t sure what to say to him, so she said nothing. After a while she heard his quiet voice. “I was born in Mbau, southeast of the Pebbled Sea.”
Hot country—good ebony, mahogany, and brass-work, though, Daja thought automatically. She remained silent.
“My father was a shepherd in our village. He was poor once. My older brother and sister talked about eating bean stew for days because that was all they had. There was enough money after I was born, though. My mother and sisters had several dresses. My father could pay someone to watch the flocks while he sat in the shuq with the elders, and told stories, and judged quarrels.” There was a dreamy tone in Frostpine’s voice, as if he told a story about someone else.
“Our mchowni—shaman, you’d call him—was like an honorary uncle. He ate with us on feast days, and brought us children presents. He found husbands for my sisters and a place among the warriors for my brother. I didn’t like him. He was always watching me.”
A larger-than-usual cloud of smoke drifted over the balcony. Taking a deep breath, Frostpine blew at it as if he were a bellows, driving it away. On and on his breath went, until no smoke remained in the air around them.
“I was ‘the moody one.’ Most of my time I spent with the blacksmith, fetching and carrying. When I was older, he taught me. I loved it, but it frustrated me, too. Something was missing. It was like always reaching for a tool, only to find it gone when you try to grab it. Some days I went so crazy that the only thing for it was to run, and run, and run.”
He fell silent, his eyes closed. At last he continued, “When I was fifteen, the mchowni died. He died—and all of my magic, that he had taken and used since the day I was born, the magic he’d paid my parents for—it came back to me. I nearly died. It was like my veins were on fire.
“He didn’t even know what kind of magic it was. He just used it to get what he needed. And me, the first time I walked into the smithy after I was well again? I heard all the metal singing. My tools melted when I picked them up. The smith ordered me out. My whole life was in ruins. And my parents told me it was for my own good. A blind man could see it was for their good that they sold my power.”
“You never said,” Daja whispered, her eyes stinging. She wanted to cry for the boy he had been.
“I was angry for a long, long time. I wanted to hate everyone. It took hard work for me to live past that anger, to realize how senseless it was. If I dwell on it, I start to get angry again, so I try not to dwell on it.”
“What happened to you? What about your family?”
“I left. I had to—there was no one who could teach me, and I had to be taught. I still hear from my youngest sister. It took me a while to grow up enough to write to her.”
“No wonder you were upset.”
He sighed. “Lark is right—you four need this. The memories were just too much.”
“It’ll be over soon, I think,” Daja reassured him. “When I get my magic back, I promise, I’ll never give it up like that again.”
Frostpine came over and kissed her forehead. “That’s all I needed to hear,” he said.
8
As they rode to see the glacier the next morning, Tris kept her fingers crossed that the journey would take them out from under the smoke that draped Gold Ridge for as far as they could see. She got a little relief from the cough that had plagued her all night as the road they followed led up, past the tiny crocus valley. Who would have thought such runty-looking plants would be worth so much? she thought as Briar pointed out the terrace where he’d fried some.
Sandry her companion on the trail, was not her usual talkative self. The magical effort in her weaving had caught up with her as she slept, just as Lark had warned; she was pale and heavy-eyed, half-dozing in the saddle. Behind them came Niko, Yarrun, and Lark, talking idly. The Gold Ridge mage had offered to come along as far as the turnoff to the glacier valley: he wanted a look at the progress of the grassfires. At the rear of their column rode Briar, who had volunteered to keep an eye on the pack horse that carried their lunch.
Polyam, still decked out in bright yellow, and Daja led their company. Once Tris’s starling, Shriek, had stopped filling her ears with his normal babble to hunt breakfast, Tris nudged her pony forward so that she could talk to them.
“A shame about the saffron crop,” Polyam was telling Daja. “That’s usually what we buy here. Lady Inoulia needs a miracle to get this valley through to the next harvest. They need rain, and they need copper and saffron. They’re out of all three.”