Magic Steps

When they came back from midday, the boy Wamuko gave Sandry a note. It was from Captain Behazin: he and Ulrina had distilled and bottled all the nothingness they could find. Two hours later a courier from Winding Circle arrived with a package for Sandry. Wrapped in canvas, it had spells of protection, and cleanliness laid so thickly on it that looking at it too often left spots on Sandry’s vision. She sighed. Of course they would spell everything for this working with all the strength of the Winding Circle mages;—she just hadn’t realized what that would do to her poor eyes. She cleared her mind, then drew a kind of veil over her sight, one that would shade her eyes from, the brightest magical fires.

When, she opened them, the blaze on the package was dimmed to a pearly shimmer.

Opening the canvas wrap Sandry found a note: The tent is being raised on the spot we discussed on Weben Ridge. Unless I bear from you otherwise, I will meet you there at eleven of the clock tonight with your remaining supplies.

Gods bless—Lark

“What is it?” Pasco reached for the sturdy, pointed, two-foot-long dowel rod that was part of the package’s contents.

“Don’t touch that!” She smacked his hand gently. Pasco jerked it away and stuck his ringers in his mouth. “Oh, stop it,” Sandry told him, exasperated. “You aren’t hurt.”

He took his fingers from his mouth and asked, “So what’s all this for?”

“The rod’s the stern for a drop spindle. It fits through here—” She picked up the second piece of wood in the canvas, a flat round piece six inches in diameter with a hole in the center. She inserted the pointed end of the rod through the hole. Three inches down the rods length, the round stuck. Assembled, the spindle looked Ike a very large top with an extra-long stem.

“My aunts and cousins and the maids use those, but theirs are smaller,” Pasco remarked.

“Mine’s bigger because I’m doing cord, not thread.” Sandry ran the oversized spindle through her fingers. And I’m in a hurry.”

Winding Circle’s carpenters had done a beautiful job.

First they had carved strips of ebony, elder, and willow, all magically protective woods, to fit together into a rod and a disk without using glue. They had done so precise a job that Sandry couldn’t take the pieces apart The rod and disk might as well have been made of solid wood. Moreover, the carpenters had laid more signs of protection, strength, and cleanliness on their work. When Sandry spun the unmagic, all of it would go into her cord and only her cord.

“Its beautiful,” commented Yazmín, leaning over Pasco’s shoulder to look at it.

“They do nice work at the temple.” Her brown eyes met Sandry’s. “This is it, right? You have to start.”

Sandry nodded. She wrapped her spindle in canvas and tied the package up again.

“I should be ready for Pasco tomorrow.” If nothing goes wrong, she thought nervously. If I don’t mess things up.

“Well, then, Pasco, come on—enough loafing.” Yazmín rapped the boy’s head with her knuckles and moved out to the corner of the ribbon net. “I want to see that jump again, and you’d better hit the mark clean this time.”

“You turned me over to a monster,” Pasco grumbled to Sandry as he got up.

Sandry patted his bare feet. “But she’s doing you so much good,” she told her student in her cheeriest warm-and-supportive voice.

By now Pasco knew her well enough to know she was teasing. He sneered at her and walked up to the ribbon set. Sandry got to her own feet again, and left them to their practice.

The duke rode with her to the ridge that night. She had argued fiercely against it—rain had already begun to fall, drumming on roof tiles, cobbles and on the canvas hood of the cart that held the bottles of unmagic—but in the end she had to admit defeat. Duke Vedris had decided to keep watch with Lark as Sandry did her danger ous work, and there was nothing Sandry could say that would make him remain at home.

They rode in silence beside the cart, which was driven by Kwaben. Oama sat beside him. When Sandry saw them on the driver’s bench, cloaked and hatted against the rain, she tried to protest that as well. The look they gave her, as if they dared her to comment on two of the most elite unit of the Duke’s Guard serving as common wagoners, convinced her that she would be as successful at talking them out of it as she had been with her great-uncle.

If the truth were to be told, she took a great deal of comfort from their presence and the duke’s during the long, wet ride through Summersea and the Mire. The squad of the Duke’s Guard behind and on either side of them was also welcome. It’s not as If I’ve never been terrified out of my wits before, she thought as they began to climb up the road between Summersea and Winding Circle.

Even before the year of disasters—earthquake, pirate attack, forest fires, and plague—that cemented her bond with her three friends, she had known trouble. Her parents had died In another plague almost exactly five years ago. As travelers her family had survived gales at sea, ice storms, pirates, and robbers. Sandry knew fear and disaster well.

But this is the first time I’ve ever grabbed danger with both hands and hugged it close, she thought, craning to see through the veils of rain ahead. “There.”’

she said, pointing at a line of lamps, off the road to their left.

“I see them,” Kwaben replied evenly. His big hands were steady on the reins.

“It isn’t raining that hard, my dear,”’ added the duke.