The Will of the Empress

Whenever she makes me truly cross, I have to remember she says things like this, thought Sandry as she acknowledged Maghen’s curtsy. I still wish she hadn’t closed herself off from me, but I’m so glad she came!

10

The village Speaker soon arrived, trailing a few bewildered goats. Tris stepped back, out of the way of the dance of manners required when Namornese commoners met the noble whose lands they worked. Once the greetings were done, Sandry asked to see the homes and wells damaged by floods in earlier years. Tris watched it all with Chime on her shoulder, her book safely tucked in a saddlebag. Since the dragon was clear unless she’d fed recently, most of the villagers couldn’t see her until they were close to Tris. One bold girl reached out to touch the small creature, and only looked around when Chime began to purr. When her eyes met Tris’s, the girl jerked her hand away with a gasp of alarm.

Tris made herself smile in what she hoped was a friendly way. Looking at the trembling smile on the girl’s lips, she told herself, I think it worked.

After that first experiment with the village girl, she got to keep on performing her social smile. The children—those who didn’t have to return immediately to work at the tasks of daily living—came to meet Chime. While she held the dragon so her new admirers could touch her more easily, Tris shifted until her nose was pointed into the rainy day breeze.

Someone upwind is making soap, she thought as she sorted through scents. And that’s butter in the churn. Oh! Household privies and animal manure, she thought grimly. Really, these people should learn to clean up more if they don’t want their water going bad. I’d better let Sandry know they need to collect their manure, before it starts leaking into their well water.

She smiled happily. There’s wet spring earth. I love the smell of wet dirt. And here’s the river under all of it.

She frowned. The river was young and ferocious, clawing at the banks. Tris didn’t know a great deal about bridges, but she did understand rivers. Left to its own devices, this one was probably digging the banks away from the piers that supported the bridge.

Handing Chime over to the girl who’d touched her first, Tris left their tour and ambled over to the steep banks near the bridge. Closing her eyes, she let her power spill down the earthen sides. They were awkwardly held in place with a patchwork of boulders, bricks, smaller stones, and even planks of wood. She felt the swirling and thrusting river as it tugged the man-made walls, trying to pry them apart. They needed to be strengthened without disturbing the bridge, or they would collapse into the river, clogging it.

Tris took a breath and sent threads of magic down into the ground as Sandry might set the warp threads on a loom, reaching deep into the clay soil. Stones of every size peppered the ground underneath her and under the far riverbank, more than enough to shape solid rock walls. The problem, of course, was that they were scattered throughout the ground, separated by the dense earth.

Tris grinned, her pale eyes sparkling. This is a wonderfully knotty problem, she thought. The trick is to warm the ground just enough to make it easy to mold, then to start shaking it just enough to move the stones as I want them—and just enough that the villagers don’t panic and run from the earthquake. Her fingers danced through her layers of braids, seeking out the ones she had used to trap earth tremors and those in which she had braided the heat of molten lava. They were heavy braids bound with black silk thread in special knots to contain the forces in them.

She sat down on the muddy earth with a plop, settling into the most comfortable cross-legged seat she knew. Carefully she began to undo the knots on her braids, sorting through the spells that would release their power for her guidance. Control is the thing, and patience, she told herself over and over, concentrating. They won’t know I did a thing.

“Oh, good, it’s one of her rainy-day gowns. Tris! Tris!” Someone—Sandry—shook Tris by the shoulder. Tris stirred. “Tris, you’ve been here for half the day. You’re scaring the nice people! You’ve scared me, and Chime, and Ambros doesn’t look that well, either!”

Tris blinked. Getting the earth to calm down once she was finished had been the hardest part of the whole thing. She had forgotten how tiring it was to force what was left of the power of the tremors and the volcanoes back into their proper braids. Weakly she fumbled to tie them up.

“What?” she demanded irritably, squinting up at her sister. “I wasn’t bothering anybody. I was just sitting here.” The rain had finally stopped.

“She made the ground ripple,” said someone very young. “It all shivered and rumbled and twitched, and nobody dared go on the bridge.”

Tris turned her head on her very stiff neck. The speaker was the girl child Maghen. Of all the people who stood and stared at her, Ambros and their guards included, only Sandry and Maghen had dared to come within reaching distance of Tris.

“I was repairing the walls on the banks,” she explained to the child. “Otherwise they were about to drop into the river.” She looked up at Sandry, her gray eyes glinting. “Or would you rather I’d have let them alone until they collapsed and you had no river?”

Sandry smiled at her. “You’ll feel better once you’ve eaten something,” she said practically. “And I didn’t make your boots. They’ll be scraping mud off them for a week.” She offered Tris her hand.

Tris took it, and fought her body—it had been in one position for much too long—to get to her feet. The mud seemed far deeper than it had been when she sat down. As she struggled and lurched, worried that she would pull Sandry into the clayey soup, she looked at herself. From her waist down she was coated in mud.