Tris's Book

Daja nodded. "You made me guess what was under the cloths, and I knew what metals they were because of my magic."

The mage's hair bounced as he nodded. "Do the same thing now. Search under you for any trace of metal. Not raw metal, but metal that's been handled, and worked."

Sweat dripped on to the dirt from her face. "It's too hot."

"Too hot?" he cried, white teeth flashing in a broad grin. "Child, we are black! Black people are made for heat, to thrive in it - just as pallid boys like Kirel are made for snow and frost."

Kirel halted. He had been walking a hundred yards away, holding a long metal divining rod out in front of him. "I hate snow," he retorted calmly. "And if you weren't crazy, Frostpine, you'd hate this weather as much as I do." Reaching up, he tied back his hair with the braids that hung on either side of his face.

Daja covered her grin with her hand. She loved working with these two. They were as relaxed and cheerful as the men of her own family had been, joking about work as they got it done.

Frostpine shook his head. "Shurri and Hakoi," he muttered, calling on the goddess and god of fire, "defend me from people who don't know how to have fun. Let's give it a try, Daja."

With a nod, she put her hands palm-down on the raw earth. For some reason trying to smell metal helped her to find it, so she sniffed deeply. Was that a trace of...?

She inhaled again, and yelped as the scents of copper, iron, silver and gold flooded her nose. Eyes watering, she sneezed, and kept sneezing. A hand gently pushed her aside; a handkerchief was tucked into her fingers. Three more bursts pushed themselves out of her lungs, making her wonder if it was possible to suffocate while sneezing.

The earth quivered under her, then shifted. Her throat closed with terror: earthquake! Her sneezes halted abruptly as she thrust herself backwards. The last shake had been just ten days ago - were they about to get another?

Small dirt clods rolled downslope. Wiping her eyes, she saw Frostpine standing where she had knelt. His arms were stretched out, his hands parallel to the ground. He shook them, gently, as if he sifted ore through a screen. Below him, the patch of ground shook, gently, in the same motion.

Daja sighed with relief. It wasn't a fresh quake or tremor, but magic, pulling something out of the ground. The dirt began to take on a strange, mesh-like pattern. Kneeling, Frostpine dug his fingers into the earth.

"Will you get that corner?" he asked, pointing to the edge of the patterned dirt. "It's a wire net."

Going to the spot he'd indicated, she dug her fingers down about an inch, until they passed through a metal web. "Got it," she told him.

"When I count to three. One - two - three."

They dragged the net from the ground: a large piece three feet long and four feet wide. Daja blinked. The net was a shimmer of the metals she'd smelled, twined into fine wires and knotted like cord. At half of the spots where the wire-threads met, a tiny mirror was set. The whole piece fell over her fingers as if made of water.

"What on earth is it for?" she demanded.

Kirel walked over to them, holding three or four smaller pieces of net. "I've never seen anything like this."

"Has either of you wondered why, in the last four hundred years, no pirates have ever attacked Winding Circle?" asked Frostpine.

"I am - I was a Trader." Daja swallowed hard. She'd almost said, "I am a Trader," when she wasn't, not any more. "We didn't think about how kaqs could or couldn't defend themselves." Sandry would frown at her for using the word kaq. Like many words the Traders used to describe non-Traders, it was not flattering.

"I lived in north Lairan," added Kirel. "We didn't know anyone could fight in ships." He grinned and winked at Daja.

"Time was this net covered the entire bluff, from the harbour wall" - Frostpine pointed to their right, where the protective wall stretched from Bit to the cliff - "to where the Emel River empties into the sea. There's more in the earth in front of the walls, too, a mile-wide belt that wraps around all of Winding Circle. Whenever the Dedicate Council thought there might be pirates or land-raiders in the area, they woke the spell-net like this." The man hummed a weird tune.

Daja and Kirel gasped. The net that Daja and Frostpine held vanished. Only the open sea lay between them - or were they high in the air, over the sea? Daja still felt metal cutting into her fingers, but made no connection between that and the distant view of -

She could not be seeing Dupan Island. Nidra was eight days from here, off the coast of Hatar. Still, she ought to know it. She'd sailed from the island's harbour just five months ago.

It wasn't just the view. She could smell land, sea and normal ship-smells like tar and wet rope. The deck rocked under her feet, and one of her cousins was scrambling up the mast, whistling.

She blinked, and she held a metal net in her hands. Kirel lurched back dizzily. "I was climbing Blacktooth Mountain," he whispered.

Daja dropped the net and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. She'd been on Third Ship Kisubo, whose crew was also her family. They were gone, shipwrecked and drowned in a late-winter storm not long after leaving Nidra.

"I'm sorry," Frostpine said, putting a hand on her shoulder. "I can't control what people see or feel when the spell-net is woken. It's powerful, though, as you've seen. Pirates have spent days in the same place, until they were too weak to avoid capture when the spell was released. And this is the first time I've been on the wrong side of the net when the spell is worked."