Nia's eyes filled with tears. "I'm sorry I'm a coward," she said, and sniffed.

  Daja sighed. "You're not a coward," she told her second student gently. "You just don't know what you're brave at."

  "I'm a coward," Nia insisted, tears running down her cheeks. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve. "Jory says I'm always squeaking and jumping, I always hide, I don't argue… "

  It bothered Daja to talk so long to a kneeling girl. She knelt and helped to gather buttons. "The bravest person I know is afraid of the dark. She sleeps with a night lamp always, but if her friends are threatened? She suddenly thinks she's a bear twelve feet tall and attacks whoever scared her friends. There are all kinds of courage. You'll find yours." She felt a sigh rise in her chest and swallowed it. Nia felt bad enough: Daja would not let the girl think that she was unhappy to teach her. "Though looking for courage when Jory gets worked up doesn't seem useful. We'll go back to the meditation we tried first."

  Nia stopped gathering buttons and frowned. "But Jory. She wiggles until I just want to scream."

  "I'll use this hour of the day for Jory's meditation," Daja said, offering Nia a handful of buttons. "You and I will meditate the hour before supper."

  "And I can breathe, and count, and sit, and not get hit with things?" Nia asked, suspicious. "We'll be quiet?"

  "Quiet as mice," Daja said. Remembering her first nights sleeping aboard her family's ship, she corrected herself. "Quieter, actually."

  With Nia reassured, Daja left to rejoin Jory. She glanced into the kitchen on her way to the back stair. The main hearth fire roared, sending heat throughout the house. Anyussa was rolling out dough for the dumplings called pirozhi as Frostpine stirred a pot of buckwheat kasha cooked with milk and spices. Anyussa laughed at something he said and looked at him in a decidedly flirtatious manner.

  Daja smiled and walked on. She liked the brisk, irritable cook much better, knowing that Anyussa had it in her to like Frostpine.

  "Well?" Jory demanded when Daja reached the schoolroom. "You couldn't find her, could you? I didn't think you would." Her hair was popping out of its braid; her cheeks were red, testimony that she had been exercising.

  "Nia and I made other arrangements," said Daja as she picked up her own broom-handle staff. "We'll meditate in the afternoons. You and I will go on meeting here at this hour."

  "How does learning to fight with a staff help me get my magic under control?" asked Jory nervously as Daja spun her light staff hand over hand, moving out into the center of the room.

  "We've got all winter to thrash it out," Daja told her. "See, the idea is, you get so used to those three blocks and those three strikes that your body will move, but your mind will be free. Then it doesn't matter if someone tries to hit you. You'll be at your center, within your spirit and your magic. That's when you start to learn control, where you pull your magic in or let it out as you need. But for now – " She struck high at Jory, who blocked just in time. Daja went immediately to the middle strike, then the low strike, slowly enough that the girl saw the blows coming and blocked them. They continued to trade blocks and strikes, so preoccupied that when the clock chimed the first hour of the day, both jumped.

  "Right here, tomorrow," Daja said. Jory nodded and ran to dress for the outdoors. She was due to leave for Blackfly Bog in half an hour.

  Daja leaned on her broom-handle staff, barely winded. It would take longer to teach Jory to grip her magic this way, but she knew they now steered the right course. She also knew she was right to give the twins separate lessons, though she was less happy about that. Still, they were both good girls and they did want to learn. Daja could appreciate that. And she had liked trading blows with Jory. She missed her practices at the temple, and Jory had a natural talent for it. Maybe once the younger girl learned to control her power, she might also like to study more combat techniques. That was something Daja could look forward to.

  After breakfast she spent the morning in her room, working on her fireproof gloves. First she molded living metal as southern bakers shaped flatbread, tossing rounds from hand to hand until they reached the proper thickness. As she worked the stuff, she sent her magic through it, calling on the power of its birth. Then she had dragged a forest fire through her flesh, which had included a hand covered by the molten brass cap of her staff. This metal would be able to endure fires that intense. She also imagined how Ben would use the living metal gloves – to knock burning debris aside as he had at the fire when they'd met, to lift flaming beams out of his way, to grasp hot metal to shift it. She filled the living metal with her idea of Ben as she'd first seen him, laden with two boys he'd carried from an inferno just in time. When she finished, these gloves would happily do whatever Ben asked of them.

  Once she set a piece of living metal on a glove form, she carried the form to the window and stuck it outside. The wind blew hard off the Syth, trying to yank her creation from her grasp without success. With the living metal strip cold enough to hold to the iron form, not drip through the openings between the rods, Daja added the next strip, molding it in place and pressing its edges against the cold section until they blended seamlessly. Then she took the form back to the window.

  She finished one glove by the time the clock struck noon, and went down to take her meal with the kitchen staff. About to return upstairs, she realized she needed physical activity. Handling living metal was more an exercise of power than work for her body. She went into the slush room and looked outside. People had been moving snow all day after the two-foot-deep fall during the night, the Bancanor servants among them. Not only were the paths around the house clear, but the ice of the boat basin was too. Daja looked out under the street bridge, where the boat basin opened on the canal. Convict work gangs were hard at work, smoothing the broad strip of ice. Skaters used the ice they had cleared.

  If I want to skate the canal, I have to practice, Daja told herself. She went to the slush room and put on her outdoor clothes, then went to the boat basin to skate.

  When she returned to her room, she felt ten feet tall. She had learned how to turn while still in motion, and she had not fallen once. While she had been telling Jory that her body had to learn movements so well that she didn't have to think about them, Daja's own body had done a bit of learning of its own.

  She felt so good that work on the second glove went even more quickly than it had that morning. She finished just as the maids came upstairs to light the lamps. Nia would be home from Camoc's soon.

  With both forms covered, Daja tied heavy cords to their inner iron frames, opened one of her windows, and hung the forms outside. The night's cold would set the liquid metal. In the morning she'd remove the iron forms and complete the magic that would keep the gloves in that shape forever.

  Pleased with her day's work, Daja leaned out the open window. Snow lay thick on the rooftops, in heaps on either side of Blyth Street and Prospect Canal, but there was less than she'd seen that morning or even at midday. People who lived with heavy snows found plenty of ways to handle it, Daja had learned. Servants worked almost as long and as hard as convicts to clear courtyards and walks so that nothing kept their wealthy masters and mistresses from the day's business. Convicts labored on snow removal in huge crews, shivering in rags and shackles. Daja felt no pity for them. They were criminals and deserved their lot.

  She scooped up a handful of snow: it melted almost instantly. She had raised her personal heat the moment she'd opened the shutters. Daja let it drain back through her until her skin held only normal warmth. This time when she gathered snow, it didn't melt away before she could eat it. She loved the taste of clean, crisp snow.

  She was working on her jewelry when she heard the clatter of footsteps on the back stair. "Daja!" Nia cried. "I'm home!"

  Daja put her work aside, collected her Trader's staff, and joined her student. "How did it go today?" she asked as she and Nia climbed to the schoolroom.

  Nia held up a cloth bag. Wooden rods in three shades – pale oak, chestnut, and ebony – poked out of it. "More buttons," she said. "By the time I'm done, no one will have to make any more for decades. Maybe even a century."

  "That's how I felt about nails," Daja told her as she opened the schoolroom door. "It's amazing how many of such things people use though."

  Nia shed her bag and coat and sat on the floor. As Daja drew the circle around them with her staff, she realized she was glad to have this quiet girl to herself for a while. Smiling, she took her own place and enclosed them in a bubble of magic.

  In the morning, after a round of staff practice with Jory and a good breakfast, Daja returned to her room and brought her gloves in from outside. Carefully she slipped her fingers between the living metal and the iron forms, then worked the forms out of their gleaming yellow sheaths.

  At last she set the iron aside and put her creations on. The gloves were much too big, of course, since they were made to Ben's measure. The cold inside the metal made her flesh ache.

  She took the gloves off rather than call heat to warm her arms. She didn't want heat near the gloves yet. First she had to embed signs in metal around the cuffs, runes shaped from lead for stability and copper for flexibility. Then she would cover the gloves inside and out with a liquid spelled for more flexibility and stability, and for strength. Only when that was done could they be safely warmed.

  Dreaming of fire suits as she wondered how in the Trader's name she would create that much living metal, Daja set the gloves upright on their bases. They looked like golden hands grasping for the next rung of an invisible ladder. She went to her suraku and collected her materials. On her way back to her worktable she froze. The gloves were collapsing in on themselves, returning to their original, thick syrup consistency.

  "Pavao!" cried Daja. "Pavao, pavao, pavao!' With all her work and with the magic she had used in their shaping, they should have kept that form for a day at least! Their collapse, while still ice-cold, meant that gloves of living metal alone would never work. She had to put them on a hard metal frame. It meant hinges at every joint and complex hinges at the wrists to allow side-to-side motion as well as up and down. With a solid metal frame her finished creations would be far heavier than she had planned. If gloves couldn't exist on their own, a whole suit of living metal would be a nightmare. A heavy nightmare.

  She put down her metals and oils and kicked her chair in frustration. White-hot pain burst through her booted toes. She hopped on one foot, softly cursing in Tradertalk, Imperial, Hatarese, and Pajunna, until she realized she was being a fool. She slumped into her chair to nurse her wounded foot.

  It was her own fault. She had given in to pride. Because she was successful with this stuff, she had thought that she could just wave a hand and get what she wanted with little planning and effort. Had she ever made anything purely of liquid metal? She hadn't. All of her other pieces had included hard metal like iron, brass, and bronze. Her false hands, arms, and legs were liquid metal fixed to iron skeletons.

  "As well expect quicksilver to walk on its own," she muttered. Over and over people had warned Tris about pride, but Frostpine had never cautioned Daja against it. Why not?

  Instead of spending her day in glory, finishing off her achievement, she began the tedious labor of replacing each lump that represented a joint with tiny oiled hinges, using her power under tight control to remove the lump and to solder each hinge into place where the lump had been. Her only breaks had come at midday, for lunch and a swift skating practice, then meditation with Nia when the girl returned home. She'd pretended to be her normal, centered self at meditation: had Nia gotten so much as a whiff of Daja's self-disgust, she would have thought she caused it, not Daja's own folly. Daja briefly considered telling the younger girl her mistake, but decided against it. She was vain enough to feel that she didn't want one of her first students to think she was human enough to make a botch of something.

  She felt shriveled and grumpy at supper, poking Anyussa's good cooking with an indifferent fork. Nia, too, was silent, listening to her parents talk. Jory was still at Potcracker's. Frostpine joined them, though he added little to the conversation. He looked exhausted. Daja looked at him with a growing sense of betrayal.

  "Why didn't you warn me about overconfidence?" she finally demanded, silencing Kol's and Matazi's conversation about a change in gold prices. "You never lectured me about pride like Niko and Lark always lecture Tris." She realized she had forgotten her decision not to let Nia realize she was human, but resentment overpowered her. "Why not? You let me walk into a mess, you know. I wasted hard work and I feel like a grub, and it's your fault."

  "I'm not the only one who knows how to make a sentence last," Nia murmured.

  Daja gave her student an I'll-get-you-later glare and turned back to Frostpine. "Well?" she asked again.

  Frostpine leaned his head on his arm. "I thought you'd find out for yourself," he informed Daja. "Learning sticks when you get it the hard way." He yawned. "When I've finished my current task, you must tell me what happened. You've worked so smoothly I'd begun to think I'd have to mention pride to you after all. Just to be sure I'd taught you properly, you see."

  Matazi tapped Frostpine's plate with her fork, making the delicate porcelain ring. "You. Bed. Now," she ordered. "You're tired and addled."

  "Yes." Frostpine left, waving an idle goodbye over his shoulder. He did not go to the front stairs and the guest rooms, but back to the kitchen.

  "He's the most annoying man," Daja announced, still vexed. "Why does he get to be right?"

  "He's always been that way," Kol assured her.

  "When he told me I'd be happier with Kol than him, I tried to punch him in the nose," Matazi added, startling a gasp of surprise from Nia.

  "Worse, he was right." Kol smiled into his wife's eyes.

  Matazi blew him a kiss. "Much worse," she agreed.

  Nia rolled her eyes at Daja.

  "If he gets too smug, tell him a truly perfect person wouldn't get seasick," Kol said without looking away from his wife.

  "That's right, he does," admitted Daja, feeling better. "I forgot." Her appetite returned, and she began to eat.

  When Ben's father had been alive, the Ladradun family worshipped on the first Watersday of the moon at the temple of Vrohain the Judge, the god who had cut off his left hand so he could never dilute the justice he dispersed with his right. On the second Watersday they attended the temple of Qunoc, mother of the earth and its seed; on the third, they paid their respects to Baion, the cold, white god of killing ice. On the fourth moon they worshipped Eihg, goddess of spring and freedom. After his father's death, Ben and his family still worshipped all four gods each month. It was Morrachane who went less and less to the other temples. When Ben returned from Godsforge's school, he took his mother to worship Vrohain each Watersday, rather than fight with her. He also made frequent offerings at the temple of Sythuthan, the trickster who ruled the immense lake.

  The day after Daja's first attempt with the gloves failed, the Ladraduns attended Vrohain's worship. As they left Morrachane was elsewhere, her copy of The Book of Judgment clutched to her chest, her pale-green eyes fixed on some vision of justice and punishment. She looked exalted. The oddest thought wriggled through Ben's mind: did he look like her when he watched a fire?

  He snorted. He had nothing in common with her. She would be the first to say so; in fact, she'd been telling the world as much for years.

  He did not share her exaltation. Instead he reviewed his plans. Tonight's test of his firefighters had to go without a hitch. For that to happen, he needed to get rid of his mother and go to work.

  Just the thought of escaping her, even for a day, sent guilt to nip him. He and his brothers had promised their dying father that they would take care of Morrachane. Only Ben had kept his word, though it got harder and harder. Sometimes he thought the best way to do it would be to put her out of her misery. That was a monstrous thought – he knew it was monstrous. Yet he thought it all the same.

  Watching the crowd, he saw the white or silver-trimmed hats and long coats of the magistrate's lawkeepers. Of course they worshipped Vrohain, both here and at the shrines in the district stations. A glint of gold mixed with silver caught his eye: the mages who served the lawkeepers were here too. Many lawkeepers and mages nodded to him: Ben was well known to the magistrates' people. He'd trained most in Godsforge's methods of fighting fires and protecting the crowds who came to watch them.

  He had not told them that the boardinghouse fire was deliberately set. Just as Ben set fires to test his brigades, he thought of them also as a test of Kugisko's magistrates' mages. They had to be vigilant. They thought the penalty of burning alive was enough to stop anyone from committing arson; it made them lazy. Once people discovered fires were set without the mages' discovering it, their office would have to improve their methods of investigation.

  Sooner or later, he knew, someone would realize that his test fires had been set. Sythuthan played tricks on everyone; sooner or later blind accident would make the authorities suspicious. When that happened, Ben would move on, happily, to another city and another set of lessons.

  "Don't jam your hands into your pockets," snapped his mother, breaking into his thoughts. "You'll ruin the line of that coat. Do you want us to freeze to death? Let's go!"

  Ben fell in beside her, plans tumbling through his head as he rearranged and resorted them.

  At home they sat down to midday in the kitchen, where the heat from the stove warmed them. Ben laid the place settings and poured tea for his mother and himself. Morrachane served a four-cornered meat pie with braised cabbage and mushrooms. There were no servants in the house; Morrachane refused to pay the extra coin that any servant expected when asked to give up his Watersday. Instead she cooked like a common householder.

  They ate in silence. Ben knew better than to draw Morrachane's attention when her mind was fixed on Vrohain. Afterward, she retired to read her Book of Judgment and nap. He cleared and washed the dishes, then left the house. The business was closed. He would be able to finish his preparations uninterrupted.

 

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