Pierce, Tamora - Circle of Magic 03 - Daja's Book

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Sunset blazed above Gold Ridge valley in north Emelan, throwing shadows over a
company of mounted riders. At the head of their train a bannerman carried the
personal flag of Duke Vedris IV, ruler of Emelan. The Duke himself rode behind the
flag, surrounded and followed by his staff, guards and friends.
Smoke drifted through the air in veils, stinging everyone’s eyes. They had been riding
through it for two days, watching it stretch over pastures and fields. Now at last, as
the company entered the deep forests that filled the northern half of the valley, they
began to rise above the thick air.
At the very rear of their column rode three girls and a boy, mounted on sturdy ponies.
When one of the adults, a woman in a dark-green habit, stopped and dismounted from
her horse, they also drew their ponies to a halt and watched her. She climbed out of
the sunken road and walked several yards under the ancient trees. A tall young dog
with curly white fur, who trotted beside the four, detached himself from their group
and followed.
“Little Bear!” called Daja Kisubo, a tall, broad-shouldered black girl. “Leave
Rosethorn alone. Come back here.”
The dog obeyed. When he reached the closest rider, Daja’s plump, redheaded friend
Tris, he sat, stirring the road’s dust with his plumed tail.
“Rosethorn?” asked Briar, the boy. “Is everything all right?”
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“Just stay put,” ordered Rosethorn. She picked up a sturdy branch, and began to dig in
the heavy litter of tree-leaves and decaying wood underfoot. “I’ll be there in a
moment.”
“That’s not what I asked,” he muttered to the girls out of the corner of his mouth. “I
asked if everything was all right.”
Daja turned her mount. From this small rise she could look through a gap in the trees.
“Daja? Are you all right?” The voice belonged to the third girl in their party, Sandry.
Everything about her, from her pony to her clothes, spoke of wealth that the other
three did not have. When she turned her mount to see what had caught Daja’s eye,
Briar and Tris did the same.
In the distance, where ridges of open pasture faded into the base of the southern and
western mountains, long bands of sullen orange fire shone.
Daja shook her head, making her eleven short braids flap. “It’s like something from a
nightmare,” she replied. “It looks like what the Traders call pijule fako!.”
Sandry shivered and drew the gods-circle on her chest for protection. She knew
Trader beliefs. “The afterlife for those who don’t pay their debts,” she muttered.
Little Bear rose to his hind legs, planting his forepaws against Tris’s saddle. She
leaned over to scratch his ears, her brass-rimmed spectacles glinting in the late
afternoon sun. “That’s the nice thing about believing in the Living Circle,” she
remarked. “No bad afterlives. We just get reborn.”
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Briar squinted, his grey-green eyes wary. “Those fires reach for miles. And there’s
nothing to stop them from burning. This whole country’s dry as tinder.”
Rosethorn thrust a clump of tree-litter into a pocket, then returned to her mount. Once
she was in the saddle, she beckoned to a local man who rode with the Duke’s party.
“How long has it been since you people last had a forest fire?”
The man chuckled. “Bless you, Dedicate Rosethorn, there’s not been what I’d call a
real forest fire in this valley since - oh, since my dad was a pup. Our mage, him they
call Firetamer, he sees to that.”
“I was afraid you’d say that,” murmured Rosethorn, an Earth dedicate of the Living
Circle temples. “Come on, you four - we’re being left behind.”
Sandry urged her pony forward. Tris, Briar and Little Bear fell in beside her.
Daja stayed where she was for a moment, her troubled dark eyes still on the blazes.
How could anything as wonderful as fire look so menacing? she wondered. She
worked with it every day; it was her friend. What if one day it turned against her as it
had against Gold Ridge’s fields?
“Stay in pijule fakol, where you belong,” she muttered to the distant flames. Clucking
to her pony, she rode to catch up with her friends.
The next day Daja entered a small mountain smithy, loaded down with tools. She
dropped everything beside the rough anvil, then realized that the staff she always
carried had fallen to the ground as well. Swiftly she grabbed it from the pile, dusting
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its polished wood. She rested the staff against the wall near the hearth, stopping for a
moment to run her fingers over its mirror-bright, unmarked brass cap. That bit of
metalwork told those who knew how to read Trader staffs that she was trangshi, an
outcast, with the worst luck in the world.
She turned her back on it and surveyed the cramped and dirty smithy. I wish I were
home, she thought, eyeing the forge.
Home was the temple city of Winding Circle, where her master had a proper, clean,
well-lit forge. This dismal place was the twelfth smithy that she had worked in since
the Duke’s train began its journey. She was alone; the smith - , who was also the
village headman - was talking with the Duke about what was needed to help this tiny
valley survive the winter.
The smith’s absence, at least, was a good thing. Even his apprentice was gone,
visiting a sick mother. She hated working in front of strangers. She was also tired of
back-country craftsmen who told her and her teacher Frostpine that they had things
soft in Winding Circle. As if we did no real work of our own, she thought, inspecting
the stone forge. Here was a pleasant surprise: the smith’s apprentice must have
cleaned out the nest-shaped firepit, and laid kindling for a new fire. He’d left her that
much less work.
Looking at the kindling, she reached deep inside her to find her magic. Drawing out
just a touch, she blew it into the firepit. Flames sprang up instantly.
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Next she sent her power outside through the wall, to the other end of the tube through
which the outdoor bellows pumped air under the fire inside. Since that summer, when
Sandry had made the four friends’ magics into one, they had been able to talk in
thought-form and to enter each other’s minds if they needed to. The ability was quite
useful, particularly when one of them needed something from the others. Tri-is... Daja
mind-called,
/ know, I know. The magic under Trisana Chandler’s reply felt like cool winds and
heavy mist. / had to move the bellows out of the opening. You might want to stand
away from the fire.
Not too much at first, Daja told her, then backed up. The burning heap of kindling
fluttered, then blazed as air from the outside was thrust in under its flames. Daja
heaped more charcoal around the sides of the kindling. Once it had caught, she added
still more. Now give me some real air, she told her friend.
The answer came in the shape of a heavier stream of wind rushing through the
opening under the forge. More charcoal caught. Daja stacked fuel until she had the
right kind of fire to work her iron rods with.
Just keep it steady for now, she mind-called to her friend. / hope you brought
something to read.
She felt Tris settle on a bench near the opening in the wall. Using one hand the other
girl picked up a book. With the other she drew a skein of breeze from the sky into the
bellows-hole.
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It’s A History of Volcanoes, Hot Springs and Mud Pots in the Mountains of Emelan.
There’s a lot of information in it, Tris explained.
Sounds delightful, Daja commented. Letting the magical conversation go, she grabbed
a handful of long, thin iron rods, carried them over to the forge-fire, and put them in
to heat.
She felt bad for Tris, stuck behind the forge. Her redheaded friend would have liked
nothing better than to ride with the Duke and their teachers, exploring the valley.
Unfortunately, when Tris got cross, small winds turned to big ones. No one wanted
her anywhere near the grassfires they had gone to inspect today.
Unlike Tris, Daja had no interest in grassfires, and had said as much to her teacher,
Frostpine. She had wanted him to give her something new to work, like the ruddy
copper that was mined in these parts. Instead he’d assigned her the most humdrum
task an apprentice could get.
Nails, Daja thought tiredly. Barehanded, she drew a thin, cherry-red iron rod out of
the fire. I dream of forging swords and crowns and armour, but what does he give me?
Nails. She carried her rod over to the anvil, and examined its gloryless surface.
The light in the small building was poor, the outer air smoky. The forge-fire was
sinking now, to become a steady wash of heat over red coals, without giving much
light. She would have to do something about that.
Daja reached a hand towards the forge, and twitched her fingers. A rope of fire rose
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from the coals. A second finger-twitch brought the rope towards the anvil. She
stopped it a foot away, then thought for a moment. Her plan was to shape it like a
branch of candles, but something else nudged her, wanting to press its own image into
the flame. She let it roll away from her and into the rope. It split, then split again,
turning itself into a multitude of fibres. These began to weave themselves in and out
of each other. When they halted, a grid of flame hung in the air, like a broadly woven
square of cloth. Daja could have stuck a thumb into the gaps between the fire-threads,
but she wasn’t sure what the result might be. The fiery cloth did cast a strong light on
her work area, and wasn’t that the important thing? She left it alone.
Using a hammer, she resentfully tapped a groove into her iron rod. Where would she
be right now, if her family hadn’t drowned? Probably south in the Pebbled Sea,
underway for their winter berth. The wind, just starting to turn chilly,
would be tumbling through her braids, filling her nose with clean, salt air - not this
dusty, smoky stuff.
Jamming the rod’s pointed end into a hole in the metal lump called a nail header, she
gave the iron a hard twist. The rod broke neatly where she had cut the groove into it.
And our ship wouldn’t have a cargo of these, she thought, putting the longer piece of
rod aside. We’d have, oh, spices from Bihan, and gold from Sotat. Maybe some
flower-perfumes from Janaal.
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With a hard, quick hammer-blow, she put a flat head on her nail. Lifting the nail-
header tool at the back of the anvil, she up-ended it: her finished nail dropped into a
water-bucket near one of her bare feet. Steam hissed out in a tiny plume. Sighing,
Daja fished for the cool nail and tossed it into a second, empty bucket. With the ease
of practice she put the nail header on the anvil, right over the hole made for it. The
remainder of the first rod went back into the fire to heat. She grabbed the next iron
rod, to begin the whole chore over again.
Daja worked steadily, ignoring the sweat that trickled down her cheeks, back and
sides, dreaming of ships under full sail in the Pebbled Sea. She was big for her years,
deep-chested and thick-waisted, dressed in a boy’s thigh-length black tunic and black
leggings. The leather apron that protected her clothes was grimy and spotted with
burns. The steady glow of light from her fire-weaving played over skin as brown as
mahogany, a wide, full-lipped mouth now tight with unhappiness, and large, deep-set
brown eyes. The only touches of colour about her were a scarlet arm-band and red ties
at the ends of her braids.
‘’You are the smith?“ a female voice enquired behind her. ”I have work to be done.“
Daja turned, squinting. At first it was hard to make out the woman who stood in the
wide doorway - the sun was at her back, leaving her face in shadow. The only thing
clear at first glance was that she had but one leg. The other, cut off at mid-thigh, had
been replaced by a sturdy length of fitted wood.
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“I’m not the smith,” Daja replied.
The visitor shifted uneasily: she was staring at Daja’s fire-square. The girl sighed.
People were always so nervous about the strange way she and her friends shaped
magic! “Sorry,” Daja murmured, and flapped a hand at the square. It twisted,
becoming a single rope, then snaked back into the forge.
The visitor took two hopping steps into the building. Now Daja saw her clearly, and
wished she could not. One side of the newcomer’s face was the colour of deep bronze,
lit with a single, heavy-lidded dark eye. The other side was a ruin of shiny brown
scars, the eye only a lumpy pit. Scars dragged at one side of the woman’s wide,
broad-curved mouth, so that she seemed to be forever sneering. Her nose was
unscarred, but something had broken it enough to make it nearly flat. Both of her
eyebrows were thick, making Daja wonder if she had been any kind of beauty even
before the loss of half of her face. The scarring aside, she didn’t look very old - no
more than twenty-five at the most.
The newcomer wore an earth-brown tunic that reached halfway down her thighs. Like
Daja, she wore leggings. They were the same dark colour as her tunic, with one leg
shortened to cover the joining of the wooden leg to her flesh. Daja noticed all of this
in an eye-blink. The thing that brought her mind to a halt was the brass-capped staff
the woman leaned on.
She was a Trader.
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Daja’s belly clenched. She tried not to stare hungrily at the etchings and metal inlays
that decorated the cap on the visitor’s staff, the marks that told those who knew how
to read them of the woman’s family and deeds. Now that she was trangshi, Daja
wasn’t supposed to care about things like that, but she couldn’t help herself.
The woman scowled and thumped the ground with her staff as she took a more
comfortable position. “What’s the matter, lugsha?” she demanded in a deep, pleasant
voice, using the word - only slightly complimentary - for ”craftsman“. ”Haven’t you
seen a cripple before? Or just not one as pretty as me?“
Daja lowered her head and waited. As soon as the Trader’s eye adjusted to the gloom,
this conversation would end.
“No, you’re not big enough to be a whole smith. Apprentice, I desire to speak with
your master,” the woman said flatly. “There is work to be done, and—”
Since Daja wasn’t looking, she couldn’t watch the Trader examine their surroundings
as she tried to spot an adult smith. When the woman fell silent, though, Daja knew
what she had seen: her staff, with its unmarked cap.
Daja looked up, in time to catch the glare the Trader directed her way. Then the
woman turned her face towards the forge.
“Where is the smith?” she called, her voice ringing from the metal all around them. “I
desire to speak with the smith, immediately! There is work to be done, work for
which Tenth Caravan Idaram will pay!”
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file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Tamora%20Pierce%20-%20Circle%2\0of%20Magic%2003%20-%20Daja's%20Book.htmSunsetblazedaboveGoldRidgevalleyinnorthEmelan,throwingshadows\overacompanyofmountedriders.Attheheadoftheirtrainabannermancarrie\dthepersonalflagofDukeVedrisIV,rulerofEmelan.TheDukehimself...

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