Magic Steps

Sandry held Alzena's eyes with hers. She could see when the woman knew what must happen if this were not stopped.

"Please…” It was Nurhar who asked, not Alzena.

Sandry shook her head.

Their bodies exploded in a crimson shower, sending pieces everywhere. The impact slammed Pasco into the wall a second time, covering him and Sandry with blood. He slumped to the floor and vomited helplessly.

"I'm still not sure I approve of moving in with dancers," Gran'ther Edoar said. He watched as Pasco loaded a seabag full of clothes into the cart that would carry him to Yasmнn's school. "If your net-dancing can be used to trap rats, and you can direct where and when people look at you, it seems you are better suited to harrier work than we guessed. What can you learn of that from this female?"

"This is better, Gran'ther.” Though it gave him quivers to argue with the old man, Pasco forced himself to say it. "If I only put my magic to harrying, well—," He hesitated, trying to put into words what he had learned in Durshan Rokat's dining room. "If I don't understand my magic, the good and the bad, I'm not a mage at all. I'm just a tool, to be used, like that poor chuff' the killers were using. Anyone could put their hand to me, and make me work however they want, if they figure out how to control me. That's not counting the trouble I might get myself into, not knowing what I can do and what I can't."

"Well, at least you've learned that much," commented Halmaedy. She had come to see Pasco's departure along with Gran'ther and Pasco's mother.

Pasco sneered at his oldest sister. To his grandfather and the silent Zahra he said, "Lady Sandry will keep me out of trouble whilst I learn. And the little monster'll work me so hard I won't have the strength to get into mischief."

"If we can go?" asked the carter, her voice a little too patient, "It's comin' on to rain, and I got bundles to deliver, too."

Zahra kissed her son's forehead. "We'll expect you to supper every Firesday," she told Pasco sternly. "Come say hello if things bring you to East District."

"Mama, it's not like I'm leaving the city!" cried Pasco, laughing. "I'm just going to Festival Street!"

"Mind your teachers!" Gran'ther told him as he climbed up beside the carter. "We don't want to hear of you giving any trouble!"

Pasco gri

Sandry halted on the doorstep at Discipline cottage. A pudgy young man in a novice's white habit sat at the table, awkwardly fitting together the pieces of a table loom. He stared at her, jaw hanging open.

She wasn't quite sure what to say. "Is—is Lark—"

The young man lurched to his feet and ran to the back of the house. He scrambled up the narrow stair to the garret.

"Comas, what on earth—," Lark came out of her workshop, a bolt of cloth in her hands. She noticed Sandry in the doorway. "Well! Look at you!" She put the cloth on the table and came to Sandry, hands out stretched. "You had people worried!"

Sandry nodded, hugging her teacher. For days after that dreadful meeting with the Dihanurs and their mage, she had kept to her rooms at Duke's Citadel, eating little, thinking a great deal. She'd had to force herself to talk to Pasco a week later. Even then she had done it only because the duke had said the boy thought she was furious with him because he'd been caught.

Once she had reassured Pasco, it seemed that life would not let her alone. There was Yazmнn, who wanted to talk about his training. Lark visited to say that she had been watching Pasco's lessons at Yazmin's, but it looked as if the novice weaver she'd mentioned on Sandry's last visit was indeed a mage. Moreover, he was too shy to deal with more than one or two people at a time. She really needed to concentrate on him, at Discipline. Erdogun had a tantrum with the Residence housekeeper Sandry’s hearing: he told the women that he’d gotten very fond of having Lady Sandrilene cover these matters; had servants no minds of their own to use?

The duke came for advice on matter of taste. What colors were flattering to him, what gifts might please a woman of experience and which were to overpowering, did he look older or younger when he rode in a carriage? That had actually been the first light moment in Sandy’s release from self-hate, the discovery that her hopes for the duke and Yazmin had borne fruit.

The final spur to her return to the larger world came as three letters in two days, one from Briar, one from Daja, and one from Tris. All were thick; all wanted to know why she hadn’t written. They were full of news about what they did and what they had seen. They brimmed with life. They made her present world look shadowy by comparison, and shadows, Sandy realized at last, where one thing she did not want in her mind.

“I’ve been very silly,” she told Lark now.

“You did a very hard thing, for reasons that everyone agreed were right,” Lark said firmly. “You acted as an adult, and you did it without hate. I’m not sure I could have done it without hating them, after seeing that poor maimed boy.”

”There’s blood on my hands,” whispered Sandry, looking at them.

“Good. As long as you feel that way, you won’t become like them, will you?” asked Lark.

Sandry shook her head. “You never did have sympathy for the glooms. Maybe I should have come back here afterward”

Lark put the teakettle on. “Should you?” She asked. “It seems to me it would have been like putting off your fine gowns and do

It was Sandry’s turn to gape, slack jawed, like the boy who had run upstairs. “you think so?”

Lark laughed. “My dear, you’ve moved into the greater world, whether you wished to or not,” she said. “As a teacher, as a noble. You’ve outgrown Discipline. You’re getting ready to take your place on the adult stage. Pasco was just the begi

Sandy propped her elbows on the table and rester her chin on her hands. “Remember that day you brought Yazmin to the residence? You knew then I was going to live there permanently, didn’t you? You didn’t seem at all surprised when Uncle said he wanted to start entertaining at this winter with me for hostess.”

Lark got down three cups, including Sandry’s, and put out honey and a loaf of spice bread. Sandry began to cut up the loaf. “I knew how close you two had become since you went there,” The women replied. “You would miss each other terribly, if you moved back here, and he might well return to bad habits. And you're learning a great deal from him, all of it good. Comas," she called, "if you don't come down, Sandry and I will eat all the spice bread ourselves."

"He's the new student?" asked Sandry. "He's a bit odd."

"He isn't odd." Lark put three plates on the table. "He's so shy it half-cripples him, poor thing. He agrees with nearly anything he's told to do, which is how he became a novice in the first place. I've got my work cut out for me, to break him of that"

"You'll find a way," Sandry told her. "You always do."

Lark cupped Sandry's face in her hands. "You and I are not finished, my heart's own. There is still much we can learn from each other, and you're the closest thing to a daughter I will ever have."

Sandry hugged Lark fiercely. "Then I can come back, if I don't like living at the Citadel?"

"Whenever you want," Lark said firmly. "You can even have your old room."

Sandry released her and gazed at the stairs. It had given her a pang, to know a stranger was in the rooms she and her friends had shared, but it looked as if this Comas needed Discipline as much as any of them ever had.