water; then he began to recite the gruesome litany all over again. The baron’s men milled uneasily around the base of the tower where they were encamped, and looked up askance towards our windows.
“Yes, Marek seems eminently persuadable,” Sarkan said as he came into the room. Faint smears of oil glistened on his throat and the back of his hand and across his forehead: he had been brewing up potions of sleep and forgetfulness in his laboratory. “What do you mean to do with that? I doubt Marek is going to eat a poisoned loaf of bread, if that was your notion.”
I turned my dough out onto the smooth marble top of the long table. I had the vague thought of the oxen in my head, the way I’d cobbled them together; they’d crumbled, but they’d only been made of mud. “Do you have any sand?” I asked. “And maybe some small pieces of iron?”
I kneaded iron shavings and sand into my dough while the herald chanted on outside. Sarkan sat across from me, his pen scratching out a long incantation of illusion and dismay put together from his books. An hourglass streamed sand between us, marking time while his potions brewed. A few unhappy soldiers from the baron were waiting for him while he worked, shifting from foot to foot uneasily in the corner of the room. He put down his pen just as the last few grains of sand spilled, precisely timed. “All right, come with me,” he told them, and took them along to the laboratory, to give them the flasks to carry downstairs.
But I hummed my mother’s baking songs while I worked, folding and folding in a steady rhythm. I thought of Alosha, forging her blade again and again, working a little more magic in each time. When my dough was pliable and smooth, I broke off a piece, rolled it into a tower in my hands, and planted it in the middle, folding up the dough on one side to make the wall of the mountains behind us.
Sarkan came back into the room and scowled down at my work. “A charming model,” he said. “I’m sure the children will be entertained.”
“Come and help me,” I said. I pinched up a wall around the tower out of the soft dough and started to murmur a chant of earth spells over it: fulmedesh, fulmishta, back and forth in a steady rhythm. I built a second wall farther out, then a third; I kept humming softly to them. A groaning sound, like trees in a high wind, came in from outside the window, and the floor trembled faintly beneath us: earth and stone, waking up.
Sarkan watched, frowning a while longer. I felt his eyes on the back of my neck. The memory curled in me of the last time we’d worked together in this room: roses and thorns sprawling furiously everywhere between us. I wanted and didn’t want his help. I wanted to stay angry at him a while longer, but I wanted the connection more; I wanted to touch him, wanted the brilliant crisp bite of his magic in my hands. I kept my head down and kept working.
He turned and went to one of his cabinets; he brought over a small drawer full of chips of stone that looked like the same grey granite as the tower, of varied sizes. He began to gather the chips up and with his long fingers pressed them into the walls I’d built. He recited a spell of repairing as he worked, a spell of mending cracks and patching stone. His magic came running through the clay, vivid and bright where it brushed against mine. He brought the stone into the spell, laying the deep foundations beneath, lifting me and my working higher: like putting steps beneath me, so I could take the walls up into clear air.
I drew his magic into my working, running my hands back along the walls, my chant still marching away beneath the melody of his spell. I darted a quick glance at him. He was staring down at the dough trying to keep his scowl, and flushed at the same time with the high transcendent light that he brought to his elaborate workings: delighted and also annoyed, trying not to be.
Outside, the sun had gone down. A faint blue-violet glow flickered over the surface of the dough like strong liquor burning off in a pot. I could just barely make it out in the