The Will of the Empress - By Tamora Pierce Page 0,14

much of interest about Briar and the girls. The children and quite a few adults were entranced by Chime. They took every free moment to feed the glass dragon and collect the flame- or puddle-shaped bits of glass that Chime produced afterward. The yellow-clad and veiled mimanders — mages — were drawn to the depth and power of the magic that filled the one hundred and fifty-two-year-old miniature pine shakkan that was Briar's companion. They consulted Briar about the magic that could be worked with shakkans, while the Trader negotiators began the slow process of bargaining for a long-term contract to buy the trees Briar was prepared to sell. The Traders even negotiated an exchange with Sandry: her embroidery on their own clothes in trade for a chance to examine weaving and embroidery done only within the rare Trader cities. This was the work of very old and very young Traders, who were exempt from the custom that forbade their people from making things. Sandry jumped at the chance: Rarely did a non-Trader so much as glimpse the work, let alone get the time for a close look at it.

Briar, Sandry, and Daja soon found something they could agree on in that first week: Tris had grown very odd. She seemed to flinch each time a fresh breeze blew through the camps and the caravans. Briar thought she would drive him mad, changing the location of her bedroll several times each night. He slept lightly, trying to avoid dreams of fire and blood. Tris woke him when she moved. While Tris didn't drive others to growl "pesky, jagging, maukie girl" as Briar did, it was almost as if by trying to be quiet and disturb no one, Tris disturbed everyone.

"I left Winding Circle so I could sleep!" he cried their fourth night on the road. "Not so's I could be jumping every other minute thinking we're under attack when it's just you missing your feather bed!"

"That's why we ride with the caravan, so their guards watch in case of attack," she replied with heavy and weary sarcasm. "Anyway, since when are you such a cursed light sleeper? The time was that we had to dump buckets of water on you to get you to crack an eyelid."

"People change," snarled Briar. "You didn't used to squeak at every least little thing." I'm not going to say I can't even trust Trader guards to know when trouble comes, he thought, moving his bedroll as far from hers as he could manage. Anyone can be taken by surprise. Anyone. You'd think she'd know that, at her age.

*

It's enough to make a person stuff her in a baggage wagon, thought Daja gloomily as she cleaned her teeth on their seventh morning out. Today they were to reach the river Erynwhit, which marked the border of Emelan and Gansar. Daja was wondering how she was going to put up with Tris's behaviour all the way to Namorn. She agreed with Briar, particularly since last night Tris had been sleeping, or moving, near Daja's bedroll.

"Why don't you see if you can ride in a wagon?" she demanded when Tris twitched one time too many over breakfast. "So you won't have to keep the rest of us awake all night while you look for a soft spot, or worry about the wicked breeze drying your cheeks all day."

Tris replied with a cold look that, in earlier years, made Daja want to put her in a keg and nail the top on. It was a look that froze the person who had dared to speak to Tris. We shamed it out of her when she lived with us, thought Daja, glaring back at her sister. I guess she fell into her old, had ways after we weren't around. "In the civilized world, people answer other people back," she told the redhead.

"Daja, it's too early," moaned Sandry. She had stayed up late, working on her Namornese with the Traders. For once, Daja saw, Sandry wasn't her bouncy morning self.

"Certainly too early for those of us who couldn't get a whole night's sleep in the first place," growled Briar as the Traders began to pack the wagons up.

The caravan, even the sleepy four, pulled together and took the slowly descending road before the sun cleared the eastern mountains. Soon they descended to the flat canyon floor the Erynwhit had carved between towering cliff walls. The river spread before them. It was a lazy flat expanse no more than a hundred