The Will of the Empress - By Tamora Pierce Page 0,80

apart. They needed to be strengthened without disturbing the bridge, or they would collapse into the river, clogging it.

Tris took a breath and sent threads of magic down into the ground as Sandry might set the warp threads on a loom, reaching deep into the clay soil. Stones of every size peppered the ground underneath her and under the far riverbank, more than enough to shape solid rock walls. The problem, of course, was that they were scattered throughout the ground, separated by the dense earth.

Tris grinned, her pale eyes sparkling. This is a wonderfully knotty problem, she thought. The trick is to warm the ground just enough to make it easy to mould, then to start shaking it just enough to move the stones as I want them — and just enough that the villagers don't panic and run from the earthquake. Her fingers danced through her layers of braids, seeking out the ones she had used to trap earth tremors and those in which she had braided the heat of molten lava. They were heavy braids bound with black silk thread in special knots to contain the forces in them.

She sat down on the muddy earth with a plop, settling into the most comfortable crosslegged seat she knew. Carefully she began to undo the knots on her braids, sorting through the spells that would release their power for her guidance. Control is the thing, and patience, she told herself over and over, concentrating. They won't know I did a thing.

*

"Oh, good, it's one of her rainy-day gowns. Tris! Tris!" Someone — Sandry — shook Tris by the shoulder. Tris stirred. "Tris, you've been here for half the day. You're scaring the nice people! You've scared me, and Chime, and Ambros doesn't look that well, either!"

Tris blinked. Getting the earth to calm down once she was finished had been the hardest part of the whole thing. She had forgotten how tiring it was to force what was left of the power of the tremors and the volcanoes back into their proper braids. Weakly she fumbled to tie them up.

"What?" she demanded irritably, squinting up at her sister. "I wasn't bothering anybody. I was just sitting here." The rain had finally stopped.

"She made the ground ripple," said someone very young. "It all shivered and rumbled and twitched, and nobody dared go on the bridge."

Tris turned her head on her very stiff neck. The speaker was the girl child Maghen. Of all the people who stood and stared at her, Ambros and their guards included, only Sandry and Maghen had dared to come within reaching distance of Tris.

"I was repairing the walls on the banks," she explained to the child. "Otherwise they were about to drop into the river." She looked up at Sandry, her grey eyes glinting. "Or would you rather I'd have let them alone until they collapsed and you had no river?"

Sandry smiled at her. "You'll feel better once you've eaten something," she said practically. "And I didn't make your boots. They'll be scraping mud off them for a week." She offered Tris her hand.

Tris took it, and fought her body — it had been in one position for much too long — to get to her feet. The mud seemed far deeper than it had been when she sat down. As she struggled and lurched, worried that she would pull Sandry into the clayey soup, she looked at herself. From her waist down she was coated in mud.

Maghen saw Tris's self-inspection. "You sank," she explained. "The ground went soft and you sank, and you didn't even move. Oooh," she whispered as Sandry and Tris brushed at Tris's skirts. The mud slid off as if the cloth were made of glass.

Tris grinned at Maghen. "When Sandry makes a dress for a rainy day, she makes sure no one will have to wash it twelve times to get it clean," she told the child. "Really, she's very useful to have around, even if she is a clehame."

Sandry elbowed Tris in the ribs. "Shake that mud off your stockings, too, while you're at it," she ordered.

Tris obeyed.

"Come see," begged Maghen. "Look what happened." She towed Tris closer to the river's edge. On both sides, a hundred yards upstream of the bridge and roughly the same length downstream, the riverbanks were secured by solid stone walls. Closer examination showed them to be made of thousands of pieces of rock, large and small, fitted tightly together into barriers a foot thick. Tris