her own circle: her foster sisters and -brother, their teachers, a handful of mages and students from Winding Circle, and Duke Vedris of Emelan. They not only knew her; they treated her as one of them, someone they loved.
“Shall I have the girl bring a tray to your room?” the cook asked, checking a sauce.
“No, not when you’ll all be so busy. I’ll come here when I’m hungry, if that’s all right,” replied Tris. Assured that it was, she took the staircase from the courtyard to the first floor.
She had just set an armful of Jumshida’s books on her bed when she heard Niko call from the workroom they shared, “Trisana, why is there a glass creature eating our antimony?”
Tris walked over to the open workroom door. There stood her teacher, hands on hips, surveying the glass dragon. Despite his long day at the conference, Niko looked fresh and crisp. His clothes, made by Tris’s foster-sister Sandry, a thread mage, showed not a single wrinkle. Niko wore a sleeveless grey linen overrobe and breeches, and a paler grey silk shirt, its full sleeves neatly buttoned at the cuffs. On his feet were black slippers with turned-up toes. He refused to wear Tharian sandals, telling Tris that he would reserve the sight of his bare toes for himself alone.
At one and three-quarter metres Niko was fifteen centimetres taller than Tris was, and wiry, with silver-and-black hair worn in a horse-tail most of the time. He possessed a full, natty, black-and-silver moustache of which he was vain, heavy black-and-silver brows, and deep-set black eyes. His face was craggy, the strong nose jutting from it like the prow of a ship.
Niko stared down that formidable nose at the dragon, who sat on its hindquarters, staring up at the mage. Its muzzle was coated with antimony; its belly was filled with the stuff.
“Is that even good for you?” Tris asked it.
As if in reply the dragon twitched, its belly roiling. A moment later it opened its jaws.
Antimony surged from its gullet to form clear glass flames that dropped as soon as they broke away from its mouth. Niko quickly thrust a hand under the dragon’s chin to catch the pieces. When the creature finished, Niko had a palmful of glass flames.
“I can’t think of the last time I held dragon vomit in my hand,” Niko remarked, his voice dry. “Why, never, in fact. There are no such things as dragons. Need I also point out there are no such things as living glass dragons?”
Tris picked the creature up and cradled it in her arms. “You shouldn’t stuff yourself that way,” she told it. “You couldn’t absorb it. Surely you can’t be hungry after all you ate at the shop.”
“Perhaps eating is how she learns the nature and substance of things,” remarked Niko, sidetracked by the thought. “After all, who can tell if she truly sees or not?”
“It’s an it, not a she,” protested Tris. She held up the dragon so Niko could see its belly was unmarked by male or female organs.
“Nonsense,” he replied. “So elegant and dainty a creature, with such wonderful eyes, has to be female.”
“You just say that because you like women better than men,” Tris retorted. The dragon climbed up her arm and draped itself across her shoulders, rubbing its head on her braided hair.
“With good reason. Few women spend the first weeks of an acquaintance trying to prove how much more they know than you,” Niko said as he gently poured the dragon flames on to the counter by the antimony jar. “You haven’t explained how this creature came to be here, Tris.”
“It’s a long story. You’re supposed to be down there, aren’t you?” she asked, nodding in the direction of the noisy first floor.
“For this lady, I will set aside the conference for the moment. I’ve never seen anything like her,” Niko pointed out. “And you’ve been using your lightning. What for? You know I can see it on you and the dragon.”
Tris shrugged. “It wasn’t much.” She set the dragon on a worktable and fitted the cork back into the antimony jar. “Some glass mage was having a tantrum. I don’t think much of the teachers here, if they can’t make a grown man learn self-control.”
“Some students don’t want to learn,” Niko offered, rubbing the dragon’s chin with a gentle finger. “Let’s hear the whole of it.”
Tris went around the room, making sure that every jar was tightly corked, as she told Niko how she had made