companion, and Tris wanted Chime to have a place where the dog couldn’t reach her if the dragon decided she had endured enough.
Tris also left a small bowl of water, though she wasn’t sure Chime drank water, and a dish with a tablespoon each of red and blue lustre salts, as well as the powder that turned glass a deep emerald green. These she also tucked well under the table. Little Bear was as convinced as Chime that there was no harm in trying to eat everything at least once.
With dog and dragon settled, Tris returned to the upstairs workroom to read. At first glance all that she had found was academic magic, not ambient. This troubled her. While any ambient mage could and did use spells, signs, talismans and potions to amplify her power, the source of ambient magic came from outside the mage. It had to be approached differently. Academic mages reached first for spell books, ambient mages for the things that gave them their power. Only another ambient mage held the truth of that difference in her very bones. What if Keth didn’t find an ambient glass mage?
I just need to look harder for books on ambient glass magic, she told herself. I’m sure they have them.
Downstairs Little Bear was barking. Tris ignored him, fascinated by the instructions for making a bowl to scry with; the Bear tended to bark at anything and everything. Another sound did shatter her concentration, a bone-shivering screech like a shard of glass dragged over hard stone. She raced downstairs and into the dining room.
Chime had climbed a table leg to the top. She clung there, tucked into the corner of the table’s frame as she made that awful sound. Tris scrabbled to undo the ribbon leash. The moment she freed the dragon, Chime threw herself at her, digging her claws into Tris’s clothes and skin.
Tris crooned gently to the trembling creature, trying to calm her. Looking at the dragon’s food, she saw a few glass flames beside the dish. Holding Chime with one hand, she set the flames in the dish with the colouring powders and put it on the table, where she couldn’t break them by accident. Chime continued to screech. Over and over Tris stroked the dragon, trying to breathe meditation-style, hoping she would calm the frightened creature.
The front door opened as Little Bear continued to bark. Tris’s breezes swirled into the front hall and returned to her with voices: Jumshida’s, then Niko’s.
“It’s all right,” she assured Chime. “They belong here. You remember Niko, don’t you?” Now she was really puzzled. Chime had been admired by total strangers all day and had voiced nothing louder than her musical purr. What had upset her?
Red-faced with effort, several of her braids knocked free of their pins, she edged out from under the table. Once in the open air she sat back on her heels and straightened, holding Chime to her chest with one hand.
“Oh, no,” said a man with a slightly husky, slow, familiar voice.
Tris whirled, forgetting that she still knelt, then fell on her side. Chime leaped free, taking flight. As the dragon zipped around the room, Tris glared up at Niko, furious to be caught unkempt and awkward before a stranger. Looking past him, she recognized the newcomer.
“You!” she cried at the same moment as Kethlun did.
“I take it you two have met?” asked Niko mildly. “Kethlun, Tris — Trisana Chandler — is the lightning mage I told you about.”
Chime screeched, that same ear-splitting sound of a nail on glass, and flew straight at Kethlun. Thirty centimetres away from him the dragon spat a flurry of glass needles into her maker’s face.
“Chime, no!” cried Tris. “Bad!” Quick as a flash — she had practised the movements for weeks so she could do this bit of magic in a hurry — she stripped the tie from one thin braid and collected a handful of sparks. She threw them at the dragon, imagining each spark as a tiny ball of thread connected to her fingertips. The balls spun around Chime to form a lightning cage with the dragon suspended inside. Tris reeled in the cage. Only when she held it in her hands did she look at Keth.
He’d flinched when the dragon came at him, saving his right eye, but that side of his face and head were peppered with thin red, blue and green needles. Niko tried to pull one out and cut himself.