“I’m not thanking it for any favours,” grumbled Keth. “I’d pass it to anybody else in a heartbeat.”
“You don’t have that choice,” Niko retorted. “Moreover, until you master the lightning side of your power, you won’t be able to make another satisfactory piece of glass — not blown, anyway. Not shaped by the breath that keeps you alive. That is why you need Tris, not a glass mage.”
Tris scowled. “There isn’t anybody else?” she demanded. “Oh, don’t bother answering, I know there isn’t.” All the needles were out. She dipped some cotton into a jar of balm made by her foster-brother and dabbed it on the bloody spots on Keth’s face.
“Ow!” Keth snapped, flinching away.
“Don’t be such a baby,” Tris ordered. “You bore getting bit by lightning, you can bear a little sting.”
Keth grumbled, then let her continue. “But she’s a student,” he protested to Niko. “Students don’t teach!”
“It’s unusual,” Jumshida said, her voice comforting. “But lightning magic is so rare…”
Jumshida and Keth had made an understandable mistake. Normal mage students got their credential in their twenties, and taught only after that. Tris, her two foster-sisters, and her foster-brother, were unique. They had mastered their power when they were all thirteen or so. Winding Circle gave them their mage’s medallion, spelled so that, until they were eighteen, the four would forget they had them unless asked to prove they were mages. It was a useless exercise: Tris’s ability to see magic and detect metal meant that she always knew what she wore.
Now she glanced at Niko; he nodded. Tris set aside the balm, reached under her collar, and drew out the ribbon from which her medallion hung. The metal circle had a silvery sheen to it, but it was a blend of silver and other metals. The spiral sign for Winding Circle was stamped on the back, to show where Tris had earned it. Tris’s name and Niko’s were inscribed on the edges of the front of the medallion: student and principal teacher. At the centre, small but still clear to the eye, the smith-mage Frostpine had engraved a tiny volcano, a lightning bolt, a wave and a cyclone, to show where Tris’s weather-magic worked. She hated bringing it out where people could see it. It felt too much like bragging.
“If she’s a mage, why do I never see her with a mage kit?” demanded Keth. “You both carry yours, even though you’re just attending a conference.” He pointed through the door to the hall, where Jumshida’s and Niko’s mage kits, fitted into good-looking packs, lay on a table.
Tris let go of her medallion and picked up the balm again. She dabbed more on Keth’s wounds. “I carry a mage kit all the time,” she replied, squinting to get the bloody spots under his short-cropped gold hair. She pointed to her head with the hand that held the cotton. “Right there.”
“Your skull is your mage kit?” asked Keth.
Tris scowled at him, though her touch remained gentle. “My braids, Kethlun,” she replied. She sat back with a sigh; she thought she had got every puncture. The ones she had tended first were already healed. By morning he wouldn’t know he’d been hurt. Briar, her foster-brother, brewed up good medicines with his plant magic. “I store power in my braids for when I need it. They hold it because I pin them in certain patterns.” She set the balm aside and pointed to the thickest braid. It ran from the middle of her forehead to the nape of her neck. “Earth force here, bled out of a few earthquakes. Tidal force in these braids.” She touched two on each side of her head. “If I’m tired, I can draw a little strength off these, or a lot, depending on what I need.”
“And then you collapse after you run out of it,” Niko said. “Actually, you collapse once you use any of your braids but the little ones.”
Tris shrugged and quoted a great-aunt’s favourite saying: “All business requires some risk.” She looked back at Kethlun and saw that he didn’t believe her. “These — ” she indicated four more braids, two on each side of her head — “are heavy lightning, like the two by my face are just for quick things.”
“Like shocking me,” Keth said drily.
Chime voiced a shushing sound that Tris thought was probably a hiss of warning. “I did tell you to stop,” she reminded Keth. “If I’d known you were afraid of lightning, I might have