her eyes briefly, concentrating on her vision. When she opened her eyes again, Kethlun’s magic was as plain as day to her sight.
His breathing and stillness served to calm him, that was clear, but his power was unaffected. It jetted from his skin in erratic flares, fluid like molten glass one moment, crooked like lightning the next. Then the lightning shapes grew, racing over Kethlun like groping hands, splitting into more bolts, until he was nearly covered with light. He opened his eyes and the lightning vanished.
“Well?” he demanded irritably. “I said I know how.”
For a moment Tris didn’t reply, stunned by the fiery lacework that had covered him over. Then she remembered to breathe herself. How could Keth hold such beauty and not know it?
She remembered something Briar had once said while her friends cowered under a tree in the rain. Tris was dancing in a field as lightning flashed and thunder roared overhead. “Not everybody thinks it’s a play-pretty like you do, Coppercurls! Send it on its way so we can go home!”
“So you can meditate,” she said to Kethlun now. “That saves time. Let me see — ”
She was interrupted by someone banging on the street door. “Open for the arurim!” a man cried. “Open in the name of the law!”
Little Bear dashed into the hall, barking furiously. Tris leaped after him and seized his collar. The housekeeper passed them both, opening the door only when she saw that Tris had the big dog under control. Tris hung on to her pet with both hands, dragging him back with all her strength as men and women in bright red tunics shouldered past the housekeeper, heavy batons in their hands.
“What is this?” the servant cried. “We are law-abiding people!”
“We seek Kethlun Warder,” said a man who wore a sergeant’s black sword border on his tunic sleeves. “We have information that he is present here.”
“I’m Kethlun Warder,” Keth said. He came to stand by Tris and the nearly-hysterical dog. “Why would the arurim look for me?”
A man stepped through the arurimi’s ranks. He was young, with dark brown skin, kinked black hair cut in a short cap around his head, and sharp brown eyes. Like the men of the arurim he wore a scarlet tunic, but his was topped by a blue mage’s stole bordered in scarlet braid. “Kethlun Warder, is this your work?” The mage held out a round glass ball. Sparks glinted faintly on its surface.
“It looks like my work,” Kethlun answered slowly. He leaned in to better look inside the ball. “Or rather, it’s like something I made this afternoon, but there was nothing in it then. It was all lightning.”
“According to a clerk from Mages’ Hall, the lightning cleared to reveal this scene just before he was to leave for the day. He brought it to us,” replied the mage.
Tris squinted at the ball and frowned. “That woman looks dead.”
To his sergeant the mage said, “Arrest him.” The arurimi surged forward to grip Keth by the arms.
“Stop!” cried Tris, outraged. “You can’t march into a private house — can they?” she asked the housekeeper. The woman nodded.
The arurim mage frowned at Tris in a well-bred way. “I do not answer to children,” he informed her. “Murder was done at the Fifth District Forum. The whole thing looked just as it does here, which means we arrest Kethlun Warder for murder.”
“But I just blew the globe, I didn’t kill anyone!” protested Keth.
“Quiet,” growled an arurim as she twisted one of Keth’s arms up behind his back. “You’ll speak when spoken to.”
Tris looked from the arurimi to their mage to Keth. She had no understanding of what was going on here — she’d been in Tharios less than a week — but she knew what Niko would say her duty was. Briar and her foster-mother Lark both had told stories of what happened to defenceless people who were taken away by those who enforced the law.
“Then I am going with him,” she informed the mage haughtily. “He is my student. You will answer to me should any harm come to him.”
The mage lost his air of superiority when he goggled at her. “You’re joking,” he said in a less self-important, more matter-of-fact way.
Tris gave the housekeeper Little Bear’s collar, then reached for the ribbon around her neck. She pulled out the medallion and allowed the arurim mage to see both sides. When he reached for it, she closed her eyes. The moment he touched the medallion to