by the door to watch, silent. Little Bear retreated in boredom to the courtyard.
At last Keth finished. He’d made a pale green octopus, its tentacles neatly arranged to touch its head, as if it had thrown up its arms in shock. He gave it a final examination, his eyes sharp as he inspected the piece, then set it in an annealing oven on the far side of the furnace. Tris knew about this step from her earlier questions to glassmakers. Without a final tempering in the oven, glass would be even more fragile than it already was.
Keth scowled at Tris. “It took you for ever to get here. Why didn’t you interrupt me?”
Now that she wouldn’t distract him, Tris came in and took the sling off her back, then set Chime’s food and water dishes in an out-of-the-way corner. The dragon began to feed. Only after Chime was seen to did Tris look at Keth.
“I didn’t want to interrupt,” she replied with a shrug. “I love to watch people work with glass. And you were using the meditation pattern to breathe. Did you feel anything different?”
Keth busied himself cleaning the tools he had used. He was pouring sweat from the heat of furnace and oven, while Tris remained cool inside her cocoon of breezes. With a couple of flicks of her hands she expanded her breezes until they wound through the shop, freshening the air.
“It, the breathing, it made me feel calmer,” Keth admitted in his slow, careful speech. “I just did it for practice. I’m all right with pulling and moulding glass. It’s the blown stuff that gets away from me. Are we going to start? The lessons, for the magic? I want to try to blow a globe before the end of the day.”
Tris bit her lip and counted to one hundred by fives to keep from snapping at him. He needs to learn to listen to me, she thought. When she was calm again, she told him, “Find a comfortable way to sit. I’m going to draw the circle for our meditation.”
“But you only do a circle when there’s a danger of magic getting away,” argued Kethlun. “I was meditating while I worked — I didn’t need any circle. We aren’t doing magic.”
“I am,” retorted Tris, “just by drawing the circle. And if you’re to grip your magic, you’ll have to let it out to work it. You’ll do that inside a circle until I’m convinced you know what you’re doing.”
“Has anybody told you you’re bossy?” demanded Keth.
“All the time,” Tris replied.
“You’ll never catch a husband that way, you know,” he pointed out. “A little sweetening would go a long way.”
She had heard this before. She didn’t like to hear it from him, but she would tell him so later. There was magic to be done now. “If I have to ‘catch’ a man to get a husband, I don’t want one,” she retorted. “Now, sit.” She pointed to a clear space at the centre of the floor. To Chime she said, “Stay put.”
First she set her breezes free to roam the city, though not without regret. It would be stifling inside without them, but at best they might distract Keth. At worst, they might carry some of his uncontrolled power into the world to wreak a patch of havoc. It was better to sweat.
Outside Tris walked around the shop to make sure that she could enclose the whole thing in a circle. Once she had, she walked the circle again, laying a stripe of pure magic as she passed. When she reached the place where she had begun, she stepped inside the circle, then closed it. Her eyes shut, Tris summoned her barriers to meet above and below the workshop, enclosing it in a perfect bubble.
Inside, Kethlun sat cross-legged on the floor. “Close your eyes and start to meditate,” she ordered. “Clear your mind of all thought. Ignore me, just meditate.”
“I wish I could ignore you,” grumbled Keth, but he obeyed. Whoever had taught him to meditate had trained him well, Tris observed. His eyelids did not even flutter. His magic cast an uneven, shimmering glow in her sight, flaring and retreating, more active now than it had been while he had focused on making his octopus.
Quietly she assembled several articles. When she had lined them up behind Keth, she set Chime next to them, motioning for the dragon to stay where she was. She had learned this approach from Daja, who had described her teacher’s