was for this girl-child to wrap an entire building with her power — and explained that day’s exercise to Keth. He thought it was ludicrous. Whoever heard of stuffing all of one’s own magic into a small object?
But she insisted, and he agreed to try. First he selected a crucible for the job. Next he imagined himself pouring all of the light of his power into it, as if magic were sand he meant to heat.
What vexed him was that the exercise turned out to be hard. His power fought his grip, sending out darts and flares like those thrown off by his lightning globes. For each spike that Keth grabbed and stuffed back into the crucible, two more seemed to sprout. By the time Tris called a halt, he was hot, sweaty, irritated and out of patience. The weather didn’t help. The air was stuffy, unmoving and sticky. When he begged Tris to lower her barrier, convinced it made the workshop’s air stale, she refused.
Keth sighed and prepared a gather of molten glass, though he doubted he could get a globe from it now. His neck was stiff, his hands sore, and no matter how much water he drank, he was soon thirsty again. Around mid-afternoon he threw off his shirt and leather apron. The apron only protected his clothes from embers. His body ignored small burns now. He rolled his breeches up above his knees. Tris, as aggravating as ever, had arrived wrapped around with breezes that ruffled through her pale grey cotton gown and white petticoats, leaving her with just a slight dew at her temples and the base of her neck.
“One thing I miss about home,” Keth remarked, wiping his dripping forehead on his arm as he prepared to take his gather from the furnace, “it cooled off at night. Of course, the winters are a curse from the gods. I suppose no place is perfect.”
“Emelan’s much like this,” Tris remarked, inspecting one of Keth’s glass bowls. “So’s Capchen. But we get the sea breezes at night, even in summer. My friends and I go down to the beach during the midday rest period, sometimes, and swim. Sometimes we don’t mean to get wet, but then Little Bear shakes off on us and we’re wet anyway.”
Keth grinned. “Our dogs at home do that. My mother and sisters won’t go down to the Syth when the dogs come along, because they know they’ll get splashed.” He set the blowpipe to spinning and concentrated on the feel of his magic, letting it flow down the length of the pipe. A breeze wrapped around his body, cooling his skin. When he looked at Tris, she looked back at him, all innocence.
His efforts to make a new globe came to nothing. His magic simply hadn’t come back enough. His third attempt gave off a few sparks of lightning, but they soon faded.
“Enough,” Tris said when he would have tried again. “Go home, rest. You can’t work with nothing.”
Keth scowled at her. “I don’t want to hear the ‘sometimes you have to know when to halt’ speech again,” he informed her.
“Then don’t make me give it,” she retorted. “Have you got a globe’s worth of magic in you?”
Keth hung his head. Complain about it though he had, the morning’s crucible exercise had shown him how to measure the extent of his power.
“Go home,” Tris ordered. “Relax. Visit a bathhouse. Something. I know it’s maddening, if that helps.”
“Do you?” he asked suddenly, wanting to know. “It doesn’t seem like you’re ever at a standstill.”
She stared at him for a moment, then glared, propping her fists on her hips. “The hardest lesson any of us must learn is there’s only so much we can do,” she informed him, her voice lemon-tart.
“We run into it head-first all the time, knowing what we can do, what we can’t, how much we can do. We think of magic as this promise that we can fix anything that comes our way, Keth. We can’t. Power’s just a tool some of us can use.” Her mouth curled wryly. “Now look. You went and made me give a speech. Go home and rest. There’s always later.” She gathered up her belongings, the dragon and the dog, and left the workshop.
Keth stood there, frowning. Even if he couldn’t produce another globe, he’d have thought she would try another exercise, rather than go. Perhaps she had a project of her own waiting back at Jumshida’s.