into a dip between the dunes and lying flat on the ground. The lightning bolt caught him as he scrambled over the last dune between him and shelter. The only warning he’d had was the eerie sensation of all of his body hair standing straight up, before his old life ended in a flash of white heat.
That he’d survived was a miracle. The discovery that he was half-paralysed and unable to speak made his survival a mockery.
But his youthful conceit had a tough core to it. He fought the living tomb of his body. He forced a finger to move, then a toe, then two fingers, two toes. Hour after hour, day after day, he reclaimed his own flesh. When his family saw that his mind still functioned, they brought in the best healer-mages in Dancruan. The happiest moment of his life was in the morning when he returned to his uncle’s factory, ready to work once more.
By noon that day his happiness was dust. His old ease was gone. Even as a first-year apprentice his hands were never clumsy with the tools, sands, salts, ashes and woods that were the basis of glasswork. The first time he tried to blow glass, his breath had hitched, he’d jerked the pipe up, and a fleck of red-hot glass rolled on to his tongue. When he tried to pour glass into a mould, it shifted, making one side of a bowl far thinner than the other. For weeks every piece he made ended in the cullet or waste glass barrel, to be remelted or used in other projects.
Now the other apprentices and journeymen smirked as his gathers dropped in the furnace or on to the floor. They grinned as the masters rejected piece after piece. Once Kethlun had never measured how much of a colouring agent to add to a crucible of molten glass: he just knew. When he measured now, the colours came out wrong.
He did not dare say that he thought the glass itself had turned on him. He had the notion that it was trying to tell him things. It wanted him to shape it in ways that differed from what he wanted. Keth feared that if he spoke such thoughts to any of his family, they would turn him over to healers who specialized in madness, and never let him near a furnace again. Even the mages in his family never talked of glass as if it were alive.
One spring day he came home to find the guildmasters seated with his father and uncles. All of them, men and women, looked decidedly uncomfortable when they saw him. Keth’s brain, so much quicker than his tongue or hands, told him what was in the wind. The guildmasters meant to strip him of his journeyman’s rank and send him back among the apprentices until he regained his old skill, if he ever did.
He could not bear it. “I’ve been th-thinking,” he said, trying to keep from stammering. He leaned against the receiving-room wall, hoping to look casual, hoping they would not sense his fear. “A change of scene, th-that’s what I need. Fresh inspiration. I’m a j-journeyman. I’ll journey. South, I th-think. Visit the cousins. Learn new techniques.”
Guildmistress Hafgwyn looked at Kethlun’s father. “It might be for the best,” she said. “I am not comfortable with the matter we discussed.” Her bright black eyes met Keth’s. “It will do. You may go with the guild’s protection. Bring fresh knowledge back to us, along with your old skill.”
And so he had worked his way down the coast of the Endless Ocean, going around the Pebbled Sea and continuing south and east. At last he reached the shop of his fourth cousin once removed, Antonou Tinas, in Tharios. By then he’d recovered some of his old ability with moulds and pulled glass. Antonou was getting old. He preferred to do engraving and polishing in the main shop as he waited on customers. Keth could make the pieces Antonou needed, then practise his glassblowing in private, with no one to see how badly he did it.
Just when he felt safe, along came this girl, and her lightning.
Trembling, Keth forced himself outside, to the well, and drank some water. Then he returned to the workshop. It was a shambles. He’d broken finished glass, thrown his blowpipe, knocked over jars of colouring agents. He had to clean up before Antonou saw the mess. He reached for a broom.