Tris, Keth and Glaki watched Dema trudge out of the courtyard. Only when he was well out of sight did Keth hear Tris mutter, “Barbarians.” She looked at Glaki and scowled. “It’s fine to talk about torture in front of a child, but gods forbid we talk about the people who get tortured.”
When Glaki’s eyes went wide with fright, Tris smiled crookedly. “I’m not angry with you,” she assured the little girl. “Not even a bit.” Glaki relaxed slightly and returned to playing with her ragged doll.
“Tharian customs,” murmured Keth, though he understood Tris’s feelings. “We’re only guests here.”
“Slavery is more honest,” she retorted. “At least the only thing anyone ever blames slavery on is bad luck, not impurity.”
Keth nodded. “We’d better start. I want to get some ordinary pieces done for Antonou today besides the other things. He’s been very good about me using up his supplies.”
Tris settled Glaki with her toys and placed her magical protections around the workshop. Once more she and Kethlun settled into meditation. That morning, at her direction, Keth worked on letting his magic fill just his skin without going outside his body. Tris barely said a word apart from letting him know that his efforts were successful.
Once they finished pure meditation, Keth blew glass. Working slowly, taking pains, he produced three glass balls. None of them held lightning; all had lightning that flickered over their surfaces, but only in bursts that did nothing to hide the glass underneath.
Glaki was placing the third globe where the others sat — the lightning on these globes didn’t sting — when someone outside the barrier cleared his throat. It was Antonou. “Keth? Cousin? Might I have a word?”
Tris lowered her magical barrier. “Keep an eye on Glaki,” she told Keth, walking past Antonou into the centre of the courtyard. “I’ll be right here, but don’t disturb me.”
Standing beside the well, Tris took off her spectacles and tucked them in her sash, then closed her eyes and began to meditate. The men’s voices and the sound of Glaki as she played with her doll, Little Bear and Chime, faded from her attention, along with the street noise. Once Tris was ready, she opened her eyes.
The day’s breezes slid before her sight: they were clear in her vision, though nothing else was. She saw the air’s eddies and pools, the change in currents where heat from the kitchen flowed through cooler air. Chime soared past her nose. Tris’s eyes picked out the curling and parting of the air as the dragon cut through it, as water parted around a boat.
Whispering a magical formula, Tris drew signs first on her left temple, then on her right: the crescent for magical vision, the seven-pointed star for the strength to manage what she would see, and the four small waves of the winds. Then she clasped her hands before her, and waited for her sight to improve.
A wisp of colour shone on a current of air, like the glint in the depths of an opal. Another wisp. Another. The air streamed with flares in many hues, threads of fast-moving colour. The wisps grew infrequent, then rare. At last they stopped appearing to Tris’s eyes at all.
She sighed. Her first try was over. Using a counter-clockwise motion, she wiped the signs from her temples, and lurched. A strong arm caught her. She looked up into Keth’s face. “Why are you mauling me?” she demanded, struggling weakly. She felt as wrung out as a sheet on laundry day.
Something on Keth’s face looked suspiciously like a smile. Tris gave up her fight and groped in her sash for her spectacles.
“I had to stop you from falling into Antonou’s well,” he explained, his voice quivering. “They’d never get the taste of mage out of the water.”
Tris shoved her glasses on to her nose and glared at him. He was smiling. “What’s so funny?” she growled.
“You. Did you know it’s almost midday?” Keth set Tris on her feet.
She swayed as she looked around. There was the lip of the well, just thirty centimetres away. Little Bear, Chime and Glaki sat on the ground nearby, staring at her in fascination.
“Come on, great teacher,” Keth said, wrapping an arm around Tris’s waist to steady her as she tottered over to a bench. “Rest your weary bones.”
“It can’t be nearly midday,” Tris argued, though her magical senses told her it was. “What happened to the morning?”
“It passed while you gazed into the air,” Keth replied, easing