feet, Little Bear dropping with a groan in the doorway. “It’s the furthest thing from my mind,” she assured him, watching threads of colour in the breeze that flowed between the window and the door. The threads all came to hover around Keth, lighting on his eyes, his jaws, his chest, making him sparkle in Tris’s sight.
“I suppose you never did anything of the kind,” Keth accused.
“Never,” replied Tris, straight-faced. “And if Niko tells you that one time I decided to halt the tides, and the rocky cove where I tried it is now called ‘Gravel Beach’, well, he exaggerates.”
“You. Tried to halt the. The tides.” There was awe in Keth’s voice.
“The important word there is ‘tried’. I was very foolish, and lucky enough to survive the experiment,” Tris informed him. “Are you hungry at all?”
Keth shook his head. “Sleepy, a little. Trying to think of ways to pull the lightning out of the globes. Where were you? I went upstairs, but Ferouze is with Glaki.”
“I’m trying something of my own,” Tris said. “I need to be in open air for it to work. It’s not going as well as I had hoped,” she confessed, and sighed.
“You have trouble? But you wear the medallion,” Keth protested, sitting up on his elbows. “I thought, once you have that — ”
Tris shook her head with a rueful smile, wishing that were so. “Different spells make different kinds of trouble,” she explained. “Nobody can do every kind of magic, and the more complex a spell, the harder it is to work.” She sighed, remembering. “Three years ago there was an epidemic in Summersea,” she told him. “Nearly thirty of us, including my brother Briar and two great mages, worked day after day, trying to make a cure using magic. Every time something went wrong, we knew more people were dying. And there wasn’t a thing we could do except keep working, one hard step at a time.”
She looked at him. She could see that he listened to her with every particle of his being. Finally now, to Keth she was not fourteen and unworthy; she was a mage, with a mage’s wisdom. They had come a long way since their first meeting. “Every mage knows what it means to fail at something,” she continued, “or to bungle it, or to do so much you just collapse. One of our great mages got the essence of the disease on her by sheer accident. She got sick and nearly died.”
“I thought magic made things simpler,” Keth protested. “Just a wave of a hand, and poof! You have answers. This slowness, this plodding, it’s — ”
“Too much like the everyday world?” suggested Tris.
Keth nodded.
Tris leaned over to pat his arm. “In some ways, magic is the everyday world, complete with fumbles, sweat, tears… All the happy things. Go to sleep, Keth. Tomorrow your magic will be fresh. We’ll try again.”
“My heart flutters with joy,” he grumbled. With a groan he turned on his side. “I’d like to tuck this killer into the furnace, let him anneal for a while. It might burn off the impurities.”
“I like that,” Tris said, imagining it. “Try not to dream about it, though.” She got up and blew out his candle, then went outside with Chime and Little Bear. Quietly they climbed back up to their room.
Tris halted outside the door, staring into the dark, or at least into a dark punctuated by the occasional spark of colour. Her head ached; her eyes burned. She would learn how to do this. She wouldn’t allow herself to be driven mad by a flood of sparks. The trick would be to learn it in time to capture Yali’s murderer. She was beginning to doubt that she would.
She woke the dozing Ferouze and sent her back to her rooms, her payment of five biks stripped of sparks. Glaki, sound asleep, lay half out of bed, her head nearly touching the floor, as limp as her ragged doll. Tris gently lifted her back on to the bed and arranged Glaki’s old doll on her left side. On her right Tris placed a new doll she had bought earlier, a pretty thing with brown hair, a yellow veil and a costume much like Xantha’s. Beside the doll she also set a brightly coloured ball so Glaki could play with Little Bear. They were just tokens, not that expensive, but Tris had owned few toys. She knew it could be lonely, sometimes, to have only one doll.