washed her face and hands and settled in the chair to read. The flicker of the candle was too hard on her weary eyes. She blew it out. Making herself comfortable, she combed one of her thin braids until enough lightning had collected on the end to make it glow. With steady light to read by, Tris opened Winds’ Path.
At Touchstone the next morning, Tris and Keth were preparing to meditate when Tris looked at Glaki. The girl sat in her usual corner, out of the range of any molten glass accidents. She had arranged her dolls, Chime and Little Bear around her, but she was looking at Keth and Tris, loneliness in her eyes.
“You’d find it boring, most likely,” Tris warned.
Glaki shrugged.
Tris looked at Keth, who also shrugged. “As long as she doesn’t make noise.”
Before Tris could invite her, Glaki raced across the shop to plop herself on to the dirt floor between Tris and Keth. “I do things and count to seven,” she told Tris.
“Right,” the older girl said. “Breathe in and count, hold it and count.”
Keth vanished into his meditation, his magic back to its former strength and tucked into his imagined crucible, where it shone brightly in Tris’s magical vision. Once she saw Glaki knew how to breathe, Tris began, deliberately using her power to reach for water without using her eyes as a change from her normal exercises. She found it. Water ran in the gutter outside as shopkeepers washed their doorsteps; it splashed in fountains on the Street of Glass, rushed in streams throughout the city, churned in the bed of the Kurchal River as it raced to the sea. Further off, in the marrow of her bones, Tris felt the pull of the sea and the draw of the tides. When they would have taken her far from shore, Tris shook herself free and returned. Glaki was asleep, her thumb in her mouth. Keth looked much improved.
They spent the morning quietly. Tris went to try wind-scrying again. Keth moulded glass bowls and pressed signs for health into their bases. When Glaki woke, she played with her dolls, Chime and Little Bear.
The city’s clocks had just struck midday when Keth shouted, “Tris?”
The redhead’s still figure in the courtyard didn’t move.
Keth frowned. “Chime, bring Tris out of it?” he asked.
Chime soared into the open air, the sun gliding from her wings as she flew. She lit on Tris’s shoulder and looked back at Keth. He nodded.
Chime sank glass fangs into Tris’s earlobe. Tris let out a yelp, swatted the dragon and fumbled for her spectacles and handkerchief. “What did you do that for?” she demanded. Her vision was filled with colours. She groped around her as a blind person might, trying to see past everything that filled the air. Chime stayed just out of her reach as Tris snatched at her.
“Tris, I’ve got that feeling again,” Keth called, his voice shaking. “Another globe.”
“Start,” she ordered. With her handkerchief pressed to her earlobe, she carefully made her way over the stones of the courtyard, seeing them dimly behind washes and currents of moving colour. “Keth, did you tell Chime to bite me?” The dragon, chinking in distress, lit on Tris’s shoulder beside the unwounded ear.
“Of course not!” Keth said, picking up a blowpipe. “But I’m glad it worked.”
“I’m sure you are,” she said sarcastically. “Next time I’ll send her to get you out of bed in the morning, see how you like it. Get started, Keth, don’t wait for me. Try what you did yesterday. Make the lightning thinner, if you can.” Without even looking she called her protective barrier out of the ground outside the shop. That was one of the benefits of laying protective circles in the ground: the earth remembered them if they were made on the same lines more than twice.
Tris sat on a bench to watch as Keth collected his gather and brought the pipe up. His hands were more deft than they had been when she’d first seen him. He barely looked inside the furnace, sensing when he had enough glass for his needs. Best of all, Tris could feel the change in him. He must have been this way before the lightning struck him, in casual command of fire and glass, born to work in a place like this. She wished she could tell him so, but doubted he would listen. To him a lightning globe that caught the Ghost was his way to buy his life back. He