Frostpine grinned. He was brown like Daja, but where her build was solid, his was wiry, his muscles cables that lined his long body. He wore his hair wild around a perfectly bald crown and kept his beard in the same exuberant style. His Fire dedicate’s crimson robes were every bit as travel worn as hers. “You can’t blame Sandry,” he pointed out. “We were supposed to be home the summer before this.”
“She’d have questions anyway,” Daja said comfortably. Before Sandry had moved to Duke’s Citadel, she had shared a house at Winding Circle with Daja and their other foster-brother and foster-sister, Briar and Tris. “She always has questions. Well, she’s going to have to come to Discipline for answers. I won’t spend forever mind-speaking, and once I get back in my own room, I’m not coming out for a week.”
Frostpine reined his horse up. “Discipline?”
Daja halted her own mount and turned to smile at her scatterbrained teacher. “Discipline cottage?” she asked, gently reminding him. “My foster-mother Lark? I live there when you’re not dragging me everywhere between the Syth and the Pebbled Sea?”
Frostpine ran a big hand through his flyaway hair. “Daja, how old are you?”
She rolled her eyes. “Sixteen,” she said even more patiently. “On the thirtieth of Seed Moon, the same day I mark for my birth every year.”
“I should have thought of it sooner,” he said mournfully. “But I swear, as I get older, the harder it gets to think .... Daja, Winding Circle has rules.”
She waited, running a finger over the bright piece of brass that wrapped the palm and back of one hand. The metal was as warm and supple as living skin, a remnant of a forest fire, powerful magics, and Daja’s ill-fated second Trader staff.
Frostpine said, “You probably know the rule already, at least for most of the temple boarding students. At sixteen, they must take vows, pay for their boarding and classes, or leave. And only those who have not attended temple school as children may attend as paying adults.”
“Of course,” Daja said. “There’s a ceremony, and they give the residents of the dormitories papers to show they’ve studied at Winding Circle. But that’s not for Sandry or Briar or Tris or me. We aren’t temple students. We study with some temple dedicates, but not all of our teachers are temple. We live with Lark and Rosethorn at Discipline, not in the dormitories. And we’re proper mages. We’re—we’re different.”
Frostpine was shaking his head. “My dear, if you four still needed a firm education, we might be able to make a case, at least until you earned a medallion as the adult mages do,” he said quietly. “But the fact is that you have your mage’s medallion. As these things are measured, you were considered to be adult mages when you received them, fit to practice and to teach. Of course, you were too young to live on your own then. But now? Unless you are prepared to give your vows to the gods of the Living Circle, you will not be permitted to stay at Discipline.”
Daja put her hand on the front of her tunic. Under it, hanging on a cord around her neck, was the gold medallion that proved that the wearer was a true mage, certified by Winding Circle to practice magic as an adult. She, Sandry, Tris, and Briar had agreed not to show it until they were eighteen unless they had to prove they were accredited mages. It was almost unheard-of for one thirteen-year-old to receive it, let alone four. Their teachers had been careful to let them know they had gotten it not only because they were as powerful and controlled as adults. Possession of a medallion also meant they had to answer to the laws and governing mages of Winding Circle and the university at Lightsbridge. “A leash,” Briar had described it, “to prove to the law we won’t run loose and pee on their bushes.” Their teacher Niko had replied that his description was “crude, but accurate.” Given that warning, and the fuss people made when they learned she had the medallion, Daja showed it as little as possible.
Frostpine bit his lip, then went on. “I can put you up over my forge for a week or two, but after that they’ll make a fuss. You should be able to stay with Lark for a couple of nights, but she does have at least one new student living with her. Perhaps you could go to Sandry’s?”
Daja was a smith, with intense bonds to fire, but for all that, she was normally slow to anger. Something in what he had said lit the tiniest of sparks. I don’t know if he realizes it sounds like he wants me out of the way, she thought, heat tingling in her cheeks. Or like I can throw myself on my foster-sister’s charity. Of course he didn’t mean it to sound as if he wants me out of the way. Even if we have been living in each other’s pockets for longer than we’d first expected to. We didn’t intend to stay so long in Olart, or Capchen, or Anderran. We didn’t plan to spend a whole extra year and a half away after Namorn.
“Daja?” Frostpine asked hesitantly.
I can’t look at him, she thought. I don’t want to cry. I feel all ... lost. Funny.
“We should get moving,” she said, nudging her horse into motion. The sky remained cloudless, but now the day felt gray. Her eagerness to go back had faded.
“Daja, please talk to me,” Frostpine said. “You can stay with me or with Sandry. Frankly, I had expected you would want a house, perhaps even a forge, of your own, since you’re of age. Certainly you can afford it. You haven’t taken vows of poverty.”
He’s smiling at me—I can hear it in his voice, she thought. I should smile back, not worry him. But I feel empty. Lost, like when the Traders declared me outcast because I was the only survivor of that shipwreck. Why didn’t Sandry warn me, all those letters she’s been writing? She babbled of the duke’s health and something or other Lark wove or she embroidered, but wrote no word of not being able to return to Discipline. Of course not. She has family. The duke, and her cousins in Namorn. But me ... I’m cast out of my home. If I don’t have Winding Circle, what do I have?
Briar and Tris will be in the same basket when they come home, Daja realized. They’ll be outcasts, too.
I suppose my lady Sandrilene thought we’d be happy to live as poor relatives. She doesn’t know what it’s like, always being on the edge of homelessness. She’ll expect us to be one cozy little family again, only living on her money, until she marries, or His Grace dies .... And I’ll be left with no home again.
Daja shook her head. It was all a mess, one she didn’t want to discuss.
She forced herself to smile at Frostpine. “Where do we stop tonight?” she asked. “Let’s worry about the other business when we’re closer to Emelan, all right?”
The first visitor to the house and forge at Number 6 Cheeseman Street was Sandry. Daja could feel her nearness through the magical connection they shared, though Daja’s heart had been in such turmoil that she had refused to open that connection to speak to her foster-sister. Now, feeling both apprehensive and angry, she waited for the housemaid to show Sandry into her study.
Sandry thanked the maid and waited for her to leave before she turned on Daja. “I have to learn from your teacher that not only have you been in Emelan two weeks, but you went and bought a house of your own?”
Daja scowled at the shorter girl. “Spare me the ballads,” she replied. “You knew very well I was close. I could hardly sleep for you bothering me to open my mind.”
“Why didn’t you let me in? Why didn’t you tell me anything?” cried Sandry.
Daja had bottled up her feelings since Frostpine had said that the home she looked forward to was home no longer. During the ride to Winding Circle and her reunion with her foster-mother Lark and her temple friends, Daja had shown a smooth and smiling face. She had quietly found a Summersea house with a smith’s forge already attached, then picked out furnishings so she could move in as soon as possible. To everyone—merchants, dedicates, the old smith whose home she had bought, her new servants—she had pretended that setting up her own household was just what she had in mind.