Tris turned to look at Zhegorz. He had gone silent, white-faced under his stubble. Daja released him so he could cover his face with his hands. He was still trembling.
Tris opened just one of the shutters this time, the half that wouldn’t let air blow directly toward Daja’s table. Neither Daja nor Zhegorz seemed to notice, though the cook and maids sighed their relief. The kitchen was heating up.
Tris went over and plumped herself down next to Zhegorz. “Where are you from?”
He flinched from her.
“Stop scowling at him,” ordered Daja, frowning at the redhead. “You’d frighten a Trader’s dozen of crazy people with that frown. Zhegorz is my friend, and I won’t have you scaring him.”
“She’s not scaring me, I don’t think,” muttered Zhegorz.
“Well, you should be scared,” Daja told him stoutly. “Most sensible people are.” She forestalled his protest by raising her brassy hand. “You’re sensible enough, even if you are crazy.”
“If he is, maybe he has reason to be,” Tris said, closing her eyes. “How old are you, Zhegorz?”
He blinked, his thin mouth trembling. “I ... don’t know,” he said at last. “One emperor and two empresses ...”
“Forty-five, maybe fifty,” Wenoura said behind Tris. “Were you too little to remember the old emperor’s death?”
Zhegorz shook his head, appearing to search his memory.
I don’t envy him the task, Tris thought, watching him count on his fingers. No doubt it’s under layers and layers of magical potions and treatments and being locked up. It wasn’t readily apparent to her daily vision, but that could mean simply that if he did have power, as she suspected, he’d tried to bury it. Deep inside herself she worked a change over her vision, closing her eyes before she brought it up to them. For the second time that day she placed a layer of magic over her eyes, though this was very different from the one she had used to see the fishing fleet. Once she felt her eyes begin to sting—they didn’t like this trick, not in the least—she opened them.
Normally she saw magics, including traces, as silver. This particular spell, one she had learned not long before her return to Emelan, showed her different magics in different colors. From this perspective, Zhegorz was coated with patch on patch of power, different spells from different mages. He’d been given all kinds of healing potions for his madness, ordinary healings for illnesses, broken bones, and decayed teeth, and a number of truth spells for the secrets he wasn’t supposed to know. Threaded around and through them, almost vanishing under her gaze before it emerged in its full strength, or part strength, was a bright gold thread that belonged to Zhegorz himself.
Tris got up and walked around the table, eyeing him from every angle. The man was an insane patchwork doll of all the spells that had been worked on him since—“When did they first say you were mad?” she asked him.
He would not look at her. “Fifteen,” he mumbled. “For my birthday they sent me to Yorgiry’s House, because I talked to the voices. I went home sometimes after, but I always got worse. They began to leave baskets of food and clothes at the garden gate, but they’d lock the gate. They wouldn’t come out until I was gone. That happened two or three times. Then one time the healers let me out and my family wasn’t there anymore. They had sold the house and moved away. I think I was twenty.” He looked at Daja. “The old emperor died around my fifteenth birthday. All of us who were mad got new black coats to wear for mourning.”
“He’s fifty-two or thereabouts, then,” Wenoura said. “By that count.” She turned: The maids had all stopped what they were doing to listen. “I don’t see supper magicking itself onto the table,” she said sharply. “Get back to work, you lazy drudges. We’ve supper and breakfast to fix and food for them and the nobles to eat on the road tomorrow while you gape like a field full of cows!”
Zhegorz looked at Daja, trembling. “You’re going away?”
Daja looked at Tris, who frowned at Zhegorz as she pulled on her lower lip. I remember that look, Daja thought. Just because we aren’t in each other’s minds doesn’t mean I don’t know what she’s thinking right now. And she won’t say another word until all her thoughts are lined up. She thinks he has magic. She’s thought it since she opened only one shutter. And it must be strange magic, or she’d have told him outright. Or there’s something peculiar in it.
Just because Tris isn’t talking doesn’t mean I can’t, she told herself. “Yes, but it’s all right.” She reached over and closed her hands around Zhegorz’s trembling fingers again. “Yes, we’re going away, but you aren’t to worry, because you’ll be with us. It means you’ll be out of the city—it’s worse in the cities, you said?”
Both Zhegorz and Tris nodded.
“You’ll be with us. Zhegorz, you know my magic’s a little—odd, right?” Daja asked.
Zhegorz nodded. Tris stopped pulling her lip and began to chew on the end of one of her thin lightning braids, lost in thought.
Doesn’t that hurt? wondered Daja, watching in awe as the redhead nibbled her source of sparks. To Zhegorz, Daja said, “Well, hers is, too, and so are the magics of the lady who owns this house and our brother.” She spoke under the clatter as the maids and Wenoura got to work. “And the thing with having odd magic is that you are more inclined to spot it in somebody else. My friend here—her name is Tris—she’s already figured out you hear voices because she hears them, too, on the winds.”
Zhegorz yanked around to stare up at Tris. “You hear them, too?” he asked in wonderment.
“For years,” Daja said when Tris only nodded. “So part of what’s wrong with you is that you never learned a way to manage what you hear, or even that the problem was magic all along. We don’t know about the visions,”—Daja glanced at Tris, who shook her head—“though maybe they’re on the winds?”
Tris shrugged.
“Well, she’ll figure it out, I suppose, and you’ll stay with us while she works on it.”
Chime had endured enough of the maids and cook who now bustled around her napping place. She wriggled out between their legs and took flight, to land on the table in front of Zhegorz. The man flinched away and knocked the bench over to land on his back.
“That’s just Chime,” said Tris, reaching down a hand. “She’s all right. She’s a living glass dragon. They’re not very common.”
Daja snorted: In her dry way, Tris had made a joke. Zhegorz stared up at Tris, then cautiously took the offered hand. As she helped him to his feet, he said in a voice filled with wonder, “Are all of you decked in marvels? Are all of you as mad as she is?” He pointed to Daja with his free hand. “She walked into a burning building that was collapsing. And before she did it, she saved my life and the lives of others who were as mad as me. Madder.”
“Collapsing buildings?” Tris asked Daja. She released Zhegorz to put the bench upright again. Gingerly the man sat to peer at Chime, who had decided to charm. As she wove her way around and between his hands and arms, chiming, Daja looked away from Tris.
“A man I knew, supposedly a friend, was setting fires,” she mumbled. “It’s not something I like to discuss.”
“She burned him up,” Zhegorz said, smoothing reverent fingers over Chime’s surface. “Her and other fire folk who were present at the execution. The governor was furious.” He looked at Daja. “It was quicker than letting him burn slow. And he broke the law.”
Wenoura handed Tris a bowl of hot soup and a spoon. The redhead set them down in front of Zhegorz. She didn’t appear to see the single tear that escaped Daja’s eye before Daja blotted it away. Daja could still remember that cold afternoon and that roaring pillar of flame. Knowing she and the other fire mages had saved Bennat Ladradun an agonizing death hadn’t soothed the pain of his betrayal.