"Strange," Zaranda Star said, and took her leave.
From curiosity she wandered down Anvil Road to where it crossed Tinsmith Way, where the halfling firebrand addressed his followers from his wagonbed. Even here, in a predominantly grimy mechanical district, the upper floors where craftsfolk lived were alive with bright flowers in window boxes. The people of Tethyr, "wicked" Zazesspurians no less than the olive-growers and sheepherders of the countryside, loved their gardens.
The flowers' brisk beauty was not mirrored in the street, where most of Toby Hedgeblossom's hearers were roughly dressed. That was nothing uncommon in Zazesspur these days. What was uncommon in this crowd were the thick calluses of workingmen's hands and the colored-cloth brassards of the guilds. Hedge-blossom addressed his spiels to the laborer, but it mainly seemed idlers who were drawn by his promises of free wealth.
Perhaps, Zaranda thought, the real workers of Zazesspur realize who'd have to pay for Toby's schemes. But no; likely the real laborers were occupied at their labors. The lure of money for nothing was hard to resist; why, after all, did so many follow the hazardous but not particularly labor-intensive road of the adventurer?
She smiled a taut smile, sliding through the crowd and turning her hips this way and that to avoid brushing anybody in a suggestive way. You're going to start having cynical thoughts about yourself if you aren't careful, girl, she realized.
Something brushed her left hand. Pickpockets were as common as potholes in Zazesspur. Zaranda was always alert, and her senses and reflexes both were fine. She spun, clapping her hand to Crackletongue's hilt, thankful she secreted her coin at various strategic points of her person rather than leaving it to dangle from her belt like ripe fruit for the magpies.
A figure clad in a stained linen jerkin was moving purposefully but not hastily away from her. She could not pursue without jostling members of Hedgeblossom's audience, who were beginning to work themselves into an enthusiastic state. Nothing seemed missing; no point in giving chase-
Then she realized that, far from taking anything from her, the mysterious figure had slipped something into her hand, a papyrus scrap half-crumpled so that the coarse fibers were beginning to part. The words inked in it in a half-literate Common scrawl were legible enough: If you want get back whats yurs, look fer the one-arm man at the Carpet Mart tomorro, wun bell past daybrek.
She looked up sharply. The linen-clad man had vanished. Zaranda shrugged and stuffed the scrap in her belt. Separating herself from the mob-now being led in a chant of "share the wealth!" by Toby Hedgeblossom-she set out with long-legged strides down the Way, toward the Exotic Quarter.
The wizard's face was a twisted red mask glaring forth from white hair and disorder. "That's it," he said in a voice wound tight as a crossbow string. "Enough. Begone with you and your eerie pranks."
The girl could barely see him through her tears of hurt and anger and the red-hair tangles that hung unwashed before her eyes. "It was an accident," she said. Her lower lip jutted in what looked like sullen defiance, but was more an attempt to hold back full-blown sobs.
His self-control snapped like a crystal goblet dropped on pavement from great height. "Accident?" he screeched. He flung out a skinny arm in a gesture that encompassed the wreckage of his shop and made his voluminous sleeve flap most alarmingly. "Accident! You summon up a whirlwind to devastate my shop, and try to pass it off as accident?"
The walls of her own control gave way. "But I can't help it!" she wailed through a sudden flood of tears. "I don't know how to control the magic. That's why I want to learn!"
"Magic? This is no magic! Did you speak an incantation?" He was so close to her now that his spittle blended with the tears, making shiny runnels down her cheek and further matting the ends of her hair. "No! Did you use spell components?" He scooped a pinch of spilled particolored powder from a bench whose marble-slab top had proven too massive to be toppled by the whirlwind.
He threw the powder in the air and blew on it. It puffed into a tiny cloud, then each mote became a brief bright spark of a different color that dispersed and drifted off into the gloom.
"No! One moment there was nothing but a thumb-fingered aspirant to be my apprentice making poor work of sweeping the floor. The next-chaos!" He shook his head. His gray hair stood out on both sides of his balding skull like dispirited static discharges. "This was no magic. Magic is orderly and disciplined. Magic is something learned, something labored for, something won."
He seized her by the elbow and marched her toward the door. "What you did wasn't magic. It was madness, or possession, or I-know-not-what. But it's not something I'll suffer near me!"
He threw open the door. From the afternoon street, the sunlight poured in like scalding water.
"Now get you gone," the magician declared, gripping the girl's arms both-handed to eject her. "And never let me see you again. Or I'll show you what magic really is ab-ouch!"
The last came out in a squall as light flashed and sharp thunder cracked. The mage jumped back, waving singed palms in the air. His dark eyes were wide with shock and terror.
She stuck her tongue out at him and ran away down the Street of Misfortune Tellers.
"Milady," a young voice called, clear and fresh as springwater. "A moment of your time?"
Zaranda's long-legged impatient strides had carried her into a district where the upper stories of buildings jutted out to overhang already narrow, twisty streets, so that it seemed they leaned their heads together to conspire against the traffic bustling below. She stopped and turned, dropping her hand inside the knuckle-bow that guarded Crackletongue's hilt. The voice had sounded fair, but Zaranda had little reason to take for granted the friendliness of anyone she encountered.
Two young people were approaching her, a youth and a maid, he with hair as bright and yellow as summer sun, she with hair of lustrous pale brown falling in kinky waves down over her shoulders. Both were dressed as simply as the poorest peasant or artisan or mendicant, in white smocks belted at the waist with knotted rope. Yet the fabric of the smocks was shim-mery stuff, white and evidently expensive to Zaranda's merchant eye; their hands were soft and pale, and she doubted the girl had been born with that delicate wave in her carefully tended hair. These, then, were children of wealth.
Such seldom had much use for rough-garbed adventuresses of Zaranda's ilk, her purchased patent of nobility notwithstanding-and naturally she did not walk the streets with an imp mincing after her, announcing to the world that she was Countess Morninggold. But their smiles were so friendly and open that Zaranda felt an urge to bundle them off the street before anyone saw them and took advantage of them.
"How may I help you?" she asked.
"We'd like to give you this flower," said the girl, holding forth a blossom as brilliantly blue as a civic guardsman's drawers.
"And what do you wish in exchange?"
The girl's face fell as if Zaranda had said something cruel. But her companion laughed a musical laugh. Like the girl, he wore a plain gold torque around his neck.
"You needn't speak that way," he said. "There's no necessity for payment. Please, lady, accept it as our love-offering."
"I've often found," Zaranda said, "that things called free often cost the dearest." But she suffered the white-clad girl to fasten the flower behind her ear.
"There," the girl said, stepping back with a smile. "You are even lovelier than before."