Тамора Пирс - Magic Steps

Passing the door to the front hall and the window, Sandry discovered they were not alone. The guards up stairs and someone downstairs must have heard voices talking. People were looking into the dining room, trying to think of ways to stop this. She knew they were asking themselves if they could take the Dihanurs before they hurt Pasco any more, and she knew they could not. Alzena was too fast with her knife.

Putting the north peg aside, Sandry looked at her student. All he wants is to dance and have fun, she thought.

Days ago—was it only days? — she had taken a strand of his magic from him and kept it inside her, so she could always find him at need. Now she grasped that thread and sent a rush of her own magic through it making it rope-strong.

"Just one more thing, and you'll be free," she told her captives, "I have to unspin the magic that's in my net, otherwise it will keep hold of you." Picking up the edge of the net, she broke the cord and tacked one end of it to the leader on her spindle.

"No tricks,” Alzena growled, her voice barely human. "I would be so happy to gut this boy of yours,"

"No tricks," agreed Sandry meekly. "I just have to gather the net on the spindle to make it release you. You've seen how they work." Thrusting her power into the spindle, she gave it a quick, hard twirl. It whirled faster than she could hold; she dropped it from a hand that blistered immediately. The knots in the unmagic were falling apart, the force of the spindle twining the net into a single thick rope. It would also spin every single drop of unmagic that was touching the net.

Sandry watched Alzena. She saw the woman's eyes widen when she felt the first gentle tug. Before the woman knew she'd been tricked, Sandry yanked hard on the rope that bound her to Pasco. It pulled him out of Alzena's grip and threw him into the wall. He staggered to his feet, his cuts bleeding.

The boy mage felt it first. He began to giggle, spreading his arms as the spindle drew on all the nothingness in him, puling him into the net and winding him up like thread.

Now Alzena and Nurhar realized they were in trouble. Their still-living flesh, unlike the mage's, was only veined with nothingness. What was left of their real bodies was being pulled apart. The spindle whirled, its tip smoking against the tiled floor. Now the Dihanurs were dragged across the room, their flesh battling the magic's pull. It bulged between the strands of darkness that were being drawn from them; the unmagic cut into them like silk threads as it twined onto the spindle.

Sandry held Alzena's eyes with hers. She could see when the woman knew what must happen if this were not stopped.

"Please…” It was Nurhar who asked, not Alzena.

Sandry shook her head.

Their bodies exploded in a crimson shower, sending pieces everywhere. The impact slammed Pasco into the wall a second time, covering him and Sandry with blood. He slumped to the floor and vomited helplessly.

"I'm still not sure I approve of moving in with dancers," Gran'ther Edoar said. He watched as Pasco loaded a seabag full of clothes into the cart that would carry him to Yasmнn's school. "If your net-dancing can be used to trap rats, and you can direct where and when people look at you, it seems you are better suited to harrier work than we guessed. What can you learn of that from this female?"

"This is better, Gran'ther.” Though it gave him quivers to argue with the old man, Pasco forced himself to say it. "If I only put my magic to harrying, well—," He hesitated, trying to put into words what he had learned in Durshan Rokat's dining room. "If I don't understand my magic, the good and the bad, I'm not a mage at all. I'm just a tool, to be used, like that poor chuff' the killers were using. Anyone could put their hand to me, and make me work however they want, if they figure out how to control me. That's not counting the trouble I might get myself into, not knowing what I can do and what I can't."

"Well, at least you've learned that much," commented Halmaedy. She had come to see Pasco's departure along with Gran'ther and Pasco's mother.

Pasco sneered at his oldest sister. To his grandfather and the silent Zahra he said, "Lady Sandry will keep me out of trouble whilst I learn. And the little monster'll work me so hard I won't have the strength to get into mischief."

"If we can go?" asked the carter, her voice a little too patient, "It's comin' on to rain, and I got bundles to deliver, too."

Zahra kissed her son's forehead. "We'll expect you to supper every Firesday," she told Pasco sternly. "Come say hello if things bring you to East District."

"Mama, it's not like I'm leaving the city!" cried Pasco, laughing. "I'm just going to Festival Street!"

"Mind your teachers!" Gran'ther told him as he climbed up beside the carter. "We don't want to hear of you giving any trouble!"

Pasco grinned and waved as the cart started forward. He knew very well that between Yazmнn and Lady Sandry, he was the one in for trouble.

Sandry halted on the doorstep at Discipline cottage. A pudgy young man in a novice's white habit sat at the table, awkwardly fitting together the pieces of a table loom. He stared at her, jaw hanging open.

She wasn't quite sure what to say. "Is—is Lark— "

The young man lurched to his feet and ran to the back of the house. He scrambled up the narrow stair to the garret.

"Comas, what on earth—," Lark came out of her workshop, a bolt of cloth in her hands. She noticed Sandry in the doorway. "Well! Look at you!" She put the cloth on the table and came to Sandry, hands out stretched. "You had people worried!"

Sandry nodded, hugging her teacher. For days after that dreadful meeting with the Dihanurs and their mage, she had kept to her rooms at Duke's Citadel, eating little, thinking a great deal. She'd had to force herself to talk to Pasco a week later. Even then she had done it only because the duke had said the boy thought she was furious with him because he'd been caught.

Once she had reassured Pasco, it seemed that life would not let her alone. There was Yazmнn, who wanted to talk about his training. Lark visited to say that she had been watching Pasco's lessons at Yazmin's, but it looked as if the novice weaver she'd mentioned on Sandry's last visit was indeed a mage. Moreover, he was too shy to deal with more than one or two people at a time. She really needed to concentrate on him, at Discipline. Erdogun had a tantrum with the Residence housekeeper Sandry’s hearing: he told the women that he’d gotten very fond of having Lady Sandrilene cover these matters; had servants no minds of their own to use?

The duke came for advice on matter of taste. What colors were flattering to him, what gifts might please a woman of experience and which were to overpowering, did he look older or younger when he rode in a carriage? That had actually been the first light moment in Sandy’s release from self-hate, the discovery that her hopes for the duke and Yazmin had borne fruit.

The final spur to her return to the larger world came as three letters in two days, one from Briar, one from Daja, and one from Tris. All were thick; all wanted to know why she hadn’t written. They were full of news about what they did and what they had seen. They brimmed with life. They made her present world look shadowy by comparison, and shadows, Sandy realized at last, where one thing she did not want in her mind.

“I’ve been very silly,” she told Lark now.

“You did a very hard thing, for reasons that everyone agreed were right,” Lark said firmly. “You acted as an adult, and you did it without hate. I’m not sure I could have done it without hating them, after seeing that poor maimed boy.”