She blinked at that and cleared her throat, hoping he would attribute her flushed face to the heat of this place and her layers of wool. Sharing was not a good idea. Sharing when she was pretending to be male was never a good idea, because they’d room her with another male. She’d have to do all her changing in the refreshing room and bind her breasts even for sleeping. At least it was winter, so the extra layers would keep her warm. “Uh . . . who am I sharing it with?”
“Me.” Pulling his scarf down, he flashed her a smile and opened a door at the bottom of the stairs. Alonnen nodded at yet another person seated at a table. This time, it was a woman, though Rexei could only tell because she had definite curves under her knit tunic. The Guild Master lifted his chin at both of them. “Margei, this is Rexei Longshanks. Rexei’s being moved to the inner Vortex. Rexei, this is Margei, master rank. She’s sort of a leftenant type—and much better-looking than my brother,” he added, winking at the middle-aged woman.
Margei blushed but gave him a dark look. “And happily married.” She turned her green gaze on Rexei. Her brow creased in a frown. “Well, you’re a bit tall for an unbearded youth. How old are you, lad? Fifteen?”
“Old enough to know it’s none of your business.” At the other woman’s affronted look, Rexei gave her a pointed one. “You’re married, remember?”
“He has you there,” Alonnen said. Tugging Rexei past the station, he led her down the hall to the door at the end. He touched the wood rather than the doorknob. She saw the faintest ripple of magic over its surface and stiffened. Sensing her movement, he glanced back at her. “Relax. Everything’s disguised by the Vortex. I’ve even made some progress with mastering that masking spell of yours.”
“Funny, I don’t remember teaching you,” Rexei countered. After her message had been delivered to the Hydraulics Guild, she had been drawn into the Mages Guild to explain just how strong she was—moderately so—and how thoroughly she could mask her abilities. That had led to her being inducted into the Teachers Guild for one month as she strove to train three other mages to replicate the meditation spells her mother had taught her. But that had been two women and a man, and that other man was taller and had possessed a rounded, more broad nose.
“Scrying mirror,” the Guild Master explained. “I watched what I could, when I could, and puzzled out the rest on my own. You’re a terrible teacher, you know.”
“I know. Aside from the Carters Guild, it’s the shortest I’ve ever been apprenticed,” she muttered. “I didn’t like doing it.”
“You’ll never make master rank in any discipline if you can’t learn how to teach better,” he warned her.
“It’s the subject I don’t like. I don’t even like saying the M word out loud, and I’ve spent over half my life hiding that such things even exist, never mind that I’m one of them. But I taught new carving tricks in the Engravers Guild, and everyone took to the lessons like ducks to water,” she countered. Then frowned. Her sense of direction was good. The hallways were still smooth and seamless, broken only by metal-framed doors. “How much of this complex is under the reservoir?”
“The outer layers are on the hillsides above the shoreline, the middle layers under the shoreline. The inner depths of the Vortex are mid-lake. There used to be an island there. It got destroyed when the last Convocation of Gods and Man ended rather abruptly, killing off Mekha. Unfortunately, not permanently. He came back, more hungry than before, which was when everything grew exponentially worse for us.”
“That foreign fellow was rather sure Mekha is gone. He swore it was what he believed had happened on a Truth Stone,” Rexei offered. “He said he’d heard about such things happening in the ancient days, back when we still had the Convocations. I don’t know how it happened now, but the embroidery, the carvings, anything directly tied to Him . . . all gone.”
“Oh, I know how. And every single one of us who pricked a thumb and bled in the protest books owes a certain Darkhanan priestess a huge thank-you, since she’s followed through on her promise.”
Using his palm to unlock one last door, he stepped through and pulled her into an astonishing chamber . . . if one could call it that, since it seemed to be both outside and inside at the same time. It was as if a great, multiguild glassworks team had crafted a huge, crystalline bowl and upended it in the reservoir, trapping a vast bubble of air in which a large, multileveled stone building now sat, anchored to what had to be the stub of bedrock left over from the explosion he had alluded to a few moments before.
“Breathtaking, isn’t it?” Alonnen asked her, grinning the moment she glanced his way. He removed his cap and green lenses as he did so, revealing kind hazel green eyes and longish strawberry blond curls pulled back into a short tail at the nape of his neck. “Welcome to the safest place for mages in all of Mekhana.”
Breathtaking was the word for it. It wasn’t just the fishbowl dome—literally, fish were swimming down near the bottom edges, barely visible in the glow from the crystals providing illumination for everything, while thin patches of ice distorted the light of what had to be Brother Moon overhead. It was also the man next to her. Seeing that grin, the welcoming warmth of it, made her feed odd. Nervous, excited, and perched on the edge of something big. Like her first solo ride on a motorhorse at messenger speeds.
“The view’s a lot better in the daylight, of course. Fish, plants . . . well, more of the latter in the warmer parts of the year. But the sunlight through the ice can be nice. Oh, don’t worry about the lights being seen at night. It’s all cloaked under layers and layers of illusions,” he dismissed, waiving his free hand. The other had tucked his scarf and cap under his arm, while his spectacles had gone into a clever pocket on the breast of his tunic. He caught her gaze drifting down over his lean chest and shrugged, misinterpreting her curiosity. “I know, I know, I’m not wearing a knitted shirt. Certainly not one I knitted myself.
“Truth be told, lad, I can practically spin wool into gold, it’s that fine and slub free, but anything after that point keeps eluding me. Stabbing my fingers with embroidery needles, hopelessly tangling any yarn—oh, speaking of which,” Alonnen added, nudging her toward the multistory structure ahead of them. “You were given a scrap of spell-knitting by Master Harpshadow. Do you still have it?”
She put her hand over her pouch. “Yes. I’m lucky I put it back in my pouch, not in my coat pocket, or it’d still be back at the temple, like my coat and my cap.”
That checked him mid-stride. Swinging around, he faced her, his cheerfulness gone, along with much of the color in his cheeks. “They have a cap from your head? With your hairs in it?”
Defensively, Rexei touched her chest. “I didn’t have any choice! One minute, I’m helping get the others out of the priests’ clutches, and the next thing I know, they’re shoving me out the door with the last of them, right past the bubble-ward! They had the doors locked and shielded before we knew what hit us. Maybe they won’t realize the cap on the floor is mine, and there’s no way they could tell which coat is mine, since there were five other Servers from the guild serving the temple at the time, and they got shoved out without their coats, too.
“I couldn’t exactly go knocking on the door asking for it back, either. Not when I was supposed to be playing a half-wit,” she added, giving him a hard stare. “I don’t care who’s signing my pay vouchers. I’m not going to take huge risks for anyone.”
“And we won’t ask you to,” Alonnen stated, touching Rexei’s forearm. “It’ll be okay. We’ve had hairs caught in tracking amulets before, and we’ve always been able to lead them astray once they get near the dam. We’ll need a few hairs from your head, but within a day, they’ll be convinced you’ve gone over the eastern mountains into northern Aurul.