“So I’m just some boohoo bleater, looking for a mama because I have bad dreams?” Briar asked rudely, though he didn’t open his eyes. “Looking for a handkerchief everywhere I go so folk will think I’m tragic and interesting?”
“If the scars were on your flesh, would you even ask me those things?” retorted Tris.
There was a long pause. At last Zhegorz said hesitantly, “She’s right.”
“She ’most always is, when it comes to other folk,” replied Briar softly. “I got off lucky. She’s being nice right now.” Inside the magic they shared, he said, I missed you, Coppercurls. With you there, we might’ve conquered Yanjing.
She looked down, her thin swinging braids not quite hiding her tiny smile. She waved a hand in awkward dismissal.
Briar waited until he was sure of his command over himself before he looked at Zhegorz. “So don’t you worry about being at Landreg House, you hear? It’s just for six more weeks or so, and then we take the road home.”
“But the city,” whispered Zhegorz, his eyes haunted. “The roads. The chatter, and the visions. The headaches, the gossip, the lies, the weeping—”
“Stop that,” Tris said sharply. “We’ve talked about you working yourself into swivets.”
Briar rubbed his chin in thought. “He’s right, though,” he remarked slowly. “He’s going to be out in the wind, with all the talk it brings. I remember you, as jumpy as a mouse on a griddle for days, when you started getting a grip on what you were hearing. And it’s worse for the old man, here, because he’s crazy to begin with. You were just a little daft.”
“Well, we certainly can’t leave you here,” Tris drawled, looking at Zhegorz. “And Green Man knows potions or oils won’t work for long. And you can’t wear my spectacles for the scraps of things you see, because my spectacles are specially ground for my bad eyes. It’s too bad it isn’t a matter of a living metal leg, or living metal gloves ... living metal spectacles?”
“Maybe like nets?” suggested Briar. “To catch visions in?”
“Or sounds. No, that’s mad. Perhaps. Let’s go see Daja,” Tris said.
“Daja will do something mad?” asked Zhegorz, now thoroughly confused.
Tris sighed. “Daja can make spell nets of wire, and she can make a leg that works like a real one. She was even crafting a living metal eye, once. Maybe she can think of something in living metal to help you.”
Briar and Tris were both dozing on Daja’s bed as the smith finished the pieces they had decided might serve their crazy man best. Zhegorz himself sat on the floor by the hearth, watching Daja work.
For Zhegorz’s ears, Daja had fashioned a pair of small, living metal pieces that looked like plump beads pierced by small holes. Once they were done, she wrote a series of magical signs on them under a magnifying lens, using a steel tool with a razor-sharp tip.
“You understand, this will take adjustments,” she told Zhegorz softly. “Depending on what you want them to do, just speak the name for each sign. Then the pieces should let that much more sound into your ears.” She knelt beside Zhegorz and gently fit one of the living metal pieces into his left ear. Watching as it shaped itself to fill the opening precisely, Daja asked, “How is that? Comfortable?”
“It’s warm,” whispered Zhegorz, looking up at her.
“I’m not going to put cold metal in your ears,” Daja said, a little miffed that he would suspect that of her. Once she checked the fit of the first piece, she gently turned Zhegorz’s head and inserted the second. “There,” she whispered, deliberately speaking more quietly to test the ability of the pieces to pick up everyday sound. She recited the first lines of her favorite story. “In the long ago, Trader Koma and his bride, Bookkeeper Oti, saw that they had no savings in their accounts books, no warm memories laid up for the cold times.”
“That’s a Trader tale,” Zhegorz said. “It’s about how the Trader and the Bookkeeper created the Tsaw’ha and wrote their names in the great books.”
Daja sat back on her heels. “On the way to Dancruan you can tell me how you learned Trader stories,” she told him with a smile. “Not now. I would like to get some sleep tonight.” She reached over to her worktable and carefully picked up her second creation. Tris had sacrificed a pair of spectacles for this piece. Daja had replaced the lenses with circles of living metal hammered as thin as tissue. Once they were fixed over the wire frames, she used her sharp-pointed tool to write in signs to fix the metal in place and cause it to work as she wished it to.
Gingerly she settled the bridge on Zhegorz’s bony nose and hooked the earpieces in place. I really don’t know about this, she thought, nibbling her lower lip. I’ve made plenty of odd things, that’s certain, but eyeglass lenses that let someone see normally and not magically? Only Tris would even come up with the idea.
“Can you see me?” she asked.
Zhegorz nodded.
“He’d have to be wrapped in steel not to see you, Daja,” said a grumpy and drowsy Tris from the bed. “You’re a big girl and you’re right in front of him. Chime, will you fly around? Zhegorz, can you see Chime?”
Daja watched Zhegorz follow the glass dragon’s flight as Chime dove and soared around the wood carvings of the ceiling. She began to grin, elated. “I begin to think I can cure dry rot with this stuff,” she said, proudly stroking the living metal on the back of her hand.
“Rosethorn would say pride will trip you on the stairs,” Briar said with a yawn. “Come on, Zhegorz. We’ll give those things a real trial in the morning.”
Daja got to her feet, wincing as her back complained after hours bent over her work. She was stretching when Zhegorz patted her shoulder. “I’ll tell you what they do in the morning. I’m sorry I ever said no one could see through metal spectacles.” He scuttled out of the room as Daja shook her head over him.
Tris caught her by surprise, swooping in to press a rare kiss on Daja’s cheek. “I know they’ll work,” she said. “Thank you, for him.”
“He’s my crazy man, too,” Daja said as Tris hurried from the room.
13
They traveled the next day with Ambros, his family and personal servants, their own servants, and ten men-at-arms for company, plowing or no. Even in the short time they had stayed at Landreg, Sandry noticed plenty of changes. The fields now flourished with assorted grain crops, made heartier and more immune to blight by Briar. He had done the same work in the orchards. Workers labored on the restoration of the bridge on the road to Dancruan. “By the time we return, it will be fixed,” Ambros said as Sandry waved to yet another knot of farmers who bowed to her from the fields.
It’s good to see all this progress being made, Sandry thought as they passed two wagonloads of mortar and slates destined for the repairs at Pofkim. Back at the castle, jewels that had belonged to her mother alone and were not part of the Landreg estate now lay in a locked box in Ambros’s study. In that same box were three copies of Sandry’s handwritten orders to her cousin. He was to sell the gems for any future work required to keep the estate thriving.
As they passed through the estate’s boundary walls, Tris scowled at her sister.
“What?” Sandry demanded, flushing slightly.
Tris drew even with her. “Will you just leave things like that?” she asked quietly. “The estate paying out to you and vulnerable to the empress’s taxes? They’re still in danger from those.”
“I’m going to see an advocate in Dancruan,” Sandry replied, keeping her voice soft. Ambros didn’t know her plans. “I’ll get a letter drawn up reducing my share and allowing Ambros to default on it entirely if taxes and estate work are high that year.” When Tris’s frown deepened, Sandry felt her temper start to boil. She stuck out her chin. “They’re my lands, left to me by my mother,” she whispered hotly. “I’m in the direct line of descent. As long as I have breath in my body, I will preserve that line of descent and inheritance, all fourteen generations of it! Those lands are mine—no one else’s! Don’t you dare lecture me about it, Tris. You don’t know the least thing about being nobleborn. About our ties to our lands and our names. My younger children will have Landreg to ensure their place in the world and the continuance of the Landreg name and bloodlines.”