Work Text:
Storm Circle Temple, southwestern Sotat
1041 K.F.
The Pebbled Sea churned, flecks of foam showing as far as the eye could see. The horizon had disappeared into hazy grey, and lightning extended bright tongues down to the waves. Rain blew into the beach in gusts, soaking the two figures standing on the bluffs. Tris smiled into the wind, a white flash of teeth as wild as the waves or the lightning. “It’s almost like being home,” she shouted.
Beside her, Keth shook his hair out of his face—it had grown since they left Tharios, and the rain had plastered it down into a tangle of dark gold. “Do you miss it?” he asked.
Tris turned her face into the storm to disguise the sudden flash of emotion cutting through her enjoyment of the storm. She had been away from Emelan for three years, and some days she still missed it like breathing. Traveling to Sotat was the first time she had moved north rather than south since leaving. “I missed the sea,” she said.
They had seen plains that blew up tornadoes like nothing Tris had ever seen, explored libraries and smaller universities, and stayed for a season with a family of glassmakers who spoiled Glaki and tried to convince Keth to stay—but they had been traveling inland until Niko was urgently summoned to Sotat.
Thunder boomed, so close as to make Tris laugh with delight, and they abandoned their conversation to scramble higher up the cliff together. Keth was the first to reach for the lightning, whooping as a bolt made contact and filled him with clean, white-hot energy.
“Tris,” Keth said over the howl of the storm sometime later. She ignored him, for a moment, until he repeated her name, a note of nervousness in his voice. She opened her eyes, the last remnants of lightning twisting and fading around her, and saw that his face had gone dead-white.
“What is it?” she said, reaching for him.
He lifted his eyes to hers, sparks still glimmering in the depths of his pupils. “I think I feel another globe coming on.”
Keth dripped his way across the shop that the Fire Temple allowed him to use. The buzzing energy under his skin had nothing to do with his and Tris’ dance in the storm. It was the third time he had felt this urge since their arrival at Storm Circle Temple, and it had yet to become clear to him what his magic was trying to tell him.
Tris worked silently beside him; as he prepared the crucible, she packed the oven with fuel. He lit the fire, and she used her winds to get it going to just the temperature he needed to work the glass. The only thing they couldn’t rush was the melting of the glass. Tris plopped down onto a stool, watching him as he eyed the crucible.
When the first globe had cleared of both lightning and mist, it showed a tower on fire, and no one Keth had showed it to recognized the tower. The second showed the same tower, but intact and hung with blue pennants. Without tongues of flame surrounding it, he could see it more clearly: it was octagonal, made of shining pale stone, with a low peaked roof. The view was close enough that he could make out carvings of human figures along the roofline, but not whether it was attached to a larger building or complex. Something about the tower was clearly important to Keth’s magic, but he had been unable to discover anything further.
As Keth started his gather, he closed his eyes and breathed with the familiar pattern of meditation, letting his excitement and frustration settle under his skin. He blew smoothly into the blowpipe, feeling his magic flow along with his breath, filling the forming globe. When he pulled it from the blowpipe, the globe was full of tiny lightning bolts, utterly obscuring the image inside.
“I wish I could understand why this happens,” Keth said. “I thought it would be just bad things, but that time I blew one in Ayuna, it was just…” He cut himself off, cheeks reddening a little. There had been no murder or even petty crime; instead, it led him to his first fling since Yali’s death. It hadn’t lasted—they needed to move on—but it had been good to find that there were other girls, other loves.
“That’s the trouble with magic,” Tris said wryly. “Sometimes it has a mind of its own. It’s leading you somewhere, Keth. We’ll find the answer.”
Keth couldn’t stop thinking about the tower, or the many faces of it his globes had shown him. Ablaze. Intact. And, in the third globe, half-collapsed, only one wall left standing all the way to the top, its carvings blackened but still recognizable.
He wasn’t expecting to see it here at Storm Circle.
Storm Circle Temple had limited room for guests. They were all placed in rooms in a small house near the wall, with a shared common area. Niko spent little time in the guest house, only returning to sleep—he had been called to help with unusually mixed and fragmented portents. Keth had had some hope that his globes might help with this.
Niko had taken the first two to the Temple seers, but when Keth showed him the third, Niko rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “I can’t say for certain that no one has seen this building, but it’s such a small fragment, you understand,” he said. “Without knowing where this tower is—” He looked at Keth’s face, then cut himself off. “It’s one of the frustrating things about seers’ magic. Even the best of us can only control so much of what we see.”
“Is this seers’ magic?” Keth said, a little dubiously.
Niko shrugged. “Most mages can do a little of it. Scrying, or your globes, or what Tris hears on the winds. Being able to see things forward or backward in time is more difficult, and it comes to you naturally. We saw it in Tharios, and I suspect you have only begun to plumb the depths of what your power can do.”
He gave Keth a weary smile. “I’ll leave this one with you. See what you can do with it.”
Keth sat in the common area long after Niko left, contemplating the globe. Nothing he did changed the image; he remembered that back in Tharios, he had only been able to see a second image in a globe because he had tracked down the source of the first one. Or, perhaps, because the second image had been so important for him to see: his own teacher in danger.
The door opened. He realized that the sun had gone down while he was staring when a lamp lit, pouring sudden light into the room. Someone said, “Oh! My apologies, you startled me.”
Keth glanced up. A stranger had entered the guest house, a woman somewhere north of fifty with a round face, brown skin, and a brightly-colored veil covering her hair. “No, my fault,” he said, hauling himself to his feet. He glanced at the pack in her hand and said, “Did you just arrive here?”
“I did, as you can see. Let me put down my bag.” She set the pack against the wall, then held out her hand. “Hafsa Adeen.”
“Kethlun Warder.”
“Kethlun Warder, it’s wonderful to meet you. I’m sure we’ll see more of each other in the morning.” She smiled crookedly. “You’ll excuse me for tonight, I hope. I’m exhausted.”
In the morning, Keth found his way to the library and borrowed a few tomes of seeing magic, wondering if they might help him with the globes. He ought to have asked Niko for some recommendations last night, or even some of his notes; he didn’t have the same joy in academic research that Tris and Niko did.
He was ready to toss the books across the room, no closer to any answers, when Hafsa came down, carrying a collection of what looked like sticks and string. He watched, curious, as she tied one end of the assemblage to a corner of the table, then settled on the floor, wrapping a woven strap around her back. “You don’t mind if I join you, do you?” she asked.
“You could sit at the table if you wanted,” Keth said.
“I like a floor better for this work,” Hafsa said. “But thank you.”
The collection of sticks and string quickly became a loom, strung between Hafsa and the table. She settled in to work quietly, her fingers deft as she manipulated the thread. He watched her more than he read as she worked with bobbins of various colors of thread, lifting a few strands at a time, moving the thread underneath them, then moving on to the next. As she worked row after row, a pattern began to form under her fingers.
It was so mesmerizing that he didn’t realize she was watching him in return until he happened to glance up at her face. “It’s all right,” she said. “Haven’t you seen a weaver at work?”
“With the big standing looms, but not in a while,” Keth admitted. “And plain cloth, not this.”
“Am I going to get you in trouble with your teacher for distracting you from your work?”
Keth glanced at the books in front of him and sighed. “No, but I probably should work on this anyway.”
They fell into peaceful silence, with only the slight clacks of Hafsa’s work to interrupt it. The trouble, he soon found, was that there was very little writing on ambient magic and seeing. He supposed there might be more in the compendium Niko had been helping with—but that would still be years in the works. He set the books aside again at last and glanced down at Hafsa’s work.
A chill raced down his spine. At the center of the weaving, three faces of a tower stared back at him. Along the borders, he saw human figures—geometric and stylized, but posed just the same as the carvings on the tower in his globes, as if they held something above their heads with both arms. “What’s that?” he said sharply.
Hafsa glanced up slowly. “Hm? Oh” She examined her work, frowning. “I’m not entirely sure, yet. I knew what kind of thread the picture wanted, but I won’t know what it means till it’s done.”
“Wait here.” Keth raced upstairs, his heart in his throat. He had left the globe in his room, thinking he would work with it later. When he returned to the ground floor, he crouched beside Hafsa and held the globe out to her. He took a deep breath, then spoke carefully, the words struggling to come out clearly in his agitation. “I’m sorry—this one doesn’t show as much of it as the last one—but do you think this could be the same building?”
She took the globe, her eyes wide. “Oh. I can see it now. But what is this? What’s happened to the Singing Tower?”
He sat back on his heels, winded. “You know it?”
She nodded. “Back home, in Luhayyah—that’s a city in Qalai. How did you make this?”
The whole story came spilling out: his glass and lightning magic, the globes, back during the Ghost’s murders and since, the three views of the tower. She watched him with interest as he spoke, but waited until he had finished to comment. “What’s happening to you sounds very familiar,” she said. She smoothed a finger over the woven strands of her work. “It happens to me with weaving—I didn’t understand what was happening at first, only that the thread wanted something. It took me years to gain some control over the process.”
She reached out, and the threads in her weaving began to wriggle and move. Keth realized in some horror that they were unweaving themselves. “What are you doing?” he yelped.
“Starting over. Now I have some idea of a direction.” She grinned, and caught a bobbin as the last of the thread spun back onto it. “Now watch. This time, I think I can ask it for specifics.”
“How?” Keth asked. He shifted, settling into a cross-legged position that he often used during meditation.
“Portents like this are the world trying to tell you something through your magic,” Hafsa said. “Whether you think that’s the gods, or just the way of things, the message has got to come through somehow. Now, crafts like weaving and glass, they express something, don’t they? But it’s hard to know how to express it until you have some idea of what you’re saying. The best pieces are shaped by your intention, not just by letting some inspiration flow through you.”
She reset her loom, the warp threads once more empty. “Now, this part’s hard to explain. I’m going to weave it with magic, and as the shape forms, I’m going to focus my intention. I have the threads: the Singing Tower, calamity. What I don’t want is some tangled, muddy picture. I’ll begin.”
Under her hands, threads began to move, shooting through the warp threads at a speed far beyond what human hands could have achieved. A picture began to form again, in red and blue thread, but this time there was only a small panel with the tower. The next was a square filled with rows and rows of stylized people, arranged sideways along the width of the piece, each row facing the opposite direction from the row above. The next showed a circle with a spiral inside it, a little like a snail shell. That reached almost to the very end of the warp thread, and the threads wove a short border and then stilled.
Hafsa inspected her work. “The Singing Tower we know. The people—that usually means fighting and strife. War, even. As for the spiral, I think I’m going to have to get closer to understand what that means. It’s not a common motif, so I suspect it has some specific meaning, but I haven’t been home in years. I’m out of touch.”
Keth had to catch his breath. It had been wonderful to watch the piece take shape, but more than that, the confidence with which she interpreted the flat images and symbols filled him with envy. His own globes gave him very clear images, but they felt so far outside of his control, and often even outside of what he wanted to know. “Could you teach me how to do that?” he found himself asking.
She eyed him sideways. “I’m not here for very long,” she warned. “I wasn’t going to stay, anyway, but I think this is telling me it’s time to go home.”
“Whatever time you can give me,” Keth said.
She held out her hand. “All right, then. It’s a deal.”
Hafsa gave him two weeks, and it didn’t feel like enough. Tris oversaw their first lessons, then only popped in periodically to watch. The urge to make more globes didn’t come often, but the first time he tried, he felt he made more progress than he had since Tharios: he managed not only to clear the globe of mist, but to get a view of the base of the tower rather than the top this time, with glimpses of color that looked like a uniform. “This was never my area of expertise,” she admitted when he asked why she stayed away. “I know magecraft and I know lightning, but you know I’m still struggling with scrying.”
Two nights before Hafsa was due to leave, they stood on Storm Circle’s wall together. It was a hot night, and the slight breeze atop the wall was a relief from the stifling air below. “Keth,” Tris said. “I’m going to say something, and I want you to hear me out before you protest.”
Dread coiled in Keth’s chest. There was a crisp note in her voice that usually spelled some lesson he wasn’t going to enjoy. “All right,” he said.
She was leaning on the wall, looking out to sea. She didn’t look at him as she said, “I think you ought to go with her. She has things to teach you that I don’t think I can. You have enough control over your lightning now; you don’t need me.”
“Of course I—” Keth started hotly.
Tris turned to glare at him, and he swallowed down his next words, remembering his promise. “I’m not saying I can’t still teach you things. You can stay if you want to. And I’m not saying you can’t come back to me someday if you go, if you find there’s something you need. We’ll always be linked, Keth. But don’t you think your magic pointed you towards that tower for a reason?”
“There’s danger there,” Keth said.
“But what business is it of yours if there’s danger in a city you’ve never heard of?” Tris shot back. “Everything the globes have told you until now had something to do with you—you had a personal interest in the Ghost’s murders, and in every other vision you’ve produced in glass. Maybe Qalai has something in store for you. Something important.”
This time, Keth didn’t protest. With a sinking feeling, he realized that he agreed with her. His magic showed him things he didn’t understand, but they weren’t the random, impersonal visions Niko saw of the future or Tris saw on the wind. He had studied some investigators’ magic, but he had never managed to produce more globes to predict crimes.
“Won’t you come with me? To Qalai?” Keth said.
Tris stepped away from the wall, wrapping a hand around his elbow. She tipped her face up with a smile, but it looked a little sad. “I’ve got Glaki to think of,” she said. “I can’t take her into what might be a warzone. And I’m…I think I’m ready to go home, Keth. I’m about done with traveling.”
“Don’t hit me,” Keth said. That was all the warning he gave Tris before he wrapped her up in a hug, holding on tighter than he probably should. Who would have known, a few years ago, that it would hurt so much to think of saying goodbye to this difficult, sharp-tongued girl? But he had come to rely on the steadiness and kindness at the core of her bluster, and the surprising depths of her knowledge. He would miss her dry humor.
He realized, suddenly, that he had already made his decision.
“Write me,” Tris said, patting his back. “You don’t get out of talking to me so easily.”
“How do you know I’m leaving?” Keth said, finding that his voice rasped a little.
Tris pulled back to look into his face. “Because deep down, underneath all that stubborn, you’re a sensible human being.” She looked down, biting her lip. “I don’t have much of a right to be proud of you—most of what I did was help you get your old skill back. But…”
“You gave me my life back,” Keth said, genuinely touched that she might be proud of him. “I’ll always be grateful for your teaching.” He hesitated. “She might not want to teach me.”
“Now, that I don’t believe,” Tris said. “But you’d better ask her soon all the same.”
Two days later, Keth turned and looked over his shoulder. Tris, Niko, and Glaki still stood outside the guest house. Glaki had her hands buried in Little Bear’s fur, clinging on as tears streamed down her face—she still had trouble with goodbyes, but Keth trusted that Ira’s daughter was in the best hands. Sunlight glinted off glass as Chime lifted off Tris’ shoulder, swooping through the air to land briefly on Keth’s shoulder. He ran a finger down her spine, and she give her tinkling purr. “Take care of her for me,” he told the dragon. She flexed her claws, then leapt into the air again.
As Keth faced forward, he felt a bittersweet exhilaration rising in his chest. He was sorry to leave the group of people he’d made a home with for the past two years, but he was excited for the adventures ahead.
He was a journeyman. He wasn’t ready to end his journey.