At last she set the iron aside and put her creations on. The gloves were much too big, of course, since they were made to Ben’s measure. The cold inside the metal made her flesh ache.

She took the gloves off rather than call heat to warm her arms. She didn’t want heat near the gloves yet. First she had to embed signs in metal around the cuffs, runes shaped from lead for stability and copper for flexibility. Then she would cover the gloves inside and out with a liquid spelled for more flexibility and stability, and for strength. Only when that was done could they be safely warmed.

Dreaming of fire suits as she wondered how in the Trader’s name she would create that much living metal, Daja set the gloves upright on their bases. They looked like golden hands grasping for the next rung of an invisible ladder. She went to her suraku and collected her materials. On her way back to her worktable she froze. The gloves were collapsing in on themselves, returning to their original, thick syrup consistency.

“Pavao!” cried Daja. “Pavao, pavao, pavao!’ With all her work and with the magic she had used in their shaping, they should have kept that form for a day at least! Their collapse, while still ice-cold, meant that gloves of living metal alone would never work. She had to put them on a hard metal frame. It meant hinges at every joint and complex hinges at the wrists to allow side-to-side motion as well as up and down. With a solid metal frame her finished creations would be far heavier than she had planned. If gloves couldn’t exist on their own, a whole suit of living metal would be a nightmare. A heavy nightmare.

She put down her metals and oils and kicked her chair in frustration. White-hot pain burst through her booted toes. She hopped on one foot, softly cursing in Tradertalk, Imperial, Hatarese, and Pajunna, until she realized she was being a fool. She slumped into her chair to nurse her wounded foot.

It was her own fault. She had given in to pride. Because she was successful with this stuff, she had thought that she could just wave a hand and get what she wanted with little planning and effort. Had she ever made anything purely of liquid metal? She hadn’t. All of her other pieces had included hard metal like iron, brass, and bronze. Her false hands, arms, and legs were liquid metal fixed to iron skeletons.

“As well expect quicksilver to walk on its own,” she muttered. Over and over people had warned Tris about pride, but Frostpine had never cautioned Daja against it. Why not?

Instead of spending her day in glory, finishing off her achievement, she began the tedious labor of replacing each lump that represented a joint with tiny oiled hinges, using her power under tight control to remove the lump and to solder each hinge into place where the lump had been. Her only breaks had come at midday, for lunch and a swift skating practice, then meditation with Nia when the girl returned home. She’d pretended to be her normal, centered self at meditation: had Nia gotten so much as a whiff of Daja’s self-disgust, she would have thought she caused it, not Daja’s own folly. Daja briefly considered telling the younger girl her mistake, but decided against it. She was vain enough to feel that she didn’t want one of her first students to think she was human enough to make a botch of something.

She felt shriveled and grumpy at supper, poking Anyussa’s good cooking with an indifferent fork. Nia, too, was silent, listening to her parents talk. Jory was still at Potcracker’s. Frostpine joined them, though he added little to the conversation. He looked exhausted. Daja looked at him with a growing sense of betrayal.

“Why didn’t you warn me about overconfidence?” she finally demanded, silencing Kol’s and Matazi’s conversation about a change in gold prices. “You never lectured me about pride like Niko and Lark always lecture Tris.” She realized she had forgotten her decision not to let Nia realize she was human, but resentment overpowered her. “Why not? You let me walk into a mess, you know. I wasted hard work and I feel like a grub, and it’s your fault.”

“I’m not the only one who knows how to make a sentence last,” Nia murmured.

Daja gave her student an I’ll-get-you-later glare and turned back to Frostpine. “Well?” she asked again.

Frostpine leaned his head on his arm. “I thought you’d find out for yourself,” he informed Daja. “Learning sticks when you get it the hard way.” He yawned. “When I’ve finished my current task, you must tell me what happened. You’ve worked so smoothly I’d begun to think I’d have to mention pride to you after all. Just to be sure I’d taught you properly, you see.”

Matazi tapped Frostpine’s plate with her fork, making the delicate porcelain ring. “You. Bed. Now,” she ordered. “You’re tired and addled.”

“Yes.” Frostpine left, waving an idle goodbye over his shoulder. He did not go to the front stairs and the guest rooms, but back to the kitchen.

“He’s the most annoying man,” Daja announced, still vexed. “Why does he get to be right?”

“He’s always been that way,” Kol assured her.

“When he told me I’d be happier with Kol than him, I tried to punch him in the nose,” Matazi added, startling a gasp of surprise from Nia.

“Worse, he was right.” Kol smiled into his wife’s eyes.

Matazi blew him a kiss. “Much worse,” she agreed.

Nia rolled her eyes at Daja.

“If he gets too smug, tell him a truly perfect person wouldn’t get seasick,” Kol said without looking away from his wife.