“Oh, no,” Daja said, trying to pull free. “No, no, no!”

“Yes,” replied Nia. “Come on. You can do this.”

Much to Daja’s surprise, Nia was right. They skated carefully from Bancanor House north to the tip of Kadasep and back. Daja fell only once, where a patch of ice was pitted. Both girls returned to Bancanor House flushed with victory.

Their good feelings carried over into Nia’s meditation after they went inside. The younger girl entered the breathing pattern with confidence. Daja watched as her power slid over her skin to coat it in a glowing layer. The emptier Nia’s thoughts, the fewer occasions when her power flared away from her skin. She was close to the point where she would be able to handle her power as she did wood.

“Did Camoc give you work for today?” Daja asked as they left the schoolroom.

Nia shook her head. “I asked if I could borrow a book on magic for hard wood, and he grunted. I think it meant yes. He knew I took it, anyway. I read some this morning-I hid it in my hymnbook.” She smiled. “Papa saw me, but he didn’t say anything. I think he gets bored in temple, too.”

Daja shook her head as they separated to dress for supper. After she ate, Daja spent the evening in the book room with the family. She went to bed feeling as if she’d accomplished a great deal that day, despite Morrachane. She was silly to let the woman irritate her, she decided as she crawled under her covers. Morrachane was a sad creature, hated by most, not understanding what a prize she had in Ben. She was to be pitied, not fought.

It was nearly dark when Ben left the warehouse, a rough wool coat and felt boots over his clothes. He wrapped scarves around his head, hiding all of his face but his eyes, and carried his device and a lantern in a basket. Unnoticed he joined the stream of servants returning to their masters’ homes, their heads bent against the hard wind that blew off the Syth. Ben appreciated the wind: protecting his face from it, he also disguised his height.

Ever since he had begun training firefighters, he had Walked over every inch of most Kugiskan islands, through courtyards and alleys, past middens and wells, around outbuildings and along the tops of walls. He had descended into cellars and climbed into garrets and towers. He knew those islands, including Alakut, better than those who had lived there for centuries.

With that knowledge, he had his pick of sites at which to test his lone Alakut Island brigade-footmen and shop assistants who skipped training a third of the time, to run their masters’ errands or simply because they forgot. They needed sharpening up. For this test he had chosen a confectioner’s shop on Hollyskyt Way. It was near enough to Ladradun House that his brigade would immediately send for him when the fire started, but not so near that it might draw suspicion on him.

Hollyskyt Way was nearly deserted. The families who ran its exclusive shops weren’t deemed good enough to live on Alakut: their businesses were closed for Watersday. There was a houseguest the confectioner didn’t know about, a beggar who crept into the cellar to sleep. But she came well after dark, when there was no chance she would be seen.

Ben had seen her, of course. He’d watched the place for two months before making his decision. Now he used her tight-fitting entrance to the shop, feeling his servant’s garb catch and pull on its edges. He would lose bits of thread that a magistrates’ mage might use to trace the wearer, but that was no problem. He would leave his outer clothes and anything he’d carried behind to burn: mages couldn’t use tracking spells on items cleansed by fire. Ben smiled as he dropped to the cellar floor, envisioning those mages like frustrated bloodhounds, looking for a trail that only doubled back on itself.

He lit the lantern and went upstairs, where he set his device in the pantry and lit the fuse. He propped the door open to feed his blaze air, and set empty sacks and jars of olive oil nearby to serve as fuel when the device set the room on fire. He left his basket there as well.

Outside the shop, he removed his coat, scarves, and boots and thrust them into the cellar, making sure his other clothes didn’t catch on the edges of the opening. Last of all he blew out his lantern and threw that into the cellar. This area was directly under the pantry: the cloth would be ash, the lantern molten tin by the time the magistrate’s mages arrived.

Then he hurried home to be his mother’s browbeaten son until his summons arrived. While she fed him her endless scolds and insults, he imagined the shop as it started to burn. Imagination got him through supper and her usual Watersday speech, that it was his fault, his inattention, his stupidity that had gotten her grandchildren killed. He endured it. Some days he wondered if she was right. Tonight he did not: his thoughts were on his test. Once she finished, she ordered him to bed, so he wouldn’t waste candles. Ben obeyed. He always did.

The truth was, Morrachane was an inconvenient convenience. In return for service as her verbal whipping boy-he’d put a stop to her real whippings a month before he married-she gave him a place to stay. If he lived alone, there would be a house to manage and servants to oversee, endless boring details that took precious time from his reason to live. He gave his mother his work at the business and someone to blame; she saw to his daily needs. And one day he would repay her for every time she made him wonder if indeed it was his fault that his wife and children were dead.

Going to bed posed certain problems. He’d planned to be reading in his nightshirt when they came, until he realized he had no urge to freeze as he fought a blaze in nightclothes. He set out his things as if he prepared them to wear the next day. He could stuff them on over his nightshirt, perhaps leave the end of the shirt trailing outside his breeches. That decided, he got into his bed and opened a book, Godsforge’s Types of Burn and Burn Healing. It was nearly impossible to read. Soon they would come. Soon, soon…