She had expected to see part of the house-foolish, given the fury of the blaze and the wind. Instead she found no house, its cellars exposed, everything a blackened mess. No wall stood higher than a foot. The ruin stretched before her, complete all the way out to the courtyard where she and Frostpine had collapsed.

How did mages like Heluda do it? How could they tell where this had started, where the evil took root? Daja was a mage, and she couldn’t tell. Looking hard, she noticed that the largest section of wall remaining was the front. It was that hard wind, which had thrust the fire into the rest of the house before it had completely devoured the front wall. Against the base of that fragment she saw a huge, old-fashioned hourglass, its brass parts melted to globs, the sand within turned to blackened glass from the heat. Ten yards to her left she saw three whole burned cow skeletons-the staff really did keep meat here in the winter.

Walking around the outer rim of the house filled her with awe for the power of fire. All that remained were parts of things: charred clothes embedded in frozen mud, melted jewelry, a set of false teeth in enamel over metal, more animal bones. The dead were gone by now.

At last she reached the rear wall and its empty gate. Firefighters had removed the wooden doors from their hinges to give easy passage to the street. There Daja turned to stare at the black ruin, leaning on her Trader staff.

In Sandry’s last letter, she had written Daja that she’d been forced to kill three murderers before they escaped a trap set for them and killed again. Reading, Daja had thought she could never do such a thing. Now, as she looked at Jossaryk House, she wasn’t so sure. Could she kill the one who had done this? Who was she to say what punishment was right? Anyone who used fire this way must be mad beyond question, mad and pitiful. Even if his madness came to evil, he shouldn’t be killed for something he couldn’t help, only locked up forever.

Another part of her disagreed. What if he escaped his keepers and set more fires? More people would die. And why did she think he was mad? Madmen didn’t burn anything mages could use to track them. Madmen wet themselves and talked to the air. They claimed to be gods and rocked in corners. They didn’t come and go unnoticed. They didn’t watch what they’d done.

That was a new idea, one she didn’t like. Did he watch? How could he?

And yet, if she had taken such care on a project, wouldn’t she want to see it through?

That was evil. It was evil of the worst kind. Such evil would show on his face. The mages would find him. There was no way he could escape capture. Then he would get the traditional penalty for firesetters: burning. His evil would be cleansed. Probably right now the magistrate’s mages spoke to people who had seen someone so empty of good it had frightened them.

With that thought to comfort her, Daja hiked back down to Mite Canal. She hoped she would see this firesetter before they burned him, so she would know pure evil if she saw it again.

On the canal she skated faster than she had before, staff tucked into the crook of one arm, trying to leave the bad thoughts in her wake. She drew closer to the canal’s center: slower skaters on the edge eyed her nervously as she passed. She almost came to grief, swooping around the rim of Kadasep into Prospect Canal, but quick shoves of her staff against the ice kept her away from those making the same turn. As Bancanor House drew closer on her right, she saw a familiar person skating toward her. Daja couldn’t see her face at this distance, but she knew Nia’s bright hat and scarves as well as she knew her own. Daja raised two fingers to her lips and blew the earsplitting whistle that Briar had spent an afternoon teaching her, then slid past Bancanor House to meet her waving student. Other skaters grimaced or made rude comments that Daja ignored.

Nia was giggling as Daja reached her. “I see you’re feeling better,” she commented as Daja turned and skated with her. “Only please, don’t let Jory hear you do that, or she’ll want to learn, too.”

Daja shuddered. “Give me credit for some sense.” She grimaced: her thighs were aching after a long skating session and her climb to Jossaryk House.

“You’ve gotten so good at this!” Nia exclaimed as they glided into the boat basin.

“I had a good teacher,” Daja said. “Speaking of that, how go your studies? I saw you were reading about wood magic the other night.”

Nia beamed at Daja. “Isn’t it fascinating? Arnen gave it to me. He assigns me pages to memorize at home and I recite back to him first thing in the morning. That way I work on the physical part at the shop during the day and do book learning at home.”

“So you like him,” Daja remarked, pleased. It seemed her conversation with Arnen at the Mages’ Society gathering had borne fruit.

“He’s really clever, once you can get him to talk. If it’s just the two of us, he chatters like Jory, but bring in someone else, and he barely speaks.” Nia shook her head, smiling. “At first I thought he was a snob,” she admitted. “But he’s just shy. And I’m learning a lot from him.”

They meditated, changed clothes, and met the family at supper. Afterward Daja joined them in the book room, accepting Kol’s challenge to a game of chess. As they played, the twins lay on their bellies, Jory in front of the hearth, Nia behind her. Their lips moved as they memorized information from small, leather-bound mage books. Matazi worked at needlepoint. One of the family’s dogs lay stretched out between the twins, while the largest of the household cats draped herself across Daja’s feet.