The hall clock chimed. It was time to change clothes for supper. Daja levered herself out of her chair. “I have to do all this?” she asked, pleading with him. “Run all over the city for magic-sniffers and teachers and all?”

“Since you don’t want to make a testing device of your own to tell you what Nia has, I suppose you do,” Frostpine replied. “And you must tell Kol and Matazi. They’ll be pleased.”

“Would you be?” Daja asked, shoving her hands into her breeches pockets.

“Now there’s an odd question,” Frostpine said. He had returned to walking the false coins over and under his fingers. “Aren’t you happy you’re a mage?”

“Sometimes,” Daja said as she went to the door. In her mind’s eye she saw herself, adrift in a wash of ship wreckage, straining to reach a floating box filled with life-giving supplies. “And then remember that I learned about my power after my entire family drowned and I got declared an outcast. I wonder sometimes if magic really is a good thing.”

Frostpine looked up at her with a smile. “Well, it was a good thing for me that you came along,” he said. “That should count for something.”

Daja went back to her room, feeling decidedly grumpy. For one thing, changing clothes for the evening meal was the kind of folly practiced by people who had too many clothes they didn’t have to wash. Since it was the custom in wealthy houses Daja changed her garments, but it chafed her spirit.

More than nice clothes, though, Frostpine’s information irked her. It was bad enough that she must teach-she was busy, after all. Just going to a mage she didn’t know to find out what exactly she must teach was somehow worse. She felt as if she had been challenged to do something, and had failed.

The magical testing methods Frostpine had mentioned involved seeing. She had studied something of the kind a couple of years ago. Tris’s teacher, Niko, whose specialty was seeing-magic of all kinds and who taught the four general magic, decided they ought to know how to scry, or to see things that took place in the past, the present, and sometimes the future. Those mages with any talent for it easily saw the present in their scrying devices. Some even glimpsed the past. Occasionally they saw bits of the future, but because the future changed from moment to moment as the present did, those bits were rarely useful.

So Niko had given the four of them a choice of crystals, mirrors, even bowls, which showed images when filled with water or oil. He then tried to teach them different ways to call visions to their chosen devices. Tris was the only one who could do it every time, but she had trouble seeing anything that interested her. Scrying was such a will-o’-the-wisp magic that Briar and Sandry had given up in disgust. The best luck that Daja ever had with it was when she looked for things in a small bowl of her living metal: that was how she had discovered that a kitchen boy was taking Frostpine’s tools. It wasn’t reliable: one bump of the bowl and the image was gone, never to be recaptured. In the end she had discarded the metal she’d used in the bowl. It continued to flicker with images long after she gave up scrying, and she couldn’t use the metal for anything else.

Daja stopped changing into supper clothes halfway and sat at her worktable, pulling a slate and a piece of chalk toward her. What if she created a living metal mirror? That would be more stable than a bowl; she could use it over and over. She could take what Niko had taught them and shape the mirror to reflect a precise image of someone’s magic. She scribbled hurried notes. If she remembered everything properly, she had all she would need in this room.

Excited-she would show Frostpine!-she opened the trunk at the foot of her bed. It was covered in leather and secured with leather straps, with the emblem of Daja’s own House Kisubo burned into every side. This was a suraku, a survival box that seafarers packed with food and water against the possibility of shipwreck. The contents of this one had kept Daja alive until Niko had found her. It was her chief treasure and all that remained of her drowned family, so it was only natural that she turn it into her mage’s kit. Inside the copper-lined box she kept magical tools, herbs, oils, and metal samples in small bottles and jars, corked, sealed, and tucked into padded trays. Daja selected tiny vials of mercury and of saffron oil, a slender hollow glass tube, a silver disk as wide as her hand was long, and an engraving tool. These she placed on her worktable.

Next she opened the big jar that took up half of the suraku’s, interior. Its contents gleamed the bright silvery gold of brass. She had started filling it with excess pieces of the metal that continued to grow on her left hand. Later, as she found uses for it, she added brass scraps and drops of her own blood to the jar’s contents: within a day the scraps would soften and blend, giving her a good-sized container of living metal whenever she needed it. Living metal creations had made her rich at fourteen: it was good she’d found a way to create more without having to wait for it to grow out of her flesh. Now she took a bowl and dipped it full, then set it on the table.

Beside the door was her Trader’s staff. The wood was five feet of solid ebony, capped in brass on the top end and iron on the butt. On the cap she had engraved or inlaid signs in wire, telling her story to anyone who read Trader symbols. Here was her survival of the sinking of her family’s ship; her time as an outcast; her rescue of a Trader caravan during a forest fire; the end of her outcast status; and her present life as a mage with whom Traders could buy and sell in honor.

It was also very useful for defending herself, as Traders had done for centuries, and for creating circles of protection. Extending her power through the ebony, Daja drew a circle around her worktable, leaving herself plenty of room. Once done, she leaned her staff against her chair and closed her eyes, sliding into the core of her power. She raised a barrier until she was enclosed in a silvery bubble that would allow no scrap of her power to leak out. In her second year as a mage, she had learned the hard way that an incomplete circle resulted in the most interesting kinds of damage wherever her power met someone else’s magic.