Pasco Acalon stood on the beach, his jaw hanging open.

Sandry drew rein beside him. “Now do you believe you have magic?” she asked.

He started with surprise—he had not heard her ride up—and bowed hastily. “Lady, my mother has never heard of dancing mages. She was once a captain of the Provost’s Guard. If she never heard of a thing, then how can it exist? This, this was just luck, pure and simple. It had to turn sometime. Whatever drove the fish off—,”

A burly man in fisherman’s clothes strode toward them, a grin on his dark face.

He grabbed Pasco’s hands and folded them around a leather pouch. “Well, lad, you did the trick.” He looked at the boats, shaking his head. “This day’s work puts food on our plates through Death’s Night, once it’s smoked. And Gran says the charm holds till the next full moon—enough to make up what we’ve lost this year.” He thumped Pasco on the shoulder, bowed quickly to Sandry, then strode back toward the workers.

The boy poured the contents of the bag into his palm and gasped. “Five silver crescents!” he cried. “Master Netmender, you said only one crescent!”

“It’s bad luck to underpay a mage,” the fisherman called back over his shoulder.

“Just don’t get greedy next year! Hi, Osa, be careful with that basket!”

“Mage?” whispered Pasco. “Next year?”

“Well?” Sandry asked the boy, nudging him with a booted foot as he continued to stare at the boats. “I know magic when I see it. So do these people. You need proper training, before your power starts breaking out in ways you don’t want it to. And it will. Power’s funny that way.”

“Power or none, it don’t matter, lady,” Pasco said gloomily. “You don’t know my family, begging your pardon. If I was a harrier-mage, that would please them no end—but even if there is such a thing as dancing magic, it’s still dancing, get it? The moon’ll drop plumb out of the sky afore my family lets me dance for my supper.”

“Explain it to them,” Sandry told him firmly, trying to keep her growing impatience hidden. She supposed he’d been through a lot today, but surely he could see what was right under his nose. He acted as if he were to ignore his power long enough, it would go away. “Surely they must have noticed something odd about you by now.”

“Other than me not having the sense of a butterfly?” Pasco inquired, meeting her eyes. The curl of his mouth was bitter. “They’ve noticed that, right enough. But no one’s said anything to me of magic. I never saw pictures in the fire or made things dance in the air when I was a babe, like all the mages do—,”

“I didn’t,” Sandry told him flatly. “Any more than my friends did.” Pasco winced and she sighed. Where had people gotten this silly notion that Briar, Daja, and Tris were to be feared? “Not all magic shows itself like that,” she went on.

He looked from her to the boats, black eyes wide with panic, then shook his head and clapped his hands to his ears. Still covering them, he bowed and walked away, toward Summersea’s east gate.

“Shall I fetch him back, my lady?” asked Oama. “Knock sense into that head?”

“No, please don’t,” Sandry replied. “He’s frightened, that’s all. Besides, I’ll be able to find him when I need to.” Thinking it over, she knew she was in over her head. She hadn’t the first notion of what to do next, but she knew who would.

“I have to go to Winding Circle,” she told her guards.

CHAPTER 4

Once inside the curtain wall that sheltered the temple city of Winding Circle, Sandry told Oama and Kwaben to ride to the east gate stables, where they and their mounts would be made comfortable until Sandry was ready to go home. They insisted on remaining with her until she had dismounted in front of the small cottage that lay behind the Earth temple. Only then did they take her mare’s reins and leave.

The cottage known as Discipline was set back from the temple’s spiral road and framed in gardens. For a moment Sandry remained outside the gate, looking around her. She had left in a hurry, hoping to be back in a day or two. Now she felt like a stranger. She had not helped to whitewash the cottage, weatherproofing it against the winter storms. She had not helped to put a fresh layer of thatch on the roof, or to bring in the last fruits and veg etables. The shutters on her room and the rooms of her three friends were tightly shut, as they had almost never been when the four were there.

Lark must be so lonely with no one at home, Sandry thought sadly. That spring Tris, Briar, and Daja had left Winding Circle with their teachers, who had decided they needed to see more of the world and of the magics used outside the temple city. Sandry and Lark had rattled about the empty cottage all summer, until word had come of the duke’s heart attack. It had been just like Lark to urge Sandry to go and stay with her great-uncle for as long as was necessary.

Sandry shook her head. She had seen Lark since the duke’s illness, but always at the citadel. This was her first trip home, and she felt as if she’d lost something. She missed open shutters, the sight of Briar’s miniature pine in his window, the lamps burning in the workshops built onto the sides of the cottage.

Something else was missing, too.

Opening the gate, she realized what it was. Once any visitor would be hailed by canine shrieks and then bowled over, if they were not careful, by the wolfhound-sized dog who lived here—Little Bear was enthusiastic in his greetings. He belonged to all four of the young people. That spring, when Tris’s teacher Niko wanted to take her south, Tris had been so heartbroken at leaving that they had talked her into taking the dog. The three of them would be south of the Pebbled Sea by now, and were not due to return until next summer.