“But Vani and them,” he objected.

“They’ve been up this long, a bit longer won’t hurt,” Sandry replied firmly.

Pasco rubbed his face with hands that trembled. “Why did this happen?” he whispered. “All I want is to dance. Not to be a mage, no, nor a harrier neither.

Just a dancer. Now I can’t even do that without something go ing awry.”

“The quicker you learn to control your magic, the sooner you can dance and not worry,” she pointed out. “So calm down, and we’ll start.” He swallowed hard and nodded, looking at his hands.

She was about to teach him the proper way to breathe when she realized that she had almost forgotten some thing very important. “I need to ward us,” she said tersely, silently cursing herself. How could she not remember that meditation with an untrained mage would cause his magic to spill all over? Her teachers had been careful to ward her and her friends when they first began their studies.

She dragged her red thread from her belt purse. I’m not ready to teach anyone, she thought as she pulled away the loose end. What else am I going to forget?

“What’s a ward?” asked the boy.

“It’s like a fence that keeps magic in. Or other things out if that’s what you set your wards against. Now hush.” thrust her irritation with herself out of her mind

and began to lay her thread down in a circle that would enclose both her and Pasco. Once it was complete and she had stepped inside, it took but a touch of power to break the thread from the spool, then join the ends to close her circle. Shutting her eyes, she raised her power until it formed a bowl that enclosed them completely.

Once that was done, she settled on the floor next to Pasco, arranging her skirts. “Until you control your power, meditation will make it spill all over,”

she told him. “Don’t meditate without an older mage present until I say you can.”

“Oh, splendid,” he grumbled. “Another thing I can’t do now without a nursemaid.”

Sandry shook her head. If he was in the glooms, nothing she could say would improve his mood. It was better to get on with the lesson.

As if he could hear Sandry’s thoughts, the boy grinned sheepishly. “You’re more patient than Mama, lady. She would’ve smacked my head by now, and told me to”—he stopped. What his mother would have said was probably too vulgar for the lady—,”to quit being a chufflebrain.”

Sandry giggled. “Chufflebrain—my friend Briar says that. Now. On to serious; matters. Close your eyes, and don’t think about anything but what I tell you.”

She taught him how to breathe: inhale to a count of seven, hold for a count of seven, exhale to the same count. Getting him to empty his mind was another matter. He shifted on his haunches; his fingers tapped out a drumroll before she stopped him. From the way his eyes shuttled behind his lids, he was thinking of something with movement to it—not what she wanted.

When she sensed that his body at least was more re laxed than it had been when they started, she said, “Now, think a moment. How can you undo what you’ve done out there?”

He looked at her, startled. “‘Undo’? Why—that means doing what I did, only backward.”

She smiled at him. “It does, doesn’t it?” Reaching over, she touched her thread circle. It broke; she felt the power in her ward draining back into her. A nudge of her finger, and the thread rolled itself up. She then reattached it to the spool in her belt-purse. Glancing up, she saw that Pasco was staring at her.

“Surely you knew I was a stitch witch,” she remarked, amused by his wondering look.

“I heard you was more than that,” he said, scrambling to his feet. He offered her a hand. She took it, and let him pull her to her feet. “I never thought you’d fuss with plain old thread.”

She led the way out. “Thread’s as important to my in agic as dance steps will be to yours,” she told him as they emerged into the courtyard gallery.

“—why the gods gifted a flibbertigibbet like my grandson with magic,” Edoar Acalon was telling Zahra, who was seated beside him.

The girl Reha made a shushing noise and flapped a hand wildly at Sandry and Pasco. Sandry shook her head. It seemed there were reasons why her new student thought that nothing he did mattered.

“Oh, look, it’s tippy-feet, finally? Vani cried. “You’d better get me down from here, Pasco!”

Sandry halted before the three airborne Acalons, eye ing Vani as if he were a bug she might swat. “What did you do to reach this point?” she asked Pasco.

He moved to a spot three yards in front of the captives. “I did a triple step left and a triple step right,” he said, half to himself, half to her. “I was humming music. And then I did that beautiful swan leap the Capchen dancers were practicing—,”

“I knew it!” shouted Vani. “You were ogling dancers while I did the work—,”

Sandry had heard enough. She pointed at him and ordered, “Be silent,” putting a twist of her power into it. Vani’s mouth snapped shut. Everyone could hear sounds in his throat; he fought to move his jaws, but he could not open his mouth. “A swan jump?” Sandry asked Pasco. “A jump goes up. Aren’t your cousins up enough already?”

“He should jump down,” offered the dangling girl, in terested in spite of everything.

“Haiday, shush,” said Zahra.

“If you think about the results before you try some thing, you can save yourself problems,” Sandry told Pasco. “It sounds like you really need to look before you leap.”