“I bet her parents tried to sell her to Traders.”

“Maybe, but even Traders wouldn’t take her. They wouldn’t think she has value!”

Everyone found this hilarious.

One of the shutters hadn’t been securely locked. It burst open, letting in a swirl of cold wind. The girls nearest to it screamed and jumped to close it. A gust of wind bowled them onto their rumps before it whipped around the room, pulling covers off beds, scouring belongings off the small shelves. By the time it roared out of the room, all of the girls but Tris were screaming.

Two dedicates, their habits thrown on over their nightgowns, rushed into the room carrying lamps. Everywhere they looked, there was a chaos of girls, bedding, and knickknacks—except at Tris’s bed. It was untouched. The girl in it stared at them with tear-reddened, defiant eyes behind the brass-rimmed spectacles that she had just finished jamming onto her long nose.

The next morning, after breakfast, they brought her down to the office of Stone Circle’s Dedicate Superior and left her in the waiting room. Beside her they placed her few bags, completely packed. She had not said a word. There was no point in it, and by now she knew how stupid it was to try to talk to someone who was determined to get rid of her.

As she waited, staring fixedly at those battered leather satchels, she realized that the Honored Dedicate’s door was not quite closed.

“—I know that you’re already on your way to Winding Circle, and I need you to take this girl with you. Is that such a hard request to grant, Master Niko?”

“Send her later in the spring, when the trade caravans leave for Emelan.” The light, crisp, male voice sounded annoyed. “I’m on a very special task these days. If I have to change my plans suddenly, this child will only get in my way.”

“We can’t keep her. Her parents swore that she was tested for magic and found to have none, but …” The Dedicate Superior’s voice trailed off. Briskly she continued, “I don’t know if she’s possessed by a spirit, or part elemental, or carrying a ghost, to be at the center of such uproar, and I don’t care. Winding Circle is far better equipped to handle a case like hers. They have the learning, and dedicates who are more open-minded with regard to unique cases. They have the best mages south of your own university. They will know what to do with her.”

Hearing all this, Tris felt sick. Spirit, elemental, or ghost-burdened, was she? And what kind of fate awaited her? Some people learned to manage such creatures within themselves; others got rid of them. Far too many ended up homeless and crazy, wandering the streets, or locked up in an attic or cellar, or even dead. She swayed, feeling ill—and then clenched her fists. She was sick of it! Sick of being gotten rid of, sick of being discussed, sick of not being helped!

With a thundering roar, hailstones battered the roof and walls around her, hitting wood and stone like a multitude of hammers. They shattered the glass panes of the window in the outer office to spray across the floor like icy diamonds. Clumsily she knelt to pick up a handful.

The door of the Dedicate Superior’s office swung open, revealing a slender man in his middle fifties. He stood there, hands on hips, black eyes under thick black brows fixed on Tris.

From the floor she glared at him, hailstones trickling from her fingers. “It’s rude to stare,” she snapped, not over her fury.

“You were tested for magic?” he asked, his clipped voice abrupt.

Why did this stranger taunt her? Her family would have put up with her oddities, if only she’d been proved to have magic, which might be turned to the profit of House Chandler. “By the most expensive mage in Ninver, if you must know. And he said I haven’t a speck of it.”

The stranger turned and looked at the woman in the yellow habit behind him. “Honored Wrenswing, I’ve changed my mind. I will be very happy to escort Trisana to Winding Circle Temple in Emelan.” He smiled thinly and reached a hand to Tris. “I am pleased to meet you, young lady.”

She ignored the outstretched hand. Getting up, she shook out her skirts. “You’ll change your mind before long,” she retorted. “Everyone does.”

In the storeroom:

Carefully Sandry eyed her right-most thread. There was the knot that she’d tied close to the end. “Time to put in something new,” she told the waiting darkness with a sigh. She was all out of green now. It had given her good service, glowing with a clearer light than either the gray or the red. She would miss it.

Yards of braid lay in a coil from which she continued to work. She fixed her mind on it and on light completely, except for the times that she ate, or slept, or used the stinking barrel that was her chamber pot. Keeping light in her threads took all of her attention, leaving her without time or energy for panic.

She groped behind her for her workbasket and froze. Muffled voices cried out on the other side of the wall. The girl swallowed hard. Had things gotten this bad? Was she going to start imagining people when they were not there?

“This way, dolts!” a voice cried.

“—don’t see anything!” someone, a man, growled in the distance.

The light in her braid paled. “Don’t you dare,” she ordered in a whisper. She couldn’t keep her mind on it. The glow died.

Breathless, she waited in the dark. If this was a dream, she wished it would stop!

“You won’t see anything,” a crisp, educated voice snapped. Its owner might have been in the same room with her—or on the other side of the door. “It was spelled for concealment.”