“I give up,” Briar announced with a sigh, putting his wool aside. “I hope I do better with plants for spinning.”

“Having a spindle helps.” Sandry crouched beside him, peering at a patch of wool on his shirt front. Pinching her fingers together, she pulled her hand toward her. “Come on,” she ordered the wool. “Don’t make me get stern with you.”

“Hey! That tickles!” Briar cried as the fibers on his shirt wriggled.

“You can’t feel the wool,” she retorted.

“I can feel what you’re doing to it, and it tickles.”

“Hold still,” she ordered. Again she pinched her fingers together and drew them toward her. The loose fibers slowly pulled themselves together into a bunch.

The girl frowned. She almost had it. How had it worked the other day? The feeling had been a familiar one. Searching her memory, she had it: when her power did what she asked, it felt the same as if she had set a hard embroidery stitch and her needle had darted through the cloth to lock it down perfectly.

Taking a breath, she found that same feeling inside, pinched, and pulled. The wool drifted over the gap between her and Briar and landed on the hand she had beckoned with. Sandry looked at it and beamed.

“Good,” said Briar. He didn’t realize that she had just done her first piece of deliberate magic. “Now can you get this bit on my britches?”

After that, their lives took on a pattern. Meditation, taught by Niko, came after morning chores. Sometimes they worked in the cottage, but he also took them onto the wall around Winding Circle, to the cave in the cliff, even to the garrets of the loomhouses, where the beat of working looms drummed through the timbers. Individual lessons filled the afternoons. In the evenings, the four read, studied, or worked at spinning. Lark was always present for that. At least one of the other teachers would come, to spin their own projects—Frostpine spun wire from silver, gold, or copper threads—or tell stories, or teach something new. Those lessons weren’t always magical: as the Willow Moon waned, Lark taught them all, even Tris, how to do handstands. In the month of Hawthorn Moon, Rosethorn showed them how to make a lotion to prevent sunburn. By then, the children needed it.

Midsummer was on its way; by the end of Willow Moon, the weather turned hot, and most adults preferred to stay indoors and nap after midday. If they weren’t fighting—and fights often came up between Tris, Briar, and Daja—the four lazed on their home’s thatched roof, wearing broad-brimmed hats and sunburn ointment. Little Bear, denied the chance to follow them onto the thatch, waited below, looking mournful and abandoned.

Their teachers worked them hard. Rosethorn guided Briar in what he felt was an endless round of weeding, weeding, weeding. “It’s early summer,” she said when he complained. “Of course it’s weeding, weeding, weeding.”

As they worked, she told him about each plant—whether it was a flower, weed, fruit, or vegetable; how he could recognize it, what uses it had in medicine, cookery, and magic, if any. He was expected to memorize it all for those times when, out of nowhere, she would ask him to find a certain plant and tell her about it.

“I wake in the night muttering stuff like ‘fennel,’” Briar complained one day on the roof. “‘None in the vegetable garden—most vegetables hate it. As a tea it is given babies to relieve colic.’ What’s colic, please?”

The girls just stared at him. “It’s a thing babies get,” Daja said at last.

Briar made a face at her. “Where was I? ‘Good for wrinkles, indigestion, helps to move the bowels. Also helps mothers produce more breast milk.’”

“Breast milk?” repeated Sandry, blue eyes wide.

“That’s what she said. Then there’s ‘Grown around the home, fennel gives magical protection; hung in windows and doors, it wards off evil spirits.’”

“How can you be expected to remember all that?” Tris wanted to know.

“He just did,” Daja murmured, watching little clouds grow into big ones.

“It’s Rosethorn,” Briar replied. “Believe me, if she told you to remember something, you’d remember it—or she’d want to know why.”

No one argued with this. Weeks of acquaintance with the tart-tongued dedicate had filled them all with solid respect.

“What about you, trangshi?” the boy asked Daja, tickling the back of Sandry’s neck with a straw. When Sandry turned to look at him, the straw was in his mouth, and he was staring at the sky. “What’s that Frostpine teaching you?”

“What does that mean?” Tris asked. “No one’s ever said. That ‘trang—’”

“The others speak Tradertalk; why can’t you?” growled Daja. “It’s trangshi, all right? It means—”

“Forbidden,” offered Sandry.

“Bad luck,” Briar said at the same time.

Tris eyed Daja. “What could you do at your age to be called that?” For a moment she thought the Trader might refuse. At last, in a few short sentences, Daja told her about the loss first of her ship, and then of her people. When she finished, Tris shook her head. For the first time, she felt sympathy for Daja.

“Maybe she doesn’t like to hear that name, Briar,” Sandry commented tartly, banging the boy’s ankle with her fist.

Daja flapped a hand. “I don’t mind,” she said lazily. “Not from him.”