“Speaking of snow, Polyam, didn’t you come here from the north? How were the passes? Is autumn there as late as it is here?” Lark wanted to know.
Polyam refilled Daja’s teacup. “Not in the Namornese Mountains,” she replied. “But the closer we came to here, the more shrunken the snow and ice-fields on all but the highest mountains.”
“Maybe you know what I saw,” said Daja. “There was a river of ice, I swear it! In the higher mountains, about ten or fifteen miles—” She looked around, trying to guess directions from the sun. She pointed. “Southwest. It ended in a barren valley—”
“It looked more scraped than barren,” Briar called from his table.
Polyam and Lark traded amused glances. “You have never seen a glacier before?” inquired the Trader.
“A glacier? A real one?” asked Tris, eager. “Where? Could I see it?”
“There is a small one, probably the one she means,” Polyam replied. “The Dalburz—it flows out of the Feyzi ice cap in Gansar.”
“But this looks like a river, except there are cracks in it,” protested Daja.
“That’s what a glacier is,” Tris informed her. “A river of ice that grows and shrinks, depending on the weather. Lark, phase can I see it?”
“We’ll have to ask Niko,” said the dedicate, getting to her feet and gracefully dusting off her behind. “Now, why don’t we go back to work, so Daja and Polyam can bargain? Now that the ice is broken, so to speak,” she added with an impish smile.
“Oh, all right,” grumbled Tris, struggling to rise.
“Thank you for the blessing and the bounty of food,” Lark told Polyam in Tradertalk, with a bow. She drew Tris away, translating what she’d just said. Sandry followed, after a small, polite curtsey to Polyam. Little Bear resettled himself, this time for a proper nap.
For a moment the Trader said nothing, twisting so she could look at Daja’s friends as they settled to their tasks. When she turned back to Daja, there was no way for the girl to guess what thoughts were behind that scarred and yellow-marked face. “They say the ice caps from which the glaciers spring are miles deep,” Polyam remarked. “I have a feeling that your story is much the same—I see only the tiniest part of what is there, for you and for all of them.” She hesitated, then added, “When we have finished our bargain, I will add a packet of tea. I know it cannot be found.”
The offer was a startling one. Their unique tea blend was one of the few things Traders did not include in business deals: while artisans, lugsha, might taste it in a bargaining session, they could not buy it.
At the mention of the reason they were there, both of them looked at the iron vine and the copper plate beside it. Daja gasped. Somehow, a rod in the trunk of the vine had separated from the others, to plunge one end into the plate. The metal around the iron looked soft and crumpled, as if the rod sucked the copper into the vine. On a branch near that rod and the plate, a tiny copper bud had appeared.
Daja got up and walked over to inspect her creation. Gently she turned it—and the plate—over. The thin piece of iron merged with the plate as if they were melted together, and copper striped the iron all the way back to the vine’s trunk. Freeing the plate would be a chore, if it could be done at all. Ought she to ask Rosethorn for help?
“I’m dreadfully sorry,” Daja told Polyam as the Trader joined her. “I had no idea this would happen. None at all.”
Polyam stared at plate and vine, rubbing her scarred ear. “Two gold majas,” she said at last. “Even gilav Chandrisa won’t argue, not when she sees this. And it seems I must find another token to give you, since I will be getting this one back in another form.”
“Please,” Daja said, putting a hand on the woman’s arm. “A token isn’t necessary.”
Polyam’s smile was wry. “First I am lectured in proper bargaining by your friends, then you tell me to ignore it. If we are to do this, let it be done correctly.”
“Besides,” Tris remarked from her seat near Briar, her gray eyes sharp behind her spectacles, “the more unusual this purchase is, the better you look to your caravan.”
“That one could almost be Tsaw’ha,” Polyam muttered.
Daja grinned. “Her family is a merchant house in Capchen,” she explained.
“She’s from that House Chandler? Then I should watch her.” Polyam gave Daja a half-bow. “I must take my news back to the caravan, and find another token. Don’t worry about the furnishings—someone will come for them. I have a feeling they won’t expect me to clean up after this.” With a nod to Lark and the other young people, she left the courtyard.
Soon after Polyam’s departure, Lark called Daja, Briar, and Tris over. Sandry now sat cross-legged on the ground. Her loom was stretched out, anchored at one end by a strap around a table-leg and on the other by the strap around Sandry’s waist.
“What we need to do,” Lark explained, “is map the paths your magic has taken. Remember the thread you were given yesterday? Sandry will weave it here, calling a pattern from the threads themselves, rather than working her pattern out beforehand.”
Briar fished the bobbin of silk from his pocket. It was grimy. “They’re all the same color,” he protested as Daja and Tris produced their bobbins. Daja’s was dirtier than his, smutched with soot; Tris’s was sticky with aloe sap. “How will she tell which is which?”