“I’m not the smith,” Daja replied.
The whites of the visitor’s eyes glittered; she was staring at Daja’s fire-square. The girl sighed. People were always so nervous about the ways she and her friends shaped magic! “Sorry,” Daja murmured, and flapped a hand at the square. It twisted, becoming a single rope, then snaked back into the forge.
The visitor took two hopping steps into the building. Now Daja saw her clearly, and wished she could not. One side of the newcomer’s face was the color of bronze, lit with a single heavy-lidded dark eye. The other side was a ruin of shiny brown scars, the eye only a lumpy pit. Scars dragged at one side of the woman’s broad-curved mouth, so that she seemed to be forever sneering. Her nose was unscarred, but something had broken it enough to make it nearly flat. Both of her eyebrows were thick, making Daja wonder if she had been any kind of beauty even before the loss of half of her face. The scarring aside, she didn’t look very old—no more than twenty-five at the most.
The newcomer wore an earth-brown tunic that reached halfway down her thighs. Like Daja, she wore leggings. They were the same dark color as her tunic, with one leg shortened to cover the joining of the wooden leg to her flesh. Daja noticed all of this in an eye-blink. The thing that brought her mind to a halt was the brass-capped staff the woman leaned on.
She was a Trader.
Daja’s belly clenched. She tried not to stare hungrily at the etchings and metal inlays that decorated the cap on the visitor’s staff, the marks that told those who knew how to read them of the woman’s family and deeds. Now that she was trangshi, Daja wasn’t supposed to care about things like that, but she couldn’t help herself.
The woman scowled and thumped the ground with her staff as she took a more comfortable position. “What’s the matter, lugsha?” she demanded in a deep, pleasant voice, using the word—only slightly complimentary—for “craftsman.” “Haven’t you seen a cripple before? Or just not one so pretty as me?”
Daja lowered her head and waited. As soon as the Trader’s eye adjusted to the gloom, this conversation would end.
“No, you’re not big enough to be a whole smith. Apprentice, I desire to speak with your master,” the woman said flatly. “There is work to be done, and—”
Since Daja wasn’t looking, she couldn’t watch the Trader examine their surroundings as she tried to spot an adult smith. When the woman fell silent, though, Daja knew what she had seen: her staff, with its unmarked cap.
Daja looked up in time to catch the glare the Trader directed her way. Then the woman turned her face toward the forge.
“Where is the smith?!” she called, her voice ringing from the metal all around them. “I desire to speak with the smith, immediately! There is work to be done, work for which Tenth Caravan Idaram will pay!”
Tris, Daja called with her magic. Tris, I need you.
Behind the smithy, Tris sighed. The worst part about helping Daja, as far as she was concerned, was the interruptions. Rather than answer, she reached out and gripped a fistful of air. Giving it a twist, she threw it like a spear through the opening in the wall. That done, she ran nail-bitten fingers through her very short red hair, thrust her brass-rimmed spectacles higher on her long nose, and went back to reading.
Inside the smithy, flames roared like dragonfire out of the bed of hot coals. The Trader flinched.
I don’t need more air! Daja informed her friend. I need help, right now!
I’m busy, came Tris’s reply. Get someone else.
There isn’t anyone else.
“I have no choice but to stand here and hope that someone will tell me where I can find the smith,” the Trader announced, turning her back to Daja. If Daja spoke, she knew that the Trader would pretend not to hear: that was how Traders handled trangshi. “It is most urgent that I speak to a smith—to a real smith.”
Trisana Chandler, I need you right now! thought Daja fiercely.
Furious, Tris rose, shook out her skirts and petticoats, and closed her book and stuck it into the pocket of her gown. Sparks glimmered at the ends of her hair as she stomped around the side of the building. Coming to a halt beside the Trader, she scowled up at the woman with storm-gray eyes. Her pale, lightly freckled skin was blotched red and white with anger; the two-inch strands of her coppery hair were rising to stand at angles to her head.
“What do you want?” she demanded. “I was reading.”
“I want the smith,” the Trader snapped back. “I am Polyam, wirok of Tenth Caravan Idaram. I have business for him.”
“The smith is out riding with the duke of Emelan,” Tris replied. “There’s my friend Daja Kisubo. She’s all the smith you’ll get till they come back!”
“I’m trangshi, remember?” Daja asked patiently. “By Trader law I don’t exist. If I don’t exist, then she can’t talk to me or hear me. Get hold of yourself, will you? You’re sparking all over the place.”
Tris raked her fingers through her hair and examined the fistful of light she had gathered. “Shurri defend us,” she muttered. Closing her fingers, she killed the sparks.
Polyam backed away from her. “If I had a choice, I would go somewhere else,” she informed Tris. “But I don’t. It’s two days’ journey to the next blacksmith on this road. I will wait until this smith comes.”
“Why don’t you tell me what you want, and I’ll tell Daja,” Tris said, a shade too patiently. “Then she can do what you need and you can go away with your whole caravan.”