LOST

When Adria reached her father’s deserted storeroom after school, she sat in a dark corner, hid her face against her knees, and cried. The new mathematics instructor had marked her work a failure. Worse, he had sent a note to her father after showing its contents to Adria.

Instructor Hillbrand told me that Adria is brilliant at mathematics, but in my view her past excellence has led her to laziness, Instructor Park had written. I instructed the students to do all of the steps which lead to the solution. She will not give the intermediate steps, only the answer. She will not do all of the work that is required.

Adria blew her nose on her handkerchief. She wasn’t trying to be bad. The stupid in-between steps just wouldn’t stay in her mind, not when the answer was so plain. She had explained that to Instructor Park, but he had only shaken his head. Then he had written the note.

What her parents would say—what her father would say! Her lips trembled and her eyes flooded. Please, gods, don’t let Father be angry, she begged silently. She didn’t know which was worse, waiting for one of her father’s rages or having one break over her head. She hated being a coward.

She wiped her eyes and got to her feet. Regardless of her problem with the new teacher, she knew she would definitely be punished if she didn’t get to her shop chores. She could see an open crate of brass lamps that had to be cleaned for sale. There was the sweeping to do as always, inkwells to be filled in the clerks’ room, brushes to be rinsed off. She would do the lamps first, the inkwells and brushes when the clerks went to supper.

As she set up a table for her polish and rags, she worried the mathematics issue like a bad tooth. Instructor Hillbrand had never cared how she reached her answers. From the time she was very small, she had known the answer to any mathematics problem, long before the other children. She had been the wonder of the district and Father’s darling. Instructor Hillbrand had even spoken of university training when she was older, though Father always said it would cost too much.

Then came Instructor Park, educated at the great university in Carthak. His mathematics for older students involved letters as well as numbers. There were steps toward the solution, and each student must do the steps as well as answer the problem. He would not accept the answer alone.

Adria polished an already shining lamp, crying again. She loved the new mathematics. The idea that letters could take the place of numbers opened a world of possibilities whose limits she could not see. Even after her scolding, she had asked the instructor about the mathematics that lay beyond their current studies. That conversation had not gone well.

“It is clever of you to deduce some of the future applications, Adria,” he had said with a kind smile. “But you overreach. First you must work your way through this course, and learn the discipline of the mathematics I will cover in these three months. Since you are already having difficulties, you should concentrate on the work at hand.” As she had turned away, red with shame, he had added, “Besides, higher mathematics is taught at the universities. Surely your family prefers that you remain here, to work in their interest, on accounts.”

After the possibilities she had glimpsed, that answer was as bad in its way as any whipping Father might give her. It was as if she had seen a star-covered sky, only to have Instructor Park tie a blindfold over her eyes.

She picked up another lamp and wiped her face on her sleeve again. That was when she heard a voice say, “Don’t cry.”

She gasped and looked around, frantic. “Who’s there?”

“Me,” the voice replied. It was a very small voice, and childlike.

Adria searched the big storeroom, forgetting the lamp in her hand. Unless the child, or any of the clerks who wanted to make fun of her, had packed himself in a crate or turned himself into a fancy jar or box, she was alone. Trembling, she went back to her rags and polish.

Doomed to be switched and mad as a rat in a trap, she thought as she scrubbed at a tarnished spot on the lamp.

“Why sad?” asked the voice.

She dropped the lamp. The lid rolled off into the shadows.

“Ow,” the voice said.

Adria stared as smoke oozed out of the lamp. No, she thought, too fascinated to run or shriek. It wasn’t smoke. It was more like liquid, but it was liquid that kept to a roundish shape, without sending random trickles outward.

The liquid rose and produced a headlike knob. A mouth opened and said, “Hello.”

Mad as a rat in a trap, Adria thought again. Trembling, she knelt before the creature. It was a little bigger than her fist. “What are you?” she asked, trying to remember the lists of immortals and gods she’d memorized two years ago. None were little black blobs.

“Lost,” the thing said.

“You’re lost, or your name is lost?” she asked, twining her fingers in her polishing cloth. Her nerves were fizzling, but at the same time she was getting excited, as excited as she’d been when she had glimpsed the mathematics beyond what Instructor Park was teaching her.

“Lost,” replied the creature. “All two.”

“You are lost, and your name is Lost,” Adria said, to confirm it. She liked to have things laid out plain.

“Yes. Name Lost, self lost.”

“And you talk.” Adria leaned in for a better look. Lost extended its head-knob toward her as if it inspected her in turn, though as far as she could tell—its “head” was no bigger than her thumb—Lost had no eyes. It did have several bright yellow threads within its glob of a body, threads that curved around like a whirlpool. On its front, or the part Adria assumed was its front, the creature bore a flake of copper like a brooch.

“Your name?” Lost asked.

Adria blinked as the tiny mouth in Lost’s head moved. “Adria,” she replied. “I’m a girl.”

“I know girl,” Lost replied with a slight note of reproof. “I lost, not stupid, Adria.”

How does it make the sounds without teeth? she wondered. This was one of her questions that her family would find annoying, but Adria could not be content unless things made sense. They had to have a reason to be the way that they were. Even “it’s magic” wasn’t a good enough explanation. She had seen enough guild magic lessons and the work of marketplace mages to know that magic had rules. People with no teeth talked badly. People with teeth managed better. Lost had no teeth that she could see, yet spoke very well.

“Adria?”

She jumped, recognizing the voice of the head clerk, Minter. She scrambled to her feet, clutching the lamp that had served Lost for a home. She didn’t notice the creature looping a long tentacle around the spout so it could pull itself up and into the lamp.

“Yes, sir?” she called in reply. “I’m in the storeroom.”

Minter stuck his head into the room. “We’re going to supper. Stop whatever you’re doing and tend the desks, please.” He didn’t wait for her to agree. He never did.

Adria, keeping very still, listened to the sounds of the clerks as they left the building. Her mind whirled with amazement and thoughts. No one who lived on the river Drell could escape seeing the fabulous creatures that had begun to return to the world nearly twenty years before. Her father did business with a centaur tribe that lived north of the canal; winged horses made regular deliveries from the markets in the south, and ogres came to trade. Adria had even gotten the chance to pet a unicorn when she was eight.

But no one had ever mentioned black blob-things. Not in the legends, not in the market gossip. She looked for the creature on the floor, but there was no sign of it.

“Right here,” Lost told her.

Adria jumped and dropped the lamp again.

The creature flowed out of its hiding place and turned its head-knob up to her. “Jumpy girl,” it said flatly. “Calm down.”

“I had a bad day,” Adria replied defensively. “Unknown creatures appearing out of lamps don’t help.”

“Not unknown,” it said patiently. “Darking. Tortallans know darkings.”

“This isn’t Tortall,” she replied, going to make sure that the clerks’ office was empty. It was, and the door to the shop where buying and selling took place was locked while the clerks were gone. She turned to find that Lost had followed her. “This is Tusaine. Tortall’s on the other side of the river. I thought you said your name was Lost, not darkings.”

“Darkings my kind,” Lost explained. “I am Lost.”

“You certainly are if you expected to be in Tortall,” Adria murmured. “I don’t know how I can help you get there. Unless I carry you to the ferry and you stow away. But I have chores, and I’m in trouble already. Chores come first.” She had been looking blindly at the door while she thought of what she could do to help her new acquaintance. With a solution in mind, she turned to look at it. Once again Lost was absent from the floor. Panicked, Adria looked around the worktables until she saw the darking. It had made its way onto the single high table that was Minter’s domain, and was poking its head into the inkwell.

“Don’t do that!” She lunged for Lost and almost knocked the inkwell to the floor. Like a very long, shiny black inchworm, Lost extended its head to the side of the desk, then let its body drop to the next table. Its head followed, and it was a round, solid blob once more.

“Not right, girl so nervous,” Lost told her with disapproval. “Who make you that way?”

“Nobody,” Adria said defensively, clutching Minter’s inkwell to her chest. “I—I have a lot of work, that’s all, and I don’t even know what you eat, or how to get you home.”

“Eat everything,” Lost replied. It thought a moment, then added, “Almost. Don’t want to go back. This more interesting. I help with chores.”

“You don’t have hands.”

Lost produced a pair of arms, and hands to go with them. Then it produced five more arms and hands. “Darkings full of surprises,” it said. Adria would have sworn it sounded smug. “Work now?”

Adria had never laughed so hard doing chores in her life as she did once Lost began to help her. She hadn’t believed the small thing could do much of use, but she also hadn’t understood how far its arms could stretch, or how strong those arms were. She suspected the darking of sipping the water it used to wash the brushes, but the inky liquid seemed to do it no harm. It lifted inkpots out of the way as Adria scrubbed around them, and stacked slates as neatly as if that were its life’s work. The heavy account books used by the senior clerks were too much for its strength. Adria handled those, shifting them to clean the desks beneath, and then restoring them to their proper places.

She stopped, as she always did, to look at Minter’s book. “This one is my favorite,” she explained to Lost, running her fingers over the page with today’s entries. “Minter has been here since before I was even born. He taught me my first numbers. He even got Father to let me attend the merchants’ school. Look how exact the letters are, and the sums. No blots, no mistakes.”

“Fun,” the darking said in a voice that told Adria he thought Minter’s pages were no such thing. She smiled. Her school friends didn’t think numbers were fun, either. Carefully she ran her dusting cloth over the closed book and raised it back up to Minter’s table. When the volume, the heaviest of the account books, began to slip from Adria’s hold, Lost put up an arm to steady it until the girl had a better grip.

They had just placed it on the desk when they heard keys in the door opening to the shop. Adria gasped. She seized Lost and stuffed it into the pocket of her dress, holding it there.

“Ow,” she heard it say.

The door opened to reveal not the clerks, but Adria’s father. She could tell from the set of his jaw that his teeth were clenched. His brown eyes were harder than the slates.

“There you are,” he said, his voice quiet. He locked the door behind him and hung the keys from his belt. Adria backed up a step, though she knew he despised anyone who showed cowardice. Her father took a folded paper from the purse that hung beside his keys. Adria recognized it as Instructor Park’s note. “What is this?” her father demanded. “You defy the teacher? You shame our house? You have become so conceited with Master Hillbrand’s praise that you think you do not need to study!”

“No, Father,” Adria said, shaking from top to toe. “I can’t remember the steps, they aren’t important—”

“They aren’t important?” he demanded, leaning toward her. Adria stepped back again. He seized her by the shoulder. “Stand still when I talk to you! You think you know better than an instructor who studied at the university in Carthak, who was brought here at great expense to instruct you children? Who do you think you are?”

The darking was fighting Adria’s hold on it. Adria clutched it tighter, hoping she wasn’t strangling it. She would not let the creature out. She wasn’t even sure why. She couldn’t think of anything when her father towered over her, bellowing at her.

“There are older people, better people, who would have done anything for this chance!” Her father shoved her into the workroom. “They would take it with humility. Now you shame us all with your presumption! My rivals will question my judgment because my daughter forgets her proper place. Over and over I have told you that we can show no weakness in this world, and yet you cannot maintain the proper diffidence, the proper decorum.”

Adria lowered her head, feeling sick and battered. He could go on like this for hours, or what seemed like hours. By the time he was finished, she would promise anything, if only he would stop talking at her. She would believe anything. He was the wisest man she knew, someone who had learned all of his neighbors’ secrets and weaknesses. Every time she tried to make him proud, she failed.

He had fallen silent. Adria flinched, not sure why he had stopped before she began to beg him to tell her what she could do to make all right with him. Then she heard what he heard: the jingle of keys at the shop door. The clerks were coming back.

He pointed his finger at her. “No supper. No food tomorrow. You will apologize to your teacher, before the class. I will hear of it if you do not. Present yourself to me after supper tomorrow, your work here and your work for school done completely. Then we shall talk about meals.” He walked back into the clerks’ office, pulling the workroom door shut behind him.

A series of squeaks and thumps in her pocket reminded Adria of Lost’s plight. She pulled her hand out, her fingers cramped around the darking. It had bulged through the gaps, but not all of it had escaped completely from her grip. She opened her cramped fingers.

It plopped onto the floor. “Ow!” it cried. “Ow, ow, ow!”

She tried to shush it. When it continued to shout, she scooped it up in her cupped hands, enclosing it completely. She could move faster than Lost, it seemed.

She opened her fingers a crack and held her hands before her mouth. “Promise to be quiet,” she whispered.

“I ow,” the darking replied.

“I’m sorry about the ow,” Adria said quietly. “Promise you’ll be quiet or I’ll lock you in a box, I swear it.”

“Will father come back?”

“He might, yes, and he must see me working, Lost, promise!”

“Promise,” the darking said after a moment.

Adria put it on the floor and grabbed her cloths and polish. She went at the brass work with desperate speed, one ear always on the clerks’ door.

Only after she had finished the work and locked the storeroom after her did Adria begin to talk to Lost again. “I didn’t let you out of my pocket because I was afraid he might take you,” she told her new friend as she walked down the street. “He might not realize you’re a person when he’s in one of his tempers. It’s my fault, I shouldn’t make him angry—”

“Not your fault!” Lost squeaked, its voice the loudest Adria had heard. “You are young, he is old! He must know how to keep temper! I know that and I am only here …” It paused, clearly thinking, then produced several fingers around its head—“this many years!”

Adria blinked down at the creature that rode half-in, half-out of her pocket. “It’s too dark for me to count.” She didn’t like this idea, that there was nothing she could do to change her father’s rages. All her life she had believed that if she only did the right things in the proper order, he would be pleased. The possibility set before her by Lost was frightening. It meant Adria could never make Father happy.

“Besides, he too slow to catch me,” Lost said.

“He’s very quick,” Adria said, thinking of the times her father had caught her unaware.

Lost made a very rude and realistic noise. Even though she was worn out, Adria still had enough of her wits to note that the darking must have spent plenty of time around humans and animals to imitate it. She hadn’t noticed the proper opening for that sound on the darking itself.

“Father slow and stupid,” Lost said. “No match for darkings.”

Adria looked around, alarmed. “There are more of you?” It was hard enough to keep Lost a secret. It would be impossible to hide others of its kind. Knowing the market, and the trade in rare and magical creatures, she feared for the life of her new friend and any like it.

“Not here,” Lost told her scornfully.

Adria sighed her relief.

“Not right, young one be so jumpy,” Lost remarked yet again. “Young things should play, have games.”

“Where did you learn that?” Adria wanted to know, thinking to tease a bit of real information from her new companion.

“Places” was the frustrating reply.

Her weary steps had brought her at last to the tradesmen’s gate in the wall around the family’s house. It wasn’t barred yet. One of the stable boys was drowsing just inside. He answered her quiet knock, rubbing his eyes. Once she had passed through, he barred the door and ambled back to his bed in the loft. Adria let herself into the house through the servants’ door. She looked into the kitchen. The cook and the housekeeper were awake yet, gossiping as the cook ground spices and the housekeeper mended linen. The housekeeper shook her head when Adria looked in. She had already received her orders from Adria’s father with regard to supper.

The girl went on up to her room. She dug into the clothes chest for the bread she tucked away each morning after breakfast, in case the day went badly. Lost ate two small bites, then crawled up the wall, snail-like, to stare out her window. It was still there when she fell into a deep, exhausted sleep.

Adria woke at dawn to a view of black with yellow threads twisted in a column just below the surface. She sat bolt upright with a gasp.

Lost’s head popped out of its body, right above the copper flake where it should have had a neck. “Jumpy!” it snapped, as if she had just woken it from a nap. “Young people—”

“Shouldn’t be so jumpy, I know,” Adria replied, rubbing her eyes. “Do you tell your children this?”

“Darkings not have children,” Lost explained as Adria ducked behind her privy screen. “Darkings split when more wanted. Saves time.”

“But then you’re all alike,” Adria said.

“No. New experiences make new darking. New learnings make new darking. New likings come, and dislikings. Have to learn quick. Human rules, immortal rules, god rules, all hard on us. Too many killed at first.”

Adria stared around the screen at it, her washcloth in hand. “You’ve seen gods up close?”

Lost shivered all over. “Too close. Gods and immortals too quick. Ogre step on me once. Make me flat for weeks.”

Adria chuckled as she finished washing up. The mental picture of a flat Lost trying to scold her was a good one.

When she came out from behind the screen in her shift, she halted, shocked. Two sausage rolls and a peach lay on the bed. “Where did those come from?” she asked as her belly growled. Never before had anyone, not even Mama, risked smuggling food to her when she was in disgrace.

“I bring,” Lost replied, its voice smug. “Bad to go hungry. Numbers won’t glow in head if you hungry.”

“But …,” she whispered, confused. The peach alone was bigger than the darking. “How?”

“Secret.” Lost was clearly pleased with itself. “Eat. Your belly talks.”

“Not here,” she said as she stuffed the food into her book bag. “If anyone catches us with this, the kitchen staff will get in trouble. Outside!”

She finished getting ready for the day in a hurry, her mouth watering at the smell of the sausage on her fingers. With Lost tucked in her pocket, she tiptoed down the back stairs. The kitchen servants were already awake, preparing breakfast for the household. None of them would look at her, knowing that she was going hungry. Adria ducked her head and trotted out of the house. So afraid was she of getting caught that she waited until she was a block away before she took a sausage roll from her bag and gobbled it down. She did not forget to give Lost as much as the darking would eat.

When they reached a small square where local households came for their morning water, Adria sat on a stone bench to eat the other roll and the peach with more decorum. She and Lost watched the sleepy-eyed maids, daughters, sons, and wives draw their buckets of water, listening to the bits of gossip that came their way. Finished and full, Adria rinsed her hands in the trough of water by the well, shyly nodding to people she recognized. Then she hoisted her book bag on her shoulder and walked toward the river.

She liked the city at this hour, when people were getting ready for the day. The mist from the river kept things cool, but it was retreating, taking its pearly curtain away like a street-corner mage. Shopkeepers opened their shutters and called out greetings to passersby, not urging them to spend money, just welcoming the new day. Horsemen were slower and kinder at this hour, waiting for people to cross instead of half-riding them down. It was for these moments of unexpected kindness that Adria loved her city in the early morning, and it was why she walked out at this hour to watch them, stolen breakfast or no.

“School now?” Lost asked when they had been walking in silence for a while.

“Oh, I’m sorry, no, it doesn’t begin for a couple of hours. I go for long walks in the mornings,” Adria explained. “It’s time to myself, to think, and … you’ll say I’m silly.”

“No,” Lost said.

It was such a complete “no” that she believed it. She opened her mouth and told Lost the thing she had never told anyone, not her favorite sister, not her friends at school, not Instructor Hillbrand.

“I like to look at the places where things are being built. I like to see how they put up houses, and temples, and such. The … the way engineers and builders fit timber and stone together, how they get the roofs up. They use mathematics for that, did you know?”

“Darkings not build things,” Lost explained. Then it added, “Yet.”

“I wish I could,” Adria said as they came to the road that ran beside the Lily Canal. “Engineers are almost like gods, making things that will last forever.” The canal was the oldest in the city. It carried anything that could be transported on the Drell all the way inland right to the governor’s palace. A bee to the biggest flower in the garden, Adria headed straight for the new bridge.

Not that it was truly a bridge, not yet. A year had been spent already driving pylons into each side of the canal, pylons that were wide and strong enough to support what all of her elders, including her father, said was the maddest idea ever to gain Crown funding. A group of young engineers claimed they could build a bridge that would rise up, at need, to let river ships pass down the canal. Adria had been coming here since the day the building crews had blocked the river off from the canal and begun to dig.

They would not be at work for a while. At night the river gates were opened for small-boat traffic on the canal, enough to ferry goods to the city’s heart. The gates had been closed two hours before dawn, and it would take the water another hour to drain enough that the bridge crews could get at their tasks. The foremen were at their stations already, checking for changes to their orders. The master builders were there, too, consulting over their plans. And for the last two weeks the woman engineer had also been present, seated cross-legged on a large crate that overlooked the shrinking thread of water below.

Her materials were scattered around her: the pad of stitched-together parchments, a bottle of ink and a brush for permanent record-keeping, a pile of maps, and the bottle of red ink and the brush she used to mark them. Today she also held the slate and chalk she used for temporary calculations. The first week she had been there, Adria had crept closer and closer from behind, trying to see what she did. Twice Adria had seen the engineer write on the pad, tear off the sheet she had written on, and wave it in the air. Both times a man from the work crew had come to take it to the builders. Unless the woman did that, however, Adria had quickly discovered that if the engineer was concentrating on her work, she noticed nothing else, not the dogs that piddled on the edge of the crate, not the street urchins who threw rotting vegetables at her until Adria had found the courage to run them off. Not the curious town girls.

The second week, Adria was a foot away on tiptoe, reading the strings of numbers and letters the engineer had scrawled on the slate. She did not immediately notice when the engineer shifted the slate a little to her right, so Adria had a better view. Adria jumped back as soon as she did realize that she had been discovered, and fled home in alarm. After long hours of internal debate, she had returned the next morning, to find the engineer in the same place, making careful notes on parchment. The slate, full of equations, was placed at her side, positioned so that Adria, standing behind her, could read it easily. The invitation had been too tempting to pass up.

Without a word between them, the engineer continued to let Adria see what she was doing. Adria had spent several days giddy with the discovery that the new bridge was to be built in two sections, with the flat parts to be lifted like castle drawbridges so ships could pass through. The mathematics was harder to grasp. It depended in part on a kind of figuring Adria did not know, though she saw plenty of the new school mathematics in the engineer’s calculations. Some of it was in strange new marks.

Then she remembered where she had seen the runelike marks before. Instructor Hillbrand had left her in his office for half an hour once while she completed a test. Finished and bored, she had begun to look through one of the instructor’s well-used texts. On one page she saw the angles of a triangle described and the rune called sine that helped the student calculate the size of the angles. When Hillbrand had returned, he’d taken the book away, telling her she would be ready for it in a year or two. That was before Instructor Park came to say Hillbrand had taught her all wrong.

Yet here was sine again, with the rune for square roots, and equations. The woman’s chalk, or her ink brush, spat them out rapidly, filling slate or paper with them. Adria soon began to piece together parts of equations. She was praying for the courage to ask the woman about the parts Adria hadn’t worked her way through when Lost came.

“Be quiet and watch,” she told Lost now when she saw that the woman was at her usual place. “Not a peep. She lets me watch her work. I don’t want to be turned away.”

“I be good,” Lost replied.

Adria carefully steadied her book bag so it made no noise and advanced until she stood a foot behind the crate and the woman. Looking over the friendly stranger’s shoulder, she saw that the engineer was writing a series of numbers and letters, using sketches of cranes, pulleys, and weights to illustrate the figures. Swiftly the engineer made her marks, dipped the brush, and continued, leaving no drops or blots. Adria wished her own schoolwork was so tidy.

Then she stopped thinking about the look of the page and concentrated on what the engineer did. With the drawings to illustrate the problems, the mathematics began to explain itself. The strange oval cut in half at the top of the page was the angle of the ramp and the angle of the height to which a bridge had to be raised to clear an average ship. The equation beneath that one calculated the speed at which the bridge could be safely lowered without accident. A chance equation, scrawled in chalk on the slate beside the woman, was the key to a half page of calculations.

One page had filled up. Today the engineer did not tear it from the pad. Instead she cut it away with the tip of her belt knife, then anchored it under the slate. Wetting her brush afresh, she began a new page.

Adria, excited, was now figuring with her as she wrote, new insight following each calculation the engineer put down. These covered the weights necessary to pull the halves of the bridge up and to hold them up. If Adria understood correctly, each stone weight could be increased with lesser ones to a point, before it was necessary to switch to heavier rope cables and larger stones. Days of rain or snow changed the load of the bridge. The engineer was calculating the difference for the seasons.

The woman had covered half a page more when Adria forgot herself. She pointed over the engineer’s shoulder and said, “No, no—it’s three x divided by five, not four.”

“Oops,” said Lost.

“Maiden tears, you’re right,” the woman said, and half turned to look at Adria. “And when did you learn trigonometry?”

Adria backed up, suddenly convinced she had opened the door to disaster. She didn’t know what manner of disaster, she only knew it was coming.

“Stop it,” Lost ordered.

Adria halted. The engineer said nothing but waited, her hazel eyes level.

Finally Adria stammered, “What’s tri—trigo—?”

The engineer turned the rest of the way around, catching her ink jar before it tumbled over. “Don’t tell me you guessed the answer!”

“No,” Adria replied, stung at the suggestion. “I worked it out, going by the calculations that went before. The only possible answer was three x divided by five.”

“Then tell me again, where did a chit your age learn trigonometry? Don’t lie to me, now.”

“Adria not lie!” cried Lost, leaping from her pocket. It plopped to the ground in front of the girl. Adria gasped and lunged for it, but the darking dodged her. It added, “Adria too honest.”

The engineer pulled at her lower lip with her teeth and released it. “Mother, bless your servant,” she murmured. “What is a darking doing in Tusaine?”

“You know what Lost is!” Adria said, shocked.

The woman smiled. “Anyone who studies at the university in Corus knows what a darking looks like.” She turned to Lost. “What is your name, noble defender of shy mathematicians?”

“Lost,” it replied, as Adria blushed to hear herself called a mathematician.

She was also more than a little alarmed to learn that darkings came from the Tortallan capital. Her homeland was currently at peace with its larger neighbor, but things had not always been that way. There was an old saying, “Warbirds fly in any weather.”

“Lost, is it?” the engineer asked. “Not spying?”

“Lost,” repeated the darking. “Too silly to spy.”

“What a comfort to your friend,” the engineer said, looking at Adria. “I hear darkings are brutally honest. If they’re keeping a secret, they’ll tell you that’s what they’re doing. They won’t lie.” She turned back to her paper. “Well, then, I correct this figure, and what do I do next? Come on, girl. Move the slate—mind my paper, there, unless you saw any mistakes on that?”

Adria shook her head. Then she realized the engineer could not see her and said, “No, mistress, I didn’t. But I shouldn’t—”

Lost had inchwormed over to the crate and up its side. It looped itself around the chalk and erasure cloth for the slate. “Her name Adria,” it told the engineer before it lowered chalk and cloth to the ground.

Slowly, shaking with nervousness, Adria walked over and took up the slate and the parchment under it. Gingerly she sat on the edge of the crate.

“Master Hillbrand said you would be timid,” the woman remarked as she wetted her brush once again.

“Master Hillbrand!” Adria cried, jumping to her feet. Lost, who had been trying to climb into her lap, fell to the ground.

“It’s polite to visit your advisor when you come to his new town,” the engineer said, glancing at Adria. “Did you know he’d taught in Corus as well as Carthak?”

The girl nodded.

“Why he came to this hole in the hedge … No offense. Anyway, I paid him a call when I arrived for this job. He told me you came this way in the mornings, and I might see you, but he never mentioned you’re as shy as a fawn. I’m Keraine Waterstone, by the way,” the engineer said. “I’m not shy.”

Adria smiled. “I noticed,” she said quietly. She curtsied. “It’s an honor, Mistress Waterstone.”

“Just Keraine, all right? Now, sit and look at these.” Keraine eyed Lost, who had climbed onto the crate. “Would you want to see, Master Lost?”

Lost produced its head-knob and shook it. “Mathematics not fun.”

“No, Lost!” protested Adria. “You see, it’s a game!” She sat in the space it had left between it and the engineer. “Now, watch.”

Lost was soon able to leave Adria and Keraine to their discussion, as Adria got so absorbed in the way trigonometry unfolded in her mind that she forgot to include the darking. Keraine kept pace for the most part, but when Adria tried to follow some of her newest ideas to their next revelation, the engineer held up a hand.

“No, that’s too theoretical for me!” she protested for the fourth time, laughing. “You’ve gone past the boundaries of what I studied! Others went on to advanced mathematics, but not me. Where did you learn this?”

“But I’ve only seen this as I’ve watched you,” Adria protested. “I’m just thinking aloud. Doesn’t it have to be this way? Other factors would change the calculations, but you didn’t include them.”

Keraine produced a flask and took a drink from it. “Barley water with lemon,” she said, offering it to Adria. “I’ve talked myself dry.”

Adria accepted it with murmured thanks. The liquid was cool in her throat. She was pouring some into her hand for Lost when the marketplace clock began to chime. Terror flooded her, buzzing in her veins and turning to heat in her belly. How could she not have heard the bell before this?

“Uh-oh?” Lost asked, peering up into her face.

“You look like a ghost just bit your heart,” said Keraine.

“School began two hours ago,” Adria whispered. “How could I not hear the bells?”

“I will write a letter to your headmaster,” Keraine said, preparing to cut a fresh sheet of parchment loose. “I will say I asked you to help me.”

Adria shook her head. “They will tell Father. My father is very strict about my attendance at school.”

“Father bad,” Lost announced flatly.

“No, no! He knows what is best for me,” Adria protested. Inside her a voice, one that had been only a whisper before Lost came to add its doubts, said, Father only cares how he looks to other merchants.

Adria brushed the chalk from her hands and mumbled something to thank Keraine. Then she grabbed her book bag and raced down the canal road to the guild school, Lost clinging to her ankle to keep from being left behind.

When she reported to the head instructor, the man waved Adria away. “Your family has already been notified, Student Fairingrove. You will report to those studies which remain of your program for the day. Tomorrow we shall discuss with your father if you should remain in merchant studies or change to a convent school.”

Adria’s throat closed up tight. She had already gone far beyond the mathematics that was required of convent girls, who learned only what was needed to keep household books. She had hoped—she had dreamed—that her success in mathematics would be so great that her father would consent to her ultimate dream, to study in the great universities of Tortall or Carthak, even though she knew it was just a dream. Now she risked the loss even of Instructor Park’s class.

She reported to Carthaki history, but she barely heard the lecture or the questions, earning her a red mark from that instructor. She moved through the rest of her day in that manner, her mind racing along the same tracks: How could she appease Father? How could she convince him to give her another chance? Could she appeal to her mother? But Mother had not said a word against her father’s will since Adria could remember.

I’ll go and clean the upper storeroom, the one I’ve been putting off, she resolved at last. Lessons were over. She nodded to her friends, hoping they would understand why she hadn’t spoken with them that day, and trotted out into the street. I’ll do that, every last bit, and then I’ll decide. If he sees how hard I work, maybe he won’t take me out of school. She looked at her hands. They were shaking badly.

Out of sight of the students and instructors now, Lost rose from Adria’s pocket, twined around her arm, and climbed snakelike up to her shoulder. “Please talk,” the darking urged. “All afternoon you only shake. You still shake. Run away if news so bad. Come to Tortall. Nobody make you shake there.”

Adria smiled for the first time that day. “I’m too frightened to run off,” she replied. “I’ve never even left this town.”

“Time to go, then,” Lost said, but Adria shook her head. The roads and woods beyond the city were filled with killer centaurs, bandits, giant spiders with human heads, and other monsters. She’d heard the stories all her life from merchants who came to buy and sell at the shop. Girls who took the road risked murder, kidnapping, rape. Father had made sure Adria and her sisters knew of every daughter of their acquaintances who got caught in a servant’s arms, who ran away to a bad end, or who disgraced their families. Every daughter, every son.

She wanted to sit down and cry all over again, but if she was going to clean the storeroom better than she had before, she had to work. She had to start now.

Lost cleaned the downstairs storeroom with her. The darking made her smile as it swung or rolled or inched from task to task. It sang to her in its piping voice, songs with words in languages she’d never heard. “Where did you learn so much?” she asked, stopping to catch her breath after shifting some crates.

“Other darkings,” Lost replied, hanging from a beam overhead. “What one know, all know.”

“Isn’t that confusing?” she asked, grabbing her buckets. It was time to attack that unused storeroom. “Having so many voices inside you? Or is that not how it works?”

“Not confusing. How we are. You two-leggers lonely,” Lost said, swinging from one temporary tentacle to another along the beams as it caught up with her. “Darkings never lonely.”

Adria bit her lip. She had been so lonely since Instructor Hillbrand had left the school.

When they reached the upstairs storeroom, she threw open the shutters. To her surprise, the late-afternoon light revealed signs of a recent dusting on the counter. There was a tattered cushion on the lone stool in the room. A man’s boot prints showed clearly in the thick dust on the floor. When Adria began to sweep under the counter, she pulled out a branch of half-burned candles that had been hidden there.

Lost vanished into those same shadows. “Books here,” she heard it call.

“Why would books be here?” she asked, getting down on her knees. “Lost, if there’s a rat under there—”

“No rat,” her friend replied. “Rats afraid of darkings. We get big, yell ‘Boo!’ Rat scamper. Fun!”

Adria chuckled softly, then smothered a gasp as her fingers touched what felt like leather. The darking was right. Someone had put books under the counter, where no one would see them. She gripped the spine of the topmost volume and pulled it out onto her lap. It was a common account book, like those in the clerks’ office downstairs but with black leather binding instead of red.

“Who would put these here?” she asked herself more than Lost. “It doesn’t make sense.” She couldn’t see what was written where she sat. She struggled to her feet, keeping the heavy book in her hands.

“Me too,” Lost called from the floor.

She could barely tell the difference between it and the dark wood. Setting the book on the counter, she scooped up her friend, giving it a quick ride to the book. “Whee!” Lost squealed.

Adria set the darking on the counter and opened the book. The writing in it was her father’s.

“Why does he hide these up here?” she whispered to herself.

Adria slowly leafed through the pages. These were accounts. Moreover, they were current accounts, with dates that began that January and ended the day before.

Uneasy, she rubbed her forehead. She remembered pages from the books downstairs. She couldn’t help it. As she worked, she looked at them and tried her own calculations against those of the clerks. Her favorite books to view were Minter’s. Seeing his familiar neat columns and calculations took her back to the days when mathematics was fun, not something Father used in his unending war with his competitors.

This book was like those Minter kept for her father, but different. There were extra columns and extra lines, costs and goods that were not in the books reviewed by the royal inspectors. Adria remembered yesterday’s totals. They were a little below the usual day’s profit, as had been the case for a week. According to this account, with these extra goods, her father’s accounts showed their business making profits a third higher than those recorded downstairs.

She continued to read swiftly. The goods labeled “sand” were plainly no such thing, not at the prices her father gave them. Nor were the goods he called “bronze ingots.” The “glass bottles” were the most expensive items of all, priced far above anything the shop ever carried. There was only one answer. Her father was smuggling. The downstairs books were for show. These recorded his real profits.

“Now what?” inquired Lost as Adria set that book aside and picked up the next one in the stack.

“Don’t know,” she replied, unaware that she was suddenly talking like a darking. “Strange.”

“Strange what?”

“Hush,” Adria whispered, reading the notations in this book, dated last year. There was another volume for the two years before that, and a fourth for the three years earlier yet. “Whatever Father is smuggling, he worked his way up,” she whispered to Lost. “See here? Only a little bit at first. More and more as time moved on, until every shipment that comes to him carries smuggled goods in the cargo.” She shivered.

“Cold?” Lost asked.

“Frightened,” Adria replied.

“You frightened before.”

“Frightened for all of us, Lost,” Adria said. There were old, oily marks—finger marks—on the paper. “The Crown skins smugglers.” She put her nose close to one of the marks and sniffed. A tiny black blob, Lost’s head, did the same thing, even making the same noise.

“Frankincense,” she whispered. Her father didn’t sell frankincense in the shop. That must be one of the smuggled items.

“Adria!”

She cringed.

“Mithros curse you, girl, I know you’re hiding here!” her father cried from the storeroom below. “The longer you avoid me in this stinking, cowardly way, the worse it will go for you!”

“Father bad,” Lost said mulishly. “Time to go.”

“I have nowhere to go!” Adria whispered. She dragged herself to her feet. Then she looked at the book in her hand. How could he have put their family’s livelihood in such danger? Didn’t he care for them at all?

Swallowing often, trying to keep herself from throwing up out of sheer terror, she made herself walk toward the steps. She didn’t want Father to find her up here. Whether she showed him the evidence of his crimes or not, she didn’t want to be trapped in this musty room with no way to escape.

“Adria!” Father shouted yet again.

She put one foot on the stair, then another. A small weight struck her back and clung. “I right here,” Lost whispered.

The darking’s voice put a little strength in her shaky ankles. She walked faster. At the foot of the stair she placed the smuggling book on a crate in the shadows, then moved into the light of the main storeroom.

Her father stood near the front door, looking into the clerks’ office. When he heard Adria’s steps, he closed the door and faced her. “There you are.” He strode quickly to her and gripped her by one arm. “How dare you hide from me? Stand straight and look me in the face. No sniveling.” His voice was quiet. That was a very bad sign.

“Father, please forgive me,” Adria whispered. “I know I was wrong to be late for school. I’ll never do it again—”

“As Mithros witnesses, you will never do so again,” her father snapped. “You will never be given such a chance.”

“Father, please don’t send me to convent school,” Adria begged. “I swear, I’ll never be late again, I’ll work here all through the holidays—”

Her father’s gray eyes opened wide. “Convent school? You have shown you are unfit for any schooling!”

“None?” cried Adria. “But I was late only once! How—”

He slapped her.

The force of his blow knocked her sideways into a stack of crates. Adria leaned there, one hand on her throbbing cheek, staring at him. He had never struck her before, or any of her sisters, though he had hit her brothers when they were younger.

He pulled his arm back for another slap.

“Stop!” A ribbon of black darted over Adria’s shoulder and onto the floor. It rose, spreading to form a thin, filmy wall. “No more hurt! No more yell!” Lost produced its head-knob on a long, skinny neck and put its face right in front of the man’s. There it spread until it could have covered the human’s face. Softly the darking added, “Or no more breathe.”

Adria’s father now took a step back. For a short time none of them spoke or moved. Then the man said, “So a monster has enchanted my obedient child. A monster that has taught her to lie.”

“Only one monster here,” Lost replied.

Her father’s words were the strangest thing Adria had heard him say. He sounded nearly mad, which made her shiver. “I’m not bespelled,” she said quietly, trying to explain without making him think she defied him. “Lost isn’t a monster. It’s a darking, from Tortall.” Adria moved so she stood beside her friend. Lost shrank in until it was a ribbon, then hopped to twine around her arm. She turned her hand so the darking could put a blob of itself in her palm. “See? It’s the most gentle creature in the world.” She stroked the darking’s head-knob with a finger that trembled.

Her father took another step back. “It’s a monster from an enemy realm. You should have brought it to me the moment you found it. Already the thing was working its wiles on you.”

He wasn’t listening. Adria tried again. “Father, there’s an engineer working on the new canal who can vouch for Lost,” she said. “She’s the reason I was late this morning. She’s named Keraine Waterstone.”

Her father reached for the flat, hard length of wood used to lever crates off carts. He clutched the lever with both hands and came closer to Adria and Lost. “Let go of that thing, my girl,” he ordered.

Adria wrapped both hands around the darking, gripping its tail with one hand to keep it from smothering her father. Now it was her turn to back away, toward the door at the rear of the storeroom. “Father, don’t!”

“Do not defy me again. Hand the monster over.”

Adria trembled. It was so hard to keep defying him, but he was finally asking too much. She shook her head. “Lost is my friend.”

Her father swung the lever at her. Adria dodged. Lost took advantage of her distraction to leap free of her hands. It wrapped itself around the lever board and yanked the tool from her father’s grip. The man stumbled, off balance, as Lost flung the board into the shadows. Adria caught the darking as it jumped back to her.

“Master Fairingrove?” a voice, Minter’s voice, called from the door to the clerks’ workroom. “You have visitors. I tried to bar them, but their … creatures managed to open the door.”

Already Adria’s father was collecting himself, straightening his tunic, checking his hair. He advanced to the door to the front offices, smiling. He never showed his angry, roaring self to anyone but family, Adria realized as she shivered near the rear exit. For years she had thought the roaring Father was the false one, the handsome, smiling Father the real one. Suddenly it came to her that the roaring Father was the Father she would always have, the one who waited inside the smiling Father. Even if she somehow cajoled him into letting her continue lessons, sooner or later she would do something to offend him. She would skip a task or drop something. He could take her food, or her few treasures. Worse, now she had Lost, whom he’d sworn to kill.

“Lost, you have to get away,” she whispered. “Go back to Tortall. You can do it. Just get a ride with a caravan. They won’t even know you’re with them. Don’t pretend you’re too silly to work it out. I know you better now.”

“No,” that soft voice said by her ear. “Lost and Adria friends. Darkings never leave friends.”

“He’ll kill you!”

“I hide.”

Adria’s belly surged. She ran into the shadows to vomit, though only water came up. Apart from the breakfast Lost had stolen for them, she’d eaten nothing that day. She waited there, thinking, ignoring the voices by the shop door. Lost was tucked under her ear, its small body warm.

That answers that, she thought wearily. Monsters on the road or no, we have to run. Lost was right. I cannot stay with Father. He will take everything that makes me happy.

Slowly, walking like an old woman, she went out into the light. She had the rear door open when Lost began to bounce on her shoulder. “No, no! Wait! Darkings here!”

“But we have to run away,” whispered Adria. “I have to pack.”

“Help come, Adria! Help here now! Go to Father!” Lost threw itself to the floor and bounced before her.

She sighed. More than anything, she wanted to leave this big, echoing room where she had worked so had, but she owed Lost for saving her a beating. She couldn’t believe her darking friend was a monster who would lead her astray, as Father said, so she followed it toward the collection of people at the shop door.

The sight of a familiar head brought her to a stop halfway there—not her father’s, whose back was to her, or Minter’s, who had returned to the clerks’ office, but Hillbrand’s. There was something new about her former instructor, she saw. A black blob that glittered with silver dust sat on his shoulder, one tentacle-arm slung over his ear in a friendly way.

Hillbrand’s face lit with a smile when he saw Adria. “But here she is,” he said, looking at Adria’s father. “You told us she had gone home.”

“We said he lied,” tiny voices chorused. As Minter and Adria’s father turned to look at her, Adria could see that Keraine Waterstone was there, too. A pair of darkings rode with her, one in the crook of her arm, one on the pack she had slung over her shoulder.

Three more darkings! Adria thought, startled. “How did they get here?” she asked Lost, her lips barely moving. It had jumped up to her wrist.

“What one darking knows, all know,” Lost whispered to Adria. “I told them, bring help.” It twined itself around the length of her arm.

“My daughter’s presence makes no difference,” Adria’s father said coldly. “You can have no possible interest in her. You have retired from the school, Master Hillbrand, and I am taking Adria from it. She is spoiled and unfit. Tomorrow she leaves for my cousin’s farm.”

“Are you mad?” Keraine asked, eyes wide. “Forgive me, we’ve only just met, but is it possible you’re unaware of your daughter’s talents?”

“My daughter does tricks with numbers that make her think she may do as she pleases,” replied the man Adria decided to think of as Master Fairingrove, not Father. “It was amusing when she was a child. I indulged her, and now she does not attend classes, she defies her teacher. She lies. She disobeys. She is completely out of hand.”

“Sir—Master Fairingrove, I am Keraine Waterstone,” Keraine said. “I am an advisor engineer for the company that is building a drawbridge over your canal. I have studied in Carthak and in Corus. I know a powerful talent when I see one. I met Adria late this morning. She and I worked on equations I’ve been doing for a series of bridges.”

“Ridiculous!” scoffed Master Fairingrove. “You expect me to believe such a lie?”

Keraine’s cheeks turned crimson. She grabbed a chain at her neck and hauled it over her head, then held it out to Adria’s father. A gold disk swung at the chain’s end. “I am a master of the guild of builders,” she told him hotly. “If you wish to contest my judgment, you may do so before the Guildmaster, when the guild convenes on Wednesday!”

“Ha ha!” chuckled Lost to itself.

Adria swallowed a gasp. The guilds frowned on anyone who accused their masters without evidence. Her father had standing in the merchants’ guild, but his rank was bronze. The merchants would not back him the way the builders would protect one of their own who wore gold, even if that one was a stranger.

“Well!” Keraine said when it was plain that Master Fairingrove would neither touch her medal nor answer her. She draped the chain over her head once more, but this time she did not tuck her insignia under her clothes. “You say you mean to send Adria to some farm?”

“She may have bedazzled you, but I am her father. I will see to it she learns proper behavior,” Master Fairingrove said, his voice tight. “The old man spoiled her”—he glared at Hillbrand—“and now she will not heed her betters.”

Hillbrand snorted. “Instructor Park is not Adria’s better,” he said with scorn. “He is a third-rater who teaches here instead of Carthak because he has neither ability nor patrons. I fear I did not help you with him, Adria,” he explained, meeting her eyes. “I told him that he should let you work ahead and come to me for special instruction. My friends at the school have let me know he took against you instead. The more he saw you could do, the more jealous he became.”

Adria tried to smile, to tell her old friend she understood, though she didn’t understand. It made no sense for a teacher—an adult, a university graduate!—to dislike her.

“Jealous! Of a child!” scoffed Master Fairingrove.

“Bad man,” said the glitter-covered darking on Hillbrand’s shoulder.

Master Fairingrove flinched. Hillbrand reached up to stroke the small creature. “Now, Silvery, that was rude,” he chided gently.

“True,” piped the darking in the crook of Keraine’s arm. “True,” echoed the one in her pack.

Adria saw Master Fairingrove’s hands clench into fists. “Please hush,” she begged, afraid of what her father might do. He seemed to have taken against all darkings, not only Lost. “Darkings, please.” Lost made an arm and patted Adria’s cheek gently with it.

“Adria doesn’t need a farm,” Keraine announced. “She needs the university in Corus. They’ll be able to keep up with her there. I know several good families who will be glad to take her in.”

“You raise her hopes for nothing,” Master Fairingrove said, crossing his arms over his chest. “I will not pay for a girl to attend university, not the fees, not whatever these people will ask to clothe, house, and feed her. In any event, she is far too young. The masters there would never accept her.”

“But they will,” Hillbrand said gently. “She has two graduates in good standing to vouch for her—Keraine and me—and she will pass the examinations easily. As for expense, I have no children, and quite a large sum in savings. I always meant to leave it to Adria. I will just do it sooner. In fact, I believe I will take her to Corus myself.”

“You will not,” Adria’s father said, his voice thick with fury. “She is mine.”

“Adria no slave!” cried Lost, raising its head from Adria’s shoulder. “Adria belong to Adria!”

“No slavery here,” called the darking seated on Keraine’s elbow. “You not own her.”

Adria barely heard them. She was thinking, working on the solution of her life. This was an equation made up of feelings and knowledge of Master Fairingrove. She had been prepared to run away to nothing. Now she had something, if she found a way to change her father’s mind. Her old self, the one who would do anything to please him, struggled and failed under the weight of all she had learned about him today. If she had been ready to run away with nothing, surely she could fight for this gift of her dreams.

She bit her lip, then forced herself to cry gaily, “Don’t worry, Father!” She ran to the shadowed area by the stair to the old storeroom and retrieved the account book she had hidden there.

“This help?” Lost asked, concerned.

“Don’t know,” Adria replied in a whisper. Back she went, going all the way to the adults this time. She offered the volume to her father. “Father, it’s all right. I finished checking the books. You don’t need me to help anymore! Unless you want me to have the guild auditors review my work?”

She met her father’s eyes, keeping her own wide and innocent. He stared first at her, then, frowning, at the account book. He turned pale when he realized that it had a black cover. He realized she was threatening to take his secret to the guild.

“I’ll have that, my girl,” he said at last.

Lost rolled onto the book. “Adria goes free,” it said. “Or all darkings in city know what we know now.”

“What one darking knows, all know,” called the one that rode on Keraine’s shoulder.

Lost put out an arm and tapped the book. “All know.”

Master Fairingrove took a deep breath. Adria could tell he was fighting to contain his temper. “I had not known your work was … done, Adria. That is … very different. Go with your educated new friends, if you like. You get no blessing from me.”

Lost rolled back to Adria’s arm, whispering “Huzza, huzza, huzza!” as she gave the book to her father. Once she was free of it, she went over to Keraine and Hillbrand.

“May she go home to say goodbye to her mother and siblings?” asked Hillbrand.

“She may not,” said Fairingrove. “I will have her things sent to your home in the morning. She is no longer a member of my family.” He looked at them as if they were beggars. “I will thank all of you, including your monsters, to leave my property. The back way.” He pointed to the rear door.

As they walked out, Keraine put an arm around Adria’s shoulders. “I am so sorry,” she whispered. Her darkings hung down, chattering softly with Lost. “I never thought he would be so …”

Adria shook her head. “It’s all right,” she whispered. She would have Lost take a note to her mother, warning her about her father’s smuggling.

“No, it isn’t all right,” Hillbrand said, stealing the torch that lit the storeroom entrance. “But it will be, eventually.”

Five days later, three travelers got onto the ferry to Tortall. The two women wore scarves against the strong wind that came downriver from the north, while the man who traveled with them wore the hood of his coat up over his head. One of the ferrymen, trying to coax a horse aboard, told the man to watch where he went. The ferryman reaped a surprise when a black blob the size of two fists put together, covered with silver dust, popped out of the man’s hood and piped that they were minding where they went! Hillbrand apologized hurriedly for his companion and sat in a protected corner with Adria and Keraine. The four darkings pooled in Adria’s lap, chuckling over the start that Silvery had given the ferryman, while Keraine dug in her pack.

Looking at the darkings, Adria had to smile. It was impossible to mope in their presence, and she loved them for coming to her aid. From them she had learned that Lost had asked friends to find Keraine and tell her that Adria needed help. Keraine had thought it would be better to bring in Master Hillbrand, who Master Fairingrove already knew. When she mentioned her idea to the darkings who had found her, they had called for a third, Silvery, to fetch Hillbrand.

In the time Adria, Keraine, and Hillbrand had spent with the four darkings, they had not gotten a straight answer as to how many others of their kind were actually in the city. The answer that gave all of them goose bumps was “Enough.” That was when Keraine decided to quickly finish her work on the bridge so she could leave for Corus with Hillbrand and Adria.

“If something is brewing, it may be better that any Tortallans are gone when it boils,” Hillbrand had remarked when Keraine announced her decision to come with them.

“Ah!” the engineer said now, producing the item she searched for. “Something to read during your journey to a proper school.”

Hillbrand took the book from Keraine. “It was a guild school that educated you for university,” he said mildly. “You never complained before. Ah. Yasmadad’s Principles of Trigonometry. Aren’t you rushing things?”

“Rushing things?” cried Keraine. “With snippets she picked up somewhere, she was reinventing trigonometry right in front of me, I told you!”

While the older pair talked, Adria opened the tattered book to the first page. There were the symbols, what she’d thought of as runes, for sine and cosine. Four black knobs on long necks arranged themselves around the edges of the book as the darkings looked on. “What trig’nom’ry good for?” asked the one called Puff, who managed to hold a cloudweed puff in its body.

“Building things,” Adria said, leafing through the book and halting at the pictures. “Bridges, houses, towers. It’s the first step.”

“Building things,” the four darkings said with a sigh, as if they were having visions of wonderful structures.

Adria glanced back at her city as the ferry drew away from it. She looked only once. Then she turned her eyes forward, toward her home-to-be.

A tentacle tugged on her sleeve. “Adria,” Lost said. “Teach us.”

“I’m learning myself,” she protested, but she bent over the book and began to read softly to her class of four.