No Flame But Mine Read Online Free Page B

do. And so I thought the mageia here might train her for magic, or you, Highness, since you were kind enough to look in.’
    In Jemhara’s vacant attic room, the moon-skimped darkness showed little. A cat might have seen: a mattress animal with rough furs; a table of intricate mosaic found in the ruins and brought to her, on which lay a piece of mirror for scrying, a goblet, some sticks and a tiny knife. A small hearth was blackened from fires. A peg jutted out of the wall near the window. Here hung another gown, this one of darned wool. Something else hung down by a ribbon. It was a twig formed disconcertingly like a hand of too many fingers.
    A temple of Ranjal, the Rukarian goddess of wood, had given Jemhara the twig when she had been going to Ru Karismi. Although she finished the journey in her shape-shift of a black hare, the twig had remained with her. It had its own peculiar power, and helped her find Thryfe in his cell of self-torture below the city. She had kept the twig, naturally.
    Nevertheless, can a twig be a hand? Can a hand listen?
    The hand of Ranjal listened.
    A faint pollen-like glow settled on its western edges.
    Slowly the twig rotated on its ribbon. The many fingers pointed.
    About half a mile off at the west end of Kandexa, the Magician Thryfe was standing by another barricade. This ramshackle haunt of the West Villagers was licking its wounds after today’s defeat by Clever Town. Half the sheep had been stolen and seventeen men were hurt, six more dead. Soot and burning lingered on the night air.
    The man with the badly splinted broken arm spat at Thryfe, but the spit bounced off which gave them pause.
    â€˜He’s some mage.’
    â€˜Hey you, can you mend bones?’
    â€˜Yes,’ said Thryfe. ‘But I charge a fee.’
    â€˜Then you’re no true mage. How much do you want, you bastard?’
    â€˜Tell me which settlement here has the Magikoy woman.’
    Sly and uncomfortable they started away and grunted among themselves like badgers.
    It had been plain enough everywhere here that most of them knew such a woman was in their minced city of zones. Envious of the group which had her, the rest refused to tell.
    Thryfe mused on the eccentricity of the non -human thing that also masked her whereabouts from him. Even though he had been able to fathom she was at Kandexa, once arrived some type of uncanny tangle hid her again and more completely. He now sensed, he thought, an intelligence withdrawn and scheming, yet primal, nearly instinctual.
    The fellow with the broken bone stepped forward again. ‘Here’s my arm. See to it, and I’ll take you over there myself.’
    Perhaps it was a bluff; the man was chuckling scornfully when Thryfe put both his hands on the mess of the arm. The chuckle became a scream. The break had been bad, a shattering. Thryfe pushed energy through the splinters of bone, realigned them, adjusted the splint, caught the man as he pitched forward in a dead faint. Thryfe handed him back to his mates.
    They remarked bemusedly on the heat the arm gave off, admired the splint and leered at Thryfe, deciding to be friends.
    â€˜Well?’ he said.
    â€˜She’s with that herd at Paradise. Across the city eastward, the lower section. Black-haired piece – er, lady. They say she was a queen once. They say she can change into a hare.’
    Thryfe had gone.
    The east had been clearly marked, another moon risen there, this one thin as a child’s nail.
    He had noted in several spots before the fading of either fear of or respect for mages, even the Magikoy. Those few years in the past it would have been unthinkable. The world had been altered. Only the endless snows were changeless.
    The endless snows—
    It was at that moment, passing beneath the ruin of a tumbled tower, that Thryfe heard the ominous groan of shifting ice. The noise was overtaken instantly by a deathly crunch, as if some more enormous bone had broken in the