Daja leaned on her broom-handle staff, barely winded. It would take longer to teach Jory to grip her magic this way, but she knew they now steered the right course. She also knew she was right to give the twins separate lessons, though she was less happy about that. Still, they were both good girls and they did want to learn. Daja could appreciate that. And she had liked trading blows with Jory. She missed her practices at the temple, and Jory had a natural talent for it. Maybe once the younger girl learned to control her power, she might also like to study more combat techniques. That was something Daja could look forward to.

After breakfast she spent the morning in her room, working on her fireproof gloves. First she molded living metal as southern bakers shaped flatbread, tossing rounds from hand to hand until they reached the proper thickness. As she worked the stuff, she sent her magic through it, calling on the power of its birth. Then she had dragged a forest fire through her flesh, which had included a hand covered by the molten brass cap of her staff. This metal would be able to endure fires that intense. She also imagined how Ben would use the living metal gloves-to knock burning debris aside as he had at the fire when they’d met, to lift flaming beams out of his way, to grasp hot metal to shift it. She filled the living metal with her idea of Ben as she’d first seen him, laden with two boys he’d carried from an inferno just in time. When she finished, these gloves would happily do whatever Ben asked of them.

Once she set a piece of living metal on a glove form, she carried the form to the window and stuck it outside. The wind blew hard off the Syth, trying to yank her creation from her grasp without success. With the living metal strip cold enough to hold to the iron form, not drip through the openings between the rods, Daja added the next strip, molding it in place and pressing its edges against the cold section until they blended seamlessly. Then she took the form back to the window.

She finished one glove by the time the clock struck noon, and went down to take her meal with the kitchen staff. About to return upstairs, she realized she needed physical activity. Handling living metal was more an exercise of power than work for her body. She went into the slush room and looked outside. People had been moving snow all day after the two-foot-deep fall during the night, the Bancanor servants among them. Not only were the paths around the house clear, but the ice of the boat basin was too. Daja looked out under the street bridge, where the boat basin opened on the canal. Convict work gangs were hard at work, smoothing the broad strip of ice. Skaters used the ice they had cleared.

If I want to skate the canal, I have to practice, Daja told herself. She went to the slush room and put on her outdoor clothes, then went to the boat basin to skate.

When she returned to her room, she felt ten feet tall. She had learned how to turn while still in motion, and she had not fallen once. While she had been telling Jory that her body had to learn movements so well that she didn’t have to think about them, Daja’s own body had done a bit of learning of its own.

She felt so good that work on the second glove went even more quickly than it had that morning. She finished just as the maids came upstairs to light the lamps. Nia would be home from Camoc’s soon.

With both forms covered, Daja tied heavy cords to their inner iron frames, opened one of her windows, and hung the forms outside. The night’s cold would set the liquid metal. In the morning she’d remove the iron forms and complete the magic that would keep the gloves in that shape forever.

Pleased with her day’s work, Daja leaned out the open window. Snow lay thick on the rooftops, in heaps on either side of Blyth Street and Prospect Canal, but there was less than she’d seen that morning or even at midday. People who lived with heavy snows found plenty of ways to handle it, Daja had learned. Servants worked almost as long and as hard as convicts to clear courtyards and walks so that nothing kept their wealthy masters and mistresses from the day’s business. Convicts labored on snow removal in huge crews, shivering in rags and shackles. Daja felt no pity for them. They were criminals and deserved their lot.

She scooped up a handful of snow: it melted almost instantly. She had raised her personal heat the moment she’d opened the shutters. Daja let it drain back through her until her skin held only normal warmth. This time when she gathered snow, it didn’t melt away before she could eat it. She loved the taste of clean, crisp snow.

She was working on her jewelry when she heard the clatter of footsteps on the back stair. “Daja!” Nia cried. “I’m home!”

Daja put her work aside, collected her Trader’s staff, and joined her student. “How did it go today?” she asked as she and Nia climbed to the schoolroom.

Nia held up a cloth bag. Wooden rods in three shades-pale oak, chestnut, and ebony-poked out of it. “More buttons,” she said. “By the time I’m done, no one will have to make any more for decades. Maybe even a century.”

“That’s how I felt about nails,” Daja told her as she opened the schoolroom door. “It’s amazing how many of such things people use though.”

Nia shed her bag and coat and sat on the floor. As Daja drew the circle around them with her staff, she realized she was glad to have this quiet girl to herself for a while. Smiling, she took her own place and enclosed them in a bubble of magic.

In the morning, after a round of staff practice with Jory and a good breakfast, Daja returned to her room and brought her gloves in from outside. Carefully she slipped her fingers between the living metal and the iron forms, then worked the forms out of their gleaming yellow sheaths.