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Chapter One

She was pressed - jammed - into a corner formed by chunks of stone. Someone's knee poked into her thigh on one side. Someone else's foot dug into her calf on the other. There had been four of them, and a dog, trapped in a bubble in the ground. The first part of an earthquake was just fading, and the rest about to roll over them like high tide pounding the harbour walls.

Sweat poured down her cheeks and back. Half-turning, she thrust her hands palm-flat on either side of a crack between the stones. Calling to the power inside her, she sent her magic through the gap. Earth-waves were coming her way, small ones in front, bigger ones behind. Their force heated dirt and stones, spreading everywhere. Her bones felt like huge rocks, pressed together so hard that something would have to give. They would slip alongside one another with a crash, forcing buildings and streets and whole cities into new shapes.

And the heat, the earth's heat was cooking her and the friends whose bodies pressed against hers. The hot waves roared through the ground, gaining strength as they travelled. When they hit, she could choose between being roasted or crushed; the earth around her small hollow would clench like a fist -

Trisana Chandler lunged out of bed, throwing off the thin sheet that had been her only covering, jumping for her open window. Dangling half out of it, she gasped in the night air.

She was above ground, in her attic room in Discipline cottage, at Winding Circle Temple in Emelan. The earthquake was ten days gone, and she and her friends had lived to talk about it.

But the heat! No wonder she dreamed of it still, with the air dead around her.

Every door and window in the attic was open, but not a breeze stirred under the thatch. It was scarcely cooler outside.

Voices reached her ears on the tiny puffs of air that did touch her. Once she'd thought the voices meant that she was going crazy. Now she knew they were only pieces of real conversations that took place somewhere, carried to her by the wind. It still made her a little nervous to hear them, although they spoke mostly of everyday things...

"Aymery Glassfire, I am impressed. " The prissy and dry-voiced speaker was a man unknown to Tris. The name "Aymery" pricked her - she had a cousin Aymery, but his name was Chandler, not Glassfire, and he was hundreds of miles away, at the university in Lightsbridge. Aymery was a common name. "The learned men who wrote these letters give you praise indeed. I could no more refuse to allow you the use of our library than I could fly. "

Tris shook her head, trying to get that voice out of her ears. To be hot and bored was just plain too much!

The simple act of moving captured a fresh puff of air, drawing it close. "Novice Jaen, how could you allow our stores of bandages to fall so low?"

"But - Dedicate Willowwater - I didn't know I was to check the other storage rooms, and so many were needed after the earthquake... "

"Oh, don't cry, girl. We'll have to contrive something, quickly. "