Daja's Book by Tamora Peirce

Author:Tamora Peirce
Language: eng
Format: epub

CHAPTER EIGHT

As they rode to see the glacier the next morning, Tris kept her fingers crossed that the journey would take them out from under the smoke that draped Gold Ridge for as far as they could see. She got a little relief from the cough that had plagued her all night as the road they followed led up, past the tiny crocus valley. Who would have thought such runty-looking plants would be worth so much? she thought as Briar pointed out the terrace where he’d fried some.

Sandry, her companion on the trail, was not her usual talkative self. The magical effort in her weaving had caught up with her as she slept, just as Lark had warned; she was pale and heavy-eyed, half-dozing in the saddle. Behind them came Niko, Yarrun and Lark, talking idly. The Gold Ridge mage had offered to come along as far as the turnoff to the glacier valley: he wanted a look at the progress of the grassfires.

At the rear of their column rode Briar, who had volunteered to keep an eye on the pack horse that carried their lunch.

Polyam, still decked out in bright yellow, and Daja led their company. Once Tris’s starling Shriek had stopped filling her ears with his normal babble of sound to hunt breakfast, Tris nudged her pony forward so that she could talk to them. “A shame about the saffron crop,” Polyam was telling Daja. “That’s usually what we buy here. Lady Inoulia needs a miracle to get this valley through to the next harvest.

They need rain, and they need copper and saffron. They’re out of all three.“ Tris looked soberly down into the valley. She could just see the edge of the shrunken lake far, far below: their road was carrying them to the river that fed it. “I wish I could do something,” she muttered, thumping her leg with her fist.

“Back home, I’d have storms up and raining buckets!”

Page 49

“Could you?” asked Polyam with a laugh. “Could you indeed?”

“She could,” Daja said glumly. “And with as much thought as rolling over in bed.”

The laughter died from Polyam’s face. “You’re serious?” Tris guided her pony to the outer edge of the roadway. Their route sloped down now, into a wooded cleft where the small, grudging river that filled the lake entered Gold Ridge valley. “Don’t tell her all I can do,” she advised Daja. “It might just make her nervous.”

“It might,” Daja admitted. To Polyam she said, “Tris makes me nervous sometimes, and she’s my saati”

Polyam shook her head. “To hear kaqs called saati - it makes me feel as if the world’s coming all unglued.”

“What else am I supposed to call them?” Daja asked, surprised. “Tris, Briar, Sandry - they’re as close to me as my own blood. It’s been a long summer,” she said, wishing that explained their friendship and knowing it didn’t even come close. “We’ve been through a lot together.”

Yarrun rode up behind them. “You must excuse me for not going further. I have no interest in glaciers,”

he announced.

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