“I am glad you survived, sister dear,” he said. “Both the surgery and the ritual. Although I am slightly peeved that when you came to the palace, you saw Songtsan and not me.”
“It was a professional visit,” she said, and kissed him on the cheek. “And I wanted to wait to see you until I knew if I would have magic or not.”
He squeezed her hand and let go. “And?”
“What?” she said. “Your spies haven’t told you every detail of my movements?”
“You mistake me for Songtsan.” Impulsively, he hugged her tightly, then stepped back. “But I am me. And I know you wouldn’t be teasing if you hadn’t excelled. So out with it. Let me see!”
Silently, Samarkar held up her hand and willed the blue light into being. It washed the color from her skin, from Tsansong’s overawed face, from the embroidered tapestries thick with the images of the room’s eponymous butterflies. “Satisfied?”
“I knew you could do it!” With a glad sound, he hugged her once more, and she let the cold light die to hug him back. “So, about Songtsan? What was the business?”
Samarkar shrugged. She didn’t know how close to his breast Songtsan was playing this, and it certainly wasn’t her space to spill the news to Tsansong. Instead she crossed to the window and leaned out. “He’s jealous of you.”
“Jealous of our wives, you mean,” Tsansong said. “Especially Payma, because she is closer to me than to him.”
Samarkar might have nodded. Her head felt so heavy she was not sure.
“Hey,” he said, coming up behind her. He put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m proud of you, you know.”
“I ran away,” she said.
He squeezed. “From here, it looks like running to.”
* * *
Two women in wizard’s weeds afoot, leading a trio of cat-agile pack mules not much bigger than large dogs, could make good speed even through the mountains. As Yongten-la had promised, Samarkar’s studies resumed, and the new learning was different. What had been theory became practice, and that which had been rote practicality clicked with slow precision into an elaborate set of theoretical scaffolds that began to take shape in Samarkar’s head.
She learned to call forth that light and warmth that had flooded from her with consistency and refinement. She learned to do it while concentrating on her foot placement on a rocky trail at the edge of a cliff a hundred man-heights tall. She learned to finesse it to just warmth, to only light, then to focus both to cutting intensity using the lens of her will and also a lens of flawless rock crystal that Tsering gave her to hang upon a chain about her neck.
“Earth,” Tsering said, “is the closest process to life, and so earth is the one of the five elemental processes that cannot be created by a wizard. And so it is the one we use to control the others—fire, air, water, and emptiness. We can manipulate earth. We can manipulate life. But we cannot create either.”
“How do you manipulate earth?” Samarkar asked.
Tsering glanced from side to side. It was afternoon; they were in the midst of a plateau, and the long shadows were crawling across earth that blew with grass and flowers between bare rocky scrapes. There were no other travelers in sight.
“Here,” she said, and moved the mules off the track, where they could graze in peace for a while. The mules, who had been snatching mouthfuls of roadside herbs at every opportunity, seemed contented with this solution.
She found a flat stone—not too much of a trick, as all Rasa abounded in them—and clambered up on it with a pack in her hand. “Here,” she said. “Come. Sit.”
Samarkar settled down cross-legged before her. She noticed the other end of the boulder housed a shrine to some traveler’s god, and resolved to make him or her a gift of a pinch of salt and millet upon arising. A polite bribe to the local authorities had never hurt anyone.
Tsering-la set out soapstone bowls sized for pickles or relish in a line before herself and filled each one with powder from a different oiled leather pouch—sparkling white, sparkling yellow, silver-gray, dull black. She set a mortar and pestle out beside them and looked up at Samarkar with a familiar, challenging expression.
“Saltpeter,” Samarkar said, touching the first bowl. “Sulfur, iodide of silver, charcoal. For a rocket to bring rain from a cloudy sky.”
Tsering handed Samarkar the pestle. Samarkar accepted it with trepidation. It weighed heavy and cool in her hand—smooth on the haft, rough on the bulb. “And if I asked you to construct a rocket now?”
“Without a balance?” Samarkar hesitated. “I’d blow my hand off.”