Shatterglass by Tamora Pierce Page A

where you have to start, too. Meditation, the whole thing. Breathing, clearing your mind, exercises to strengthen your grip on your magic.” She held Chime away from her plate as the dragon tried to inspect it for anything edible.
    “I know how,” Keth told her, then took a bite of chicken.
    Tris pursed her lips. It sounded as if he claimed he could simply to shut her up. “You know how to meditate. And where, pray, did you learn?”p>
    Now he looked up into her face. “We all learned it,” he said impatiently. “In the Glassmakers’ Guild. It helps you get control over your breath, so you can blow long and steady and not swallow molten glass. It was the first thing we learned as ‘prentices. Well, that and how to tell what’s good charcoal and what’s bad.”
    Tris propped her chin on her hand. “Show me.”
    “Now?” Keth demanded. “I’ve been pounding around Heskalifos all the blessed day.”
    “If you’re to be a mage, you must control your mind — your power — anywhere, at any time, tired or no,” she retorted. “Now.”
    Keth put down his fork with a sigh. He shut his eyes and took a deep breath. Slowly he inhaled as Tris counted silently to seven. He held the breath for the same count, released it for seven, and held for seven. As he continued Tris closed her eyes briefly, concentrating on her vision. When she opened her eyes again, Kethlun’s magic was as plain as day to her sight.
    His breathing and stillness served to calm him, that was clear, but his power was unaffected. It jetted from his skin in erratic flares, fluid like molten glass one moment, crooked like lightning the next. Then the lightning shapes grew, racing over Kethlun like groping hands, splitting into more bolts, until he was nearly covered with light.
    He opened his eyes and the lightning vanished.
    “Well?” he demanded irritably. “I said I know how.”
    For a moment Tris didn’t reply, stunned by the fiery lacework that had covered him over. Then she remembered to breathe herself. How could Keth hold such beauty and not know it?
    She remembered something Briar had once said while her friends cowered under a tree in the rain. Tris was dancing in a field as lightning flashed and thunder roared overhead. “Not everybody thinks it’s a play-pretty like you do, Coppercurls! Send it on its way so we can go home!”
    “So you can meditate,” she said to Kethlun now. “That saves time. Let me see—”
    She was interrupted by someone banging on the street door. “Open for the aruriml” a man cried. “Open in the name of the law!”
    Little Bear dashed into the hall, barking furiously. Tris leaped after him and seized his collar. The housekeeper passed them both, opening the door only when she saw that Tris had the big dog under control. Tris hung on to her pet with both hands, dragging him back with all her strength as men and women in bright red tunics shouldered past the housekeeper, heavy batons in their hands.
    “What is this?” the servant cried. “We are law-abiding people!”
    “We seek Kethlun Warder,” said a man who wore a sergeant’s black sword border on his tunic sleeves. “We have information that he is present here.”
    “I’m Kethlun Warder,” Keth said. He came to stand by Tris and the nearly-hysterical dog. “Why would the arurim look for me?”
    A man stepped through the arurimi’s ranks. He was young, with dark brown skin, kinked black hair cut in a short cap around his head, and sharp brown eyes. Like the men of the arurim he wore a scarlet tunic, but his was topped by a blue mage’s stole bordered in scarlet braid. “Kethlun Warder, is this your work?” The mage held out a round glass ball. Sparks glinted faintly on its surface.
    “It looks like my work,” Kethlun answered slowly. He leaned in to better look inside the ball. “Or rather, it’s like something I made this afternoon, but there was nothing in it then. It was all lightning.”
    “According to a clerk from Mages’ Hall, the lightning cleared to reveal this scene just before he was to