Free Shatterglass by Tamora Pierce

clerk to the upper floors of Mages’ Hall.
    By the end of the afternoon, Kethlun was more adrift than he had been that morning.
    He had seen two more mages after Rainspinner. Like Amberglass, they had sent him on to other glass mages or weather mages. Keth yearned to go home. If he spent much more time up here, Yali would have left Ferouze’s and gone to perform by the time he got home.
    When the clock struck the fourth hour, his guide led him back to the area where the mages’ clerks sat, copying out schedules and lessons and reviewing correspondence.
    “You’ll have to return tomorrow,” the clerk said, wetting a reed pen in a pot of ink.
    He had placed the basket, with its sparking glass ball, at the farthest corner of his desk. The clerks at neighbouring desks inched away from it. “Present yourself at—”
    “Come back?” Keth asked, cursing his slow speech. What he wanted to do was scream, but he couldn’t. If he didn’t force himself to speak carefully, the stammer -
    would return. Then no one would be able to understand him. He leaned on the counter between him and the clerks, his head and feet aching. “I have a debt to pay, work to do. I cannot spend my l-life h-here waiting like a pet dog. Aren’t y-you p-people supposed to help?” There, he heard it: the stutter. He thrust the knuckle of his index finger into his mouth and bit down just hard enough to grab his attention, pulling it away from his fury. He did meditation breathing until he thought he could continue.
    None of the clerks had budged since he started talking. “Your charter says you are duty bound to instruct new mages,” he said, letting each word finish its journey from his mouth before he tried the next sound. “Well, here I am. All new and shiny, fresh from the lightning strike. I need help now. Who knows what I will make next, when I do not know what I am doing?“
    People were emerging from their offices. Most wore tunics and kytens, with the mage-blue stole looped to waist-length in front and left to dangle to the knees behind.
    Kethlun looked around, counted, and gulped: twenty-three mages now stood in the room.
    “How is it, my peers, that anyone can make such a complaint on this of all weeks?”
    The speaker was a tall chestnut-brown woman with startling blue-grey eyes. Her nose was long and thin with broad nostrils, her wide mouth smoothly curved. She wore her greying dark hair in curls bound up with ribbons, covered by a sheer blue veil weighted with tiny glass drops at the hems. Like most Tharian women she wore the kyten and sandals that tied around her calves. Her ribbon belts were the same shade of blue as her mage’s stole. Kethlun hadn’t seen her or her companion, a white-skinned older man, emerge from an office behind him. The woman continued, “Here we have gathered a conclave of seers, glass mages, truthsayers and masters of visionary magics from half the world, and we cannot name one man’s power?”
    “It is a mixture, Dhasku Dawnspeaker,” explained the clerk who had shepherded Kethlun all day. “Something the mages and assistants who have seen Koris Warder have never encountered before.”
    “You give it a try, Jumshida Dawnspeaker,” said the mage Amberglass with a sigh.
    “I’ve never got such a mangled reading of someone’s power.”
    “Then perhaps we must stop wasting everyone’s time, and go to the best vision mage present,” replied Dhasku Dawnspeaker. She looked at her male companion. “Dhaskoi Goldeye?” she asked with a smile that Keth judged too warm for a woman who addressed a mere colleague.
    Goldeye was a lean, wiry fellow, dressed in a sleeveless lilac overrobe, light grey silk shirt and loose grey breeches. His long hair was black-streaked grey, held back from his craggy face with a tie. His eyes, dark and fathomless, set between heavy black lashes, caught Kethlun’s gaze and held it well past the time Keth would gladly have looked away. At last he nodded, freeing Keth of the power in his eyes.
    “I see why those who