“A for amethyst,” he whispered, running his fingers over the stone. It wasn’t high in quality; it wouldn’t have fetched much in the market, but Evvy had loved it. It was her first step into her new life as a mage. She had kept the alphabet where the cats couldn’t play with it….
“The cats?”
“The letter said they killed the animals. We can hope they escaped,” Parahan said, his voice cracking.
He had spent time with Evvy and her cats, Briar remembered. “Might I be alone now?” he asked politely. “I’ll be all right.”
“Are you certain?” Souda wanted to know. “We can only imagine how bad this is for you.”
“Really, I’ll be fine,” Briar said. “I do this best alone.” Or with Rosethorn, and Lark, and my sisters, he thought, and none of them are here! None of them are with me! They’ve all gone off to do their whatevers and left me to face this!
It wasn’t fair. He knew it wasn’t fair. He didn’t feel like being fair just then. He climbed up the wall and walked along until he could look north. Right now he hated everyone, the First Dedicate and the God-King, Lark for not making Rosethorn stay home, Rosethorn for not refusing the emperor and the First Dedicate, Evvy for being unwilling to come along with him. Himself for not insisting that she come, or for not staying with her.
Especially himself. He hated himself. He was her first teacher, and he had dragged her into the path of the huge imperial armies and the legions of imperial mages. He stood by and watched as Weishu smiled and played games with their lives. Briar had left his Evvy to be tortured and to die alone. She was good with her power, but these people were masters of theirs. She was only twelve.
He clutched the stone alphabet and stared at the grasslands beyond the north gate. They were gray in the starlight. Somewhere across those were the imperial armies. That way lay the torturers, the murderers, and those who would steal other people’s countries. They would pay. He would make sure of that.
In the dark the grasses strained upward, their blades trembling with the power that filled them. Their roots swelled and stretched. For a long moment the land shook, then sank back.
THE TEMPLE OF THE TIGERS, AND
KANGRI SKAD PO MOUNTAIN IN THE DRIMBAKANG LHO
Dawn found Briar with the orange-and-black stone tiger at the southern temple gate. He had managed to talk the guards into letting him out at some point; he didn’t remember when. The tiger was good company in his present bleak mood. Wrapped in a fur from his bedroll, he had told it about Evvy, how aggravating she could be, how protective she was of her cats, how much she loved new clothes. The tiger had curled around him, forming a bowl to hold Briar. At last he had slept.
It was the chief priestess who found him. She spoke with the stone tiger gently, thanking it for its care of Briar, until it slowly uncurled and took its normal place by the gate.
As Briar looked at the old woman sleepily, she told him, “I think we must treat the gate tigers differently after this. It is written in our books that they are mindless slaves of our magic, but apparently they are otherwise. We have you to thank — perhaps.” She touched one of his swollen eyes. “You have been weeping.”
For a precious moment he had forgotten. Tears spilled down as he told her, “They killed Evvy. My student.”
“You shall have revenge,” the old woman said. “Last night a messenger came from the west. Your people will wait here another day for the wounded to heal. By this afternoon warriors from the western temples and tribes will join you. Parahan and Souda want to go east, to trap the enemy in Fort Sambachu. We shall see. General Sayrugo is closer.”
“I want to go there,” Briar said, struggling to his feet. “I want to serve them at the fort like they served Evvy!”
The old woman helped him up. “When you agreed to help Parahan and the others, you put yourself at the orders of the God-King. You may not have a choice.”
Briar glared at her, but he was too weak with grief to argue. Instead he thought of something else. “Wait — I can’t go. I have to wait here for Rosethorn. She’ll be returning from the mountains soon, I hope. I said I would meet her.”
“And you will,” the priestess said patiently. “When was the last time you had any food?”
He shook his head, not because he didn’t want to eat, but because he couldn’t remember his most recent meal.
“As I thought,” she said. She towed him into the temple complex.
They fed him egg soup and momos, scolding him when he picked at his food. When he’d eaten enough that the cooks let him be, he went to the healers’ tent and helped there. Midday was curry. Jimut sat on one side of him, Souda on the other. Between them he ate all that was set before him, just to stop them from nagging him to death.
He was about to leave the temple to say prayers for Evvy in one of his new willow groves when a squad of Gyongxin warriors carrying the yellow banner of messengers galloped up the road. He knew a couple of them from Fort Sambachu.
“We almost did not come up here,” the woman who carried the banner told the gate guards. “Those trees weren’t on your road when I was here last! How —” Looking past the guard’s shoulder, she saw Briar. “Oh. I thought Rana made that up about you growing trees from nothing. Never mind. I bring messages for Prince Parahan and Princess Soudamini, and Captains Lango and Jha!”
Only when Lango identified the newcomers as General Sayrugo’s warriors did the guards open the gate. The messenger and her guards led their horses inside. Briar felt distantly sorry for them. They would soon learn of their own losses: the slaughter of Captain Jha and his company. At least they had been soldiers. They had known they were expected to die in war. Evvy had not. She had been dragged here by Briar and Rosethorn. She had not wanted anything to do with the emperor. All she had wanted to do was see the mountains.
Evvy slept a lot. She dreamed, too, and they were the strangest dreams of her life. The fluorite bear was in most of them, trundling beside her from her head to her feet, watching as snakes made of backbones and skulls unwound her bandages. Lions made of ice and packed snow licked her feet. A spider at least twice her size leaped down from a roof she couldn’t see and bandaged her feet in its webs.
In some dreams, when the bear wasn’t present, a woman with a white eye painted on her forehead came and argued with her about food. Usually Evvy would drink the soup brought by the woman just so she would go away. Evvy knew that dreams didn’t work like that. People didn’t go away because you did the things they wanted you to do in dreams, but these dreams were as odd as the strange things that she saw in them.
In one, she asked the fluorite bear, “Which is weirder, the nine-headed snake, or —” Suddenly she was wide-awake and saying, “— the giant spiders that come from above?” She sat up and looked around. She was definitely awake. She could feel her ragged clothes against her skin. She could smell herself. When had she last bathed? “Can you smell me?” she asked the bear.
“No,” it said gravely.
“Oh, good.” Swallowing, terrified of what she might see, she made herself look at her feet. They were there, looking like her ordinary, everyday feet. She wriggled her toes. They were stiff, but not painful. “I dreamed the Yanjingyi yujinon flayed my feet and killed everyone in the fort, but that part was so real,” she murmured. “I dreamed they killed my cats. And then I came here and a big spider wrapped my feet in its webs. I know that part was a dream.”
“It was all real, Evumeimei Dingzai,” the bear told her. “I called to you so you might find safety here in the mountains. The webs dropped from your feet a sunrise ago, when your feet were healed.”
Tears trickled down her cheeks. “My cats really are dead?”
“Once I understood why you called for them in your dreams, I showed their images to one of my snow leopards,” the bear said. “She went to the dead pile behind the stone cave. She found the seven little cats that matched your dreams in the pile.”
Evvy turned over on the soft pile of rags whe
re she had been sleeping and wept harder.
When she finally dried her eyes and sat up again, she found the bear had not moved. “I don’t usually cry like this,” she told him belligerently. “Just so you don’t go thinking I’m some kind of watering pot.”
“What is a watering pot?” he asked.
“It’s a jar. You put water in it and pour it on plants so they grow.”
“Is not the rain enough?”
Evvy rubbed the dried blood on the back of one foot. It flaked off. “People have plants in their houses. They use watering pots for indoor rain.” Slowly, grimacing because she was so stiff, she drew one foot up onto the opposite knee so she could look at the sole. It was puffy with scars that crisscrossed the flesh, but when she poked them, they were merely sore, not as painful as they had been when she had fled the fort. “You cured them.”
“The webs of the peak spider cured them,” the bear explained. “Forgive us for keeping you in slumber. We felt that it would be less unnerving for you if you did not see how you were healed.”
“I don’t care about how I was healed,” Evvy said bitterly. “I care that I was hurt in the first place. I care that they killed all those people in the fort. I care that they killed my cats.” She opened and closed her hands, remembering the feel of the stone-cold dead cats under them as she crawled over bodies, looking for clothes. “What did the villagers ever do to deserve dying like that, tell me! They had little ones with them, babies, and those imperial qus killed them and dumped them in a pile to rot!” She glared at the fluorite bear, who had cocked his head knob once more. “What! You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”
“I do not know what crazy means,” the creature said in his slow, thoughtful way. “What I think is that we healed the hurt in your feet and the hurt in your body, but now your spirit is sick. I want to heal that pain for you, but I do not know how. I can heal the meat creatures of my mountain, but I leave two-legged meat creatures to their own kind.”
“Do you always talk this way?” Evvy demanded. She wasn’t being polite, or grateful, but if her cats were dead, why couldn’t this thing just have left her to die? Briar and Rosethorn have each other, she thought. The memory went through her like lightning. Briar and Rosethorn! If the enemy got around General Sayrugo and her troops, or killed them all, to reach Fort Sambachu, maybe they caught up to Briar and Rosethorn, too! How will I ever know?
The stone thing said, “My difficulty is that you are not entirely of the meat creature kind.”
“Of course I am!” Evvy retorted.
“No. If you were, I would not have heard your approach when you were still in the lowlands of the Ice Naga River.”
“The what?”
“The river that flows below my mountain, before the stone place where they tried to kill you, Evumeimei Dingzai.”
“We call it the Snow Serpent River,” Evvy told him. “And you can call me Evvy.”
“I could not begin to say such a name before I would have finished it. Will you accept Evumeimei?”
She sighed. “I suppose I have to. What do you call yourself?”
He tipped back his head knob and gave voice to a series of sounds she could not even begin to remember. Her mind caught on to two syllables she knew she could say.
“I’m going to call you Luvo. I’m sorry, I know that’s not your whole name, but I can’t say it all, or even remember it.” She hung her head. “I’m not trying to be rude or disrespectful. I suppose being a mountain is a big thing, like being a god. I can’t do big things.”
“I am only the heart of this mountain,” Luvo said kindly. “And part of you is of my kind, the mountain kind. Though it saddens me to say that you are impaired. Too much of you is a meat creature. I cannot understand how you came to be.”
Evvy wiped her nose on her arm. “Rosethorn and Briar say I’m an ambient mage. We draw our power from different parts of the world. They get their magic from plants and growing things. Briar has one foster-sister who gets hers from the weather, and another one who takes it from metal and fire, and one who draws it from making and working with cloth. I get mine from stones.”
“I did not know that this could ever be true,” Luvo said, fascinated. “This magic is of a different kind from that used by the chanting people, or the people of the white eye.”
“I think those are academic mages and shamans,” Evvy said. “I know Briar’s somewhere west of the fort with Parahan and Soudamini. They have mages with them, but I think Briar’s the only ambient one. If he isn’t dead.” She twisted her hands in her ragged shirt. “What am I going to do? How will I find him or Rosethorn? They don’t know where I am. I can’t go back to the fort — they’ll torture me again!”
“You could not return to the fort,” Luvo told her. “It no longer stands.”
Evvy blinked at him. “Did General Sayrugo come? Or the God-King’s army? What happened?”
“The hill that it was built on shook,” Luvo said. “The fort fell down.”
Evvy looked at the stone creature for a long moment, not exactly sure what he meant. Then she asked, “How did that happen?”
“Our mountains are young and still growing.” Luvo’s deep voice was bland. “Growing mountains may shake the land around them.”
“Why?” Evvy demanded. She had a feeling this was not an accident.
“The land and its guardians do not care for intruders who damage and kill those who belong here, or those who would bring good things here.” Evvy could have sworn she felt the ground quiver beneath her. In fact, she was sure of it. Nervously she eyed the stalactites that hung from the cave’s ceiling.
Then she screamed. A giant spider was leaping from one stalactite to the next, coming lower and closer, until it dropped to the ground only a few yards away from her. Evvy looked at its hairy body and its large black eyes and screamed again. It held one great foreleg in the air as if it were hurt. Evvy realized it held a bag even as she scrabbled backward off her bed of moss and scraps.
“Evumeimei, stop it!” boomed Luvo. “You frighten Diban Kangmo!”
“I frighten — whatever that is?” Evvy shrieked.
“Her name is Diban Kangmo. She is bringing food for you,” Luvo said firmly. “Stop that dreadful noise. You must thank her. She did not want to feed you. She did not like the idea of bringing a meat creature so far into our mountain.”
Evvy clapped her hands over her mouth and stared at the spider. She was six feet tall if she was an inch. Her mouthparts would easily crush Evvy’s arm. Once the girl caught her breath and was certain of what she would say, she moved her hands to ask, “Dee-what?”
“Dee-bahn kang-moh,” Luvo said even more slowly than he normally spoke. “One of her daughters healed your feet.”
Evvy gulped at the thought of something so huge working on her body. She was so very grateful she had not woken up then. “What is she? What are they?”
“Peak spiders,” Luvo replied. “The gods and goddesses of the utmost heights of the Drimbakangs.”
Evvy shuddered. She did not want to think about gods shaped like spiders. Slowly she knelt and touched her forehead to the cave floor. “I am very, very sorry, Diban Kangmo,” she told the giant spider. “I guess I am still upset by what has happened to me. Please thank your daughter for healing my feet.” This she meant with all of her heart. “I would have died, probably. And thank you for feeding me. I swear you won’t regret it.”
She peeked at the spider. Diban Kangmo took two steps forward — her feet made clicking sounds on the stone. Slowly she uncurled the leg with which she held what Evvy saw were several cooking pots. She carefully set them on the ground. Then she stepped back a couple of yards.
Evvy looked at the pots. She wasn’t quite sure what to say, or do. “Where did she find them?” she whispered to Luvo.
For a moment Luvo said nothing. Then he told Evvy, “There is a place on the Ice Naga — what you call the Snow Serpent River — to the west, like the … fort … that fell down,
only with more — You do not like it when I call your people meat creatures. What do you call them?”
“Humans,” Evvy said. “Or people.”
“People can be anyone,” Luvo argued. “Diban Kangmo and her kin are people, as are the ice lions, the cave snakes, the nagas, the deep runners, we mountains. Humans are those meat creatures on two legs?”
Evvy nodded.
“The place like a fort where many humans are gathered just now. It is a place that reaches for the sky in spirit, and the humans who live there all of the time make pretty noises with long tubes and metal plates.”
“It’s a temple, maybe,” Evvy said. “I heard Parahan say that the first stop on the Snow Serpent Road was the Temple of the Thunder Horses.”
“That is where she found your food.”
“Did the humans there see her?” Evvy asked, wondering if she was the only one to scream at the sight of the giant peak spider.
Luvo sounded amused. “No one sees the spirit people of this realm if those people do not desire it. They prefer quiet lives. Stop asking questions, Evumeimei!”
Gingerly, keeping an eye on Diban Kangmo, Evvy crawled over to the pots. All of them were cold. She did not care. She started with tea, gulping it down. It soothed her dry and raw throat. She then turned her attention to the food, scooping up the barley-flour balls called tsampa and stuffing them into her mouth. These had butter and milk curds. Normally she would have spat such things out. Today they tasted better than anything she had eaten in her life, even her beloved fried eggplant. Another pot contained spicy rice curry with lamb. She alternated handfuls of that with the tsampa until she could eat no more. Only when she couldn’t even look in the other pots to see what was there because she was so full did she lurch to her feet and go to the great stretch of water near her resting place.
“I’m dirty,” she told Luvo. “I’m going to wash.” Since she was fairly sure he wouldn’t know what dirty was, she explained, “I’m all over blood and piss and dung and sweat. I don’t normally smell like this.” She fumbled with her clothes, peeling them off layer by layer. It didn’t occur to her to be shy. A talking rock and a giant spider were hardly the sorts to make her nervous about baring her skin. “I wish I had clean things.” It was hard to tell in the green light from the glowing spots everywhere, but she was nearly certain there was blood on some of her clothes. That made sense, given that she had taken the garments from the dead.