Once they were packed up and riding, Rosethorn found herself near the very head of their group where Parahan and his guards rode. She had Riverdancer, her translator, Briar, and Jimut for company. Souda and the western chief called Glacier Cracks each took fifty volunteers and split off, Souda going east, Glacier Cracks riding west. They were scouting to see if they could find any stray Yanjingyi raiders. They had promised to catch up with their northbound comrades sometime during the afternoon.
Rosethorn heard Briar and Jimut sigh enviously as they watched Souda go. “Don’t be so eager to find battles,” she warned them, not wanting to mention the soft grumble she heard from very far in the north, near the ceaseless temple horns and gongs of Garmashing. “There will be enough for everyone eventually.”
“This is just march, march, maybe a squabble, healing, and then more marching,” Briar explained. “Why don’t they just settle down and fight?”
Parahan overheard. “Why should they, if they can tire us out first?”
Rosethorn, who had been through a few large battles, didn’t tell Briar she was just as happy to put off the next one. She knew he would think her spiritless. He was young.
They halted to water the animals and to eat a midday meal, albeit a cold one. Glacier Cracks and his people returned halfway through the afternoon. They had found an empty village and a fortified temple with its gates locked and armed warriors on its wall. They had not seen any sign of the enemy between the road and the Tom Sho River.
Rosethorn and Riverdancer, through her translator, struck up a conversation about healers’ spells. Rosethorn was getting some interesting ideas from the shaman. The conversation also distracted her from the nagging question: Where were Souda and her fifty riders? Had they found trouble east of the main road? Troops on their way to join whatever was making that noise so far ahead?
The afternoon dragged. The sun inched down with no sign of the eastern group. With the wind blowing from the north, the pesky leftover effects of the Treasures gave Rosethorn no sign of whether there was an army in the east or not.
She was better able to hide her fidgets than were Briar and Parahan. The men of Souda’s company who had not gone with her grew even testier with the passage of time. Leaving the column to ride back to the water barrels, Rosethorn saw that the healers were preparing for wounded, piling their supplies on the sides of their wagons so they could lay a few of the injured flat. Refilling her water flask, she noticed how very quiet everyone was, even the tribal warriors. The temple soldiers had prayer beads out and were softly chanting as they marched.
When she rejoined Riverdancer and her translator, she saw that several Kombanpur warriors were talking with Parahan. One of them waved his arms and shouted.
“They want to go search for the missing. Lord Parahan says they’re fools to ask.” Jimut translated the Banpuri for them. “He says if the lady and her people are taken, any searchers will be captured, too.”
The sun’s edge had touched the distant peaks when Rosethorn saw Riverdancer look to the east. A hill stood between them and anything that might be going on, but when the shaman reined up, Rosethorn did as well. Within a moment everyone heard the drawn-out blast of a battle horn, not one of the Gyongxin horns.
“Jimut?” Briar asked.
“Enemies!” Jimut said, reaching for his crossbow. “Er — do you want me to use a sling?”
Rosethorn shook her head. If the enemy came over the hill, or even around it, their chances were too good that the balls would roll back to the Gyongxin troops. “Not this time, I think,” she said. “Too risky.”
Briar could see what she saw. “What, then?”
“Off the road on the left,” she told him. “We’re healers today.” She turned and waved her arm over her head to let the columns of Banpuri warriors know she wanted an opening in the road, a split in their numbers. Slowly, with perfect discipline, they opened a corridor for her.
To the east, soldiers galloped into sight along the shoulder of the hill. These were their people, clad in the earth-colored tunics of the western tribes or the armor of the Realms of the Sun and Gyongxe. Some of them barely clung to their saddles. Others were riding double.
“This way!” she cried, backing her horse down the opening between the soldiers at her back. The healers would come to her, as they had discussed in planning as they rode.
“This way!” yelled Briar. Riverdancer, her translator, and Jimut were shouting the same thing in their own languages. There was a ripple among the eastern edge of the column of soldiers: They beckoned the galloping soldiers to them. Behind their racing allies came the enemy, several hundred Yanjingyi swordsmen and archers.
Rosethorn grabbed one of their wounded as he came through the opening in their front ranks, dragging him across her saddle with a care for the arrow that jutted from his back. A soldier ran forward to seize the reins to the wounded man’s frantic horse. Briar grabbed the bridle of the next mount. The rider was able to stay upright; she had a sword cut that bled into her eye.
Healers ran forward to take Rosethorn’s wounded soldier from her saddle. “Carefully,” she cautioned them. “He’s got an arrow in his back.” They nodded and carried the soldier facedown to a wagon.
Rosethorn looked for Briar. He had turned his mount over to a soldier and kept his medicine packs. He began to examine those with lighter injuries as they came in, mostly cleaning sword cuts. Riverdancer’s translator stood beside him, a roll of bandages in her hand.
One by one everyone on the opening in their lines caught one of the wounded and guided them to the healers. Once they were relieved of their charges, they returned for more wounded, if any came, and to fight. The Yanjingyi archers were raining crossbow bolts into their ranks.
Rosethorn glanced at the returning warriors who rode to Parahan. One was a dusty Soudamini. She held a bloody sword, but showed no injuries herself. She spoke rapidly to her twin as the small army’s archers shot into the oncoming enemy troops.
Rosethorn turned at the sound of a cry and ran to help two wounded on one horse as they came through the opening in the lines. The air around her filled with the sergeants’ yells for archers to take aim, then shoot. After that she was too busy to keep track of what took place along the battle lines.
As a plant mage who had also studied healing, she had learned her fair share of basic surgery. Riverdancer came to help as she began to remove arrows from the flesh of the wounded. It was nervous work. To stay calm, Rosethorn focused only on her assistants. She had been known to cut while a temple was falling down around her. It was a useful skill to have that day. They had no sooner cared for Souda’s wounded when those hurt in the more recent fight with the Yanjingyi soldiers began to come in.
Finally Rosethorn stopped to catch her breath. She hadn’t realized that it was already dark. Someone shoved a large pottery mug of tea, heavily buttered and sweetened, into her hand. She gulped it thirstily.
“How are you managing?”
She looked up and blinked at Souda. “Well enough.” Her voice came out a croak. “How goes the fighting?”
Souda shrugged. “The enemy has retreated to the other side of this ridge. Parahan split his warriors. Half of the archers are up there.” She pointed to the top of the hill. “They have them pinned down, I think, but it’s too dark to tell…. What’s that?”
Over the hill a greenish light bloomed brightly enough to show the archers Souda had mentioned. Rosethorn finished the mug of tea, forcing herself to stay calm. That green light was mage work. None of the mages in their small army was capable of that kind of spell and neither she nor Briar did magic that cast a light.
“I’ll go look,” she heard Briar say. “If they have willow or oak or gingko on them, I’ll put a stop to that.”
“Briar!” she cried, but he’d taken a saddleless horse and ridden off around the side of the hill. The hill itself was too steep for a rider.
They were bringing another wounded victim from the battlefield. This one
had a gash down his chest. If she didn’t clean it and get it sewn, he would die of infection. She could treat these people, or she could go after her boy.
An open sword cut that bared ribs had to come first. Briar was sixteen and a man in the view of the world. She raised a prayer to Yanna Healtouch for the warrior before her and to the Green Man for Briar’s safety. Then she got to work.
Riverdancer sent her off much later; she didn’t know what time. No one had seen Briar. They promised to look for him if she would only rest. Rosethorn hesitated, but her hands were shaking; she needed food and a break. The tents were up, including one for the healers. She lay on a mattress there and told herself to wake in two hours, no matter how tired she might be.
Someone was shaking her awake. It was Jimut. Seeing the look on his face, she struggled to her feet. Then she followed him at a run. He took her straight to the healers’ tent.
Two assistants were caring for a warrior by lamplight. One of them cleaned his bruised face. The other was carefully trying to cut his leather breeches away from the gash in his thigh.
The warrior was Briar.
Jimut was talking to her, but his words could have been thunder for all she understood him. For a moment she thought she would go to pieces. Her bones felt loose and watery. Her father’s ghost shouted in her ear, “Don’t you come the pretty princess, Niva! Get your arm in there and ease that calf out or I’ll give you so many stripes you’ll sleep on your belly for a month! There’s a chamber pot because I won’t let you so much as go to the privy, so do as I bid!”
Thanks, Da, she thought as she stepped over to the cot. She felt for Briar’s pulse — strong — and his warmth — colder than she liked, but he was wounded. She glanced at his thigh. The healer cutting the leather breeches off was carefully pulling them away from the wound. It was deep and dirty.
Rosethorn peeled back one of Briar’s eyelids. They had given him something for pain already. His pupil was wide enough that she could barely see his gray-green iris. That was good. She would have to hurt him to clean the slash, and she preferred that he was not awake for that.
Hot water. She would need —
One of the assistants stood on the far side of the cot, a pot of hot water cushioned by wrappings in her hands and clean cloths over one arm. Briar’s clothes were cut away and dumped elsewhere. For a moment Rosethorn turned her back to the cot, closed her eyes, and prayed to Yanna Healtouch of the Water temple for healing, the Green Man to ward off the racing growth of infection, and Shurri Flamesword of the Fire temple for a steady hand. Then she turned back to the cot and began to clean the gaping slash. Blood followed. As soon as Rosethorn was done, Riverdancer swiftly placed a padded bandage on Briar’s thigh and pressed to control the bleeding. They waited for a few moments. The woman lifted the pad and they replaced it with a clean one. Rosethorn pressed this one, counting to herself for what seemed like forever. When she lifted it, there was blood, but less of it.
“Praise Yanna,” she whispered. In tiyon she added, “It appears no big veins were cut.” She switched for a clean pad and let someone else press. She went through her medicines for one to cleanse and one to hold the inside of the wound together.
This time, when they removed the pad, Rosethorn warned the others. “Hold him, please,” she said. “He’s going to jump.” When they had him by the hands, shoulders, and legs, Rosethorn said, not caring if Briar was awake or not, “This will hurt, my lad, but not as much as you will hurt when I talk with you in the morning.” She swiftly dribbled the cleansing potion in the open wound.
Briar arched against the cot and the hands that kept him on it, his eyelids flying open. He let out a screech. Riverdancer leaned over his head, a vial in her hand. She showed it to Rosethorn, who sniffed and recognized it as a potent sleep and pain medication favored by Gyongxin healers. She nodded.
Riverdancer let three drops fall into Briar’s open mouth. He swallowed, coughed, and relaxed back onto the cot. As his eyelids fluttered down, Rosethorn added a thin line of the medicine that would hold the inner muscle of his thigh together like a line of stitches. By the time she was done, Briar was snoring.
Rosethorn smiled grimly and turned back to her medicines. She would need a needle and gut to sew up Briar’s skin, and then a healing potion for that.
By the time she had finished, she felt dizzy. “Would someone bandage him?” she asked in tiyon.
Kind hands steered her away from the cot as Riverdancer took over. Someone pressed a cup not of tea but of broth into her hands. She sipped from it carefully. From time to time she wiped away tears that ran down her face on her sleeve.
When Briar awoke, he felt as if someone had used his head for a drum. Worse, Daja had taken one of her white-hot irons from the forge fire and shoved it into his thigh. He demanded that she remove it or suffer the consequences, or rather, he tried to demand it. The words left his mouth as mush. He went back to sleep.
Evvy turned over, screaming as Musheng held up Asa and brandished a knife. She opened her eyes, stared at the low earth ceiling above her, and screamed again.
Five little silver snakes with skulls for heads vanished into the ceiling of the tunnel.
“Evumeimei,” Luvo said calmly in her ear, “they are only baby cave snakes.”
“They’re dead!” Evvy cried, sitting up on Big Milk’s back. “They’re all bones!”
“Nonsense. They are made of metal and earth. They cannot be dead. Big Milk says you bawl more than her young ones.”
Evvy glared at her small traveling companion. “I’m sorry, Luvo,” she told him. “I’m sorry, Big Milk,” she added, stretching out so she could scratch the giant yak on the poll. “I was dreaming again. Are we going up?” She squinted at the tunnel ahead of them. Even in the scant light of the glowing mold, she was certain. The tunnel was sloping upward for the first time in their journey.
“It is my hope that you will do better under an open sky,” Luvo said. All around them the earth began to groan. “I believe you will dream less.”
General Sayrugo’s camp was on alert. The enemy’s scouts had been seen to the north and to the west. She ordered triple sentries and prayed she would unite with Captain Lango and the twins from the Realms of the Sun the next day. All the signs pointed to a big fight before she even reached Garmashing.
Suddenly she heard an uproar. Cursing, she grabbed her sword and raced to the source of the noise. On the southern line of defense, her guards stood and pointed at something. With a roar of command she sent the onlookers back to their posts and squinted into the growing twilight. At least the other sentries had kept their positions, she told herself.
Then she blinked, and blinked again. The plain was tearing itself in two a hundred yards away from their picket line. The ground was trembling under her feet. She turned to yell for her shamans, only to feel the quivering stop. She stared at the hole that had opened in the — up until now — solid, reliable earth.
The biggest yak she had ever seen in her life plodded out of the hole and began to graze on the grass near it.
Then, as Sayrugo and her sentries gawped like farmers in Garmashing for the first time, someone slid off the yak. The someone removed some bags, or packs, slinging one off his or her shoulders. Then the someone scratched the yak on the forehead. Sayrugo knew there was another word for a yak’s forehead, but she was a city woman; she didn’t know these things. She did, however, know all the words for the pieces of a crossbow. She held out her hand, groping for one in the empty air.
A huge voice boomed in the air. “Do not attack us, defenders of Gyongxe.” It was deep and musical. It could not belong to the person who walked toward them, hands — holding bags — in the air. “We are allies to you and foes to the invader from Yanjing!”
The huge yak turned and ambled south on the plain. Sayrugo wished she could do the same.
The second time Briar woke, someone was ordering him to drink. He obeyed, then tried to spit the nasty sweetness of spirits laced with
opium from his mouth.
“Drink it, or I’ll use you for sword practice next time,” Parahan told him. The big man sat on a camp stool beside his cot, bracing Briar with one arm as he held the cup in his free hand. “You were supposed to be healing people — what were you doing on the battlefield?”
Briar drank the rest of the cup’s contents. “I went to see … what the green light was,” he mumbled. “It was our people. Gyongxe. ’N then I stayed to work on the wounded. ’N someone whacked me with a sword.”
His brain wasn’t so muzzy that he couldn’t remember that. He had been checking a fallen temple warrior by the light of one of Evvy’s glow stones. Suddenly, nearby, a Yanjingyi warrior had lurched to his feet.
“You!” he’d cried in tiyon. He was hardly more than Briar’s own age. “You’re one of their demon mages!” He had stumbled forward, raising his sword as he fell. Briar had felt something hot in his leg. He’d looked at the Yanjingyi boy to find that he had fallen because he was dead. He had been dying of a big wound in his chest when he attacked Briar. Only crazy luck, Lakik’s luck, had made him chop Briar’s leg instead of something more important.
For a wound that wasn’t vital, it had made Briar scream anyway. People from his own side had found him. When they lifted him to bring him back to camp, the pain had been so bad that he had fainted like some temple archive lily.
He was trying to tell Parahan all this when the potion hit and he slept.