The walkway he’d chosen led through a bamboo grove to the banks of a bubbling creek. They crossed on a high, arched bridge carved and decorated as all Yanjingyi bridges were, following the path to an ancient oak grove. They stopped at the foot of a black-barked ancient tree with branches so heavy some of them bowed to touch the ground before they arched up again.
“Oh, that’s better!” Evvy said. Dropping to her knees, she set her palms against two of the lumps of red and yellow sandstone clutched tight by the oak’s exposed roots. “What have the gardeners here got against rocks, anyway?”
“Don’t blame them.” Parahan stretched out on a length of mossy ground that was clear of rocks and roots. The guards sat on their heels a few feet from them. One took out a dice box and they began to play. “It isn’t the gardeners, but the imperial will. Unless the garden is supposed to be a little picture of a place, with bridges, a stream, small trees, rocks, and so on, the emperor wants each garden to be absolutely tidy. There can’t be anything to distract from the flowers. Not weeds, not insects, not stones. It’s a sad gardener who doesn’t remove everything but the proper plant.”
“I can’t like any garden without stones,” Evvy murmured, discovering the differences between sandstone here and sandstone in Gyongxe. “It would be like taking someone’s ribs out.”
“What can you do with stones, if I may ask?” Parahan asked. “Can you change the course of a stone hurled by a catapult?”
Evvy made a face. Some of the people who had hosted them on their journey west had asked such questions. Oddly, she didn’t mind them coming from Parahan. He was just staring at the sky and making conversation. “No. Catapult stones are too big. I can only help them get to where they’re going faster. Look. I can do this.” She reached into the sandstone under her hands and sank light into the thousands of grains of quartz, apatite, and garnet that were part of it. When she heard Parahan inhale, she realized that she had closed her eyes. She had not needed them to tell her the sandstones under her fingers were blazing. The guards were babbling in the language of the imperial court to each other. Ignoring them, she opened her eyes and grinned at Parahan. “I can do it with heat, but heat won’t stay long in sandstone or limestone. I need pure crystal or gemstone to hold light or heat for very long. I’m really good at lamps. We saved all kinds of money traveling because we didn’t have to buy torches or lamp oil.”
Parahan got to his knees and, keeping his chains out of the way, crawled over until he could hold a hand over a glowing stone. “Will it burn?”
“Oh, no,” Evvy told him. “Rosethorn threatened to send me to bed without supper if I didn’t learn to do cold light and hot heat every time.”
Parahan grinned as he touched the stones. “No heat at all. She only threatened you?”
“I missed too many meals before she and Briar took me on. I don’t think she likes taking food from me, even to teach me something.”
“Speaking of food …” Parahan raised his beak of a nose to sniff the air. “I smell fried cakes and ginger!” He looked at the glowing stones. “We can’t take these. The gardeners will get in trouble if anything is missing.”
Evvy frowned. “Stones in a wood should be free to go where they want if they let go of their soil. Not that I’d pry these fine fellows loose. They’re happy with their tree.”
“Stones in a wood that does not belong to the emperor, perhaps,” Parahan murmured. He got to his feet and gave Evvy a hand up as the light from the stones faded. “Let’s see what we can steal from the cooks.”
The guards stood, too. “You can’t steal the emperor’s breakfast!” said the darker-skinned guard in tiyon.
“We won’t steal,” Evvy told them, all innocence. “We’ll borrow … from the edges. From the stuff they give people who aren’t imperial.”
Parahan hooked arms with Evvy and they marched up the path.
Rosethorn had to wonder if she was meant by her gods to spend her entire visit to the Winter Palace in a towering state of vexation. For one thing, when the emperor said they would visit his gardens, he meant that he, Rosethorn, and Briar, as well as a gaggle of mages and courtiers, watched as gardeners dealt with the plants. If she even touched one, the gardeners hovered as if they feared she might break it. For another thing, she and Briar had been forced to wear silk again today, because they were in the imperial presence. She should have known they would not be allowed to get dirty when the maids placed silk clothes before them that morning.
Third, she was deeply unhappy with the mages who dogged their tracks. They drowned the voices of the wind in the leaves and flowers of the garden with the constant click of their strings of beads. She had heard that eastern mages favored beads imprinted with spells and strung together to be worn on neck and wrist. She had seen local mages twirling short strings of spell beads during their journey down from Ice Lion Pass. Court mages wore ropes of them. Apparently Rosethorn and Briar in a garden were considered far more dangerous than Rosethorn and Briar in a throne room.
As if we couldn’t have turned those potted plants into weapons, Rosethorn thought as the breeze carried another burst of hollow clicks to her ears. She rounded on the mages. “I can’t hear a thing these plants say with that unending noise,” she informed them.
All around her the emperor’s prized roses, brought at great expense from far Sharen and raised more carefully than most children, trembled and reached for her across the stone borders of the path. The courtiers shrank closer together, terrified of touching those priceless blossoms. Weishu looked on, his face emotionless.
Briar raised his hands to both sides of the path. The roses halted their movement and waited, trembling.
Rosethorn had not taken her eyes off the mages. “What are you doing with those things?” she demanded. “I’m not working magic. If I were, you couldn’t distract me with noisemakers.”
“They are not noisemakers,” said the youngest of them, a woman. “Our magic is inscribed in the marks on each bead. The greater the mage, the more inscriptions — the more spells — on a bead. And the more beads.”
Rosethorn squinted at the ropes that ran through the woman’s fingers. The small bone-white beads that made up the bulk of her wrist and neck strings, as well as those of her fellow mages, were etched with minuscule ideographs. In between those beads were others, some brown glass inscribed with Yanjingyi characters, some white porcelain with heaven-blue characters and figures, some carnelian with engraving on the surface.
“As I said, I am not using magic. Would you do me a favor and be quiet?” she asked, as patiently as she knew how. “The plants tell me how they are doing — when I can hear them.” Even if I did magic, I strongly doubt that you would detect it, you academic prancer, she thought. Like most ambient mages, Rosethorn had little patience for those who drew their power from their own bodies and worked it through spells, though she had studied academic magic in her youth.
“Is Nanshur Briar not using magic?” an older mage asked. Not only did this man have two long ropes of beads in his hold, but there were spell figures tattooed onto his hands and wrists. Unlike Briar’s, this man’s tattoos were motionless.
Briar lowered his hands. “I asked them to stop trying to help Rosethorn.”
Rosethorn let her own power flow into the bushes, calming the roses. As she suspected, not one of the Yanjingyi mages so much as twitched. Ambient magic was not only rare here; it was unknown. She called her power back into herself and looked at Weishu. “If you would like me to tell you if they are well, I must be able to concentrate, Your Imperial Majesty,” she explained. “I see you think I am deluded, claiming to hear the voices of plants. Don’t your priests hear the voices of ghosts and mountains?”
“Ghosts were once men, and our mountains are ancient,” Weishu said. “Blossoms live but a season, and plants a few years at best. Perhaps some of our oldest trees have voices, or the spirits within them do, but it takes ages for living things to gain the wisdom of human beings.”
> Everyone around them but Briar murmured their agreement. Rosethorn bit her lip rather than call them all fools. Royalty, their pet mages, and their pet nobles seemed to think they knew everything. The mages she was used to dealing with knew instead that they were just beginning to scrape the surface of the world.
And what about you? she asked herself as she followed the emperor along the garden’s main path. Weren’t you starting to think you had all the answers before Niko brought Briar and the girls to Winding Circle? Before their magics started to combine? We all learned there was no predicting how their power would turn out. We couldn’t have guessed that four eleven-year-olds could shape the power of an earthquake, or that one girl’s metal flower would take root and bloom in a vein of copper ore, or that those children would pull me back from death itself. I could never have dreamed some of the ways Briar has learned to shape his magic, or Evvy hers. I needed shaking up. We all did.
She felt the ailing rosebush before she saw it. Immediately she and Briar stepped off the path. They’d just reached it — only a single branch showed brown and wilted blooms — when they heard Weishu thunder, “What is this?”
They stared at him as courtiers and mages fell to their knees and bowed until their foreheads touched the stone flags of the path. Six gardeners, who had been hanging back among the roses, ran forward to drop to the ground before Weishu and do the same. Briar looked at Rosethorn, waiting for instructions. She clasped her hands and watched the emperor, letting her power trickle gently into the ailing plant all the while. She could feel the touch of the wetlands fungus that had gotten into the roots and was eating it.
“What manner of care do you give our roses?” the emperor demanded. “How is it that we find an imperfect one on the very day we bring important nanshurs, great nanshurs who know much about plants, to view them? You will be beaten until your backs run red! Head gardener!”
One of them looked up from the ground. He was trembling.
“Remove this wretched bush and burn it. Replace it with another that does not offend our eye,” Weishu ordered.
Rosethorn had heard enough. When the poor head gardener touched his forehead to the ground once more, she gave a slight bow. “If I may, Your Imperial Majesty?” she asked. The emperor nodded and she said, “There is no need to uproot this plant. It’s been attacked by a mold native to these lands, a fast-growing one. I can tell this damage happened overnight, and we are here quite early. How could your gardeners have known?”
Weishu looked down his nose at her. “It was their duty to know.”
Rosethorn tucked her hands inside the sleeves of her robe so he would not see she had clenched them into fists. Of all the silly replies! “Your Imperial Majesty, as a gardener you know how delicate roses can be, particularly out of their native climate. This province is lush and green most of the year, I am told, and very damp. The homelands of the rose are in the southern and eastern parts of the Pebbled Sea — dry lands. And like most things that are transplanted here, they grow ferociously fast. In growing fast, this rose helped the fungus grow.”
“The bush is fine now, Your Imperial Majesty,” Briar said, taking over smoothly. Rosethorn knew he must have seen she was struggling with her temper. She should not have to explain this to someone like the emperor, who claimed to know about gardening.
Briar gestured to the plant like a showman. It was green and glossy everywhere, the blooms a perfect red. “Healthy as ever. Healthier, because Rosethorn made it resistant to your local molds, Your Imperial Majesty,” Briar announced. Rosethorn wound threads of her own power throughout the roots of all the plants in the garden to ensure just that as Briar added, “I’ll wager your gardeners must run mad, fighting mold.”
Without raising their heads, the gardeners nodded rapidly.
“Rosethorn and I can fix that while we’re here, Most Charitable and Wise Majesty,” Briar said.
Rosethorn refused to give him the fish-eye as she usually did when her boy laid things on too thick. No one else would notice; this was the way they normally addressed the emperor. To her Briar sounded like the flattering, thieving imp who had stolen his way into her garden and workroom five years ago.
Briar told the emperor, “We’ve got advantages these poor fellows don’t. It would be our pleasure to do this for you.”
He looks like he swallowed sour milk, Rosethorn thought, watching the emperor. Then he was the smooth, unreadable emperor again.
“You cannot fight these illnesses?” he asked the gardeners.
The head gardener did not look up. “No, Glorious Son of the Gods, Protector of the Empire, Imperial Majesty. It is as they say. The heat and the wet of these southern lands, that make so many things grow so fast, also produce much that preys upon the roots and leaves.”
The emperor looked at his mages. “And you? You cannot stop this?”
They looked at one another with alarm. “We do not know, Great Son of the Gods,” said one, many of whose thin beads were colored green. “I would have to make a study of such things for the space of months, perhaps years. My field of expertise, as you know, is that of medicines and potions that may benefit Your August Majesty. It is well known that when something causes a plant in the gardens to sicken, that plant is simply destroyed.”
“Your Imperial Majesty, I don’t understand,” Rosethorn said, forcing herself not to sound as impatient as she felt. “There are many Living Circle Earth dedicates here in Yanjing, mages and non-mages, who have studied plant diseases all their lives. You have only to summon them.” She had been surprised at first that none of the local dedicates had come to visit her, but the maids in their pavilion had explained it was considered rude to meet guests before the emperor had done so.
Weishu smiled. “We shall have our people make appropriate inquiries,” he replied. “The truth of the matter is that the priests of the Living Circle and the priests of the gods of Yanjing, of our state religion, do not fare well together. We fear that, should we invite priests of the Living Circle into our palace, the priests of our state religion would make trouble. It is better for our subjects to be peacefully guided by our priests, keeping harmony in our palace.”
Rosethorn gazed up at the emperor’s unreadably smooth face. His explanation was believable, but she did not trust it. She suggested politely, “Then, Your Imperial Majesty, for the sake of your gardeners and your plants, I recommend they speak to local farmers. They will know all about this sort of thing. Crossing them with local plants might strengthen the roots of your roses against common molds and funguses. It is something everyone could work on at your pleasure.”
“We could make a study of it ourself, given time,” Weishu replied with a smile. He looked at the gardeners. “Until Dedicate Initiate Rosethorn and Nanshur Briar find the leisure to return and see to the health of my roses, uproot that one and burn it.” He pointed to the bush that Rosethorn had saved.
She threw herself in front of it as the gardeners scrambled to their feet. “Imperial Majesty, why?” she demanded, shocked. “It’s healthy now — healthier than ever! There’s no reason to kill it!”
“There is every reason,” he told her. “It failed us at the moment of a test, when we came to show the splendor of our works to a foreign guest. Anything that does not present itself in glory and perfection betrays us and must be destroyed.”
“But you weren’t betrayed!” Rosethorn argued, thinking fast. What would satisfy this absolute ruler? “We have never seen such splendid gardens — have we, Briar?” He shook his head. He’d gone to her side and was keeping an eye on the gardeners. They had yet to notice the tiny green shoots sprouting through the dirt at their feet. She glanced hurriedly at Briar and then at the bits of green.
He closed his eyes briefly. The green sprouts shrank into the earth, seemingly before anyone noticed they were there.
“We’d like your permission to sketch the roses, because we won’t be able to describe them,” Rosethorn told Weishu quickly. “The king of Bihan will
weep with envy when we tell him about your rose gardens and lily ponds. This plant didn’t fail you. If you approve, we can create a new color for you from its blooms. One that will breed true, that will be only yours forever.”
He hesitated. She had tempted him. “We would take it as a great favor indeed if you were to give us such a gift,” Weishu said with a broad smile. Then the smile vanished. Rosethorn hated the way these people had schooled themselves to hide their true feelings behind a blank face. “But the plant dies,” Weishu said. “A flaw is not to be tolerated.”
A gardener must have laid a gloved hand on the bush when Briar was distracted: Rosethorn heard the plant’s cry when the man gripped it hard. She couldn’t bear it. She would have felt the rosebush’s pain as she walked away. Throwing herself to her hands and knees, she did as the Yanjing people did and touched her forehead to the earth. All around her the ground quivered as roots and sprouts strained to break through.
“A favor, Imperial Majesty!” Rosethorn cried. The bushes trembled as Briar’s temper flared. She wrapped her power around him for a moment, squeezing his magic gently in hers as a reminder to Briar to exercise control. Slowly, reluctantly, she felt him relax. As he calmed, so did the roses, sprouts, and roots.
To the emperor Rosethorn said, “It is flawed and an embarrassment to you, with your eagle’s eye. But to a humble dedicate from a temple far away it would be an incredible gift. I beg of you, will you let me have it, in memory of my audiences with the great emperor of all Yanjing? It would be an honor beyond all words.”
Nothing seemed to move, not even the air. Finally the emperor said, “You truly believe this.”
“I truly believe this,” Rosethorn said in agreement.
After a long moment’s consideration, Weishu told Rosethorn, “This plant will be in your pavilion, with a suitable container, when you return there today. You will carry this thing all those miles home with you?”