Briar sat cross-legged, grimacing as tight muscles stretched. “But howcome I have to hope there’s a stone mage here? It’s no skin off my neb.”
“Why, not howcome, and off my nose,” she corrected absently. “We never explained the rules to you four, did we? About new mages?”
“What rules?” he demanded sharply. This was starting to sound too much like chores for his liking.
Rosethorn sighed. “If there is no mage about whose magic is on the same order as that of a newly found mage — that’s your friend Evvy —”
“I don’t even know her,” objected Briar.
Rosethorn continued, ignoring him. “— if there’s no mage of her craft available to instruct her, then it is the obligation of the mage who discovers her to teach her the basics. The sooner the better. If her magic hasn’t broken away from her before, just the fact that you saw it means it’s expanding outside whatever unconscious control she’s had until now. Sooner or later it will really break out. If she’s a stone mage, I can think of all kinds of things that can go wrong, right here.”
“I’m a kid,” Briar objected. “Fourteen isn’t old enough to marry, let alone teach!”
Rosethorn shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. You’re a mage and you found her. If there isn’t a local who understands her magic, you have to teach her to meditate, to control her magic, and some of the most basic spells. Academics, too. She’ll need to learn different kinds of rocks and their magical applications, astronomy, reading, writing, mathematics —”
“Not from me she won’t,” said Briar. “I couldn’t even teach our dog to walk on a leash, remember? You need some unexcitable person to be a teacher.”
“Wrong again. You either teach her or hand her over to another stone mage.” Rosethorn reached over and held Briar’s wrist. “Trust me, you do not want to know the penalties for leaving an untaught mage to shift for herself.”
“Who’s gonna work those penalties on me?” Briar demanded crossly. “They’d best bring their supper to do it. They’ll be working a while.”
Rosethorn let him go. “That would be the closest member of Winding Circle’s Initiate Council or the Magecouncil of the University at Lightsbridge. They set and enforce the laws for mages from the Endless Ocean in the west to the Heaven Mountains in Yanjing.”
“Then I’ll go. They can come find me,” Briar snapped. “I ain’t their errand boy.”
“The nearest member of both of those councils is me.”
Horrified, Briar met Rosethorn’s eyes. The affection she always had for him was there, but it mingled with iron purpose. He didn’t ask if she were exaggerating to make a point. He knew her. She would land on him with both feet if he didn’t listen. And she could. Four people in the world had the ability to make him sorry he had crossed them. She was at the top of that short list — his foster-sisters were the others, and they were inside his mind when the four of them were together. Rosethorn didn’t have to be. He’d known for three years that she was what their world called a great mage, but even before learning that, he’d felt the breadth and depth of her power. He also knew there were times he could tease her, and times he could not. This time, he could not.
Seeing that he understood her very well, Rosethorn picked up her slate again. “You’d better track down the amir’s stone mage,” she said mildly. “Sooner, rather than later. When do we eat?”
Briar sighed and padded downstairs to start supper. Afterward, while Rosethorn cleaned up, he’d go over to the Earth temple. One of their dedicates would know if there were stone mages who lived closer to the Street of Hares than the one in the amir’s palace. He’d also have to find a way to talk to the girl Evvy. She was a wary street rat, just as he’d been. She’d go back to Nahim Zineer’s — she’d never walk away from the few coppers he paid.
She’ll think since I saw her in the afternoon, I’ll come back in the afternoon, he reasoned as he set out food. So she’ll go there in the morning. Which means if I’m to talk to her, I’d best get there before she does. I’ll have to hide, or she’ll run off as soon as she sees me.
And he’d wait to approach until after the stone-merchant paid her, this time. He didn’t want to cost a fellow street rat any more meals.
Evvy rose with the dawn, not because she wanted to, but because Mystery was perched on her collarbone, kneading busily, her thin, needlelike claws hooking into Evvy’s skin. Once Mystery had been petted, the other six cats wanted affection, too. At least they were not hungry this morning. Evvy had been digging in the garbage heap of one of the Ibex Walk inns just as a cookmaid tossed out a bowl full of meat scraps. Heibei the Lucky smiled on Evvy twice, because no one else was scrounging there at the same time. She’d gotten it all, plus some half-rotted vegetables. The meat went to her seven companions. She’d picked the rot from the vegetables and added a three-day-old round of bread for a feast of her own.
Since she was awake, Evvy decided to visit Golden House as soon as it opened. If that crazy boy thought to find her there, he’d probably come in the afternoon. She could work her way through Nahim’s baskets and be gone by then, if Nahim let her. She couldn’t think why he wouldn’t, but no one had ever accused her of magic before.
If Nahim remembered that, he said nothing when Evvy arrived. Instead he produced the polishing cloths and returned to working on his accounts. She sighed inwardly in relief and picked up the first stone to catch her eye, one in a basket of turquoises. She couldn’t have said why this stone called to her and not another, only that it would like polishing. Once she finished it, she placed it in the bowl Nahim gave her for the stones she’d handled, and searched through the turquoise basket for more such pieces.
She was tired by the time the Golden House clock struck twelve. Sadly she put down a basket of peach-colored moonstones. It was time to stop: anything she handled once her bones started to ache would turn gray and lifeless in her hands, its value and beauty gone. She folded her cloths and draped them over the bowl of finished stones, looking sidelong at Nahim.
He was picking through the contents of his belt-purse. He stopped and frowned, then smiled at Evvy. She blinked. Should she run? He’d never smiled that way before, as if his teeth hurt. Still, she’d promised the cats dried fish two days ago, and she hated to disappoint them. Gingerly she held out one hand, ready to bolt if he did anything odd.
He dropped not one copper dav or two, but — three, four, five copper davs into her palm! Evvy closed her fingers on the money, in case he changed his mind.
“You earn it, girl,” Nahim said, his eyes still squinched up, as if something important ached ferociously. “I don’t know what you do, but those stones you polish are the ones I sell first.”
“He means if you become a mage he doesn’t want you thinking he cheated you,” his neighbor called from across the aisle. As long as Evvy had been coming here, almost a year now, the two men had needled each other constantly. “He wants to keep you working for him.”
Evvy shook her head and slid the coins into a small pocket on the inside of her ragged tunic. Usually she just took the money and left, but five whole davs seemed to call for some kind of response. She gave Nahim a smile only a hair less odd than his own, then left before he tried to take his money back. So confused was she that she didn’t see yesterday’s stranger emerge from behind a tapestry drape across the aisle. She did hear a guard shout “Hey,” but thought nothing of it.
Only when she turned down a side corridor did she look back. The jade-eyed boy was following her. Where he’d come from she didn’t know, but if he thought he could track her, he was mistaken. She’d been followed in Golden House before, by people who wanted to know how she got in and out without the door guards turning her away.
Quick as a mink she darted into a deep-end gap between two empty stalls. The only things back here were two giant rolls of carpet stacked against the wall. She headed for them at a dead run, turned to pop through the gap between them, and vanished.
When she s
tarted to run, Briar tossed out a vine of his power, letting it wrap around her. She might be out of view, but he could now follow her as he liked, without spooking her. Squinting in the dim light of the back passages in Golden House, he found his vine and tracked it. It slid between two very large rolls of carpet. Only when he was right in front of them did Briar see they covered an opening in the wall of the souk, one barely visible in the shadows.
Briar shouldered through the gap and into the street outside. Looking for his vine, he found the girl. She was three blocks away, turning down a narrow side street.
Briar followed, picking up speed in the less crowded road. She led him a proper chase, around one turn and another, down the twisting ways that threaded through the city. She almost shook him near the large hammam, or bathhouse, on the Street of Tentmakers. She had vanished and Briar was squinting to see his magic in the sun’s glare when the sound of a pot shattering made him look up. She climbed a building using the iron grates over the windows as hand and foot holds, to reach the roof.
Briar followed, embarrassed that he was not as quick to climb as she, and relieved to be above the streets. Too often those narrow ways with their small windows, seamless front walls, and twists and turns made him feel trapped.
The roofs gave him an entirely different set of problems. Evvy had a good lead. Trotting along nimbly, she dodged flowerpots, drying laundry, baskets, children, women, and dogs. She leaped the short walls that divided one house from another easily, drawing farther away from Briar.
Neither realized others followed. Two male Vipers kept pace in the street below; a female Viper pursued them on the rooftops, careful to stay two houses behind Briar.
The women and children might curse Evvy for her rush across the rooftops, but they reserved their fists and attempts at capture for Briar, realizing there was something alien about him. He shook off children and dogs and ducked the women’s fists, sticks, and baskets. Even if he had walked slowly and greeted everyone, he knew they would have tried to stop him.
Evvy jumped the narrow gaps that were the streets below easily, rarely using the plank-and-rope bridges to cross. Briar gritted his teeth and did the jumps where necessary, but he wasn’t happy, and he meant to discuss his unhappiness with her at length. When he caught her.
He lost track of where they were. Working his way through a stand of grapevines, trying to talk the vines out of hanging onto him from sheer affection, Briar looked up and swore. Some way ahead loomed the orange-and-brown stone heights of Chammur Oldtown. His girl was making a beeline for the tunnels, holes, and honeycombs of dwellings in the rock cliffs within the city’s walls. She had been headed for them all along.
Oh, no, Briar thought wearily as he braced his hands on his knees and fought to catch his breath. Not Oldtown. I won’t follow her there. The arcades, halls, and tunnels that led to the apartments in the orange stone were lit by torches if they were lit at all. The smell was indescribable. The Earth dedicate who had given Briar and Rosethorn a complete tour of the city had said that parts of the heights had been inhabited for nearly twelve hundred years. As far as Briar was concerned, they smelled like it.
The thought of following a native there gave him the crawls. He ought to track down a stone mage first. He could catch the girl the next time she left Oldtown. His —
“Thief!” A basket filled with laundry slammed into his back. The grape vines fluttered with dismay. They recognized the woman who tended them and gave them water. Why was she pounding their new friend? “Murderer! Thief!” the woman cried.
“I am not!” Briar protested.
“Eknub!” shrieked the woman. She thumped him with her basket even harder. ”Eknub, eknub!”
She acts as if that’s worse than murder and theft, Briar thought crossly, shielding his head. And my accent must be awful. “Look,” he said, being more careful with his Chammuri, “I just want to get to the street! I’ll go, just show me —”
She gave him a final whack and marched to the edge of the roof. Gathering a rope ladder heaped in a corner, she hurled it over the wall as if she meant to do the same to Briar. “If you loiter I’ll call the Watch!” she scolded as he tested the ladder’s anchors. “See if I don’t, spawn of Shaihun, eknub parasite!”
“The next one who asks me if folk here are friendly, I’ll send ‘em to you for a blessing!” he retorted as he swung his leg over. “The gods’ sweet day to you for your charity!”
He was a foot down when she yelled: “Whoever taught you Chammuri had the accent of a hen!”
“I’d love to travel, Rosethorn,” Briar growled as he clambered past small, grate-covered windows. “I’ll learn new languages and be insulted in them. I can ask civil questions and people will run off. Travel would be just the thing!”
The moment he set foot on the street, the woman yanked the ladder from his hold and pulled it up. Briar stuck his tongue out at her and turned to survey his location. The street looked just like every other sun-bleached residential street in Newtown.
Well, think, idiot, he told himself. The cliffs were visible over buildings to his right. If he kept them there, and started walking, he would run into the north wall.
A thock of wood overhead gave him the smallest of warnings. Reflexes he hadn’t needed in years made him leap sideways. A stream of dirty wash-water poured down where he’d just been, soaking his left arm. When he looked up, the woman he had offended gestured rudely, and walked away from the roof’s edge. For a moment Briar considered asking her grape vines to grip her and keep her prisoner until dark, but then he shook his head. There was no sense in getting the vines in trouble, too. With a sigh he searched for a street that led north as he wrung out his sleeve.
Evvy saw it all from a roof across the street, hands clapped over her mouth to hush her giggles. The jade-eyed boy had looked so much like a cat as he climbed down and as the angry woman had dumped water on him. Evvy half-expected him to shake himself off, then sit to wash himself angrily. Instead he had stalked away down the street. He didn’t even look for Evvy.
After chasing her all this way, he was just going to give up? He’d done well for an eknub on the roofs — surely he wouldn’t let an angry Chammuran and a bucket of water drive him away!
And yet it seemed he would. Evvy crept along the roofs, trailing him. He wasn’t even looking up. Why follow her all this way, just to quit?
She knew she had five davs and could perhaps get more by begging, but that wasn’t as interesting as the boy. She trailed him, trying to work out who and what he was. He’d said he was a mage. She wasn’t sure if she believed that. All the mages she’d ever known — magic-workers, healers, and hedgewitches — were adults in their mid-twenties or older, very full of themselves and whatever scraps of magic they could use. People who were younger rarely claimed the title, but he said it as casually as if it were his name.
And now that she looked him over, keeping a house behind as he walked through the streets, she could tell that his clothes were better than even Nahim’s. She sometimes made a dav or two picking rags: she knew quality tailoring when she saw it. The boy’s clothes fit as if made for him and no one else. Interestingly, the cloth didn’t wrinkle like normal clothes did. His sleeve was wet, but apart from that his garments looked as clean as if they’d just been washed. Evvy had acquired another layer of dirt on her clothes in that rooftop run, but he was still fresh. His boots were sturdy and well made. They at least carried a layer of dust from the street.
She had followed him three blocks when she saw a green-and-yellow ribbon drop onto him from a second-story window: it landed across his shoulders and curled around his neck. Evvy swallowed a gasp, thinking a serpent had dropped onto the boy from the iron-grated window. He stopped and wrapped both hands carefully around the thing, lifting it over his head.
Then Evvy got a better look and almost wished it had been a snake. The thing was a vine, the kind Chammurans called “Traveler’s Joy"; the yellow spots were its whiskered flower petals. It hun
g from a box under a window grate on which it grew. Unlike any plant Evvy had seen in her life, this one moved, twining and wrapping around the jade-eyed boy’s head and arms, making her think of hungry cats who know when a human has a treat for them.
She couldn’t hear what he said, but his lips moved. Finally he raised his arms toward the window-box. Slowly, chagrin in its drooping leaves and blossoms, the vine retreated to wrap around its grate once more.
Evvy rocked back on her heels. It reached for him, she thought, her mind spinning. Like it was alive. Like it had feelings!
She peered down at the street again, just as the boy turned the corner. In a flash she was up and running, following in earnest. As she did she saw rosebushes in pots lean toward him. Grapes, vines, and bean plants threw runners down from rooftops. His progress slowed; if he could not reach a plant to touch it, he stood beneath it for a moment, until it returned to its proper home. Flowers turned their faces as he passed, and grass sprouted from cracks in the street in his wake.
Always he made his way north, until he turned west on the Street of Hares. He stopped briefly to talk to a cluster of boys and girls wearing the Camelgut green sash. Whatever they said, it had to be funny, because everyone laughed. Eventually the boy walked into the house she had seen him enter the day before. Just before he went in he turned and inspected first the street, then the roofs. Evvy jerked back and down; when she looked again, he was closing the door behind him.
Evvy perched on the roof of a warehouse across the street from the eknub temple and wrapped her arms around her knees. He really was a pahan, a mage. It was the only explanation for what she had seen, though she had never heard of magic that made plants act like animals. Where had he come from, this jade-plant boy? What could he possibly want from her?