Briar had been riding east on Triumph Road, winding around pedestrians, riders, flocks, and camels, when he felt a surge of fright come down the magic-vine that connected him to Evvy. He couldn’t sense thoughts through it, unless the tie was to another plant mage or his foster-sisters, but feelings came easily. He was about to ride on — Evvy wouldn’t be as old as she was if she couldn’t take care of herself—but the next big surge of fright slammed him. He felt her magic flare, wildly out of control.
Briar wheeled his mount and rode back the way he had come, ignoring the people who dodged out of his way. The closer he came to the intersection of the Street of Victories and Triumph Road, the steadier his connection to Evvy felt. Her fright was there but under control. What could have happened?
She was nearby. He slowed his mount, looking around the part of the Market of the Lost at the base of Princes’ Heights, hoping to spot her. Someone blundered into his horse. Briar, shaken from his concentration, yelled, “Watch where you’re going, bleater!” in Imperial.
A girl wearing the nose ring and garnet of a Viper braced herself against his mount. Her face and clothes were marked with small burns; she peered at him as if she were nearly blind. Two youths swayed beside her, speckled with burns just as she was. They pulled her away.
“Mind your manners, eknub scum!” snarled the black youth in Chammuri. He was one of the Vipers who’d stopped Briar in Golden House. The trio stumbled on down the street, cursing.
Briar watched them with a frown. What were they doing halfway across the city?
He shook his head and picked up the invisible vine of his magic, following it behind a cluster of stalls. In the shadows his power gleamed as it threaded through a heap of large baskets.
Briar dismounted and walked over to them, the horse’s reins in one hand. He pushed two aside, uncovering Evvy. She stared up at him, her eyes watering, terror in her face and in the magic between them. Then she whipped around and clawed at the baskets behind her, trying to escape.
Briar was in no mood to be kind. He called to the reeds woven into the baskets, waking them from their dead slumber, sparking them into new growth. He also called to the madder seeds that lay in the ground under Evvy. The madder surged gleefully in his magic, tough stems erupting from the ground; reeds unwove themselves to wind around the madder stems and grow with them. Together the combined plants wrapped around the girl’s limbs and waist, binding her tight. Evvy shuddered and went still, closing teary eyes.
“It’s just me,” Briar said, remembering to speak in Chammuri this time. “What did you do, Evvy? You used your magic, didn’t you?”
Her eyes flew open: she gave him her best glare. The bundle of food she’d stashed in her tunic leaked, painting grease stains in the cloth across her chest and belly.
“I won’t hurt you,” Briar continued patiently. “I’m trying to help.”
“Then let me go,” she snapped.
“So you can scramble off again?” he asked, not unreasonably, in his mind. “I don’t feel like teasing you out any more today, thanks all the same. Why are you blinking?”
“Let me go,” she insisted.
“No,” he said, his voice flat. He waited.
At last Evvy growled, “I threw rocks at them and told the magic to do something.” She wiggled, trying to break free. The ropes only tightened their grip. “It made some rocks light up and go hot enough to burn, and now I’m seeing spots, and it’s all your fault for telling me about the magic, so there. I hate you. You ruined my life.”
“No, magic ruined it,” Briar pointed out sympathetically. “It ruined mine, too, for a while. You’ll survive.” He went to his horse and drew his mage’s kit from a saddlebag. Like his clothes, the cloth of his kit had been woven, sewn, and treated by his foster-sister Sandry, which meant that when he touched the knot that closed it, the knot came undone. The kit unfolded itself. Briar looked through it until he found the small jar labeled EYEBRIGHT. “Did your magic touch you at all?” he asked.
She squinted, trying to see him through the bright, dancing globes that covered her vision. “No,” she said, unhappy with the situation and his question. “I threw it at them, not at me. I’m fire-blind, is all. And tangled up in your magic.” She tugged at her bonds, but the reeds and madder had used the time they’d been talking to wrap still more stems around her. “My nose itches.”
“That’s nice.” Briar opened the eyebright jar and dabbed the tip of his index finger in the salve. “So who were they? How many were there? Hold still and close your eyes.”
Evvy jerked her head as far back from him as her bonds would let her. “You’re going to do something awful.”
Briar growled, exasperated. “Now, look, youngster, I’m just going to help you see. It won’t hurt. I happen to be pretty good at this, so stop arguing and close them. If you’re good, I’ll let you loose.”
Evvy flinched as he dabbed salve first on one eyelid, then the other. “It’s cold,” she complained.
“No, it’s an aromatic, or some of it is,” he retorted. “It just feels cold. Stop fussing and open your eyes.”
Evvy obeyed. “The spots are gone!”
“Told you I knew what I was doing.” Briar wiped the extra salve into the jar and closed it, then did up his kit again. “So who did you throw magicked stones at?”
Evvy shrugged. “Vipers. Three of them. They were trying to grab me!” she cried, misreading his frown. “I had to protect myself!”
“Of course you did,” Briar replied absently. “Two boys and a girl, right? But this isn’t Viper ground, is it?”
“Market of the Lost is open ground, same as any other souk. Anybody can come here,” explained his captive. “But they followed me through Camelgut and Snake Sniffer territory.” She frowned, trying to remember her route from the Street of Hares. “Rockhead, too. That’s bat-dung crazy, that is. Rockhead’s are too stupid to know they’re killed, so they never lay down.”
“I don’t know anyone like that,” Briar said drily. “Now, what do I do with you?” It wasn’t really a question. He already knew her well enough to expect that anything she suggested would not help him.
“You said you’d let me go,” Evvy pointed out.
Briar looked at her, checked the angle of the sun, and eyed her again. Had they enough time to go to the amir’s palace together?
“I can’t pay for lessons, you know,” she added after a moment. “I haven’t two davs to my name. And I want to go home. My cats are hungry.”
Briar raised his eyebrows. “Cats, is it? Why am I not surprised? One, you don’t pay your magic teacher except with chores. That’s to help you learn the tools and some discipline. Two, I won’t be your teacher. You need a stone mage. I’m a plant mage.” They would never reach the amir’s palace before dark. Even if they could, the guards wouldn’t admit a ragamuffin like Evvy. “If I let you go, you have to swear on your honor and your soul you’ll come to my house by the time the clocks ring the third hour after dawn,” he told her sternly.
“Thukdaks have no honor, everybody knows that,” she retorted.
“What a thukdak?
“Me. I’m a thukdak. Those beggars over there, they’re thukdaks. Don’t you know anything?” Evvy shook her head at Briar’s ignorance.
“Ah,” he said, enlightened. “Back home we’re called ‘street rats.’” He gave the name first in Imperial, then translated it awkwardly into Chammuri.
“Belbun’s good eating,” Evvy said, using the Chammuri word for rat. “Nobody wastes a belbun meal on thukdaks.”
Briar opened his mouth to ask if she always thought and talked of food, then closed it. How could he have forgotten what it was like, to always have an empty belly? What else had he ever thought of, besides just staying alive, until his arrival at Winding Circle?
“Do you think you have no honor?” he asked Evvy. “You’d better find something to swear by, because I won’t let you go till you do.”
Evvy rolled her eyes. “I
swear by my cats and by Kanzan the Merciful, Lady of Healing, goddess of Yanjing,” she told him, face and voice overly patient. “I’d spit on it, too, but it would just go all over my face.
Briar looked at her for a moment, trying to see if she meant to trick him. It occurred to him, suddenly, how nearly impossible it was to tell if someone lied or not by looking into the person’s eyes. He would have to trust his instincts after all.
He released his hold on the reeds and madder plants. The reeds unwound from the madder stems, then wove themselves into their basket frames, the leaves and stems they had grown dropping away. Most were grateful to return to their former, unliving state. They had forgotten how much effort sprouting things and sinking roots took. The madder plants, firmly rooted and determined to stay that way, drew away from Evvy.
She sat up, rubbing circulation back into her arms and legs. “Third hour after dawn,” she told Briar wearily, and spat on the ground next to her to seal the promise. The madders instantly drew her wet spittle into their roots, buying more green time above the ground, even in the market shadows.
“Here.” Grubbing in his pocket, Briar found a silver dav coin, worth three of the copper ones. “Find a hammam and clean up,” he ordered, holding the coin out. Evvy grabbed it, but Briar didn’t let go. “Hair, ears, neck, you name it, it gets washed between now and tomorrow morning. Understand?” Evvy nodded, and Briar gave her the coin. “Have you any other clothes?”
There again was that too-patient, don’t-you-know-anything? expression on her face. “This is my best thing,” she replied, and looked at the front of her tunic. It was covered with grease from the food she carried. “Maybe I can wash it at the hammam.”
“Don’t bother,” said Briar. He hadn’t lived with Sandry for years without gaining some knowledge of cloth and grease stains. “I’ll find something.” All the Living Circle temples kept clothing for the poor. If the Earth temple wouldn’t give him any, Briar would find a secondhand clothes dealer. Until he could hand the girl off to Jebilu Stoneslicer, he stood in the place of her teacher, which meant he was responsible for her needs. At least, that was how Rosethorn and the girls’ teachers had always acted.
“It would be nice to have something good,” Evvy remarked wistfully.
“All right. My house, tomorrow, third hour of the morning. And Evvy,” he said as she turned to go. She looked back at him. “I found you today. I can find you whenever I want. Don’t go thinking you can disappear and keep that coin. If I have to track you, you won’t like what comes of it.”
Evvy spat on the ground, to remind him that she’d already promised, and trotted up the path to Princes’ Heights. A hundred yards away she turned around. Cupping her hand around her mouth she yelled, “Who are you, anyway?”
Briar grinned. “Briar Moss,” he called back.
“Tomorrow, Briar Moss,” the girl yelled. She raced on up the path.
4
Briar was just two blocks from home, the Earth temple and his house in plain sight, when someone whistled shrilly, making the narrow street ring. He looked for the source and saw a stocky girl in a Camelgut green sash trotting toward him.
“Pahan, we need help,” she said when she reached him. “It’s Hammit, that you gave the medicine for.” Briar remembered the boy whose facial burn he had treated and nodded. “We can’t wake him up,” the girl continued, her brown eyes worried. “Looks like he was jumped and hit on the head, but nobody saw who done it. This way.” She led him down the Street of Wrens.
When she turned into a dark gap between the houses, Briar halted. “I can’t take my horse down there, and I must look plain silly if you think I’ll leave him out here.”
The girl undid her green sash and used it to tie the horse to a nearly dry fountain. She opened a cock in the stone over the spout, filling the basin with enough water for the animal to drink before she closed it. “Nobody will dare touch him, tied up with my sash,” she assured Briar.
He dismounted, using his motion to hide the fact that he was checking the placement of his knives. Then he took his mage’s kit from his saddlebag. “After you, Duchess,” he said with a gallant bow. Girls usually giggled and blushed when he teased them, but not this one. She gave him a half-smile, her mind clearly elsewhere, and led him down the narrow passageway, into a small alley, and down a stair into a basement.
From the weapons on the walls and the bedrolls around the room, Briar guessed that this was that gang’s main den. Either they trusted him or they were desperate. When the cluster of Camelguts near one wall gave way, revealing his patient, Briar knew he’d been called in desperation. Ham-mit’s face was swollen and black with bruises.
“Light,” Briar said, dropping to his knees next to Hammit’s mattress. Someone passed over a lamp that filled the air with the scent of burning fat.
Some healing was the lot of every plant mage, since they not only grew many ingredients for medicines, but they made up the medicines themselves. In the last three years, Briar had acquired a great deal of medical knowledge. First he pried open each of Hammit’s eyes to look at his pupils. Both were completely dilated and remained that way as Briar moved the lamp to and fro. Normal pupils would have grown or shrunk depending on how much light fell on them.
Briar turned Hammit’s head. One side of his face drooped, as if he’d had apoplexy. Gently he felt through the fallen boy’s hair, ignoring the bugs — lice or fleas — that ran over his hands as he checked the skull. There was a dent behind Hammit’s ear. The other boy had been panting when Briar started; now his breathing slowed. Briar checked the pulse in his throat: it, too, was slow. With both pupils opened up all the way, he knew they’d waited much too late to call for help.
He sat back on his heels, slow fury heating his belly. “What happened?”
“Found ‘im in the fountain at Cedar Lane and Street o’ Hares near dawn.” The speaker was a boy who had been pitching coppers with Hammit the day before. “He left to visit his ma last night, and never come back. He come around a bit near midday. Said he never saw who got ‘im.”
Briar tried to think of a way to tell them what was coming, without saying that if they’d gotten him to a healer right away, he might have lived. With the bleeding in his skull so gradual that it had only begun to kill him now, even the slowest Water temple healer might have fixed things if the Camelguts had taken Hammit in right away.
He was still trying to control his anger and helplessness when Hammit’s mouth opened impossibly wide, revealing shattered teeth and bloody gums. His body stiffened; his arms went straight as his palms turned out from his body. The Camelguts shrank away. As tough as they were in the streets and in battle, this was unknown, alien.
“You’re a pahan — fix him!” cried the girl who had fetched Briar.
He clenched trembling hands. He’d seen this often enough to know it for what it was. Hammit collapsed. The air blew from his lungs in a last escape, bubbling through his nose and bloody mouth, until his lungs were empty. The Camelguts drew close as Briar checked the pulse in Hammit’s big neck vein. There was none.
“He was dead hours ago,” Briar said softly. “His heart and lungs kept going for a while, that’s all. That’s why one side of his face was all funny. His head was bleeding inside somewhere.” He closed Hammit’s staring eyes. Before they could pop open again, he drew two copper davs from his purse and placed them on the eyelids to keep them shut. He’d wanted to use silver — he’d liked Hammit — but that would have been asking too much of the Camelguts. This gang didn’t have enough money that they could afford to bury silver with their dead.
For the thousandth time Briar wished he’d been a healer rather than a green mage. Medicines only did so much. Sometimes it took a magically gifted healer to turn the tide. Briar was there too often when such times came around, and the only mage in sight was him. It was Lakik the Trickster’s favorite joke on him.
Two more Camelguts, a boy and a girl, lurched through the door. The girl’s face was bru
ised, the eye on that side puffed completely shut. To Briar it looked as if she had been clipped hard on the cheekbone.
“Vipers,” wheezed the boy, helping the girl to sit. “They was on her when I got there.”
“Will you try to help this time?” demanded the girl who had summoned Briar.
“He’s a pahan, Mai, not a god.” Briar’s defender was the one who’d said where Hammit had been found. “You do medicines, but you can’t heal, am I right?”
Briar nodded and went over to the injured girl. At least he could do something for her. With the balms in his kit Briar lowered the swelling and eased the pain of a shattered cheekbone. That was something, and it was more than the Camelguts would get from any local healers. Only the Living Circle Water temples offered free medical care to the poor, but Chammurans mistrusted foreign temples as well as foreigners.
No sooner had Briar finished with the girl than a third victim lurched into the room, one broken arm dangling. He, too, identified his attackers as Vipers. He’d also seen the weapons they had used, small, rounded batons that were far heavier than they looked. “Sounds like blackjacks,” Briar commented as he examined the newcomer’s arm.
“Since when could they afford those?” demanded the fiery Mai. “This is more of that takameri’s doing, I bet!”
“They won’t have hands to hold their new toys when we’re done with them,” snarled another member of the gang. They clustered together to lay battle plans as Briar finished his examination of the newest victim. His request for two long, straight pieces of wood for splints only distracted one Camelgut from the conference. As soon as he gave them to Briar, he went back to planning.
When the splint was secure, Briar told his patient and the girl with the broken cheekbone, “Look, I know the Living Circle Water temple is an eknub place, but the healers work for free and I’ve done all their medicines. You won’t have to pay so much as a copper dav. They’ll have someone who can do broken bones. It’s on the Street of Wells — let them know you talked to Briar Moss.”