Briar could do little for the boy whose forehead was visibly dented, except make him comfortable. Sometimes people recovered from such injuries; sometimes they didn’t. He moved on to another boy, squinting as he tried to see the extent of his injuries. The nearest torch burned poorly, dumping smoke into the air. Briar’s eyes stung. It was hard to tell if he was looking at a mammoth bruise or dirt on his patient’s shin. His hands told him it was a bruise, but it would have been nice to see the difference.
That gave him an idea. “Evvy,” he said.
“Yep.” The girl crouched beside him, careful not to jar the contents of the basket she carried.
“Put that down.” She obeyed as Briar grubbed in his breeches pocket. He found his worry stone, a small crystal egg he liked to hold whenever he thought he was about to say or do anything stupid. Its coolness seemed to draw the anger from his veins whenever he remembered to use it. Rosethorn said it worked because thinking of the stone instead of the thing that upset him simply broke the chain that fed a rising temper.
He wasn’t angry now, and he could always come by another worry stone. “See this?” He held it up.
“Ooh.” She reached for it with eager fingers. “It’s happy.”
Briar rolled his eyes. Why did girls get honey-sweet over things that weren’t even alive? Sandry would coo like that over a spool of silk thread, Daja over a piece of well worked brass. Even Tris, who was sensible for a skirt, turned silly over a bit of ball lightning, giving the thing a name for as long as it lasted. “I don’t care if it’s the Queen of the Solstice,” he informed Evvy tartly. “But look, it’s a clear stone, you’re a stone mage, right?” He fumbled for the words to guide her to do her first planned magic spell. “I bet if you really, really concentrated, just, oh, poured your whole mind into that stone? I bet if you did, you could make it light up like a lamp. A real lamp, one everybody can see.”
“Oh, that,” Evvy said scornfully. “That’s not work.” She gripped the crystal. Suddenly light blazed through her fingers. She opened her hand. The stone gave off a bright, steady glow.
Briar swallowed. Of his foster-sisters, Daja and Tris had learned to make crystals into lamps, Daja because fire was part of her smith-magic, Tris because lightning was part of hers. They had done it once by accident, making a night light for Sandry. After that it took each of them weeks to get the knack of it so they could do it as they needed. No one he’d known could make stone glow with no effort at all. He’d thought it would be possible, given Evvy’s magic and the fact that he’d already known mages who could get stones to hold light or fire, but it was one thing to think it possible and another to see the results of “Oh, that.”
“Is it hot?” he asked.
“Nope.” Evvy put the stone beside the boy they were supposed to be treating.
Reminded of his patient, Briar went over him again. The leg bruise shrank under his bruise ointment, but Briar could feel a bone chip that remained under the boy’s skin. Cutbane, spread neatly over the splits in his left eyebrow and cheek, drove off infection and worked to close the wounds. Next Briar put an uninjured Camelgut to work cutting the wooden staves to a proper length for splints. As he straightened the arm, Briar said to Evvy, “I thought you never used magic before yesterday.”
“I didn’t,” Evvy said, watching him with interest.
The boy who’d cut the splints gave them to Briar. “How’d you make my stone light, if you never did magic before?” Briar asked as he splinted the broken forearm.
“I knew I could when I went home,” she pointed out. “Doesn’t that hurt him?”
“That’s why it’s nice for us that he’s passed out. Elsewise they’d hear him yelling at the Aliput Gate.” Finished, Briar gathered the crystal and the remaining bandage and knee-crawled to the next pallet. This patient was a girl with a shattered kneecap and a broken collarbone. “So you knew you could do magic when you got home, and —?”
“I have rocks. Some came with the place, and some I brung there. For pretty, you know?” Evvy put down her basket. “And I remembered how the junk stones I threw at the Vipers lit up, so I thought I’d try and see what stones would light for me. Some of them did. Some just got hot, though. Do you need me to make something hot?”
Briar sat back to think. He’d ordered the Camelguts to put their blankets over the injured, but what good were blankets that were mainly rags? He’d thought to ask his helpers to fill gourds with hot water to put in the beds, but stones would keep heat in longer.
“Can you make sure the heat won’t burn folk?” he asked.
Evvy scratched her head. “I can try,” she said at last.
“Do it,” ordered Briar.
“I need different rocks,” she pointed out.
“Don’t stand there telling me about it. Sooner before later, all right?” he asked. He was taking a chance that her magic wouldn’t spill out of control, but he’d seen her slip just enough power into his stone. Was it because she was used to thinking of a rock as an enclosed thing? “Do you need help?” he wanted to know.
Evvy shrugged. “I don’t think so.” She trotted out of the Camelgut den.
So far she hadn’t once questioned his right to give her orders. Later, when he had this mess straightened out, he would have to find out why.
Briar continued to work on the injured with the Camelguts’ help. When he saw he would run out of bandages soon, he instructed his assistants to dump rags into a pot of water and set it to boiling. Of the boiled water in the pot he’d fetched from home, part went for washing, part to willowbark tea, to ease the aches of injuries.
The boy with the dent in his head died by the time Briar had examined the worst hurt and had come to look at him again. Briar did a second check of the others on pallets, then got to work on the less seriously hurt. He wished for Rosethorn over and over — a second pair of experienced hands would have been nice — but knew he could manage if he just kept after things, provided the gang members continued to obey. Besides, Rosethorn was disheartened enough by the exhausted farmlands of Chammur.
The nice thing about Chammur, Evvy thought as she returned to the Camelgut den swinging her loaded bucket, was that it was easy to find plenty of rocks, even one particular kind of rock. Rather than work on them in the Camelgut den, with its noise and smells, she had found a rooftop where she could do as Briar had asked. It was much harder than calling light to his beautiful crystal. The core of noncrystal stones didn’t like warmth. They hadn’t felt warm in ages of time, and didn’t see why she wanted to put it into them now. Her results were spotty, heat flickering in some of the bigger stones, but it was the best she could do. Her head was aching by the time she was done.
Briar was sewing a deep gash in a boy’s forearm when Evvy reached him. When he finished bandaging the work, he inspected Evvy’s creations.
She watched him anxiously. “It’s not like light,” she grumbled, hunching one shoulder in case he decided to hit her. “I can’t do it so good. They’ll stop being warm after a while, and they aren’t at all steady.”
“But these are lots better than gourds filled with hot water,” Briar said absently, turning the stone over in his hand. “This helps, Evvy. Thanks.”
A knot formed in her throat as he took the bucket from her. She watched him, blinking eyes that burned and trying to swallow that knot, as he tucked her stones into the blankets of those who needed to be warm. He’d said she helped. He’d thanked her.
As he placed the last of the stones he glanced at her slyly. “They don’t work steadily because you don’t have your power under control all the way. Jebilu Stoneslicer will teach you to get rocks to hold warmth longer, and steadier.”
“He can teach, but I won’t learn, not up at the palace,” Evvy retorted.
Briar stood and faced her, hands on hips. “What is it with you?” he demanded. He kept his voice low, but he leaned in so Evvy heard every word. “Even you know you have to be taught now! He’s the only stone mage in this whole,
imp-blest, festering city!”
Evvy shrank away from him. Even if he hit her, she was going to speak her mind. “If I show myself at the palace, they’ll, they’ll toss me in the cells of Justice Rock for not knowing my place,” she stammered. She went giddy with horror as her traitor mouth ran on. “Or they’d sell me. I’ve been sold once already — I won’t be sold again!” She dropped the bucket and covered her face. How could she have said that? She’d told no one that before!
When he said nothing, she peeped at him through her fingers. Whatever she’d expected him to do or feel, it wasn’t what she saw on his face now. What she saw looked like sorrow. Not pity — sorrow. “You’re a slave?” he asked softly.
“I ran away,” she mumbled. She didn’t want the Camelguts to hear this. The reward for an escaped slave would tempt them; she knew that it would.
“And the collar?” he inquired, his voice softer yet. “How’d you get rid of it?”
Evvy lowered her hands. “I broke it with a rock.”
Briar smiled thinly.
She guessed what he was thinking: more rock magic. “I thought it was a cheap collar,” she explained, almost smiling. “You don’t need a lot of iron to hold a scrawny piece of crowbait like me.” It was her old master’s favorite term for her. “You mean I had it” — she touched the corner of her eye in a sign that meant “magic” in Chammur — “even then?”
He walked over to a Camelgut girl who’d been seated, waiting for him. “You’re born with magic,” he explained. “It just gets frustrated if you get older and you don’t do anything real with it, so it breaks out.”
“Why can’t you teach me?” she asked as he began to wash the sores on the girl’s leg. “I already know you, and you know the rules and things.” What she didn’t, couldn’t, say was that she was comfortable around him. For all his pushiness and foreign-ness, she still felt as if she’d known him all her life. He was quick and inventive, as she’d learned to be, living on her own. She might vex and puzzle him, but never once had she seen pity in his eyes, even when she’d let slip that she’d been a slave. Never once had he treated her as a child, a female, or even a thukdak.
“I’m not a stone mage,” he said wearily. “It’s important that you get someone to teach you stone magic.” To the girl whose leg he cleaned he said, “You can’t scratch fleabites open like this — they get infected. Or if you do, wash the scratches out right off, with clean water — that means it’s been boiled. And soap if you have it.”
“Oh, sure, pahan,” she retorted with a quick smile. “I left some under my pillow just the other day.”
Briar returned her smile, looking the rest of her over while he held onto her foot. Evvy smiled crookedly. So even pahans weren’t immune to the hug-and-kiss madness that swamped older girls and boys.
“Tell you what,” Briar said to the girl. “You know the aloe leaves they sell in the market?” The girl nodded, and tried to tickle the inside of his arm with her toes. “Behave, or I’ll put something that bites on these.” The Camelgut girl pouted at him prettily. Evvy sighed and shifted her weight from one foot to another. He was spending more time on swollen fleabites than he did on broken arms. “Steal some aloe leaves,” Briar suggested, “and when you itch, break a piece off and rub the juice on the itch. It’s good for burns, too.” Carefully he smoothed a salve over the sores and put a light bandage over them.
“Thanks, pahan,” she said with another quick, sidelong glance from under curling lashes. “I’m Ayasha — if you have any more wisdom to share.” She got up and walked over to a group of Camelguts huddled in a corner.
Briar looked at Evvy, who was shaking her head. “What?” he demanded.
“You want a cloth to wipe the drool off your chin?” Evvy asked wickedly.
Briefly he looked the way she felt sometimes about her old home in Yanjing, lost and lonely. Then he shed the sad look and said tartly, “Keep making sour faces and you’ll need spectacles. It happened to one of my mates, it can happen to you.”
“What? You aren’t old enough for one wife, let alone more,” Evvy objected as she followed him to the pallets.
“Not my wife, my mate,” he said, blotting sweat from a sleeping boy’s face. “It’s a word we used at home, for somebody that’s closer than blood family, your best friend. Don’t you have mates?”
“The cats,” Evvy said. “Not people, though. I keep to myself.”
“Don’t keep saying you aren’t ganged up,” Briar replied, his face mulish. He rubbed one of his salves on the sleeping boy’s arm, above and below the splint. “I lived in a place a lot like Oldtown for years. All the kids were ganged up, unless they were crippled or simple. And you aren’t crippled, though sometimes I wonder about the simple part.”
“I’m no fool,” Evvy retorted softly, to keep from catching any Camelgut’s attention. How could someone as clever as he was not understand? Unless he told the truth, and he had belonged to a gang.
No, that was too outlandish. Old gang kids worked in inns, or peddled rags, or labored on farms or on buildings. They never became clean, well dressed anything. “Gangers always want this, and that, and some other thing. They’re your friend, and why can’t you help, and you’d be safer with us, and then they try to show you what you’d be safe from. Cats don’t want anything from me, though it’s nice if I feed them. I like that.”
Briar frowned at her. “The Vipers wouldn’t've grabbed you if you had a gang,” he pointed out.
“No, the other gang would have grabbed me first. Grabbing’s rude no matter who does it,” she retorted. “Let someone try it on you sometime and see if you like it.”
They made two more rounds of the room as Briar checked bandages, coaxed people to drink the sharp-scented tea he’d brewed, and gave out more medicines. Evvy watched him, fascinated. For all his fine clothes, he didn’t mind handling the sick, as if he’d wiped away sweat, blood, and vomit all his life.
He stopped at last and looked around. “I think we’re just about done,” he remarked.
Someone in the group of unhurt Camelguts in the corner yelled, “I can’t believe you! They killed Hammit! Pilib’s dead, now, too!”
Briar frowned. Evvy wondered why. He might be caring for these people, but their squabbles weren’t his.
“They’ll kill us all,” another boy argued. “If they don’t, you know Snake Sniffers and Rockheads will move in and pick us off. Look around! Half of us can’t even fight!”
“The Vipers have the takameri to buy weapons for them,” added Douna, the girl who had led Briar and Evvy here. “What’s she going to get them next? Axes? Swords?”
A youth added, “If she’s paying out that coin, I say she ought to pay it for weapons for us, too.”
Evvy was impressed. None of the gang people she knew had the sense to think of things like this. They were too tied up with honor and protecting their ground.
“They want us to join and I don’t want anybody else dying,” said a male voice. “Hands. For joining?” Most of the walking Camelguts’ hands rose. Other hands were raised as the kids in beds, those who were awake, cast their vote.
“Come on,” Briar told Evvy, disgusted. “I’d've fought till the end of time before joining a gang that killed a mate of mine. We’re finished here.” He waved to those of the gang who looked at him, and led Evvy out into the open air.
She followed, dazed. Was it possible she’d been wrong, that he really had belonged to a gang once? That was just the kind of thing she’d expect a gang boy to say.
It was the first time that Ikrum Fazhal had visited Lady Zenadia doa Attaneh’s home before sunset, but she had ordered that he was to come the moment there was word on the Camelgut matter. As her expressionless servants admitted him through the tradesmen’s gate and led him to the patio and garden where the lady usually saw him, Ikrum wondered what they made of her interest in thukdaks like the Vipers. He could tell that they were as much in awe of her as he was, or they would have found their own w
ays to end his visits.
They left him standing before the couch where she usually sat. They had placed a pitcher of wine, a cup, and a bowl of fruit there for her. Ikrum was not even tempted to help himself. The one time he’d been so bold, he’d discovered that she carried a thin, bladed crop in her expensive draperies. It had left a broad scar across the back of his right hand, right between his Viper initiation scars.
Sometimes he wondered what would have happened if he and some other Vipers hadn’t mistaken her for an overpriced prostitute wandering the Grand Bazaar one night. They’d grabbed her and dragged her into a nook between closed stalls, meaning to strip her of her jewels and her silks. Instead they had discovered her shadows, the armsmaster and the mute, and the lady’s own tiny dagger, which she laid against the big vein under Ikrum’s jaw. He had thought he was dead. Then he had told her, “Cut hard and fast and get it over with,” and she began to laugh.
She liked his courage, she had said. She took him to a shop that sold coffee, buying him pastries and cups of that bitter, expensive drink. Her armsmaster and the mute sat Ikrum’s friends on the carpets in front of the shop and kept them from running away.
Terror-sweat poured from his body when he had learned that she was the amir’s aunt, a lady from one of the great noble houses. He saw his headless corpse and those of his friends dangling from Justice Rock. Instead of calling the Watch, she asked about him and the Vipers.
She asked and listened so well that Ikrum found himself telling her his troubles. He even talked of the slight he had been dealt by the city’s richest and most powerful gang, the Gate Lords, who held all the territory between the Grand Bazaar, Golden House, and the Hajra Gate. Ikrum had foolishly fallen in love with the sister of the Gate Lords’ tesku, or leader. The tesku had told Gate Lords and Vipers alike that he would never allow his sister to go with the tesku of a pack of glorified errand boys.