Battle Magic

Rosethorn took his hand in both of hers. “Mila and Green Man bless you,” she told him. “And may Shurri Flamesword see you home in victory one day.”

Parahan kissed her forehead. “You played the part of the agreeable traveler well, but wildflowers don’t last very long here. I am glad to see you escape.” He clasped Briar’s hand, then Evvy’s, in a jangling of chains. Crouching in front of Evvy, he tweaked her nose. “I wish you could have met my sister Souda,” he said with a smile. “You two are much alike.”

Evvy flung her arms around his neck. “I hate it that you’re his captive!” she whispered in his ear.

“I don’t like it, either, but what can we do? We’re just little cats in his big house full of lions,” he replied.

Evvy let him go and ran into her room, sliding the thin door shut with a bang.

Parahan bowed to them. “May all our gods watch over you on your journey home.” He ambled out of the house, fading into the twilight. Briar listened until he could no longer hear the slightest jingle of chain.

Rosethorn went to bed soon afterward. Briar made certain the cats were all tucked into Evvy’s room behind her magicked gate stones. Then he went to his own bed.

He was drifting off when he thought of Parahan. Gods curse it, I need to sleep! he told himself angrily. We leave at dawn! But there was no denying it; the plight of the man from Kombanpur bothered him. Any other master would have let them buy Parahan from him, but not Weishu. Parahan was some kind of prize. The emperor could give them nine saddlebags full of gold coins for the Weishu Rose alone — and he had — but he wouldn’t sell this one captive. Briar would have traded all of that gold for Parahan, and he knew Rosethorn and Evvy would have done the same.

Dawn, he reminded himself. We get up before dawn.

Calm thoughts. I’ll be able to wear plain old breeches and a tunic again. I look nice in all the silk robes, true, but there’s nothing for comfort like the clothes Sandry made for me. Great Mila, I’ll be so glad to wear my good old boots instead of slippers, where I feel every rock in my path!

On that agreeable thought he drifted off to sleep.

Something made him pop awake near midnight. He listened, but the pavilion house was quiet. Uneasy, Briar got up and checked Evvy’s room.

The cats were draped over her bed. They had moved to take the space she had left empty. They looked up at Briar.

“When I catch her, she’s dead!” Briar mouthed to them.

Mystery raised a leg and began to wash.

Swiftly he pulled on breeches and a tunic, then slung his smaller mage kit over his shoulder. Boots in hand, Briar crept to the door of Rosethorn’s room and looked in. She was asleep, making the little buzzing snore that he thought was so funny.

Briar sneaked out of the pavilion. There were no servants in the outer rooms or even guards in the street beyond. He put a small bundle of sleep herbs in his tunic pocket in case he met anyone unfriendly on the way, and yanked on his boots. Once set, he began to run, his way lit by a half-moon. He had a very good notion of where she had gone. He should have realized she would not accept leaving Parahan behind, not after she had spent most of five days in the captive’s company.

It took him longer than he liked to reach the Pavilion of Glorious Presentations, where Parahan was caged. That was because he kept to the trees and bushes beside the road, making frequent stops to look and listen for guard patrols. He saw and heard none, which only made him more nervous, not less.

He finally reached his destination. Before he approached his runaway student, he scouted the outside of the long hall. Everywhere else around the perimeter of the large building he found no sign of guards. Inside was the row of hanging gold cages, one of which housed Parahan at night. The hall of cages was easy enough to identify on the outside: It squared into the audience chamber, forming an L in the stone work.

When he was certain there were no guards anywhere else around the pavilion, Briar went into the trees along the cage side of the pavilion of Glorious Presentations. There were the small windows high up, higher than a tall man could reach, so the captives had fresh air. There was the corner where the long hall became the emperor’s throne room.

Very well, Evvy-knows-everything, he thought grimly as he worked his way through the small wood, how do you mean to get inside?

Then he heard tiny grunts of effort.

She’s trying to pull down the wall! he thought in panic. She’ll bring any guards within earshot down on us!

He stepped out of the tree cover at Evvy’s back. She was kneeling with both hands placed on a marble block two feet above the ground. She wobbled, snorting, but he could see no movement in the stone. For some reason, Evvy — who could guide tons of stones as they fell from cliffs — could not get these blocks to budge.

“Evvy, stop it!” he whispered.

She jumped, but she did not turn around. “No!” she whispered fiercely. “I won’t leave him here! What if the emperor turns on him one day and burns him up like he did the roses?”

“How did you find out about that?” Briar grabbed her by the shoulders and tried to yank her to her feet. It was like trying to move a boulder, as he should have remembered from the last time he tried to displace her when she didn’t want to obey.

“I heard the servants talking,” she told him patiently. “Why don’t you stop being silly and help me? I don’t know why I can’t move these things.”

The sight of the gardeners’ corpses burning at the heart of the rose garden was still too fresh in his mind. “He can’t come with us,” he told Evvy. “They’ll kill us if they think we helped him to escape.”

“I bet he knows a way out of the palace grounds,” Evvy said flatly. “The only things that keep him here are the cage and his chains.” Then she said the thing that truly horrified Briar. “I brought your lock picks with me. I’m going to pick his locks. But first I have to get in there and these blocks won’t budge.”

Briar chewed his lip. He knew what Sandry and Tris would say. He even knew what Daja, who was more practical, would say: “What’s the matter, thief boy? Lost your nerve?”

“I have plenty of nerve,” he muttered to his smith-mage sister. He hesitated for a moment longer, then realized that Evvy was throwing her power into the marble block again. She wasn’t waiting for him to decide.

Growling softly, he cast his magic around to see if there were vine seeds in the earth. The gardeners had cut back the local vines, but if he could get their seeds to grow, there was no risk of examiners later finding bits of foreign ones he might have to grow from the seeds in his mage kit. It was in that casting that he felt the ghost of once-living plants at the level of his face. How could that be possible? The only thing in front of him was the marble wall.

He shook his hands as if to clear them of the last magic he had used, a habit Rosethorn teased him for, and let more of his power flow out directly in front of him. Now the entire wall responded with that shadow of life that had once been green.

“Evvy, stop,” he whispered. “What’s in the mortar?”

“Mostly limestone,” she replied, her voice as soft as his. “There are other things in it that I don’t feel, though. It clings like the marble is going to run away.”

Briar ran his finger over the cracks between blocks. Suddenly he grinned. “And you think plant magic is useless.” He crouched on the ground and opened his kit.

“You mean it isn’t?” Evvy inquired, being difficult on purpose.

“Apparently the thing you can’t feel is rice,” Briar informed her. “And that I can manage.”

“Rice?” she demanded, outraged.

“I know rice in my bowl and I know it in the mortar. It’s the rice in the mortar that makes it cling so, I’ll bet. Tell me, were you going to pull the wall down?”

“Nope. I was going to pull out just enough blocks to climb in.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do. But we should make that enough blocks to let Parahan out.”