take them at least ten
Evumeimei Dingzai was a skinny former slave who never missed a meal if she could help it. She was five feet tall with a strong Yanjingyi face: wide cheekbones, sharp chin, and long black eyes. Briar liked to tease her that she’d smacked her face into a door once, since her nose was flat at the tip. Her hands and nails showed scars and scratches from two years of hard work as a stone mage and a lifetime as a cat owner. He had found her scraping for a living in a slum. Although her magic was different from his, he had learned that he would not give her up to a teacher of her own power who would be unkind to her.
The God-King stood and moved off the giant pillow where he and Briar had spent the morning. “Wait a moment, Evumeimei.”
Evvy scowled. From the very beginning the God-King had treated her as a beloved sister. She had soon lost any shyness she could be expected to feel in his presence. “You always tell me to wait. I’ll have you know I am older than you —”
“I am the two hundred and ninety-eighth God-King in a straight line of choice from the first God-King,” he replied as he did whenever she brought up their difference in age. “You will have to be as old as —”
The stone beneath Briar’s feet had begun to shake. He sat hurriedly and pulled at Evvy’s arm. She signaled for the God-King to join them. Everyone outside was sitting as well.
Briar heard the kind of grinding noise that brought landslides to mind. Looking across the river, he felt his stomach roll. He clapped his hands over his mouth to keep his very good breakfast where it was supposed to be. Stones that had fallen, gravel that had dropped off a cliff, dust that had settled after the skeletons had gone for their walk belonged on the ground. All of these things had no business rising into the air in front of the gap in the cliff. None of them should be entering that gap, nor should any of the boulders on the riverbank or the stones between the water and the cliff be rolling to it and climbing over one another in their eagerness to fill in the hole left by the skeleton statues. Now more stones rattled down the slopes of the mountain that stood behind the cliff. They hesitated only briefly on the edge of the drop, then rolled over. In a maneuver that left Briar feeling as if he had been inhaling strange smokes, the new stones fell not straight down, but in a curve, dropping into the hole where the rocks from below had still left gaps. Now, except for a few openings, the rectangular space that had provided the statues was filled.
“Who did that?” Evvy cried. “Is that what Dedicate Dokyi meant when he said the mountains would clean up the loose rock?”
“That is what he meant,” the God-King said, getting to his feet. “And I am glad the work is finished. I don’t like to leave before the cleaning-up is done. There have been accidents in the past.” He went to the edge of the rock slab and held his hands out palm up. Tilting back his head, he opened his mouth. Sounds came out, spoken in something other than the
Briar uncovered one ear. Normal sounds were returning to the canyon. He cleared his throat and got up. “What was that about?” he asked the God-King.
“I was thanking the canyon,” the younger boy replied. “The shamans did it, of course, but the little gods appreciate it when I say something, too.”
Evvy was slowly coming back to herself, her joy being replaced by her usual liveliness. Dedicate Dokyi found her as they waited for the servants to gather their tent and the cushions. He was a gnarled and sun-wrinkled man in his fifties, with dark eyes buried under heavy lids. His wide-lipped mouth, like his eyes, was framed by laugh lines. His knotted legs and muscled arms showed he was no stranger to hard work and plenty of it. Even his brown dedicate’s habit didn’t soften the hard shape of his body.
“Nicely done back there earlier, Evvy,” he said, tweaking her nose. “I don’t suppose you could teach me how you made the stones overhead fall backward into the opening?”
Evvy reached out with her hands, opened and closed them, then shook her head with regret. “I asked them to go that way,” she explained.
Dokyi looked at Briar. “She asked them. I see them as tools to be set in place along the frame of a spell pattern, and your student treats them as partners in the work.”
Briar, who asked plants to do things, smiled at the older man. At least Dokyi wasn’t hostile about the way in which Evvy worked, unlike many of the mages they had encountered in their travels.
A pigeon caught their attention as it swooped to and fro, trying to fly past them into the tent. Briar spotted the small tube bound to one of the bird’s legs and moved Evvy out of the way so the bird could fly to a landing on the God-King’s shoulder.
Servants rushed to complete the packing of the tent, as if the pigeon were a signal. Dokyi walked over to take the bird so the God-King could undo the ties around the delicate strip of paper. Once he had it, the God-King reached one hand into a pocket and brought out a selection of dried berries and seed. Dokyi took that and fed the bird as the boy read the message.
“What is it?” Evvy demanded. The silence had stretched too long for her liking.
Briar gripped one of her ears between his thumb and forefinger, giving that organ a gentle twist that promised to get harder if she did not behave. “Didn’t me and Rosethorn have that little talk with you about ‘affairs of state’ and you sticking your neb where it oughtn’t to go?” he asked in Imperial, the language they had taught Evvy to use. “You don’t go around asking kings about their messages!” The thought of Evvy being so impertinent to Duke Vedris, back home in Emelan, made Briar shiver. Vedris was a good old fellow for the most part, but when he got on his dignity, he could freeze someone’s hair off. And Evvy was more fragile than she acted.
“It seems that although the Green Pass is not open and we cannot get word to or from Inxia, the great emperor of Yanjing is more than capable of sending messengers through Ice Lion Pass,” the God-King said. The look on his face was quite strange. “This, though my weather mages tell me that Ice Lion will not be open for at least two months. A messenger from the emperor waits in my audience chamber bearing letters for me and for Rosethorn.”
The imperial messenger was sleek and elegant, dressed in three overlapping silk robes, each heavily embroidered. Briar’s fingers itched for an eastern-style ink brush and a pad of paper sheets, knowing that his foster-sisters would never forgive him if he couldn’t describe imperial fashions and decoration perfectly. He wondered what such plain dressers as Dokyi and Rosethorn made of the messenger’s yellow, green, and black garments, or of the black silk cap with wings that were stiffened to stick out straight on either side of the man’s head. It was impossible to tell from their faces, which were as blank as any stone. Dokyi wore the plain brown habit of the Earth temple here in the east, with the black border of the initiate, or mage. Briar was relieved to see that Rosethorn had cleaned up from her morning’s work with plants. She wore a clean habit in the Earth green of the western Living Circle temple, also with the initiate’s black border. Her short, dark red hair was still wet. Months spent indoors had kept her skin the ivory shade she preferred, while she held summer suns and wrinkles at bay with a large selection of creams she made herself. Her large brown eyes missed nothing, ever. That was why Briar kept Evvy half hidden in back of him now. She ought to have been stone like the rest of the people in the room, but instead he felt her shake with silent giggles. If he had to guess the source of her merriment, it was the messenger’s hat. It did look silly, but Briar could control himself.
“Rosethorn’s watching,” he whispered out of the corner of his mouth. “Do you want to spend another week washing our clothes yourself?”
That calmed Evvy down. She respected Rosethorn like no one else, not even her first teacher and friend, Briar.
As if she knew she was being discussed, Rosethorn moved until she stood next to them. Dokyi came with her.
