Parahan shrugged.
Briar saw sheets of paper flutter under a stone near where the commander of the soldiers had first been standing. He wandered over and pulled them out from under the stone. He couldn’t read the Yanjingyi writing under the drawings on each paper, but the pictures were perfectly clear: Parahan on one; Evvy, Rosethorn, and Briar on the other. He gave them to Rosethorn, then went to make certain that the mules were unharmed.
Rosethorn remained in the saddle, watching the guardhouse. Once she had looked at the papers, she stuffed them in the sling on her chest and took out more thorn balls, just in case.
Evvy dismounted from her pony. She let the reins trail so the animal wouldn’t wander, then trudged toward the guardhouse.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Rosethorn called.
Evvy looked back at her. “Are you joking? Do you know how long it takes me to knap an edge on those flint pieces so I can throw them just right? I don’t think I’m going to find more flint here, either.” She looked at the fallen archer, gulped, and bent down to pry the dark stone circle from his throat.
Parahan followed and took it from her fingers to wipe it clean on the dead man’s clothing. “Beetle dung. It
“I’ll go with him,” Briar told Rosethorn. “Evvy, come watch the mules.” He waited until Evvy took the reins before he ran into the guardhouse after Parahan.
The downstairs was empty of animals except for chickens on their nests. Upstairs was the main living room. Midday for the guards sat half eaten on a long table. Pallets were rolled up and stacked in a corner. The archer who had fallen inside lay in a heap on the floor, plucking at the flint circle stuck in his chest.
Parahan killed him with a sword thrust. “We can’t have them reporting who did this,” he told Briar. He retrieved Evvy’s second flint circle and wiped it off. “Perhaps you shouldn’t tell Rosethorn, though.”
Briar grimaced. Rosethorn would not like to hear of the killing of a wounded man, but Parahan was right. “We’d best get out of here, then, before the townsfolk come.”
“Yes, you’re right. Ouch!”
Briar saw that the big man was sucking blood off a fingertip. “Oh, sorry. Those things are nasty sharp.” He took a handkerchief from his pocket and slid the circle from Parahan’s hold. Carefully he wrapped the flint and put it in his sling, but even so, he could see it was cutting through the linen of the handkerchief. Evvy owed him a fresh one.
As they went down the ladder, Parahan said, “I confess, even with their magic, I am … impressed with how strong-hearted our ladies are in battle. Will they need time to calm themselves? We can’t linger — the herd boys will report trouble here to the town.”
When they went outside, they found that Rosethorn had tethered her pony. She had managed to catch one of the horses and saddled and bridled it. From the length of the stirrups, she meant the brown gelding for Parahan. “Are you finished?” she asked them. “Because I would like to put some distance between us and this, now.”
“Yes, Mother,” Briar said. To Parahan he said, “See? She’s calm.” He skittered out of the way when Rosethorn mimed a swat at him. Smiling, Briar took Evvy the flint disk Parahan had recovered. She tucked it into the pocket with the other flint after wiping off the last traces of blood. Briar said nothing to her about the vomit he could see a few yards away. Evvy never faltered in battle, but blood still set her back on occasion.
Moving quickly but without fuss, Parahan resupplied himself from the dead soldiers until he had two swords, a belt, an iron-covered leather jerkin, and leather boots that fit. After testing a couple of the spears used by the Yanjingyi guards, he fashioned a quiver for them and his spear, and slung it across his back. Evvy found a spare water bottle for him. She and Briar swiftly searched the food packs for some kind of midday meal before they swung into their own saddles.
The four of them shared out cold rice balls wrapped in leaves and cold red-bean buns. As they were about to leave, Rosethorn trotted her pony by the open windows and tossed two of her thorn balls inside. Vines began to sprout through the doors and windows as she joined the other three on the road. Chickens erupted from their side of the house, squawking in alarm.
As they moved on, Briar tossed a thorn ball of his own onto the road behind them. In the house, spiked vines were shooting out of the upper windows. Those vines that grew from where dead men lay now crawled over the ground, snake-like, bound to meet their friends in the guardhouse. There was no sign of bodies anywhere. The vines had spread to cover them all.
“They’ll know we were here,” Parahan said.
“Too bad,” Briar and Rosethorn said at the same time.
“I was tired of sneaking around anyway,” Briar added. “Let’s teach Weishu to keep his greedy hands to himself.”
10
SNOW SERPENT PASS
They trotted forward as the mules complained. “I don’t see what you’re whining about,” Evvy told them. “You just stood around while we did all the work.” She had put her rice ball half eaten and her bun untouched back into the cloth sling over her chest. Though she had done her part without flinching earlier, the memory of the man whose throat she’d cut kept rising past any other thoughts or pictures in her head. He joined her vivid memories of a handful of people she had killed, trying to survive before she had met Briar and Rosethorn and in bandit attacks on the road to Gyongxe. It never got easier.
When the road curved around the edge of a hill, she looked back. Thick green thorn vines covered everything between the tumbling river and the fence behind the guardhouse. The chickens and the horses that had grazed inside the fence had gotten away, the chickens to huddle on the bridge, the horses to gallop through the fields.
Someone would notice the problem sooner or later, but by the time anyone came to look, the thorns would have reached the water’s edge, blocking the road completely. They could try to go behind the guardhouse to get at the road, Evvy supposed. She wasn’t really sure when the thorns would stop growing. Rosethorn and Briar created very determined magic.
She looked ahead once more. At least the dead men were covered. That was something, since they hadn’t had time to give them a burial or prayers.
They trotted a mile before the jolting and the image got to Evvy. She cried for a halt. She dashed behind a boulder on the hillside and lost what food she’d eaten. Once she’d covered that mess, she heard Rosethorn call, “I’m coming up. Nobody watch.”
Since that meant Rosethorn needed to take care of business, Evvy thought she might as well do the same. She had her complaints about dried grass, but it was what was available. She was tugging at the ties on her breeches when Rosethorn asked quietly, “Are you all right?”
“It’s just … I don’t like killing people,” Evvy whispered, ashamed of her weakness.
“None of us
“Oh,” Evvy breathed. She had been so caught up in the picture of the dead man that she had forgotten all the times she had been roused in the night by Briar — and Rosethorn — crying out in their dreams.
“Parahan will be different. He’s a soldier. We saw that today. It wasn’t just bragging from him. It may not bother him as it does us. But you aren’t weak because you threw up, girl. You’re human.”
“Thank you,” Evvy whispered. Feeling less like slime, she scrambled down the hillside to wash her hands. They went numb as soon as she dipped them in the icy brown torrent. She got to her feet and tucked her fingers into her armpits to warm them, glaring at Briar and Parahan as she walked over to the mules. It wasn’t fair that men didn’t have to twist themselves into knots to pee!
Rosethorn looked up the gorge, her eyes narrow. “My boy’s restless. Not you, Briar, my mount. I don’t think he likes what he smells on the wind.”
