Battle Magic

present bleak mood. Wrapped in a fur from his bedroll, he had told it about Evvy, how aggravating she could be, how protective she was of her cats, how much she loved new clothes. The tiger had curled around him, forming a bowl to hold Briar. At last he had slept.

It was the chief priestess who found him. She spoke with the stone tiger gently, thanking it for its care of Briar, until it slowly uncurled and took its normal place by the gate.

As Briar looked at the old woman sleepily, she told him, “I think we must treat the gate tigers differently after this. It is written in our books that they are mindless slaves of our magic, but apparently they are otherwise. We have you to thank — perhaps.” She touched one of his swollen eyes. “You have been weeping.”

For a precious moment he had forgotten. Tears spilled down as he told her, “They killed Evvy. My student.”

“You shall have revenge,” the old woman said. “Last night a messenger came from the west. Your people will wait here another day for the wounded to heal. By this afternoon warriors from the western temples and tribes will join you. Parahan and Souda want to go east, to trap the enemy in Fort Sambachu. We shall see. General Sayrugo is closer.”

“I want to go there,” Briar said, struggling to his feet. “I want to serve them at the fort like they served Evvy!”

The old woman helped him up. “When you agreed to help Parahan and the others, you put yourself at the orders of the God-King. You may not have a choice.”

Briar glared at her, but he was too weak with grief to argue. Instead he thought of something else. “Wait — I can’t go. I have to wait here for Rosethorn. She’ll be returning from the mountains soon, I hope. I said I would meet her.”

“And you will,” the priestess said patiently. “When was the last time you had any food?”

He shook his head, not because he didn’t want to eat, but because he couldn’t remember his most recent meal.

“As I thought,” she said. She towed him into the temple complex.

They fed him egg soup and momos, scolding him when he picked at his food. When he’d eaten enough that the cooks let him be, he went to the healers’ tent and helped there. Midday was curry. Jimut sat on one side of him, Souda on the other. Between them he ate all that was set before him, just to stop them from nagging him to death.

He was about to leave the temple to say prayers for Evvy in one of his new willow groves when a squad of Gyongxin warriors carrying the yellow banner of messengers galloped up the road. He knew a couple of them from Fort Sambachu.

“We almost did not come up here,” the woman who carried the banner told the gate guards. “Those trees weren’t on your road when I was here last! How —” Looking past the guard’s shoulder, she saw Briar. “Oh. I thought Rana made that up about you growing trees from nothing. Never mind. I bring messages for Prince Parahan and Princess Soudamini, and Captains Lango and Jha!”

Only when Lango identified the newcomers as General Sayrugo’s warriors did the guards open the gate. The messenger and her guards led their horses inside. Briar felt distantly sorry for them. They would soon learn of their own losses: the slaughter of Captain Jha and his company. At least they had been soldiers. They had known they were expected to die in war. Evvy had not. She had been dragged here by Briar and Rosethorn. She had not wanted anything to do with the emperor. All she had wanted to do was see the mountains.

Evvy slept a lot. She dreamed, too, and they were the strangest dreams of her life. The fluorite bear was in most of them, trundling beside her from her head to her feet, watching as snakes made of backbones and skulls unwound her bandages. Lions made of ice and packed snow licked her feet. A spider at least twice her size leaped down from a roof she couldn’t see and bandaged her feet in its webs.

In some dreams, when the bear wasn’t present, a woman with a white eye painted on her forehead came and argued with her about food. Usually Evvy would drink the soup brought by the woman just so she would go away. Evvy knew that dreams didn’t work like that. People didn’t go away because you did the things they wanted you to do in dreams, but these dreams were as odd as the strange things that she saw in them.

In one, she asked the fluorite bear, “Which is weirder, the nine-headed snake, or —” Suddenly she was wide-awake and saying, “— the giant spiders that come from above?” She sat up and looked around. She was definitely awake. She could feel her ragged clothes against her skin. She could smell herself. When had she last bathed? “Can you smell me?” she asked the bear.

“No,” it said gravely.

“Oh, good.” Swallowing, terrified of what she might see, she made herself look at her feet. They were there, looking like her ordinary, everyday feet. She wriggled her toes. They were stiff, but not painful. “I dreamed the Yanjingyi yujinon flayed my feet and killed everyone in the fort, but that part was so real,” she murmured. “I dreamed they killed my cats. And then I came here and a big spider wrapped my feet in its webs. I know that part was a dream.”

“It was all real, Evumeimei Dingzai,” the bear told her. “I called to you so you might find safety here in the mountains. The webs dropped from your feet a sunrise ago, when your feet were healed.”

Tears trickled down her cheeks. “My cats really are dead?”

“Once I understood why you called for them in your dreams, I showed their images to one of my snow leopards,” the bear said. “She went to the dead pile behind the stone cave. She found the seven little cats that matched your dreams in the pile.”

Evvy turned over on the soft pile of rags where she had been sleeping and wept harder.

When she finally dried her eyes and sat up again, she found the bear had not moved. “I don’t usually cry like this,” she told him belligerently. “Just so you don’t go thinking I’m some kind of watering pot.”

“What is a watering pot?” he asked.

“It’s a jar. You put water in it and pour it on plants so they grow.”

“Is not the rain enough?”

Evvy rubbed the dried blood on the back of one foot. It flaked off. “People have plants in their houses. They use watering pots for indoor rain.” Slowly, grimacing because she was so stiff, she drew one foot up onto the opposite knee so she could look at the sole. It was puffy with scars that crisscrossed the flesh, but when she poked them, they were merely sore, not as painful as they had been when she had fled the fort. “You cured them.”

“The webs of the peak spider cured them,” the bear explained. “Forgive us for keeping you in slumber. We felt that it would be less unnerving for you if you did not see how you were healed.”

“I don’t care about how I was healed,” Evvy said bitterly. “I care that I was hurt in the first place. I care that they killed all those people in the fort. I care that they killed my cats.” She opened and closed her hands, remembering the feel of the stone-cold dead cats under them as she crawled over bodies, looking for clothes. “What did the villagers ever do to deserve dying like that, tell me! They had little ones with them, babies, and those imperial qus killed them and dumped them in a pile to rot!” She glared at the fluorite bear, who had cocked his head knob once more. “What! You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

“I do not know what crazy means,” the creature said in his slow, thoughtful way. “What I think is that we healed the hurt in your feet and the hurt in your body, but now your spirit is sick. I want to heal that pain for you, but I do not know how. I can heal the meat creatures of my mountain, but I leave two-legged meat creatures to their own kind.”

“Do you always talk this way?” Evvy demanded. She wasn’t being polite, or grateful, but if her cats were dead, why couldn’t this thing just have left her to die? Briar and Rosethorn have each other, she thought. The memory went through her like lightning. Briar and Rosethorn! If the enemy got around General Sayrugo and her troops, or killed them all, to reach Fort Sambachu, maybe they caught up to Briar and Rosethorn, too! How will I ever know?

The stone thing said, “My difficulty is that you are not entirely of the meat creature kind.”

“Of course I am!” Evvy retorted.

“No. If you were, I would not have heard your approach when you were still in the lowlands of the Ice Naga River.”