Battle Magic

she said. “Where did you get this ‘burden’ notion?”

The palanquin moved into the shade and halted again. This time eunuchs on both sides opened the curtains. They offered silk-clad arms so the emperor’s guests could climb out of their luxurious box.

Once they were on their feet, imperial waiting-women rushed forward to straighten Evvy’s layers and even Rosethorn’s habit. They backed away when Rosethorn glared at them — or had they seen the tiny saplings that also sprouted on the outside of the palanquin’s box? Evvy wasn’t sure. She held still, determined to be good for once and not give Rosethorn anything to worry about. Instead she looked at the ceiling while the women tidied her robes and hair.

There was a ceiling because they had been brought inside a huge stone building. The rafters were dark, gilded wood hung with huge paper lanterns. Evvy was grateful that the lanterns weren’t lit. It was fairly cool in here, except for the occasional drift of warm air from outside.

An insistent thumb called her away from her thoughts on weather and rafters. A maid was pushing on her chin while another waited with a pot of red lip paint.

“I’m too young for that,” Evvy said flatly in tiyon. What she wanted to say was that the court women with their single drop of red on each upper and lower lip looked stupid, but Rosethorn wouldn’t like that. “Take that red stuff away.”

“Evvy,” Rosethorn said, warning dripping from her voice.

“I let them put the white stuff and the rouge on my face because you told me to,” Evvy said. If anyone within earshot speaks Chammuri, it serves them right for eavesdropping, she thought fiercely. “I look like a tumbler in a show. I will not let them give me the drop of blood.” The maids at their guest pavilion had told them that was the name for the current style in lip paint.

Both she and Rosethorn turned when they heard the scrape of a chain on the floor. “But all the ladies who must make their kowtow to his imperial majesty wear the drop of blood and the lily face,” the stranger said. He had stopped next to the newly arrived Briar, as if for contrast.

Briar was a slender youth, handsome and smiling in his own set of green, peach, and ivory-colored robes. He did not wear the stiffened black silk cap of a nanshur or a noble, leaving his short, glossy black hair uncovered. The newcomer also had very short black hair. He wore only a white garment like very loose, draped breeches that ended at his knees. He was a darker bronze than Briar, heavy with muscle, and scarred as a warrior was scarred. His wrists and ankles were secured by gold shackles and connected by lengths of heavy gold chain. His wrist shackles were chained to a throat collar, also gold.

He saw the direction that Evvy’s eyes had taken and raised his wrists a little, tightening the chains that led from throat to arms to feet. “No, I’m the only one required to wear these,” he said, a wry twist on his mouth. “It makes it difficult for me to run away.” He bowed deeply and saluted first Rosethorn, then Evvy, then Briar by touching his fingers to his brawny chest, then to his lips, and last to his forehead. “I am Parahan, the latest imperial amusement. Just now I am ordered to bring you into the presence.”

“I am —” Rosethorn began.

“Rosethorn,” Parahan interrupted. “Though I have trouble believing that so beautiful a rose has any thorns at all.”

“You have no idea,” Briar murmured as he fell in step with Evvy behind Parahan and Rosethorn as they walked out into the open.

The big captive led them to a small cluster of three chairs at the foot of a stone dais. Evvy saw now that they stood at the top of a short pyramid. Its point had been lopped off to make a platform. Briar dug a sharp elbow into Evvy’s side and nodded in the direction of the throne. The emperor was looking at them. Hurriedly Evvy joined Briar and Rosethorn in a deep bow. Parahan managed to kneel without his chains getting in the way. Like the emperor’s messengers in Garmashing, he touched his hands and forehead to the stones.

The emperor only nodded casually to them. Then he turned his attention to what lay before them all. They did the same as Parahan got to his feet.

The view spread out below the pyramid left all three of the newcomers silent and staring. Before them horsemen rode in complex patterns, fighting mock combats with long spears and swords, shooting at targets, and racing down grassy strips set on either side of the sprawling field. Periodically, at the rear of the performing troops, something would boom. In the distance, earth would explode into the air and fall.

“What was that?” Evvy cried the first time it happened.

“Boom-dust,” Briar muttered in Imperial. His hands were clenched into fists on the arms of his chair. He still had nightmares of the time pirates had attacked his and Rosethorn’s home with the brand-new weapon, maiming and killing many.

Parahan sat cross-legged on the stones between Rosethorn and Briar. “I don’t know your name for it,” he said in tiyon, half turning to look up at Briar. “Here it’s called zayao. And I think they have the right to call it whatever they want, since they invented it.” His gaze sharpened as he took more notice of Briar’s hands and the movement under his skin. “Raiya be kind, what happened to you?”

Briar sighed and stretched out one hand so Parahan could have a closer look. “I was trying out a little tattoo,” he explained. “Something with vegetable dyes I made up myself — I’m a green mage. I applied it with one of my foster-sisters’ needles.”

“She’s a stitch witch,” Evvy said cheerfully. She never tired of the story. She spent so much of her time feeling stupid around Briar that it was very comforting to know he could be stupid, too.

“She is more than a stitch witch,” Rosethorn corrected. “She is a thread mage. He borrowed the needles she uses in her magic.”

“It wasn’t like she has one set for sewing and one for magic,” Briar protested. “Her sewing is her magic. Anyway,” he told Parahan, after glaring at Rosethorn, “it should have worked. Only the flowers I put on my hands weren’t just pictures after all.”

“They grow,” Evvy explained. “They bloom and move around and die and grow some more. And they’re growing up along his arms. I think it’s splendid.”

“Hmm,” Parahan said. “May I?”

Briar let the man turn his hands over and inspect them. Parahan saw deep pockmarks in Briar’s palms, reminders of a determined thorny vine that had not wanted to release the boy when he was younger. The man noted that the flowers and leaves grew under Briar’s fingernails. When he lifted Briar’s hand to let the silk robes slide back, he even saw that the colorful plants continued up the young man’s arms, moving and opening leaves or new blossoms and sending out new stems as he watched.

Finally he said cautiously, “I find it very interesting that a young fellow would want to put flowers on his hands. Might you have been trying to cover over something, oh, between your thumb and forefinger, perhaps?”

Evvy covered her giggles with both hands. This friendly stranger had guessed Briar’s secret. Before he had been a mage, Briar was a thief and jailbird, with two arrests to his discredit — and two jailhouse X tattoos, one on the web between the thumb and forefinger of each hand. He’d been arrested a third time, about to go to hard labor for life, when a mage had seen the magic in Briar and brought him to Rosethorn.

Briar glanced at the throne and its occupant. Neither the emperor nor his immediate court was within earshot. “I’m reformed, practically,” Briar said quietly, his voice very dry. “And I do so much more damage as a nanshur than I did as a thief.”

Parahan released him with a sigh. “I am only envious,” he confessed. “Had I been a mage of your skills, instead of a spoiled warrior prince, I might have stopped my uncle from selling me to the emperor. You were wondering about my attire.” He shook his wrists, making his chains jingle.

This interested Rosethorn. “Your uncle sold you?”

Parahan grinned, displaying strong white teeth. “You should pity him. I know he would much rather have killed me so he would be sure to inherit my father’s throne someday. Sadly my uncle did not dare to do so.” Parahan looked out over the field. The horsemen were forming in brigades to either side of the great field. “In Kombanpur — where I come from, one of the Realms of the Sun — it is very bad luck to kill a twin. I have the good fortune to be one such, with my sister Soudamini. Actually I am not certain if my uncle believes in bad luck in general, or if he simply knows what would happen if Souda learned I was dead by his hand.” He winked one large brown eye at Evvy. “I’m the easygoing one. Souda is the battle cat.”