Battle Magic (26 page)

Everyone looked at her in shock. “It is?” Rosethorn asked.

Sayrugo smiled. “I am taking troops northeast along the Drimbakang Sharlog,” she explained. “Parahan and Souda will have two companies of my people as well as their own two hundred to ride along the Snow Serpent Road going west. We all have to move villagers to safety and fight any imperials that have come so far south. But Captain Rana’s company will remain in charge here to defend the pass and the local
villagers. A barrier of thorns on the pass will make Rana’s work easier. There will be no more Yanjingyi soldiers to come through that way.”

Rosethorn frowned.

Briar smiled wryly. “I don’t think any trade will be going down the Snow Serpent for a while, Rosethorn, if that’s what’s wrinkling your face. It won’t matter if the pass is blocked.”

She nodded slowly. “We could do thorns, then. I’ll go with Parahan and Soudamini as far as the Tom Sho River, provided they don’t slow down too much alerting the villages and temples.”

“And I’ll go with you, since Evvy will be snug as a flea in an armpit here,” Briar said cheerfully. Soudamini choked on her curried rice.

“Briar!” Rosethorn cried. “Where are your
manners
?”

“In the same dung hole you left your bleating brains when you said you were going off without me!” Briar shouted back, jumping to his feet.

“Boy, you cannot go to the Temple of the Sealed Eye with her,” Dokyi said. “It will not be permitted.”

Briar stared at Dokyi in white-hot rage, wondering if he should tell the old hand waver what he could do with his permission.

Dokyi stood and put an arm like stone around Briar’s shoulders. “Let us confer outside,” he said agreeably.

I’m not even one of his precious dedicates! Briar thought, indignant. He did not argue. At the moment standing this close to the old man was like being close to Rosethorn when she was in the depths of her magic, only stronger, like stone.

Outside the room with the door closed, the First Dedicate released him. Softly he said, “I know that you have lived under terrible strain since you reached Yanjing.”

“So?” Briar demanded. He kept his own voice quiet. He didn’t want Rosethorn to hear, either.

Dokyi folded his hands in front of him. “I honor your care for her, Briar, but this is now something only she can do, and it concerns survival for many. She wanted you to come with her, but it is quite truly not possible. If you love her, you will help her, not hinder her.”

“Is there no one else?” Briar whispered.

Dokyi shook his head. “The task requires someone extraordinary. She is that person. Do not make her duty more painful.”

He walked back into the supper room, leaving Briar to think and kick the wall. When he returned to his seat, Evvy was saying, “The emperor has plenty of riches. He doesn’t need Gyongxe. The farming here isn’t very good. What can he want here?”

Dokyi shook his head, smiling. “But he
isn’t
the heart of the world. He hears Gyongxe is the spindle on which the world turns, but he does not understand it. He thinks if he takes Gyongxe, people will say that he is the spindle.”

“He thinks Gyongxe means wealth, and magic,” General Sayrugo explained. “He thinks that people build temples here to be close to magic. In truth they come to be closest to the sky, where the gods dwell. When our ambassador reminded him that five holy rivers, that feed hundreds of thousands, rise here, he only said that was interesting.”

“He must not be allowed to control our temples or to handle the gifts of our gods,” Dokyi said. “He will do what he has done to every other realm he has conquered. He will loot its treasures and destroy all the signs of its history. That is what the emperor does to his conquered nations.”

Evvy stared at the man, her eyes wide. Briar glared at him for frightening her and put his arm around Evvy.

They picked at their food in silence for a time before Parahan said, “Do you know, I would like Briar with us.” To Soudamini he said, “You must see what my friend here can do with a handful of seeds, Souda.”

“Truly?” she asked.

Evvy nodded. “There’s plenty of the emperor’s soldiers that won’t be buried with their ancestors because of what Briar can do.”

Souda smiled wickedly at Briar. “Impressive.”

Briar looked at her. Parahan’s twin was a couple of inches shorter than Briar and well curved. Tonight she wore her blue-black hair in complexly twined braids secured with gold pins. A wicked dimple accented her mouth. Briar was the first to admit he was a fool for a dimple.

“Ride with us and find some Yanjingyi dogs to fight,” Souda proposed. “Show me these skills of yours. A
prebu
is always welcome.”

Briar looked at Parahan, confused by the strange word. “A
nanshur
,” Parahan explained in
tiyon.

“We’re going to have a splendid time deciding which language to speak,” Souda murmured.

Briar shoved his hands into his pockets to give himself a second to think. If he went with the twins, at least he could watch Rosethorn for part of her journey. He could see Evvy was worn-out. There was also her un-Evvy-ish drifting off as she stared at the vast mountains. Perhaps if she stayed here for a time, to feed her cats and rest, she would get used to the tall peaks and come back to herself again. With the pass closed off, and Gyongxe armies roaming in two directions, the fort ought to be safe for her.

He hated to think it, but maybe Dokyi had a point as well. Watching Rosethorn until she left the twins for this strange temple was probably all of the orange he was going to get. Half of the fruit was better than none. With luck, he would find her when she returned from her strange errand. He would be able to sense her as she came down from the mountains: The very grasses would tell him.

He glanced at her. She had actually cleaned her plate. Her color was better than it had been since they left the Traders.

“You need to go to bed if we’re taking the road again soon,” he said gruffly. He looked at Dokyi, Parahan, and Soudamini. “We can’t wait another day?”

“You may wait,” Dokyi said. “I leave at midnight.”

“Alone?” Souda asked, alarmed.

“Alone is best,” Dokyi said. “Souda, I
am
the First Dedicate of the Earth temple of First Circle Temple. Midnight and the dark are my elements. I will be fine.” He stood and went to Rosethorn. “Do not wait for more than a day. The new magic will strengthen you as you travel, and the emperor is on the move. Good fortune and the gods’ blessings to you, my daughter.” He kissed Rosethorn
on the forehead and looked at Briar. “If all things go well, soon we will meet again.”

As he walked from the room, Parahan, Soudamini, and the general followed to ask their own questions. The moment the door closed behind them, Rosethorn began a scold that blistered Briar’s ears.

F
ORT
S
AMBACHU
S
NOW
S
ERPENT
P
ASS

Briar rose at dawn the next day after a night filled with foul dreams of Rosethorn and Evvy in the hands of imperial torturers. Rather than go back to sleep and risk more dreams, he borrowed a mare with a stable girl’s permission and rode out of the fort.

He had thought to go uphill, but the sight of the Sun Queen’s three mountain husbands towering over him made him feel uncomfortably fenced in. Instead he rode down, past the tent village where most of the army was camped, over the Snow Serpent River crossing, and out onto the grasses and brush of the Gnam Runga. The light in the sky was pearly and seemed to come from everywhere in the east. It would be a while before the sun crested the topmost heights of the hills and mountains there.

His horse startled a pair of pheasants, who drove horse and rider away from what turned out to be a parade of peeping youngsters. Snow finches, wagtails, and larks also gave their opinions of the rider and his horse as their day was interrupted. Briar wasn’t sure, but those opinions sounded like bird insults. He scanned the
sky for the famed Gyongxe buzzards and steppe eagles, but there were none in sight.

“Too cold,” he told the mare. Gloomily he added, “Or they’re out where the fighting’s going on. They’ll get plenty of food at those places, enough for every carrion bird in Gyongxe.” Normally he grudged no one a meal, having often gone without for the first eleven years of his life, but it was hard to wish a buzzard well at a battlefield.

Once he could no longer see the village on the eastern hills or the fort on the southern ones, Briar dismounted, letting the mare’s reins trail. The horse, a sturdy animal bred for the thin air of the mountains, began to graze. Briar walked on until he heard only the wind in the grass and the insults of the smaller birds.

Someone had told him that Gnam Runga meant “Sky Drum.” It was a vast plain between the Drimbakang Lho and the Drimbakang Zugu, the long finger of mountains that curved out of the southern heights and around the capital, Garmashing. The enemy was aiming for that wide plain, where his generals could put their catapults to good use. First they would have to fight the emperor’s army in the north and the tribes of the Drimbakang Sharlog around the eastern passes. No one wanted the imperial armies to mass on the Gnam Runga.

Briar would have preferred to fight in the canyons, where he could have put trees to work, but the plain was what he would have, first when he rode west with Parahan and Souda and later when they rode to Garmashing. Now he crouched and tried to dig his fingers into the dirt of the Gnam Runga. The grass was interwoven and tough. It fought his intrusion, just as it fought the death of the winter freeze.

“I’m a friend,” he told it. “I just want to meet the dirt. Let me in a little.” He spread his magic over the bed of plants. There were patches of bare earth here and there, but he could feel the plant roots running under them, nourished by the trickle of moisture from the distant river.

The grasses trembled and then gave way.

“Thank you,” Briar told them gravely. “You’re very strong. Those lowland grasses would never stand a chance against you.”

The grasses were scornful of fat, water-soaked plants beyond the mountains. Only here, next to the sky, could they reach for the infinite.

Briar shook his head and looked around. A line of boulders stood close by. There were images painted on them in bright colors and outlined in white: a many-headed god, a snake twined about itself to make an intricate circle, a goddess riding a beast whose antlers were tipped with stars, a spider that wore a crown. It wasn’t the first time he had seen such paintings on rocks. Then, as now, he wondered who went to such trouble, and why. The Snow Serpent Pass was bare of them. Now that he thought of it, the Ice Lion Pass, which they had taken on the way to Dohan, had also been bare of the paintings. It was as if the artists had not wanted to share them with foreigners.

Shaking his head at the idea, possibly a leftover of his nightmares, he scooped up a little dirt. The grass closed over the space it had made for him. Briar said his thanks, rubbing the dirt in his palms to get a feel for it. If he was going to be fighting on these plains, he needed to understand his battlefield. He spent his ride back to Fort Sambachu smelling that earth, rolling it between his fingers, and dusting it onto his cheeks. Finally he rinsed it off in
the little river that ran past the camp. By then he understood the earth of the Gnam Runga and what grew there, if not the stones and their paintings.

This dirt was very young and energetic, thrust up by the same force that made the Drimbakangs themselves. That same youth filled the roots and stems of everything that grew in it, making it more inclined to do whatever he — or Rosethorn — might ask of it.

He was considering the possibilities on his return to the fort when a soldier in the armor of the Realms of the Sun hailed him and informed him that Their Highnesses Parahan and Soudamini desired his company at breakfast. By the time Briar left Parahan and Souda, they had equipped him for any fighting they might encounter as they got the villagers to the safety of the temple fortresses. He now had three horses assigned for his use, extra packs, a tent, an armored vest, riding gauntlets, leather riding breeches, and an armored cap with a tassel of bronze eagle feathers. He also had a short, potbellied rider named Jimut, who had been assigned to care for Briar’s horses, tent, and even Briar himself.

He and Jimut had just dumped everything in Briar’s room when Rosethorn banged on the door. Briar could hardly believe what he saw when he opened up. Rosethorn looked fresher and brighter than she had in a couple of years. There was an extra gloss to her short-cropped hair. Even the natural red of her lips was more vivid than it had been in a long time.

“What are you gawping at, boy?” Her voice was louder and crisper, as if she had more wind in her lungs. Briar forgot himself and hugged her. She pushed him away. “What has gotten into you? Don’t think I’ve forgiven you for your rudeness to First Dedicate Dokyi last night!”

He grinned at her. “Never crossed my mind,” he reassured her.

Rosethorn looked at Jimut. “And who’s this?”