Battle Magic (8 page)

Briar knew that Rosethorn would be as aware as he was that they were being steered away from the rest of the imperial court and any other foreigners who were present. Briar had hoped to glean some information on the emperor’s plans for Gyongxe, if any, for the God-King, but that would be impossible if the emperor’s people kept them buttoned up this way throughout their visit. He also would have liked to examine the many flowering plants set throughout the room. Instead the Master of Presentations shooed them through a side entrance Briar had not noticed before. They were outside; their palanquins waited there on a small side road. No slow walk through a corridor meant to overwhelm visitors! Briar thought cynically. Now they just want to rush us back to our pavilion before we can talk to anyone. But why?

The Master of Presentations didn’t even wait to see them off.

T
HE IMPERIAL GARDENS
T
HE
W
INTER
P
ALACE
D
OHAN IN
Y
ANJING

Slowly Evvy drifted to the end of the procession that followed Emperor Weishu, Rosethorn, and Briar through the series of gardens they had entered shortly after dawn that morning. She was starved. In their rush to watch everything bloom, or whatever reason they had chosen for getting out of bed at this hour, they had not stopped for breakfast. Also, she was bored. The servants wouldn’t let her touch the ornamental rocks on the walkway borders and the odd decorations within the gardens. Other than those, Evvy could see no stones anywhere. It was hard to believe that they had all been dug up and carted away, but she felt nothing other than the border stones within a couple of feet of the surface. So where
were
they?

She was so busy pouting that she didn’t realize someone was behind her until his hand touched her shoulder. Startled, she jumped with a squeak.

“Easy, easy,” Parahan said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you!” He was dressed just as he’d been dressed the night before, in the
very loose, loincloth-like garment that seemed to be all the emperor would allow him. He still wore chains, too. They hadn’t even given him shoes. Drops of water shone in his short hair and on his scarred shoulders.

“Are all those from fighting?” she asked, pointing to his scars.

“No, my mother gave me my shoulders,” he said. “Silly, if they look like cuts, of course they’re from fighting. I was leading soldiers from the time I was fourteen. I bet you’re hungry.”

“They didn’t give us time to eat this morning,” Evvy complained.

“Come on. I’m hungry, too.” Parahan put his finger to his lips and steered Evvy down a side path. Two of the guards from the entourage broke off to accompany them.

Evvy spun and glared at them. Parahan turned her back around. “Don’t blame them. I have to have guards whenever I’m off my leash,” he told her. “Weishu likes me too much to let me escape, though how far I would get in these chains, I can’t imagine. I doubt there are many smiths who would take them off or pick the locks. And the palace gardens may be huge, but the wall around them is quite high and well guarded by magic and by soldiers.”

Evvy’s heart sank. “If he really liked you, he’d give you an army so you could go home and kick your uncle all the way to Namorn,” Evvy replied.

“
Now
you sound like my sister. Weishu likes to dangle me over my uncle’s head,” Parahan explained. “Right now my father lives. One messenger from the emperor, and my uncle dies. So long as my uncle sends gold, opium, and jewels to the emperor, he
is safe. When my father dies, if my uncle does not continue his tribute to the emperor, he knows the emperor will send me home, with an army. So I am the emperor’s most rewarding toy.”

“That would make me angry,” Evvy informed Parahan.

“You’re free,” he replied. “You can afford anger. Besides, I hear many interesting things at the emperor’s feet. My father always complained that I spent all my time in school joking around. He would be very pleased if he knew how much I was learning now.”

The walkway he’d chosen led through a bamboo grove to the banks of a bubbling creek. They crossed on a high, arched bridge carved and decorated as all Yanjingyi bridges were, following the path to an ancient oak grove. They stopped at the foot of a black-barked ancient tree with branches so heavy some of them bowed to touch the ground before they arched up again.

“Oh, that’s better!” Evvy said. Dropping to her knees, she set her palms against two of the lumps of red and yellow sandstone clutched tight by the oak’s exposed roots. “What have the gardeners here got against rocks, anyway?”

“Don’t blame them.” Parahan stretched out on a length of mossy ground that was clear of rocks and roots. The guards sat on their heels a few feet from them. One took out a dice box and they began to play. “It isn’t the gardeners, but the imperial will. Unless the garden is supposed to be a little picture of a place, with bridges, a stream, small trees, rocks, and so on, the emperor wants each garden to be absolutely tidy. There can’t be anything to distract from the flowers. Not weeds, not insects, not stones. It’s a sad gardener who doesn’t remove everything but the proper plant.”

“I can’t like any garden without stones,” Evvy murmured, discovering the differences between sandstone here and sandstone in Gyongxe. “It would be like taking someone’s ribs out.”

“What can
you
do with stones, if I may ask?” Parahan asked. “Can you change the course of a stone hurled by a catapult?”

Evvy made a face. Some of the people who had hosted them on their journey west had asked such questions. Oddly, she didn’t mind them coming from Parahan. He was just staring at the sky and making conversation. “No. Catapult stones are too big. I can only help them get to where they’re going faster. Look. I can do this.” She reached into the sandstone under her hands and sank light into the thousands of grains of quartz, apatite, and garnet that were part of it. When she heard Parahan inhale, she realized that she had closed her eyes. She had not needed them to tell her the sandstones under her fingers were blazing. The guards were babbling in the language of the imperial court to each other. Ignoring them, she opened her eyes and grinned at Parahan. “I can do it with heat, but heat won’t stay long in sandstone or limestone. I need pure crystal or gemstone to hold light or heat for very long. I’m really good at lamps. We saved all kinds of money traveling because we didn’t have to buy torches or lamp oil.”

Parahan got to his knees and, keeping his chains out of the way, crawled over until he could hold a hand over a glowing stone. “Will it burn?”

“Oh, no,” Evvy told him. “Rosethorn threatened to send me to bed without supper if I didn’t learn to do cold light and hot heat every time.”

Parahan grinned as he touched the stones. “No heat at all. She only
threatened
you?”

“I missed too many meals before she and Briar took me on. I don’t think she likes taking food from me, even to teach me something.”

“Speaking of food …” Parahan raised his beak of a nose to sniff the air. “I smell fried cakes and ginger!” He looked at the glowing stones. “We can’t take these. The gardeners will get in trouble if anything is missing.”

Evvy frowned. “Stones in a wood should be free to go where they want if they let go of their soil. Not that I’d pry these fine fellows loose. They’re happy with their tree.”

“Stones in a wood that does not belong to the emperor, perhaps,” Parahan murmured. He got to his feet and gave Evvy a hand up as the light from the stones faded. “Let’s see what we can steal from the cooks.”

The guards stood, too. “You can’t steal the emperor’s breakfast!” said the darker-skinned guard in
tiyon.

“We won’t steal,” Evvy told them, all innocence. “We’ll borrow … from the edges. From the stuff they give people who aren’t imperial.”

Parahan hooked arms with Evvy and they marched up the path.

Rosethorn had to wonder if she was meant by her gods to spend her entire visit to the Winter Palace in a towering state of vexation. For one thing, when the emperor said they would visit his gardens, he meant that he, Rosethorn, and Briar, as well as a gaggle of mages and courtiers, watched as gardeners dealt with the plants. If she even touched one, the gardeners hovered as if they feared she might break it. For another thing, she and Briar
had been forced to wear silk again today, because they were in the imperial presence. She should have known they would not be allowed to get dirty when the maids placed silk clothes before them that morning.

Third, she was deeply unhappy with the mages who dogged their tracks. They drowned the voices of the wind in the leaves and flowers of the garden with the constant click of their strings of beads. She had heard that eastern mages favored beads imprinted with spells and strung together to be worn on neck and wrist. She had seen local mages twirling short strings of spell beads during their journey down from Ice Lion Pass. Court mages wore ropes of them. Apparently Rosethorn and Briar in a garden were considered far more dangerous than Rosethorn and Briar in a throne room.

As if we couldn’t have turned those potted plants into weapons, Rosethorn thought as the breeze carried another burst of hollow clicks to her ears. She rounded on the mages. “I can’t hear a thing these plants say with that unending
noise
,” she informed them.

All around her the emperor’s prized roses, brought at great expense from far Sharen and raised more carefully than most children, trembled and reached for her across the stone borders of the path. The courtiers shrank closer together, terrified of touching those priceless blossoms. Weishu looked on, his face emotionless.

Briar raised his hands to both sides of the path. The roses halted their movement and waited, trembling.

Rosethorn had not taken her eyes off the mages. “What are you doing with those things?” she demanded. “I’m not working magic. If I were, you couldn’t distract me with noisemakers.”

“They are not noisemakers,” said the youngest of them, a woman. “Our magic is inscribed in the marks on each bead. The greater the mage, the more inscriptions — the more spells — on a bead. And the more beads.”

Rosethorn squinted at the ropes that ran through the woman’s fingers. The small bone-white beads that made up the bulk of her wrist and neck strings, as well as those of her fellow mages, were etched with minuscule ideographs. In between those beads were others, some brown glass inscribed with Yanjingyi characters, some white porcelain with heaven-blue characters and figures, some carnelian with engraving on the surface.

“As I said, I am not using magic. Would you do me a favor and be quiet?” she asked, as patiently as she knew how. “The plants tell me how they are doing —
when I can hear them.”
Even if I did magic, I strongly doubt that you would detect it, you academic prancer, she thought. Like most ambient mages, Rosethorn had little patience for those who drew their power from their own bodies and worked it through spells, though she had studied academic magic in her youth.

“Is
Nanshur
Briar not using magic?” an older mage asked. Not only did this man have two long ropes of beads in his hold, but there were spell figures tattooed onto his hands and wrists. Unlike Briar’s, this man’s tattoos were motionless.

Briar lowered his hands. “I asked them to stop trying to help Rosethorn.”

Rosethorn let her own power flow into the bushes, calming the roses. As she suspected, not one of the Yanjingyi mages so much as twitched. Ambient magic was not only rare here; it was unknown. She called her power back into herself and looked at Weishu. “If you
would like me to tell you if they are well, I must be able to concentrate, Your Imperial Majesty,” she explained. “I see you think I am deluded, claiming to hear the voices of plants. Don’t your priests hear the voices of ghosts and mountains?”

“Ghosts were once men, and our mountains are ancient,” Weishu said. “Blossoms live but a season, and plants a few years at best. Perhaps some of our oldest trees have voices, or the spirits within them do, but it takes ages for living things to gain the wisdom of human beings.”