Street Magic (8 page)

“Sit,” he ordered Douna, pushing her toward the table. He pulled off his overrobe and folded it neatly, putting it on the sideboard. “Have some tea and something to eat. I’ll need to get some things. Evvy, grab that basket and come with me.” They’d have to argue about her schooling later. Right now he would use the healer’s trick of putting every idle pair of hands to work.

Evvy stuffed the rest of a large slice of cheese into her mouth and grabbed the basket he’d pointed to. He led her upstairs to the workroom. It wasn’t as elaborate as the one at home at Winding Circle, but there were still plenty of lotions, balms, teas, and syrups, some of them his, some Rosethorn’s. He’d replenished his kit the night before out of habit, but he would need as much extra as he and Evvy could carry. He fully subscribed to Rosethorn’s belief: sometimes thinking ahead was just as good as magic.

Quickly Briar filled small jars from the large ones, wrote down contents on the corks that stopped the jars, and tucked them into Evvy’s basket. Next he stopped at the linen chest and cushioned the jars with pads which could be made into bandages. From the roof he fetched a number of thin, flat boards used for gardening: they made good splints. Another length of bandage was converted into a sling for the boards, which he hung on his own back.

“What’s all this for? And why are you letting some Camelgut order you around?” Evvy wanted to know.

“Because I can help and they won’t get anyone who can help better,” retorted Briar, trying to think if he’d missed anything. Suddenly he noticed a flaw in his plan to put Evvy to use. “What gang are you with?” he asked. Some gangs had treaties, allowing members to cross territories. If her gang had a treaty with the Camelguts…

She interrupted his thoughts with her abrupt reply. “I’m not in a gang.”

Briar made a face. “Evvy, this is serious.”

“So am I,” she insisted. “I didn’t belong, I don’t belong, and I’ll never belong.”

“Because if the Camelguts are at war with your gang,” he began.

“Is I’m not in a gang just too big an idea for you?” she cried.

Briar shook his head. He’d get the truth out of her later. Right now he needed an extra pair of hands. Not only had Evvy shown she was inclined to obey him - within limits - but she was also too young and too little to try to fight him if he vexed her with an order. He couldn’t say the same of any Camelgut.

He walked into the dining room. “Douna, is there a decent pot at the den? A clean one?” Douna, who had stuffed her mouth as rapidly as Evvy had, shook her head. Briar marched into the pantry and came out with a cauldron that was roughly as large as Evvy’s basket. Boiled water was safer if the pot it got boiled in was clean. He grabbed Evvy’s napkin from the front of her tunic, where it still rested, and tossed it to Douna. “Wrap some food in that and let’s go,” he ordered.

The Camelgut den was in chaos. Gang members lay on pallets as others tended them. Apparently there had been fights throughout the night. Very few Camelguts sported no bruises at all, and there were eight fresh victims, not five.

Briar took a deep breath. For some reason he remembered a talk he’d had during one of Summersea’s medical crises, one of the many times he’d been pressed into work with the sick. “Why do they obey you?” he’d asked the woman as those who were well enough to work carried out her orders.

“It’s no mystery,” she’d said then. “I act as if they should. And they’re frightened enough to turn instinctively even to those who only know a bit more than they do.”

Act as if they should obey, Briar thought now. And they did send for me again, after all. They must trust me some. He turned to Douna. “Get that pot filled with water and put it on to boil,” he ordered. “Evvy, stick close to me.”

“Oh, I will,” she muttered, watching the Camelguts from the corners of her eyes.

Briar unslung the staves from his back and leaned them against the wall. Then he scratched his head and considered the room. Since his arrival at Winding Circle, he had worked in sickrooms in three epidemics and a border war, but he’d always been under the guidance of Rosethorn and experienced healers. What would they do?

First straighten out the mess, Rosethorn’s voice said in his mind. You won’t be able to find your ankles with both hands and a lamp otherwise.

“Here’s how we start,” he called loudly. All conversations stopped. Even those who were moaning fell silent. Urda save me, Briar thought, they are actually listening. He didn’t try to savor the moment, but rattled off instructions. He’d already found with Evvy that if he didn’t give her time to argue, she wouldn’t. He put that knowledge to use with the Camelguts, ordering some to move the pallets into rows and others to clear away the mess of jars, rags, crates, and barrels that littered the floor.

“Why are the doors and windows covered?” he asked one of the Camelguts.

The boy, who was about Briar’s age, shrugged. “We got tired of local kids peeking at us all the time.”

“But it’s not that this is a secret place?” Briar wanted to know. The Camelgut shook his head. “Then uncover them,” Briar ordered. “Let’s get some light and air in here.”

The Camelgut pulled aside the rags that covered the windows and doors and secured them: now some light and fresh air entered the room. A group of three was sent with jars and handfuls of sand to fountains, where they had orders to scour the jars with sand, fill them with water, and bring them back. The fire was built up and trash taken outside. Even with the windows uncovered, the den was still shadowy. Two Camelgut boys made rough torches and thrust them into holders on the walls.

As the gang members cleaned up, Briar inspected each victim. Those whose bruises and cuts didn’t look serious were ordered to clean up or sit on a bench against the wall. Dealing with the less seriously hurt was easy for Briar - growing up in the slums of Hajra, he’d learned about all kinds of injuries and wounds, including the ones that might eventually kill someone. In Summersea’s epidemics he had seen how the healers sorted groups of the sick, treating the worst off first. He found those now, and got to work.

Briar could do little for the boy whose forehead was visibly dented, except make him comfortable. Sometimes people recovered from such injuries; sometimes they didn’t. He moved on to another boy, squinting as he tried to see the extent of his injuries. The nearest torch burned poorly, dumping smoke into the air. Briar’s eyes stung. It was hard to tell if he was looking at a mammoth bruise or dirt on his patient’s shin. His hands told him it was a bruise, but it would have been nice to see the difference.

That gave him an idea. “Evvy,” he said.

“Yep.” The girl crouched beside him, careful not to jar the contents of the basket she carried.

“Put that down.” She obeyed as Briar grubbed in his breeches pocket. He found his worry stone, a small crystal egg he liked to hold whenever he thought he was about to say or do anything stupid. Its coolness seemed to draw the anger from his veins whenever he remembered to use it. Rosethorn said it worked because thinking of the stone instead of the thing that upset him simply broke the chain that fed a rising temper.

He wasn’t angry now, and he could always come by another worry stone. “See this?” He held it up.

“Ooh.” She reached for it with eager fingers. “It’s happy.”

Briar rolled his eyes. Why did girls get honey-sweet over things that weren’t even alive? Sandry would coo like that over a spool of silk thread, Daja over a piece of well worked brass. Even Tris, who was sensible for a skirt, turned silly over a bit of ball lightning, giving the thing a name for as long as it lasted. “I don’t care if it’s the Queen of the Solstice,” he informed Evvy tartly. “But look, it’s a clear stone, you’re a stone mage, right?” He fumbled for the words to guide her to do her first planned magic spell. “I bet if you really, really concentrated, just, oh, poured your whole mind into that stone? I bet if you did, you could make it light up like a lamp. A real lamp, one everybody can see.”

“Oh, that,” Evvy said scornfully. “That’s not work.” She gripped the crystal. Suddenly light blazed through her fingers. She opened her hand. The stone gave off a bright, steady glow.

Briar swallowed. Of his foster-sisters, Daja and Tris had learned to make crystals into lamps, Daja because fire was part of her smith-magic, Tris because lightning was part of hers. They had done it once by accident, making a night light for Sandry. After that it took each of them weeks to get the knack of it so they could do it as they needed. No one he’d known could make stone glow with no effort at all. He’d thought it would be possible, given Evvy’s magic and the fact that he’d already known mages who could get stones to hold light or fire, but it was one thing to think it possible and another to see the results of “Oh, that.”

“Is it hot?” he asked.

“Nope.” Evvy put the stone beside the boy they were supposed to be treating.

Reminded of his patient, Briar went over him again. The leg bruise shrank under his bruise ointment, but Briar could feel a bone chip that remained under the boy’s skin. Cutbane, spread neatly over the splits in his left eyebrow and cheek, drove off infection and worked to close the wounds. Next Briar put an uninjured Camelgut to work cutting the wooden staves to a proper length for splints. As he straightened the arm, Briar said to Evvy, “I thought you never used magic before yesterday.”

“I didn’t,” Evvy said, watching him with interest.

The boy who’d cut the splints gave them to Briar. “How’d you make my stone light, if you never did magic before?” Briar asked as he splinted the broken forearm.

“I knew I could when I went home,” she pointed out. “Doesn’t that hurt him?”

“That’s why it’s nice for us that he’s passed out. Elsewise they’d hear him yelling at the Aliput Gate.” Finished, Briar gathered the crystal and the remaining bandage and knee-crawled to the next pallet. This patient was a girl with a shattered kneecap and a broken collarbone. “So you knew you could do magic when you got home, and -?”

“I have rocks. Some came with the place, and some I brung there. For pretty, you know?” Evvy put down her basket. “And I remembered how the junk stones I threw at the Vipers lit up, so I thought I’d try and see what stones would light for me. Some of them did. Some just got hot, though. Do you need me to make something hot?”

Briar sat back to think. He’d ordered the Camelguts to put their blankets over the injured, but what good were blankets that were mainly rags? He’d thought to ask his helpers to fill gourds with hot water to put in the beds, but stones would keep heat in longer.

“Can you make sure the heat won’t burn folk?” he asked.

Evvy scratched her head. “I can try,” she said at last.

“Do it,” ordered Briar.

“I need different rocks,” she pointed out.

“Don’t stand there telling me about it. Sooner before later, all right?” he asked. He was taking a chance that her magic wouldn’t spill out of control, but he’d seen her slip just enough power into his stone. Was it because she was used to thinking of a rock as an enclosed thing? “Do you need help?” he wanted to know.

Evvy shrugged. “I don’t think so.” She trotted out of the Camelgut den.

So far she hadn’t once questioned his right to give her orders. Later, when he had this mess straightened out, he would have to find out why.

Briar continued to work on the injured with the Camelguts’ help. When he saw he would run out of bandages soon, he instructed his assistants to dump rags into a pot of water and set it to boiling. Of the boiled water in the pot he’d fetched from home, part went for washing, part to willowbark tea, to ease the aches of injuries.

The boy with the dent in his head died by the time Briar had examined the worst hurt and had come to look at him again. Briar did a second check of the others on pallets, then got to work on the less seriously hurt. He wished for Rosethorn over and over - a second pair of experienced hands would have been nice - but knew he could manage if he just kept after things, provided the gang members continued to obey. Besides, Rosethorn was disheartened enough by the exhausted farmlands of Chammur.

The nice thing about Chammur, Evvy thought as she returned to the Camelgut den swinging her loaded bucket, was that it was easy to find plenty of rocks, even one particular kind of rock. Rather than work on them in the Camelgut den, with its noise and smells, she had found a rooftop where she could do as Briar had asked. It was much harder than calling light to his beautiful crystal. The core of noncrystal stones didn’t like warmth. They hadn’t felt warm in ages of time, and didn’t see why she wanted to put it into them now. Her results were spotty, heat flickering in some of the bigger stones, but it was the best she could do. Her head was aching by the time she was done.

Briar was sewing a deep gash in a boy’s forearm when Evvy reached him. When he finished bandaging the work, he inspected Evvy’s creations.

She watched him anxiously. “It’s not like light,” she grumbled, hunching one shoulder in case he decided to hit her. “I can’t do it so good. They’ll stop being warm after a while, and they aren’t at all steady.”

“But these are lots better than gourds filled with hot water,” Briar said absently, turning the stone over in his hand. “This helps, Evvy. Thanks.”

A knot formed in her throat as he took the bucket from her. She watched him, blinking eyes that burned and trying to swallow that knot, as he tucked her stones into the blankets of those who needed to be warm. He’d said she helped. He’d thanked her.

As he placed the last of the stones he glanced at her slyly. “They don’t work steadily because you don’t have your power under control all the way. Jebilu Stoneslicer will teach you to get rocks to hold warmth longer, and steadier.”

“He can teach, but I won’t learn, not up at the palace,” Evvy retorted.

Briar stood and faced her, hands on hips. “What is it with you?” he demanded. He kept his voice low, but he leaned in so Evvy heard every word. “Even you know you have to be taught now! He’s the only stone mage in this whole, imp-blest, festering city!”