Tamora Pierce - Street Magic

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!”

Evvy shrank away from him. Even if he hit her, she was going to speak her mind. “If I show myself at the palace, they’ll, they’ll toss me in the cells of Justice Rock for not knowing my place,” she stammered. She went giddy with horror as her traitor mouth ran on. “Or they’d sell me. I’ve been sold once already—I won’t be sold again!” She dropped the bucket and covered her face. How could she have said that? She’d told no one that before!

When he said nothing, she peeped at him through her fingers. Whatever she’d expected him to do or feel, it wasn’t what she saw on his face now. What she saw looked like sorrow. Not pity—sorrow. “You’re a slave?” he asked softly.