Tamora Pierce - Street Magic

“I ran away,” she mumbled. She didn’t want the Camelguts to hear this. The reward for an escaped slave would tempt them; she knew that it would.

“And the collar?” he inquired, his voice softer yet. “How’d you get rid of it?”

Evvy lowered her hands. “I broke it with a rock.”

Briar smiled thinly.

She guessed what he was thinking: more rock magic. “I thought it was a cheap collar,” she explained, almost smiling. “You don’t need a lot of iron to hold a scrawny piece of crowbait like me.” It was her old master’s favorite term for her. “You mean I had it”—she touched the corner of her eye in a sign that meant “magic” in Chammur—“even then?”

He walked over to a Camelgut girl who’d been seated, waiting for him. “You’re born with magic,” he explained. “It just gets frustrated if you get older and you don’t do anything real with it, so it breaks out.”

“Why can’t you teach me?” she asked as he began to wash the sores on the girl’s leg. “I already know you, and you know the rules and things.” What she didn’t, couldn’t, say was that she was comfortable around him. For all his pushiness and foreignness, she still felt as if she’d known him all her life. He was quick and inventive, as she’d learned to be, living on her own. She might vex and puzzle him, but never once had she seen pity in his eyes, even when she’d let slip that she’d been a slave. Never once had he treated her as a child, a female, or even a thukdak.

“I’m not a stone mage,” he said wearily. “It’s important that you get someone to teach you stone magic.” To the girl whose leg he cleaned he said, “You can’t scratch fleabites open like this—they get infected. Or if you do, wash the scratches out right off, with clean water—that means it’s been boiled. And soap if you have it.”

“Oh, sure, pahan” she retorted with a quick smile. “I left some under my pillow just the other day.”

Briar returned her smile, looking the rest of her over while he held onto her foot. Evvy smiled crookedly. So even pahans weren’t immune to the hug-and-kiss madness that swamped older girls and boys.

“Tell you what,” Briar said to the girl. “You know the aloe leaves they sell in the market?” The girl nodded, and tried to tickle the inside of his arm with her toes. “Behave, or I’ll put something that bites on these.” The Camelgut girl pouted at him prettily. Evvy sighed and shifted her weight from one foot to another. He was spending more time on swollen fleabites than he did on broken arms. “Steal some aloe leaves,” Briar suggested, “and when you itch, break a piece off and rub the juice on the itch. It’s good for burns, too.” Carefully he smoothed a salve over the sores and put a light bandage over them.

“Thanks, pahan” she said with another quick, sidelong glance from under curling lashes. “I’m Ayasha—if you have any more wisdom to share.” She got up and walked over to a group of Camelguts huddled in a corner.

Briar looked at Evvy, who was shaking her head. “What?” he demanded.

“You want a cloth to wipe the drool off your chin?” Evvy asked wickedly.

Briefly he looked the way she felt sometimes about her old home in Yanjing, lost and lonely. Then he shed the sad look and said tartly, “Keep making sour faces and you’ll need spectacles. It happened to one of my mates, it can happen to you.”

“What? You aren’t old enough for one wife, let alone more,” Evvy objected as she followed him to the pallets.

“Not my wife, my mate,” he said, blotting sweat from a sleeping boy’s face. “It’s a word we used at home, for somebody that’s closer than blood family, your best friend. Don’t you have mates?”

“The cats,” Evvy said. “Not people, though. I keep to myself.”

“Don’t keep saying you aren’t ganged up,” Briar replied, his face mulish. He rubbed one of his salves on the sleeping boy’s arm, above and below the splint. “I lived in a place a lot like Oldtown for years. All the kids were ganged up, unless they were crippled or simple. And you aren’t crippled, though sometimes I wonder about the simple part.”

“I’m no fool,” Evvy retorted softly, to keep from catching any Camelgut’s attention. How could someone as clever as he was not understand? Unless he told the truth, and he had belonged to a gang.

No, that was too outlandish. Old gang kids worked in inns, or peddled rags, or labored on farms or on buildings. They never became clean, well dressed anything. “Gangers always want this, and that, and some other thing. They’re your friend, and why can’t you help, and you’d be safer with us, and then they try to show you what you’d be safe from. Cats don’t want anything from me, though it’s nice if I feed them. I like that.”

Briar frowned at her. “The Vipers wouldn’t’ve grabbed you if you had a gang,” he pointed out.

“No, the other gang would have grabbed me first. Grabbing’s rude no matter who does it,” she retorted. “Let someone try it on you sometime and see if you like it.”

They made two more rounds of the room as Briar checked bandages, coaxed people to drink the sharp-scented tea he’d brewed, and gave out more medicines. Evvy watched him, fascinated. For all his fine clothes, he didn’t mind handling the sick, as if he’d wiped away sweat, blood, and vomit all his life.

He stopped at last and looked around. “I think we’re just about done,” he remarked.

Someone in the group of unhurt Camelguts in the corner yelled, “I can’t believe you! They killed Hammit! Pilib’s dead, now, too!”

Briar frowned. Evvy wondered why. He might be caring for these people, but their squabbles weren’t his.

“They’ll kill us all,” another boy argued. “If they don’t, you know Snake Sniffers and Rockheads will move in and pick us off. Look around! Half of us can’t even fight!”

“The Vipers have the takameri to buy weapons for them,” added Douna, the girl who had led Briar and Evvy here. “What’s she going to get them next? Axes? Swords?”

A youth added, “If she’s paying out that coin, I say she ought to pay it for weapons for us, too.”

Evvy was impressed. None of the gang people she knew had the sense to think of things like this. They were too tied up with honor and protecting their ground.

“They want us to join and I don’t want anybody else dying,” said a male voice. “Hands. For joining?” Most of the walking Camelguts’ hands rose. Other hands were raised as the kids in beds, those who were awake, cast their vote.

“Come on,” Briar told Evvy, disgusted. “I’d’ve fought till the end of time before joining a gang that killed a mate of mine. We’re finished here.” He waved to those of the gang who looked at him, and led Evvy out into the open air.

She followed, dazed. Was it possible she’d been wrong, that he really had belonged to a gang once? That was just the kind of thing she’d expect a gang boy to say.

It was the first time that Ikrum Fazhal had visited Lady Zenadia doa Attaneh’s home before sunset, but she had ordered that he was to come the moment there was word on the Camelgut matter. As her expressionless servants admitted him through the tradesmen’s gate and led him to the patio and garden where the lady usually saw him, Ikrum wondered what they made of her interest in thukdaks like the Vipers. He could tell that they were as much in awe of her as he was, or they would have found their own ways to end his visits.

They left him standing before the couch where she usually sat. They had placed a pitcher of wine, a cup, and a bowl of fruit there for her. Ikrum was not even tempted to help himself. The one time he’d been so bold, he’d discovered that she carried a thin, bladed crop in her expensive draperies. It had left a broad scar across the back of his right hand, right between his Viper initiation scars.