Tamora Pierce - Street Magic

After a while, just as Briar was starting to think of a nap, Rosethorn asked, “How did your talk with Stoneslicer go?”

Briar sighed. “We had to change our plans.” He told Rosethorn about the day’s work, keeping the story short. She didn’t care how different people talked or behaved. Only the girls and Lark enjoyed that part of stories.

When he finished, Rosethorn sat down on the roof carefully, ordering the plants back to their proper places. When they let go of her she turned so she could look at Evvy. “So you won’t visit the palace, eh?” she asked. She spoke more slowly than she did to Briar. Some people found her speech, with its hint of a slur, hard to follow. “I can’t say that I blame you. Palaces are cold and unfriendly, as a whole.” Evvy nodded vigorously. Rosethorn looked at Briar. “Well, you’d better ride up there and talk to him. If she’s already experimenting, we can’t get her a teacher quickly enough.” She looked at the western sky. “It’s too late now. That’s for tomorrow, then, first thing. And when are you supposed to sell trees in Golden House?”

Briar grimaced. “Day after tomorrow. And I have work to do yet. That one fig tree keeps arguing with me.”

“Well, go argue back,” Rosethorn ordered him with a smile. “You’re welcome to stay for supper,” she told Evvy.

The girl shook her head. “I have cats,” she explained.

Rosethorn smiled. “And they must be fed. But you’ll come here tomorrow—around noon, perhaps? We’ll know when you can meet with your teacher by then.”

Evvy nodded rapidly, making Briar wonder if she would come back. He hoped that she would, after today, but he could tell she wasn’t resigned to an unknown teacher. If she didn’t come, he would simply have to collect her from her warren in Princes’ Heights.

The girl started to climb over the wall, then she stopped, and turned back. “I better get my old things,” she told Briar, smoothing a wrinkle from her tunic. “If I go back to Lambing Tunnel like this, they’ll think I have money.”

“Should have thought of that myself,” said Briar, leading the way into the house. Rosethorn had folded Evvy’s grayish tunic and trousers and placed them on a stool in the workroom, under a note on a slate: Shake out fleabane before wearing. Briar diplomatically lifted first the tunic and then the trousers, stirring the folds until the herbs dropped to the floor. He left Evvy there to change. When he returned she was gone, her new clothes folded almost neatly and left on the stool. Her sandals lay on top of the pile.

Kid’s got pluck, Briar thought, remembering how he’d hated wearing any kind of shoe at first. Not one complaint out of her, and I bet they rubbed her feet.

He went up to the roof. “She left,” Rosethorn said absently as she trimmed the lively jasmine back. “Over the roofs.” Eyeing the jasmine to make sure she’d cut all she needed to, the woman said, “I’d forgotten.”

When she didn’t continue, Briar nudged, “Forgotten what?”

“Hm?” Rosethorn asked, startled out of her reverie. “Oh, I’d forgotten what stone mages are like. Stubborn doesn’t begin to describe them. I should have warned you.”

Briar smiled thinly. “That’s all right,” he told her. “I found out myself already.”

Rosethorn snorted. “I suppose you did.”

Evvy trotted along the rooftop roads, bound for home. From top to toe she was trembling from the strangeness of it all. It had been such a treat to sit in hot water at the hammam twice that day, scrubbing until she glowed a golden peach color, feeling her hair really clean. If she had just used common sense and gone home after that… But she’d had to see what the jade-eyed— Briar, whispered a part of herself. He has a name. A plant-name. Calling him something else is silly.

Of course she knew people with names: Sulya, old Qinling, who spoke the language of home, blind Ladu, who warned the street people when the slaving gangs came through. But names seemed more important with— Briar, and Rose thorn. As if the words could change her life.

I don’t want my life changed, Evvy thought rebelliously as she crossed a bridge over the Street of Wrens. For a moment she stopped to look down at the passageway that led to the Camelgut den. She would have liked to know how they did, if they had gone ahead and joined the Vipers. She had the feeling that Pahan Briar had disliked their choice, but she applauded their common sense. You didn’t survive in Chammur’s slums unless you learned to bend before you broke. Strange that a plant wizard wouldn’t know that. But that was plants, tricky, rock-cracking parasites that would break apart any stone they got their roots into. They never seemed to realize that sometimes quiet was better. As long as you were alive, fresh chances to fight would come.

Seeing no signs of Camelguts or Vipers, Evvy moved on. She felt unsettled now, even with the city’s heights rising ahead, lit a flaming color by the late-afternoon sun. Always before the sight of those towering stone reefs calmed her, made her feel safe: it was why she had come here after running from her master. Let others complain of smells and crumbling walls and ceilings in warrens that had been inhabited for a thousand years. Inside those rock halls and corridors Evvy was safe.

But now she knew why she’d always been safe, and the knowing shook her. She really had magic, and could learn how to make stone like her even more. That couldn’t be bad. Stone, unlike people, was constant. It was everywhere, in all its varieties. Who knew what she might be able to do with it, if she knew proper stone magic?

The only problem was that to learn more about stone, she would have to deal with more people on a steady basis than she had in years. Pahan Briar seemed all right, for a plant person, but he wasn’t going to teach her. A stranger, one who lived in the palace, would teach her. Evvy wasn’t sure that she liked that. What if a real stone mage scorned her for what she didn’t know? Pahan Briar just told her what to do, and if she didn’t know how, he showed her. He assumed she would keep up. And hadn’t she done just that all day? Even when keeping up had meant such strange things, like heating stones, new clothes, and food. She wasn’t sure that she liked the sandals, which had blistered the tops of her feet, but the clean cloth had felt so good against her skin, and the food in her belly felt even better.

She pulled her rolled-up headcloth from the front of her tunic, and checked its contents—an entire meat dumpling, and halves of others. She hadn’t been able to finish all the food he’d bought. With the salt fish and the leftovers from yesterday’s feast, she and the cats would eat well tonight.

Would this stranger mage feed her as Pahan Briar did? Pahan Briar had been a thukdak. He understood about meals. How would a palace man know anything about going hungry and eating scraps until a whole dumpling was a feast?

She clambered down and trotted through the Market of the Lost. Her thoughts absorbed her so much that she never realized a Viper was following her, keeping well back in case she chanced to turn and look around.

Briar gathered his horse’s reins. “You’ll be careful how you talk to her, if she comes before I get back?” he asked Rosethorn, worried. “You know you scare people.”

“I won’t scare her,” Rosethorn told him. “I’ll be as kind as her own mother.”

“Don’t do that,” Briar said. “Her mother sold her.” He clucked to the horse and set it forward, up the Street of Hares. Perhaps he shouldn’t worry if Evvy would arrive before he returned, but whether she would come at all. If she didn’t, he would have to root her out of those stone tunnels, a chore he didn’t even want to think about. He would just hope that she would come for the free food.