He found his larch and woke it to its full strength, feeling it crash out of its shallow dish. Its growing roots lanced through tiles, grasping at the earth beneath. On the far side of the house he felt vines rip the service gates from their hinges. In the kitchens dill seed, fennel, pepper, star anise, and cardamom forgot their dried existence as spices. They sprouted and groped with new roots for a bit of earth. Sensing it beneath the kitchen flagstones, fueled by Briar and his shakkan, their roots burrowed into cracks between the flags and shot into cool dirt. All around the walls his ivy climbed, webbing them in green, sending tendrils into each and every crack, anchoring itself firmly. As it grew, stucco began to flake from the walls in patches, baring pale orange stone and mortar. The ground quivered under Briar’s feet. His plants were shaking things up.
“Hey, boy!” someone inside the main gate yelled. “Your sort doesn’t loiter here! Move on your own, or we’ll move you along!”
Briar ignored the guard and sat cross-legged before the gate as he continued to pour strength into all the green life within the walls. Nearby something cracked, and grated. He glanced toward the sound as a piece of the wall’s upper rim dropped off. The vines swarmed through the gap it left, now attacking the wall from both sides.
He heard the rattle of keys and looked up. A guard was opening the main gate to come after him. Briar reached into his mage kit, found a rose-seed cluster, and tossed it at the guard as he approached. The cluster leaped into growth in midair, sinking roots as it twined around the man’s legs. It gripped him, biting in with its thorns. The guard struggled and went deathly still as the plant wrapped his thighs and hips.
“Good decision,” Briar told him softly. “I hate to think of all the tender places that thing will hook if you move.”
The guard turned white and began to sweat. Briar stood and walked toward the open gate. As he went by, he patted the man on the shoulder. “Don’t go away, now.”
“You’ll regret the day you were born,” the guard snapped. He shouted, “Filyen, Osazi, alert! Get Ubayid!”
“Over a boy?” someone called. “You take care of it!”
Briar looked in the direction the voice had come from: a watchman’s box just inside the gate on his left. A lamp shone through the lone window. The men inside couldn’t see he had walked through the open gate.
The watchbox was made of wood. Briar started to let his magic go, then called it back. I’d best save this, he thought — waking dead wood used power he might need. Instead he called on the vines that had come over the wall and the jasmine that grew inside of it, both running riot under the magic he’d already put in. They twined into ropes, then reached out. Some grabbed the flat wooden roof of the watchbox, some went lower to grip two of the walls. At an unspoken command, the vines yanked hard. The walls flew out, the roof dropped. The men inside yelled. The lamp went out; when no flames came after, Briar drew a breath in relief.
The quickest way to Evvy was around the house, by his reckoning. If he went inside, there would be fewer big plants to help him, and more of the lady’s men-at-arms. Already a fistful of them came running from the side nearest the tradesmen’s entrance, buckling on swords, some with napkins tucked into their collars. Their attention was on the men yelling in the ruined watchbox and the man at the gate, not on the boy strolling to the left of the house. Noise had started to come from inside the main building as glass shattered and voices cried out.
Briar walked as if he had the right to be there, hands in his pockets, following the large garden around the house. Grasses sprouted in his wake, the burst of soaring green life rustling like the sweep of an imperial cloak. As he enjoyed the growing cool of the evening, Briar roused every plant and seed around him. People rarely crossed mages; it was his duty to remind the lady why tonight.
Evvy stirred, her head banging. She lay on some kind of mattress. When she sat up, she discovered that her hands and legs were free; the blindfold was gone. She was in a dark room, but the door had a panel in it that was carved. Flickering light shone in from outside.
She heard footsteps in the distance. “… don’t know how much juice she’s got.” It was crisp-voice; Ikrum, the Vipers had called him. “She was shaking and all over sweat after she pulled those stones out of the wall.”
“If she is strong, we must keep her drugged, until she sees reason. She will destroy no walls here.”
Evvy would never mistake this lovely female voice. It was Lady Zenadia’s, and she was not far from the door.
Life as a slave and a thukdak meant learning to think fast at bad moments. She wanted her power for later; she did not want to be drugged again. Evvy thrust her magic away, into the stone of the floor, the wall and the ceiling of her room, into stone walls above her room. She saw her power in her mind’s eye, fizzing its way through marble and slate: it built a picture of the house above for her. She thrust and thrust at her magic, sending away as much as she could, leaving her body with just a trickle of it while voices murmured outside, and keys jingled, and the door swung open.
Evvy shaded her eyes against fresh lamplight. When she could see past the glare in her vision, she saw the lamps were carried by a tall, thin Viper and a servant woman who bore hers on a tray. They followed Lady Zenadia and a pale white woman whose clothes were styled like those worn by the eknubs west of Chammur.
Evvy moaned and collapsed onto her pallet again, keeping her eyes covered. “My lady, I’m sorry,” she said in a tiny voice. “My head hurts.”
A billow of some unusual scent washed over her; expensive silk rustled. Evvy uncovered her eyes. The lady sat on a low chair she had drawn up. She watched the girl over her veil with concerned eyes.
“Ikrum, you may have given too much potion the second time,” the lady said, resting a cool hand on Evvy’s cheek. “My dear child, welcome to my home.”
She had seen people around the nobility often enough to know how to act like one. She grabbed the lady’s hand and kissed it, struggling to sit up. “Thank you! I thought the Vipers would kill me, and Pahan Briar wouldn’t let me come live with you! If I’d known they were bringing me to you I wouldn’t have been so bad …” She kissed the lady’s hand again, and promised she would scrub every part of her that touched the lady with strong soap when she was free.
The lady gave a small gasp of polite surprise. “Do you mean to say you wished to accept my offer?”
Evvy nodded briskly, then clutched her temples. That was no show for the lady: her head banged like a drum.
“Something for her headache, if you please?” The warmth fled the lady’s voice as she looked at the healer, a mistress giving an order to a servant. The healer took a cup from the tray held by the maid, looked at Evvy, then added something to it from a vial on the tray. She swirled the contents of the cup, then crouched beside Evvy.
“How strong is her power?” the lady asked the healer.
The healer shook her head. “I feel only a residue, mistress. There are medicines I must give her to offset the magical draining. Did that boy teach you nothing?” the healer asked Evvy. “Young mages must not overextend. The damage could be permanent.”
“I thought they were going to hurt me,” Evvy grumbled. There was no help for it; she would have to drink whatever was in that cup, or the lady would be suspicious. She prayed it wasn’t a drug that would fuzz her mind again. “Is that for my head?”
The healer passed the cup to Evvy, who drank its contents with a prayer. The banging in her temples slowed; the headache eased.
“Would you like to stay?” the lady asked again. “I was told you were unwilling —”
“Pahan Briar and his teacher were mean to me,” Evvy complained, keeping to her role of greedy thukdak. “They made me do servant work like cooking and cleaning. I want the things you offered, and to live in a nice house. They couldn’t even teach me my own magic!” She thought of the look on her mother’s face when she told the auctioneer to get as much as he could when he sold Evvy, and her eyes filled wi
th tears. It was a trick that never failed. “I think they were going to sell me for a slave!”
“Well, you are safe here,” the lady assured her, once more cupping her cheek with a cool, hennaed hand. “No one has the power to take you from me. Now. You must rest, and take the medicines the healer brings to you, and eat. You will stay here for the night, I think, and tomorrow you may choose your own room in the house.”
Evvy yawned. “I’m tired,” she admitted. “And awful hungry.”
“Very hungry,” the lady corrected her with a kind smile. “Only thukdaks say ‘awful hungry,’ and you are no longer a thukdak, my dear.” She rose from her chair.
Evvy knew what she had to do, and she did it. Rolling from her pallet, she crouched before the lady and kissed her slippered foot. “Thank you, great lady! May Lailan of the Rivers and Rain bless you!”
The lady smiled. “Healer, see that she gets those medicines and food.” She swept out of the room, Ikrum and the maid following her.
The healer remained, staring down at Evvy as the girl crawled back onto the pallet. “Soup, I suppose,” she commented dryly, “and it will take some time to assemble the medicines to restore your strength. Use the chamber pot in the corner for your business — the lady doesn’t like it when people just pee on the floors. You won’t be allowed to leave this room tonight. It’s magically shielded, in case the plant mage comes looking for you.” She walked out. When she closed the door behind her, Evvy heard the jingle of keys, and the clack of a turning lock.
Evvy stood and spat on the floor to get the taste of the lady’s shoe from her lips. A pitcher of water and a cup sat on a table: she drank straight from the pitcher, not caring if water spilled over her face and onto the floor. Then she sat cross-legged on the pallet, and began calling back the power she had hidden in the stone all around her.
This ought to be easy, she thought, smiling tightly. The stone around her was fairly new, not stubborn with ages of sitting in the same place. She would need much less effort to make it move.
As he walked down the side of the house, Briar caught the first ripples of unpleasant scent. Rotten meat, he judged after a sniff. Maybe they used fish as a fertilizer after all.
The walk between the outer wall and the long side of the house showed him the upper half of the wall was buried in green and going to pieces. Chunks of stone dropped off it on either side. In one spot, where a clump of deodar pines stood, the wall was shifting as the pines expanded outward. Briar went over to pat them and tell them they had done well. If the trees had been young girls they would have blushed at his praise; they quivered instead, and continued to grow. A large section of wall beside them collapsed into the alley beyond.
Briar halted: there was a glint of light beside the deodars’ roots. Their earth turned and tumbled with the trees’ swift growth, casting something out. Briar picked up the pale thing that had drawn his eye, and hurriedly dropped it.
It was a skull — a very small skull. A very small, human skull. In his years at Winding Circle, Briar had studied anatomy, animal and human, as backup for his lessons in healing. He knew a human skull, however small, from a monkey’s.
One by one, he picked up other bones thrown to the surface by the deodars’ surge. A thigh bone, an arm bone, ribs and back bones, all child-sized, old enough that no tissue remained to keep them attached to one anther. He also found a ball, and a silk scarf. Who had buried a child’s remains under the deodars? How long had the child been dead? Was this one of the murders which the mutabir had mentioned, or something more ordinary? Cemeteries, particularly the small ones attached to most nobles’ houses, were sometimes dug up for new buildings, the bones placed elsewhere. Or perhaps a servant’s child had died. Briar knew that if he were dead he would rather be buried under trees than in Chammur’s hard sun.
All the same, he didn’t order the plants to cover the bones, or the trees to open a hole so they could be tucked back into the earth. Some instinct made him place them a little way from the still-growing pines and draw a cypress oil protective circle around them. Only then did he wipe his fingers on his handkerchief and continue his walk.
15
The stench of rotting meat grew as Briar approached the back of the house. It was particularly strong in the corner where a stand of almond trees grew by the wall. The trees, like every other green thing on the grounds, were doing their best to outrace their proper growth, pitting slender trunks and roots against the wall. It was giving way, pushing into the lane behind the house. Inside the small grove, thrown from the ground by clamoring trees, was a bloated, reeking body. The clothes were blackened rags; a deep cut passed all the way around the neck, separating it into two parts. The swelling was so great that it was impossible even to guess the sex of the body. About a yard from it Briar saw another corpse, this one so far gone in decay that only scraps of skin clung to the bones. A knotted cord hung around the neck.
The stench of rotten flesh was so bad it made his stomach roll. While he hadn’t been sure the child’s bones were a sign of murder, it was harder to think of legal reasons why these newer bodies would be here, among dainty almond trees, rather than in a proper burial yard. Most gardeners didn’t like the thought of walking on the dead when they did their work.
Briar retreated from the six-tree grove. He turned straight into another pocket of stench, wafted into his nostrils by the mild breeze from the east. There were more dead to be found in this largest of Lady Zenadia’s gardens, he realized. He wiped his sweaty forehead on his sleeve.
Suddenly he froze. His connection to Evvy pulsed: she was angry, furious. A surge of magic rolled through their bond, leaving Briar without breath in his lungs. He sent his power back, as if she were one of his foster-sisters, but it was no good. She couldn’t even feel it, let alone use it. Her magic was too different and not mixed with his. Briar had the feeling that it was only because he had a little earth and metal magic in him that he could sense anything more than where she was.
From inside the house he heard the thunder of falling stone. It went on for a breath, then stopped. A puff of dust rose in the air over the roof like smoke. Briar forced a query to Evvy through their bond. What he got back was savage satisfaction and a calming of her rage. Whatever had taken place, she was pleased.
A fresh series of rumbles began in the house as green voices called a warning to Briar. The lady’s mute certainly was silent in his movements, but the grasses on which he walked were not. The mute had come around the house to take Briar from behind. Using his right hand the boy slid a cloth bundle out of his kit, a special mix he had worked on for a long time. In his left he already grasped a wrist knife.
The bowstring settled around his neck, then wrenched cruelly tight, cutting off Briar’s air. He tossed his small bundle behind him, where he guessed the mute’s feet to be, and slid his knife under the strangler’s cord. The knife bit into his neck as it cut the bowstring — Briar didn’t mind a little blood if it meant he could breathe again.
He smashed a booted heel into the mute’s bare foot, hearing bone crunch, then lunged away. Turning to face his attacker, Briar coughed, his throat aching from the pressure of the cord. Now he gripped knives in both hands.
“How many of ‘em did you do that to?” he snarled when he could speak again. “Did you like it? Did you have fun choking them and burying them as fertilizer?”
The mute bent over, trying to massage his foot. He didn’t even look at Briar.
The second assailant didn’t try to be quiet. Behind him Briar heard the hiss of a drawn sword. With his power he tapped the bundle he’d left between the mute’s feet, and faced the swordsman. The man leveled his weapon. Sharp metal gleamed in the scant light cast out here by indoor lamps. Another sullen rumble came from inside the house, drawing closer to them. Neither the man nor Briar risked a look to see what caused it.
Instead the swordsman laughed when he saw Briar’s knives. “I have the advantage of you, boy,” he told Briar smoothly. “I have r
each and expertise.”
The mute shrieked, his tongueless mouth freeing a sound more animal than human. He screamed a second time; the third cry broke off in the middle. After that the only sounds were the rattle of branches growing rapidly, tearing flesh, and a slow, wet drip. The swordsman could see it over Briar’s shoulder. His eyes widened in horror.
Briar didn’t turn. He and Rosethorn had once defended Winding Circle from pirates, using mixed seeds of thorny plants; the girls had given him use of their magic to make the plants extra lethal. A similar mix of seeds had been in the packet he’d tossed at the mute. Now Briar told the swordsman in a chatty tone, “Four years ago it took me and my three friends to work this bit.” He had to raise his voice to be heard over the crunch of falling stone in the house. “The trick is to make this stuff grow so fast it just goes clean through anybody on top of it.” He grinned, showing teeth. “I’ve learned a lot since then. I can do it by myself.”
The copper tang of fresh blood drifted on the desert wind. The swordsman stood motionless, eyes bulging at the nightmare behind Briar. The boy sheathed one of his knives. His foe didn’t look as if he wanted to attack anymore.
“I can do it to you,” Briar said quietly. “In fact, maybe I should.” He reached into his kit. The swordsman fled, stumbling and thrashing his way through the rioting garden plants. He ran not for the house, but for a gap the vines had torn in the back wall.
Now Briar made himself look at the mute. He had killed the man, after all; he owed it to him to face his work. There was little of the mute to see. The thorns and vines had covered him completely, gouging him in a thousand places and sprouting through his flesh, holding him in a massive, woody, bloodstained sheath. Briar nodded to his creation, his mouth trembling.