“Before we didn’t need anything but the spell-net,” Rosethorn commented. “No one could fight it—”
“Because once invaders touch the net, they have no idea of where they are, or what they do,” said Frostpine. “The net is still protecting the rest of the wall on the west, north, and east. But the cove … I think Moonstream needs you senior mages who can walk to find ways to defend the south gate, and the beach.”
Rosethorn slowly grinned, showing her teeth. “I can be of use, then.” She strode into her workshop, crooking a finger at Briar. “Come on—you’ll help me.” The boy obeyed.
Lark drummed her fingers on the table, thinking. Abruptly she commented, “Sandry, continue with this kind of weaving while I’m gone.”
“But Lark—” protested the girl.
Lark raised a hand to quiet her. “I know we’d thought to go back to magical weaving this afternoon, but I can’t risk you trying it alone.”
“I’ll be careful.”
Lark smoothed a lock of hair away from Sandry’s face. “Some of the spells we’ve done with you four—the weaving spell, the spell Niko used with Tris to see what happened at Bit, the one Frostpine and Daja used on the harbor chain—those are called great-spells. Without a senior mage who understands great-spells to guide them, young mages have been known to get so caught up in one that they die. They feed their magic and their lives into the pattern of the spell, without ever realizing what they were doing.”
“My best friend died that way, twenty years ago,” Frostpine commented, resting his head on his folded arms. “He was building a lead pattern—it was to be a window in the shape of a thousand-petaled flower, one that would hold and give off sunlight on the gloomiest days. He wanted to impress our master, and he burned up right in front of my eyes.”
Sandry gulped and nodded. “I’ll stick to this, I promise,” she said, patting the small loom. This weaving lacked the feeling of power she’d had the day before, as she watched the novices stagger away with baskets full of new bandages. On the other hand, she was enjoying life too much to risk losing it so foolishly.
Rosethorn and Briar returned. Briar carried a cloth bag, Rosethorn a bottle and a cup just big enough to hold an egg. To the eyes of all three children present, the bottle gleamed white with magic. Placing the cup next to Frostpine, Rosethorn poured it half full of green liquid. “Drink,” she ordered. “You and Daja must be able to move, just in case.”
Frostpine made a face. Lifting the cup, he dumped its contents down his throat. “Auugghh!” he yelled, his voice stronger than it had been since his return from the harbor. “Are you trying to kill me, woman?”
“If I mean to kill someone, I do it,” Rosethorn told him. “I don’t try.” She poured a lesser amount of green liquid into the cup. “Give this to Daja, and put the bottle back in my workshop. And keep resting, while you can.” To Lark and Briar she said, “Let’s go.”
Frostpine whistled the dog back when Little Bear would have followed the three of them. The ashy tone was fading from the man’s dark skin, and his back was straighter. Getting to his feet, he took the cup in to Daja.
“I hope they’ll be all right,” Sandry whispered to Tris.
“Maybe bring our cord out here, just in case,” the other girl said quietly.
Sandry nodded, and went to get the circle of lumpy thread.
When they reached the top of the south gate, Briar decided it had been a bad idea to invite all the senior mages up. The racket was worse than in a houseful of geese, he thought, and the noise made about as much sense. There was Crane, First Dedicate of the Air Temple and Rosethorn’s main rival, waving thin arms as he argued with Niko and Moonstream. Gorse was nowhere in sight. Surely anyone who could blow people out of the kitchens without touching them was a senior mage, but perhaps his cookery spared him from follies like this. He also didn’t see Skyfire near the Dedicate Superior. That was because Skyfire was in position further down the wall, beside a pair of mages, scowling at the invading fleet.
Lark waded into the crowd. She put a hand on one yelling dedicate-initiate’s shoulder, spoke in another’s ear. Both looked shamefaced, tucked their hands into their habit sleeves, and stood back to let her through. Touching, smiling, talking quietly, Lark worked her way through the noisy gathering, leaving calm in her wake.
“There’s more to Lark than meets the eye, isn’t there?” Briar asked Rosethorn.
“We’ll make an initiate of you yet, boy, if your perception keeps improving,” Rosethorn said. “Come on. If we get arguing with this lot, we’ll lose time.” She headed for Skyfire with Briar in tow.
He looked out to sea. The illusion-spells were off the fleet: He guessed there were ten dromons in all, and fifteen plain galleys. Inching between the ships were long boats laden with men, small catapults, and weapons: a landing-force. In the prow of each boat stood a man or woman—mages, Briar guessed, to protect the raiders from Winding Circle’s magic. Not just from magic, either, he realized, seeing that all along the southern stretch of the wall, dedicates and novices readied catapults of their own. Beside each stood an open barrel filled with globes: animal skins that held a dreadful-smelling liquid.
“Battlefire?” he asked one of the mages near Skyfire, pointing. The woman looked and nodded.
Briar shivered. Once in Hajra, three ships, survivors of a pirate attack, had limped into harbor when he and some friends were playing on the docks. Each had been hit by the jelly called battlefire. One ship burned as it came and sank inside the harbor’s mouth. The other two had docked to off-load their dead and wounded. The sight and smell of scorched flesh had given Briar nightmares for months.
Rosethorn waited until Skyfire was done speaking with a runner, then told him, “You’re so busy planning how to weave magics, shielding that and blending this, that you forget it doesn’t have to be magic alone.”
Skyfire glared down at the stocky woman, thin nose twitching. “Only shields will protect us from those catapults and the boom-stones,” he snapped.
“And the cove?” she asked. With a wave she indicated the stretch of open dirt below them. It was pocked with deep craters and reeked of boom-stone smoke.
“That’s why we have archers, not to mention these clackers up here,” Skyfire snapped, glaring at the crowd around Moonstream. “They just haven’t been used yet.”
Rosethorn poked Briar so he would show the redheaded dedicate the bag he carried. “Brambles,” she told Skyfire, naming the seeds that she’d ordered Briar to put into it. “Rosevines. Sea buckthorn. Briars.” She grinned at the boy. “Sea holly. Milk thistle, Namorn thistle—and a few things here and there to help it all along.”
Briar tried not to smile. Before he’d tied each fistful of seed into a square of cloth, Rosethorn had drenched them in a liquid that did for plants what her other tonic did for weak birds and worn-out mages.
Skyfire lifted one of the small bundles in his hand. “You think you can grow enough of a barrier to hold off that landing force?” he asked, skeptical.
“Get that seed all over the ground, and Briar and I will see what we can do,” she told him firmly. “All your warriors need do is launch the bundles—Lark will make sure they open to scatter the seed.”
Skyfire rubbed his chestnut beard, then took the bundle from Briar and waved to a handful of soldiers loitering nearby. One of them was the woman who had taken charge of Little Bear that morning; she winked at Briar and stood at attention for Skyfire’s orders. “Get two of these little balls to each of the catapults along this quarter of the wall,” he said. “Load them immediately. Get them into the air. Cover all the area not shielded by the spell-nets.”
“Get Lark,” Rosethorn whispered to Briar.
Lark was coming already. “I’ll do more good over here,” she grumbled to Rosethorn quietly. “Why is it no one wants to work with anyone else?”
“I don’t want to work with those idiots,” said Rosethorn. One of the war-mages standing close enough to hear snort
ed.
They heard a snap. The catapult nearest to them hurled small gray bundles high in the air. From one sleeve Lark brought out a square of cloth, its edges unsewn and fraying. Her eyes on the cloth bundles as they soared over the ground, she tugged two edges of the bit of cloth, yanking out threads three and four at a time. The bundles came apart, releasing clouds of seed into the air.
Rosethorn made room for herself and Briar by a notch, so they could lean on the raised stone beside it. Briar was pressed against it, with Rosethorn close behind him. He breathed in her funny scent: pine, dark soil, hints of basil and aloe. With her at his back, he felt almost as if he rested in the arms of Mila of the Grain herself, though he quickly assured the goddess there was no blasphemy meant.
“Are you ready?” inquired Rosethorn.
His eyes were on the seeds as they drifted to the ground. “I think so.”
“The magic is a pattern of reaching into the ground and growing with the seeds from there. I’ll pass it through you, so you can follow it, and me,” she told him. “Just don’t think you can do this with growing things all the time.”
“They need to grow slow,” he replied. “So they’re strong clean through.”
“That’s right. I’m glad you understand. All right, breathe in—”
Closing his eyes, Briar drew breath in through his nose. The two of them sank down through the cold, white-flashing inside of the wall—
What is all that light? Rosethorn demanded within his mind.
With a half-blink’s time of thought, he explained about Tris’s magicked spectacles and the glitter of magic that the four now saw. Then he and Rosethorn broke through the wall, and the earth outside the wall, and the spells that held the ground under Winding Circle together. They were in soft dirt now, spreading themselves wide through the slope down to the water.
The seeds were on the surface. Rosethorn called to them, breaking into hundreds of magical threads, each seeking, then entering, a seed. In her magic was the power of stone-cracking vines, of pine seedlings that could grow over a farm in a handful of years, mixed with the demand for haste that only humans felt. Briar saw how she made her magic a root system. All that was left for the seeds to do was to stretch out branches and limbs, instead of fragile shoots. Once he knew what he saw, he reached with his magic, running it through the pattern she had placed inside him. Connecting to hundreds of seeds to her left, he fed them a rush of strength. Bushes and brambles leaped into growth, exploding from the ground, throwing out leaves and flowers as if a spring were compressed into minutes.
Rising above the ground for a look, he discovered his third of the barren slope was covered with the fresh, pale color of new growth. Rosethorn had two-thirds of the open ground; her plants were dark green, the thistles already a foot high. Her vines and brambles fought to cover as much surface as they could, reminding Briar of a litter of puppies scrambling after a meat-covered bone.
Nearby he could hear a series of dull cracks. Something thudded, shaking his spine.
Fire erupted in his shoulder and on his back—not the back of the body still up on the wall, but on his magic’s back. Briar yelled, looking around. Five more craters had been gouged out of the earth. They smoked and glowed like dying embers, filling the air with the stink of burning leaves.
He could feel Rosethorn trembling behind his true body. “Concentrate!” she snapped when she realized he was thinking of her.
Briar urged his plants forward through the magical root-pattern. He coursed along their veins, filling them with anger. Bramble wove itself into thistle clumps and braided with rosevines. Sea holly mingled with sea buckthorn to form solid walls of stickers. Moving out into the plants’ skins, he gave particular attention to each and every spine and thorn, urging them to grow, and to grow sharp.
To give them fuel, he fed them his hate for pirates on shore leave who thought it fun to kick a street boy or to break his arm as a warning to pickpockets. The plants would wrap and cling like the muck of the sewers that he’d once lived in. Emotion ran through his garden like sullen blood, a dose of misery, resentment, and fury that they would be eager to pass on.
More cracks: overhead, boom-stones bounced off glowing circles in the air. The circles turned and shifted as the mages used them like shields to keep boom-stones off Winding Circle. Once a ball was knocked from its path, it either blew up—or fell.
Roars shredded the air as four boom-stones exploded high overhead. Near the base of the wall two fountains of dirt and rock erupted, spraying everyone above. Rosethorn and Briar screamed in pain and rage as their greenery was torn to oozing pieces.
“Look at the shore. Can you speed it up?” Skyfire asked, his voice booming in their bodies’ ears. Sending their power aboveground, Rosethorn and Briar looked at the water’s edge. The longboats had reached the shore. Three-foot-high plants awaited them where Rosethorn had been working; Briar’s were a little more than two feet tall. It wasn’t enough to stop them, not for long.
“Deeper,” Rosethorn growled. “I’m going deeper into the spell.”
“How?” Briar asked her. “Show me.”
“No. Keep working as you have. You aren’t ready for this.”
Somehow she moved him, until his pattern fed into the plants she had brought along already. Part of her remained there, while the rest wove itself into Briar’s old area. She flexed around him, then pulsed, expanding like a bursting sun. Where he had gone only as deep as each plant’s skin, keeping most of his attention for their weapons, Rosethorn became each and every root and stem. She collapsed the growth of months, even years, into a breath. Everything grew.
It was a comfort to find that her thorns, needles, and stickers weren’t as long or sharp as his. She didn’t hate enough, he decided. She had never been tossed through the air by pirates celebrating a big haul or dropped because they were too drunk to see where she was thrown. Briar shared that with her plants as their leaves and stems lengthened. Their spines stretched for him, looking for a pirate to sink into.
Something louder than the earlier boom-stones whooshed through the air, near enough that his real body flinched. There was a dull thud and a sudden wash of heat. Briar threw up an arm to shield himself—to shield his plants—from the fire. Rosethorn screamed, and screamed again.
The raiders had landed. Setting up catapults, they had launched skins of battlefire into the green tangle before them. On landing, the skins burst, spraying jelly everywhere. Their mages had only to touch the stuff with flame to make it burn. Sheets of fire sprouted between the raiders and the wall.
Nearby, someone was screaming. Further down the wall, a gout of battlefire had splashed through the mages’ protections. A warrior-dedicate stumbled burning through a notch and fell into the brambles. Other dedicates were beating out flames with their habits. Two novices dragged a charred body out of the way. It looked like the woman warrior from that morning.
Rosethorn sagged against Briar. He dragged her arms around him, taking her weight on his shoulders. She was groaning deep in her throat. Suddenly he was terrified. Sandry! Tris! Da—
We’re here. Power flooded in, making every hair on his body stand up. Clutching the thread circle, the girls were twined together like a spun cord, Sandry a gold-white strand, Daja red-orange, darker—weaker—than the other two for today, Tris a brilliant blue shot through with white. What do we do? they asked.
Rosethorn refused to let go of her magic and her ties to the plants. She clung to them, despite the pain from all the burning. Everything continued to grow frantically.
Like this, Briar told his friends. He slammed into his pattern, taking them along. They roared through its crossings and turnings, bringing it to life in the mind they now shared. Now they saw, as he did, how to build the magical fire until every green thing in the cove had to grow fast or explode. They fed the thorns and stickers with their anger and bitterness. Daja had her own memories of pirates, as did Sandry. Tris was furious at these parasites who burned and kil
led and made her new home unsafe. The four boiled through every root, branch, vein and needle, forcing them higher, longer, thicker, sharper—definitely much, much sharper.
They knocked Rosethorn out of the pattern without knowing it. Ablaze with anger and fear, they were unable to feel the hands that shook and tugged at them.
“Trisana, you aren’t listening to me!” a cracked, sharp, familiar voice said in her mind. She smelled vinegar and mildew. “You beggar me with your extravagance! I’m just a poor widow, with barely enough to live on, and you eating me out of—”
Tris’s hold on their joining faltered. “Cousin Uraelle?” she whispered. “You’re dead.”
“No more beef at this table, not at these prices! Copper penny for turnips? You didn’t bargain enough! You—”
The others felt Tris shrink and fade as that voice railed on and on. She was losing confidence. She was losing her grip on the pattern.
A fiery spindle appeared in the children’s mind, whirling counterclockwise, unraveling things. Their bond with the plants was coming unspun. Briar’s grip on the magic relaxed. Sandry, recognizing Lark’s work, dropped away. In Discipline, Frostpine held Daja’s fingers, wrapped tightly around the lumpy thread, and gently pried them open, one at a time. Oh, all right, she thought, and let go of the magic herself.
Someone pinched Briar’s earlobe hard. “Don’t ever break loose from me like that again,” Rosethorn said, her voice ragged. “You could have killed yourself and the girls.”
“But they were hurting you,” he protested.
Lark, shaking her head, tucked her spindle away. “You should have warned him,” she murmured.
“You’re not helping,” snapped Rosethorn. To Briar she said, “A little pain is bearable, to protect this place. And at least we’ve done that.” She pointed to the ground outside the wall.
He could see nothing but stems, vines, and very long thorns. In some places the growth was nearly six feet high; nowhere was it shorter than four feet. It reached up to, even a little way into, the water. Search though he could, he found no sign of the longboats, their catapults, or the pirates who had manned them.