Battle Magic

Evvy flung her arms around his neck. “I hate it that you’re his captive!” she whispered in his ear.

“I don’t like it, either, but what can we do? We’re just little cats in his big house full of lions,” he replied.

Evvy let him go and ran into her room, sliding the thin door shut with a bang.

Parahan bowed to them. “May all our gods watch over you on your journey home.” He ambled out of the house, fading into the twilight. Briar listened until he could no longer hear the slightest jingle of chain.

Rosethorn went to bed soon afterward. Briar made certain the cats were all tucked into Evvy’s room behind her magicked gate stones. Then he went to his own bed.

He was drifting off when he thought of Parahan. Gods curse it, I need to sleep! he told himself angrily. We leave at dawn! But there was no denying it; the plight of the man from Kombanpur bothered him. Any other master would have let them buy Parahan from him, but not Weishu. Parahan was some kind of prize. The emperor could give them nine saddlebags full of gold coins for the Weishu Rose alone — and he had — but he wouldn’t sell this one captive. Briar would have traded all of that gold for Parahan, and he knew Rosethorn and Evvy would have done the same.

Dawn, he reminded himself. We get up before dawn.

Calm thoughts. I’ll be able to wear plain old breeches and a tunic again. I look nice in all the silk robes, true, but there’s nothing for comfort like the clothes Sandry made for me. Great Mila, I’ll be so glad to wear my good old boots instead of slippers, where I feel every rock in my path!

On that agreeable thought he drifted off to sleep.

Something made him pop awake near midnight. He listened, but the pavilion house was quiet. Uneasy, Briar got up and checked Evvy’s room.

The cats were draped over her bed. They had moved to take the space she had left empty. They looked up at Briar.

“When I catch her, she’s dead!” Briar mouthed to them.

Mystery raised a leg and began to wash.

Swiftly he pulled on breeches and a tunic, then slung his smaller mage kit over his shoulder. Boots in hand, Briar crept to the door of Rosethorn’s room and looked in. She was asleep, making the little buzzing snore that he thought was so funny.

Briar sneaked out of the pavilion. There were no servants in the outer rooms or even guards in the street beyond. He put a small bundle of sleep herbs in his tunic pocket in case he met anyone unfriendly on the way, and yanked on his boots. Once set, he began to run, his way lit by a half-moon. He had a very good notion of where she had gone. He should have realized she would not accept leaving Parahan behind, not after she had spent most of five days in the captive’s company.

It took him longer than he liked to reach the Pavilion of Glorious Presentations, where Parahan was caged. That was because he kept to the trees and bushes beside the road, making frequent stops to look and listen for guard patrols. He saw and heard none, which only made him more nervous, not less.

He finally reached his destination. Before he approached his runaway student, he scouted the outside of the long hall. Everywhere else around the perimeter of the large building he found no sign of guards. Inside was the row of hanging gold cages, one of which housed Parahan at night. The hall of cages was easy enough to identify on the outside: It squared into the audience chamber, forming an L in the stone work.

When he was certain there were no guards anywhere else around the pavilion, Briar went into the trees along the cage side of the pavilion of Glorious Presentations. There were the small windows high up, higher than a tall man could reach, so the captives had fresh air. There was the corner where the long hall became the emperor’s throne room.

Very well, Evvy-knows-everything, he thought grimly as he worked his way through the small wood, how do you mean to get inside?

Then he heard tiny grunts of effort.

She’s trying to pull down the wall! he thought in panic. She’ll bring any guards within earshot down on us!

He stepped out of the tree cover at Evvy’s back. She was kneeling with both hands placed on a marble block two feet above the ground. She wobbled, snorting, but he could see no movement in the stone. For some reason, Evvy — who could guide tons of stones as they fell from cliffs — could not get these blocks to budge.

“Evvy, stop it!” he whispered.

She jumped, but she did not turn around. “No!” she whispered fiercely. “I won’t leave him here! What if the emperor turns on him one day and burns him up like he did the roses?”

“How did you find out about that?” Briar grabbed her by the shoulders and tried to yank her to her feet. It was like trying to move a boulder, as he should have remembered from the last time he tried to displace her when she didn’t want to obey.

“I heard the servants talking,” she told him patiently. “Why don’t you stop being silly and help me? I don’t know why I can’t move these things.”

The sight of the gardeners’ corpses burning at the heart of the rose garden was still too fresh in his mind. “He can’t come with us,” he told Evvy. “They’ll kill us if they think we helped him to escape.”

“I bet he knows a way out of the palace grounds,” Evvy said flatly. “The only things that keep him here are the cage and his chains.” Then she said the thing that truly horrified Briar. “I brought your lock picks with me. I’m going to pick his locks. But first I have to get in there and these blocks won’t budge.”