The Will of the Empress

Quen ate a chunk of carrot, his eyes alert as he watched them. “Frustrating, isn’t it? I had to spend plenty of time at Lightsbridge breaking out of trap spells as part of my specialization. Maybe you could do a double working that would get you out eventually, but that’s why I pulled you apart.” He studied his nails. “You really should consider employment with Berenene. She takes good care of her people. I’ll even teach you some tricks once Shan and Sandry are wed. Not this one, of course. But you’ll see I’m a decent enough fellow after that.”

He is starting to annoy me, complained Daja.

Let’s shut him up, then. Briar and Daja thrust at the spells with their own spells for destruction, Briar’s for decay and the destruction of parasites, Daja’s for rust. Nothing worked. Each suggested charms and tricks they had learned in the last three years, creating variations within their own specialties. These, too, failed. The glove spells slid around them, jelly-like, making Daja’s knees weak with distaste. Quen took a fiddle from the bench and played it, which made Briar crazy. He hated being laughed at.

Should we yell for Tris? Briar finally asked.

There’s a way we can do this, Daja said stubbornly. On our own, without Tris and her book learning. Besides, she’s probably still weak as a kitten.

Something caught Briar’s attention then. Tris. Book learning.

Daja waited to hear his thought.

When Briar worked it out, he was both jubilant and ashamed for not seeing it sooner. The solution lay in his own experience and his own teacher. Rosethorn had engaged in a constant battle with university-trained mages, over the difference between academic magic and ambient magic.

Stop playing his game and start playing ours! he said. He tapped into his shakkan and the plants around him, drawing their power through himself and turning it into vines. These he sent through the spells of the glove. Like all vines, they found each and every chink and opening, spaces no human being used, weaving their tendrils through to break into open air. Reaching Daja’s prison, they did the same thing all over again, finding the openings between the spells. At last they broke through to twine themselves around her, growing until they cupped her entire body.

Daja called to the metal on her hand and in her mage kit, the strange living metal that was always growing and absorbing new metal. She drew on the strength of the kitchen’s metal and fires as well, adding it to the liquid metal until she could spin wires of power out of herself. They twined with Briar’s vines, following the paths the magical plants had taken through the openings in Quen’s spells. Busily they worked themselves into Briar’s prison, encasing him as his vines had encased Daja.

Slowly, the spells that enclosed Daja and Briar began to melt, like thick ice under boiling water.

Quen dropped fiddle and bow and stretched a hand out to them, his lips moving as he tried to renew the spells. The mess around Briar and Daja struggled to rebuild, and collapsed completely.

Quen gestured. A fresh shield billowed toward them like a giant, thick bubble. Daja leaned forward and blew like a bellows, hard and long, forcing the heavy thing back toward Quen. He fought to hold it off. While he was occupied, Briar reached into an outer pocket of his mage kit and pulled out a small cloth ball. Deftly, he tossed it on the floor. It rolled to Quen’s feet.

Briar filled the seeds in the ball with green magic and called them to wakefulness. Weaving the shoots as they thrust up, he gripped them in an iron hold and kept them from sinking roots. All of their strength had to go into growing up, not down. He needed this cage to move.

The plants shot through the cloth of the ball that held them, weaving. They were as high as Quen’s knees before he saw the danger. He turned his shield on them, but Briar was ready. The vines, thick with thorns, spread out and over the shield, still growing.

Watching Quen’s sweaty face, Daja pulled a spool of fine wire out of her sack. She sent the wire’s end snaking toward the base of the vine cage, where it began to weave itself in among the vines. As it climbed she called light to it, making Quen blink and shield his eyes. It was a distraction, something he could not afford. While he tried to shield his vision, vines and wire finished a globe of a cage.

Briar had prepared the seed ball to withstand the magic of mages and hill shamans alike, both hazards of the road to Gyongxe. It was why he had brought it downstairs. Daja had made this spool of wire to handle and contain power, her own or that of others. Bearing down with their wills—Briar’s forged in the streets, in epidemics, and in war; Daja’s, in forges and mammoth blazes—they tightened their cage on Quenaill, crushing his last shield.

Briar and Daja joined hands and fed their cage a last surge of power. The gaps between wire and vines blazed, sealed against magic from within. The pair let go.

For a moment they could hardly see Quen inside the cage. Magical workings rayed out from the man like sunlight, connecting him to every spell he still had in place—those on the inn, and those that served Sandry’s kidnappers. They blazed with silver fire in Briar’s and Daja’s vision.

“Once more,” Daja said, panting. “Drain him, so his other spells break.” Her knees wobbled; her thighs felt loose. They touched fingers this time and hammered the cage with the last of their strength. At first they saw no difference. Then the first fiery strand vanished. Another followed, then three, then more. All winked out inside the cage. At last Quen stood inside, naked of power.

All around them, the inn stirred. Briar could hear the inn’s staff moving in the private room. He sat down on the kitchen table and began to eat chunks of carrot. Daja took a seat on a stool and leaned against the wall.