“They don’t talk imperial,” Zhegorz mumbled.
“Belbun dung,” Briar said, half-listening. “Green Man bless us, you’re a long way from home.” The tree beside the one that sheltered the ferns was stocky for a tree, with leaves marked by distinctively silvery undersides. “Zhegorz, have a look. This is a Gyongxe sorbus. Someone had to plant this here. It’s not natural to Namorn, though I suppose it would do all right. Soil’s a little rich for you, though, girl.”
“They don’t talk imperial,” Zhegorz insisted.
“They’re trees, they don’t talk at all,” Briar replied. “Well, not so you’d hear ....”
“Those men. They talked about ‘my lord,’ and rabbits in traps, and ‘beats catching a flogging for tarnished brass.’”
“They’re imperial soldiers on leave, and their troops are commanded by nobles,” Briar insisted, sending his power into the sorbus to fortify it against any hazards that might plague a foreigner in Namorn. “And they’re here to hunt. I wouldn’t talk imperial, either, if I was on leave after fighting Yanjing. Stop fussing.”
“They talked about weddings,” Zhegorz insisted.
“Men on leave get married. If you don’t have anything more serious, go soak your head in the river,” Briar snapped. “I mean it, Zhegorz. Tris just told you to come with us so you wouldn’t lurk about Landreg House giving her the fidgets. Once they’ve fixed you up at Winding Circle, you’ll be able to manage better. Now scat! And put your spectacles and both ear beads back on!”
Without a word, Zhegorz got to his feet and returned to the inn. Watching him go, Briar felt a rare twinge of conscience. He kicked that out, too. I’ll make it up to him later, he promised himself. But truthfully, sometimes a fellow needs time alone with green things. They won’t talk me half to death.
Tired of people, he returned to the inn for his shakkan. With it in his hands, he went out onto the riverbank and settled between the roots of an immense willow. There he spent the afternoon, the shakkan at his side, soaking in the feel of all that green life around him.
While Briar relaxed, Daja offered to take Gudruny’s children off her hands for a while. Gudruny accepted with gratitude. Once they were awake, Daja took them on a hike along the canyon that opened to the rear of the inn, where she could sense some metal veins in the rock walls. Sandry and Gudruny dozed and read. Zhegorz sulked in the stable, then paced outside the inn, restless under the threat of his calming drops from Sandry.
Everyone ate a quiet supper. Briar’s impulse to apologize to Zhegorz died under the older man’s glare during supper. He was happy to watch Zhegorz climb the stairs to go to bed early. Briar wasn’t sure he could keep his temper if Zhegorz continued to stare at him as if Briar had just murdered his firstborn. Instead, Briar listened to Sandry tell Gudruny’s children a bedtime story. Once they had gone upstairs, he helped Sandry straighten her embroidery silks. Despite the naps nearly everyone had taken, all of them were yawning not long after twilight had faded. They soon went to bed. Even the staff vanished. When Briar got up to close the front door, he saw that the guards were asleep around their fire. He had planned to set his shakkan back with the packs before he turned in, but something made him change his mind. After trying to think, and nearly splitting his jaws as he yawned, Briar had simply carried the old pine upstairs.
Zhegorz was already sound asleep in the other bed, a mild buzz of a snore issuing from his lips. Grateful not to have to have to talk to him, Briar set the shakkan on the floor and took off his clothes. Clad only in his loincloth, he crawled under the covers.
Given all the yawning he had done, he had thought he would be asleep the moment he put his head down. Instead, he felt imprisoned by his clean cotton sheets. His brain felt as if it were weighed down by clouds; his nose was stuffy. The feeling was one he knew, one his tired brain associated with blood and weapons in the night. Briar half-heard the roar of Yanjingyi rockets overhead and the shriek of dying people all around. He fought the clouds, turning his fingers to brambles to claw his way out of them. The clouds thickened. Desperate, he made his fingers into hooked thorns and slashed through layers of heavy mist.
The clouds parted slightly. Briar thrust a vine of power out through the opening, groping blindly for help with the weight that made it hard for him to breathe or move. He fumbled and reached—and touched his shakkan. White fire blazed, burning the clouds away in a heartbeat. Briar took deep breaths of clean air and woke up.
For a moment he thought he lay in a Gyongxe temple. The scent of sandalwood and patchouli was heavy in his nose; the ghosts of warning gongs thudded in his ears. When he put his feet on the floor, however, they met thin carpet, not stone. The smells faded in his nose; straining, he heard no war gongs. He wasn’t in Gyongxe. He was in a Namornese room. The two had only one thing in common: Someone very powerful was trying to keep him asleep.
He used the water pitcher to fill his washbasin—tricky work when his hands shook so badly. Then he ducked his face in the basin and splashed water on the back of his head, cleaning off some of the nightmare sweat. They’re powerful, whoever they are, but they ain’t the Yanjingyi emperor’s mages, he thought grimly. He checked the bond that linked him with Sandry. She was missing.
Not again! he thought angrily. Don’t these clod-headed bleaters ever give up?
He looked over at Zhegorz. Normally their scarecrow, less of a scarecrow after some weeks of decent meals, would have been up after the noise Briar had made. He slept very lightly, but not tonight. Briar shook him with no result.
Sorry, old man, he silently told the sleeping mage. You were right all along.
Briar grabbed his mage kit, yanked open the door, and raced down the hall to Sandry’s room. Gudruny and the children were sound asleep on pallets on the floor. Sandry was not in the empty bed. Instead, he saw a complex sign, written in pure magic, on his friend’s mattress. Briar had never seen anything like it. He tried to inspect the curls and twists inside the thing, only to find he was swaying on his feet, sleep already blurring his mind.
This sign felt different, more powerful, from the fog of sleep that had wrapped him around beginning in the common room. Briar dug in his kit until he produced the slender vial whose contents he had labeled wake the dead. Once he removed the cork, he quickly stuck the vial under his nose and took a breath. For a moment his nose and brain felt as if they might well be on fire. He yanked the bottle away and recorked it, then wiped his streaming eyes and took a second look at the design. It tugged at him, urging sleep, so he hung on to the bottle of scent. Bending down to risk a closer look, he saw the design was done in oil. Moreover, it bled along the threads of the sheet, uncontained.
Done like that, it wouldn’t last very long, he realized. Which means I’m not looking at the original spell. He stripped away the sheets to reveal the mattress. There, too, the design had bled up and through. Briar shoved the mattress aside. On the slats that kept it up he found the original spell. It was done on parchment in oils, and kept within the bounds of the parchment by a circle drawn in ink. Briar turned the parchment over: The mage who had made it had glued spelled silk onto the back and had written signs to enclose on that, to keep the spell from leaking down.
Musta been under the mattress for hours, to bleed up through everything, Briar decided. The energy in the oils had to move somewhere. The only way the mage that made the spell left it to go was up.