Battle Magic (42 page)

Someone was shaking her awake. It was Jimut. Seeing the look on his face, she struggled to her feet. Then she followed him at a run. He took her straight to the healers’ tent.

Two assistants were caring for a warrior by lamplight. One of them cleaned his bruised face. The other was carefully trying to cut his leather breeches away from the gash in his thigh.

The warrior was Briar.

Jimut was talking to her, but his words could have been thunder for all she understood him. For a moment she thought she would go to pieces. Her bones felt loose and watery. Her father’s ghost shouted in her ear, “Don’t you come the pretty princess, Niva! Get your arm in there and ease that calf out or I’ll give you so many stripes you’ll sleep on your belly for a month! There’s a chamber pot because I won’t let you so much as go to the privy, so do as I bid!”

Thanks, Da, she thought as she stepped over to the cot. She felt for Briar’s pulse — strong — and his warmth — colder than she liked, but he was wounded. She glanced at his thigh. The healer cutting the leather breeches off was carefully pulling them away from the wound. It was deep and dirty.

Rosethorn peeled back one of Briar’s eyelids. They had given him something for pain already. His pupil was wide enough that she could barely see his gray-green iris. That was good. She would have to hurt him to clean the slash, and she preferred that he was not awake for that.

Hot water. She would need —

One of the assistants stood on the far side of the cot, a pot of hot water cushioned by wrappings in her hands and clean cloths over one arm. Briar’s clothes were cut away and dumped elsewhere. For a moment Rosethorn turned her back to the cot, closed her eyes, and prayed to Yanna Healtouch of the Water temple for healing, the Green Man to ward off the racing growth of infection, and Shurri Flamesword of the Fire temple for a steady hand. Then she turned back to the cot and began to clean the gaping slash. Blood followed. As soon as Rosethorn was done, Riverdancer swiftly placed a padded bandage on Briar’s thigh and pressed to control the bleeding. They waited for a few moments. The woman lifted the pad and they replaced it with a clean one. Rosethorn pressed this one, counting to herself for what seemed like forever. When she lifted it, there was blood, but less of it.

“Praise Yanna,” she whispered. In
tiyon
she added, “It appears no big veins were cut.” She switched for a clean pad and let someone else press. She went through her medicines for one to cleanse and one to hold the inside of the wound together.

This time, when they removed the pad, Rosethorn warned the others. “Hold him, please,” she said. “He’s going to jump.” When they had him by the hands, shoulders, and legs, Rosethorn said, not caring if Briar was awake or not, “This will hurt, my lad, but not as much as you will hurt when I talk with you in the morning.” She swiftly dribbled the cleansing potion in the open wound.

Briar arched against the cot and the hands that kept him on it, his eyelids flying open. He let out a screech. Riverdancer leaned over his head, a vial in her hand. She showed it to Rosethorn, who sniffed and recognized it as a potent sleep and pain medication favored by Gyongxin healers. She nodded.

Riverdancer let three drops fall into Briar’s open mouth. He swallowed, coughed, and relaxed back onto the cot. As his eyelids fluttered down, Rosethorn added a thin line of the medicine that would hold the inner muscle of his thigh together like a line of stitches. By the time she was done, Briar was snoring.

Rosethorn smiled grimly and turned back to her medicines. She would need a needle and gut to sew up Briar’s skin, and then a healing potion for that.

By the time she had finished, she felt dizzy. “Would someone bandage him?” she asked in
tiyon
.

Kind hands steered her away from the cot as Riverdancer took over. Someone pressed a cup not of tea but of broth into her hands. She sipped from it carefully. From time to time she wiped away tears that ran down her face on her sleeve.

When Briar awoke, he felt as if someone had used his head for a drum. Worse, Daja had taken one of her white-hot irons from the
forge fire and shoved it into his thigh. He demanded that she remove it or suffer the consequences, or rather, he tried to demand it. The words left his mouth as mush. He went back to sleep.

Evvy turned over, screaming as Musheng held up Asa and brandished a knife. She opened her eyes, stared at the low earth ceiling above her, and screamed again.

Five little silver snakes with skulls for heads vanished into the ceiling of the tunnel.

“Evumeimei,” Luvo said calmly in her ear, “they are only baby cave snakes.”

“They’re dead!” Evvy cried, sitting up on Big Milk’s back. “They’re all bones!”

“Nonsense. They are made of metal and earth. They cannot be dead. Big Milk says you bawl more than her young ones.”

Evvy glared at her small traveling companion. “I’m sorry, Luvo,” she told him. “I’m sorry, Big Milk,” she added, stretching out so she could scratch the giant yak on the poll. “I was dreaming again. Are we going
up
?” She squinted at the tunnel ahead of them. Even in the scant light of the glowing mold, she was certain. The tunnel was sloping upward for the first time in their journey.

“It is my hope that you will do better under an open sky,” Luvo said. All around them the earth began to groan. “I believe you will dream less.”

General Sayrugo’s camp was on alert. The enemy’s scouts had been seen to the north and to the west. She ordered triple sentries and prayed she would unite with Captain Lango and the twins
from the Realms of the Sun the next day. All the signs pointed to a big fight before she even reached Garmashing.

Suddenly she heard an uproar. Cursing, she grabbed her sword and raced to the source of the noise. On the southern line of defense, her guards stood and pointed at something. With a roar of command she sent the onlookers back to their posts and squinted into the growing twilight. At least the other sentries had kept their positions, she told herself.

Then she blinked, and blinked again. The plain was tearing itself in two a hundred yards away from their picket line. The ground was trembling under her feet. She turned to yell for her shamans, only to feel the quivering stop. She stared at the hole that had opened in the — up until now — solid, reliable earth.

The biggest yak she had ever seen in her life plodded out of the hole and began to graze on the grass near it.

Then, as Sayrugo and her sentries gawped like farmers in Garmashing for the first time, someone slid off the yak. The someone removed some bags, or packs, slinging one off his or her shoulders. Then the someone scratched the yak on the forehead. Sayrugo knew there was another word for a yak’s forehead, but she was a city woman; she didn’t know these things. She did, however, know all the words for the pieces of a crossbow. She held out her hand, groping for one in the empty air.

A huge voice boomed in the air. “Do not attack us, defenders of Gyongxe.” It was deep and musical. It could not belong to the person who walked toward them, hands — holding bags — in the air. “We are allies to you and foes to the invader from Yanjing!”

The huge yak turned and ambled south on the plain. Sayrugo wished she could do the same.

The second time Briar woke, someone was ordering him to drink. He obeyed, then tried to spit the nasty sweetness of spirits laced with opium from his mouth.

“Drink it, or
I’ll
use you for sword practice next time,” Parahan told him. The big man sat on a camp stool beside his cot, bracing Briar with one arm as he held the cup in his free hand. “You were supposed to be healing people — what were you doing on the battlefield?”

Briar drank the rest of the cup’s contents. “I went to see … what the green light was,” he mumbled. “It was our people. Gyongxe. ’N then I stayed to work on the wounded. ’N someone whacked me with a sword.”

His brain wasn’t so muzzy that he couldn’t remember
that
. He had been checking a fallen temple warrior by the light of one of Evvy’s glow stones. Suddenly, nearby, a Yanjingyi warrior had lurched to his feet.

“You!” he’d cried in
tiyon
. He was hardly more than Briar’s own age. “You’re one of their demon mages!” He had stumbled forward, raising his sword as he fell. Briar had felt something hot in his leg. He’d looked at the Yanjingyi boy to find that he had fallen because he was dead. He had been dying of a big wound in his chest when he attacked Briar. Only crazy luck, Lakik’s luck, had made him chop Briar’s leg instead of something more important.

For a wound that wasn’t vital, it had made Briar scream
anyway. People from his own side had found him. When they lifted him to bring him back to camp, the pain had been so bad that he had fainted like some temple archive lily.

He was trying to tell Parahan all this when the potion hit and he slept.