Briar's Book (8 page)

“We could use another pair of hands,” remarked Henna.

“You’ll get them,” Jokubas said crisply. “My daughter is coming up here now, with ten more sick.”

T
he news that Briar and Rosethorn had been joined by Dedicate Henna was greeted with relief at Discipline Cottage. Everyone went to bed early that night, tired by worry and their own labors. Tris woke sometime after midnight to the sound of rain tapping the thatch overhead. She put on her spectacles, a wool gown, and a shawl, sending her power out. The familiar sense of hot metal in the room across from hers was missing – she frowned, then remembered that Daja was at Frostpine’s, working and sleeping at his forge. With a sigh Tris let her magic seep through the boards and plaster between her and the ground floor. Lark slept heavily, the warmth of her magic lower than Tris had ever felt it. Sandry was in the same shape. They had worked hard, putting their strength into the masks and gloves for Crane and his staff.

Tris found Little Bear’s life force, that of a dozing animal with unhappy dreams. He had to be sleeping in Briar’s room again: her sense of him was nearly overpowered by the magic that radiated from Briar’s
shakkan.
Over its one-hundred-forty-six-year existence, the miniature tree had been used to store and build upon the magic of its earlier owners; its green strength pressed on her own power. There was a curiously similar feel to the
shakkan
and to Little Bear, a kind of sadness. They missed Briar.

“We all do,” she muttered crossly, stuffing her feet into thin leather slippers. “Can’t you keep it to yourselves?”

With the stealth of months of practice she left the house, though she wondered why she bothered to be quiet. From the feel of Sandry and Lark, Tris thought that she might bang kettle lids in their ears and they wouldn’t twitch.

Through the back gate she passed, then between the fence and the vineyard. Over the winter she had worn a path in the grass, one that led across a band of open ground. It went straight to the closest stair on the inside of Winding Circle’s thick wall. The rain fell steadily as she climbed, hoisting her skirts to keep from tripping, panting with effort. At least these days no one who saw her puffing was silly enough to yell at her to lose weight. Before she had learned to control her power – and the way it produced hail or lightning when she was vexed – some had teased her, with interesting results.

Learning to control her magic had meant she had to give up rewarding those people who gave cruel advice. She hadn’t liked that, even when Niko pointed out that those she frightened became enemies. Niko is a spoilsport, thought Tris, trying to catch her breath as she stepped onto the top of the wall.

Most nights when she came up here, she walked south to get a view of the harbor islands and the Pebbled Sea beyond. There was no glimpse of the sea tonight; the rain cloaked it. Below and to her right lay the joining of the roads that wrapped around Winding Circle and the granite ridge between the temple and the Mire. The slum and even walled Summersea were gone from view; no light cut through the rain, not even that of the harbor beacons.

“One day – ” a quiet voice began.

Tris gasped and jumped. Niko’s approach had taken her by surprise. He steadied the girl with a hand on her shoulder. She could barely see his craggy face under the wide-brimmed hat he’d worn to keep off the wet.

“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said.

“Well, you did,” muttered Tris. “What were you going to say?”

“Only that if you ever get a home of your own, you ought to consider a nice tower, preferably on a cliff. You seem to prefer lookout spots.”

“I’m a weather mage, aren’t I?” she asked. “Of course I like heights.”

“Tell me, weather mage, how long you do expect this storm to last?”

Tris sent her power rolling into the clouds. “A day, maybe two,” she replied, testing the feel of water, heat, and cold in the air. “Hard rain toward dawn, mistylike until ten in the morning, light rain after.”

“Can you make it end? Usher the storm away from here?”

Tris stared at him. “You just asked me to meddle with the weather.”

“Yes.” He evaded her eyes, staring out at the dark landscape.

“But you threatened dire things if I used my power like that. I’m not allowed to muck with nature.”

“This is different.”

“How do you know
your
telling me to do it won’t turn out as badly as if I did it on my own?” she demanded.

“I don’t,” was the flat reply. “I feel it’s important enough to try, though, or I never would have brought it up.”

That
made her nervous. “Please explain,” she said, unusually meek.

Niko sighed. “It seems this disease isn’t carried in the air, which is the only good news we’ve had all week. That leaves human contact, insects or animals, or water. If animals were carriers, we would have noticed sick ones. There are no flies or mosquitoes at this time of year, though we can’t rule out fleas and lice. I believe this thing spreads too quickly to be simply a matter of human contact, though Crane won’t rule that out. The only thing we can try to change – ”

“Is water,” said Tris.

“The water in the sewers rises by the hour,” said Niko. “It may already be leaking into the city’s wells. It certainly will do so if the water continues to rise. If we can move this rain along, our outlook would be improved.”

Tris removed her shoes, spectacles, and shawl, handing them to Niko. She climbed into one of the flat-bottomed notches in the top of the wall and turned away from the wind. The storm was at her back, coming from the southeast, bound for the northern mountains. She spread herself in it and let its motion thrust her to its leading edge. The hills around Summersea rolled under her. Rivers, streams, towns, she felt them all as she flowed overhead, bound for the great mountains beyond.

An opposing wind in her face brought her to a halt. Here was a pressure to counter the storm she rode, a whirling mass of air entrenched nearly thirty miles to the north. It would go nowhere; if she insisted, she would regret it. She had met such things before and wouldn’t have cared if she’d had no storm at her back to move along.

She jumped onto the edge of the unmoving northern system. Following its edge west as she sought a gap where she could put her storm, she found none. At last she gave up. Returning to the storm over Winding Circle, she used its power to send her shooting high above the clouds into open air. Safe from her storm’s pull, she turned west again, still looking for a space to move it to. There was nothing she would not have to fight other weather to clear.

Cat dirt, thought Tris, using a favorite expression of Sandry’s.

Curious, she sank until she was caught up in her storm’s counterclockwise spin. She let it drag her south and east, saving her own strength for the return trip. At the storm’s southernmost point she yanked free. A fresh storm caught her almost instantly. She let it pull her even farther south and jumped free – straight into a third storm.

When at last she opened her body’s eyes, she found that the sky showed barely pink through a small break in the eastern clouds. A fine drizzle fell on Winding Circle.

Her body had gone stiff in her absence. She lurched and saw there was but an inch between her feet and the edge of the wall. She’d forgotten she stood in a notch, with nothing to keep her from walking into thin air.

A wiry arm circled her waist and yanked her back. Tris and Niko both tumbled to the walkway in an undignified pile.

When she rolled off him, Niko sat up, gasping for air. “Don’t
ever
do that by yourself!” he scolded when he caught his breath. “You might have been killed!”

“I noticed,” replied Tris, shuddering.

Niko rumbled at his belt, producing a flask. He opened it and put it to her lips. Tris drank obediently, trying not to let the sweet tea leak between her chattering teeth. It was a mixture she didn’t recognize, flavored with dates, citron, and plums.

“That isn’t one of Rosethorn’s,” she gasped when she was done. She didn’t need to see the magic that infused the tea; she felt it in her veins. Her head cleared, and her chilled body warmed quickly.

“Moonstream fixed it,” replied Niko, returning the flask to his belt. “I assume you were gone so long for a reason – have you good news for me?”

Tris lurched to her feet, wringing her very wet skirts. Niko remained on the walkway, staring up at her, eyes bright under his broad-brimmed hat.

Taking a deep breath, Tris said, “I can move this storm, but it won’t mean anything. There are storms behind it for hundreds of miles. They’re dumping rain over the whole east half of the Pebbled Sea. Whatever I send off will be replaced in a day, even less.”

Niko’s heavy brows snapped together in a frown. “Why now, O Gods?” he demanded. “Why give us all this rain now? We don’t need – ”

“Hoy!” someone yelled from below, inside Winding Circle. “I was told Niklaren Goldeye is up there!”

“How could anyone know that?” asked Tris as Niko got up.

“While you were – busy,” he said drily, “I had several chats with the guards. They must have told him.” He leaned over the edge of the walkway. “One moment,” he called. Walking briskly to the stair, Tris behind him, he descended.

Their summoner looked happy to wait: he was bracing himself on spread knees as he fought to catch his breath. Tris was interested to see he wore the uniform not of the Duke’s Guard – which looked after the Mire and everything else outside Summersea’s wall – but of the Provost’s Guard, which patrolled inside it.

“They said you was to know right off,” the man wheezed when they reached him. “Someone told our cap’n, and she ordered us to search the house, and we found three of ‘em. And then she ordered us, do the flanking houses, and we got three more in one and five in t’other. Cap’n’s turning out all Cobbler’s Lane now. You’re wanted in town.”

Niko held up a hand, his expression bleak. “Three, three, and five what?” he asked, his light voice slightly husky.

The guard took a deep breath, and straightened. “It’s the blue pox, Master Goldeye,” he said, his eyes haunted. “Inside the city wall.”

A
fter a long night in which more time was spent caring for the sick than sleeping, Briar, Rosethorn, Henna, and the new healer were treated to gruel, tea, and the prospect of a busy day. No sooner had they finished breakfast than the women were called to a meeting of all the healers in Urda’s House. “Stay put,” Rosethorn murmured to Briar. “There will be a lot of quarreling before anything useful is discussed. Your time is better spent here.”

Briar stayed and watched as those not at the meeting – House workers and members of the Duke’s Guard, all gloved and masked – carried in more patients. By noon every bed was filled. Workers then laid pallets in the broad center aisle. Once those were made up, ten more sick were brought in. A screen was put around the coughing man. He had survived the night, but his breath now bubbled horribly in his throat.

Intimidated by the new adults, not liking the fact that they tended patients without gentleness, Briar stayed beside Flick’s bed. He left only to fetch water, visit the privy, or fill cups from the big pot of broth and the bigger one of willowbark tea set up on the table.

Outside the night’s storm continued: its winds moaned through the cracks in the walls. As workers brought fresh lamps to relieve the gloom, Briar made a happy discovery. The spots on Flick were shrinking and fading. When Rosethorn came back, he dragged her to Flick’s bed. “The pocks are going!” he said gleefully. “She’ll make it!”

Rosethorn took Flick’s pulse, then tried the heat on the girl’s forehead and chest. “Still feverish, though not as much,” she remarked. “We’ll just have to see.” She looked up at Briar, who scowled at her calm way of receiving the best news he’d had in a while. “She
may
be on the mend. That fever is more dangerous than the spots – I don’t like how it resists the willowbark. In any event, you have to leave her for a while. We have work to do.”

“Who’ll look after her?” demanded Briar.

“The people who work up here, for now,” said Rosethorn.

“But they aren’t careful. They just poke the sick ones and go.”

Rosethorn frowned. Briar huddled into his clothes, expecting to get the rough side of her tongue. She looked to be in that kind of mood.

Instead she took a breath and resettled the strings that held her mask around her ears, getting her temper in hand. “They’ll look after your friend as well as anyone. There is work for plant mages, and it must be done now.”

Briar put his cups down with a sigh and followed her out. They passed three other large rooms like theirs on the way to the inner staircase. Those wards were filled too. More than half of the people who worked in them wore the blue habits of the Water Temple, a sight that comforted Briar. Though the new healer in their room, Atwater’s daughter, seemed all right, he had never met any of the others who worked in Urda’s House. What he did know, from Rosethorn’s tales of arguments with them over the winter, did not leave him with much confidence in the locals.

“Why serve here, if they don’t like poor people?” he asked Rosethorn as they descended the stairs.

She smiled crookedly. “Some care. Some do it because it’s fashionable these days to take an interest in the Mire,” she explained. “Some because it’s the only work they can get. Between guild charity funds and the duke, they’re paid a decent wage. Some cared once, but they’ve seen so much poverty that their hearts broke.”

There was a sobering thought, Briar reflected, that you could love something and lose that love. Would he ever run out of love for green things? He brushed Rosethorn’s sleeve with his fingertips so lightly that she didn’t feel it.

No, he thought with a smile. I’ll never run out of that.

They passed the second-floor landing and the ground floor, ducking around people who carried supplies upstairs. At last they came to a vast cellar. This floor too was busy: storerooms of all kinds lined one side of a stone-walled corridor. Opposite them were the furnace and pump rooms that got water to the wards.