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“Which means what?” Briar asked Tris as they plodded home. The day was warm, almost summery. Time to start hoeing, he thought, seeing green shoots in the gardens around the buildings.
“He might learn something and we might learn something,” Tris replied.
“That’s what I thought he meant. Why doesn’t he come out and say so?”
Tris blinked at him. “I thought he did.”
“Oh, you’re no help.”
The minute they entered Discipline, they looked in on Rosethorn. She was drowsing, her cheeks flushed, one hand on the shakkan. Someone had placed more pillows at her back, so that she was half sitting. Lark was in the chair beside the bed, worrying her fingernails. When she saw Briar and Tris, she put a finger to her lips for silence and got up.
The rustle of her habit woke Rosethorn, who brushed Lark’s sleeve with her fingertips. “I’m all right,” she murmured, and coughed. The cough went on and on, thin and high; she had no chance to catch her breath. Lark picked a cup off the bedside table and held it to Rosethorn’s lips, steadying her.
Somehow Rosethorn drank what was in the cup. Her coughs faded, slowly. Finally she nodded, and Lark helped her to ease back.
“Pesky thing,” whispered Rosethorn. “The cough, I mean.” She began to hack.
“Rest,” Lark said when Rosethorn was at ease again. “Don’t talk.”
Rosethorn nodded and closed her eyes.
Tris pried Briar’s fingers from her arm. Unknowingly, he’d gripped her tightly enough to bruise.
Lark shooed them out and closed the door behind her. Briar took the cup from her hand, exploring its contents with his magic. He recognized Capchen chestnut and syrup of poppies.
“Poppy?” he whispered, horrified. “How’d she get so bad she needs poppy?” He turned to Daja, who cut designs in metal sheets at the table. “You told us she did fine!”
Daja’s eyes were bloodshot. “You asked yesterday morning. I said she still had that cough.”
“We didn’t know,” Lark told Briar, drawing him away from Rosethorn’s door. “Rosie started to complain she couldn’t breathe lying down, so we raised her and sent for a healer. Grapewell told us to make this up—he said it would ease the cough. And it does, for a while.”
“Didn’t he do anything? Didn’t he have magic? Didn’t you tell them it was for her?” demanded Briar. Something in Lark’s eyes scared him badly.
“The healers are at the last of their strength, I bet,” said Tris. “They’ve got to be careful with how they spend it. And maybe her body resists whatever they do. Osprey says that happens a lot, when people keep getting treated with magic.”
Lark nodded.
Briar stared at Tris. How could she be so cold? This was Rosethorn in trouble, not a street rat, not some pampered lady who thought she was dying when she sneezed.
Tris’s gray eyes met his, and Briar stepped back. There was something in them that made even him a little afraid. She had learned to grip her feelings: that didn’t mean she had no feelings at all.
“Sandry’s looking for a healer,” Lark told Briar. “Someone with more juice in him than Dedicate Grapewell.” She didn’t even smile at the almost-pun. “Rosie’s fever’s up again—that willowbark tea might as well be water.” Her fingers trembled. “She may have pneumonia. Grapewell listened to her chest, and I know he didn’t like the sound. I listened early this morning. It’s crackling, like bacon on the stove.”
“Where’s the willowbark?” asked Briar. “I’ll give it a boost.”
“On her windowsill,” Lark replied.
Briar went into Rosethorn’s room and found the teapot. He was so intent on pouring magic into its contents, raising the willow’s power as much as he could, that he didn’t hear Rosethorn at first. It was only when he poured the tea into a cup and turned around that he realized she’d been calling, her voice hardly more than a squeak.
“Sorry,” she apologized when he came to her. “If I talk louder, I cough.”
“So don’t talk,” he ordered sternly. “Drink this.” He helped her to sit up as Lark had done. The hard knobs of her spine pressed into his shoulder. She was too thin! What did she have to fight pneumonia with?
Rosethorn pushed the cup away. “Tired,” she squeaked. “But sleep doesn’t rest me much.” She pressed against his shoulder, letting him know she wanted to lean back. “Crane?” she asked when she was comfortable.
“Stupid me,” he muttered, taking her hand. This way we don’t have to risk you coughing, he began, and stopped, horrified. Her power, vastly greater than his, was down to embers, and fading.
Out, she said firmly, and tugged her hand from his. “You don’t want to be tangled with me, if … you just don’t,” she squeaked, her fever-bright eyes holding his. “Go. Let me rest.”
Briar ran from the room to find Sandry talking to Lark, hanging on her teacher’s arm as she panted. She’d been running. “—two to three healers each, and they won’t budge,” she said, gasping. “They’re brewing cures and watching whole wards and everyone else is in Summersea. Everyone! I told them how sick she is, but they said unless we bring her in they can’t see her. And Lark, it’s all second-raters here, I checked. They figure most of our people are mages to start with, so—” Daja pushed a cup of water at Sandry. The noble released Lark and grabbed it, gulping the contents.
“The strongest healer-mages have gone to Summersea,” Lark finished grimly. “Well, she’s too badly off—second-raters won’t do.”
“She’s dying,” Briar announced, his voice shaking. “I looked inside her. She needs the best they got, Lark.”
“But you have to be wrong—she was fine yesterday morning,” argued Daja.
“Except she never lost the cough. There’s people in the infirmaries who are all better—they’re going home,” Sandry reminded Daja.
Tris protested, “Briar’s not a healer, you could be wrong—”
“Almost all her magic is gone,” he said flatly. “Clean gone.”
Lark held up a hand for silence. They gave it, letting her think. Sandry watched her, knowing how dire the situation was. Only yesterday she had seen Lark work her most powerful charms to keep Rosethorn safe. Not two hours before Tris and Briar had returned, when Sandry had brought fresh linens to the sickroom, she had discovered Lark weeping, her charms in her lap. All of them had fallen to pieces, unable to work in the face of Rosethorn’s disease.
“Well,” Lark said at last, “I’ll have to find Moonstream, that’s all.”
“Moonstream?” asked Daja. “She’ll order a healer to come?”
Lark shook her head. “She started as a healer. I bet she’s at full strength. I’ll track her down. That may be difficult.” She looked at the four. “One of you will stay with her at all times? Alert, and on guard?” They nodded. “Fetch one of our healers if she gets worse.” Her face hardened. “I don’t care what you do to persuade them to come.”
That, more than anything, told them how frightened Lark was. To threaten a healer …
We’ll just hope it doesn’t come to that, Sandry remarked through their magic. Hope really hard—
Because if it does come to that, we will get one here, Daja said with grim promise.
Lark shook out her habit. “Whatever happens, if she—” The woman swallowed, her mouth trembling. “If she actually goes, don’t put your magic in her. Under any circumstances. You can’t come back from that. No power can bring you back. Do you hear me?”
The girls all nodded vigorously.
“Moonstream,” Lark said firmly, and left the house.
Briar’s tea brought Rosethorn’s fever down briefly. It never touched her cough. She continued to doze. He sat with her first, watching intently, praying to any gods that might listen. He would not fail Rosethorn as he had Flick.
An hour and a half after her departure, Lark returned, leading a horse. “Moonstream’s in the city. We sent a messenger bird to Duke’s Citadel, just in case, but her assistant
doesn’t believe she’s there. I’m going to look. Crane’s with me, and Frostpine and Kirel. We’ll split up once we reach the Mire.” Tris looked outside and saw the men waiting there, all on horseback. Lark continued, “I found Dedicate Sealwort at the main infirmary. He’ll be here as soon as he can, to sit with her.”
“Go,” Sandry urged. “Go, go.”
“Start praying,” whispered Daja as Lark and the men rode off.
Sandry was on watch the first hour after Lark went to the city; Tris was next. Rosethorn dozed. Her fever began to rise during Tris’s hour, but Briar was afraid to give her more willowbark. Too much could normally irritate the stomach; he had no way to know if willow laden with all the power he could call to it might not do more serious harm.
The day went from warm to hot, an early hint of summer. Sandry went into her room, keeping the door open. At first she embroidered—later she napped. Daja was up and down the attic stairs, tending both the house altar and the incense and candles on her own small family shrine. Each time she checked her candles, she prayed, asking the spirits of her drowned parents and siblings not to let Rosethorn into the ships that carried the dead to paradise. Briar dozed at the table and checked on Rosethorn every few minutes. He knew he irritated Tris, who was officially on duty, but for once the hot-tempered girl kept her silence.
At last Tris came out of Rosethorn’s room and poked Briar’s shoulder. He woke.
“Now it’s your turn,” she informed him.
“Thanks,” he muttered. “That Sealwort—he still ain’t here.” Before he went in, he poured a dipper of water over his head and face. It helped to wake him. The warm day had acted almost like poppy syrup on a boy who was short of sleep.
Rosethorn looked no better. When her lips parted, he could hear the crackle of her lungs. Her pulse was rapid and thin under Briar’s fingers, her breaths slow and draggy. She stirred as he took her pulse and looked at him.
“Something to drink? Water or juice?” he asked, hopeful.
She shook her head.
“Come on,” he insisted. He raised her and put a cup of water to her lips.
She sipped, then turned her face away. “I just want to sleep,” she said in that scary, breathless voice. “So tired.”
The chair was not a comfortable piece of furniture; he suspected Lark chose it for that reason. The back rungs pressed his spine. The wooden edge of the seat dug into the tender muscles behind his knees. There was nothing to read, and he’d brought nothing to work on.
Come to think of it, he hadn’t so much as stuck his head into Rosethorn’s workroom in weeks. Rising quietly, he went to the window. Before the workshop had been built, that window would have granted him a view of the road and the loomhouses. Now he viewed shelves and counters in disorder. Briar winced and turned away. There was plenty for him to do there, once things calmed down.
He padded back to the chair and sat for a while more. With no window to the outdoors, the room was stuffy. He should open the workshop windows when he finished here, to get a breeze going….
He dozed, then jerked awake. How could he sleep in that chair? Wrapping his fingers lightly around Rosethorn’s hand for comfort, Briar fought with his eyelids. They drooped. He yanked them open. They fell shut as if weighted. He ought to ask Daja to take over.
No. Rosethorn was his teacher. His sister, his friend …
A sound woke him, a strangled gasp. He thrashed and fell off the chair. Rosethorn surged from her pillows, eyes starting from her head, clawing at her throat.
Seizure. The word came from nowhere. Seizure, she was having a seizure—
She was turning blue. Blue, from lack of air.
Sandry raced in, looked, and screamed for Tris and Daja. How long? she mind-spoke, frantic. How long has she been at this?
Don’t know! he retorted, and grabbed Rosethorn’s hands. He felt her mind and magic pull away, no, fall away. She dwindled in his power’s eye, as if she had gone over a long, long drop.
He did remember Lark’s warnings about being with her as she died. He remembered and ignored them. Gathering himself, he leaped after Rosethorn, seized a trailing rootlet of her power and clutched it tight.
Tucking himself into a ball, Briar Moss plummeted after his dying teacher. Desperately he threw back an arm-vine, twining it around the towering magic hidden inside the shakkan.
Sandry roused to a thud and a gagging sound. She scrambled into the sickroom in time to see Briar thrust a sun-bright flare of power into Rosethorn, a shining bridge to a place filled with shadows. That place had opened a door inside Rosethorn.
“Tris! Daja!” she screamed, and asked Briar how long Rosethorn had been unable to breathe. He didn’t know, and he didn’t care. He was gone, chasing the person he loved best into the shadows. He threw out a snaking vine of magic in his wake, letting it coil around the shakkan.
Sandrilene fa Toren took a deep breath. She too remembered Lark’s warning, but there were other issues here. Death had seized her parents and the nursemaid who was like a mother to her. It was time to make a stand. Death would not take Rosethorn. Death would not take Briar. And wasn’t it lucky she’d had some days of rest once the cure was found?
She knotted her magic briskly around Briar’s swiftly fading power and jumped into the shadows in his wake. As the darkness pulled her from the sickroom in Discipline cottage, someone—two some-ones—grabbed her hands.
Who anchors? Tris wanted to know. She briskly sank hooks of lightning into Sandry as the noble’s power stretched, a rope between the three girls and Briar. I don’t know if the shakkan will be enough to hold us all.
Who else anchors? Daja inquired calmly. As if you had to ask. Her power was at full spate, restored from her magical workings with Frostpine. Some of it she hurled into the ground like a lance, feeling it shoot through earth and rock, spreading in an almost plantlike way. She solidified that system, making roots of stone. The other end of her magic she threw around Tris, wrapping her tight.
Sandry drew strength from the chain of girls, feeling lightning roar through her magical self. Shadows jumped back as she bore down on the streaking comet that was Briar. Knotting lightning to shape a net, she threw it over the boy and pulled, until the net caught on the center of Briar’s power and held. He was not going to die. They would not let him die.
Briar knew the girls had him, had anchored him in the living world. He was glad to have their company and their strength, but if they thought he would come home without Rosethorn, they were wrong. He couldn’t let her go. He’d allowed Flick to die—wasn’t that failure enough for anybody?
Things were strange, where he was. Sounds and images that were haunting and familiar coursed through him and were gone before he could tell what they were. He could learn things here, he realized, important things, things that no one else knew. Just one might lead him to all he wanted; something made him sure of that. It might be riches, or every secret of growing things. Knowledge was there; he just had to pick one aspect and follow.
Something brushed his cheek. A tantalizing flower scent drew him from his path. His bond to the shakkan tugged at him, making him stop. What was he doing? None of the hints that lured him away felt like Rosethorn.
He opened his hand, inspecting the wisp of her that he’d grabbed when they started to fall. Now he stood in his own skin, or something that felt enough like it to be comfortable. His feet—bare, as they’d been for most of his life—pressed flat gray cobblestones on a gray street in a gray city. There were no windows in the towering citadels all around him, no doors. There wasn’t a hint of green anywhere he looked, and no other people. He did see other streets, hundreds of them. They opened onto the dull avenue where he stood.
How was he supposed to find Rosethorn? Even weeds or hedges or the tiniest bit of moss would know Rosethorn’s name and murmur it to him. This gray maze was dead.
Not entirely. Sandry’s magical voice was a thin whisper. He could feel her straining to hold onto him. We aren’t d
ead, which means you aren’t.
He turned. A shining rope stretched to infinity behind him. Groping his back with a hand, he discovered it turned into a web of fibers that entered him in a hundred places. In it he could feel the girls.
I ain’t coming back without her, he said regretfully.
We never asked you to, Sandry retorted. Look at that thread you have in your hand. I bet she’s at the other end.
Briar looked. She was right. Wrapping it around his fingers, he began to follow it.
Something jarred her. Tris looked back to the magical blaze that was Daja. What’s going on? she demanded. I don’t need any diversions, you know!
Sorry, Daja said sheepishly. People are shaking me, trying to make me let go.
Well, tell them to stop, snapped Tris. We’re busy!
Sandry murmured to Tris.
Sandry says, tell them if they break our rope, they’ll lose us all.
Daja obeyed. The jarring stopped.
Better, said Tris. She renewed her grip on Sandry and on Daja, and waited.
He walked forever. Every time he stopped, to catch his breath or to massage his aching feet, visions and sounds flowed over him, trying to distract him. They would make him let go—he would never see Rosethorn or the girls again.
“Tempt somebody else,” he growled.
He might have thought he was on a giant wheel, walking around and around inside it without getting anywhere, except that the ball of thread from Rosethorn got bigger in his hands. When it was the size of a peach, and he’d found a blister on his right foot, he noticed something else: a sprout of grass between cobblestones.
He knelt and brushed it with his fingertips. “Am I ever glad to see you,” he told it. Getting up, he walked on. He saw another blade of grass, then a tuft of it. Touching the slender leaves, he realized the fluffs of temptation had left him after he greeted that first grass shoot.
