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“Say nothing,” Rosethorn murmured. Briar flinched. “Our soldiers have orders to keep the villagers away from the river or they’ll panic. We’re only a mile from the temple.”
“What if the temple’s under attack?” Briar asked. “What if imperial soldiers are there already?”
Rosethorn shook her head. “Scouts came to tell us all’s safe. The dead are coming from west of there. No one’s been reported on the south side of the river.”
“You aren’t still going on alone!”
“I’ll be fine,” Rosethorn said. “You stay with Parahan and Souda and do as you’re told, understand? They know more of war than you do.”
Briar glared at her.
“When we go home, I am giving Vedris a big hug and kiss,” Rosethorn remarked. “I never appreciated what a fine ruler he is before we made this journey.”
“Me neither,” Briar agreed. “There’s a lot to be said for a king who isn’t greedy.”
They rode together in silence, trying not to look at the other bodies that came down the river. At last they reached the two bridges at the meeting of the Tom Sho and the Snow Serpent Rivers. The temple rose on a rocky hill high above both of them. Their people didn’t wait. Soldiers and villagers streamed across the Tom Sho Bridge on their way up the hill.
Rosethorn leaned across the space between her mount and Briar’s to kiss him on the cheek. “Travel safe, travel well,” she told him. “We’ll see each other soon enough. It takes more than the likes of Weishu to come between my boy and me.”
Parahan rode over to wait with Briar as Rosethorn crossed the Snow Serpent Bridge alone. She looked small and lonely as she followed the lesser road away from them.
“I should go with her,” Briar said, gathering up his reins. “Someone will see her by herself like that —”
Parahan grabbed his arm. Slowly, from the edges in, Rosethorn and her horse disappeared from sight. All that remained was an empty road.
FORT SAMBACHU, GYONGXE
Evvy soon learned that it was one thing to be the companion of Rosethorn and Briar, the nanshurs from the west, and quite another entirely to be a student nanshur of eastern blood who had been left behind without them. For her first day after her friends’ departure, she had slept, eaten, explored, slept, and eaten some more. Even the cats were happy to laze and stuff themselves. On the second day she wandered among the refugees who were coming in from the villages on the eastern hills and plain. Unlike Briar or Rosethorn, she could do that without inspiring awe or fear. Here near the border, her Yanjingyi face was common enough to cause no extra interest. She admired babies, helped the families to settle in the fort’s empty rooms and sheds, and — when no one was looking — shored up crumbling walls in the rooms by packing the pieces they had lost back into the crevices. On the third day she wandered idly between the buildings, sending gravel and larger stones to fill in cracks.
It was when she looked at the fortress walls that she began to worry. They were not as solid as they ought to be. She started at the gate. There were gaps between the wooden frame and the wall that surrounded it. This close to the mountains, the builders had used stone in the walls instead of the brick preferred by house builders, to Evvy’s great approval. If she was to make repairs, she could do more with stone. She would need to do a great deal to make up for all this neglect and age.
Shaking her head, she climbed up to the battlements for a look around. Things were no better here. There were holes in the plaster on the walkway where running men could easily trip. Brick edging in the crenels had fallen away: Soldiers leaning out for a look below could slip on gravel or crumbling plaster and fall to their deaths. Anxious, she began to usher loose stones into the gaps on the walkway until one of Captain Rana’s mages caught her.
“You are a student!” he shouted. “Students do not practice magic without their teachers!”
“My teachers let me do the magic I’m best at!” Evvy shouted in return. “I don’t need a teacher for filling in gaps!”
The mage marched her straight down to Captain Rana’s office. They had to wait as the captain listened to complaints from refugees ahead of them in line. Finally he gave them his full attention.
The mage stood haughtily straight. “I caught this student practicing magic, unsupervised, without permission, on the wall. She was meddling with the walkway. She could have destroyed everything!”
“I am certain that she did not. I am familiar with her skills. You may go,” the captain said.
“But, sir —”
“Dismissed,” the captain said firmly. The mage stalked off, and the captain sighed. “Evvy, you can’t carry on here as you did with Briar and Rosethorn to back you up.”
“But you knew I didn’t do any harm! And the walls here need shoring up!” cried Evvy. “I can pack stone into the holes so tight it’ll be as if there’s new rock in place!”
“A few holes in plaster do not mean the fort will collapse,” the captain said patiently. “I have seen your work. I was impressed, but I am not prepared to do battle with my mages every time you want to fuss with things. This fort has stood for centuries.”
“It shows.”
Rana held up a hand. “We can use some more of those glowing stones you made on our journey,” he said kindly. “Why don’t you do that? It will help us save torches, and you’ll be useful.” Firmly he added, “That will be all, Evvy. Try to stay out from underfoot.”
Like the mage, she knew she had been dismissed. She stomped back to her room to sulk for the rest of the day. She made several handfuls of her spare pieces of quartz glow, then go dark again, just to be spiteful. Finally, knowing Briar and Rosethorn would both raise their eyebrows at her if they knew she was carrying on, she made them glow again. She put them in a basket and carried them out to the gate, where the sergeant in charge of the watch could be found.
“Captain Rana wants these,” she announced, and left the basket at the astonished man’s feet. Without another word she climbed up to the southern wall. Several of the guards saw her, but they were from Rana’s company and knew her. They nodded and left her alone. For the rest of the night she listened to the mountains sing.
A few of the tones almost made sense, she thought as she listened. One was water trickling over rock. Another was water streaming over it, and another was water roaring over it. That tone was rain falling on stone. She thought one might be snow falling on granite, but she would have to be closer to granite during a snowfall to be sure. There was a click that had to be a mountain goat setting a hoof on limestone, and a long, soft brush that she would bet was a snow leopard’s tail passing over gravel. But what was that metal scrape on granite, the tone that wavered? And the ringing clop like horseshoes in a cave, but not exactly?
A guard sent her to her room finally. Her cats curled around and on her. Monster’s cheeping mew of worry intruded on her thoughts and she petted him to comfort him. Ball settled between her shoulder and ear and purred loudly as if to drown out the mountains’ singing. She couldn’t do it; Evvy could hear them even in her room now. Apricot and Raisin covered her feet, Mystery her belly, and Ria curled inside the curve of her free arm. Asa settled on top of her head. Their combined purrs led her into sleep. She dreamed of the Sun Queen’s husbands. The cats climbed the mountains and laughed at her for not going with them.
Perhaps that was why, after feeding them and letting them out in the fort’s grounds to do their business in the morning, she took a small pack, filled it with dumplings and a water bottle from the fort’s mess kitchen, and strolled out of the rear gate. “Don’t go too far,” the guard cautioned her. “And if you hear a trumpet, come running.”
She nodded and ambled on. The herd boys had already gone out with the villagers’ goats, sheep, and yaks. Everyone felt safe with the southern mountains at their backs and the massive wall of thorny vines blocking Snow Serpent Pass in the east. She’d heard the soldiers say that by the time any Yanjingyi warriors came over the plain, everyone
would be inside the fort with the gates closed and barred.
Evvy meant to go only as far as a ridge she could see from the southern walkway. It was home to a waterfall that fed the little river by the fort. She would take her lunch there, listen to the mountains a while, and return.
It was a glorious day. The sun warmed all the stone surfaces around her as she walked. She inhaled the air, scented with granite, limestone, and quartzite. The mountains’ chorus rang out in her ears, louder than the cries of the eagles and the singing of the smaller birds, louder even than the waterfall as she approached it.
The trees at the foot of the waterfall hid a canyon on the other side of the small river. Exploration would have been out of the question had a large pine not lain across the water, forming a perfect bridge. Evvy looked up at the ridge, where she had planned to have lunch, then down at the fort and the plain. There was no sign of any horsemen or trouble. She climbed onto the pine and across the river.
The canyon led her deeper into the stone reaches at the mountain’s foot. It made an echo chamber for the birds and the singing. Evvy felt like she was inside magic. She finally stopped for lunch by the creek that ran along the canyon floor, ravenous after her morning’s explorations. She was ready to swear that the mountain husbands and the Sun Queen herself sang to her as she took a nap.
Then she was yanked out of pleasant dreams. Soldiers in Yanjingyi uniforms grabbed her and bound her hands tightly behind her back. When she screamed, she was slapped. “Are there any more of you out here?” one of them demanded. “Speak up! Are any more of you out here?”
Evvy kicked and caught him on the thigh. She twisted her head and savagely bit one of the soldiers who held her. He cuffed her so hard she saw light flashes inside her head. The man she’d kicked grabbed her legs and tied them.
“Who else is with you?” he demanded.
She fell back on Chammuri to tell him what his mother ate for breakfast. He lifted her and dumped her over his armored shoulder. When she screamed, he pinched her leg hard and said in tiyon, “Silence, or you’ll wish you were as dead as my mother.”
Evvy called to the canyon rocks. They began to fall. Men shrieked as they were battered by the stony rain.
“Well,” someone out of her view said, “this is where she got to. You will talk eventually, Evumeimei Dingzai, but in a more comfortable setting.” A hand thrust a bottle of something smelly under her nose. Evvy tried to turn her face away, but the bottle was too close. Fog traveled up her nose and into her brain.
When she awoke, a man was bending over her. She yanked away only to discover she could not move from the neck down. They had taken her clothes and tied her to a table. Her legs were raised on a board above her hips and tied at the ankles so her bare toes pointed back toward her head. She couldn’t move her feet.
Her mouth was dry. She wanted to scream; she wanted to weep, but she would give these snot-suckers neither of those things.
The soldier who leaned over her wore the tan tunic and breeches of a regular foot soldier in the Yanjingyi army. “Here’s water.” He supported her head as he put a cup to her lips. Evvy drank the liquid greedily. “If you want my advice, girl, you’ll answer any questions you’re asked. Otherwise they’ll torture you. Nobody is hard enough to take that.”
“Why do you baby her?” Another soldier sat on a chair by Evvy’s feet. He stood. Like the other man, he wore the tan uniform. This one had an untidy mustache and carried a leather strap in one hand. “She’s going to get the full treatment sooner or later.” He drew back his arm and slapped the soles of Evvy’s feet with the strap, hard.
The pain shot through her like fire. She gasped, then bit her lip.
“Please, take my advice,” the soldier next to her head whispered. “Tell him what he wants to know.” He looked at the other man. “She’s just a girl! Ask your questions — you don’t have to hit her!”
“You’re an idiot, Musheng. Why are we here if we don’t teach them respect for the emperor? She came to this country to carry information against him and fight for his enemies, didn’t you, Evumeimei Dingzai?” He struck Evvy’s feet with his strap again. She screamed and tried to imagine a stone where she could keep her secrets. She had done so before. Another blow, or two, might make her blurt out something important, like where the others had gone, or the thing that Rosethorn carried. That was the problem with being quick with her tongue. Sometimes she spoke before she thought. She couldn’t do that now.
The soldier Musheng took Evvy’s hand and clasped it tightly. “Dawei, she could be your daughter!” He looked at Evvy. “Please, child. You came here with three companions, Briar, Rosethorn, and a dangerous slave, Parahan. Tell us where they are. We’ll have a mage see to your feet —”
“Let them heal like my arm had to heal when the northerners poured boiling oil on it!” snapped Dawei. He drew the strap lightly across Evvy’s burning, bleeding feet, making her flinch.
“A mage will tend your wounds,” Musheng said with a glare at Dawei. “But my captain won’t allow it unless you tell us what we need to know. These people abandoned you here when they knew trouble was coming, didn’t they? You don’t owe them anything.”
Evvy didn’t listen. She had the stone in her mind. Inside it she hid her cats, and her friends and where they went: Rosethorn and the thing she carried, Briar and the soldiers moving the villagers to safety, Dokyi and his lonely journey to Garmashing. Souda vanished inside the stone as well. Maybe these zernamuses didn’t already know she had come to Gyongxe with two hundred soldiers. Finally she blinked at Musheng. “What people?”
Dawei snorted. “That’s what you get for your kindness! Insolence! A Zhanzhi gutter rat lies to you about information she knows perfectly well you already have!” He slapped the strap harder over the soles of Evvy’s feet twice, grinning at her screams. “Tell him the names of your companions, and apologize!”
“I don’t know their names anymore,” she said.
Musheng sighed. “Why don’t you know their names, Evumeimei?”
“They told us she was a mage student,” Dawei said. “She did some magic.”
“Forgetting things is a high degree of magic for a student,” Musheng said. “I think you’re lying to us. Girl, you don’t help yourself this way.”
Evvy didn’t answer. Now she was trying to think her feet to stone. She had done it before. Someone — she couldn’t remember who — had told her to imagine herself as stone, though he’d woken her just as she had it worked out. That part she remembered.
Dawei lashed her again. She lost the feeling of stone. Pain washed up her legs in bloodred waves.
“Tell the emperor you have me,” she whispered. She remembered the emperor. “He likes me. He gave me a cinnabar cat.”
“Who do you think sent us in search of you and your friends?” Musheng wiped her face with a cold cloth. “Where are they, Evumeimei?”
“I want my clothes,” Evvy said. Her feet throbbed. In spite of herself tears trickled from the corners of her eyes. They ran into her ears. How could feet hurt so much? “I feel bad without any clothes.”
“You don’t need clothes,” Dawei told her. “Talk, and you’ll get them back.” He looked at Musheng. “She ought to have said something useful by now.”
Musheng nodded. “Let’s see what the mage thinks.”
Dawei scowled. “It’s past midnight. She hates to be woken up.”
“She’ll want to know the girl hasn’t talked, late hour or no. Wake her.”
Dawei left the room. Musheng leaned against the wall. “If I were you, I’d tell Nanshur Jia Jui what she wants to know, right away. She isn’t patient like Dawei.”
Jia Jui — she knew that name, but she wasn’t sure where she knew it from. She thought Jia Jui was another friend of hers who had cats. It was hard to think when she hurt so badly. “I don’t know what you want,” Evvy said. “I wouldn’t tell you if I did, but I don’t.”
“They were at this fort with you,” Mushen
g said. “The other prisoners told us that much. They said the First Dedicate of the Living Circle temple was here, too. Dokyi left before they did. What did he want?”
When he said “Dokyi,” Evvy saw a stone in her mind. “I don’t know,” she said, trying not to whine. “Would you put water on my feet?” It was hard to concentrate on making them feel like stone when they burned so badly. “Really, I’m just a kid. Why would these people you’re talking about tell me anything?”
“You’re a baby goat?”
That confused her. “I — I heard it somewhere. It’s street talk for somebody young.”
“Kid or no, you’re a prisoner now,” Musheng said. “Tell me something that Nanshur Jia Jui will think is useful and I’ll pour water on your feet. I had mine lashed once. I know how much it hurts.” He sighed and drank some water. “None of the villagers or soldiers we questioned knew why First Dedicate Dokyi was here, but you were with Rosethorn. He talked to her for a long time. Tell me what he wanted, and I’ll help you.”
“Anything to report?” A beautiful young woman entered the room with Dawei just behind him. She wore a bed robe of soft peach silk rather than a mage’s usual black robes and hat. There were no mage beads on her neck or wrists.
“She is very stubborn, Nanshur Jia Jui,” Musheng replied, bowing deeply. “She did not respond to the strap or to kindness.”
Evvy’s thinking, sluggish with pain and the effort she needed to maintain the stone around some of her memories, finally placed the young woman. “Jia Jui,” she mumbled. “Where are your cats?”
Jia Jui smiled as she bent over Evvy. “You remember me. That is good. Sadly, my cats are at home. They are too unhappy when I travel. But I understand you dragged your poor cats all the way here.”
Evvy frowned. “They’re used to traveling. Why are you in Gyongxe?”
