Battle Magic

1

OUTSIDE THE WALLS OF GARMASHING, CAPITAL OF GYONGXE

IN THE CANYON OF THE TOM SHO RIVER

FAR TO THE EAST OF WINDING CIRCLE TEMPLE

IN THE MONTH OF CARP MOON

Two boy-men sat on the river’s eastern bank, where an open-fronted tent gave them shelter from the chilly spring wind. It whistled down the canyon, making the banners around them snap.

Briar Moss was the older of the two, sixteen and a fully accredited mage of the Living Circle school in Emelan. He was the foreigner, his skin a light shade of bronze, his nose long and thin, his eyes a startling gray-green in this land of brown-eyed easterners. He wore a green silk quilted tunic patterned with light green willow leaves, gold-brown quilted breeches, and the calf-high soft boots that were popular in the mountains. He sat cross-legged on cushions with a traveling desk on his lap, but his eyes were fixed just now on the events across the river.

There five shamans from the Skipping Mountain Goat Tribe stood before a sheer rock face on the cliff opposite Briar and his companion. Crouched near to the shamans were two horn players, a drummer, and three players of singing bowls. The musicians sounded their instruments. Briar would not call what they produced “music.” The shamans — three men and two women in dark brown homespun robes — shuffled, turned, and hopped, ringing the small cymbals that were fixed to their hands. As they did, Briar started to feel a quiver under his rump. The longer the shamans danced, the more pronounced the quiver grew.

“What are they doing?” he asked the boy who sat nearby. “Aren’t you worried?”

The God-King looked up from his own desk. The ruler of Gyongxe was an eleven-year-old boy with the ruddy bronze skin, long brown eyes, and short, wide nose of his people. He was dressed even more simply than the shamans in an undyed, black-bordered long-sleeved tunic, undyed quilted breeches, and black boots. Like most Gyongxin boys and girls, he wore his shiny black hair cut very short, with one exception. From the moment he had been chosen as God-King, he had grown the hair at the crown of his head long. He wore it in a braid, strung with rings of precious metals or semiprecious stones, each a symbol of the eleven gods he served. He also wore eleven earrings, six in one ear, and five in the other, made of the same materials.

“Why should I be worried? I told you what they’re doing,” the God-King reminded Briar. “They’re calling a statue for their temple out of the cliff. It does involve a little bit of shaking.”

Briar looked at the ink in the dish by his side. It quivered, too. “What if the cliff falls on us?” he demanded. “How do you know they’re doing it right?”

The God-King chuckled. “They always do it right. That’s why there’s more than one dancer, so if one gets a step wrong, the others correct for it. People have been getting statues from Gyongxe’s stone for generations, Briar. They haven’t pulled the cliffs down yet.” He nodded to a waiting messenger and held up a hand for that young woman’s scroll.

Briar scowled at the river, then at the dancing shamans. “This kind of religion is too odd for me,” he muttered to himself.

He looked at the group of people near the shamans, trying to spot his student, Evvy. There she was with some of the local stone mages and the warriors who had escorted the shamans. Evvy was standing far too close to the cliff for Briar’s liking. Suddenly he grinned. First Dedicate Dokyi, head of Gyongxe’s Living Circle temple and a stone mage himself, wound a big fist in Evvy’s tunic and gently towed her back from the cliff. Ever since Briar and his companions had arrived in Garmashing between blizzards four months ago, the busy First Dedicate had made time in his day to instruct Evvy. That morning he had told Briar that he, too, wanted to see how the shamans worked — it was very different from the way the scholar-mages did their magic — and so it would be his pleasure also to keep an eye on Evvy.

Briar was grateful. Evvy had frustrated the few other Earth dedicates they had met who specialized in stone magic. Like Dokyi, they worked their magic with charts, books, and spoken words, letting the magic they were born with pass through stones that responded. Evvy, like Briar and Briar’s mentor Dedicate Rosethorn, drew her magic directly from the outside world. Stones gave Evvy her power, just as plants gave their magic to Briar and Rosethorn. Dokyi at least had spent years with the shamans and in other lands. He could adjust to a mage who worked in a different way. He could show Evvy the books, charms, and spells of stone magic that could strengthen what she did. He could also sense when she tried to experiment on her own and stop her before things got out of hand. His special stones helped him with that.

“Should I make Evvy come here?” Briar asked the God-King, who was reading his message scroll.

“Hmm?” The younger boy looked up and grinned. “Let her stay. Dokyi can handle her. Ah, they make progress.”

If “progress” meant “more noise,” Briar agreed. Small rocks and sand fell down the cliff face, though nothing appeared to land on the shamans, musicians, or other mages who waited there. Briar suspected that Evvy was sending the stones away from the people, particularly when he saw one large rock arc away from the cliff to drop in the river.

Needing something to occupy his hands, Briar picked up one of a number of stones that Evvy had left with him before she had crossed the river with Dokyi. She was always collecting bits of rock and handing them to him or Rosethorn while she gathered more. Before they moved on there would be a painful session at which she would have to choose the pieces she could not do without and those she would have to abandon.

After nearly two years in Evvy’s company, Briar knew limestone when he held it. The surprise lay in the image embedded deep in its surface: a curved section of leaf much like a fern. Interestingly, it was unlike any fern that Briar knew — and after five years of Rosethorn’s teaching, he knew many. He stared at the cliff across the river, not really noticing the twenty-foot-tall rectangular crack that was writing itself into the rock face.

As he would if the fossil were a living plant, Briar reached for it with his magic, only to find nothing. The limestone held an image, but no remainder of the plant that had left it. Briar glared at it and reached for another piece of stone. It was unmarked, but the third rock he examined gripped a fossil much like a sardine.

“This is a sea fish,” Briar muttered. Life near the docks from early childhood had taught him the look of salt- and freshwater fish, flesh and bone.

“Eons ago all the Gyongxin flatland was a sea,” murmured the God-King. Slowly he straightened. His pen fell from his hand. “Then the Drimbakang mountain gods were born. They shoved their molten bodies up against the shore and dragged the Realms of the Sun with them.” He said it as if chanting an ancient tale, half awake, half sleeping.

Briar tried not to shiver. It felt as if every hair on his body were standing.

The God-King continued in that unearthly voice. “Higher they drove the shores and the sea. Greater they grew, the youngest gods, clawing at the sky, rising toward the Sun and the Moon and the Stars. When they could grow no more, when they stood taller than any other mountain gods, the sea drained away between them, seeking its ocean mother. The immense shoreline forests of palm, cactus, and fern withered. Only firs, spruces, larches, junipers, and hemlocks thrive here, and rarely on the open plateau. Here the gods see everything. Gyongxe has nowhere to hide from the gods of this world.” He slumped. Briar was almost afraid to breathe until the younger boy blinked and straightened. Rubbing the back of his neck he looked at Briar sheepishly. “Did I go off? They never give me any warning, you know. I’ve told them and told them that it frightens people when they grab me, but gods and spirits don’t really understand fear.”

“Do they do that to you often?” Briar whispered, goose bumps rippling all across his skin.

“Often enough. The land is crowded with them, what with one thing and another, and I can never tell when one of them will work through me.”

A large crash split the air. The God-King jumped to his feet with a whoop. “There we go!” he cried as if he had just won a wager.

Briar remembered what had brought them to this cold ledge on a chilly morning. Setting aside the boy’s tale to ponder later, he looked across the river.

Rock tumbled from a rectangular hole at least twenty feet high in the cliff’s face, cascading around a solid shape at its center. The shamans continued to dance and the musicians to play as they backed toward the place where Evvy and the other observers stood. Briar whistled in silent admiration: He knew he couldn’t dance and walk backward, yet the shamans and their musical helpers never faltered. Only Evvy moved, walking forward around the line of shamans. Dokyi lunged to grab her again and missed. Evvy took a place on the riverbank, in front of whatever was going on in the cliff, and held out her hands.

Briar fought to stand, spilling the tray of ink. He ignored it, but he could not ignore it when the God-King grabbed one of his arms.

“Stop,” the younger boy ordered in a voice that froze Briar where he stood. “She will be fine. Watch.”

He released Briar, who instantly found he could move again. Rather than continue to try to reach his student, Briar waited.

He wasn’t quite sure if Evvy made any noise. The racket caused by the grinding, collapsing wall of rocks drowned out any other sound except, of course, for the God-King’s voice. Briar wondered if Evvy might not be chanting a spell, though. He knew she was working her magic, because the tumbling rock split on either side of the opening it made, like curtains before a window. That was pure Evvy. Neat piles of broken stone grew from the falling rock on either side of the rectangular gap in the cliff. At its heart stood a pair of embracing, human-like, stone skeletons. As the heaped boulders and chips in front of them shifted to either side, the twenty-foot-tall skeletons walked out of the cliff.

Evvy wavered. She was trying to do too much at once. Worried, Briar stepped up to the edge where the tent was pitched, then halted again. Dokyi had reached the girl. He stood next to Evvy, writing signs on the air as he worked spells of his own. She straightened, able to control the falling stone again with Dokyi’s help.

The skeletons, which had paused when she seemed about to fall over, resumed their walk away from the cliff. One of the two skulls looked curiously at Evvy and Dokyi while the other scanned the riverside behind them, the gap in the cliff, and then the shamans and their musicians. An arm from that skeleton reached around to tap the skull that had cocked its head as it stared at Evvy. When that skull turned to glare at the other, the tapping hand pointed to the shamans. Both skeletons lumbered toward the dancers.

Briar looked at the God-King. “What are they for, the statues? I don’t think you said.”

The God-King squinted at the dancing skeletons. “Such things are a promise from this realm to those who build their temples here. They are our blessing on the temples, and a sign of our protection. They tell invaders that the temple is guarded by the gods of Gyongxe as well as the gods of the temple where the statues stand.”

Seemingly unafraid and without missing a step, the dancers and musicians continued to back up, dancing or playing as they went. The warriors mounted horses to form a half circle around them. Other members of their group that handled the wagon they had brought helped the musicians into it. As smoothly as if they often traveled this way, the warriors and wagon set off in the lead, their half circle ending with the dancers just inside. The two skeletons, arms around each other’s stone spine waist, came last of all.

Dokyi turned to Evvy and bent until they were face-to-face. He grabbed her by the ears and pressed his forehead to hers. Briar wasn’t sure if he was trying to scold Evvy or just knock two rock heads together. Thinking that he ought to intervene before Evvy said or did something rude, he turned to excuse himself to the God-King. The boy was scowling at the message he had just received.

“You don’t look very happy,” Briar said.

“I have not heard from the king of Inxia.” That was the realm to the northeast, a country that stood between Gyongxe and the Yanjing empire. “I often do by now. Our mages who deal in conversations at a distance have not heard from his mages in several months. No horse messengers have come through the Green Pass, either.”

“It is only the third month of the year,” Briar reminded him. “It’s probably frozen solid.”

The God-King gave him an absentminded smile. “The Green Pass is in hill country, beyond the mountains of the Drimbakang Sharlog. Usually it is open by this time, though the weather has been very harsh in the hills this year.” He stopped speaking as he stared off into the distance.

Briar waited longer than he would have waited for anyone else to resume talking. When he was sure the God-King had simply forgotten what he’d begun to explain, Briar asked, “So what has this Inxia fellow to do with how well you’ll sleep tonight?” He could tell the God-King was worried.

“All three kingdoms north of Yanjing have been fighting the empire for the last five years,” the God-King explained. “Since Inxia is our closest neighbor, we have sent mages and soldiers to their assistance for four of those years. We should have heard what they will need for this year’s fighting by now.”

Briar nodded. Now he understood. “Because if Inxia falls, Gyongxe is next.”

“I would like to think not,” the younger boy replied, but he did not sound convinced. “We have very little to interest the Emperor Weishu. Except the gods and spirits, who are closer here than anywhere else in the world, and you can’t pay soldiers with those. There are the temple treasures, but surely Weishu’s mages do not believe they can take the curses from temple goods. We do spread word that there are curses on anything stolen from the temples of Gyongxe, and we cannot remove them.” The God-King sighed. “I would feel better if I knew the Yanjingyi armies were denting their teeth on my neighbors again this year.”

A surge of pity raced through Briar’s heart at the expression on the God-King’s face. That’s not the look any boy his age ought to wear, thought Briar. I’d even feel sorry for a man of twice my years in his shoes.

It was at moments like these that Briar understood why the gods of Gyongxe had told their priests to choose this boy to rule over the many different tribes, villages, cities, faiths, and temples of Gyongxe. There was something great inside the God-King; something larger than Briar was. He wouldn’t have spent a day in the God-King’s skin for all the pretty girls between there and home.

“Briar, did you see it?” While they had talked politics and war, the rest of the statue-raising party had crossed the river bridge to join the God-King’s group. Evvy raced over to the tent. The pockets of her orange wool tunic sagged with what Briar knew were more stone fragments. “You aren’t even looking!”

“We watched the statue raising,” the God-King told her. “I’ve seen such things before, you know. Briar was impressed.”

“I was,” Briar assured the girl.

Evvy stopped at the open doorway and bowed to the God-King, then braced her hands on her knees while she struggled to catch her breath. They had been in high mountain country for nearly two years, but Evvy and Briar would struggle with the thin air if they tried to run. Rosethorn had trouble breathing all of the time. Although their entire journey had been Rosethorn’s idea, she had been forced to spend much of it resting. She had chosen to work on the spring gardens instead of taking the awkward journey down the cliff into the river canyon with Briar and Evvy that morning. Briar looked forward to getting back to lowlands again, so his Rosethorn could breathe more easily.

“Could you see what I did?” Evvy demanded. “I kept the scrap rock from falling on anyone!” She grabbed the pack she had left with Briar and emptied her stones into it. “Do you know it’s going to take them at least ten days to walk back to their home temple? They only had the five shamans who could do the spell, so there’s no one to keep the magic going at night. If they aren’t dancing, the statues won’t move. They’re going to be awfully tired — the shamans, not the statues. I offered to clean up the loose rock, but Dokyi said the Drimbakang Zugu have their own way of dealing with it. What does that mean?” She gathered the stones she’d left with Briar and stowed them in her pack as well.

Evumeimei Dingzai was a skinny former slave who never missed a meal if she could help it. She was five feet tall with a strong Yanjingyi face: wide cheekbones, sharp chin, and long black eyes. Briar liked to tease her that she’d smacked her face into a door once, since her nose was flat at the tip. Her hands and nails showed scars and scratches from two years of hard work as a stone mage and a lifetime as a cat owner. He had found her scraping for a living in a slum. Although her magic was different from his, he had learned that he would not give her up to a teacher of her own power who would be unkind to her.

The God-King stood and moved off the giant pillow where he and Briar had spent the morning. “Wait a moment, Evumeimei.”

Evvy scowled. From the very beginning the God-King had treated her as a beloved sister. She had soon lost any shyness she could be expected to feel in his presence. “You always tell me to wait. I’ll have you know I am older than you —”

“I am the two hundred and ninety-eighth God-King in a straight line of choice from the first God-King,” he replied as he did whenever she brought up their difference in age. “You will have to be as old as —”

The stone beneath Briar’s feet had begun to shake. He sat hurriedly and pulled at Evvy’s arm. She signaled for the God-King to join them. Everyone outside was sitting as well.

Briar heard the kind of grinding noise that brought landslides to mind. Looking across the river, he felt his stomach roll. He clapped his hands over his mouth to keep his very good breakfast where it was supposed to be. Stones that had fallen, gravel that had dropped off a cliff, dust that had settled after the skeletons had gone for their walk belonged on the ground. All of these things had no business rising into the air in front of the gap in the cliff. None of them should be entering that gap, nor should any of the boulders on the riverbank or the stones between the water and the cliff be rolling to it and climbing over one another in their eagerness to fill in the hole left by the skeleton statues. Now more stones rattled down the slopes of the mountain that stood behind the cliff. They hesitated only briefly on the edge of the drop, then rolled over. In a maneuver that left Briar feeling as if he had been inhaling strange smokes, the new stones fell not straight down, but in a curve, dropping into the hole where the rocks from below had still left gaps. Now, except for a few openings, the rectangular space that had provided the statues was filled.

“Who did that?” Evvy cried. “Is that what Dedicate Dokyi meant when he said the mountains would clean up the loose rock?”

“That is what he meant,” the God-King said, getting to his feet. “And I am glad the work is finished. I don’t like to leave before the cleaning-up is done. There have been accidents in the past.” He went to the edge of the rock slab and held his hands out palm up. Tilting back his head, he opened his mouth. Sounds came out, spoken in something other than the tiyon language that he’d used all morning with Briar and Evvy, the common tongue of the east. These words rolled along the canyon, grating on Briar’s bones. He pulled his tunic over his ears, willing to do nearly anything to make them stop. Evvy rose, her face alight, and listened until the God-King lowered his hands.

Briar uncovered one ear. Normal sounds were returning to the canyon. He cleared his throat and got up. “What was that about?” he asked the God-King.

“I was thanking the canyon,” the younger boy replied. “The shamans did it, of course, but the little gods appreciate it when I say something, too.”

Evvy was slowly coming back to herself, her joy being replaced by her usual liveliness. Dedicate Dokyi found her as they waited for the servants to gather their tent and the cushions. He was a gnarled and sun-wrinkled man in his fifties, with dark eyes buried under heavy lids. His wide-lipped mouth, like his eyes, was framed by laugh lines. His knotted legs and muscled arms showed he was no stranger to hard work and plenty of it. Even his brown dedicate’s habit didn’t soften the hard shape of his body.

“Nicely done back there earlier, Evvy,” he said, tweaking her nose. “I don’t suppose you could teach me how you made the stones overhead fall backward into the opening?”

Evvy reached out with her hands, opened and closed them, then shook her head with regret. “I asked them to go that way,” she explained.

Dokyi looked at Briar. “She asked them. I see them as tools to be set in place along the frame of a spell pattern, and your student treats them as partners in the work.”

Briar, who asked plants to do things, smiled at the older man. At least Dokyi wasn’t hostile about the way in which Evvy worked, unlike many of the mages they had encountered in their travels.

A pigeon caught their attention as it swooped to and fro, trying to fly past them into the tent. Briar spotted the small tube bound to one of the bird’s legs and moved Evvy out of the way so the bird could fly to a landing on the God-King’s shoulder.

Servants rushed to complete the packing of the tent, as if the pigeon were a signal. Dokyi walked over to take the bird so the God-King could undo the ties around the delicate strip of paper. Once he had it, the God-King reached one hand into a pocket and brought out a selection of dried berries and seed. Dokyi took that and fed the bird as the boy read the message.

“What is it?” Evvy demanded. The silence had stretched too long for her liking.

Briar gripped one of her ears between his thumb and forefinger, giving that organ a gentle twist that promised to get harder if she did not behave. “Didn’t me and Rosethorn have that little talk with you about ‘affairs of state’ and you sticking your neb where it oughtn’t to go?” he asked in Imperial, the language they had taught Evvy to use. “You don’t go around asking kings about their messages!” The thought of Evvy being so impertinent to Duke Vedris, back home in Emelan, made Briar shiver. Vedris was a good old fellow for the most part, but when he got on his dignity, he could freeze someone’s hair off. And Evvy was more fragile than she acted.

“It seems that although the Green Pass is not open and we cannot get word to or from Inxia, the great emperor of Yanjing is more than capable of sending messengers through Ice Lion Pass,” the God-King said. The look on his face was quite strange. “This, though my weather mages tell me that Ice Lion will not be open for at least two months. A messenger from the emperor waits in my audience chamber bearing letters for me and for Rosethorn.”

The imperial messenger was sleek and elegant, dressed in three overlapping silk robes, each heavily embroidered. Briar’s fingers itched for an eastern-style ink brush and a pad of paper sheets, knowing that his foster-sisters would never forgive him if he couldn’t describe imperial fashions and decoration perfectly. He wondered what such plain dressers as Dokyi and Rosethorn made of the messenger’s yellow, green, and black garments, or of the black silk cap with wings that were stiffened to stick out straight on either side of the man’s head. It was impossible to tell from their faces, which were as blank as any stone. Dokyi wore the plain brown habit of the Earth temple here in the east, with the black border of the initiate, or mage. Briar was relieved to see that Rosethorn had cleaned up from her morning’s work with plants. She wore a clean habit in the Earth green of the western Living Circle temple, also with the initiate’s black border. Her short, dark red hair was still wet. Months spent indoors had kept her skin the ivory shade she preferred, while she held summer suns and wrinkles at bay with a large selection of creams she made herself. Her large brown eyes missed nothing, ever. That was why Briar kept Evvy half hidden in back of him now. She ought to have been stone like the rest of the people in the room, but instead he felt her shake with silent giggles. If he had to guess the source of her merriment, it was the messenger’s hat. It did look silly, but Briar could control himself.

“Rosethorn’s watching,” he whispered out of the corner of his mouth. “Do you want to spend another week washing our clothes yourself?”

That calmed Evvy down. She respected Rosethorn like no one else, not even her first teacher and friend, Briar.

As if she knew she was being discussed, Rosethorn moved until she stood next to them. Dokyi came with her.

The Gyongxin guards stood at attention. Two of their number struck a pair of large brass gongs, while one of the rotating number of priests from Gyongxe’s many temples cried, “The God-King is here!”

Together with some residents of Gyongxe and a handful of other visitors, Rosethorn, Briar, and Evvy bowed low. The boy ruler walked briskly into the room through a side entrance and climbed the steps to the backless pile of cushions that served the God-King as a throne. There he sat, lotus fashion, propping an elbow on one knee, and looked at the Yanjingyi group. As soon as he was settled, his advisers ran up the steps to stand on either side of the throne. Dokyi remained with Rosethorn and the two young people, a gesture Briar appreciated.

The moment they took their places, one of the Yanjingyi group, a barrel-chested man in black silk trimmed with yellow satin, stepped forward. He began to speak in a deep, thundering voice that boomed in the huge throne room. Briar didn’t recognize the language. He glanced back at Evvy, who looked as confused as he felt. Briar didn’t check Rosethorn’s face. He doubted that this was a language she knew, since he actually understood more languages than she did.

“It’s the language of the imperial court in Yanjing,” Dokyi said in a voice that went no farther than the four of them. “It’s as old as the imperial line, that’s what they say. If they caught anyone not a noble or not of the imperial household speaking it, that person would die the death of ten thousand cuts.”

Briar looked down so no one could see the face he made. He tried to remember if he’d ever heard of anyone dying for a language before.

The herald stopped speaking. At the sound of rustling cloth, Briar looked up again. Everyone in the imperial party, led by the chief messenger, had knelt on the floor. Now, in unison, they placed their hands on the floor, leaned down, and touched their heads to the cold tiles. They straightened, then repeated the head-touching exercise seven more times. Finally everyone but the messenger halted, their heads against the floor. The messenger straightened and began to speak to the God-King. He did not stand, and the language he used sounded much like that spoken by the herald.

Evvy could stand it no longer. Speaking quietly, she told Briar in Chammuri, “Only eight bowings and touchings! They insulted him! They give the emperor nine bowings and touchings!” Chammuri was the language she had spoken when they first met. She was taking a chance on it being unknown to anyone from Yanjing. Traveling messengers might know Imperial, which was spoken over many western lands.

“Maybe they think they were complimenting him, giving him almost as many as their own master,” Briar murmured in the same language. “Now hush.”

“Your accent is a delight to the ear, and your facility with words a pleasure to any listener,” the God-King told the messenger in tiyon. “You will forgive me if I ask you to favor us with what I do not doubt is equal mastery of tiyon. My guests, whom you seek, have never been granted the opportunity to study the golden phrases of the imperial speech, nor will they have the years it takes to master it as you have done.” Briar noticed that he said nothing about his own obvious mastery of the Yanjingyi language.

The messenger bowed first to the God-King, and then, half turning, to Rosethorn. “Forgive this unworthy servant of a great and glorious master,” he said in perfect tiyon. “If offense was given, I offer my life to blot it out.”

“A bit extreme, don’t you think?” Briar heard Rosethorn murmur to Dokyi. Briar turned his snort of laughter into a cough. By the time he had gotten himself under control the messenger was making a flowery speech in tiyon to the God-King, passing on greetings from the emperor in the east. Briar ignored the fellow, who added half bows and gestures as he talked, to look at Rosethorn. The corner of her naturally red mouth was tucked deeper than usual, a sign that Briar knew meant she was contemptuous of the messenger’s overwrought manners. At least she had not crossed her arms, the signal that trouble was brewing behind her brown eyes.

Evvy nudged Briar with a bony elbow. She had noticed the tucked corner of Rosethorn’s mouth, too, even if she hadn’t heard her comment.

The messenger got to his feet as gracefully as a dancer. Once he was upright, he reached into one wide sleeve and produced two scrolls, each bound with gold streamers and secured with what looked like green jade buckles. He touched them both to his forehead, then offered one to the God-King.

Does he think the God-King is going to run down the steps to get it? Briar wondered.

If the messenger did, he was disappointed. One of the generals who had been in residence in the palace all winter walked slowly down to the messenger to accept the scroll for the God-King. Only when the general had worked several spells over it without result did he let the boy ruler have the message.

Once the God-King was reading his scroll, the messenger turned until he faced Dokyi and Rosethorn. “Is this unworthy one correct?” the messenger asked. “Has this one the honor to address the First Dedicate and Dedicate Initiate of the First Temple of the Living Circle, and Dedicate Initiate Rosethorn of Winding Circle temple?”

“I am Dokyi,” the older man said without bowing. “This is Rosethorn.”

The messenger bowed slightly and offered the other scroll. “Then I am honored to present my master’s invitation to Dedicate Initiate Rosethorn and her companions,” he said. His dark eyes flicked over Briar and Evvy. He bowed, very slightly, but there was still respect in his voice as he said in tiyon, “Am I mistaken? Have I also the honor to stand before Nanshur Briar Moss and his student, Evumeimei Dingzai?” Nanshur was the tiyon word for mage.

Briar was impressed in spite of himself. Few adults gave him his proper title, refusing to believe that someone his age had achieved a mage’s certification and power. He returned the bow and nudged Evvy with his foot until she did the same. Since he had been at the courts of royalty and the houses of nobles enough by now to navigate their mazes of manners, Briar said politely in tiyon, “May I have the blessing of one’s own name, so that I may thank one’s ancestors for the pleasure of a son with such grace and perception?”

“I can’t believe you just said that,” Evvy muttered.

Briar burned to give her a proper scolding. Instead he kept his face pleasant and watched the messenger. If the man heard Evvy, he showed no sign of it, but bowed a little more deeply to Briar. Were the movements all measured out for him? It made Briar wonder if he had a measuring stick at home, and if he practiced bowing to each particular notch on it so he would know just how far to bow to a lord, or a mage, or someone who had paid him a compliment.

“Forgive this humble messenger, gracious nanshur, but when this humble servant of the emperor, great is his name, Son of all the Gods, Master of Lions, speaks in the voice of so great and puissant a master, his own pathetic name and being is obliterated. Only the name of the mighty Emperor Weishu Maorin Guangong Zhian, sixth of the Long Dynasty, remains.” The courier cocked his head slightly, his black eyes glittering with more than a little touch of mischief.

“And if we wanted to ask how was the weather in the passes, would we say, ‘Excuse me, you?’” Evvy wanted to know. “How could the emperor in his distant palace know the weather in the mountains?”

Briar wouldn’t call the swift look that the courier shot Evvy a glare. Distaste, perhaps. The man found a smile — a tiny one — to plaster on his face. That was what he offered to Evvy. “But it was the Eagle of the Heavens, the Leveler of Mountains, who arranged our easy journey through the Ice Lion Pass,” he said coolly. “Such is his eagerness to meet Dedicate Initiate Rosethorn, Nanshur Briar Moss, and even the student of such acclaimed magic workers that our dread master banished the storms and split the snows in Ice Lion Pass to allow this unworthy messenger to bring the gracious imperial invitation to you.”

Rosethorn finally looked up from the scroll, her brown eyes shining. “It — this is amazing.” She looked at Dokyi, first, then the God-King. “I had told you that our plans were to travel through Yanjing with a Trader caravan when the passes cleared, then sail home from Hanjian. Our hope — my hope, and Briar’s — was to visit as many gardens and gardeners along the way. I never thought … I didn’t expect …” She took a breath and let it out. “Briar, the emperor has invited us to visit the Winter Palace in Dohan. He is offering to show us his gardens there himself.”

“You are also invited to be guests, all three of you, at the celebration of the Son of the Gods’ fiftieth birthday,” the messenger said. “It is the rarest of honors. There will be lords of Yanjing who will be gnashing their teeth with vexation that they have not been included.”

“The gardens at the imperial palace in Dohan,” Rosethorn whispered, running her fingers over the raised gold letters on the scroll of invitation. Her perfectly arched eyebrows snapped together in a worried frown. To the God-King she said, “Will you be offended if we leave soon? Because you’ve been so good to us, and I really don’t want to offend you.”

Briar looked at the God-King. Did he dare say no, given his concerns of that morning? He had not sounded as if he looked forward to any kind of conflict with the great emperor of Yanjing.

The God-King smiled at Rosethorn. “Keep you from the most famous gardens in our part of the world? I would not be so cruel. You have given us four glorious months of your company. I am only sorry to lose you as I would have been if you had left us according to your original plan, in six weeks.” To the messenger he said, “I do hope you will let them have two days to pack and let us say our farewells.”

The messenger faced the God-King, knelt once more, and touched his forehead to the floor. Those who had come with him had not budged from their positions in all that time. “My glorious master has ordered his humble servant to give all obedience to the God-King of Gyongxe,” he replied.

“I suppose that means yes,” Briar heard Rosethorn murmur to Dokyi now that the messenger wasn’t looking at her.

Briar let a sigh of relief escape him. She was her usual mocking, hardheaded self. It was understandable that she would be excited by the chance to see the emperor’s famous, personal, gardens, but after the God-King’s remarks and all of the rumors and stories about the emperor that Briar had heard over the last four months, Briar wanted Rosethorn at her most hardheaded. With Rosethorn and Evvy both to look after, Briar wanted all of the good sense he could find, buy, or steal.