The Will of the Empress (41 page)

“Kill me later,” Briar told her as she scrambled to get at him. “Some
belbun
nicked Sandry, and he’s got a serious mage in his pocket. If he isn’t the mage himself.”

Daja rubbed her eyes. “What’s in that poison?”

“Just the biggest wake-up weeds I know, spelled to crunch through any sleep spell. That’s how they got us in Gyongxe, sleep spells.”

Daja pulled a sack out of her mage kit and began to put items in it. She wore only her medallion, a breast band secured with a tie looped around her neck, and a loincloth. Her lack of clothing didn’t seem to concern her. “One of these days you’re going to have to tell me about what happened in Gyongxe,” she said, turning a spool of fine wire over in her hand before she stuffed it into the bag. “And not that ‘It was just a war’
pavao.
” She straightened. “Let’s go smelt this down and see what floats.”

B
riar suddenly realized he was
very
glad it was Daja with him. She was solid in spirit and heart—he’d forgotten that. She didn’t have Tris’s temper, vexing even with its most dangerous aspects held under rigid control, and she wasn’t inclined to the kind of noble arrogance that Sandry kept displaying. Of course he wouldn’t tell Daja that, but it was good to be reminded.

They trotted downstairs. The inn’s staff was asleep in a private parlor. It looked as if they’d told themselves they’d just put their heads down for a moment, then fallen asleep at one table. The four other guests had not returned from the horse fair.

I bet Zhegorz was right. Maybe they were soldiers, but now they’re in the pay of whichever imperial favorite tricked us this time, thought Briar. Maybe they had charms to hold off the sleep spell, but old Zhegorz scared them into the woods to wait till we were snoring, instead of being all nice
and snug in here. Briar spat on the tiles in disgust. Tris was right to send him, and I was a bleater.

Daja went outside and quickly came back. “Asleep, all of them.”

“Stables are through the kitchen,” Briar said, pointing. “They’ll have needed horses to take Sandry.”

Daja nodded grimly. They walked through the kitchen door together into a force that felt like hard jelly. It wrapped around them in an eyeblink, then pulled them apart, leaving a yard of space between them.

One man was still awake. Quen lounged at the cook’s big table, fiddling with pieces of chopped turnips and carrots obviously meant for soup tomorrow. “I’ll wager you’ve never walked into anything like that before, have you?” he asked casually, his brown eyes gleaming in triumph. “Don’t worry, you can breathe. In fact, inside that working, you can stay alive for weeks. I tested it on a criminal scheduled for execution. After three months, Her Imperial Majesty lost patience and had him executed anyway.” He yawned. “I can’t leave this inn and still hold you two like this, but I’ve had worse situations. I wish you could tell me how you broke my sleep spell. No one was supposed to wake from that for three days. And I shaped it so that it couldn’t
be
broken once you were asleep.” He scratched the side of his mouth. “You’ll tell me when I free you, perhaps. Or I could let the glove of air down enough to free your mouths, if you swear
to behave. Or not. I suppose you’re a little more powerful than I expected.” He smirked. “So, what shall I talk about?”

Daja and Briar reached out at the same moment along their magical connection, withered as it was. It sprang to life as Daja said,
He’ll bore us to death if he keeps talking.

It seems like that
, Briar answered.
While he natters, we still don’t know about Sandry.

Sandry!
cried Daja, grabbing for their bond.
Sandry!

I couldn’t reach her before
, Briar said. At the same time, he added his call to hers. They still found no trace of their friend.

“I suppose you’re running through all the spell-breaking charms you know,” Quen observed. “But that’s the beauty of it, don’t you see? They’re layered shield spells, but some of them are reversed. My own design. No single charm possessed by any mage will work on this glove spell. Well, Isha broke out, but she’s even more powerful than I am. She just blasted it. She said I need to stay humble. She even thought she might not be the only one who could do it, but really, outside noble courts, or the universities and the Living Circle schools, you’re not likely to find that many great mages. People tend to dislike us. They think we’re conceited and high-handed. They never think that perhaps we just spend so much time trying to wrestle our magic into behaving that it makes us short-tempered with the everyday world. So we hide.”

Quen ate a chunk of carrot, his eyes alert as he watched
them. “Frustrating, isn’t it? I had to spend plenty of time at Lightsbridge breaking out of trap spells as part of my specialization. Maybe you could do a double working that would get you out eventually, but that’s why I pulled you apart.” He studied his nails. “You really should consider employment with Berenene. She takes good care of her people. I’ll even teach you some tricks once Shan and Sandry are wed. Not this one, of course. But you’ll see I’m a decent enough fellow after that.”

He is starting to annoy me
, complained Daja.

Let’s shut him up, then.
Briar and Daja thrust at the spells with their own spells for destruction, Briar’s for decay and the destruction of parasites, Daja’s for rust. Nothing worked. Each suggested charms and tricks they had learned in the last three years, creating variations within their own specialties. These, too, failed. The glove spells slid around them, jelly-like, making Daja’s knees weak with distaste. Quen took a fiddle from the bench and played it, which made Briar crazy. He hated being laughed at.

Should we yell for Tris?
Briar finally asked.

There’s a way we can do this
, Daja said stubbornly.
On our own, without Tris and her book learning. Besides, she’s probably still weak as a kitten.

Something caught Briar’s attention then.
Tris. Book learning.

Daja waited to hear his thought.

When Briar worked it out, he was both jubilant and
ashamed for not seeing it sooner. The solution lay in his own experience and his own teacher. Rosethorn had engaged in a constant battle with university-trained mages, over the difference between academic magic and ambient magic.

Stop playing his game and start playing ours!
he said. He tapped into his
shakkan
and the plants around him, drawing their power through himself and turning it into vines. These he sent through the spells of the glove. Like all vines, they found each and every chink and opening, spaces no human being used, weaving their tendrils through to break into open air. Reaching Daja’s prison, they did the same thing all over again, finding the openings between the spells. At last they broke through to twine themselves around her, growing until they cupped her entire body.

Daja called to the metal on her hand and in her mage kit, the strange living metal that was always growing and absorbing new metal. She drew on the strength of the kitchen’s metal and fires as well, adding it to the liquid metal until she could spin wires of power out of herself. They twined with Briar’s vines, following the paths the magical plants had taken through the openings in Quen’s spells. Busily they worked themselves into Briar’s prison, encasing him as his vines had encased Daja.

Slowly, the spells that enclosed Daja and Briar began to melt, like thick ice under boiling water.

Quen dropped fiddle and bow and stretched a hand out to them, his lips moving as he tried to renew the spells. The
mess around Briar and Daja struggled to rebuild, and collapsed completely.

Quen gestured. A fresh shield billowed toward them like a giant, thick bubble. Daja leaned forward and blew like a bellows, hard and long, forcing the heavy thing back toward Quen. He fought to hold it off. While he was occupied, Briar reached into an outer pocket of his mage kit and pulled out a small cloth ball. Deftly, he tossed it on the floor. It rolled to Quen’s feet.

Briar filled the seeds in the ball with green magic and called them to wakefulness. Weaving the shoots as they thrust up, he gripped them in an iron hold and kept them from sinking roots. All of their strength had to go into growing up, not down. He needed this cage to move.

The plants shot through the cloth of the ball that held them, weaving. They were as high as Quen’s knees before he saw the danger. He turned his shield on them, but Briar was ready. The vines, thick with thorns, spread out and over the shield, still growing.

Watching Quen’s sweaty face, Daja pulled a spool of fine wire out of her sack. She sent the wire’s end snaking toward the base of the vine cage, where it began to weave itself in among the vines. As it climbed she called light to it, making Quen blink and shield his eyes. It was a distraction, something he could not afford. While he tried to shield his vision, vines and wire finished a globe of a cage.

Briar had prepared the seed ball to withstand the magic
of mages and hill shamans alike, both hazards of the road to Gyongxe. It was why he had brought it downstairs. Daja had made this spool of wire to handle and contain power, her own or that of others. Bearing down with their wills—Briar’s forged in the streets, in epidemics, and in war; Daja’s, in forges and mammoth blazes—they tightened their cage on Quenaill, crushing his last shield.

Briar and Daja joined hands and fed their cage a last surge of power. The gaps between wire and vines blazed, sealed against magic from within. The pair let go.

For a moment they could hardly see Quen inside the cage. Magical workings rayed out from the man like sunlight, connecting him to every spell he still had in place—those on the inn, and those that served Sandry’s kidnappers. They blazed with silver fire in Briar’s and Daja’s vision.

“Once more,” Daja said, panting. “Drain him, so his other spells break.” Her knees wobbled; her thighs felt loose. They touched fingers this time and hammered the cage with the last of their strength. At first they saw no difference. Then the first fiery strand vanished. Another followed, then three, then more. All winked out inside the cage. At last Quen stood inside, naked of power.

All around them, the inn stirred. Briar could hear the inn’s staff moving in the private room. He sat down on the kitchen table and began to eat chunks of carrot. Daja took a seat on a stool and leaned against the wall.

Will it be enough?
she asked him wearily. Their bond to
one another remained even when their power was as weak and floppy as a dead fish.

We cut off all he had. Sandry was at the end of some of it. We’ll hear her soon enough.
“Can we get some food in here?” Briar yelled. “I’m
starving
!”

Sandry was moving. That was the first thing she noticed. The second was that a man sat with her in his arms, one easy tan hand holding a horse’s reins. She saw the reins, and the hand, when she opened her eyes just a crack. Little weights struck her lightly all over her body, clinking when they hit one another. All around her she heard men talking and joking. Someone asked if he could actually bring himself to wait three days, and the man who held her laughed.

“I want her in my little love nest, all nice and cozy, where I won’t need all these charms Quen put on her to keep her tame,” a too-familiar voice said.

Charms, Sandry thought. That’s what the little weights are, and the clinking noises. Someone has tied a basket full of charms all over me, as if I were some nomad’s bride to be protected from spirits.

“With the potions I have for her to drink, and the spell patterns he gave me, she won’t be able to lift a finger against me once we’re inside.” Lips kissed the back of her neck, making Sandry’s skin crawl. Shan added, “She’ll get accustomed. She was half in love with me before some idiot gossiped to her. I just have to convince her that Her Imperial
Majesty was a relationship of convenience, while she is my own true love. Trust me, you tell a woman things like that, and she’s putty in your hands.”

“Her Imperial Majesty won’t kill you when she learns?” someone inquired.

“She needs every copper this lady’s lands provides. All that adventuring along the Yanjing border has stretched the imperial treasury
very
thin,” Shan explained. “If I make a big enough present to Her Imperial Majesty, she’ll let me be.” The confidence in Shan’s voice made Sandry want to scream. Instead, she continued to flop in front of him, limp and supposedly well asleep.

It’s morning, if not afternoon, she realized, hearing birdsong and feeling the sun’s heat on them as they rode. There’s a river nearby, and lots of echoes. We’re in the canyon people spoke of, I think.

They rode on for some time. Shan had just called for a break to rest and water the horses when a thin magical voice filtered through the spell that still lay on Sandry’s skin like a film.
Can you hear?
Daja asked.
It’s taken hours for the workings to wear off enough for me to find you. We’ve been trying since dawn. Why do those charms even have magic still?

Maybe he bought them from someone else
, Briar put in.
We undid all his spells to keep us all under wraps, but it didn’t touch the extra charms he used.

I’m waking up
, Sandry replied.
Yes, there’s still a bit of power in these charms.

Shan let Sandry drop into another man’s arms. This captor placed her gently on a patch of grass.
Don’t worry about me
, she told Daja.
The charms are on my outside, but I’ve all my magic still, and the pig-swiving bleat-brain tied the charms to me with ribbons. I suppose it didn’t occur to him ribbons are made of cloth. I’ll come to you when I’m done. Quen did all this magic?

Our little friend Quenaill
, Briar said with contempt.
He spelled us asleep. If I hadn’t been wary, thanks to Zhegorz…We owe old Zhegorz a big apology. He tried to warn us, and just because he talked crazy, we didn’t listen.
He paused for a moment, then asked gruffly,
Do you need our help? We know you like Shan—

Used to
, Sandry interrupted.
I
used
to like him.
She sank into her magic, and spoke a word of command. The knots that tied those carved-stone charms to her clothes and body came undone at once. They slid to the ground with a soft series of clinks.

She waited for a moment until she knew that she had the strength to stand, then did so, lashing out with her power. The six men and one woman lingering on the riverbank dropped whatever they held as their sleeves flew together and fused, binding their arms from wrist to elbows. Before they could do more than blink, their riding breeches did the same thing, the thread of each leg weaving itself with the opposite from knee to lower calf. They fell forward helplessly.

The woman and one of the men began to mutter. Silvery tendrils rose from their bodies.

Magic, Sandry thought disdainfully. Try
mine.