Briar's Book (22 page)

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 someones – 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 plant-like 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 dead, 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.

Sundry 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.

“Dunno if that’s good or bad,” he admitted, and trudged on.

Here was a buttercup, its yellow so vivid in all that gray rock that it had the effect of a shout. Here was a clump of moss. He covered it with his palm for a moment, refreshed by that velvet coolness on his skin. He moved on, the ball in his hands the size of a melon.

His feet were bleeding when he found a patch of purple and violet crocuses that had thrust cobblestones from the road. He began to run. Crocuses were Rosethorn’s favorite spring flower: she had talked about their arrival for a month.

Running got harder. The plants were rioting, overturning stones, leaving holes for an unwary boy to wrench his ankle if he didn’t look sharp. The gray buildings shrank as he found more living things. Finally they vanished altogether. So too did the cobblestone road, giving way to a broad carpet of lush grass. It lay before a stretch of wrought-iron fence nearly fifteen feet high.

He put down the ball of thread. Now it moved on its own, rolling itself up as it travelled. It didn’t have far to go: there was an open gate in the fence. Inside stood Rosethorn, looking over her new domain.

Briar hesitated. He couldn’t see her face, but he knew the set of her back, the will in those hands planted so firmly on her hips. Ahead of her lay a vast garden in chaos. Trees, bushes, and flowers did battle with weeds, and lost. A fountain bubbled as if it gasped for life, its spouts clogged with moss, its drains stopped with dead leaves. Some type of climbing vine Briar had never seen before had laid claim to everything to his left. It was a gardener’s dream, a mess that would take months, even years, to return to its proper glory.

His fingers itched, too. Like his teacher, he did enjoy a challenge.

Not
this
challenge!
cried Sandry. She strained to hold onto him.
There are challenges back home, for both of you.

The ball of thread rolled to Rosethorn’s feet and vanished into her. Startled, she turned and saw Briar.

Her eyebrows came together with a nearly audible click; her red mouth pursed. She looked better – healthier, more alive – than she had in weeks. “Absolutely not,” she said firmly. “Turn right back around. Girls,” she called, “bring him in!”

“Nope,” he informed her. “Not without you.”

“Don’t be absurd,” she snapped. “You have a long life in store.”

“So do you,” he replied stubbornly.

“I did good work, I did important work, and now it’s over. Perhaps I didn’t want it this way and this soon, but you can see there’s another lifetime’s worth of labor here.” She looked over her shoulder at that garden, which so clearly needed someone very good to look after it. Cleaned up properly, it would be magnificent.