The Will of the Empress Read online

  The next morning Sandry arrived with her guards and a cart piled with bolts of cloth. Since Tris had gone to do the marketing and Daja was at Winding Circle, the maid fetched Briar.

  Briar took one look at Sandry and knew trouble was in the air. Sandry’s bright blue eyes sparkled dangerously, and little red flags of temper marked her cheeks. “We thought you’d be happy to have us along, you wanting togetherness and all, so what’s put pins in your noble rump?” he asked, jamming his hands into his pockets. “And what’s this for? Tents? Or you think we’re too poor to have clothes?”

  Sandry glared at him. “I doubt you have court clothes from cloth and stitching that I have done,” replied Sandry. “And I refuse to answer your other, vulgar question.”

  As the house’s manservant carried in the first load of cloth, Briar rolled his eyes. “I’ve been vulgar for years and it never bothered you. If you think I’ll put off getting my trees ready for Rosethorn to look after so you can stick pins in me, think again. I don’t have time for fittings.” He turned and went into the house, back to his workroom. He knew Sandry would follow. When she wanted a fight, nothing stopped her from getting it.

  While he waited he busied himself with his shakkans, preparing them for the trip to Winding Circle. They grumbled as he checked their leaves, branches, and soil before he set them in their traveling baskets once more. Like Briar, they had looked forward to staying in one place for a while.

  “You’ll like it so well with Rosethorn, you won’t even remember me,” he told them with a gentleness he rarely showed to people these days. “And she won’t take you anywhere anytime soon.”

  “Then why agree to come, if you didn’t want to?” Sandry demanded from the doorway. She carried a sewing basket in one hand.

  Briar didn’t look at her. “Because His Grace asked me to.”

  “Oh!” From the sound of her voice, Sandry had just gotten angrier. “So if my uncle asked you to reopen our old connection, you’d do it for him, but not for us.”

  Briar closed his eyes, drawing serenity from the very old miniature apple tree under his fingers. Had she been so childish before? “His Grace would never ask something so foolish of us.”

  “Foolish!”

  Briar turned so he could glare at Sandry. He didn’t want his irritation flooding into his tree. “Look here. It’s one thing to be all happy and friendly and romping in each other’s minds when you’re little, Sandry. Kids think of kid things, and we were kids, for all we were powerful enough and well-taught enough to get our mage medallions.” In his upset he’d slid back to his native street slang, using the word for a young goat to mean a child. “We kept our minds neat and clean and orderly for our magic and it was easy, because we were kids. We’re not kids now. We can control our power because we’re stronger, and that’s nice, because our minds are messy adult minds!”

  “You mean your mind is messy,” Sandry retorted, crimson with fury. “You, all well-traveled to distant lands, with your mysterious war and your Yanjing emperor, while you left silly me at home to stay a child!”

  Briar took a step forward to glare down into her face. I also forgot how gods-curst aggravating she can be, always poking at a fellow’s sore spots! he thought. “Why does it always have to be so witless personal with you?” he demanded.

  Sandry braced her fists on her hips and rose up on the balls of her feet to lessen the five inches of difference in their heights. “Personal? Personal is what I’ve had while my brother and sisters raced all over the world, in case you’ve forgotten, Master Big Britches!”

  Briar gaped at her, astonished. “You said you didn’t mind!”

  Sandry glared up into his eyes. “I had to say that, idiot. You were going if I liked it or no. All I could do was salvage my pride!”

  Now Briar’s temper came to a boil. “That bleating noble’s pride, so much more meaningful than the kind us ground-grubbers get—”

  Sandry retorted, “Better than your stiff-rumped streetboy fecklessness that makes fun of anything serious!” She thrust out one hand and shoved him on the chest. Briar rocked back on his heels and grabbed her wrist.

  “Well.” Daja stood in the door, arms crossed over her chest. “I can see this will be a splendid trip.”

  Embarrassed, Briar turned back to his plants. Sandry shoved out of the room past Daja.

  After a long silence, Daja asked, “Does this mean you’re not going?”

  Briar, who could feel a hot blush swamp his face from the tip of his nose to the backs of his ears, shook his head. When he heard no sounds that meant Daja had left his workroom, he mumbled, “Girls. Always getting their skirts in an uproar over a lump in the mattress.”

  “But you feel better for yelling at her,” Daja suggested, her voice very dry.

  Briar shrugged. He kept his back to Daja so she wouldn’t see the slow smile that spread across his lips. It was good to see that Sandry still had some spice in her.

  After a long moment, he heard the sounds of Daja’s retreat from his workroom. “Tell her I’m not wearing fussy embroidery or pointed shoes!” he yelled over his shoulder.

  “Tell him I’m putting hoods with the faces sewn shut on all his tunics!” Sandry yelled from somewhere inside the house.

  “Tell each other yourselves!” called Daja from somewhere between them.

  Briar grinned. For a moment it felt like it had in the old days, back at Discipline cottage. Daja’s house had felt like home.

  The 17th day of Seed Moon, 1043 K. F.

  The Erynwhit River

  Southwestern Gansar

  Briar was smugly pleased to find that, unlike most non-Traders who rode under the protection of Trader caravans, the four were not kept to a separate camp, guarded by the Traders but shut out of Trader conversations and Trader campfires. He tried not to smirk at the non-Traders when he passed their lonely fires. The four would have been forced to join them if not for Daja. Though she had once been a Trader outcast, the same powerful act of magic that had left her with living metal on one hand had also redeemed her name with all Traders, and made her and her friends known and respected by her people. Now Daja carried an ebony staff, its brass cap engraved and inlaid with the symbols of her life’s story, like any Trader’s staff. Now she could do business with Traders, eat with them, talk with them, and travel with them, as could her brother and sisters.

  “Those fires look awful lonesome,” Briar confided to Tris their first night on the road.

  She was not fooled. “Stop gloating,” she replied.

  The people of Third Caravan Saralan soon found there was much of interest about Briar and the girls. The children and quite a few adults were entranced by Chime. They took every free moment to feed the glass dragon and collect the flame- or puddle-shaped bits of glass that Chime produced afterward. The yellow-clad and veiled mimanders—mages—were drawn to the depth and power of the magic that filled the 152-year-old miniature pine shakkan that was Briar’s companion. They consulted Briar about the magic that could be worked with shakkans, while the Trader negotiators began the slow process of bargaining for a long-term contract to buy the trees Briar was prepared to sell. The Traders even negotiated an exchange with Sandry: her embroidery on their own clothes in trade for a chance to examine weaving and embroidery done only within the rare Trader cities. This was the work of very old and very young Traders, who were exempt from the custom that forbade their people from making things. Sandry jumped at the chance: Rarely did a non-Trader so much as glimpse the work, let alone get the time for a close look at it.

  Briar, Sandry, and Daja soon found something they could agree on in that first week: Tris had grown very odd. She seemed to flinch each time a fresh breeze blew through the camps and the caravans. Briar thought she would drive him mad, changing the location of her bedroll several times each night. He slept lightly, trying to avoid dreams of fire and blood. Tris woke him when she moved. While Tris didn’t drive others to growl “pesky, jagging, maukie girl” as Briar did, it
was almost as if by trying to be quiet and disturb no one, Tris disturbed everyone.

  “I left Winding Circle so I could sleep!” he cried their fourth night on the road. “Not so’s I could be jumping every other minute thinking we’re under attack when it’s just you missing your feather bed!”

  “That’s why we ride with the caravan, so their guards watch in case of attack,” she replied with heavy and weary sarcasm. “Anyway, since when are you such a cursed light sleeper? The time was that we had to dump buckets of water on you to get you to crack an eyelid.”

  “People change,” snarled Briar. “You didn’t used to squeak at every least little thing.” I’m not going to say I can’t even trust Trader guards to know when trouble comes, he thought, moving his bedroll as far from hers as he could manage. Anyone can be taken by surprise. Anyone. You’d think she’d know that, at her age.

  It’s enough to make a person stuff her in a baggage wagon, thought Daja gloomily as she cleaned her teeth on their seventh morning out. Today they were to reach the river Erynwhit, which marked the border of Emelan and Gansar. Daja was wondering how she was going to put up with Tris’s behavior all the way to Namorn. She agreed with Briar, particularly since last night Tris had been sleeping, or moving, near Daja’s bedroll.

  “Why don’t you see if you can ride in a wagon?” she demanded when Tris twitched one time too many over breakfast. “So you won’t have to keep the rest of us awake all night while you look for a soft spot, or worry about the wicked breeze drying your cheeks all day.”

  Tris replied with a cold look that, in earlier years, made Daja want to put her in a keg and nail the top on. It was a look that froze the person who had dared to speak to Tris. We shamed it out of her when she lived with us, thought Daja, glaring back at her sister. I guess she fell into her old, bad ways after we weren’t around. “In the civilized world, people answer other people back,” she told the redhead.

  “Daja, it’s too early,” moaned Sandry. She had stayed up late, working on her Namornese with the Traders. For once, Daja saw, Sandry wasn’t her bouncy morning self.

  “Certainly too early for those of us who couldn’t get a whole night’s sleep in the first place,” growled Briar as the Traders began to pack the wagons up.

  The caravan, even the sleepy four, pulled together and took the slowly descending road before the sun cleared the eastern mountains. Soon they descended to the flat canyon floor the Erynwhit had carved between towering cliff walls. The river spread before them. It was a lazy flat expanse no more than a hundred yards wide and barely three feet deep even at this time of year, when snowmelt should have swollen it enough to cover the whole canyon floor. The ride leader told Daja that, twenty years earlier, this road had been impassable in springtime, until some lord or other built a dam far upstream.

  Thanks, whoever you were, she told the unnamed noble silently. Without your dam and this crossing we’d have to ride a hundred miles to the bridge at Lake Bostidan.

  On moved the caravan, herd animals, riders, and the first of the wagon groups. Daja was about to enter the water when she saw that Tris had halted her mare in midstream. The mare turned and twisted, fighting Tris’s too-tight grip on the reins.

  Daja ground her teeth, then rode over. “Ease up on your horse’s mouth,” Daja growled. “You’re hurting her, you’ll make her hard-mouthed, wrenching her about that way—”

  Tris pulled the horse’s head around in an abrupt turn, kicking the mare into a gallop while still in the water. Daja stood in the stirrups to yell, “We taught you how to ride, Oti log it, Trader tax you! A hard-mouthed horse earns less on resale!”

  Tris didn’t seem to hear. She galloped her little mare onto a hillock where the road entered the water and drew her to a halt. There, she rose in her stirrups, facing upriver.

  Why is she taking her spectacles off? wondered Daja, as vexed with Tris as she had been in years. She looks completely demented, and she’s blind without them—now what?!

  Tris ripped off the net that confined her braids, and turned the mare. Setting the horse galloping straight for the river, she grabbed a handful of air and placed it in front of her mouth. “Get ’em across!” she yelled. She had done some trick: Her voice boomed in the canyon. “For your lives, get them across! Move!”

  The caravan leaders and the head mimander started to ride back to Tris.

  “There is no storm, no flood,” cried the mimander. “You frighten our people—”

  Tris stood in her saddle, her gray eyes wild. The ties flew from the thin braids that framed her face. They came undone, laddered with lightning bolts that crawled to her forehead and back over her head. “Are you deaf?” she bellowed. “I didn’t ask for a vote! Move them!” She thrust an arm out. Lightning ran down to fill her palm. It dripped to the ground. Wagon drivers whipped their beasts, wanting to put the river between them and Tris. Herds fled, splashing among the wagons and the riders.

  Chime shot into the air. Lightning rose to cling to the dragon, outlining her graceful figure. Down she swooped, harrying the Traders’ dogs and sheep, driving them into the river and keeping them from fleeing downstream. Briar and Sandry charged back into the water, followed by Traders, making sure people rode across instead of fleeing along the river’s length.

  I’ll kill Tris when everyone’s safely out, thought Daja, keeping the column tight on the upriver side. For causing such a fuss, for frightening everyone, and why? The mimander said there’s no flash flood coming. His specialty is weather with water—the ride leader told me so when we left Summersea!

  She glanced at Tris. The redhead screeched, “Not fast enough!” at the mimander and the caravan leaders. Two long, heavy braids popped free of their ties. These did not crawl with lightning, like the rest of Tris’s braids. They were lightning.

  She dragged fistfuls of blazing power from each and squeezed them through the gaps between her fingers, creating about seven strips of lightning in each hand. “Move!” she screamed, and hurled them in the caravan’s wake. Lightning cracked like whips over the heads of horses and mules. It lashed close enough to one herd of sheep to singe wool and to leave scorch marks on the side of a nearby wagon. Daja saw Tris drag on it to keep it from touching the water. Thank the gods for that, she realized. One strike in the water and we all might cook.

  Three lightning strips flew at the mimander, the caravan leaders, even Daja herself, nipping at the rumps of their horses. Thunder boomed in the canyon, startling the herds into a run. Animals, Traders, and non-Traders alike decided they’d had enough. They, Sandry, and Briar fled across the river with Tris behind them, just in back of the last wagons.

  “Keep going!” Tris screamed, her voice hoarse. Now she used her lightning to goad the caravan’s rear and its front, scaring the horses and the oxen who pulled the wagons until they rushed up the inclining road. The end of the caravan was a scant twenty feet above the canyon floor when a rumbling sound made the cooler-headed riders stop.

  Rocks pattered down the cliffs that overlooked the road. Bits of the ledge that overlooked the canyon floor crumbled away from its edge. In the distance they could hear a dull roar.

  This time, Tris, clinging to her horse’s mane, didn’t need to speak. Everyone scrambled to move higher on the steep road. They were sixty feet above the riverbed when a wall of tree- and stone-studded water snarled down the canyon to swamp the river flats. It ripped boulders from the ford, ground the road away, and plowed on down into the canyon again. Had they been just a little slower, the savage torrent would have swept them up and carried the remains far downstream.

  “But there was no rain, no snowfall, higher in the mountains.” That lone voice belonged to the mimander. Daja did not look at his veiled eyes, out of consideration for his shame. Trader mimanders studied one aspect of magic all their lives. They chose their specialty when they were young, and risked their lives to learn all they could about winds, or the fall of water from the skies, or avalanches, or storms at sea.

 
How humiliating, she thought. It must look like he missed this coming, even after years of study. He knows this caravan puts its life in his hands.

  And how humiliating, to yell at your sister because she doesn’t have time to save over two hundred people and explain herself, too.

  Briar looked at the swirling mess below. He blinked. For a moment the trees were bodies: gaudily dressed men, women and children who were missing limbs or heads, their wounds streaking the brown water red. They were joined by the bloated corpses of yaks, goats, even birds, and by the corpses of soldiers. The stench of the rotting dead swamped him.

  Not here, he thought, closing his eyes and clenching his teeth. Gansar, not Gyongxe. Peacetime, not war. Not here.

  When he opened his eyes, he saw the remains of trees and the bulk of stones. Only the stench of death continued to haunt his nose.

  He forced himself to study this flood, the one that was real right now. Already it was clawing at the earthen walls on the far side of the river flats. “You ask me, I think the dam broke upriver, master mimander,” he commented. “It was too old, maybe, or it needed fixing, or something, but some of those rocks look like dressed stone. It wasn’t your fault if that’s so. A dam break isn’t weather.”

  Tris, limp along her mare’s neck, nodded briefly.

  Daja was looking very sheepish, he saw. She rode over to Tris. “I’m sorry,” Briar heard her mutter. “I should have—”

  “Trusted me?” Tris’s reply was muffled, but it clearly stung Daja. “Remembered it’s my favorite thing in all the world to act like a crazy person before strangers, and it would have been nice if my sisters and brother had said, ‘Oh, she’s peculiar, but she’s usually peculiar for a reason’? Go away, Daja. I don’t feel like blushing and accepting your kind apology just now, thanks all the same.”

  Daja drew herself up. “All that traveling and all those conferences, and they never taught you how to be gracious.”

  “You want Sandry for that. She’s up ahead. Leave me be.”