“What was that?” Evvy cried the first time it happened.
“Boom-dust,” Briar muttered in Imperial. His hands were clenched into fists on the arms of his chair. He still had nightmares of the time pirates had attacked his and Rosethorn’s home with the brand-new weapon, maiming and killing many.
Parahan sat cross-legged on the stones between Rosethorn and Briar. “I don’t know your name for it,” he said in tiyon, half turning to look up at Briar. “Here it’s called zayao. And I think they have the right to call it whatever they want, since they invented it.” His gaze sharpened as he took more notice of Briar’s hands and the movement under his skin. “Raiya be kind, what happened to you?”
Briar sighed and stretched out one hand so Parahan could have a closer look. “I was trying out a little tattoo,” he explained. “Something with vegetable dyes I made up myself — I’m a green mage. I applied it with one of my foster-sisters’ needles.”
“She’s a stitch witch,” Evvy said cheerfully. She never tired of the story. She spent so much of her time feeling stupid around Briar that it was very comforting to know he could be stupid, too.
“She is more than a stitch witch,” Rosethorn corrected. “She is a thread mage. He borrowed the needles she uses in her magic.”
“It wasn’t like she has one set for sewing and one for magic,” Briar protested. “Her sewing is her magic. Anyway,” he told Parahan, after glaring at Rosethorn, “it should have worked. Only the flowers I put on my hands weren’t just pictures after all.”
“They grow,” Evvy explained. “They bloom and move around and die and grow some more. And they’re growing up along his arms. I think it’s splendid.”
“Hmm,” Parahan said. “May I?”
Briar let the man turn his hands over and inspect them. Parahan saw deep pockmarks in Briar’s palms, reminders of a determined thorny vine that had not wanted to release the boy when he was younger. The man noted that the flowers and leaves grew under Briar’s fingernails. When he lifted Briar’s hand to let the silk robes slide back, he even saw that the colorful plants continued up the young man’s arms, moving and opening leaves or new blossoms and sending out new stems as he watched.
Finally he said cautiously, “I find it very interesting that a young fellow would want to put flowers on his hands. Might you have been trying to cover over something, oh, between your thumb and forefinger, perhaps?”
Evvy covered her giggles with both hands. This friendly stranger had guessed Briar’s secret. Before he had been a mage, Briar was a thief and jailbird, with two arrests to his discredit — and two jailhouse X tattoos, one on the web between the thumb and forefinger of each hand. He’d been arrested a third time, about to go to hard labor for life, when a mage had seen the magic in Briar and brought him to Rosethorn.
Briar glanced at the throne and its occupant. Neither the emperor nor his immediate court was within earshot. “I’m reformed, practically,” Briar said quietly, his voice very dry. “And I do so much more damage as a nanshur than I did as a thief.”
Parahan released him with a sigh. “I am only envious,” he confessed. “Had I been a mage of your skills, instead of a spoiled warrior prince, I might have stopped my uncle from selling me to the emperor. You were wondering about my attire.” He shook his wrists, making his chains jingle.
This interested Rosethorn. “Your uncle sold you?”
Parahan grinned, displaying strong white teeth. “You should pity him. I know he would much rather have killed me so he would be sure to inherit my father’s throne someday. Sadly my uncle did not dare to do so.” Parahan looked out over the field. The horsemen were forming in brigades to either side of the great field. “In Kombanpur — where I come from, one of the Realms of the Sun — it is very bad luck to kill a twin. I have the good fortune to be one such, with my sister Soudamini. Actually I am not certain if my uncle believes in bad luck in general, or if he simply knows what would happen if Souda learned I was dead by his hand.” He winked one large brown eye at Evvy. “I’m the easygoing one. Souda is the battle cat.”
Anything else they might have discussed was drowned out as musicians came forward to strike drums, blow horns, and hammer large gongs. The explosions stopped; those who had set them off cleared away. In the distance Evvy could see a line of color. Slowly it grew larger and larger still, until she realized that she was looking at line after line of armored soldiers, flanked by officers and flag bearers. After them came teams of camels pulling catapults and companies of archers.
Spaced between companies of foot soldiers, archers, and the teams that worked with each catapult and its ammunition were men and women on horseback. Many of them wore the long black silk robe and cap of a nanshur. Evvy did not need the wardrobe to identify the role played by the new arrivals. To her ambient magic, the power of these people blazed from around their necks and wrists. They had to be wearing some kind of spell-worked stones as jewelry. If they embroidered occult signs or threaded their stones on cotton or linen, they would be just as obvious to Rosethorn and Briar.
None of them spoke as the army marched, and marched, and marched, its members coming all the way up to the foot of the imperial pavilion. When at last the drums, gongs, and horns fell silent and there was no more movement on the ground, the army stretched as far as Evvy could see. Her skin was crawling with goose bumps. She had never seen such a large force in her life.