“If she’s ignorant of it, why is she with Lark and Rosethorn?” a woman snapped. “Everyone knows the mageborn are placed in their care!”
Briar, Sandry, and Daja looked at each other, startled.
“So that’s why nobody nicked the cart and horse,” Briar muttered.
“My kinfolk told me I was crazy!” Tris cried, her voice cracking. “The tester said I had no magic, and they got rid of me!”
Lark climbed into the back of the wagon and drew Tris close. “She’s exhausted,” Lark told the duke. “She needs food, and she needs to go to bed. If you mean to punish her, may we wait until she knows what’s happening?”
People left, shaking their heads. A sick girl wasn’t nearly as worrisome as a mage who deliberately used her magic for harm.
“Are you satisfied?” the duke asked the three who stayed: the baker, a man with a goldsmith’s badge on his hat, and the Trader who had called Daja trangshi.
“Until we hear of another such incident,” said the goldsmith. “She’s a danger to everyone as she is.”
“And if I confine her to Winding Circle until Master Niko says that she has control over her power?” the duke wanted to know. “Is that agreeable?”
“If they leave the city as soon as possible, I will be satisfied,” replied the baker. The goldsmith nodded.
The Trader said nothing, only turned and walked away. Daja watched him go, her hand tightening on her staff until her knuckles were white.
The duke looked the children over. “What of that animal?” he asked Sandry.
Rosethorn started to protest, then sighed. “The dog stays with us,” she said.
“There, you heard that?” Sandry asked her new friend. “You belong to us now.” The pup whimpered and licked her face.
Instead of leaving the city immediately and getting caught in the after-market jam of horses and carts, they accepted the duke’s offer of supper at a nearby eating-house and a guard to accompany them home. Throughout the meal, Lark concentrated on Tris, cajoling the exhausted girl into eating.
Once their bellies were full, the other children were allowed to bathe their new pet in the tiny yard behind the eating-house. Rosethorn anointed his cuts with a sharp-smelling balm. “You four get to train this fierce, wolflike creature to take his business out-of-doors,” she told them as she worked. “And clean up after him, and stop him from chewing everything in sight.” When the dog snapped at her touch on a particularly ugly wound, she gripped him gently by the muzzle. “Enough,” she said. “I don’t like dogs any more than I like children.”
Sheepish, the pup wagged his tail and whined at her. He didn’t snap again.
As Sandry and Daja took the cleaned-up dog out to show Niko, Lark, and the Duke, Briar helped Rosethorn to gather her medicines. “I’m no mage,” he said abruptly.
“Nonsense,” was the tart reply. “You’re as much a mage as I am. It’s just that your magic—the girls’ too, if it comes to that—shows itself in unusual ways.”
He put a hand on her arm. “Niko has it wrong. I’m no mage.”
Rosethorn looked meaningfully at the hand on her sleeve until he withdrew it, a blush staining his gold-brown cheeks. “It’s no accident that Niko was at your sentencing—he’d had a premonition of a boy with the green magic in him. I knew he was right when I heard my bean plants welcome you. You got them all excited, my buck. They wanted to throw out seed pods a month early. I had to be stern with them.”
“That ain’t magic,” he protested.
“Of course it is, and important magic at that. The most important, to my way of thinking. You don’t need to share that with Lark or Niko.”
“I’m a thief,” he protested.
“I bet you had a lot of plants like moss and mushrooms in whatever hole you lived in,” she said, dark eyes sharp. “I bet strange things happened to you in rich men’s gardens.”
The boy hung his head, rubbing a thumb over the deep scars in his palm. Rosethorn touched the hand. Her fingertips found each large, dimpled pock left by the vine whose name he had taken.
“They grow big-thorned briars to protect the tops of garden walls,” she remarked. “This one must have loved you, to leave so deep a scar.”
“With mates like that plant, I don’t need constables,” he mumbled. Something cool poured into the old wounds and up his arm. Scented with turning leaves and wet stone, it was the thing he’d smelled in her shop the day they’d worked on the shakkan. Looking into her face, he saw the glint of green and gold in her eyes and felt the pull of life that flowed through her stocky frame: the kind of power that could sink tendrils into rock and split it open, given time.
“Magic?” he whispered.
“Go tell Niko it’s time to leave,” she ordered. “We need to be home before the Earth temple’s midnight worship.”
Once they returned to the cart, Tris was bundled up in blankets fetched from the guards’ barracks. She went to sleep almost immediately. The other three children made themselves comfortable among the empty sacks as Rosethorn took the reins. Lark rode double with Niko for the moment, behind the cart; they were talking quietly. The duke and his soldiers came as well, the squad breaking in two so that five guards marched ahead of the cart, five behind. The duke rode beside the cart, talking to Rosethorn about the summer crops.