The Newtown roofs stopped well short of the rocky skirts of Princes’ Heights, where Evvy made her home. She climbed down from the last of them and looked around warily. Then she crossed the Street of Victories, where clusters of ragtag and furtive stalls housed the Market of the Lost. Behind every facade of respectable merchandise — rags, spices, cheap food and liquor, secondhand clothes, used pottery, and furnishings — lay much less respectable items. Drugs and weapons could be bought, as could ill wishes, outright curses, poisons, and healing services for those who dared not go to, or could not afford, more respectable healers.
Evvy scanned the stalls. If soldiers of the Watch were about, long-timers would vanish, warning locals that the law was around. If they hadn’t been in their usual spots, Evvy would have lingered in Newtown a while longer. The Watch wasn’t always precise in who they hauled to Justice Rock’s prisons when they conducted a sweep in Oldtown.
Everyone who should be there was. Feeling safe, Evvy trotted through the mazes of stalls until she reached the tumble of gravel, dirt, and loose rock at the foot of the heights. The stone cliff towered above her, riddled with paths, streets, windows, doors, and the arches that led to the tunnels. Evvy smiled at those orange-flame heights. She was almost home.
Three Vipers encircled her, putting the treacherous gravel pile at Evvy’s back. She scrambled a few steps up onto it anyway, feeling the loose tumble of dirt and stone slide under her feet. She pinwheeled her arms to remain standing.
“Hello, kid,” the girl Viper said with a smile on her face. “We’re your mates. We’d like to buy you supper.” As she talked, the two boy Vipers closed in.
“All real friendly,” said the light-brown boy with a painful-looking red weal on one nostril. He was the only one of the three who wore no nose ring. “Nobody gets hurt.”
It was the third, a black-skinned boy, who grabbed for her. The other two came on as Evvy scrabbled up and back two more steps. She stumbled and sat down hard as the ground slid under her. Panicked, she seized two fistfuls of gravel and hurled them at her attackers, crying to the rocks in her hands, “Do something!”
The stones flared with light and heat as they struck the Vipers’ faces. Both Evvy and the Vipers were blaze-blinded; the brown-skinned boy screamed. All three Vipers clapped their hands to their faces. Staggering, they lost their footing and rolled to the foot of the slope. Their clothes smoldered in a handful of places, as if Evvy had thrown burning embers on them. Their faces were speckled with small, red burns.
Evvy pushed herself up the slope on her backside, her heart galloping. The Vipers started at the noise she made and struggled to their feet. Bobbing and weaving, hanging onto each other, they fled into the marketplace.
Evvy rubbed her eyes: light-spots still danced through her vision, half-blinding her. The Market of the Lost and Oldtown were not places where it was wise to let others see her handicapped in any way. She was in no condition to find her way among the maze of trails between here and home, and the locals would be after her in a moment. She needed a hiding place until she could see clearly again. Lurching to her feet, Evvy walked-skidded down the slope and found her way to the back of Sulya’s herb and charm stall. Sulya kept the large baskets she used to tote her wares tied to a post there. Evvy groped her way between them and settled, whispering “It’s Evvy, Sulya,” through the cracked wood of the stall’s back.
“Don’t break nothin’, strangers’ child,” Sulya warned. She had the sharp ears of a desert fox, and a large cudgel that she used on those who touched her property.
“Not me,” Evvy assured her. She rested her head on her knees, praying to Kanzan, goddess of healing, for her sight to return. What had she done?
Briar had been riding east on Triumph Road, winding around pedestrians, riders, flocks, and camels, when he felt a surge of fright come down the magic-vine that connected him to Evvy. He couldn’t sense thoughts through it, unless the tie was to another plant mage or his foster-sisters, but feelings came easily. He was about to ride on — Evvy wouldn’t be as old as she was if she couldn’t take care of herself—but the next big surge of fright slammed him. He felt her magic flare, wildly out of control.
Briar wheeled his mount and rode back the way he had come, ignoring the people who dodged out of his way. The closer he came to the intersection of the Street of Victories and Triumph Road, the steadier his connection to Evvy felt. Her fright was there but under control. What could have happened?
She was nearby. He slowed his mount, looking around the part of the Market of the Lost at the base of Princes’ Heights, hoping to spot her. Someone blundered into his horse. Briar, shaken from his concentration, yelled, “Watch where you’re going, bleater!” in Imperial.
A girl wearing the nose ring and garnet of a Viper braced herself against his mount. Her face and clothes were marked with small burns; she peered at him as if she were nearly blind. Two youths swayed beside her, speckled with burns just as she was. They pulled her away.
“Mind your manners, eknub scum!” snarled the black youth in Chammuri. He was one of the Vipers who’d stopped Briar in Golden House. The trio stumbled on down the street, cursing.
Briar watched them with a frown. What were they doing halfway across the city?
He shook his head and picked up the invisible vine of his magic, following it behind a cluster of stalls. In the shadows his power gleamed as it threaded through a heap of large baskets.