The women and children might curse Evvy for her rush across the rooftops, but they reserved their fists and attempts at capture for Briar, realizing there was something alien about him. He shook off children and dogs and ducked the women’s fists, sticks, and baskets. Even if he had walked slowly and greeted everyone, he knew they would have tried to stop him.
Evvy jumped the narrow gaps that were the streets below easily, rarely using the plank-and-rope bridges to cross. Briar gritted his teeth and did the jumps where necessary, but he wasn’t happy, and he meant to discuss his unhappiness with her at length. When he caught her.
He lost track of where they were. Working his way through a stand of grapevines, trying to talk the vines out of hanging onto him from sheer affection, Briar looked up and swore. Some way ahead loomed the orange-and-brown stone heights of Chammur Oldtown. His girl was making a beeline for the tunnels, holes, and honeycombs of dwellings in the rock cliffs within the city’s walls. She had been headed for them all along.
Oh, no, Briar thought wearily as he braced his hands on his knees and fought to catch his breath. Not Oldtown. I won’t follow her there. The arcades, halls, and tunnels that led to the apartments in the orange stone were lit by torches if they were lit at all. The smell was indescribable. The Earth dedicate who had given Briar and Rosethorn a complete tour of the city had said that parts of the heights had been inhabited for nearly twelve hundred years. As far as Briar was concerned, they smelled like it.
The thought of following a native there gave him the crawls. He ought to track down a stone mage first. He could catch the girl the next time she left Oldtown. His —
“Thief!” A basket filled with laundry slammed into his back. The grape vines fluttered with dismay. They recognized the woman who tended them and gave them water. Why was she pounding their new friend? “Murderer! Thief!” the woman cried.
“I am not!” Briar protested.
“Eknub!” shrieked the woman. She thumped him with her basket even harder. ”Eknub, eknub!”
She acts as if that’s worse than murder and theft, Briar thought crossly, shielding his head. And my accent must be awful. “Look,” he said, being more careful with his Chammuri, “I just want to get to the street! I’ll go, just show me —”
She gave him a final whack and marched to the edge of the roof. Gathering a rope ladder heaped in a corner, she hurled it over the wall as if she meant to do the same to Briar. “If you loiter I’ll call the Watch!” she scolded as he tested the ladder’s anchors. “See if I don’t, spawn of Shaihun, eknub parasite!”
“The next one who asks me if folk here are friendly, I’ll send ‘em to you for a blessing!” he retorted as he swung his leg over. “The gods’ sweet day to you for your charity!”
He was a foot down when she yelled: “Whoever taught you Chammuri had the accent of a hen!”
“I’d love to travel, Rosethorn,” Briar growled as he clambered past small, grate-covered windows. “I’ll learn new languages and be insulted in them. I can ask civil questions and people will run off. Travel would be just the thing!”
The moment he set foot on the street, the woman yanked the ladder from his hold and pulled it up. Briar stuck his tongue out at her and turned to survey his location. The street looked just like every other sun-bleached residential street in Newtown.
Well, think, idiot, he told himself. The cliffs were visible over buildings to his right. If he kept them there, and started walking, he would run into the north wall.
A thock of wood overhead gave him the smallest of warnings. Reflexes he hadn’t needed in years made him leap sideways. A stream of dirty wash-water poured down where he’d just been, soaking his left arm. When he looked up, the woman he had offended gestured rudely, and walked away from the roof’s edge. For a moment Briar considered asking her grape vines to grip her and keep her prisoner until dark, but then he shook his head. There was no sense in getting the vines in trouble, too. With a sigh he searched for a street that led north as he wrung out his sleeve.
Evvy saw it all from a roof across the street, hands clapped over her mouth to hush her giggles. The jade-eyed boy had looked so much like a cat as he climbed down and as the angry woman had dumped water on him. Evvy half-expected him to shake himself off, then sit to wash himself angrily. Instead he had stalked away down the street. He didn’t even look for Evvy.
After chasing her all this way, he was just going to give up? He’d done well for an eknub on the roofs — surely he wouldn’t let an angry Chammuran and a bucket of water drive him away!
And yet it seemed he would. Evvy crept along the roofs, trailing him. He wasn’t even looking up. Why follow her all this way, just to quit?
She knew she had five davs and could perhaps get more by begging, but that wasn’t as interesting as the boy. She trailed him, trying to work out who and what he was. He’d said he was a mage. She wasn’t sure if she believed that. All the mages she’d ever known — magic-workers, healers, and hedgewitches — were adults in their mid-twenties or older, very full of themselves and whatever scraps of magic they could use. People who were younger rarely claimed the title, but he said it as casually as if it were his name.
And now that she looked him over, keeping a house behind as he walked through the streets, she could tell that his clothes were better than even Nahim’s. She sometimes made a dav or two picking rags: she knew quality tailoring when she saw it. The boy’s clothes fit as if made for him and no one else. Interestingly, the cloth didn’t wrinkle like normal clothes did. His sleeve was wet, but apart from that his garments looked as clean as if they’d just been washed. Evvy had acquired another layer of dirt on her clothes in that rooftop run, but he was still fresh. His boots were sturdy and well made. They at least carried a layer of dust from the street.