Evvy scowled at him. “They’ll cook you and eat you if you tell,” she said, repeating an old lie about Trader habits.

“I’m old and stringy,” the man replied. “Don’t be cranky, Evvy. I thought you liked me.”

“That was before you got us into this mess,” she grumbled.

“The gods would have found another path for us to enter this mess,” Rosethorn said as she stirred the pot. “Can’t you tell fate when it bites you?”

“No,” Evvy and Parahan said at the same time.

“She has to talk like that,” Briar said. He was mixing and baking flatbread on a heated rock. “She took religious vows and everything.”

Once they were seated with their meal, Parahan sighed. “Warm feet. I had forgotten what warm feet were like. Now, I need to ask, how are you three fixed if it comes to a fight?” The three looked at him. “Evvy, stay back with the animals. Rosethorn —”

“What part of ‘mage’ did you not understand?” Briar reached into the sling on the ground next to him. Taking out a seed ball, he flipped it to the edge of the firelight closest to the road. It burst, immediately sinking roots into the ground. The vines shot up and out, sprouting their long thorns as they grew, spreading around the ground where they struck. By the time they stopped they were three feet in height and covered a circle of three feet in rough diameter. With no target, the thick stems had formed large curls around one another. Even in the flickering firelight the thorns could be seen. Some were four inches long. Others were two inches long and two inches thick at the base, curled rather than straight like the longer ones.

Parahan, fascinated, got up and started to walk toward the plant.

“Don’t do that,” Rosethorn said as the vines rustled. “They’re still awake.”

Parahan stopped. The vines settled. “You could kill a man with that,” he said, his voice cracking.

“We don’t carry them for toys,” Briar replied. “Don’t be so upset. I only let a couple of the seeds grow.”

“Want to see what I have?” Evvy asked eagerly.

“No,” Parahan said suddenly. “No, I don’t think I do.”

“But you think I’m a kid!” Evvy protested, using Briar’s slang for child. “You don’t think I can help protect us!” Rocks rose from the ground and began to whirl around Parahan’s head.

“Evumeimei,” Rosethorn said dangerously.

“Sorry, Parahan,” Evvy apologized. The stones fell to the ground. “But — you did know we’re mages.”

“I’m not sure I thought about what you three do in terms of war,” he admitted. Sitting on his heels by the fire, he grinned. “We may have an easier time getting past the border than I thought.”

Rosethorn served out the tea. “What do you expect once we’re there?” she asked as she warmed her hands on her cup.

“It’s a small post, from what I learned,” Parahan explained. “If things were normal, we might expect caravans coming through southern Gyongxe in another month, but not this early. Figure no traffic coming from the Gyongxe side. There’s a village that supports the border post on the Yanjing side. They keep perhaps five guards on duty at a time. We’re going to have to fight if they’ve received word to stop anyone from crossing. If they’ve gotten word about you leaving the caravan, or about me, we’ll really have to fight.”

“We might scare them into running,” Evvy said cheerfully, giving Ria a scratch.

Parahan grunted. “We might, though if they’re imperial regulars, not locals recruited to stand still and look tough, they won’t scare.” He looked at the staff on the ground beside him. “I wish I had a sword to go with this thing.”

Rosethorn looked at him in horror. “You mean to take on armed guards with a staff?”

He wiped his bowl with the bread that Briar had made. “But I have three mages at my back.” He stood and stretched as they stared up at him. Then he bent double at the waist and grabbed his ankles, bouncing a little without bending at the knees. Turning halfway, he put his right leg out in front of him as if he were lunging, and did so until his right leg was at a right angle and his left was stretched all the way out. After he had done that a number of times, he switched his front leg to the left. Rosethorn and Evvy began to clean up, while Briar tried to do similar stretches.

Finally Parahan picked up his staff and pulled one end of it off to reveal a long, slender, double-edged blade. “Not much as a throwing weapon,” he told Briar as he began to spin it in both hands, “but I could jab fish if I was in the woods with no supper on my way south. I tried to stay off the roads, at least till I got to Kushi. When I finally got tired of fish, I tried the beggar disguise. That hurt as much as it helped.”

“I wondered how you did that,” Evvy said, on her way to fetch dung for the fire. “Once I had to go through this tunnel that wasn’t quite high enough for me in Prince’s Heights, where I used to live. It was really long. When I came out I had a terrible ache in my back and my neck.”

“I still do,” Parahan admitted. He got the spear twirling over his head. Stepping well away from Briar, he spun it rapidly down along one side of his body, then up, over, and along the other. As the firelight sparked off the blade, it gave him the appearance of wings.

He did other exercises while Rosethorn and Briar prepared more thorn balls and Evvy more disks of flint and quartz. Off and on they would look up to see him kicking and punching into the air, spinning to kick at the side, or to lash out with a fist so fast it was a blur. Finally he came over to the fire with one of his packs and settled in to sharpen his belt knife.