Once they were gone, the lady considered her next move. Until now she hadn’t known how to give her pet gang confidence: the Gate Lords, who controlled the territory she and Ikrum wanted the Vipers to control, were too many, and too well equipped. Taking apart a smaller, poorer gang might serve her very well. Why had she not considered something like this before?

The city would learn respect for her gang, and learn it well. After all, disrespect to a Viper was disrespect to her, and that she would never permit.

2

The house where Briar and Rosethorn currently lived was clean and bright, with potted plants everywhere. They set up a welcoming chorus to Briar, reaching for him. As always when he came in, he made the circuit of the first floor, greeting each in the front room, dining room, kitchen, and rear courtyard. If he forgot any one of them, the plants would droop until reassured of his affection.

Once they were calm, Briar sent his power through the house. Rosethorn wasn’t on the second floor, where their workroom and bedrooms were. All he felt there was the magic embedded in the tools, plants, and medicines in the workroom, and the varying blazes that marked his miniature trees. Briar quested past that and found the banked, steady fire that was Rosethorn on the roof.

Like most Chammuri houses, this one had a staircase that led to the roof from the second floor. The other houses Briar had visited in Chammur were the same: it was as if the roofs were as much a part of the house as the kitchen, something he found odd. He climbed up and out into the waning afternoon light with the voiceless song of happy plants vibrating in his skull.

Their roof was almost solid green: tubs and pots filled with the plants Rosethorn thought would help local farms covered every inch of space. All were in different stages of growth regardless of the season, magically encouraged to sprout, flower, and fade over a matter of days while Rosethorn harvested seed for the locals to use.

Rosethorn herself sat on a bench, carefully writing on a slate. She was a broad-shouldered woman in a long-sleeved dark green habit, the emblem of her dedication to the earth and its gods. Her large brown eyes were fixed on her slate. Briar saw she had already been to the Earth temple baths: her chestnut hair, worn mannishly short, was dark against her skull, the strict part white against her wet hair. Her creamy skin bore just a trace of gilt from a summer’s work and travel — she was vain of her ivory complexion, employing hats and various lotions to keep it from going to leather as farmers’ skin did. Though she was now two inches shorter than he was, Briar always thought of her as towering over him. She still did, in learning and power.

“Tell these weeds to calm down, why don’t you?” Briar asked Rosethorn in their native language, Imperial, rubbing his ears. “You think they’d be used to us by now.”

“They can’t help it,” Rosethorn informed him absently in the same language, reviewing her notes. Her speech was a little slurred, one result of her illness four years before. She had died of it, but Briar and his foster-sisters had called her back to life. The precious minutes she had been dead left their mark: a clumsy tongue, and a slight tremor in her hands. “And when we pump them up to rush them through their growing, it makes them talk more.” Nevertheless she sent out her magic like a calming bath, soothing the greenery around them until it quieted.

“How were those western farms?” Briar wanted to know as he sat on the waist-high wall that fenced the roof. “Weren’t you going out there today?” Word that a famed green mage had come to Chammur had spread like wildfire in the days after their arrival, bringing group after group of farmers to see Rosethorn. They needed serious help: their harvests had been shrinking every year. Rosethorn had gone out every day to inspect different fields.

“Desperate,” she told Briar now, her red mouth twisted wryly. “As desperate as the eastern and southern ones. Everyone says I needn’t bother with the northerners — they’ve been growing rocks for three generations.” She rubbed a note out with her sleeve and carefully chalked something else in its place. “How was the Water temple?”

“Finished. Stocked up for a year at least, with plenty extra. All their medicines are at more than full strength. I told you I could do it in a month. Say, Rosethorn —”

“What?”

“Stone mages are common, right?” Briar asked, stroking the fleshy leaves of an aloe vera plant beside him. “You know, ones that magic crystals and jewels and things.”

“Stone magic is common, yes,” she replied. “Most mages deal with spells for stones at some point. Are you asking if there are stone mages like we’re plant mages?”

Briar nodded.

Rosethorn considered. “Yes, there are more whose power comes from stones than there are other kinds of ambient mage.”

Briar scratched his head. He knew that word “ambient.” “Oh, right — mages that work with the magic that’s already in things.”

Rosethorn looked up at him, her large, dark brown eyes sharp, her mouth curled with wry amusement. “Don’t go playing the country bumpkin, my buck. You know very well what ‘ambient’ means.”

How could he explain he’d been thinking like a street rat, after talking to the Vipers and Camelguts? Even now, after four years of regular meals, affection, and education, he sometimes felt as if his head were split in two. Magic and the Living Circle temples didn’t exactly mesh with a life in which meals were stolen and mistakes were paid for with maiming and death.