“I can’t like any garden without stones,” Evvy murmured, discovering the differences between sandstone here and sandstone in Gyongxe. “It would be like taking someone’s ribs out.”
“What can you do with stones, if I may ask?” Parahan asked. “Can you change the course of a stone hurled by a catapult?”
Evvy made a face. Some of the people who had hosted them on their journey west had asked such questions. Oddly, she didn’t mind them coming from Parahan. He was just staring at the sky and making conversation. “No. Catapult stones are too big. I can only help them get to where they’re going faster. Look. I can do this.” She reached into the sandstone under her hands and sank light into the thousands of grains of quartz, apatite, and garnet that were part of it. When she heard Parahan inhale, she realized that she had closed her eyes. She had not needed them to tell her the sandstones under her fingers were blazing. The guards were babbling in the language of the imperial court to each other. Ignoring them, she opened her eyes and grinned at Parahan. “I can do it with heat, but heat won’t stay long in sandstone or limestone. I need pure crystal or gemstone to hold light or heat for very long. I’m really good at lamps. We saved all kinds of money traveling because we didn’t have to buy torches or lamp oil.”
Parahan got to his knees and, keeping his chains out of the way, crawled over until he could hold a hand over a glowing stone. “Will it burn?”
“Oh, no,” Evvy told him. “Rosethorn threatened to send me to bed without supper if I didn’t learn to do cold light and hot heat every time.”
Parahan grinned as he touched the stones. “No heat at all. She only threatened you?”
“I missed too many meals before she and Briar took me on. I don’t think she likes taking food from me, even to teach me something.”
“Speaking of food …” Parahan raised his beak of a nose to sniff the air. “I smell fried cakes and ginger!” He looked at the glowing stones. “We can’t take these. The gardeners will get in trouble if anything is missing.”
Evvy frowned. “Stones in a wood should be free to go where they want if they let go of their soil. Not that I’d pry these fine fellows loose. They’re happy with their tree.”
“Stones in a wood that does not belong to the emperor, perhaps,” Parahan murmured. He got to his feet and gave Evvy a hand up as the light from the stones faded. “Let’s see what we can steal from the cooks.”
The guards stood, too. “You can’t steal the emperor’s breakfast!” said the darker-skinned guard in tiyon.
“We won’t steal,” Evvy told them, all innocence. “We’ll borrow … from the edges. From the stuff they give people who aren’t imperial.”
Parahan hooked arms with Evvy and they marched up the path.
Rosethorn had to wonder if she was meant by her gods to spend her entire visit to the Winter Palace in a towering state of vexation. For one thing, when the emperor said they would visit his gardens, he meant that he, Rosethorn, and Briar, as well as a gaggle of mages and courtiers, watched as gardeners dealt with the plants. If she even touched one, the gardeners hovered as if they feared she might break it. For another thing, she and Briar had been forced to wear silk again today, because they were in the imperial presence. She should have known they would not be allowed to get dirty when the maids placed silk clothes before them that morning.
Third, she was deeply unhappy with the mages who dogged their tracks. They drowned the voices of the wind in the leaves and flowers of the garden with the constant click of their strings of beads. She had heard that eastern mages favored beads imprinted with spells and strung together to be worn on neck and wrist. She had seen local mages twirling short strings of spell beads during their journey down from Ice Lion Pass. Court mages wore ropes of them. Apparently Rosethorn and Briar in a garden were considered far more dangerous than Rosethorn and Briar in a throne room.
As if we couldn’t have turned those potted plants into weapons, Rosethorn thought as the breeze carried another burst of hollow clicks to her ears. She rounded on the mages. “I can’t hear a thing these plants say with that unending noise,” she informed them.
All around her the emperor’s prized roses, brought at great expense from far Sharen and raised more carefully than most children, trembled and reached for her across the stone borders of the path. The courtiers shrank closer together, terrified of touching those priceless blossoms. Weishu looked on, his face emotionless.
Briar raised his hands to both sides of the path. The roses halted their movement and waited, trembling.
Rosethorn had not taken her eyes off the mages. “What are you doing with those things?” she demanded. “I’m not working magic. If I were, you couldn’t distract me with noisemakers.”
“They are not noisemakers,” said the youngest of them, a woman. “Our magic is inscribed in the marks on each bead. The greater the mage, the more inscriptions — the more spells — on a bead. And the more beads.”
Rosethorn squinted at the ropes that ran through the woman’s fingers. The small bone-white beads that made up the bulk of her wrist and neck strings, as well as those of her fellow mages, were etched with minuscule ideographs. In between those beads were others, some brown glass inscribed with Yanjingyi characters, some white porcelain with heaven-blue characters and figures, some carnelian with engraving on the surface.