A neighbor was washing clothes on her roof where he came up. When he put his finger to his lips, she raised her eyebrows, and jerked her head in the direction of the watcher two houses over. Briar smiled grimly and nodded. The woman — he had given her something for her skullsplitting headaches three weeks ago — snapped her fingers. The scruffy dog who slumbered in a corner got to his feet.
Briar shook his head. He wanted to talk to the spy first. The woman made a shooing motion with her hand and the dog lay back down. Briar crept forward through lines of drying laundry until he could see the watcher without being seen. She wore a gold nose ring with a garnet pendant. Briar scowled. So the Vipers were still about!
Using laundry, barrels, and other rooftop clutter as cover, he crept up on the Viper unseen, nodding to those of his neighbors who were present. Someone from every household was up here, puttering. They might have to live with gangs using the upper roads, but they weren’t about to let anything be stolen.
One roof away, Briar watched the Viper. Her attention was fixed on his house — she definitely wasn’t expecting company. The very casualness of the way she lounged by the roof’s edge vexed Briar. He was getting tired of the Vipers. It was time they knew it.
The house she had chosen was perfect for his purposes. Its owners had roses planted in tubs along the back and sides of the roof. With a little encouragement, they would prevent the Viper’s escape. Briar stood and stepped over the low wall between his roof and that of the watcher.
She scrambled to her feet. There were now daggers in both of her hands; she held them easily, a girl with plenty of fights under her belt. She was nearly as tall as Briar, perhaps a year or two older. He backed up three slow steps toward the rear of the roof.
Thinking he feared her, the Viper closed with him, dark eyes flashing. “I know you,” she said tightly. “You’re the eknub pahan who lives across the street.”
“You’re not here for me?” Briar asked, trying to look scared. It wasn’t something he was sure he could do. When he was afraid, he did his best to hide it. “You want Evvy.”
“That’s right.” The Viper advanced another step, ignoring the rustle of the roses along the wall behind her. “And you don’t have a thing to say to it, not if you don’t want me gutting you.” She sneezed.
“I have plenty to say,” Briar told her coldly, showing her that he carried a knife of his own. The girl settled into a street-fighter’s crouch. Briar was about to ask the rose bushes to grab her when she sneezed twice more.
“What’s your name?” Briar demanded.
She spat a curse that ended in a sneeze. Briar smiled. She had rose fever, what the Winding Circle healers called an “allergy.” Just as some people got sneezes or itching spots at haying time or in a room where cats had been, others could not live with roses.
“I’m going — to — leave you for, for fire ants,” the girl raged between sneezes. “I’m —” She sneezed three times in rapid succession, then wiped her eyes on her sleeve. Briar used the moment to push two more potted rose bushes forward, until the Viper was hedged all around. The older girl gasped for air, forgetting the knives in her hand.
“Wrong answer,” Briar replied calmly. The roses had faded, preparing for the autumn rains. He called them to full, lively growth. Buds swelled to the size of grapes, then exploded into heavy crimson blooms. The Viper sneezed repeatedly, unable to do anything else.
He let the blooms shrink, fade, and die, calling even larger buds from their stems. Wait a moment, please, he asked them before they could open. The Viper was scrubbing her red, itching face on the hem of her tunic. Briar walked over, passing through the screen of rose bushes without even hooking his clothes on the thorns. Before she knew what he did, he coolly took her knives and replaced one with his pocket handkerchief. He then walked back through the screen of roses and sat on an overturned washtub. “Comfortable?” he asked.
He listened to her curses for a moment, and shook his head. “You know, there’s kids about, learning bad ways from you,” he said. “This is a respectable neighborhood — not what you’re used to.” When she continued to swear Briar gestured to the plant behind the Viper. It had grown as tall as she, and had sprouted a very large rosebud next to her cheek. At Briar’s gesture the bud started to open, one petal at a time.
The Viper mopped her eyes and looked to see what tickled her cheek. She shrank away, only to discover the other rose bushes had closed in around her, forming a thorny cocoon that reached as high as her chest.
“Calm down and behave, or you’ll have more than one of those to worry about,” Briar informed her. Using one of her knives, he cleaned dirt from under his fingernails until she stopped thrashing. “You going to behave?”
The girl sneezed ferociously, then nodded.
Briar saw that there were a number of red spots on her face. “You’re one of the ones who tried to grab Evvy out by the Market of the Lost, aren’t you?” he asked. “One of the ones she burned with her rocks.”
The girl hesitated, then nodded.
“Didn’t you learn anything from that?” he inquired.
The girl cursed him and Evvy alike. Briar nodded to the flowerbud that bulged next to her cheek. It unfurled swiftly, a blood crimson bloom that was nearly as big as her head once it was fully open.
“Do your bidding like little scratchy lapdogs, don’t they?” she demanded before the sneezes took her.