“As I said, I am not using magic. Would you do me a favor and be quiet?” she asked, as patiently as she knew how. “The plants tell me how they are doing — when I can hear them.” Even if I did magic, I strongly doubt that you would detect it, you academic prancer, she thought. Like most ambient mages, Rosethorn had little patience for those who drew their power from their own bodies and worked it through spells, though she had studied academic magic in her youth.

“Is Nanshur Briar not using magic?” an older mage asked. Not only did this man have two long ropes of beads in his hold, but there were spell figures tattooed onto his hands and wrists. Unlike Briar’s, this man’s tattoos were motionless.

Briar lowered his hands. “I asked them to stop trying to help Rosethorn.”

Rosethorn let her own power flow into the bushes, calming the roses. As she suspected, not one of the Yanjingyi mages so much as twitched. Ambient magic was not only rare here; it was unknown. She called her power back into herself and looked at Weishu. “If you would like me to tell you if they are well, I must be able to concentrate, Your Imperial Majesty,” she explained. “I see you think I am deluded, claiming to hear the voices of plants. Don’t your priests hear the voices of ghosts and mountains?”

“Ghosts were once men, and our mountains are ancient,” Weishu said. “Blossoms live but a season, and plants a few years at best. Perhaps some of our oldest trees have voices, or the spirits within them do, but it takes ages for living things to gain the wisdom of human beings.”

Everyone around them but Briar murmured their agreement. Rosethorn bit her lip rather than call them all fools. Royalty, their pet mages, and their pet nobles seemed to think they knew everything. The mages she was used to dealing with knew instead that they were just beginning to scrape the surface of the world.

And what about you? she asked herself as she followed the emperor along the garden’s main path. Weren’t you starting to think you had all the answers before Niko brought Briar and the girls to Winding Circle? Before their magics started to combine? We all learned there was no predicting how their power would turn out. We couldn’t have guessed that four eleven-year-olds could shape the power of an earthquake, or that one girl’s metal flower would take root and bloom in a vein of copper ore, or that those children would pull me back from death itself. I could never have dreamed some of the ways Briar has learned to shape his magic, or Evvy hers. I needed shaking up. We all did.

She felt the ailing rosebush before she saw it. Immediately she and Briar stepped off the path. They’d just reached it — only a single branch showed brown and wilted blooms — when they heard Weishu thunder, “What is this?”

They stared at him as courtiers and mages fell to their knees and bowed until their foreheads touched the stone flags of the path. Six gardeners, who had been hanging back among the roses, ran forward to drop to the ground before Weishu and do the same. Briar looked at Rosethorn, waiting for instructions. She clasped her hands and watched the emperor, letting her power trickle gently into the ailing plant all the while. She could feel the touch of the wetlands fungus that had gotten into the roots and was eating it.

“What manner of care do you give our roses?” the emperor demanded. “How is it that we find an imperfect one on the very day we bring important nanshurs, great nanshurs who know much about plants, to view them? You will be beaten until your backs run red! Head gardener!”

One of them looked up from the ground. He was trembling.

“Remove this wretched bush and burn it. Replace it with another that does not offend our eye,” Weishu ordered.

Rosethorn had heard enough. When the poor head gardener touched his forehead to the ground once more, she gave a slight bow. “If I may, Your Imperial Majesty?” she asked. The emperor nodded and she said, “There is no need to uproot this plant. It’s been attacked by a mold native to these lands, a fast-growing one. I can tell this damage happened overnight, and we are here quite early. How could your gardeners have known?”

Weishu looked down his nose at her. “It was their duty to know.”

Rosethorn tucked her hands inside the sleeves of her robe so he would not see she had clenched them into fists. Of all the silly replies! “Your Imperial Majesty, as a gardener you know how delicate roses can be, particularly out of their native climate. This province is lush and green most of the year, I am told, and very damp. The homelands of the rose are in the southern and eastern parts of the Pebbled Sea — dry lands. And like most things that are transplanted here, they grow ferociously fast. In growing fast, this rose helped the fungus grow.”

“The bush is fine now, Your Imperial Majesty,” Briar said, taking over smoothly. Rosethorn knew he must have seen she was struggling with her temper. She should not have to explain this to someone like the emperor, who claimed to know about gardening.

Briar gestured to the plant like a showman. It was green and glossy everywhere, the blooms a perfect red. “Healthy as ever. Healthier, because Rosethorn made it resistant to your local molds, Your Imperial Majesty,” Briar announced. Rosethorn wound threads of her own power throughout the roots of all the plants in the garden to ensure just that as Briar added, “I’ll wager your gardeners must run mad, fighting mold.”

Without raising their heads, the gardeners nodded rapidly.

“Rosethorn and I can fix that while we’re here, Most Charitable and Wise Majesty,” Briar said.