“You may wait,” Dokyi said. “I leave at midnight.”

“Alone?” Souda asked, alarmed.

“Alone is best,” Dokyi said. “Souda, I am the First Dedicate of the Earth temple of First Circle Temple. Midnight and the dark are my elements. I will be fine.” He stood and went to Rosethorn. “Do not wait for more than a day. The new magic will strengthen you as you travel, and the emperor is on the move. Good fortune and the gods’ blessings to you, my daughter.” He kissed Rosethorn on the forehead and looked at Briar. “If all things go well, soon we will meet again.”

As he walked from the room, Parahan, Soudamini, and the general followed to ask their own questions. The moment the door closed behind them, Rosethorn began a scold that blistered Briar’s ears.

FORT SAMBACHU

SNOW SERPENT PASS

Briar rose at dawn the next day after a night filled with foul dreams of Rosethorn and Evvy in the hands of imperial torturers. Rather than go back to sleep and risk more dreams, he borrowed a mare with a stable girl’s permission and rode out of the fort.

He had thought to go uphill, but the sight of the Sun Queen’s three mountain husbands towering over him made him feel uncomfortably fenced in. Instead he rode down, past the tent village where most of the army was camped, over the Snow Serpent River crossing, and out onto the grasses and brush of the Gnam Runga. The light in the sky was pearly and seemed to come from everywhere in the east. It would be a while before the sun crested the topmost heights of the hills and mountains there.

His horse startled a pair of pheasants, who drove horse and rider away from what turned out to be a parade of peeping youngsters. Snow finches, wagtails, and larks also gave their opinions of the rider and his horse as their day was interrupted. Briar wasn’t sure, but those opinions sounded like bird insults. He scanned the sky for the famed Gyongxe buzzards and steppe eagles, but there were none in sight.

“Too cold,” he told the mare. Gloomily he added, “Or they’re out where the fighting’s going on. They’ll get plenty of food at those places, enough for every carrion bird in Gyongxe.” Normally he grudged no one a meal, having often gone without for the first eleven years of his life, but it was hard to wish a buzzard well at a battlefield.

Once he could no longer see the village on the eastern hills or the fort on the southern ones, Briar dismounted, letting the mare’s reins trail. The horse, a sturdy animal bred for the thin air of the mountains, began to graze. Briar walked on until he heard only the wind in the grass and the insults of the smaller birds.

Someone had told him that Gnam Runga meant “Sky Drum.” It was a vast plain between the Drimbakang Lho and the Drimbakang Zugu, the long finger of mountains that curved out of the southern heights and around the capital, Garmashing. The enemy was aiming for that wide plain, where his generals could put their catapults to good use. First they would have to fight the emperor’s army in the north and the tribes of the Drimbakang Sharlog around the eastern passes. No one wanted the imperial armies to mass on the Gnam Runga.

Briar would have preferred to fight in the canyons, where he could have put trees to work, but the plain was what he would have, first when he rode west with Parahan and Souda and later when they rode to Garmashing. Now he crouched and tried to dig his fingers into the dirt of the Gnam Runga. The grass was interwoven and tough. It fought his intrusion, just as it fought the death of the winter freeze.

“I’m a friend,” he told it. “I just want to meet the dirt. Let me in a little.” He spread his magic over the bed of plants. There were patches of bare earth here and there, but he could feel the plant roots running under them, nourished by the trickle of moisture from the distant river.

The grasses trembled and then gave way.

“Thank you,” Briar told them gravely. “You’re very strong. Those lowland grasses would never stand a chance against you.”

The grasses were scornful of fat, water-soaked plants beyond the mountains. Only here, next to the sky, could they reach for the infinite.

Briar shook his head and looked around. A line of boulders stood close by. There were images painted on them in bright colors and outlined in white: a many-headed god, a snake twined about itself to make an intricate circle, a goddess riding a beast whose antlers were tipped with stars, a spider that wore a crown. It wasn’t the first time he had seen such paintings on rocks. Then, as now, he wondered who went to such trouble, and why. The Snow Serpent Pass was bare of them. Now that he thought of it, the Ice Lion Pass, which they had taken on the way to Dohan, had also been bare of the paintings. It was as if the artists had not wanted to share them with foreigners.

Shaking his head at the idea, possibly a leftover of his nightmares, he scooped up a little dirt. The grass closed over the space it had made for him. Briar said his thanks, rubbing the dirt in his palms to get a feel for it. If he was going to be fighting on these plains, he needed to understand his battlefield. He spent his ride back to Fort Sambachu smelling that earth, rolling it between his fingers, and dusting it onto his cheeks. Finally he rinsed it off in the little river that ran past the camp. By then he understood the earth of the Gnam Runga and what grew there, if not the stones and their paintings.

This dirt was very young and energetic, thrust up by the same force that made the Drimbakangs themselves. That same youth filled the roots and stems of everything that grew in it, making it more inclined to do whatever he — or Rosethorn — might ask of it.