Daja obeyed. The jarring stopped.

Better, said Tris. She renewed her grip on Sandry and on Daja, and waited.

He walked forever. Every time he stopped, to catch his breath or to massage his aching feet, visions and sounds flowed over him, trying to distract him. They would make him let go—he would never see Rosethorn or the girls again.

“Tempt somebody else,” he growled.

He might have thought he was on a giant wheel, walking around and around inside it without getting anywhere, except that the ball of thread from Rosethorn got bigger in his hands. When it was the size of a peach, and he’d found a blister on his right foot, he noticed something else: a sprout of grass between cobblestones.

He knelt and brushed it with his fingertips. “Am I ever glad to see you,” he told it. Getting up, he walked on. He saw another blade of grass, then a tuft of it. Touching the slender leaves, he realized the fluffs of temptation had left him after he greeted that first grass shoot.

“Dunno if that’s good or bad,” he admitted, and trudged on.

Here was a buttercup, its yellow so vivid in all that gray rock that it had the effect of a shout. Here was a clump of moss. He covered it with his palm for a moment, refreshed by that velvet coolness on his skin. He moved on, the ball in his hands the size of a melon.

His feet were bleeding when he found a patch of purple and violet crocuses that had thrust cobblestones from the road. He began to run. Crocuses were Rosethorn’s favorite spring flower: she had talked about their arrival for a month.

Running got harder. The plants were rioting, overturning stones, leaving holes for an unwary boy to wrench his ankle if he didn’t look sharp. The gray buildings shrank as he found more living things. Finally they vanished altogether. So too did the cobblestone road, giving way to a broad carpet of lush grass. It lay before a stretch of wrought-iron fence nearly fifteen feet high.

He put down the ball of thread. Now it moved on its own, rolling itself up as it traveled. It didn’t have far to go: there was an open gate in the fence. Inside stood Rosethorn, looking over her new domain.

Briar hesitated. He couldn’t see her face, but he knew the set of her back, the will in those hands planted so firmly on her hips. Ahead of her lay a vast garden in chaos. Trees, bushes, and flowers did battle with weeds, and lost. A fountain bubbled as if it gasped for life, its spouts clogged with moss, its drains stopped with dead leaves. Some type of climbing vine Briar had never seen before had laid claim to everything to his left. It was a gardener’s dream, a mess that would take months, even years, to return to its proper glory.

His fingers itched, too. Like his teacher, he did enjoy a challenge.

Not this challenge! cried Sandry. She strained to hold onto him. There are challenges back home, for both of you!

The ball of thread rolled to Rosethorn’s feet and vanished into her. Startled, she turned and saw Briar.

Her eyebrows came together with a nearly audible click; her red mouth pursed. She looked better—healthier, more alive—than she had in weeks. “Absolutely not,” she said firmly. “Turn right back around. Girls,” she called, “bring him in!”

“Nope,” he informed her. “Not without you.”

“Don’t be absurd,” she snapped. “You have a long life in store.”

“So do you,” he replied stubbornly.

“I did good work, I did important work, and now it’s over. Perhaps I didn’t want it this way and this soon, but you can see there’s another lifetime’s worth of labor here.” She looked over her shoulder at that garden, which so clearly needed someone very good to look after it. Cleaned up properly, it would be magnificent.

“I don’t care,” Briar said flatly. “We don’t belong here. We belong with the girls and Little Bear. And Niko, and Frostpine,” he added, seeing her flinch at each name, knowing it gave her pain to hear them, and not caring. She wanted to leave him! “—and—yes, Crane! You’d be leaving him behind. What of Lark? Her most of all—tell me that don’t matter to you.”

Rosethorn looked down, her mouth working.

“Come home,” whispered Briar.

She came over and hugged him fiercely, then let him go. Briar trembled. She looked solid enough, but she felt transparent. If a whisper had a body, that was what he’d embraced. “I’m tired,” she told him softly. “Tired to the bone. I want to rest.”

“Rest at home,” he repeated stubbornly.

“Briar, it’s my time, and it isn’t yours. Go back to the girls. You’ll break their hearts if you get lost here.” She turned to pick up a basket and shears he hadn’t seen in the grass before that moment.

“You’re breaking my heart,” he said quietly.

She straightened, her back to him. “I can’t go back,” she said patiently. “It will hurt.”

“’Scuze me for thinking it’s worth it to pick up a few ouches!” he cried. She was not coming back for any street rat. Briar had playmates to look after him. Briar didn’t need a great plant-mage who kept his heart in her pocket. “‘Scuze me for thinking maybe you liked me enough to want to come home!”

“I like you, boy,” she said gruffly. “I love you. And I am dead. That’s that.”

He took a breath. Here was the end of the debate. She wouldn’t change her mind, not now. Already he could feel Sandry’s grip on him fray. They were never supposed to have been able to do this in the first place.