“Absolutely not!” snapped Briar. “I’m a plant mage, not a stone mage. You need to learn from a stone mage.”

“Not one that lives in a palace,” she replied flatly. “I —”

“Pahan Briar! Pahan!” Someone pounded on the door.

Briar scowled at Evvy once more and went to see who had come. The visitor, a small, monkey-faced girl of fifteen years or so, wore the green sash of the Camelguts. This one, Douna, had assisted him late the night before. “What do you want, Douna?” asked Briar.

“Pahan Briar, you have to come,” the older girl said, bracing her hands on her knees as she caught her breath. “They got five more with their blackjacks — we didn’t even find ‘em till this morning. They’re a mess.”

“Can’t you get a real healer?” Briar demanded, feeling pulled in two by Evvy and the Camelguts. “I just make medicines!”

The look in Douna’s small brown eyes made him ashamed that he’d asked. What could a poor gang offer a healer to make it worth the risk to visit them? Even if they had enough coin for one of the locals, what kind of healing could they get? Up until he reached Winding Circle, Briar himself would have found the idea of getting a healer for his gang’s wounds hilarious. Street kids, whether they were called rats or thukdaks, learned to fend for themselves.

“Sit,” he ordered Douna, pushing her toward the table. He pulled off his overrobe and folded it neatly, putting it on the sideboard. “Have some tea and something to eat. I’ll need to get some things. Evvy, grab that basket and come with me.” They’d have to argue about her schooling later. Right now he would use the healer’s trick of putting every idle pair of hands to work.

Evvy stuffed the rest of a large slice of cheese into her mouth and grabbed the basket he’d pointed to. He led her upstairs to the workroom. It wasn’t as elaborate as the one at home at Winding Circle, but there were still plenty of lotions, balms, teas, and syrups, some of them his, some Rosethorn’s. He’d replenished his kit the night before out of habit, but he would need as much extra as he and Evvy could carry. He fully subscribed to Rosethorn’s belief: sometimes thinking ahead was just as good as magic.

Quickly Briar filled small jars from the large ones, wrote down contents on the corks that stopped the jars, and tucked them into Evvy’s basket. Next he stopped at the linen chest and cushioned the jars with pads which could be made into bandages. From the roof he fetched a number of thin, flat boards used for gardening: they made good splints. Another length of bandage was converted into a sling for the boards, which he hung on his own back.

“What’s all this for? And why are you letting some Camelgut order you around?” Evvy wanted to know.

“Because I can help and they won’t get anyone who can help better,” retorted Briar, trying to think if he’d missed anything. Suddenly he noticed a flaw in his plan to put Evvy to use. “What gang are you with?” he asked. Some gangs had treaties, allowing members to cross territories. If her gang had a treaty with the Camelguts …

She interrupted his thoughts with her abrupt reply. “I’m not in a gang.”

Briar made a face. “Evvy, this is serious.”

“So am I,” she insisted. “I didn’t belong, I don’t belong, and I’ll never belong.”

“Because if the Camelguts are at war with your gang,” he began.

“Is ‘I’m not in a gang’ just too big an idea for you?” she cried.

Briar shook his head. He’d get the truth out of her later. Right now he needed an extra pair of hands. Not only had Evvy shown she was inclined to obey him — within limits — but she was also too young and too little to try to fight him if he vexed her with an order. He couldn’t say the same of any Camelgut.

He walked into the dining room. “Douna, is there a decent pot at the den? A clean one?” Douna, who had stuffed her mouth as rapidly as Evvy had, shook her head. Briar marched into the pantry and came out with a cauldron that was roughly as large as Evvy’s basket. Boiled water was safer if the pot it got boiled in was clean. He grabbed Evvy’s napkin from the front of her tunic, where it still rested, and tossed it to Douna. “Wrap some food in that and let’s go,” he ordered.

5

The Camelgut den was in chaos. Gang members lay on pallets as others tended them. Apparently there had been fights throughout the night. Very few Camelguts sported no bruises at all, and there were eight fresh victims, not five.

Briar took a deep breath. For some reason he remembered a talk he’d had during one of Summersea’s medical crises, one of the many times he’d been pressed into work with the sick. “Why do they obey you?” he’d asked the woman as those who were well enough to work carried out her orders.

“It’s no mystery,” she’d said then. “I act as if they should. And they’re frightened enough to turn instinctively even to those who only know a bit more than they do.”

Act as if they should obey, Briar thought now. And they did send for me again, after all. They must trust me some. He turned to Douna. “Get that pot filled with water and put it on to boil,” he ordered. “Evvy, stick close to me.”

“Oh, I will,” she muttered, watching the Camelguts from the corners of her eyes.

Briar unslung the staves from his back and leaned them against the wall. Then he scratched his head and considered the room. Since his arrival at Winding Circle, he had worked in sickrooms in three epidemics and a border war, but he’d always been under the guidance of Rosethorn and experienced healers. What would they do?