Read Briar's Book for Free Online Page B

Rosethorn, lifting one graceful eyebrow. “Mudrunners?”
    “Scorching means ‘good,’ ” Briar translated. “Mudrunners is a Mire gang.”
    “Charming,” Rosethorn said drily. “The language
I
speak is so drab by comparison.” Pouring a cup of fruit juice, she gave it to Flick.
    Flick scowled. “Why do I have to keep drinking this muck?” she demanded.
    “You’re feverish,” Rosethorn told her, more patient than she had ever been with Briar. “You’re drying out. Get too dry, and you won’t be able to keep fighting the sickness. Look at it this way, it’s better than willowbark tea.” Coaxing, joking, and being firm by turns, she got the sick girl to finish the juice, then helped her back to bed. Once she had lain down, Rosethorn produced a jar of aloe balm and began to smooth it into Flick’s pox-mottled skin.
    Briar had seen Rosethorn be gentle as she tied up bean plants, coaxed grapevines to wind more firmly around a trellis, or patched a tree that had lost a limb in a storm. This was the first time he’d seen her use that delicate touch on a human. She could have been the girl’s mother, had Flick’s mother loved her kid, he thought.
    Flick dozed, lulled by silence and Rosethorn’s kind touch.
    “Niko said you don’t like people,” Briar remarked softly when Rosethorn came back to the table.
    “I don’t like nursing them,” was her quiet reply.
    “But you go to Urda’s House and the healers at the City Temple every month,” he pointed out.
“Every
month, rain or no. And you always take stuff – ”
    “I check medicines and replenish them if they are running low,” Rosethorn told him. “Especially here, where their goods are the cheapest money can buy, I spell their medicines to the greatest strength magic can give. I don’t go near the sick.”
    “If you’re magicking stuff, why didn’t you make me stay and watch?”
    She smiled crookedly. “Boy, I teach you six and seven days a week at times. Every now and then we both need a rest.”
    He turned that over in his mind. He
did
like their days in the city, when he was free to go with Flick and her friends, if he wasn’t visiting the market with the girls. “You’re being nice to Flick,” he said at last.
    “You needn’t adore humanity to feel bad for someone in this fix,” she replied. “Street rat or no, she’s sick and frightened. There’s a difference between people like her and adults who think they know more about your life, and their illness, than you do. If you’ve nothing better to do than chatter, you can help take inventory of these cupboards. If we get more patients in here, I don’t want to run out of anything important.”
    By the time the clock on top of the Winding Circle tower known as the Hub rang three in the afternoon, Daja had come to work at the big table. Before her lay a spool of thick iron wire, cutters, a thin-tipped punch, and a small hammer and pliers, the tools needed to make chain mail. She was threading a link through its neighbors when she heard a familiar voice in the road that ran past the cottage.
    “Don’t whine at me, woman! A lack of planning in the Water Temple should
not
be an emergency for
me!”
    The pliers slipped from Daja’s fingers. Frostpine yelling? He was usually the most easygoing of men. When she’d left him earlier that day, he had been lazy with good humor over the success of the morning’s work.
    She ran to the door and threw it open. The rain had stopped. Her teacher, Dedicate Frostpine of the Fire Temple, was striding through the front gate. He looked like a thundercloud about to spit lightning.
    A thin, fluttery, pale-skinned woman in the blue habit of the Water Temple followed him. “Your language is intemperate!” she cried.
    Frostpine whirled to glare down at her. His brown skin was flushed; his eyes blazed. His wild mane of side-hair and beard gave him the look of a bald lion. His bright red habit, scarred with burns and soot, made him an even more