Melting Stones (7 page)

"Acid." Fusspot looked absolutely miserable. "This water has turned to acid."

"These plants and trees have been poisoned by it." Rosethorn dragged me to my feet, away from the water. I didn't complain, not after a look at those fish. I didn't want my shoes burned off my feet. "There, now, Myrrhtide. It's not sewage, as
you
thought."

"Not here, anyway. It might be sewage in the water table elsewhere."

Myrrhtide never knows when to give up.

"Evumeimei?" Somehow Luvo had stayed on the horse even while I fell off. "You are all right?"

"I'm fine. Just my dignity hurt. Jayat, listen, nobody could have drawn earth power here." I got up. Rosethorn let me go, once she knew I wouldn't stumble into that nasty-looking brown pond, with its scum of dead things. "The stones were touched by something great, but not lately. They fizz, but it's all leftovers. Maybe you and your Tahar Catwalker were chewing funny leaves. The shamans of Qidao do that, to imagine they can talk to the sky and horse gods."

"We didn't teach you how to be
rude
." Rosethorn was using her this-is-your-only-warning voice.

I'd been rude? I was impatient. How was I rude if I was just honest and wanted a straight answer?

"That's what I've been trying to tell you." Either Jayat didn't agree I'd been rude, or he was really easygoing. "We
used
to be able to call up the deep power with the right spells. Mages here have done it for centuries. The veins along these trails are so accustomed to this use, they almost offer the power at a touch. But at least close to Moharrin and the lake, it's all gone out of reach. And if I can't reach it, my master can't—I'm stronger than she is, even if I don't know a quarter as much. Further up the trail, there are more bad places. In one of them, there's a spot where the power is too close to the surface, and there's too
much
of it."

Myrrhtide frowned. "What do you mean, too much? You're a mage, you need to learn to be more precise in your reports. 'Too much' is hardly definitive."

Maybe I was wrong about Jayat's patience. He
did
scowl at Fusspot. "Master Tahar was called to help a woman who was having a difficult childbirth. She lives out by that place I mentioned. It's a power spot Tahar has used since she was my age. She was going to save this woman and her baby, with spells she's worked all her life. That time, when she set the spells to channel the power, it swamped her magic and her control. It was, was…" He shook his head. "It was a river, an ocean. Tahar would have killed them both if she'd used it. Instead she turned it back through herself. They died anyway. Master Tahar couldn't leave her bed for two weeks. She couldn't work magic for a month."

"What would make it do that?" I asked Rosethorn.

She shook her head. "There are all kinds of reasons. The earth lines are part of nature. They aren't an easy source of power for academic mages who need a bit extra. Too many things can go wrong." She frowned at Jayat.

He shrugged. "You're a dedicate initiate of Winding Circle temple. You can say that. I bet you've never had to call on sources outside yourself for help in your life."

"You're wrong about that," Rosethorn said. "I draw from the green world all the time."

"Because the green world is you, and you are it," replied Jayat. "Master Tahar and I aren't so lucky. Our people depend on us to help them live, Dedicate Rosethorn. You and Dedicate Initiate Myrrhtide here will leave when you've solved our problem."

"Of course." Myrrhtide sniffed, as if Jayat smelled bad, not the water with the dead things in it. "You could hardly expect us to remain
here
. We have other demands on our time and skills."

"Well,
Moharrin
is the demand on Tahar's time and skills. She's in her eighties. She needs all the help she can get." Jayat didn't even look grumpy as he spoke. It makes me cross just to
see
Myrrhtide when he sniffs that way. "So we do what we must to satisfy the village's demands, since we are the only mages here. If doing our work right means tapping a vein of power, as the mages before us did, you can't blame us for using the tools we have."

"Except there's nothing here but cold earth and stones that remember something," I reminded Jayat. "I can stretch down half a mile, and it's all ghost fizzing."

"I can reach even further," Luvo announced.

From the way Jayat flinched, he had forgotten that Luvo rode on my saddle. I wondered why Luvo always had to be so slow. Didn't he understand that life was just whooshing by?

Luvo went on talking. Slowly and pokily. "There is no crack below the ground, though it may be there was at one time. Some of the rock faces a mile to the west are cloven, as if they were sheared off. As if they were once small fault lines in the earth. But that shearing is no longer evident. You could no more reach the power in the faults under the heavy cloak of the earth than I could fly."

Myrrhtide sniffed. "Nonexistent fault lines are all very well, but I understand our little tour of inspection will take us up on the mountain today. You may talk rocks at another time. Let's go."

"No." Rosethorn pointed to a big, brown-needled pine tree on the far side of the pond. It was leaning, half-uprooted from the soft earth. "That's a hazard. It needs attention."

"You certainly don't expect me to get an ax and hack at it," Fusspot told her huffily.

"Oswin said he would cut it down," Jayat called to Rosethorn.

She was already walking around the pond. "He took in the children the pirates abandoned. Azaze was telling me about that. He's got enough to do with his days. I can handle this."

Jayat turned his horse. "I know where Oswin keeps his saw."

I put a hand on his arm. "She'll hate it if you cut. She wants to give the tree a proper funeral."

He frowned at me. He didn't understand, but he had the sense to halt and wait to see what happened. I picked Luvo up and cradled him against my chest.
But we can do something to help, right
? I asked him through our joined magics.

Luvo and I mixed our power and let it sink into the ground. Under the pond we flowed from stone to stone. I winced at the burn of that water on each rock we passed through. Even with a foot of mud between us and the pond itself, we could feel the acid in it.

Did some evil mage poison it or something
? I asked.

No mage has been here, Evumeimei
, Luvo told me.

That was that. When Luvo was definite, he knew what he talked about. I don't know how he understood things, but he did. He tells me I'll know, too, in a few thousand years. I can't get him to see that I won't be around all that time. It makes me wonder if he knows something I don't.

Ahead shone the white blaze of Rosethorn's magic. She jammed vines of her power into some shadowy thing. The threads spread away from her to fill the shape of a leaning tree. Slowly and clumsily they tugged, trying to move its dead roots.

Luvo and I entered the stones around and under the tree. There Luvo went very, very still. I felt us flex, as if Luvo had swallowed with our magics. A wave of coolness from outside Luvo and me bore down on us. It was an invisible power that filled the earth, calling to the children of iron in the surrounding stone. The iron in fool's gold, hematite, and olivine, even specks of iron no bigger than pinheads in the granite around us, all stirred like waking bees.

Rocks don't like to move. Still, given a choice between their iron's pull to that immense force, and battling the loose soil to stay put, the rocks chose to move away from the tree's roots. Luvo and I drew them back from Rosethorn, too, so she wouldn't be knocked off her feet.

With no rocks to help keep it standing, the tree slowly lay down on the ground. Luvo and I thanked the earth power that called the iron
very
politely. Luvo talked to it then for a while. My head was a bit woozy, so I drew back to my body alone, and leaned on my horse.

When I could, I drank some water and ate a peach, then looked around. Rosethorn was speaking the Green Man's prayers over the dead pine and the other dead trees. Myrrhtide, who grumbled that he should do
something
, collected pond water as he waited. He worked spells on it, to see what was wrong.

Jayat's face was covered with sweat. "What was that?" he whispered when he saw me smile at him. "Something went through me. It came from you and Luvo. I—I didn't know what was up or down, where the village is, where the mountain or the lake is…"

"There are more important things in the world than this village and lake." Myrrhtide was definitely cranky. Maybe he was as touchy about sick water as Rosethorn was about sick plants. "Even a half-trained bumpkin like you should understand that."

I was taking a breath, getting ready to teach Fusspot some manners, but Luvo had come back from talking with that great force. He stood in front of me. I steadied him as he spoke in his thundering mountain voice. "Respect a mage in his lands, human. You know nothing of those things that Jayatin has put into this place. You do not know the dedication and sacrifice that he and his masters have given this lake, this village, this mountain. You preen yourself on your learning. Take shame instead for the fear that bars you from true work and true devotion. You have not the heart for it. You have not the soul to understand those whose measure will always be greater than yours."

Myrrhtide went dead white. He kicked his horse into a trot on up the trail, away from us.

Rosethorn came over. "Luvo, remind me to stay on your good side. It was very well done, though." She mounted her horse and looked at Jayat. "I hope Myrrhtide went in the right direction."

Jayat wiped sweat from his face and nodded. His dark cheeks were scarlet. He took a drink of water. "I don't think I was worthy of that, Master Luvo."

"I am thousands of years older than you, Jayatin. I know what you deserve."

We caught up to Myrrhtide. Nobody said anything for a long time. I believe none of us could think of anything that wouldn't sound like fake jewels after Luvo's thunder.

The trail followed those earth lines marked for the island's mages. It often came close to places where plants and water had gone bad. Not all the water places—ponds or streams—had turned acid, but there were plenty of dead patches of land. Rosethorn got quieter and quieter. Her eyebrows came together more often in her puzzled look, until they just stayed that way. Myrrhtide fussed over each bit of dead water as if it was his child.

We crawled up the mountain's shoulder except for halts at dead spots. I kept searching the ground for the fizzing rocks, for something to do. They were hard to find. The strength in those ones I touched was fading, without their source of power to renew them. I was getting bored to
death
.

"The whole world is hurrying by while we poke along," I muttered when we stopped for the thousandth time.

Jayat shrugged. "We can only ride so fast. Here's where the earth's power swamped Tahar." He pointed to the farmhouse that sat back from the road. "The farmer's mother looks after him now." He and Rosethorn went to the house to talk to the family.

Myrrhtide glared at me. "Magical investigation takes time. A proper student would be taking notes."

I smiled at him. "I'm not Rosethorn's student."

"You think you don't have to obey temple rules because you have her and Briar Moss and that rock for friends?" he asked me softly. He kept an eye on Rosethorn. "In two years you'll be sixteen. It won't matter then
who
your friends are. You'll be out on your ear,
Evumeimei
. Out on the street where you belong." He smiled cruelly. "Unless you take your vows to the temple. But you'd have to care about us—and that's not a thing you can lie about."

Something around my heart pinched me. "I'll be on my way to magecraft, Dedicate Fusspot." I said it with as much sass as I could, pretending I didn't care. "I won't need your precious temple then."

"Spoken like a true guttersnipe." He sounded pleased. "Take, take, take. Never give anything back. Why the temple keeps allowing the likes of you in—"

"Shut up." I turned to face my horse. "Rosethorn's coming, you stupid man." I climbed back into the saddle, thinking, He's just a nasty old fusspot. I don't care what bile he spits.

"What were you talking about?" Rosethorn looked suspiciously at us. "You both looked very passionate about something."

I dug a smile up from somewhere. "Midday. I'm always passionate about food, you know that. He wants to wait awhile, and I didn't eat enough breakfast."

She looked at Fusspot, who was getting back on his horse, then at me. She didn't seem convinced. "Luvo, were they discussing the midday meal?"

"I was inattentive, Dedicate Rosethorn." Luvo's head knob was pointed toward the cliffs to the west. "My thoughts were on the fine-grained volcanic gabbro and quartz crystals higher on the mountain. Some of the crystals have a pleasing violet-pink color which I have never seen."

Jayat looked awed. Rosethorn could tell something was not right, but she could never bring herself to call Luvo a liar. Not that he was lying. Luvo's thinking is funny. It works like the rope of clear crystals that runs through his body. Each crystal is a little mind. Luvo has thoughts in all of them going on at once. He probably
was
thinking of gabbro and quartz, in part of him.

"Let's move on." Rosethorn mounted her horse. "Myrrhtide, you will ride beside me, if you please."

Off we went. Luvo sat in front of me and didn't move for a long time. Jayat rode ahead of Rosethorn and Myrrhtide, thinking about something. I tried to sit quietly, but it got harder as the morning wore on. I swear, even the sunlight made my blood itch to move faster. My flesh throbbed inside my skin.

Is this how Luvo feels when he watches us? I wondered. Birds and small creatures dashed past and around the trail, living their real lives at a
real
pace, not crawling along. Does Luvo feel as if life is passing him by? Or does he like being
sllllloooowww?