Melting Stones

I Fuss with Fusspot

W e 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?

I ground my teeth.

At yet another halt, Luvo looked at me. I don't know how, because he didn't have to turn his head to do it, but I felt his eyes on me. "You tremble. You give off heat. Are you ill?"

"Just restless. I feel fine," I retorted. "I feel better than fine. I just want to ride, not trudge along like a snail. I'm not hot. I don't feel the ground trembling one bit. I'm not trembling."

But I looked at my hands on the reins. They shook, as if I had a fever. I didn't feel sick.

I felt it then, far below the stone and earth under us. The little hairs on my arms stirred as I called the warning: "Shake coming!"

We all dismounted. I held Luvo with one arm as I clutched my horse's reins with the other. Now everyone else had the sense of it. The birds and little creatures were silent. Our horses stamped and yanked at the bits. We hung on as the earth rattled the loose leaves from the trees and the stones from their places. When the shock struck us, I felt like a thousand fingers were tickling me. I giggled. Then the power was gone. Life got slow and boring again.

As we rode on, those neglected stone markers started to vex me. What if they didn't show the local mages where strength could be drawn from the earth anymore? That was no reason to leave them untended. They had done generations of service. Some of them had fallen over. Some were just tilted, which made them look undignified.

When I found moss covering most of one granite marker, flaking its carvings away, I couldn't bear it anymore. "Rosethorn!"

"Evvy, I'm thinking," she said.

"It's moss on a rock, and the rock doesn't want to be changed. It likes being all neat and carved." I was jittery and aggravated. "If you won't clear it away, I will, Rosethorn, you know I will. I have followed like a good dog all morning. Now I would like to tend this marker."

She sighed and dismounted.

"I can't believe you're doing this." Fusspot turned his horse around in the road. "We're going about important work, looking at serious problems. Why do you cater to that spoiled brat you insisted on burdening us with?"

Jayat rode a little way up the trail, to get away from us.

Rosethorn glared at Fusspot. "Evvy and I have an understanding. There are plenty of reasons for doing things as we do them. She is no burden to me. Since I am senior and in charge, I will thank you to hold your tongue!" She came over to me and muttered, "Don't make me have to defend your behavior to him again."

I didn't tell her I could defend myself. I was eager and nervous and vexed, but I was not ready to die. It was one thing to snap at Fusspot. I had learned early on, a person who snapped at Rosethorn had best be armed for war and prepared to take casualties.

"What is the matter with you, anyway?" Rosethorn demanded. "You don't normally care if there's moss on stone or not. Didn't you tell me in Yanjing that you don't even think vines are rock killers now? That since rocks have no bodies like ours to grow and change, they are dependent on forces from the outside to change them, and that includes plants?"

I scuffed my foot in the dirt of the road. "This marker wants to stay the way it is for now." Normally I would have told the rock not to be silly, but my veins were filled with hot, fizzing blood. It was like what I'd sensed in those old power places, only stronger. If Jayat and Tahar had drawn this kind of strength from there, I was surprised Jayat could bear to ride along so pokily.

"And stop jittering," snapped Rosethorn. "Mila save us, Evvy, it's like you've been sniffing dragonsalt. Enough!"

Carefully Rosethorn put her hands on the moss. She talked it into letting go of the stone. Piece by piece, she lifted it free and moved it to a shady patch. I called a fistful of lesser stones in the soil to come together, bracing the marker. They helped me to push it until it was straight again. When that was done, Rosethorn and I mounted up and followed the others along the trail.

Fusspot couldn't keep still for long. We hadn't gone more than five more markers up the slope of Mount Grace when he drew his horse even with Rosethorn's. "I want her left at the village next time! She is a distraction and a nuisance! She is—"

"What in the Green Man's mercy?" Rosethorn turned her horse down a path among a tumble of rocks. Myrrhtide might think she was riding off in a temper, but I knew better. She hadn't even heard him. Something else had gotten her attention. I looked at Jayat.

"There's a better place to see it from," Jayat called to her, and turned to me. "How did she know?"

"How did she know what?" I asked. Fusspot shoved in front of us to ride after Rosethorn. Jayat didn't answer; he just followed Fusspot, and I followed him.

Rosethorn led us down among rocks that got taller and taller. These were big, gorgeous slabs of flat stone. They looked like some giant had cut them from the mountainside with an ax. We came out on a ledge. Stone rose behind us, and the ground sloped far below. The slope ended in a small canyon filled with dead trees.

Jayat sighed. "This is the worst place. My uncle and I found it two weeks ago as we were hunting."

I dismounted and put Luvo on the ground. The fizzing in my blood was starting to annoy me. It made me fidget, when I am not by nature a fidgeting person. I rested my hand on one of the slabs behind us, hoping the nice, steady granite would calm me down. Instead its roots warned me of what was rising under our feet.

"Shock!" I yelled. How did it come up on us so fast? It must have welled up under the mountain. "Earth shock!"

The others threw themselves off the horses, which were panicking. The animals had felt the coming shakes almost as soon as I had. That was embarrassing. I should have known faster. "Luvo, why didn't you warn me?" I cried.

"It is too quick. Too close," he said.

I dragged my horse's head down. It fought, until I yanked my jacket off and covered its eyes.

The earth shuddered and crackled. Trees fell into the dead canyon from its sides. Boulders tumbled along with them. Everything smashed to bits at the bottom. The wave of power struggled to reach the surface, fell short, and sank back.

We waited and did nothing, only listened. Luvo and I sent our magics into the ground, feeling for more waves.

We found nothing. On the mountain and in the canyon, more stones fell. Big ones, little ones… They welcomed the chance to change themselves. I wished them well on their journeys to new shapes.

"That was very, very close." Jayat, like me, had covered his horse's eyes to keep it calm. He began to unwrap his shirt from his horse's head.

I stared at the long scars on Jayat's back. He shrugged and said, "Not everybody was sad when the foreign lords killed as many pirates as they could find."

I nodded. I could see that he wouldn't be too upset at that. "Luvo? Are you all right?" I asked.

Luvo wandered over to the ledge to look down into the dead canyon. "The crack in the earth beside the road closed, but a new one opened down below. I do not recommend that you try to use the new line of power, Jayatin. There are seams of quartz crystal around and below it. They will make any magical strength drawn by a human somewhat irregular."

"Are you sure we would do so badly, Master Luvo?" Jayat smiled patiently, as if he spoke to a child. "We've gotten pretty good at finding ways to draw on this stuff, you know. We have to, you see. We're just a little bit desperate at the moment. Perhaps our skills don't look like much to you, being stone…"

"The strength you used is affected by certain laws, including those of crystals, Jayatin." Luvo was in his teaching mood. I was glad it wasn't me who brought it on. "Magic passes into quartz as light does. It is reflected from the inner walls of the crystal. You would gather it up quickly, if your magic passed only through one crystal. However, along the seams below and around the crack in that canyon are large clusters. Within each cluster the crystals are turned in their own arrangements. They will reflect each bit of power back upon itself, then to other crystals. You would be trapped here, chained by your magic, until it wore out."

I heard a grinding noise above our heads.

So did Rosethorn. "Luvo, be quiet." Her brown eyes searched for the source of the sound. "Everyone, back up—"

Higher up the mountainside, a huge slab of granite gave way. The shock had broken it from its roots. It slid toward us, collecting a train of smaller boulders and gravel as it came. As it fell, it gathered the strength of its falling, picking up speed.

And then it flipped, like a coin in a street magician's hand. In my head I had been set to send it on a neat detour around us—until that flip. When it leaped high in the air and came down like a six-ton ax, there was no time to be pretty. I even forgot Luvo was there. I just threw up my hands and my power, sucking the strength of the mountain granite in through my feet. I hurled it around that slab and the worst of the boulders.

They locked into place over our heads. They were as solid in the air as they had been on the mountainside. I held them still, wondering what I was going to do now.

Luvo's power slid into place over mine, cool opal slabs over my thin mica sheet. "I have it, Evumeimei. We are fortunate that you are so quick."

He gently lifted all that stone away from me. I've seen parents set infants in bed with a careful gentleness, as if one slip might break the baby. That was how Luvo settled the slab and its boulder friends in the canyon below, as if they were his children, and he didn't want to disturb their sleep.

"Still wishing she had stayed at Winding Circle?" Rosethorn raised an eyebrow at Fusspot. One of the smaller rocks that escaped me had bruised her cheek. I winced in shame—I should have caught those stones, too. She took a little pot of something from her saddlebag and dabbed some of its contents on her skin. The bruise faded to a yellow spot. Then she did the same for Jayat, Fusspot, and the horses, who had all been dinged by smaller rocks. Jayat gaped at me even when Rosethorn was mending his cut.

"What?" I was feeling cross. "Are the flies lonesome? Are you offering them a warm, wet home?"

"Hunh?" Jayat blinked at me.

Rosethorn pushed Jayat's chin up until he realized his mouth hung open. He closed it.

"It's just raw power. There wasn't any art to it." Fusspot was red-faced as he fiddled with his horse's reins. "Thank you." He said it to the horse's side.

Despite the banging in my head—it hurts to work so fast and so hard—I had to grin. I bet the horse didn't get thanked every day. That night it would probably tell all the other horses about the strange human who snapped one moment and said thanks the next.

Jayat was still staring. "Stop goggling," I snapped. "You don't do that to Rosethorn or—" I almost said Fusspot, which Rosethorn wouldn't like. "Myrrhtide."

"They're dedicate initiates. You're my age." Jayat tugged at his collar like it was suddenly too tight.

"Luvo did the really hard work. I just stopped it. Ogle Luvo," I ordered.

"Ogle no one." Rosethorn gathered her mare's reins in her hand. "Let's go someplace safer and eat our midday I don't know why it is, but sudden peril and rescue always improves my appetite."