Street Magic - By Tamora Pierce Page 0,26

who could get stones to hold light or fire, but it was one thing to think it possible and another to see the results of "Oh, that."

"Is it hot?" he asked.

"Nope." Evvy put the stone beside the boy they were supposed to be treating.

Reminded of his patient, Briar went over him again. The leg bruise shrank under his bruise ointment, but Briar could feel a bone chip that remained under the boy's skin. Cutbane, spread neatly over the splits in his left eyebrow and cheek, drove off infection and worked to close the wounds. Next Briar put an uninjured Camelgut to work cutting the wooden staves to a proper length for splints. As he straightened the arm, Briar said to Evvy, "I thought you never used magic before yesterday."

"I didn't," Evvy said, watching him with interest.

The boy who'd cut the splints gave them to Briar. "How'd you make my stone light, if you never did magic before?" Briar asked as he splinted the broken forearm.

"I knew I could when I went home," she pointed out. "Doesn't that hurt him?"

"That's why it's nice for us that he's passed out. Elsewise they'd hear him yelling at the Aliput Gate." Finished, Briar gathered the crystal and the remaining bandage and knee-crawled to the next pallet. This patient was a girl with a shattered kneecap and a broken collarbone. "So you knew you could do magic when you got home, and –?"

"I have rocks. Some came with the place, and some I brung there. For pretty, you know?" Evvy put down her basket. "And I remembered how the junk stones I threw at the Vipers lit up, so I thought I'd try and see what stones would light for me. Some of them did. Some just got hot, though. Do you need me to make something hot?"

Briar sat back to think. He'd ordered the Camelguts to put their blankets over the injured, but what good were blankets that were mainly rags? He'd thought to ask his helpers to fill gourds with hot water to put in the beds, but stones would keep heat in longer.

"Can you make sure the heat won't burn folk?" he asked.

Evvy scratched her head. "I can try," she said at last.

"Do it," ordered Briar.

"I need different rocks," she pointed out.

"Don't stand there telling me about it. Sooner before later, all right?" he asked. He was taking a chance that her magic wouldn't spill out of control, but he'd seen her slip just enough power into his stone. Was it because she was used to thinking of a rock as an enclosed thing? "Do you need help?" he wanted to know.

Evvy shrugged. "I don't think so." She trotted out of the Camelgut den.

So far she hadn't once questioned his right to give her orders. Later, when he had this mess straightened out, he would have to find out why.

Briar continued to work on the injured with the Camelguts' help. When he saw he would run out of bandages soon, he instructed his assistants to dump rags into a pot of water and set it to boiling. Of the boiled water in the pot he'd fetched from home, part went for washing, part to willowbark tea, to ease the aches of injuries.

The boy with the dent in his head died by the time Briar had examined the worst hurt and had come to look at him again. Briar did a second check of the others on pallets, then got to work on the less seriously hurt. He wished for Rosethorn over and over – a second pair of experienced hands would have been nice – but knew he could manage if he just kept after things, provided the gang members continued to obey. Besides, Rosethorn was disheartened enough by the exhausted farmlands of Chammur.

The nice thing about Chammur, Evvy thought as she returned to the Camelgut den swinging her loaded bucket, was that it was easy to find plenty of rocks, even one particular kind of rock. Rather than work on them in the Camelgut den, with its noise and smells, she had found a rooftop where she could do as Briar had asked. It was much harder than calling light to his beautiful crystal. The core of noncrystal stones didn't like warmth. They hadn't felt warm in ages of time, and didn't see why she wanted to put it into them now. Her results were spotty, heat flickering in some of the bigger stones, but it was the best she could