Street Magic - By Tamora Pierce Page 0,28

madness that swamped older girls and boys.

"Tell you what," Briar said to the girl. "You know the aloe leaves they sell in the market?" The girl nodded, and tried to tickle the inside of his arm with her toes. "Behave, or I'll put something that bites on these." The Camelgut girl pouted at him prettily. Evvy sighed and shifted her weight from one foot to another. He was spending more time on swollen fleabites than he did on broken arms. "Steal some aloe leaves," Briar suggested, "and when you itch, break a piece off and rub the juice on the itch. It's good for burns, too." Carefully he smoothed a salve over the sores and put a light bandage over them.

"Thanks, pahan" she said with another quick, sidelong glance from under curling lashes. "I'm Ayasha – if you have any more wisdom to share." She got up and walked over to a group of Camelguts huddled in a corner.

Briar looked at Evvy, who was shaking her head. "What?" he demanded.

"You want a cloth to wipe the drool off your chin?" Evvy asked wickedly.

Briefly he looked the way she felt sometimes about her old home in Yanjing, lost and lonely. Then he shed the sad look and said tartly, "Keep making sour faces and you'll need spectacles. It happened to one of my mates, it can happen to you."

"What? You aren't old enough for one wife, let alone more," Evvy objected as she followed him to the pallets.

"Not my wife, my mate," he said, blotting sweat from a sleeping boy's face. "It's a word we used at home, for somebody that's closer than blood family, your best friend. Don't you have mates?"

"The cats," Evvy said. "Not people, though. I keep to myself."

"Don't keep saying you aren't ganged up," Briar replied, his face mulish. He rubbed one of his salves on the sleeping boy's arm, above and below the splint. "I lived in a place a lot like Oldtown for years. All the kids were ganged up, unless they were crippled or simple. And you aren't crippled, though sometimes I wonder about the simple part."

"I'm no fool," Evvy retorted softly, to keep from catching any Camelgut's attention. How could someone as clever as he was not understand? Unless he told the truth, and he had belonged to a gang.

No, that was too outlandish. Old gang kids worked in inns, or peddled rags, or labored on farms or on buildings. They never became clean, well dressed anything. "Gangers always want this, and that, and some other thing. They're your friend, and why can't you help, and you'd be safer with us, and then they try to show you what you'd be safe from. Cats don't want anything from me, though it's nice if I feed them. I like that."

Briar frowned at her. "The Vipers wouldn't've grabbed you if you had a gang," he pointed out.

"No, the other gang would have grabbed me first. Crabbing's rude no matter who does it," she retorted. "Let someone try it on you sometime and see if you like it."

They made two more rounds of the room as Briar checked bandages, coaxed people to drink the sharp-scented tea he'd brewed, and gave out more medicines. Evvy watched him, fascinated. For all his fine clothes, he didn't mind handling the sick, as if he'd wiped away sweat, blood, and vomit all his life.

He stopped at last and looked around. "I think we're just about done," he remarked.

Someone in the group of unhurt Camelguts in the corner yelled, "I can't believe you! They killed Hammit! Pilib's dead, now, too!"

Briar frowned. Evvy wondered why. He might be caring for these people, but their squabbles weren't his.

"They'll kill us all," another boy argued. "If they don't, you know Snake Sniffers and Rockheads will move in and pick us off. Look around! Half of us can't even fight!"

"The Vipers have the takameri to buy weapons for them," added Douna, the girl who had led Briar and Evvy here. "What's she going to get them next? Axes? Swords?"

A youth added, "If she's paying out that coin, I say she ought to pay it for weapons for us, too."

Evvy was impressed. None of the gang people she knew had the sense to think of things like this. They were too tied up with honor and protecting their ground.

"'They want us to join and I don't want anybody else dying," said a male voice. "Hands. For joining?" Most of the walking Camelguts' hands rose. Other hands