The Will of the Empress - By Tamora Pierce Page 0,157

thing in common: someone very powerful was trying to keep him asleep.

He used the water pitcher to fill his washbasin — tricky work when his hands shook so badly. Then he ducked his face in the basin and splashed water on the back of his head, cleaning off some of the nightmare sweat. They're powerful, whoever they are, but they ain't the Yanjingyi emperor's mages, he thought grimly. He checked the bond that linked him with Sandry. She was missing.

Not again! he thought angrily. Don't these clod-headed bleaters ever give up?

He looked over at Zhegorz. Normally their scarecrow, less of a scarecrow after some weeks of decent meals, would have been up after the noise Briar had made. He slept very lightly, but not tonight. Briar shook him with no result.

Sorry, old man, he silently told the sleeping mage. You were right all along.

Briar grabbed his mage kit, yanked open the door, and raced down the hall to Sandry's room. Gudruny and the children were sound asleep on pallets on the floor. Sandry was not in the empty bed. Instead, he saw a complex sign, written in pure magic, on his friend's mattress. Briar had never seen anything like it. He tried to inspect the curls and twists inside the thing, only to find he was swaying on his feet, sleep already blurring his mind.

This sign felt different, more powerful, from the fog of sleep that had wrapped him around beginning in the common room. Briar dug in his kit until he produced the slender vial whose contents he had labeled wake the dead. Once he removed the cork, he quickly stuck the vial under his nose and took a breath. For a moment his nose and brain felt as if they might well be on fire. He yanked the bottle away and recorked it, then wiped his streaming eyes and took a second look at the design. It tugged at him, urging sleep, so he hung on to the bottle of scent. Bending down to risk a closer look, he saw the design was done in oil. Moreover, it bled along the threads of the sheet, uncontained.

Done like that, it wouldn't last very long, he realized. Which means I'm not looking at the original spell. He stripped away the sheets to reveal the mattress. There, too, the design had bled up and through. Briar shoved the mattress aside. On the slats that kept it up he found the original spell. It was done on parchment in oils, and kept within the bounds of the parchment by a circle drawn in ink. Briar turned the parchment over: The mage who had made it had glued spelled silk onto the back and had written signs to enclose on that, to keep the spell from leaking down.

Musta been under the mattress for hours, to bleed up through everything, Briar decided. The energy in the oils had to move somewhere. The only way the mage that made the spell left it to go was up.

He couldn't say how he knew the mage was a man, but he did. Moreover, the fiery brightness of the original spell and its complexity, even if he didn't know how it was made, told him that they faced a very powerful mage, even a great mage. It was as bright as any work done by the four's teachers.

To keep her asleep longer and deeper than the spell on us, I bet, thought Briar, recognizing some of the signs written into the original spell. To keep her out for days, not a day. And it woulda seeped into her power slow, so she'd never feel it coming over her. She'd be halfway across Namorn before she'd wake.

As soon as we get the rest of the household up and on her trail, we'll destroy this and wake her up. Won't that be a fine surprise for whoever's got her? He smiled thinly and placed the parchment on the frame of the bed. Mage kit in hand, he went to Daja's room. She slept as soundly as the others. Once more, Briar uncorked his wake-up potion and put the vial under her nose. She gasped, choked, and opened her eyes. Coughing, she swung a fist out to clip Briar's head. Expecting it — the potion had that effect on many people — he dodged the blow.

"Kill me later," Briar told her as she scrambled to get at him. "Some belbun nicked Sandry, and he's got a serious mage in his pocket.