The Will of the Empress - By Tamora Pierce Page 0,159

to find that many great mages. People tend to dislike us. They think we're conceited and high-handed. They never think that perhaps we just spend so much time trying to wrestle our magic into behaving that it makes us short-tempered with the everyday world. So we hide."

Quen ate a chunk of carrot, his eyes alert as he watched them. "Frustrating, isn't it? I had to spend plenty of time at Lightsbridge breaking out of trap spells as part of my specialization. Maybe you could do a double working that would get you out eventually, but that's why I pulled you apart." He studied his nails. "You really should consider employment with Berenene. She takes good care of her people. I'll even teach you some tricks once Shan and Sandry are wed. Not this one, of course. But you'll see I'm a decent enough fellow after that."

He is starting to annoy me, complained Daja.

Let's shut him up, then. Briar and Daja thrust at the spells with their own spells for destruction, Briar's for decay and the destruction of parasites, Daja's for rust. Nothing worked. Each suggested charms and tricks they had learned in the last three years, creating variations within their own specialties. These, too, failed. The glove spells slid around them, jelly-like, making Daja's knees weak with distaste. Quen took a fiddle from the bench and played it, which made Briar crazy. He hated being laughed at.

Should we yell for Tris? Briar finally asked.

There's a way we can do this, Daja said stubbornly. On our own, without Tris and her book learning. Besides, she's probably still weak as a kitten.

Something caught Briar's attention then. Tris. Book learning.

Daja waited to hear his thought.

When Briar worked it out, he was both jubilant and ashamed for not seeing it sooner. The solution lay in his own experience and his own teacher. Rosethorn had engaged in a constant battle with university-trained mages, over the difference between academic magic and ambient magic.

Stop playing his game and start playing ours! he said. He tapped into his shakkan and the plants around him, drawing their power through himself and turning it into vines. These he sent through the spells of the glove. Like all vines, they found each and every chink and opening, spaces no human being used, weaving their tendrils through to break into open air. Reaching Daja's prison, they did the same thing all over again, finding the openings between the spells. At last they broke through to twine themselves around her, growing until they cupped her entire body.

Daja called to the metal on her hand and in her mage kit, the strange living metal that was always growing and absorbing new metal. She drew on the strength of the kitchen's metal and fires as well, adding it to the liquid metal until she could spin wires of power out of herself. They twined with Briar's vines, following the paths the magical plants had taken through the openings in Quen's spells. Busily they worked themselves into Briar's prison, encasing him as his vines had encased Daja.

Slowly, the spells that enclosed Daja and Briar began to melt, like thick ice under boiling water.

Quen dropped fiddle and bow and stretched a hand out to them, his lips moving as he tried to renew the spells. The mess around Briar and Daja struggled to rebuild, and collapsed completely.

Quen gestured. A fresh shield billowed toward them like a giant, thick bubble. Daja leaned forward and blew like a bellows, hard and long, forcing the heavy thing back toward Quen. He fought to hold it off. While he was occupied, Briar reached into an outer pocket of his mage kit and pulled out a small cloth ball. Deftly, he tossed it on the floor. It rolled to Quen's feet.

Briar filled the seeds in the ball with green magic and called them to wakefulness. Weaving the shoots as they thrust up, he gripped them in an iron hold and kept them from sinking roots. All of their strength had to go into growing up, not down. He needed this cage to move.

The plants shot through the cloth of the ball that held them, weaving. They were as high as Quen's knees before he saw the danger. He turned his shield on them, but Briar was ready. The vines, thick with thorns, spread out and over the shield, still growing.

Watching Quen's sweaty face, Daja pulled a spool of fine wire out of her sack. She sent the wire's end snaking toward the