Street Magic - By Tamora Pierce Page 0,58

shrugged. "I don't smell anything." She raised her flat-ended nose and sniffed. "Oh, all right, somebody was cooking goat last night. Don't you like goat?"

A heap of rags by the wall cackled and turned into an old woman who struggled to sit up. "You live here long enough, my lad, and you won't smell nothin' either. Got anything for an old lady, Evumeimei?"

Evvy knelt by the old woman. "Maybe I do." She pulled two rolls from her pocket: they looked suspiciously like some of the ones Rosethorn had bought for breakfast. "Qinling, chew careful," she cautioned.

"Don't go worrying about me," Qinling replied. She gnawed a roll eagerly.

Evvy walked on. "I'll miss Qinling," she murmured just loud enough for Briar to hear. "She's the only one who speaks Zhanzou with me."

"What's za – what you said?" he asked, wiping his dripping eyes on his sleeve.

"Zhanzou. The language we spoke in my province. Qinling tells me stories in it sometimes, if she's not too drunk. This is Lambing Tunnel, what we're on." She led him around a turn.

Briar stopped and looked back for a moment, trying to tell if they were followed. They had passed doors and windows on the way, openings barred with wood, rags, or even bead curtains. He'd sensed people behind those barriers, peering at them, sizing them up. He half-expected them to follow, like starving rats. Flexing his hands, he realized his wrist daggers had dropped out of their sheaths and into his palms. He kept them there. All along he'd felt less and less plant life as roots on the ground overhead reached their limits. There would be no calling on plants for help in this sunless place. Only mold grew down here, and mold wasn't much good in a fight, though he supposed he could use it to make attackers sneeze themselves blind. He hadn't felt so naked of friends in years.

Evvy stopped in front of a shallow niche formed by one chunk of stone overlapping another. She rested her forehead against the stone, her back to Briar. "I know he's a stranger, but he's a good stranger," she murmured to the stone. "He'd never hurt me. He's my teacher. He's safe."

Briar shook his head – his foster-sisters would laugh themselves sick to hear him called a teacher. He still felt not like someone who deserved the title, but an imposter. Once we get her a proper teacher, she'll know I'm not one at all, he told himself. If that idea pinched him a little, it was overtaken by shock. What he'd thought was a shallow niche was really a passage. How had he seen a wall there?

I'm starting to think the rock hides my squat, she'd said yesterday.

She was right.

Briar followed her into the narrow passage. It was just wide enough to admit them and the baskets they carried on their backs, though Briar had to crouch to keep from banging his head. Ten yards down they began to climb steps so old they were worn like bowls in the middle.

"I think there was a cave-in, long ago," Evvy remarked quietly. "It sealed off my place in front. This was the back way, originally." She passed through an opening at the top of the stair to be greeted with a chorus of yowls. Briar sneezed: the aroma of cat urine blended with the funk of the passage. He didn't even try to blow his nose. The worst thing he could imagine just now was a nose clear enough to smell everything afresh.

Evvy's home was a two-room chamber carved in orange stone. The light was better than it had been in any of the tunnels. It shone steadily from five opaque or cloudy white crystals that were sunk into the stone of the walls.

At first it seemed as if the floor crawled with cats. They meowed and twitched their tails as they mobbed the girl, who knelt to pet each one. A second look sorted them out. There were indeed seven, all as thin as Evvy. They came in a mixed bag of colors: blue-gray with apricot patches, brown-black with orange patches, two brown masks and feet with gold fur, two cinnamon masks and feet with gold fur, black-and-white. Evvy crooned and handed out the contents of a cloth bag she'd pulled from the front of her tunic: chunks of beef and what looked very much like half of the breakfast ham.

Briar inspected their surroundings while Evvy tended her friends. A pile of rags in the