In the fifteenth and final chapter of Street Magic, Briar gets his revenge, but not without a cost. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to read The Circle Opens.
Trigger Warning: For death, gore, body horror, PTSD, suicide, and poverty.
The more I think about it, the more certain I am that this book had to end violently. The world of Chammur forced Briar into a conflict with himself. Could he ever reckon his past with his present? Briar has undoubtedly moved upwards in life, but he never did so without violence. He lived in it under the Thief Lord; he reacted with it towards Niko and the people of Discipline House, all of whom did not understand his upbringing; he learned to wield it carefully in his application of his magic.
And now, as the world of nobility and privilege is revealed to be precisely as ugly and savage as he thought it was, he claims the life of one who acted in support of it.
I suppose it’s astounding to me to read any book that’s so blatantly in support of the poor, telling their stories and validating their experiences, no matter how uncomfortable they are. It’s not comforting to hear about people – children! – being sold into slavery. It’s not comforting to hear that kids turn to gang life for support, only to sometimes do monstrous things in support of it. And it’s certainly not pleasant to be forced to realize that the rich and powerful use the bodies of those below them in life. That is, of course, literally represented here as Briar discovers the bodies of everyone that Lady Zenadia had killed, and all for what? Her comfort. Her pleasure. Her protection.
And yet, the people killed by Briar and Evvy were merely her agents. That’s not to say that they shouldn’t be held responsible for what they did, and at the very least, that’s what their fates mean to me. Briar kills Zenadia’s assassin both out of self-defense and as a small gesture of revenge:
“How many of ’em did you do that to?” he snarled when he could speak again. “Did you like it? Did you have fun choking them and burying them as fertilizer?”
It’s a small consolation, obviously, that this man’s fate is even more violent than what he inflicted on everyone he killed. But I kind of want to wait until the end of this to talk about the ramifications of Briar’s actions because I feel it reflects on the book as a whole. I suppose the same goes for Evvy, who not only manages to use her magic to escape her prison, but she, too, gets revenge. There’s a part of me that’s sad about Ikrum’s fate. Because Pierce spent time in his head, showing us why he behaved as he did, I was quietly hoping he’d have an epiphany, that he’d realize he could break free of his dependency on Lady Zenadia. At the same time, Evvy deserves to have closure, and Ikrum was the one who kidnapped her, taking her away from the only person she’d ever come to love. She needed this chance, and as sad as it is, I can’t fault Pierce here. This part of the story needed to be closed, and Evvy had to be the one to do it.
I guess that it’s hard to see closure – any just version of it, that is – in Lady Zenadia’s fate. Right up until she kills herself, she’s despicable. The only regret she expresses isn’t accountability. She’s just upset that she’s been caught. Seriously:
Her smile was tiny, but a smile all the same. “Do you think they will care about dead thukdaks? The children of the streets are without value to anyone.”
Zenadia has always existed in the extremes, and her careless admission is part of that. She knows she’ll get away with everything she’s done because she always have. The rich and privileged protect one another because that act protects themselves. So why would anyone ever turn on her? Too many depend on her wealth and prestige.
Well, to a point, one which both Briar and Evvy exploit by goading her on about her fate. After losing her assassin and Ubayid, who is left to support her? Briar beautifully addresses this:
“If I were your family, I’d think you’ve gone too far. If I were the amir, or the mutabir, I’d think the common people will be angry when they find out nobody cared how many poor folk and slaves you murdered. Lots of the mutabir‘s Watchfolk come from poor districts, I bet. He can order them to shut up about what they see here, but how many will do it? How long before riots start? How long before your family thinks maybe it’s time to wash their hands of you?”
I LOVE YOU, BRIAR MOSS. And look, I appreciate how plain this message is, as well what Pierce writes a few paragraphs later:
Even the poorest had a right to be mourned by someone.
I appreciate it because you can’t imagine another meaning. You can’t twist it into something else. It is a defense of the humanization of the poor, one that’s absolutely vital to an understanding of Street Magic. Again, the poor in this book have been repeatedly exploited, often times right up until their lives were stolen from them. You can’t ignore that, and Pierce doesn’t. Even in death, Zenadia is surrounded by signs of her wealth. So I found it satisfying as hell to know that Briar’s actions demolished the grounds. It’s a symbolic victory because Zenadia’s status no longer has a physical manifestation. It now belongs to nature and no one else.
But is this a Pyrrhic victory for Briar? Despite saving his student and friend, despite dismantling Lady Zenadia’s influence and system of terror, he’s left feeling empty and terrified. In this, Pierce includes a powerful validation of Tris’s own experiences with PTSD while also showing why it’s flawed to make fun of such a thing. As stated here, Briar could never understand why Tris was so upset by her actions in Tris’s Book. But that lack of empathy is destroyed once Briar begins to experience PTSD after what happened in Zenadia’s home. I think that maybe his killing of the assassin weighs heavier on him than he’d like to admit, given how intense and gory it is, but it’s obvious that the dead he discovered messed him up. What good did killing the assassin do if all those people still died? How much responsibility does he have in this situation?
Yes, we know he’s not responsible for the death of anyone aside from the assassin, but he’s haunted by the image of all the people he couldn’t help. It’s fascinating to me that Pierce addresses this through the ideas of power and secrets, though. Why does Briar feel such a burden? Well, I think what he and Rosethorn say helps shed a light on that:
“They never tell you some things,” Briar said bitterly. “They tell you mages have wonderful power and they learn all kinds of secrets. Nobody ever mentions that some secrets you don’t ever want to learn.”
“All you can do is learn good to balance the bad,” Rosethorn told him. “Learn and do all the good within your reach. Then, if you wake in a sweat, you have something to set against the dream.”
Rosethorn doesn’t deny that mages see the worst in people, nor does she attempt to say that there’s an easy solution to Briar’s dreams. He might always have them. He might always feel the specter of that horror, right up to his last breath. All that he can do is refuse to give up or give in to the temptation to rest in his sadness and apathy. The bad in the world can’t be cancelled out, but neither can the good, you know?
And Street Magic ends on an undeniably good note. I don’t know that we’ll ever see Evvy again in the Emelan books, but this sure does give us a sense of hope, you know? Briar and Evvy’s life together is just starting, and they both have a lot to learn from each other. But now that they’re both out of Chammur, there’s a better chance that they can do this together and without the threat of gangs, amirs, or exploitative nobility. They can live life and learn on their own terms, and I can tell how important that is for the two of them.
I seriously want a thousand more books with both of these characters in them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFpHNoHRDDg
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