“They must not see me on the ground,” she insisted in panicked blasts in Leaper’s direction. “They must not do as I do. Catch your spines in my scales quickly, wielder of lightning. They must not see me on the ground.”
Leaper had spent his childhood in the home of Understorian hunters and learned to work with or bed down on skins of demons. No Canopian demon leather could have withstood the razor-keen slash of his shin or forearm spines. Yet Hunger’s scales went unscored. Only his weight on the hooked tips of the spines, catching on the crests of the scales, kept him secured to the arch of her back as she beat her enormous wings.
It was an ungainly takeoff. The winged one extended her striding legs little by little as she covered a thousand human paces of ground, until her sprint finally gave her enough speed to leave the plateau.
Then the great black wings, which had obscured Leaper’s view in their frantic beating, snapped level. His steed turned in a slow arc, facing into the wind, settling into a glide.
Leaper’s tongue shrivelled again, but he didn’t close his eyes. The Titan’s Forest was visible once more. Sunset’s rose afterglow kissed the great tree trunks at its western edge. Between Hunger and her destination were an inestimable number of paces, yet Leaper was seeing for the first time how the stony plateau with the long line of lakes dropped off into the grassy valley in cliffs just as steep as the ones where Hunger had her lair.
He hadn’t noticed before, as the wind-tossed ship had passed over in pitch-darkness. The Bright Plain lay much lower, like the bottom terrace in a garden, filled with grassland and swamp, containing everything from the Titan’s Forest to the City-by-the-Sea; all the peoples and their squabbles Leaper had ever known or heard of.
Loneliness caught at him in that moment. He wanted his three mothers, his three fathers, and his two sisters around him. They would berate him. They would interrogate him. They would laugh with him. They would feed him. But that could never happen; they could never all be together again, the way it had been before Unar woke and Leaper went with her to Canopy. Imeris was now searching for her lost leopard-child. Ylly was Audblayin, a goddess, guarded by Nirrin, Imeris’s childhood friend.
Oldest-Father had been dead for ten years, sealed into a tree by the sorceress Kirrik.
And Leaper was cursed.
None of us can go back. Not Oldest-Father. And not me.
Leaper twisted in his seat to stare back at the baby winged ones, also rose-tinted, tumbling along behind their mother in the turbulence of her passage. He imagined himself filling with Airak’s borrowed power. Smelling charred floodgum, feeling like the sky was his body and white sparks his blood. Calling lightning to the hatchlings, one at a time, until all twelve had turned black as Hunger and were able to safely alight in the grasslands to rest.
I’m not a leaf on the breeze. I’m master of my destiny.
After I’ve helped her, Hunger will carry me back to the mountains. Soon, we’ll be joined by all the Servants of Airak. Somehow I’ll get a message to them to leave him, to leave Canopy. They’ll make a pilgrimage. Follow the chain of lakes to the cave of Time. They’re the ones who will help me, not just to carve the statue but to make the city live again. Together we’ll—
His fantasy died as he felt the first magical surge of Ulellin’s curse rattling the pinions of Hunger’s wings.
She maintained headway for a few moments, but then the wind strengthened again.
I didn’t tell her, Leaper told himself calmly, because she didn’t need to know.
Gliding became out of the question. Hunger’s wings began working as hard as they had during takeoff. They lost altitude. Leaper couldn’t tell if it was the wind slowing her, or if Hunger slowed voluntarily so that her hatchlings could catch up, in a protective instinct.
She said she was more powerful than Ulellin when it came to commanding the wind. She called Ulellin a red-hearted meat-animal.
The winged one’s bellow-breaths expanded her rib cage to dangerous proportions. Leaper spread his limbs wider apart, hooking himself desperately to her spinal protrusions.
She called Ulellin weak, vain, and one-fourteenth of a titan. I didn’t break my promise. Hunger broke her promise!
The wind shrieked in his ears. It all but tore him from Hunger’s back. His spines skittered free of her scales as she went into a spinning dive. He glimpsed the hatchlings, little brown teeth bared helplessly, being driven towards the ground.
Before he could join them, his shin spines caught at Hunger’s shoulder joint. Leaper dangled and screamed, but he didn’t fall. Hunger twisted, recovering from the dive, and one of the hatchlings landed across her back, right in front of Leaper. It was about the same length as he was, and sliding. He grabbed it by the legs with both hands, discovering as Hunger tilted again that it was about as heavy as he was, too.
“Tilt the other way!” he shrieked, despite the howl of the wind, despite Hunger having warned him that they wouldn’t be able to speak once they took to the sky. He could imagine what she would want to say to him—You lied to me, wielder of lightning, when you said we could safely approach the forest!—and he bellowed the words he would have replied with. “Didn’t you see me calling lightning to them? You said it was foretold!”
Yet they weren’t anywhere near close enough to the forest for him to use Airak’s magic. He hugged the yowling, thrashing hatchling to his chest, even as one of its siblings brushed a stand of bamboo with its wing and instantly fell apart, fluttering away in the grass-flattening gale like an emptied bucket of ash.
Another touched the ground, and another. They were tired, and the curse was powerful.
Leaper soon realised with horror that the hatchling he held was the last one left.
I doom you, Ulellin had said—she was good when it came to doom, the goddess of wind and leaves.
by my power
Apparently one-fourteenth of a titan was still stronger than a winged one.
to wander far from home.
And Ulellin didn’t care who else was harmed by the deadly winds sent Leaper’s way. Not Floorians. Not Yran. Not the hatchlings of the last winged one left alive.
Hunger reacted with rage as she worked her way higher into the sky. Her huge head arched back, and her jaws would have closed over Leaper’s head if he hadn’t held the hatchling like a shield.
In her terrible, white-hot eye, he saw frustration but also resolve.
I can’t kill you now, the eye seemed to say, but as soon as my last hatchling is deposited safely in the cave of Time, you will die.
TWENTY-SEVEN
WITH ELEVEN of the twelve hatchlings dead, they made better time.
Or perhaps every journey goes faster when it’s your last.
Hunger crossed both valley and stony plateau with the speed and cold precision of a javelin. The day dawned and the cave of Time waited on the southern horizon. Leaper and his living shield dangled over Hunger’s neck. Soon enough, the writhing, white-scaled offspring grew quiet in his arms, beady eyes closed, thin wings limp. It was exhausted. He could throw it down in a final act of petty revenge, but why, when this failed expedition was his own fault, his own doomed miscalculation?
There must be a way out. There must be something I can say to save myself.
It wasn’t as if he’d ever pictured himself dying an old man. He’d even dared to imagine something heroic in his final moments. Helping Imeris slay a monster. Snatching a magic sword from under the nose of angry Crocodile-Riders. Even being crushed under a winged one’s clawed foot would have satisfied the eager, impatient child-self who’d successfully begged his spines from his mothers so early, seeking a place in the sun.
But now that the day of his death had arrived, he could see clearly what it was he’d hoped to achieve in life—and it hadn’t been heroics. He’d slain the monster so that Imeris would love him. So that he might belong with his sisters, even though he was the smallest child, the child lacking in extraordinary gifts. He’d needed Aurilon’s swor
d to fulfil the promises made by Aforis, who had vouched for him before the Lord of Lightning.
He’d broken every oath he’d ever taken, to win Ilik’s love.
All he’d wanted was to feel that—with all his flaws—he’d finally earned his place among the kings and gods that surrounded him; instead, he’d stolen secrets for a master who burned him to the bone before drowning thousands to keep hold of the reins of absolute power.
It wasn’t over yet. He could redeem himself, he could do something worthwhile—I know it!—if only he could talk Hunger out of killing him.
I’ve always been able to think of the right thing to say.
Nothing came to him.
I should have stayed home. All those boring speeches Aforis gave me, all Ousos’s frustrated blows, all the disciplinary drainings of my magic—if only they’d worked. If only they’d actually made an impression on me. Too late to listen to them now.
He started to laugh helplessly as Hunger banked towards the cave opening, wings folded. She would barely fit through it. Leaper tried to predict how she’d catch the stone floor with her talons and turn, shoulders hunched, to tuck her tail and huge haunches into the depths of the cavern. Perhaps he could—
No. There was no bark for him to catch. No vines for him to climb.
But what if he landed on something soft—
No. There was nothing but stone, and sticks, and bones.
Well, I’ve died before. I’ll die again.
It was rare for anyone who wasn’t a goddess or god to know who they had been, before. Leaper knew. He’d known even before Unar, the Sleeping Girl in their home, had emerged one day, stared at him with yearning and horror, and whispered, Frog’s soul. He’d known since he stood on a long limb, looking upwards, searching for the sun, and told Oldest-Mother that he wanted go up, that he belonged up.
It’s very strange, Oldest-Mother had said, smiling her sweet-sad smile, but I think you share a soul with somebody I knew. Somebody who made mistakes, who died young, and very close by, but who couldn’t bear to leave her sister’s side, even in death.
Little Leaper had felt his closed eyes; he’d always imagined his soul to be trapped between them, in the place where two pictures turned into one picture.
Do you mean I have a bad soul?
Oldest-Mother had kissed him.
You have a good soul. Don’t stare at the sun. I’ve heard of people going blind from staring at the sun in Canopy.
At that time, Leaper had never seen the sun in its unscreened glory. The day they’d climbed and seen not only the sun but the Garden Gates, he’d expected to be moved to joy, and yet in that first moment his spine went rigid with mixed fear and hatred: a flash of something that Frog had felt, before him.
When he’d touched magic for the first time, he’d revelled in the new dimension of his connection to his sister Ylly—who’d always smelled like quince blossom and wood fern but now overwhelmed him with the bitterness of germinating quince seed, blocked his nose with a powder coating of spore—but also had the strange pang that said, Wasn’t I supposed to hate her?
And then having Aforis gently sever his connection to her and stitch it onto Airak. Blossom and fern curled away like dying vines burned back by the new lightning and obsidian blaze of his heart. He’d been excited to be serving someone he saw as a more powerful deity, but also at the thought that he was leaving the last whispers about Frog behind, starting out on his own path.
How could he have dreamed that Airak was nothing but a mortal thief of one-fourteenth of a soul? With a spyglass made from a great tree, keeping one eye out for the winged!
Whoever Leaper was going to be next, he hoped it wouldn’t be a lovesick fool struggling to impress people who he thought were his betters but weren’t. I hope I’m born a historian or a hunter. I hope I never serve another god! How would that be, for starting on another path?
And then the cave mouth closed around him, cutting off the beautiful sunlight he had craved. His heart sank; his head all but brushed the ceiling. The hatchling in his lap came awake, squirming as Hunger’s great weight struck the stone shelf, and dust rattled from hanging stone fangs silhouetted against the shrinking sky.
Leaper shoved the hatchling away from him. Unhooked his shin spines. Took a deep breath and held it. Tried to crouch in place, ready for a spring, but Hunger’s jaws were already open and swinging towards him.
He threw himself sideways and upside down.
Black-scaled neck thrashing.
Ceiling receding.
Hands catching on the sharp, obsidian feathers covering the wings as they curled.
One wing edge knocked him towards the tunnel that led to Time. Leaper looked up in the split second before striking the wall. There was no time to get his hands up in front of his face.
Then, though he must have been falling, head down, everything seemed suspended and slow. He hadn’t felt himself hit the wall, and now he couldn’t feel anything but a burning sensation inside the whole of his body and a trickle of liquid running down his cheek.
Maybe tears. Maybe blood.
Leaper blinked and found himself lying on his back at the base of the rock wall, his limbs across the entrance to the tunnel. His gaze was on the dim, distant cavern ceiling. Hunger’s slavering jaws appeared there. Her white-hot eyes shone like the sun he’d craved.
Turn away, he screamed at himself, more terrified than he’d ever been, but his neck refused to turn. Something was moving beneath him, raising him abruptly closer to the ceiling, closer to his death; or maybe he was hallucinating. His body wasn’t obeying him. If not for the burning sensation, he might have thought his body wasn’t there. He couldn’t speak to save himself.
Couldn’t swallow.
Could hardly breathe.
All he could do was close his eyes, so he did.
TWENTY-EIGHT
LEAPER HAD hoped death would be dreamless.
Instead, Unar stood before him, cradling a baby before the Gate of the Garden. She was sixteen or so, the same age she’d been while she hibernated in the hunters’ home.
She wore the torn remnants of a skirt and long-sleeved shirt. Black rags bound her bleeding feet. Her hair was in its customary twin braids. An expression of pain twisted her face almost beyond recognition
“I love you, Isin,” she said, and Leaper felt her power flowing through him, healing his wounds. He tried to look down at his body, to feel his hands and feet again, to brush away the injuries the winged one, Hunger, had dealt him and laugh in the monster’s rage-filled, fanged face.
But the cave wasn’t there.
Nothing was there besides Unar and the baby.
His body ripped itself apart in a shower of blood.
* * *
LEAPER’S OLDER sister, Ylly, who’d turned out to be the goddess Audblayin, stared down at him from the wooden sides of a bed. They were in the cave. It was enormous.
No, this is our home.
There were no limestone teeth hanging from the ceiling. It was polished tallowwood. Leaper was home. He was safe.
I still can’t feel my body, though.
Panic began to rise in him before he wriggled his fingers, with difficulty, and realised he could feel his body; it was just wrapped tightly in something, arms trapped at his sides.
A blanket. It was difficult for him to focus on it, but he saw the crest of the House of Epatut. He wasn’t in a bed, but a cradle. Candles burned on the edge of a shelf that was one with the tallowwood wall. How had his sister brought him home safely to Understorey? Of course, she was a goddess. She must have powers that nobody suspected.
And yet Ylly was a little girl, no more than eight or nine years old. Her long, straight hair had been brushed until it gleamed, and her round cheeks were rosy enough for the pink to show through the blackbean-brown. She smiled. It was the smile of a goddess, even if she didn’t know it yet.
“Hush, baby,” Ylly cooed. “Baby, you’re safe. I made you safe. You were scared an
d floating and waiting and hating, so I brought you here.” She frowned, as though that was something she didn’t want to dwell on too closely. “Listen. You can share my mamas. They are the best mamas, they’ll cheer you up, you’ll love them. You’ll see.” Her returning smile smoothed out her brow, and she put one finger to Leaper’s nose.
He smelled wood fern and quince as he sank into a peaceful sleep.
* * *
THE GODFINDER’S ti chest was small.
Still, Leaper had found a way to fold himself into it, with his nostrils near the keyhole so that he could still breathe.
Though he’d wished she’d taken up farming tapirs or salamanders instead of flowerfowl, on account of them being so stupid and noisy, this morning a scare by some hungry bird of prey had distracted his guardian for long enough that he’d been able to position himself perfectly to eavesdrop on whatever it was she wanted to speak to Airak’s Skywatcher about.
Unar’s sharply indrawn breath sounded by the door.
“You look d-different.” She sounded terrified. “Aforis.”
“You look the same, Godfinder,” came a strange man’s husky, grave voice. “Though you’ve been gone a while. Did it really take sixteen years for you to find Audblayin in Understorey? Everyone guessed that you’d died. The goddess Ehkis was slain a second time, and you were not here in Canopy to find her.”
“I was sleeping,” Unar said in a strangled voice. “You remember. The sleepers.”
“I remember everything.”
There was no trace of anger in his tone, yet Unar began weeping noisily. It was a distressing, ugly sound that Leaper had never heard before, and it terrified him in turn. What had his guardian done to offend this man? What does she owe him? Was she going to hand Leaper over to him as some kind of payment, and if so, how could Leaper have been so foolish as to gift wrap himself inside a ti chest?
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