“Gods and goddesses are jealous creatures.”
“Only when it comes to worshippers. I am your sister.” But you are not the sister I could torment, whose little ears I could pull. Middle-Father was wrong to suggest I am not helping you. I am helping take care of our mothers so that you do not have to.
“You worship Odel’s Bodyguard,” Audblayin said.
“Is that why you are set on keeping me from seeing Aurilon again? Fighting her again?” She said she was not the teacher I needed. She will never teach me. Leaper was right all along.
“I’m saving her for you.” Audblayin smiled wanly. “We don’t worship what we’ve defeated.”
“Do you know what would be better than locking me out of Canopy forever? Dissolving the barrier. Merging Canopy and Understorey into one.”
Why is it my task to make peace? Why not yours, when you have so much power?
“That’s not possible.” The smile vanished.
Imeris turned to find Daggad knuckling his back, all his straps creaking and buckles jingling, great sword on his hip, hip-length hair falling around his funny-angled face.
“Are we going back to Odelland?” he asked, tonguing the black mark on his lip. “I sure am getting tired of that walk.”
“Not today,” Imeris answered.
Daggad fell on her. His unexpected weight crushed her down onto the platform. The great sword hilt drove up into her solar plexus, and she gasped for breath beneath him, wondering, What is this? Is he trying to kill Audblayin? Was I a fool to trust him all along?
Then she realised Audblayin was beside her, smothered under the white robes of the Gatekeeper.
A single arrow stuck into the Gate.
Writhing under her fellow Hunter, Imeris spotted a thin green strapleaf rope. It led from the attachment point of Middle-Father’s door lintel to a swaying weight a hundred paces away, off the edge of one of the smaller tallowwood paths.
Middle-Father hauled on the rope. His face looked furious. After a while, the other end came visible on the path. It was a dead body, struck through the rib cage by the barbed, white-apple javelin. Imeris hadn’t realised the throwing spear had a rope swaged to the end with a metal ferrule, which brought the plainly dressed, presumed slave up like a fish on a line.
If the dead man had held a bow, it was gone. Fallen. The arrows, likewise.
“Let me up, Aoun,” Audblayin gasped. “Bernreb says the danger is over.”
Imeris hadn’t heard Middle-Father make a sound, but the Gatekeeper obeyed the instruction. Daggad rolled away, too, and together the sisters sat upright, Imeris sucking at the air, recovering from a stunned diaphragm. Eventually, she was able to stand.
Middle-Father brought the would-be assassin along the path, gripping one arm and one leg, the man’s bulk across his shoulders. He dumped the corpse at their feet with a sigh. Imeris pictured him back in their family home; that sigh was the exact sound Imeris had heard thousands of times as he’d dumped a dead beast on their table and sighed in the face of the long task of skinning and butchering.
Imeris recognised the sad, lifeless face.
It was the blond, brown-eyed slave from Mistletoe Lodge who had sent the bird to Loftfol.
“He was not trying to shoot you, Holy One,” Imeris concluded immediately. “He was here to kill me. He was an agent of Loftfol. Perhaps he was a student there before becoming a slave. If I had not been here with you, if Middle-Father had not been watching over us, I might have died. Are you sure you want to banish me down below the barrier?”
“Are you sure you won’t stay and be my Bodyguard?” The Gatekeeper seemed startled, but Audblayin’s focus was on Imeris’s face.
“I am sure.” Imeris grimaced. She thought of Anahah and his little green child, and her fingers rose reflexively to her lips.
“Then I’m going into the Garden,” Audblayin said. “I’ll return with the items you’ve asked for, Issi.”
“Thank you, Holy One,” Imeris said. When Audblayin and Aoun were gone, she stood by while Middle-Father wriggled his javelin free. At length, she told Daggad, “I want to go to the silk market on the way down to Gannak.”
“Bribes for your three mothers?” Daggad guessed. “To keep them from ’aranguing you about the danger you keep leapin’ into? Or to distract them from the question of grandchildren?”
“No,” Imeris said, scowling. She was beginning to understand Oniwak better every day she spent with Daggad. “I want to see the place she dropped me. You know where it is.”
“I know where it is, but I do not—”
A clean break.
“I want to see the place where I fell.”
* * *
THE SILK market nestled between the boughs of three great mulberry trees.
Imeris breathed in the bitter steam of brown silkworm pupae being boiled in cauldrons alongside the intersecting lanes of the market. Daggad already snacked on a leaf-cup of spiced, fried worms. He held it up to her, grinning, like the king of Airakland proposing a toast with a glass goblet.
“Imeris,” he said with great satisfaction, “would you like to taste yourself?”
Imeris pushed his hand down out of her face. Great sheets of shining silk hung down from the branches like red and gold rivers; others were tightly rolled and protected from the sun and rain by awnings of leaves or leather. Scarves and skirts fluttered on lines beside vendors of dried roots and pots of liquid dye.
“Show me where my family trades,” she said curtly.
“Look for the banner I once bore on my tongue,” Daggad replied drily. “Most of the silk they sell is from Ukakland and Ulellinland. One is a better niche for the insects, the other for mulberry leaves. ’Ere is the best for sellin’. ’Ere, silk prices are ’ighest.”
Imeris spotted the sigil almost before he’d finished speaking. The wheel, cocoon, and loom was pressed into a bearskin resting on tent poles of purpleheart. Wife-of-Epatut scolded a pair of slave girls, her back to Imeris and Daggad but her broad silhouette and silk-woven hair unmistakeable.
“That is where she dropped me?” Imeris asked doubtfully. Nothing in the market had triggered any memories. What if the chimera had eaten more than one fallen child? What if the cloth she’d had with her was some other baby’s wrappings?
No. Her physical resemblance to Epatut could not be wished away.
“Go and ask ’er,” Daggad suggested, crunching down on a fried silkworm at the same time; it made a popping sound and flecked his lips and Imeris’s cheek with juice. “As I am a free man, I will stay right ’ere.”
“You might as well take the books and scrolls Odel gave us down to Sorros, then,” Imeris said, watching Wife-of-Epatut. She absently wiped her juice-flecked cheek with the back of her hand. “Make sure he is well. Begin searching through the writings for the information we need. I will follow you to Gannak.”
But before he could leave, Wife-of-Epatut turned. She locked eyes with Imeris across the press of customers. Turning, she lifted a bundle out from under the display bench of the stall and began squeezing through the crowd towards them.
Imeris straightened her shoulders. She braced herself. This was it; her birth mother was coming to recognise her. To present her with some kind of heirloom.
“Daggad,” Wife-of-Epatut said with a nod, “Hunter of Audblayinland. In the past few days, these gifts have been presented to me in your name by strangers, citizens of Aublayinland. They’re tokens of gratitude for your part in the slaying of the monster. I pass them on to you.”
Daggad tipped the last few silkworms hastily into his mouth, freeing both hands to accept the bundle. It was silk-wrapped. Inside were wooden boxes, perfumed gourds, stoppered glass bottles, and other, smaller silk bundles tied with embroidered ribbons.
He slanted a glance at his former owner.
“You did not know I would come ’ere,” he said. “You would ’ave kept these.”
“You did not leave me,” Wife-of-Epatut answered, “any forwarding a
ddress.”
Imeris touched an exquisitely carved bowl of scented satinwood packed with pink salt. If she had gifts like these, she would not need gold from her sister to pay tribute to Odel. Was Daggad receiving them because he was Canopian? Because he was a man?
“Where are mine?” she asked.
“You’re the Hunter of Odelland,” Wife-of-Epatut said levelly. “I imagine your gifts are being left at Odel’s emergent.”
“I knew it,” Daggad said. “I knew we would ’ave to go back there.”
“Not yet,” Imeris said sharply. Tribute could not be paid on behalf of children not conceived. First, she had to deliver the fertility amulet to Nin.
“I am not sure,” Daggad said with a slight swagger, “I can carry all the books and scrolls as well as my new gifts. I might hafta make two trips—”
“Will you come to my house, Imeris?” Wife-of-Epatut interrupted. “It was your house. It is the house where you were born.”
“You will excuse me,” Daggad told Imeris, ignoring Wife-of-Epatut, “if I do not return to the scene of so many wasted years. I will go to the smith’s ’ome, like you said.”
“Why invite me to your house?” Imeris blurted at Wife-of-Epatut. “What for?” Wife-of-Epatut gazed at her for what seemed like a long time.
“For the sake of what might have been.”
FORTY-ONE
WIFE-OF-EPATUT’S HOUSE, the extravagant crown of a gobletfruit tree, was crammed full of—Imeris did not know how else to describe them—a great many things.
It was a market with no customers. A village’s worth of goods for just one family. There were rooms full of merchandise, bales of silk, piles of clothing, wooden worm-breeding assemblages, and components of giant weaving apparatus. But there were also things kept that others might have cast away, such as a stack of old, gilt-framed paintings of Ukak, Ulellin, and their prior incarnations, previously in pride of place over the dining table where Audblayin’s portrait now hung. There were stands of hung children’s clothes in a place with no children and preserved dead birds in lifelike positions that had no use besides decoration.
“Greetings, sister,” Imeris murmured to the portrait as she passed.
“This way,” Wife-of-Epatut said skittishly, leading her on through the wide, winding halls. There was so much silk on the walls, and so few windows, that Imeris began to feel as though she’d entered the enormous cocoon of her namesake.
Then they halted in an open doorway. This room, at least, had a skylight of translucent bone.
“My bedchamber,” the older woman said. “You were born here, Imeris.”
Imeris stared at the round, magenta-silk-draped, eucalyptus-smelling room that might have been familiar and beloved. At the knots and splinters in the ceiling that might have witnessed the secret hopes and fears of her childhood.
With her reflexes and quiet understanding of the wild, might she have rebelled against her merchant parents and grown to serve as a soldier of Audblayinland? Or, without enemies and threats to shape her, would she have enjoyed the company of silent silkworms and whispering looms as she hoped one day to enjoy the company of flowerfowl and sacks of feed?
“I thank you,” she said, “and my birth father Epatut for the gift of my life.”
“I kept your cradle,” Wife-of-Epatut said. “In the nursery. I’ll show you.”
The nursery was draped in orange and yellow, a perpetual sunrise. The cradle was fine work, woven of black wattle and set in a rocking frame of sweet-fruit pine. Imeris tried to imagine herself matched to a man like Epatut, absent all the day but useful for his wealth and connections. She looked again at her birth mother, who had been called Igish before marriage, who had tried her best but made an error of judgement when it came to the gods, and seen her whole life shaped by that mistake.
“What does the name Igish mean?” she asked.
“It’s a little bee-eating bird,” Wife-of-Epatut replied. “Rainbow-coloured. You don’t have them … down below?”
“We have dayhunters,” Imeris said grimly, touching the thin, worn furs in the cradle. The animal hides provided by her three fathers were the bedding of royal babes in Canopy. “We have the spotted swarm. We have chimeras.”
Wife-of-Epatut touched the wings folded along Imeris’s back.
“It’s almost as soft as silk,” she said slowly. “I couldn’t have given a skin like this to you. I wouldn’t have known where to find the warrior teachers you needed. Since seeing you in Airakland, Epi is a boy possessed. He never cared about weapons or training before. Now he’s discovered that soldiering skills are passed down through soldiering families, and my husband will never allow him to leave this family and be adopted by soldiers.”
“Do you wish me to stay and train him?” Imeris asked guardedly, ready to refuse.
“I wish you would stay and marry him.”
Imeris shook her head. She lifted her hand from the cradle, thinking again with a pang of Anahah. He had made mistakes too, but he understood her, and she thought she understood him. She had decided that she loved him, yet she did not yearn for him as the songs and sagas said that lovers yearned. Did she really love him? It seemed thrilling enough that she should brush against the secret thought of him, sometimes. If he was nearby, she’d only get angry at him again for letting Oldest-Father die, and besides, she would never see him again.
“I am banished by my sister, Audblayin, back to Understorey,” she said.
Maybe she would see him again, though. Audblayin said Imeris’s home was Understorey and was intent on sealing her away below the barrier, but what if attempts to make peace with Loftfol failed? Marrying Epi, returning to the House of Epatut, would be one way of defying the interfering deity. Marking her tongue with the slave-making token she still carried would be another.
“For what crime?” Wife-of-Epatut wanted to know.
“Every time she opens the barrier for me, Audblayinland is endangered.” And she is angry that I do not behave slavishly towards her. She blames me for not knowing who I am.
“I see.”
“Aside from Daggad and me, there are four Hunters who survived.” Despite how it had gone, Imeris was pleased to think of them returning to their own niches, gathering their gifts. “Oniwak, Eeriez, Owun, and Ibbin. If you wish me to write letters, to ask them to tutor your heir, ask now. I am headed back to Understorey. I will be permitted one final visit to Canopy next moon. If there is anything else you want from me, ask now.”
Wife-of-Epatut smiled.
“Don’t write letters,” she said. “But go back to Understorey knowing I’m proud of you. I’ll go to Atwith knowing I brought something of value into the world. And although I love Epi with all my heart, more than I’ve ever loved anything—aside from you, when I had you, before you fell—he is no warrior. He never will be. Safe journey, Imeris.”
“Thank you, Birth Mother,” Imeris said, briefly bowing her head.
Then her thoughts skittered ahead of her, to Gannak, wondering what secrets of the gods Daggad and Sorros had unlocked.
* * *
HOPING FOR unlocked secrets, Imeris found the forge unlocked, instead.
The air was bitter with the smell of spilled bia. It was the early hours before morning, and slow-roiling mist separated the great trees, hiding all but the brightest lanterns of the village nearby.
Imeris hesitated on the threshold as usual, hating the assault of memories that accompanied her presence in the forge.
“Sorros!” Imeris called, her voice echoing through the gloomy rooms, and heard Daggad’s sleepy chuckle from the toilet chamber. She found him sitting on the hole, drunk and bare-arsed.
“Musta fallen asleep,” he mumbled when she prodded him in the forehead.
“Where is Sorros?”
“In ’is ’ouse. With ’is wife. Could not watch them together. She was mine.”
“What about the writings, Daggad? Has he looked at them? Did you look at them together?”
“Not yet.”
Imeris dragged him off the toilet and back to his blankets before leaving the forge by the front door. She climbed high enough in the jackfruit tree to give her an easy glide to the ulmo where Sorros and Nin lived.
The house where she had visited Nirrin.
Night air whistled over her eyes and ears. She slapped hard against the wrinkled ulmo bark in the dark, efficiently setting her spines, folding her wings, dropping down to the platform outside the smith’s door.
The woman who opened the door was small and stout with a wrinkled neck and silver-blond hair braided in rings around her crown. She rubbed sleep out of her eyes and hid a yawn.
“I do not know you. Do you need moonflower? Wait.” She wrinkled her nose. Imeris knew she smelled of bark, sap, and eucalyptus oil. “How did you get ’ere?”
Imeris had only ever seen Nirrin and Vesev’s mother from a distance before. Now she saw Nirrin’s sky-blue eyes in Nin. Wondered at the deceptive, bland exterior, which hid a history with Daggad that ended in disaster, the loss of her two children, and life with a man who was famous for saying nothing.
“Many things have conspired to bring me here,” Imeris said. “My mother who dropped me. My fathers’ refusal to obey orders. The prejudice of the Loftfol school. The goddess Orin. The king of Airakland. Your husband, Sorros. Your son, Vesev, and your daughter, Nirrin. The sorceress Kirrik.”
“Imerissiremi,” Nin said, standing immediately back from the doorway so that Imeris could enter. Inside, the brightest light was the orange glow from three oil lanterns hung over a tallowwood table. The books and scrolls Daggad had brought were spread out. Sorros’s black-haired head was bent over them. “Will you take ti?”
Imeris shed her wings at the door.
“I can make the ti,” she said. The memory of her visit came back to her startlingly strongly. “I remember where you keep the honey.”
Nin tilted her head inquisitively, but when Imeris didn’t say anything else, she nodded and went to the table. She propped her straight arms against its edge and looked down at the rough notes her husband made with charcoal on pieces of wood.
Echoes of Understorey Page 32
