“It will never fade,” Frog scoffed.
“I wanted to search for you, too, when you fell!”
“But you did not. You knew it was hopeless. You were wiser, then, than you are now.” Frog raised her palm and with the forefinger of her opposite hand, impersonated an inchworm. “So dank. So doltish, Unar.” Her fists flashed to her hips and she grimaced. “You want answers, but you do not even know which questions to ask.”
FORTY-EIGHT
HOURS LATER, rain drummed once again on Unar’s head and shoulders.
She shivered. It trickled into the raw wounds where her spines had been implanted, where her own magic still hummed, setting up a resonance that interfered with anything else she might try, which was why she’d been set outside to cool off, as Kirrik called it.
She had expected the magic would render the procedure painless. The boy who had come before her hadn’t screamed.
Unar had screamed, and her screams had been used by Frog to force the snake-jaws deeper into her marrow.
Hasbabsah, no doubt, had received her spines without screaming. Frog, too, and the three brothers Esse, Bernreb, and Marram. Thinking of them firmed her resolve. She’d done what she had to do, to get what she needed. She would undo the terrible consequences at the first opportunity.
I have spines. Next, I need a way through the barrier.
She thought carefully about what Kirrik had said, that the adepts of Audblayin would have no goddess to help them escape back to Canopy. Was the direct application of power by an incarnated god or goddess the only way to open a door in the barrier once a Canopian’s innate magic had faded?
Understorians do not always raid Canopy, Hasbabsah had said. In hungry times, they trade. In prosperous times, they buy back captured slaves.
Kirrik gloated over the fact that the Gardeners couldn’t return because their god was a mewling babe, somewhere, and could not open a door for them. But perhaps other gods could be persuaded. Unar had spoken to the god Odel, held a conversation with him as if he were a mortal man. What about Ehkis? Could Edax carry a message to her? Would the rain goddess help a Gardener to escape a house suspended in the arms of Airakland, to foil an Understorian plot aimed directly at the gods?
Unar rubbed at her forehead as if by rubbing she could untangle her thoughts. The movement of her tendons seemed to set her arm aflame. She couldn’t cradle her arm, for the new spines were extended and razor-sharp. Instead, she howled and stayed as still as possible until the pain ebbed to a deep throbbing.
Frog poked her head out of the dovecote.
“Core Kirrik says to be quiet.”
“Can’t it be healed right away, Frog?”
“It has been.”
“I don’t feel healed.”
“If your bone is healed too quickly and the snake bones are healed too quickly, they will heal separately and fall out. Is that what you want?”
“You don’t know what I want,” Unar snapped. “And I don’t know what you want. I don’t know who you are. You’re probably not even my real sister.”
Frog slammed the door shut.
More hours passed with Unar distracting herself from the pain by remembering the smell of loquats and the taste of pomegranates, the feeling of her bore-knife going into bark and the sound of Oos’s thirteen-pipe flute.
The door opened again, and there was Frog, emerging with a plate of porridge.
“Eat this,” she said. “I am your real sister. I wish that I was not. Do you want to know how I imagined my real sibling?”
“No,” Unar said, but Frog told her anyway.
“I imagined a fighter. A warrior. Perhaps a soldier of the king of Audblayin, yet imprisoned, tortured, for the belief that the barrier is cruel and must be abandoned. Sikakis intuited the truth, even while surrounded by lies. But not you. Eat this.”
Unar glared up at her. “Are you going to stay and watch me?”
“Of course.”
“Of course,” Unar said bitterly. “It’s what you do.” She stared at the porridge, knowing that when she moved her hand to grip the spoon, pain would shoot through her again.
“Do you want me to feed you like a baby?”
“No.” Another scowl. “I want you to tell me how you and Core Kirrik can take my power away from me as if I’m a baby.”
Frog laughed.
“Not how to get through the barrier?”
Unar gritted her teeth as she reached for the spoon. The pain wasn’t as bad as before.
“If I’m so dank and doltish, it can’t hurt to tell me, can it? You can always outwit me, can’t you, my sister?”
“That is right,” Frog said, sitting easily on her haunches. “I can. You wanna know why Core Kirrik is able to use you so easily? I am not surprised you could not work it out. Just as you can only heal someone you love, you can only steal power from someone you hate. You will not get control of your own power from Kirrik until you hate yourself more than she hates you, and that will never be. It was Servants of Audblayin who killed ’er parents.”
Good, Unar thought angrily.
She ate another spoon of tasteless porridge, resisting the urge to rub her forehead again.
“So … so you hate me, too, Frog?” Hate me and love me, because you healed me.
“Just a little bit. Just enough.”
“Like I had to hate Oos, just a little bit. I stole her power.”
“Because she had what you wanted.”
True enough.
“What did I have that you wanted?”
Unar expected Frog to answer, A real mother and father.
“The gift,” Frog said, eyes gleaming. “If I had it, we would not need you. It would just be the two of us. Core Kirrik and me. That is the treasure our parents gave you. Not your dank name.”
“The gift? Is that why she doesn’t care about those three sons of hers? Because they were born without the gift? Or is it because of her other son, the one who hated her, who ran away? How can you love her, Isin?”
How can you love her so much more than you love me?
“Dunderhead! She does not care about them because it is dangerous to care. I will tell you somethin’, and then maybe you will stop makin’ stupid assumptions about me.” Frog gestured with her chin towards the closed door of the dovecote and lowered her voice. “Core Kirrik had a daughter too, once. Before she had any of ’er four sons. That daughter was gifted, and Core Kirrik loved ’er, but bein’ close to a sorceress means bein’ burned by the flames. She killed ’er own daughter. By mistake, but it could not be undone. I do not want Core Kirrik to love me. Why would I wanna end up dead? If you love me, and you learn from ’er, you could kill me, too. So stop it.”
“What do you want, if you don’t want her to love you?”
Frog’s smile echoed that of the woman in the black skirts. The woman who had accidentally killed her own daughter and deliberately driven away a hate-filled son. The woman who did not love.
“I want revenge.”
* * *
THEY LET Unar back in at nightfall.
Core Kirrik sat at her desk, writing, seemingly oblivious. Sleepy birds perched above and around her. The men’s voices rumbled in the corridor, though the door to their bunkroom was shut.
“Dry off by the fire,” Frog said. “Change your clothes if you must. Hang your wet things by your bunk. Then go and make supper.”
“No,” Unar said. “Things have changed. My obeying your orders was before. This is now. We have an arrangement. I’m not your slave anymore.”
Kirrik didn’t look up from her work.
“You never were,” Frog said. “You jumped out of the Garden to save a slave who held ’er tongue for seventy years, and you could not even hold yours for two weeks. Not even for me.”
She went into the corridor and Unar followed her, furious. She had held her tongue. This past fortnight she’d let Kirrik treat her like dirt, when Unar was the one with the power. Unar was the one who deserved respect and obe
dience.
“Aren’t you coming to watch me? I might poison the supper.”
“Go ahead. You poison everythin’. Our parents’ hearts, so they didn’t want more daughters. Audblayin’s Garden. You were the poison in the home of the three hunters, and you are the poison between my mother and me.” Frog slammed the door again, this time to the bunk room they were supposed to share.
She’s still a child, Unar reminded herself, and she’s wrong. Wife-of-Uranun wanting Frog to fall had nothing to do with her. The Garden wasn’t poisoned, it was healthy and strong. Its strength would only increase when Unar returned with Audblayin. As for the three hunters, she had begged Marram not to follow. But she couldn’t help feeling uneasy about Frog’s heated words.
And Frog called Core Kirrik her mother. She does want to be loved, no matter how she denies it.
Instead of going to the kitchen, Unar went up the stairs, alone, without a lantern. Now that the Master deception was over, the barrier wasn’t needed. Marram was where Kirrik had put him, sleeping the sleep of the almost dead, surrounded by Understorian warriors. All of them had the spines.
I’ll wager none of you screamed, Unar thought, ashamed.
She used the quietest possible sound, the tiniest wheeze of her breath, to send a filament of magic into Marram’s chest. There was no injury there for her to find. Nothing for her to pull, to draw his waking mind back into his body.
Well, she’d gotten some information out of Frog by pandering to her vanity. She could do it again. Frog would tell her what she needed to know. Unar moved away from Marram, examining the next man, and the next man. They were all the same. There was nothing to find. It seemed a healthy sleep, except for the interminable slowness of their beating hearts and all-but-absent breath.
The next rag-shrouded figure seemed a little small for a warrior. When Unar probed the body, she gasped. Beneath the swathe of cloth lay the gangling form of a girl about the same age as Frog. When the thread of magic touched her, it vanished.
“She is Ilan,” Kirrik said softly, and Unar spun on her heel. “Protector of Kings.”
“How have you done this?” Unar cried. “How have you captured a goddess and kept her secret?”
Kirrik made no retort about Unar only speaking when spoken to. Instead, she gently stroked Unar’s forearm, sending pain through Unar’s spines.
“Her body is a girl’s body,” Kirrik said. “I was able to put her to sleep with all the rest. It is eighteen years since the old incarnation of Ilan died, only eight since I captured this one. She was not self-aware. Her powers had not manifested.”
“Her Servants must be frantic not to have found her.”
Kirrik smiled.
“They have started starving themselves to atone. Other Servants will take their place, and may those fools starve, too, for all the good it will do them.”
“Is this how you’ll do it, then? Capture them one by one, and keep them here, until you can kill them all at once? Between sunrise and sunset of a single day, is it? Does she dream? Are her powers manifest now? How do you know she won’t wake?”
Kirrik waved a dismissive hand.
“She cannot age, and so she cannot manifest her powers. While she sleeps here, the strength of kings’ rule fades. Disorder and injustice reign. It will help to keep them from organising against us when the time comes.”
Unar stared at the sleeping goddess and felt afraid for Audblayin. Kirrik must not be allowed to find him first while he was vulnerable.
“Try to wake her,” Kirrik commanded, and Unar jerked with surprise.
“What do you mean?”
“Try to wake her, I said. You gaze at her. You wish you could wake her and age her with your ability to manipulate the stuff of life. You wish to watch her destroy me. Is it not so?”
Unar blinked.
“Core Kirrik, you’ve given me these.” She raised her forearms where the spines were still extended, ragged and bloody as though she had used them to kill. “I will give you what I promised.”
“Frog tells me that your face heats when you mention this man, Edax, Bodyguard of Ehkis. She says you will never betray him.”
Unar remembered the upside-down kissing. The animal sounds she had made in Edax’s expert hands. She remembered how careless he had sounded, telling her about the foot bones of would-be assassins he had fastened to the bottom of a fig-tree lake, careless of anything and everything but the need to keep his goddess safe.
She looked at the small form of the child on the floor.
I will keep my god safe.
“There is a place,” she said, “where we used to meet.”
* * *
THE BROAD myrtle branches that had formed the rim of the pool spilled water like thin sheets of crystal.
Unar gazed at the place that had seemed safe to her while she dallied with Ehkis’s Bodyguard. She and Edax had met after dark. This was the first time she’d seen the myrtle pool during the day.
Trapped fragments of scarce, grey light from the clouds above Canopy gave body to the vertical river. It twisted like a woman’s waist seen through a window. The air was cooler, perfumed by summer blooms and fresh foliage.
Sounds Unar had half forgotten wove in and around the fall of water. Monkeys howling. The too-woo, too-woo of amorous fruit doves. Silvereyes pip-pip-pipping. Lorikeet trills, bowerbird wheezes, and the high-pitched chatter of fantails. Toucans croaking and manakins warbling, birds of paradise stuttering and catbirds screeching.
“You swam here?” Core Sikakis shouted into Unar’s ear over the animals and the roar of rain and river.
“It was smaller,” Unar shouted back. Streams from Canopy pounded the pool in five places, feeding the surge that fell from the lowest edge. The patter of fresh droplets, small sticks, dead leaves, fruit, and insects was relentless.
Three and a half months of the monsoon were past. There were one-and-a-half still to come. Ehkis was at the height of her power. The tributes and prayers to her this year must have been mighty. Last year’s monsoon had been feeble in comparison.
“What makes you think he’ll come? Won’t he have heard you’re dead? Your own people confirmed your fall.”
Kirrik had shown Unar a note she hadn’t been able to read. Apparently it was news that Servant Eilif had announced Unar’s demise, along with the deaths of Oos, Ylly, and Hasbabsah. Eilif had raised a new Gardener, a new Servant, and had purchased four new slaves in the face of Wife-of-Epatut’s refusal to return Sawas and baby Ylly to the Garden.
If not for the pronouncement of names that Kirrik couldn’t otherwise have known, Unar might not have believed her. Who was sending messages to Kirrik from inside Audblayinland? Sawas had mentioned birds, and the slaves were taught to read and write so they could tally the produce of the Garden, keep track of the tributes, and maintain calendars for planning and planting, but Unar didn’t think it could be Sawas.
“It’s just a feeling I have,” she told Core Sikakis, looking up at him. Here, Edax and Unar had broken the rules together, and she also had a feeling Sikakis knew much more than she about breaking rules. By Frog’s account, the former prince had found out about his family’s rise to power in a carelessly shelved volume of secret histories. He’d gone to the Temple of the lightning god and demanded that Airak open up his section of the barrier to allow Understorians to come into the sun.
Then he’d been forced to flee for his life before his father’s soldiers could murder him; he’d fled into Kirrik’s cold embrace. Unar made a face at the thought.
“The barrier is close here,” Sikakis said. Unar knew, but said nothing. “Core Kirrik asked me to stay out of sight. This friend of yours may be skittish if he sees you’re not alone. You know what to do, but know this also. If you try to run, we will bring you down.”
Unar kept her face blank. You’ll bring me down? The three brothers could not bring me down, and they’ve brought down demons.
Core Kirrik had given her the ear bone to augment her st
rength. After they’d reached the myrtle tree that held the pool, the pool where Edax had taught her to love both the water and the feeling of male and female parts together, Core Sikakis had confiscated the piece of Old God that Unar had used to grow the pathways.
Nobody had noticed, yet, that the tooth was missing.
“How can I run?” Unar’s shrug, palms upwards, encompassed their surroundings. “Even if my spines were fully healed, there’s nowhere for me to go but straight upwards. Nobody can glide from tree to tree in the monsoon.”
Hold on, Marram. I will find a way to free you.
Her promises to herself had never felt so empty. She’d never felt so alone.
Sikakis nodded. He put his larger spines, gleaming magically clean and eternally razor-sharp, into the trunk of the myrtle tree and began to lower himself to the bracket-fungus platform that Unar had grown for him and the others.
Unar waited from midday until midnight.
Edax didn’t come.
* * *
ON THE fifth day, at sunset, Unar hummed to pass the time.
She sat cross-legged by the pool in her dangling sleeves and long black skirts, wet and bored. They’d warned her not to use magic. It would arouse suspicion, and besides, she might need her full strength to capture Edax. In the meantime, despite the warning, she’d found a way to make fish come to the surface of the pool by making sprouted seeds wriggle on the edge of the pool’s bank. She was so sick of porridge, even the taste of fish would have been welcome.
She thought of Esse handing her roasted fish portions on a stick. His long limbs. His grey eyes. He’d follow her, she knew. Punish her if he could. She remembered Aoun, passing her the fish with the spines on its back, and how hard she’d slapped it away.
“Who are you?” a man’s voice exclaimed, not Edax’s, and Unar sprang to her feet. The Canopian who stood there, dressed in only a short, silver-coloured skirt and sandals, was shorter than she, but muscular, wiry, and covered in scars that looked like burns. His skin was as velvet black as the depths of Floor, but the left half of his parted, braided hair was white, and he had one white eye.
A Servant of Airak.
Crossroads of Canopy Page 26
