TWO NEW moons later, the evening came when Unar had enough magic to fool the wards on the wall.
As she climbed, the light, inner touch of the magic reached her senses, smelling like turned earth and life but also a male presence, and she recognised that maintenance of the spell had been Aoun’s. The magic was as muscularly built and unadorned as his naked body had been the day of Audblayin’s death, and the feel of it set Unar’s heart fluttering, her nipples hardening, and her cheeks flushing; the deity’s dampening effect upon her urges had never fully returned, or perhaps it was simply her age and attainment of a woman’s full growth and capabilities.
“I am a seedpod,” she whispered to the wards. “A seedpod borne on the wind.”
The wards allowed her to pass, since she carried the seeds inside of her that all young women carried, and she dropped down on the other side, triumphant. She didn’t need Aoun and his key. With her magic regrown, the Garden knew her. The Garden was part of her.
The Garden is mine.
She’d eaten supper to give her stamina for the journey, but food was not what she had in mind for the tribute that would keep baby Ylly safe. The season had changed. The three-month dry-season winter inexorably followed the short, one-month autumn. Slaves were allowed to lie in with their newborns for a season, but now was the time when Sawas, the baby’s mother, would be required to return to work. Baby Ylly would be learning to move, struggle, escape from the confines of cradles and tree trunk hollows.
The other baby, Imeris, who had fallen in the autumn, the one that Unar had futilely searched for with her goddess-given senses, was all but forgotten by the searchers once keen to claim the reward. Wife-of-Epatut had come to the Temple to seek enhanced fertility and the conception of a new child.
Unar, despite being excluded from the lessons of the Servants, through her friendship with the elder Ylly now had access to slaves’ gossip. It was said that Wife-of-Epatut had dropped her daughter at the silk market. The beewife who had bumped her was imprisoned at the palace of the king of Ehkisland.
Unar sought a different palace tonight. The story of Ylly and the princess of Odelland haunted her. Should such wickedness go unpunished? Perhaps an Understorian could be ignored by the gods and goddesses of Canopy. Perhaps the fate of an enemy’s descendent was not the concern of higher powers. But the elder Ylly was Unar’s friend now.
Ylly was hers to protect, as she would one day protect Audblayin.
To protect or to avenge.
Canopy’s roads were crowded, both high and low. The fruit harvest had peaked and the season of nuts and seeds was waning. Though it was past sunset, slaves and citizens alike carried baskets brimming with macadamias or windgrass grain, green oilseeds and orange oilseeds, some for eating and some for burning, some for leaching of their toxins to make them edible and others for pounding into sealant or adhesive. Several hours passed before Unar reached the crossroads of the Falling Fig, and several more before she’d squeezed through the press of bodies along the snake path and found her way into Odelland.
It wasn’t Odel’s emergent, the sweet-fruit pine, which Unar sought first, this time.
She went to the palace of the king of Odelland, and stared for a long while at the parapets from which Ylly’s mother had been pushed.
The palace, built in a blue quandong tree, swayed in the stiff winds like a giant bird’s nest, polished timber after polished timber placed in a seemingly unstable fashion. Though the breeze bent the boughs that the building rested on, not a plank fell out of place. Hidden dovetails and dowels held snowy sweet-fruit pine branches snugged tight to scarlet bloodwood. The steep roofs of fresh, grey windgrass thatch, highly valued as insect-repellent bedding and for driving the foul flavour from cooked monkey meat, not only trumpeted the king’s wealth but completed the image of Odelland royalty as colourful toucans nesting where fruit would fall on them like rain.
Yet they had killed a woman for the crime of growing old. Perhaps the death god, Atwith, approved of such things, but Unar didn’t, and Atwith was not her god.
Unar sat where the trunk of the adjacent floodgum obscured her from the guards who watched from crooked towers at the corners of the ever-swaying structure. Ostensibly kicking her sandalled feet out in a pose of relaxation, she felt for defects in the path, and in a moment when all human traffic was moving away from her, she swung herself underneath it, hanging like a sloth from ropes of torn floodgum bark.
Hand over hand, wary of the scorpions, biting ants, and tarantulas that called the cracks and bark curls home, Unar made her way to the place where floodgum branch met quandong, directly below the palace.
There, she began to scale the walls in darkness. Nothing could have been easier. The untrimmed ends of the artfully stacked timbers would have given purchase to a child. Soon, she was so high that not even the light from lamp-carrying merchants below could show her the contrast of her fingernails against the fine finish of the multicoloured woods.
Her magic was faded this far from the Garden, but it was still strong enough to inform Unar whether there were any women in the princess’s apartments before she climbed into them. A screen of fragrant smoke filled the window, to keep the insects out, and Unar felt a beetle abandon the back of her jacket in a panic as she passed through the smoke. She had known these west-facing rooms would be the princess’s, but she hadn’t known how a royal daughter would sleep: on a pink, orchid-shaped mattress floating above a lily-pad-shaped platform of pale bone.
How had the royal family traded for such a thing from Odel? Unar hadn’t realised the gentle god owned any powers besides keeping children from falling. Then again, Audblayin could make sky-coral and her Bodyguard float; why not all the goddesses and gods? Unar tried to examine the mattress with her magical senses, but her link to the distant Garden was too strained. She couldn’t see the threads of power holding it in place, nor could she smell anything arcane.
The ostentatiousness of the bed and the sound of Ylly’s voice in her head made Unar want to burn it and its feather-filled pillows. That would make a fine smell, but she’d come for one thing—an object suitable for tribute to Odel, to keep Ylly’s granddaughter safe from falling—and she mustn’t become distracted. She must escape the palace without any alarms having been raised.
Gold combs and charmed anklets covered the dresser with its opal-studded silver mirror, but every item was stamped with the toucan crest of the king of Odelland, and soldiers would be summoned if she offered any such thing at a Temple. The goblets and pitcher on the mantel were the same. Even the iron pokers by the smoke-producing braziers were marked with the symbols.
Her attention was caught by railings that had been plugged into place by the bed and by the armchairs. She threw back the veil surrounding the squat, where the covered hole for piss and shit to fall through had a sort of harness in place, suitable for an old woman whose knees wouldn’t hold her weight while she squatted.
The princess was old. Much older than Ylly’s mother had been at the time of her demise, Unar would wager. It made her blood boil. Without magic, this room would probably smell of urine, too. The beautiful bed no longer seemed a girl’s flight of fancy, but a hag’s need for the bed to rise in order to roll herself out of it.
Unar had wasted too much time. The decrepit princess could retire to her apartment any moment. Unar expanded her tenuous ability as far as she could, her nostrils filling with the smell of sweet-sour quandong fruit, bitter kernel and clean, fresh crushed leaf, in the hope she’d be warned of women approaching.
Instead, something hidden in the floor under a silk carpet tickled her mind.
Unar threw herself to the floor. She peeled back the carpet. A hexagon of bloodwood pulled out of place like a puzzle piece. Inside a small, revealed hollow lay bundles of something black, cool and supple to touch, but difficult to see; as Unar lifted the edge of the cloth, it rippled to brown, taking on the colour of her hand.
Chimera skin. It changed colour, like a chameleon’s, even after the animal’s death. There was something inside. Bits of old bones. She shook them out of the cloth.
Then Unar stuffed the cloth into the front of her jacket, making a false paunch above her belt, before putting the piece of bloodwood back in place and smoothing out the carpet. She leaped for the window, but the smoke solidified, throwing her roughly back.
Stunned, Unar waited for her dizziness to clear. She tried to make sense of the swirl of sound that had thickened around her.
You are a thief, the window had accused her.
It was something similar to the wards around the Garden.
Unar climbed to her feet. She went to the window and laid her fingers tentatively on the sill. The smoke buzzed angrily.
“I’m no thief,” Unar told it softly, trying to link her mind to it the way she linked her mind to the Garden. “The five pieces of cloth I’ve taken are payment for the life of a murdered woman.”
It is too much, the window said. That cloth can buy a thousand slaves.
“But never replace a specific one who has fallen. Slaves aren’t all the same! You could buy a thousand slaves and yet not find another like her. Read my thoughts. See my truth. I’m taking this cloth to protect a great-grandchild that the murdered woman is not alive to protect. I am no thief!”
You are no thief, the smoke conceded, parting.
Unar climbed through the window, triumphant, to begin her descent of the swaying, bird’s nest castle.