WITH THE crossing, Unar felt as though she doubled in size.
She blinked. One hand went to Marram’s amulet. The other hand went to the place below her ribs where her magic resided; her body hadn’t grown at all, but the well of power within had deepened, and now it pulsed, exerting pressure on her to be used.
No. I am not worthy of this.
I was wrong about everything.
Edax, Airak, Aurilon, and Odel died for nothing.
Audblayin’s Bodyguard will be a man. Not me.
Yet it was like nothing she’d felt before. It had to be something that Kirrik had done to her. Some wicked power entering her. Audblayin’s gift somehow twisted. She wouldn’t use it.
“Boy,” she said, grabbing the elbow of a dirty child who scampered along the road with his arms stretched as if to catch the stream of flat-faced white bats overhead. “Which way to the House of Epatut?”
“Maybe I know!” He tried to pull angrily away from her. “What’ll you give me?”
Unar put her hand up and caught one of the creatures, ignoring the razor-teeth that it drove into her thumb.
“I’ll give you this.”
Eyes shining, likewise enduring the creature’s gnawing, the boy paused to wrap the bat in his jacket before scampering off again.
“This way!” he shouted back to her, and Unar followed with her palms pressed to her sternum, as if she could keep the magic from oozing out. It had wanted to come out. It had wanted to make a cage for the bat from vines and leaves.
It doesn’t want anything. Audblayin doesn’t want anything, except for milk and arms around her. She’s only a baby!
Only a baby, and because of Unar, that baby had been sold away from the safety of the Garden. If Wife-of-Epatut had lost the baby she’d been carrying before the monsoon, she might have decided to love baby Ylly instead. Or, in a fit of jealousy, she might punish Sawas with hard labour.
If only Wife-of-Epatut knew that the daughter she’d dropped in the silk market now had an Understorian name. Rescued from the mouth of a chimera, Imeris lived with three huntsmen, below the barrier, in Audblayin’s emergent.
Old Ylly, grandmother of the child that Wife-of-Epatut knew, cared for Issi in baby Ylly’s place, while baby Ylly was cared for in the House of Epatut.
Unar felt dizzy just thinking about it.
Is this what you wanted, Audblayin? Was this your plan, when you chose to enter baby Ylly’s body with her first breath?
But Audblayin couldn’t hear prayers until she became self-aware at puberty and her memories merged with those of the body she had taken. Odel had said he might see her in his next life, but he couldn’t know for sure. His domain was neither birth nor death. Anyway, Unar wouldn’t survive him long. She had one last task to carry out before she joined him, maybe in the same chimera’s jaws. The demon could very well be following her.
“There it is,” the boy said. “In the gobletfruit tree. The whole crown, it’s his, isn’t it? My pa catches songbirds. Sold some in a cage to the wife. But if you need cloth, and obviously you do, he’s not open till morning. I’m going home.”
Unar didn’t answer him. She stared at the gobletfruit tree. Ruddy, skin-soft arms were twisted into a labyrinth of hollowed burls each as big as most men’s houses, connected by small bridges to a hollowed bulge in the wide main trunk. Fluffy white flowers that would open with the sun and bell-shaped nuts hung everywhere. If Wife-of-Epatut had caged songbirds inside, it would be a wonder if she could hear them over the screeching of parrots that would arrive at daybreak to feast on those nuts, and daybreak was not far away.
Unar marched up the front ramp and beat her fist on the heavy door. Smoke to keep insects out oozed under and around the oval-shape; the wheel and cocoon of the silk merchants’ guild were carved over the more humble loom symbols of the family of weavers from which Epatut had come. Unar beat on the door a second time. When it was finally thrown back, the short and dumpy human-shape that answered was too smoke-wreathed to identify for a long moment.
“Sawas?” Unar said, coughing.
“It’s you,” Sawas breathed. She’d gained a great deal of weight since Unar had last seen her, and without her duties in the sun, she’d reverted to a lighter golden-brown. One of her enormous breasts was shoved into the greedy mouth of a boy child black as char against her brown bosom. It couldn’t be Epatut’s son. Unar hadn’t been away for long enough. An adopted nephew, maybe. Sawas’s other, covered breast made a wet spot on the front of her fine robe; the sight of the leak made Unar press her own chest even harder, determined that none of the evil she had brought with her would enter Epatut’s House.
“It’s me,” Unar agreed.
“Where’s my mother?” Sawas asked. “You stole her. You killed her.”
“She’s alive in Understorey. I didn’t steal her. I freed her.”
“Only a fool would believe you!”
“Sawas, listen,” Unar said urgently. “Your baby is Audblayin reborn. She’s in danger. Haven’t there been attempts to steal her? You must take her back to the Garden, right now. Where is she?”
Can I beg for her forgiveness?
No. She’s only a baby. She can’t hear me.
“She’s not mine to take,” Sawas said venomously. “She’s the property of the House of Epatut, and you are a runaway thief who couldn’t pass through the Gate of the Garden if you tried. If you have no fear of exposure or arrest—and I would fear both, if I were you—then come back when the sun’s in the sky and ask the mistress for the babe yourself.”
Sawas closed the door in her face. Unar heard the bar dropping into place. There was no time to argue. There was no time to explain. Reluctantly, she took her hands away from her sternum.
“Wake, friend,” she whispered, feeling the great gobletfruit from its top shoots brushed by cloud-filtered starlight and the first suggestion of sunrise to the roots that fed on fish corpses, pressed beneath the restless weight of swirling monsoon water.
The House of Epatut came to life. It had no mind of its own, but it borrowed Unar’s mind while they were merged, and the creatures that had nested in its skin and kept the wounds open made its sap quicken with resentment.
“Be gentle with them,” Unar said softly. “They haven’t given you burdens you could not bear. Only give me the child.”
A man started screaming. His voice was soon joined by a woman’s. More screaming voices joined in.
Branches moved. The tree groaned. Windows widened and narrowed like talking mouths. Leaves entered cavities and brushed woody corners, searching. Unar shook her head; there was no need to search. She felt every human life within the tree. She knew each one of them intimately. Sawas was with both children in the farthest room of the house, body folded protectively over body, as she and Ylly had been before birth.
There was no question about that baby being Audblayin. The power that animated the tree flowed directly from the diminutive form, not to the Garden and then to Unar, but on the shortest path, from one to the other.
Wood bent into wave patterns. Sawas was tossed mercilessly into the air. Ylly was carried out from underneath her mother by undulations that brought her through previously solid walls, out the door and down the ramp.
“As you were,” Unar said sharply, and the tree contorted itself back into shape. The screaming didn’t stop, but Unar knew no one had been harmed. She pressed on her sternum to stop the flow of power, as wonderful as the connection felt. The gobletfruit became separate from her, and she became separate from the child, even as she bent to pick her up beneath the armpits.
Ylly gazed at her with enormous eyes. She was not a baby anymore, not really. Unar had forgotten how quickly children grew. Ylly’s feet, which had been doughy, club-like, and ineffectual, now bore calluses from leather shoes, and her hair was long enough to braid.
“You’re big,” Unar said.
“I want Mama,” Ylly answered.
“Mama will come later. Let’s go to the Garden.”
She wasn’t a thief. The Gates would open for her, though not in the way she dreamt. Nothing she could do would be enough to redeem her. Aoun wouldn’t welcome her with his arms around her. She would not be a Bodyguard, and she would not fly. But Audblayin will be safe.
Then she smelled it. Ozone in the air. She heard the crack of lightning. Felt the flow of a different river of power, this one coming all the way from Airakland.
Aforis.
Clutching Ylly to her chest, she began to run again.
Drawn to the screams of the occupants, people had come to stare at the House of Epatut. Perhaps they’d seen her pick up the baby disgorged by the house itself, but none of them got in her way. If they whispered to each other in her wake; if they reported to the king that the runaway Gardener had been seen; if soldiers came, then that was to her advantage. A heartbeat later, she began to shout at strangers in passing.
“Summon the guards! Rouse the army! Understorians are here!”
She didn’t stay to see if any took heed, nor did she angle towards another, taller gobletfruit which held the palace and its associated outbuildings; it must be in mimicry of the King of Audblayinland that so many wealthy merchants wanted gobletfruit crowns of their own.
Only the Garden mattered, and the blue-white blaze before its Great Gate, distant but growing larger as Unar approached.
She saw armoured Audblayinland soldiers in brown skirts and tunics wielding weapons against bare-limbed Understorians. The king’s men were here. She had rarely seen so many. Two hundred or so, and that was two-thirds of the soldiers that he commanded, with only a third left behind to protect the palace. Metal made dull sounds against bone. Some that fell screamed, but others fell in silence.
It was a battle like none the Garden had seen in Unar’s lifetime.
Unar thought the closeness of death in this moment made all the warriors’ lives blaze brighter to her magical senses. She sent threads out along the web of wooden paths, searching for Frog and Kirrik, the ones she must avoid until she could reach the Gate. If Kirrik sensed her, she might snuff her life out, stealing her body, to keep her from interfering, and then make off with Audblayin.
If only Unar had learned from the sorceress to see the future. Or somehow earned her sister’s loyalty. Two enormous men swung swords at one another right before her. Unar tried to take another path, but fighting blocked that way, too.
Lightning struck the brown-clad soldier. His skeleton glowed blue-white as he fell. The other man turned towards Unar, his sword turning with him. She skipped backwards to avoid the gleaming blade.
Only, there was no more path beneath her feet.