UNAR HEALED the child and held her.
“You have until the count of five to crawl back down where you belong,” boomed the thunder.
I forbid you to use Audblayin’s power in my realm, Odel had said. But he hadn’t said that it wouldn’t work. Only that he had forbidden it, and Ylly, who ruled this realm, could barely speak, and so could not forbid anything.
Soldiers covered their ears, but the sound was everywhere. Unar looked into Ylly’s eyes. The child goddess and her would-be protector curled up together a mere body length beyond Kirrik’s bare feet. Raindrops darkened the enemy’s black skirts. Kirrik’s fingernails cut into her palms. Frog had eyes only for her mistress and Aforis let the bone fall while they weren’t looking.
Unar watched the bone plummet, wondering if it would land on Eilif’s broken body. She looked at Ylly again. The child should have been terrified, but she reached out to pull a yellow leaf out of Unar’s hair.
“I want Mama,” she said.
Unar kissed her, pushed the warm little head whose wounds she had healed so recently, and in rapid succession, into her armpit, and craned her neck to try to see what Kirrik was staring at.
A woman stood at the far edge of the fighting, dressed in robes so luminously kingfisher-blue that Unar could hardly bear to look at them. Her skin was blue-black, but her eyes were as sky-pale as the gleaming silk she wore. Like most goddesses and gods, her hands were gloved and her feet booted. A high collar studded with sapphires stood up around her long neck, sheathing a head of grey and indigo hair twisted into ropes like rivers running down ironbark.
Bringer of Rain.
Audblayinland soldiers who had cowered at the sound of Ehkis’s first command straightened and looked at their opponents, giving them space, clearly expecting them to flee back to Understorey now that all the rules had been broken. A goddess had trespassed in another deity’s niche. It was unheard of. The Canopians couldn’t imagine that the enemy wouldn’t be as shocked as they were and obey the very voice of the storm. In the separation of combatants, Unar finally spotted the king of Audblayinland, a fat fighting man whose belly protruded through his vest. Spines from slaves he’d captured rattled on a chain around his neck.
“One,” the thunder rumbled. The blue-clad figure’s lips had not moved. Unar saw, with her magical sight and sense of smell, the connections between the woman, the sky, and every drop of rain that fell around them.
“Ehkis,” Unar whispered. She looked for Aurilon and spotted her, camouflaged, in the shadow of a bent branch.
“Put her to sleep, Frog,” Kirrik murmured above Unar’s head. “I will divert her.”
Then everything happened at once.
Aforis twisted away from Frog. He would have fallen, taking the leash and its holder down to Floor, if rain hadn’t seemingly solidified around him. Wind howled through the trees, lifting Aforis high into the sky. Unar watched him fly upwards, and then fall with the rain towards some distant part of the forest.
Ylly, after everything that had happened, finally started crying.
Frog, who had let go of the leash, stood motionless, staring after Aforis, for a full second before seizing Ylly’s cries from out of her mouth.
“You cannot steal a goddess’s power, Core Kirrik,” Frog said, meaning Ehkis, but making a liar of herself as she prepared from Audblayin’s power the pattern of something encompassing and smothering, suited to putting everyone outside the Great Gates, besides Kirrik and herself, to sleep.
Unar soaked her senses into the tallowwood tree, and a branch erupted upwards, directly through Kirrik’s body. The sensation of the woman’s heart muscle squirming around the living wood, trying to keep beating, sickened Unar, and she heaved nonproductively over the silently screaming, struggling little girl in her arms.
And Kirrik’s soul hovered for a moment over the body that Unar had destroyed. An intangible essence, sucking light and warmth from the air, it crossed the space like an arrow and plunged into Ehkis’s body.
The rain stopped, again. It wasn’t just that no new droplets fell, but that water which had been suspended vanished as if it had never been.
“It is my power, now!” Kirrik cried triumphantly from the lips of the blue-robed goddess, but her voice didn’t boom like the thunder. Confusion crossed her beautiful features in the time that it took for Aurilon to leap out of the shadow and onto her back, curved blade in hand, already beginning a line of red across the slender throat.
The gift goes with the body. Only godhood goes with the soul.
Frog turned such a rictus of hate towards Unar that Unar knew she could no longer pretend that Frog could be redeemed. Had she really thought Frog would give in, just because her tool, Aforis, had been taken away? Had Unar really thought there was any way to keep Audblayin safe without spilling her sister’s blood?
“I love you, Isin,” she said, and the first flush of her magic through Frog’s flesh healed the cuts and scrapes Frog had received while climbing. The second flush urged even healthy tissues to begin replicating madly. Repair. Change. Grow, Unar’s magic ruled.
In Frog’s eyes, Unar saw the confused, unfocused eyes of the baby Erid had brought into the world, so different from the angry child who had tried to poison an adopted father, who had hoped to find a sister wiser than Unar had any hope of being. If only you hadn’t fallen. We could have protected one another. I could have protected you from Kirrik, and you could have protected me from my own selfishness. It wasn’t Audblayin that I was supposed to guard.
It was you.
Frog’s body was torn apart by ripe explosions of obscenely distorted muscle and bone.
Unar realised she could hear Ylly’s crying again. It was audible because nobody remained to steal the sound of it. Kirrik and Frog were dead. Murdered by her.
She kissed the cradled head, again, and whispered that all would be well. Kirrik’s men, still stunned by the appearance and apparent assassination of Ehkis and flinching from droplets that fell from the trees, began surrendering all around her, new slaves for the king of Audblayinland. Servants emerged from the Garden, willing to heal soldiers outside of the grounds, another thing unheard of, but Unar didn’t care.
Unar crawled to the Gate and set her hand against the wards. There was no need to summon the Gatekeeper. She was home. Aoun had showed her how to open it. He had given her the key. She did what he had shown her, sowing the seed, taking a piece of it inside herself, but strangely, the wards didn’t soften against her hand. Instead, they accused her, in her head.
Have you stolen food?
Have you stolen the sovereignty of another’s body?
Have you stolen human life?
“No,” she said listlessly. It wasn’t supposed to accuse her. She was home. There was some mistake. It had to be Ylly who was keeping her from entering. Children stole things all the time. She let go of the incarnation of the goddess and beat against the wards with both hands.
“Unar,” Aoun said soothingly, shifting through the Gate to stand beside her. At his feet, Frog’s mutilated remains had left a shallow splash of blood, fat, and gristle. With one hand, he held Ylly back from the dangerous edge, ignorant of the fact that Odel’s power prevented the child from falling. With his other hand, he squeezed Unar’s shoulder. “Unar, you’re alive, you saved us, but you killed the woman and the child. You cannot enter.”
“I can,” she shrieked in his face, flecking his cheek with spittle. She beat harder against the wards, this time with her magic as well as her fists, feeling the shields made of Aoun’s magic begin to bend under the mighty, unmatched pool of power she now possessed. If he had tried to stop her, to drain her as he and Oos had once done before, she might have killed him.
Instead, he waited calmly by her side. Over and over, she planted the seed, the key, in the gateway, watched the tendrils curl out of it, only for those tendrils to wither under the weight of her crimes.
I can’t break them. I can’t force my way through.
“Who is this child, Unar?” Aoun asked.
I have stolen human life. Unar didn’t answer him.
“Is she another orphan?”
I am no orphan. The Garden is my mother. The Garden is my father. I must go home.
“The Garden cannot use a slave so young.” Aoun’s face was earnest. He thought he was speaking reason. He hadn’t shared her journey. For him, nothing had changed. “We can’t care for her, not yet. Not until she’s old enough to serve.”
I must go home.
Unar gazed into Aoun’s dark, deep-set eyes. No tears. He could see that she was searching for something and not finding it; the frown lines between his heavy, knitted brows deepened. Why wasn’t he more distraught about their impending separation? Why not euphoric at discovering she was still alive? What was wrong with him? Couldn’t he feel anything? Didn’t he know anything?
So dunderheaded, Aoun.
Unar was made speechless by the depths of her failure, the heights of her absurd expectations.
She could have told him that the child was Audblayin. She could have told him where to find Sawas. Slave mother and slave child would be reunited and readmitted to the Temple. But Unar had fallen in the first place to free a slave. And now she realised what her true destiny had been, all along.
After you have lived with us for long enough, you will wonder why you ever wished to crawl and kiss Audblayin’s hand.
It was not to bring Audblayin to the Garden, that she might grow surrounded by the same ignorance and isolation of Gardeners and Servants that had always surrounded her. It was to answer the questions that Kirrik had posed Unar, back at the dovecote during their first night on watch: And if you desired to feel the sun, what then? If you needed fresh fruits to cure a child’s illness? What if you had fallen and your family remained above, and they were forced to watch while demons ate the flesh off your bones?
Maybe the gods and goddesses didn’t care for the people of Understorey because they didn’t know them. Had never lived among them.
Why them and not us? Why can they not protect everyone? Are they so weak?
She would return Audblayin to the Garden. Yes, she would. But not now. Not yet. The Garden was no place for children, and there was no place that was a good place for slaves. Let baby Ylly stay with her mother, and below the barrier too. Then, perhaps Audblayin in her next life would have a proper answer to give, when asked why everyone couldn’t pass through the barrier, why everyone could not live in the sun.
It was a good decision, Unar thought, but it also robbed her of the triumphant moment she’d dreamed of for so long. She wiped her nose on her torn sleeve. The motion drew Aoun’s attention to the seams where her spines were hidden. His handsome face showed revulsion.
“Unar, those cannot be … you cannot … the rules have been bent, this day. I don’t believe there would be objections if I … Unar, do you want me to … I could remove those. I could heal them.”
“No, Aoun.” Unar gathered Ylly to her again. She reached out to unfasten the sash that held his robes closed. He allowed it, but she took no pleasure in the sight of his muscular chest. The sash was for binding the child safely, and his bore-knife she took because the Garden made good tools. She might not again have the opportunity to take one. “I’ll need them.”
She slashed at the branch beneath her feet with her forearm. Her spines bit deep. She lowered herself over the edge, meeting Aoun’s gaze for what felt like the last time. He could have called the king’s men to imprison her, a traitor whose only place was as a slave. Instead, he shifted his position slightly so that his body shielded her from their line of sight.
Neither of them said good-bye.