DAYLIGHT SEEMED to pierce her.
Unar couldn’t remember it being so bright. Colours of dyed cloth. Scarlet fruit in baskets. Yellow birds so illuminated by sun that they might have been small suns themselves. The House of Epatut was raucous with the chattering of macaques. Disregarding the movements of humans on the roads below, they feasted on nuts and threw the empty casings at passers-by.
Two hired guards who hadn’t been there before dawn flanked the ramp to the front door. One of them yawned behind his hand. The other asked, “What is your business with the House?”
“I’m a healer, come to see Wife-of-Epatut,” Unar said.
The yawning one went inside. When he returned, Wife-of-Epatut was with him, big-bosomed and frog-eyed, but so was Sawas. She threw herself at Unar at first sight, her fist smacking Unar in the eye.
“Where is she? Give her back!”
“Sawas,” Wife-of-Epatut said in a low, acerbic voice, and Sawas retreated behind the woman who owned her, cringing yet trembling with rage at the same time.
“Good day, Wife-of-Epatut,” Unar said. “I knew your slave, Sawas, when I was a Gardener in the Temple of Audblayin. I come to offer you healing and new life, if you will accept it, in exchange for Sawas.”
“That will not be possible,” Wife-of-Epatut said, folding her arms. “Even if you are the adept who turned my house inside out as I slept this morning. Sawas makes milk for my nephew, who has come to live with us. His mother suffered an accident. If you take her, he’ll go hungry.”
“Let him eat nut paste. Fruit mush. Insects trapped in sap and boiled in monkey oil. Or bring his distraught mother to live with you.” It was a guess, but the widening of Wife-of-Epatut’s protuberant eyes told Unar she had hit on the truth. “The healing I offer is a healing of your husband’s mad desire to have a son. Without one, he is afraid that you believe he is less. You are a better weaver than he is. A better trader and a better human being. I can heal his envy. I think I know how.”
Wife-of-Epatut struggled visibly to hide her shock.
“My husband isn’t an envious man,” she said, “but even if he were, what healing could I accept from you? You’re cast out, worse than a slave, and you’re a thief. You wrecked my house.”
“Do you refuse my help, then?”
Her lip quivered.
“I must refuse it,” she said.
“If that’s what you wish,” Unar said, exactly the same way she had said it to Oos. She had no need to sing the godsong here. Seizing power from Canopy itself, she ignored Wife-of-Epatut’s astonishment when the merchant’s already-large breasts became heavy with milk. “I’ll give you this gift instead. Feed your own nephew from now on. Come with me, Sawas. I’ll take you to your daughter.”
“No!” Sawas howled, touching her tongue, which no longer bore her slave’s mark. “Little Epi is like my own child, too. I’ve been closer to him than anyone! You must bring my daughter back here, or, I warn you, my mistress will go to the king!”
Unar sighed. For a moment, she was tempted to leave Sawas where she was. Did Audblayin really need this fool to raise her? Surely she would be better off raised by those who were older and wiser, like Hasbabsah and Ylly the elder.
“You promised to teach me to swim, Sawas,” Unar said. “Somebody else needs your lessons now. Whatever those lessons are.”
However unworthy I may think them.
“You’re a liar,” Sawas cried, clinging to Wife-of-Epatut. “You’re not taking me to Ylly. You’re taking me to drink my blood and steal my soul.”
“What have you done?” Wife-of-Epatut babbled. She patted ineffectually at her erupting bosom. “What have you done to me? Undo it at once!”
Unar didn’t use her magic to seize Sawas with vines. Instead, she marched up to her, plucked her by the collar, and began dragging her down the ramp. The hired guards looked uneasily to the otherwise occupied Wife-of-Epatut, but didn’t try to stop them.
“You were named so you could travel up and down, Sawas,” Unar said. “Down you’ll go. Whether you come back up again is up to you.”
Once they were out of sight of the House of Epatut, Sawas seemed to give in. She allowed Unar to push and prod her along the now-crowded streets of Audblayinland. Everyone who had emerged from their homes—everyone but the occupants of the House of Epatut, it seemed—spoke of the battle that had raged at the Garden Gate that morning. About how the king had defended them, even in the absence of the goddess Audblayin, and that perhaps some of the tribute that had been reserved for the deity might find its way to the palace, instead. Maybe some of their second sons could be spared to serve the royal family.
Meanwhile, marketplaces that should have stayed closed for another two months had become bustling and noisy, the signs still wet with paint and the ropes that kept people from falling from platforms pale green and freshly knotted.
At the Great Gate of the Garden itself, lines of grateful citizens, from stricken to internoders, waited to press material goods upon the Gatekeeper. Aoun ushered them in towards the egg and moat that Unar would never see again.
Tears blurred her vision in her uninjured eye as she stepped out onto the branch where she had planned to descend. Before she could crouch down and order Sawas to climb on her back, Aurilon stepped out of a shadow, tall and scarred and graceful and deadly.
Sawas whimpered and clung to Unar’s clothes the way she had clung to Wife-of-Epatut’s.
“Odel is dead,” Aurilon said without preamble.
“I know,” Unar replied hesitantly. “At least, I didn’t see how he could have survived. I’m sorry.”
“I do not want you to be sorry. I want you to find him again.”
“Find him again? But he must be just born, and besides, I’ve had enough of taking babes from their mothers. I won’t do it.”
“I will not take him. I swear to you on his soul. Only watch over him. Wait for him. You found Audblayin. Do not pretend that you did not. You can find Odel.”
Unar was so tired. So close to being allowed to rest.
“I can find him,” she said. “What happened to Aforis? Do you know?”
“Ehkis returned him to the second-tallest tree in Airakland. Airak did not die when his Temple fell. His Servants have approached the wood god to help build them another Temple. When Aforis tells his story to the other Servants, I cannot say whether he will be punished or rewarded.” Aurilon’s expression showed little concern.
“Let’s hope for a reward. He’s been punished enough. What of Ilan?”
“She was a casualty of the fighting in Ehkisland.”
“So. Three gods did die at once. I’ll come with you in just a moment.”
Unar gathered her magic. Seeds sprang to life, soaking up water and sunlight, infiltrating the bark with their roots. Vines writhed along the tallowwood’s branches and then fell away, forming a rope ladder that led down; a long way down.
Unar stood at the edge, looking down at the ladder, not moving. She had planned to escort Sawas down, but after agreeing to help Aurilon, it seemed she had a Canopy-wide search to accomplish first.
“Thank you,” Aurilon said. “I would not ask it of you, but I still fear the soul-changer. This is what the Lakekeeper conveyed to me of the One Forest henchman, prince of Airakland. He was by the lake at the Temple of Ehkis. Ilan had been cut from the straps on his back by one who did not recognise her true nature. She was dumped into the lake, sleeping even as she sank into the water. The prince slew the man who had cut the straps, and turned as if to dive and retrieve her, his best key to unlocking the barrier. But then his body shuddered. He fell to his knees. He lifted his hands and gazed at them. The whites of his eyes showed. ‘No! Sikakis, no!’ That is what he screamed, over and over.”
“Core Kirrik,” Unar said flatly.
“Indeed. He was no longer the prince Sikakis but the sorceress, Kirrik. She saw the Lakekeeper skirting the lake, coming to kill her again, and she dropped, climbing with her spines down the side of the tree. By the time the Lakekeeper reached the place where she had begun to descend, she was gone, and the child, Ilan, drowned.”
All Unar could think was If Ilan is dead, Kirrik can’t come through the barrier again. Even if she has taken Sikakis’s body.
True, Unar had sent Audblayin below the barrier, but nobody else knew of Ylly’s true nature besides Aurilon; perhaps Sawas, if she’d been listening closely, but Sawas was even less likely to jeopardise her daughter than Aurilon was to endanger Canopy.
“Sawas,” Unar said. “Go down the ladder. It will take you home.”
Strangely, with Aurilon staring at her, Sawas didn’t argue. She climbed down nimbly until Unar couldn’t see her anymore. When she passed through the barrier, Unar’s sense of her life force faded.
“Three hundred boy babies were born in Odelland last night,” Aurilon said.
“Lead me to them,” Unar answered thickly. She drank water from a gourd that Aurilon put to her lips, and let the Bodyguard take some of her weight. “I’ll listen to them cry. And then I’ll find the goddesses who died. You must watch over them, too, Aurilon.”
“It will be my pleasure. They will not even see me. I have a new chimera skin, and this one I do not intend to mount for display.”
* * *
THREE DAYS later, Unar parted ways with Aurilon and went into Understorey.
Aurilon was content. She’d knelt at the feet of an out-of-niche woman who was beatific in her status as a new mother at the age of fifty-two. Odel’s newborn head had been spotty and squashed-looking. He’d had hair on his forehead that the midwife assured them would fall out soon enough.
The Lakekeeper, one of the rain goddess’s Servants, hadn’t been best pleased to see Unar, but she’d forced on him every detail she could remember of Edax’s fate. Aurilon’s mildly threatening presence had convinced him to come with them to the House of Itit, where a jeweller’s daughter, only one day old, already preferred blue gemstones to green.
How can you be sure she’s Ehkis? the Lakekeeper had asked, fists on hips.
Unar is the Godfinder, Aurilon answered. She crosses into all niches. Canopy is hers now.
It wasn’t the title Unar had yearned for, but the Lakekeeper had repeated it with bafflement and a little awe. His respect meant nothing. He wasn’t Aoun, or Isin, or Audblayin.
He was nobody. Unar would have despised him if she hadn’t been numb on the inside. She would have flung the undesired bestowment back in Aurilon’s face.
I’ll find one more goddess, Unar had said. Then I’m done.
She found that child, the child that would be Ilan, goddess of justice, in a prison cell in the queen’s palace in Ilanland. The child’s mother, Ear, despite being heavily pregnant, had been arrested for insulting the royal heir, and had given birth that night in her cell.
I would have protected my baby anyway, goddess or no, Ear said earnestly. I would have bought Odel’s protection if I’d had to lie with the jailer to earn it.
You don’t have to, Unar had said. Aurilon, can’t you—?
I can, Aurilon sighed, and filled Ear’s cupped hands with coins of silver and gold. This is for you. We had it from the Servants of Ilan, when we brought them the body of their drowned goddess. The Servants are no longer starving themselves because they cannot find the one they serve. Call on me in Odel’s Temple if you need more. You are free to go.
Unar rolled up her sleeves and carefully set her spines in the side of the tallowwood tree.
She, too, was finally free to go.
The much-reduced river sang to one side of her, and the autumn wind made the forest moan. Gods died and returned to life, but Unar was seventeen years old, significantly older than the girl child who would be Audblayin. Unar would die before Audblayin was reborn a man. When Unar was born again, unlike Audblayin, she wouldn’t remember anything of her past lives.
With the finding of the last deity, she was set adrift. How strange to feel, while not performing Understorian magic, less solid than the trees that turned the wind. To have felt for so long that she was a tool constructed for a single purpose, only to discover she was as fit for being a Bodyguard as a frog was fit for flying. But there was still the question.
She would have an answer.
The opening she’d made into the brothers’ home was now neatly fitted with a door. It opened when she pushed against it, and she walked down the stairs into light and warmth. The new addition had been modified to accommodate candle niches. A second fireplace had been built in the enlarged storeroom-turned-permanent-bedroom. Unar smiled at the candles. The bear that had died so that its fat could produce that smoky, flickering light; the grasses whose twisted fibres had made the wick and the trees, not pillars of the world as the emergents were, but smaller, unnoticed in the dark, that had provided the wood for fuel for the hunters’ dwelling; those transient things were her kin, unmourned and unremembered, interchangeable as individual breaths.
“You are back,” Hasbabsah said, sounding surprised and pleased, a knitted cap pulled down over her almost-bald head. She looked up from the rope jig with its metal weights, where she and Oos formed uniform lengths that must have pleased even Esse the perfectionist.
“I’m back,” Unar agreed. “How is Sawas settling in?”
Hasbabsah grunted.
“She will take some more time to adjust. You kept your word. You have done what you promised to do in the Garden and more. You do not need to worry about Sawas anymore.”
I have not done what I promised, Unar thought, because the Garden has not kept its promise to me, to raise me into the sun.
But the Garden hadn’t made that promise. Unar didn’t know why she’d promised herself something that could never come true. Nobody else had stood over her, insisting that she take what she deserved; it had been her own inner voice, all along, and she had trusted it. But why not? Who else in the world was trustworthy?
“Where’s Esse?” she asked. “I must make more rooms.”
“He is sleeping,” Oos said. “He has been making more defences around the tree, further down. He said that those men should never have reached as high as they did.”
Unar walked through the brothers’ house. She smiled at faces that smiled at her, but didn’t speak to any of them. Ylly and Issi fought over a floppy black hat that had golden imitation chimera’s eyes sewn onto the sides of it. Sawas sat in Bernreb’s lap, picking bones from her plate of roasted fish.
The brothers’ bedroom was cramped. Unar pushed back the curtain to enter, and tried to straighten once inside, but her head brushed the curve of the spherical ceiling, and the three free-standing bunks in the centre of the room looked like a stack of rough-cut, storm-felled debris. Esse slept on the top, covered in an itchy-looking fur.
Unar sang the godsong to herself as she reshaped the bed into a thing of elegance and added space, waking up the last still-living cells at the timber’s rim. They’d been part of a sweet-fruit pine tree, once. The tallowwood walls of the room were easier to flex and widen. The great tree told her which parts of itself were safe to hollow and which must remain sound, which carried the sap and which carried the incredible burden of the weight of the top of the tree.
Before she had finished, she saw Esse’s grey eyes, open and watching her. He didn’t move a muscle of his long body.
“I’m sorry for disturbing you, Esse,” she said. “But there’s one more favour I need from you. Not monsoon-right, this time, but a right to sleep here, in the new part of this room, for fourteen or fifteen monsoons, or however much time passes before the younger Ylly feels in her bones it’s time to wake me.”
“Is this Canopian double-speak?” Esse asked. “Is it death that you want?”
“Not yet,” Unar answered. “I must deliver the goddess Audblayin to the Garden first. Help me to get up there, please.”
Esse sat up. Before she’d changed his bed, he would have struck his head, but now there was room for him to stand on the top bunk, if he wished, without touching the domed ceiling. He examined the niche she’d made, high in the wall, with its brackets shaped like loquat trees, and a hammock-sized space that a large human or a small dayhunter could have crawled into.
“How will you breathe in there?” he asked.
“I’ve made a small, hidden, ventilation hole. The mesh over it is magic. Nothing will crawl down it, I promise you.”
“That is good. I would not want cockroaches gnawing on you while you are sleeping. Mind your spines, Canopian. You still do not use them very well.”
Esse lifted her to kneel on his shoulders. From there, she was able to use her forearm spines to pull herself into the space. It was cold, but her body heat would soon be enough to keep her warm. Esse took a few steps back and peered in at her.
“What if Ylly dies?” he said. “What if she never decides it is time to wake you?”
Unspoken prophecies can come true, too.
“Good night, Esse,” Unar said, forming the pattern that she had seen Frog form outside the Great Gate. She wrapped the deep, hibernating sleep around herself like a blanket, being careful not to let it touch any of the other lives nearby.
And she closed her eyes.