ODEL’S SLEEPLESS Bodyguard, like Audblayin’s, owned a rarely used bed.
“Lie still,” Aurilon ordered, setting Imeris and her loosely splinted arm into a mattress that rustled with windgrass thatch stuffing. The secret hollow lay behind a false wall of the Temple, inside one fin of the fish. Two tiny bores were barely enough to keep the air fresh, and there was neither smoke nor fire. A single blue lantern hung from a brass chain in the centre of the domed ceiling, and a small, red-spotted gecko lingered there hopefully, waiting for tiny flies.
Later, when night fell and a frog refrain relieved the choir of cicadas, Aurilon brought water and Imeris asked, “Are you sure she received your message?”
“Quite certain,” Aurilon said. “But Airakland is far away. It may take some time for her to come.”
“I thought I could outmatch you, in the dark,” Imeris said, distracted by pain, barely hearing Aurilon’s answer. “I am from Understorey. You are the Canopian, the one who relies on the light, or so I thought. But I suppose the ones who gave you your markings see no more sunshine than the Bird-Riders do. I finally figured out where they are from.”
“Yes,” Aurilon said, taking the water gourd away.
“You fell, the same as I did.”
“Not quite the same. I was older. Maybe seven? The wealthy children dared each other to jump over a gap between branches.” Aurilon offered a bedpan. Imeris eyed it. Her legs were quite well. Apparently Aurilon, or her master, did not want a fully spined Understorian seen loitering about Odel’s Temple looking for a suitable place to toilet. The Bodyguard went on. “I was smaller than the other children. They had Odel’s protection and knew it. I did not. They goaded me anyway. That is how I fell.”
Imeris could easily imagine it.
“You want to teach me.” She took the pan. Used it. “Why else give me so many chances? You feel a kinship between us.”
“Not enough of a kinship to teach you before you are ready.” Aurilon’s mouth firmed. Her black eyes flashed in the blue lantern light. “A fool speaks to one without ears.”
Then she turned her scarred, bumpy, scale-like back to Imeris and opened the panel in the false wall, departing to empty the pan. Afterwards, Imeris guessed, she would lurk in some high place, defending Odel from dangers while he dreamed his horrible, prescient dreams.
* * *
TWO DAYS later, the Godfinder came.
Unar didn’t need to stoop, as Aurilon did, to enter the hidden room. She was shorter, softer, plumper, and slightly lighter-skinned than the Bodyguard. Her hair was loosely woven into two shoulder-length braids tied with tallowwood twine. Permanent frown lines scored the spot between her bushy brows.
The adepts of the Garden from which she’d been expelled didn’t permit her to wear the white robe of a Servant, nor the red robe, crimson shirt, and spinach-coloured trousers of a Gardener. Unar wore, instead, the rough brown woven shirt of an out-of-nicher; the ankle-length, split wrap skirt of a Bodyguard, in nobody’s colours; and her Godfinder’s cloak, a long, hooded brown robe patched with dried and preserved leaves of a hundred faded hues.
All the niches of Canopy knew and respected that cloak. Since Unar had taken it up, the faithful bereft of their goddess or god no longer had to wander, naked and half-starved, from niche to niche, in hope of finding their deity.
Imeris remembered her as the sleeping princess in their home, a mystery that her three mothers and three fathers refused to properly explain to her.
Did you sneak into the roof, Issi? little Ylly, six years old, had whispered to Imeris one night, shivering with anxiety and awe. Did Oldest-Father stay sleeping? What is in there?
A girl, Imeris answered, creeping under the blanket with Ylly, unable to shake the mental image of the round, sooty face with its wide nose and generous lips, nestled in a pillow of springy black hair, which Imeris had searched for its resemblance to her own. A girl is sleeping up there. I had to wait for ages before I felt her heart beat. She sleeps like a tree bear through the monsoon.
Do you think she is a princess? Excitement replaced fear in Ylly’s voice. A cursed princess? Is she our sister, or your birth mother, Issi?
Imeris had been irritated her sister had guessed her motive so easily. Her birth mother. No. The sleeping girl did not seem old enough. She had no stretch-stripes on her skin, and her breasts were too small.
Maybe she is our sister. Maybe when she wakes, she will tell us.
When Unar had woken, however, all she’d done was reveal Ylly as the goddess Audblayin and split their family forever between Canopy and Understorey. What she’d done was take Imeris’s little sister away, and her little brother, and her middle-father, and foreshadow the fact that Ylly-Audblayin would be the one that sagas spoke of, that Ylly-Audblayin was the one whose famous name would live forever.
A child their three mothers and three fathers could truly be proud of. Yet the goddess had done nothing to stop Kirrik. Considered her an Understorian problem, like dayhunters and chimeras.
“Fighting again, Imerissiremi?” the Godfinder asked wryly, and Imeris knew from the heat and reduction of pain in her broken arm that her injury was being magically appraised.
“I did not break it on my own,” she answered peevishly.
“You might have lost the use of your spines in this arm if I hadn’t been able to come.”
“Can you heal me or not?”
Unar’s smile transformed her unremarkable features.
“The old Odel,” she said, sitting on the bed beside Imeris, “wouldn’t have allowed me to use Audblayin’s power in his niche. And the old Audblayin would have thrown me out of a tree years ago for my disobedience. But since we’re together at this particular crossroads in time, yes, I can heal you.”
You might have lost the use of your spines. Imeris’s lip trembled. It wasn’t the pain. She had a high tolerance for pain. It was fear of never completing the task. Now that she had failed at earning Aurilon as a tutor, who in Loftfol should she learn from next? The Litim, Dammammad, who taught the short sword? What about Saliailas, the Huntingim, who was unmatched in the use of the javelin? Clearly, choosing Horroh had not helped. She could not tell him so. He knew nothing of her matches in Canopy. None of them did.
When will it be over? When will I be free?
“I am lucky you were able to come, Godfinder,” she said. “And grateful my sister is a goddess.”
Unar closed her eyes. Her smile faded.
“She knows I’m with you. She’s willing me to help you. But you should be more careful.”
“I will be,” Imeris lied.
The Godfinder’s lids flickered open again.
“Daughter of a chimera,” she mused, “in the place where I once came to see a chimera skin.”
“There was a chimera in Wissin. It knew my smell. It turned back from my tree. The villagers were amazed.”
“They should have been horrified.” Unar scowled. “Chimeras turn back from the stench of sorceress’s souls.”
“It knew my smell,” Imeris repeated. “I wonder if they have a language. I wonder if they speak to one another.”
Healing magic was unspectacular. Nothing like when Leaper called lightning to his piles of black sand. Imeris’s arm became numb to the feeling of broken pieces of bone moving. The eerie shifting beneath her skin showed them fitting together and knitting.
But when feeling flooded back, the seam remained bloody and raw. Her spines protruded like the red-smeared teeth of a rough-made saw.
“You know how it goes,” the Godfinder said grimly. “I can’t heal a spine-seam completely, or you’ll lose your climbing hooks. Wrap them up in the dressing and come with me. Aurilon has had enough of coddling you. You can stay with me in Airakland until you’re ready to climb back down. And you can see your brother while you’re there. You’re very lucky to have a brother. To have your family looking out for you.”
“Yes,” Imeris murmured. They used to tell me how lucky I was to have all my mothers and fathers still alive. “I know.”
A great hunter. A great healer. A great musician. A great mother. A great Bodyguard. A great goddess. A great Godfinder.
There’s nothing great about being great. I just want it all to be over.