IMERIS POUNDED on the invisible barrier below Odel’s emergent.
“Aurilon!” she shouted until she was hoarse. “Aurilon!”
It was all day and most of a night since she’d fled Loftfol. The blood on her spines had mingled with the sap of a hundred great trees but not worn away completely. She tried to tell herself Horroh had deserved to die, over and over again, but she couldn’t really make herself believe it.
This is how it starts. One day a child dreaming of Great Deeds, the next day a killer with Understorian blood as well as Canopian on her conscience, with both the Garden of Audblayin and the great school of Loftfol closed to her forever. Who am I? Where do I belong?
“This is beneath your dignity,” Aurilon’s smoky voice advised from slightly above her, and Imeris lifted bleary eyes to see Odel’s Bodyguard hanging upside down from rope and harness as she had the very first time Imeris had seen her. “You did not squeal this way as a child.”
“Warriors from beneath Ehkisland are close behind me,” Imeris panted.
“Then I can hardly advise my master to make a way through the barrier for you.”
“Do something! Help me! I am so tired, Aurilon!” And I will never rest in my Loftfol bunkroom again. Never rise before the sun to take a bow to hand and bend it in the Unrolled Room of Echoes, never glimpse my dark reflection in the pond under the bridge at the halfway mark or pull shafts from the straw god target on the far side.
A place of safety from Kirrik, where I knew she could not come.
Imeris tried to think what she might do if Odel refused to let her through. There had to be some other way. No ideas came. She gazed at the Bodyguard in mute appeal.
Aurilon sighed. She plucked something, a coin or a counter, pale as shell or bone, from the dense weave of her bark-ornamented hair.
“I could mark you with the sigil of the slaves of the king of Odelland. The barrier would recognise you as belonging to the world above and not the world below. It would let you through, as if you’d fallen only hours ago instead of decades.”
“And then?” Imeris asked, waiting for Aurilon to reassure her that the mark would be removed. Anahah had reassured her. The mark he’d given her was gone before the fear had had time to really sink its teeth in. She couldn’t understand why Aurilon didn’t hurry up and say it. That it was all a trick to escape pursuit.
“And then you would feel gently, but over time, ever more powerfully compelled to go to the palace of Odelland,” Aurilon said, “where your sister’s great-grandmother served and died. They might take you in and give you work to do, or they might throw you down to choke before breaking. I am no mighty magic wielder. My master cannot free slaves that are not his own. The bone coin that makes the mark was given ages ago, as a hint that I might send human gifts to the king.”
“A hint,” Imeris repeated woodenly. “That you might send human gifts.”
“Children have been given as tribute to save other children before.” Aurilon held the bone coin up between thumb and forefinger. “This has the power to admit you to Canopy, not I. It will also admit you within the wards of the king’s palace. Once within those wards, you could not leave except by his orders. Are you really being hunted?”
“Yes, Aurilon. The pursuit is mere minutes behind me. Please! Ask Odel to open the way! You cannot mean for me to be a gift to the Odelland king.”
Aurilon bared her teeth.
“I cannot allow you to lead a raid on Canopy, whether by design or by accident, student of Loftfol.”
“No longer a student. I killed my teacher. That is why they come for me!”
Odel’s Bodyguard held out the bone coin.
“Take it,” she said, “or stay below the barrier where you belong. You were right. I do feel a bond with you, Imeris, but I serve the Protector of Children.”
Imeris took the coin with unsteady fingers. She turned it over in her hand. So innocent-seeming. Like the effigy of Orin in the archery practice range at Loftfol. It seemed a clumsy straw thing, shaped by new students the same way the old students had shaped it, but what it really reflected was generational rage. This coin pretended to be a tiny thing of value, a wondrous instrument of magic; instead it represented all the cold, cruel indifference of Canopy to the lives of the less fortunate. Her fingers clenched around it, and she suppressed the urge to throw it away.
“I could share it with the ones who pursue me,” Imeris said suddenly, savagely. “I could mark them all. Gently, you said, but over time, more powerful. We would have time to raze your Temple! Would that surprise you, Aurilon?”
“Yes,” Aurilon said without blinking. “I would be surprised. But you would not do it, and if you did, I would kill you. The dead make poor pupils. Besides, I know truth when I hear it, and when you said the words I could, I heard I could never beneath them.”
Aurilon tipped herself upright in her harness and shimmied up the rope, arcane aura permitting her through the invisible barrier that was solid as stone to Imeris, leaving the ex-student alone with a racing heart and jumbled thoughts.
My master cannot free slaves that are not his own.
She tried to remember what Anahah had said, how he had explained the process of his marking, but tiredness warred with urgency and everything was a fog. Had Anahah specified which sigil was to be used, or how he had gained authority to use it? Was it stolen and copied, the way that Anahah’s different animal forms were stolen and copied? Had a slave died in the marking and unmarking she’d endured?
Once within those wards, you could not leave except by his orders.
Who would come to save her, if she branded herself this way? The Godfinder? Middle-Father? Leaper? None of them would be her owners. None of them would have the power to free her. All her confidence from the earlier episode was eroded.
“They will buy me somehow,” Imeris whispered, and pressed the bone coin to her tongue. She might argue with her family constantly, but she knew she could rely on them. Canopian or Understorian, they were one.
It was agony, as it had been before.
How will my family know I am there?
She spat the coin into her palm and slipped it, slick with saliva, into her salt pouch. This time, when she raised her hand to the barrier, it passed through.
To a Canopian, it is only empty air.
Imeris glanced down. She couldn’t yet see the scouts she knew were in her wake. Her breath tasted suddenly foul. She panted with hope and with fear; she drove her spines into Odel’s emergent to continue climbing and wondered if someone would come to save her before her spines were snapped off and cast away.
My wings. Youngest-Father’s beautiful wings, from the skin of the chimera who saved my life.
She would never be allowed to keep them. They were hundreds of times more valuable than a slave. Only a king could buy them back for her. It would be better to hide them somewhere.
Odel could use them to buy me back and then free me.
She looked up and saw Odel’s Temple, tail of the leaping fish and the highest branches of the emergent licked by the lemon light of sunrise. Would Aurilon hide the wings for her in the secret room? Or perhaps stored with the skin of that other chimera, the one that had killed Odel’s previous incarnation?
As if the marking on her tongue was sensitive to her plans to divert and delay its demands, the urge to find the palace rose irresistibly up in Imeris like the urge to vomit.
She ran out along one branch until it crossed another, then ran back towards the entry to the Temple.
Aurilon wasn’t inside. Or if she was, she was by the side of the sleeping god below. Imeris started to go to the trapdoor, but the urge tugged at her again, more insistently.
There was no time.
No!
She couldn’t just shed the glider onto the floor. Anyone could take it. The bronze scale armour was valuable, too, but replaceable. In desperation, she placed Youngest-Father’s wings on the pile of tributes. He would understand. Even kill another chimera, take the curse onto himself, if that was what was required. He’d never sired his own offspring, but his dedication as a father was never in doubt.
Good-bye, Chimera-Mother. Forgive me, Youngest-Father. Better to give the skin to the god than allow the Odelland king to keep it.
“This tribute,” she said with tears in her eyes, “is for a child whose name I do not know. She is like me. She has a warrior self.” Imeris groped for more ways to describe the child she wished to protect, the one that Oldest-Mother had told her was out there, in the forest somewhere. “She yearns for a quiet life. She has a Canopian self. She has an Understorian self. Even—even a chimera self.”
Blurting her last words, Imeris obeyed the urge and turned, retching, both hands over her mouth. She walked with as much dignity as she could manage from the open door of the Temple. Obeying did not lessen the urge, but seemed to make it stronger. Trying to avoid a misstep that might force her to reveal her unbroken spines, she descended the winding staircase and stepped out along the branch road that led to the king’s palace.
It lay to the southwest, lower down in Canopy. Imeris kept her eyes downcast, still fighting the urge to vomit. She watched her feet, the feet of passing strangers, and the road. Her boots were given a blue cast by Airak’s lanterns.
Each time she saw a blue quandong branch road, Imeris glanced up to check the signposts; she knew the palace was in one, and she knew blue quandong in Understorey by its hard, grey, moss-blotched bark. Blue quandong in Canopy meant something else; it meant javelin-bladed emerald foliage with scarlet leaves interspersed with green and brilliant blue fruit swollen to ripeness by the rain. The sun rose higher and the nausea grew more powerful, and still none of the signposts were marked with the king’s toucan crest.
And then they were.
Imeris sobbed with relief as she made the turning, cheeks wet and tongue burning. The road, widening all the time, had deep parallel ruts from the passage of barrows, and at the end of it the palace filled the quandong crown like an overweight ibis balanced in a sapling. Humankind made two types of dwelling in the arms of the forest; one was hollowed from and yet considerate of the great trees; the other was tacked on to the outside to boast mastery over branches. This palace was the second sort. To Imeris’s eyes, it was a larger and even more immodest version of a Headman’s house in Understorey.
The road ran between paired, thatched wooden guardhouses connected by iron gates. It broadened again on the other side of the gates, forming a north-facing forecourt-cum-practice yard, which currently milled with soldiers.
A stream ran over the road between practice yard and palace, with a lowered drawbridge across it. Then the branch road disappeared into the palace, a tall building of stacked red-and-white timbers. Its symmetrical towers and main hold were crowned with pointed roofs thatched with grey windgrass. The place where the branch road connected to the tree was hidden in the heart of the palace.
Sweet-smelling smoke belched from every window, keeping the royal dwelling insect-free. The thatch was fresh and sweet-smelling, too. How could it stay so clean, the seat of a lineage so stained with blood?
Imeris looked for the west-facing window that had belonged to a long-dead princess. It was the nephew of that murderous princess who now ruled Odelland.
That nephew was also Middle-Mother’s nephew. Sawas was Oldest-Mother’s unwanted child by the old king.
Middle-Mother, was the thought Imeris clung to as another wave of nausea doubled her over. Middle-Mother is descended from the royal family of Odelland. If she is, then my sister and brother are, too. They can free me. They own me!
Soldiers in Odelland’s pale orange tunics and short, bloodred skirts caught her as she stumbled towards the guardhouse. She stuck her tongue out for them to see, and they cracked the iron gate open for her to pass, pushing her roughly through.
She didn’t care what the commotion in the practice yard was. More and more soldiers seemed to be emerging from the thatched barracks building to the west. There, the stream that ran by the palace entry fell off the edge of the yard. Soldiers rinsed their mouths, scrubbed their hair, and pulled on armour by the edge of the stream.
They had different armour—lighter, layered, and lacquered—to the armour of some other soldiers, who made loud demands in the yard. Those soldiers wore solid ebony plate edged with silver and studded with black glass.
Soldiers from Airakland.
Imeris dragged her hands away from her mouth and pressed them over her ears. It didn’t matter what they were saying. The turmoil was none of her doing. She had to climb inside the wards around the palace before the sickness of being newly marked made her insensible.
One of the black-clad soldiers, an officer by the raven’s feathers in his hair, pointed straight at her.
Imeris lowered her eyes and stumbled on.
Of course I look odd. Out of place. There is another entrance. A slave’s entrance. Walking over the drawbridge like an honoured guest is not for scum like me, but what can I do?
Both kinds of fighting men crowded around something that was in the officer’s hand. They looked at it. Then they crowded around Imeris.
“This is the one!” somebody boomed. A hand caught her wrist. Bodies pressed against her.
“’Ware the unbroken spines,” somebody else shouted, and her other wrist was seized. Her arms were pulled wide apart. She needed air. She couldn’t breathe. Her tongue was swelling.
Choking her.
“There is no mistake,” the officer growled, waving the thing in his hand in front of Imeris’s face just as the sun speared through the branches and blinded her.
I can let the darkness take me, I suppose. She closed her eyes. Consciousness slipped from her grasp. Surely someone will carry me inside before I die.