IT WAS still dark when the Hunters approached the Godfinder’s farm.
There had to be hundreds of farmers in Airakland. Imeris had no information, no reason to suspect that the creature’s victim was Unar.
Yet she stepped up to the false palm path with a sense of dread. Oniwak led the group to the crossroads in the scented satinwood tree. There, the barrows and hollows of the traders were covered in weighted blankets and tight-woven leaf mats to keep furry nocturnal pests and blown-in rain away from the grain.
Flame-coloured climbing salamanders hunted slugs and moths in the lantern light. Crickets used the acoustics of the hollow to amplify their calls. A pair of hungry-looking out-of-nichers dozed on a pile of empty sacks. Otherwise, the crossroads were abandoned.
“Wake one of them,” Oniwak said. “Find the way to the farm.”
“The farm is this way,” Imeris said, stepping onto the straight satinwood branch which led to Unar’s gate. She half expected him to call her a liar and attempt to bring her back, but the Hunters fell in behind her.
The path wasn’t lit. The last time she’d come this way, she’d been preoccupied with her failure and humiliation, longing for what she considered the easy life of flowerfowl farming. When she came to the archway with the dead-looking vines, she flung out her arms to bar Oniwak’s passage.
“It is a magical gate,” she said. “The rest of you cannot go through.”
“I don’t see a doorbell,” Ibbin piped up.
“There may be clues left behind by the creature,” Oniwak said.
“The Godfinder lived here.” Imeris’s voice came out huskily. She remembered the sleeping woman in her fathers’ home. The tea they had taken together so recently. “Her magic controlled the vines. Only she could have taught this gate to recognise you for a friend. You must not approach the arch. This is as far as you can go.”
“But not you?” Daggad asked shrewdly.
In response, Imeris put her upturned wrist into the archway. She held her breath, waiting for the vines to come to life. Waiting for them to taste her, to withdraw and let her through.
The vines trembled, but they didn’t move. No new tendrils grew out of them.
“Someone’s coming,” Oniwak said in a low voice, peering keenly through the night. “Be ready.”
A cloak-wrapped shape stopped several paces back from the other side of the arch. Unar’s voice issued from it, and Imeris’s heart leaped.
“Unfortunately,” the Godfinder said drily, “my thief-proof gate has been ruined by a goddess’s pet impossible for me to kill. The Hunt, is it? There don’t seem to be enough of you. Imeris, I’m surprised to see you again so soon. Aren’t you supposed to be at Loftfol?” Daggad grunted and stared at Imeris at this revelation. “This isn’t the usual hour for receiving guests.” Unar put her fists on her hips. Imeris blinked back tears of happiness at the familiar sight. “Come on. You might as well all come inside and have some ti.”
* * *
ONIWAK SIPPED his ti without lowering his gaze from Unar’s face.
“So you heard screaming. Then what happened?”
They sat across from each other on feather-stuffed cushions. Daggad sprawled on the blue carpet behind them, propped up on one elbow to drink his ti. Ibbin swung in one of the Godfinder’s hammocks, whistling quietly to himself, while the Lakekeeper sat as far back from Unar as he could manage with a barely disguised expression of distaste. Ingaget turned the blue lantern over curiously in his hands.
Imeris squirmed in her cushion-seat, wanting to get Unar alone. The caramel smell of the satinwood was stifling. Her relief and happiness on finding the Godfinder alive had faded. A sense of urgency had overtaken all else.
Unar could get a message to Understorey. To Youngest-Father. To tell him what had happened at Loftfol. That Imeris had killed her teacher Horroh and was now outcast. Hunted.
That the students might be hunting Youngest-Father, too.
Oldest-Father had many clever traps, but he was no longer alive to maintain them, and Youngest-Father couldn’t fight off all of Loftfol if they found out where he was. She thought of the spy who had seen her at Mistletoe Lodge in Ehkisland. How many spies did Loftfol have in Canopy? What if they were watching her now?
Her name was written tall on the wall of the memorial tree, and twelve Hunters being chased out of Orinland by the king’s soldiers and waves of wild animals could hardly stay secret. Informers could be lurking outside the farmhouse at that very moment. If they were, they might not dare to strike at the Hunt, but they might tear Understorey apart looking for her fathers, to punish them instead.
Imeris squirmed again.
“I went up the steps,” Unar said. “I saw something enormous with its head stuck in my vines, trying to wrench them out by the roots, but the vines kept growing, wrapping it in deeper and deeper layers—”
“Enormous?” Oniwak interrupted. “How big, exactly?”
Unar raised an eyebrow at him.
“Longer than it was wide or tall. Maybe ten or twelve paces long. Three paces high at the shoulder. The head, as I said, was wrapped in vines, but the front legs and haunches were black-furred. Powerful, but with red scars running all over. At least, I thought they were scars at the time.”
“Could you see who was screaming?”
Unar’s nostrils flared and her eyes lost their focus.
“I saw legs and shoes sticking through the arch, between the creature’s front paws. Veiny old legs with green-dyed sandals. They belonged to the woman who sold flowerfowl fodder at the crossroads. She was delivering a few bags for me, and the birds had gone to greet her, eager to get at the grain.”
“Do you know the grain farmer’s name?”
“To my great shame, no,” Unar admitted. Imeris tried catching her eye. Tried to stare at her from behind Oniwak’s head, to signal that she had something important to say.
“How did you drive the creature away?” Oniwak sounded irritated, and Imeris couldn’t decide if it was because he wished Unar had left the creature tangled in the vines by the head, or if it was because he was starting to suspect that magic would be more effective in the Hunt than the crossbow that he carried.
“I didn’t. It pulled back from the arch, and its head came away from its neck. The red scars that I saw weren’t scars. They were places where it could break apart. Once the body moved back to make room, the head broke into these writhing chunks. A handful of them, half red-raw, half furred, or half tusked. They rolled back along the bloodied path and stuck back onto its body again. It stood there breathing heavily for a few moments, as though that had been an effort for it. I think—I thought—there might have been more than two eyes.”
Daggad snorted with apparent amusement, but Oniwak didn’t blink.
“How many?” Oniwak wanted to know.
“There might have been two eyes in each piece that made up the head. It turned around and went into the crossroads. I went to the woman’s body, but it was gutted. Gored. A whole lot of my birds had been crushed as well. There were lots of feathers and blood. Her grain barrow had been knocked down, I think. My archway was poisoned, nearly dead. I tried to find the woman’s family at the crossroads.”
“They’d already gone to the palace,” Oniwak said, “to report the attack.”
“I went to Airak’s emergent to do the very same. I have a—a relative, there.”
Unar glanced at the Lakekeeper, who scowled and looked away.
“You’re an interesting woman, Godfinder,” Oniwak said. “You’re acquainted with an Odelland slave girl as well as the Lakekeeper of Ehkisland. You were a Gardener, serving Audblayin, and now you claim to have a relative among the Servants of Airak. That is very interesting. Can you think of any reason why Orin’s creature would seek you out? Are you acquainted with the traitor Anahah?”
“No.”
“Could the traitor have been hiding here? Could the creature have been following his scent? Before the attack, did any of your grain or fowl go missing?”
“No.”
Imeris went very still. Her heart beat faster.
Could the creature have been following his scent?
“Could you have been,” Oniwak pressed ruthlessly, “anywhere that the traitor could have been, where his scent could have gotten on you, or his stolen magic mixed up with you or yours?”
“Not unless he’s disguised himself as Odel. Since the monsoon ended, Odel’s Temple is the only place I’ve been that is further from here than the next tree.”
Imeris struggled to stay motionless. Her queasiness deepened. Oniwak gestured towards Ingaget.
“Pass me the lantern, Ingaget. I’ll send a message to the others in Eshland. Godfinder, have you parchment, quill, and ink to spare?”
“Yes,” Unar said, stiffly unfolding her legs from the cushion, pushing one hand off the floor to rise.
Imeris seized the opportunity to go after Unar into the next half room.
“What’s wrong?” the Godfinder asked her, and Imeris grabbed her by both upper arms, turning her away from the main room, spilling in desperate whispers the disaster of her return to Loftfol, the death of Horroh, the loss of the chimera-skin wings, the slave-branding and its overturning when she was chosen for the Hunt.
“I beg you,” she said at last, searching Unar’s face, “warn my fathers.”
“Of course,” Unar said. “You don’t need to squeeze the blood out of my arms. And don’t worry about them. They’ve been dodging Gannak far longer than you’ve been dodging Loftfol.”
Imeris let go.
They returned to the main room. Oniwak wrote a message out on the parchment before opening one of the panes of the lantern and stuffing it inside.
“Eeriez of Eshland!” he cried as the message was consumed, the blue glow intensifying. A moment later, the blue glow flared brighter again. Oniwak thrust his hand into heat and light that should have seared him to the bone, pulling out a piece of reed paper scrawled on in charcoal.
“What does it say, Captain, if your fellow Hunters are permitted to know?” Ingaget inquired, while Daggad craned his neck over Oniwak’s shoulder, trying to read it directly.
“It says,” Daggad boomed, “that the wooden clockmaker killed by the creature in Eshland ’ad been commissionedta craft somethin’ for the traitor. A soul cage, made of bone. Eeriez cannot say if the cage was completed before the clockmaker’s death.”
“What is a soul cage?” Ibbin called from his swinging hammock.
“What does it sound like?” Daggad said, guffawing.
“There’s no such thing as a soul cage,” muttered the Lakekeeper. “Superstitious nonsense.” But when Imeris glanced at the Godfinder, Unar looked contemplative and said nothing.
“We’ll meet them on the southern border of Ehkisland,” Oniwak said. “At a place called Mistletoe Lodge. The innkeeper was killed there. We must discover the connection between them.”
“Must there be a connection?” Daggad drawled. “It could be killin’ indiscriminately.”
“No,” Ingaget mused. “Its mission is neither to sow fear nor cause chaos. And anyway, to accomplish either of those things, it wouldn’t need to expend energy ranging so quickly or so far. The captain is right. There must be some common connection to Anahah, the creature’s quarry.”
Unar’s gaze snapped sharply into focus. Imeris felt it strike her like an arrow.
The Godfinder’s farm. Mistletoe Lodge. Imeris was the connection. She had sheltered Anahah there.
If I become a human guest in a human space, Anahah had said, the Mistress of the Wild cannot find me.
He had also said, Orin killed every living member of my family. All my friends. Anyone she remotely suspected might provide me with shelter.
Orin’s creature had killed the poor innkeeper and then followed Imeris’s scent from Mistletoe Lodge back to the Godfinder’s home. To make sure Anahah was not being sheltered there. It must own more than an ordinary beast’s intelligence. It must still be partly human.
She pressed her tongue against her palate, keeping herself from sharing all she knew with Oniwak, but also remembering the feeling of the slave’s mark there. Anahah had mixed his magic up with her. That much was certain.
And Imeris now had bait for a trap, if she cared to use it.
Herself.