DROWSING BY the door, Imeris dreamed of Horroh.
They faced one another in one of the training halls at Loftfol, darkness and the sounds of the monsoon all around, the floor beneath them polished by generations of students’ bare feet. The river that ran through the school roared. Rain punched at flat leaves. It gurgled as it drained through bark crevices. One side of Horroh’s grub-white, shaved head was lit. One doughy cheek. The iris of one eye, such a pale grey that it was almost white, around a pupil dilated by the dark.
Do not let them tell you that your skin decides what you are, Horroh said. He gripped her right palm in his, holding her forearm up so that her extended spines shone yellow in the light of the tallow candle. This is what you are. An Understorian warrior. A student of Loftfol. My student. If you ever forget, let your spines remind you.
Imeris blinked; found her spines smeared with blood. She looked up at Horroh, but his grip was loosening. His throat gaped open, striped red and white and black where the windpipe still held the memory of his last words.
The tallow candle flickered and went out.
Imeris’s dream went with it.
She sat up on the floor in the Mistletoe Lodge, sweating and shaking. Daggad crouched beside her, an adze in his hand.
“No time for sleepin’,” he whispered, grinning. “Make sure not to wake the others.”
Imeris clutched the curved cooper’s adze with both hands. It was heavy, made of floodgum and steel. The noise would be terrible. She would have to mask it somehow. If only she were the Godfinder and could carve the channels by the sides of the door and window with magic.
Imeris pulled off her boots and armour. On quiet feet, she crept past the other rooms into the dead innkeeper’s kitchen, sighing with relief as she sized it up.
The kitchen window faced away from Southeats, where the watch was being kept.
Imeris found a clothesline. A cupboard full of wooden cutting boards and pots. Sealed gourds of magenta cherry jam. She tied the pots and boards to the end of the clothesline, smeared everything with jam, and dangled it out the window.
Shoving several wedges under the kitchen door so it was effectively locked from the inside, she then used her spines to climb out the kitchen window and into the closest empty guest room.
She’d been back in her own room only a few minutes when the first crash of boards and bowls against the tree sounded. Imeris hid the adze under the bed. She curled up on top of it, turning her back to the door, hiding her small satisfied smile.
The boards clacked and rattled again.
More. Louder.
Monkeys and gliders screamed, fighting over the jam-smeared boards. Every time an animal tried to make off with the treasure, the clothesline brought them up short and the utensils banged back into the side of the tree.
“What is that racket?” Oniwak grumbled from the hallway. Imeris heard her door creak open a hand-span. “Useless woman. Sound asleep.”
Bare feet, shuffling carefully, came to a halt beside the partway-open door.
“Captain Oniwak,” Ingaget said. “It’s nocturnal animals, gliders and such, getting into the kitchen. The door’s stuck. They’ll go away when they’ve finished feeding.”
When Imeris was sure the soldier and the old man were gone, she rolled over and fished around under the bed for her adze. She closed the door. Felt for the markings she’d made with her spines when she’d measured the frame. The first time she brought the adze down and a curl of pale, sinus-prickling tallowwood came away, she waited, holding her breath, to see if any of her fellow Hunters would come to investigate.
They didn’t.
By the time Daggad returned with a barrow full of turpentine blocks and a note from a smith with a copy of the specifications for the blades together with a promise they’d be done on the morrow, Imeris had the first set of parallel grooves completely hollowed out.
“How did you get past Ibbin?” Imeris demanded.
“Gave ’im some bia. ’E wentta sleep.”
“Gave him some bia?” She set the adze down and looked up at Daggad incredulously. “He cannot be older than … How many monsoons has he?”
“Would you rather I tied ’im to the other side of the tree?” Daggad slid the blocks under the bed. They squealed like rusty hinges. Imeris winced. “’E was tired anyway.”
“Oniwak will be angry with him.”
“There is no more room under the bed,” Daggad observed, fists on hips.
“Too noisy,” Imeris muttered. “Everything is too noisy. How can we get the others out of here tomorrow so we can build the gods-cursed trap?”
Daggad looked at her. He quirked an eyebrow.
“I ’ave an idea,” he said.
* * *
IN THE morning, Oniwak hollered, “Up, woman!” and pounded on the door.
Imeris rubbed the grit from her grainy eyes and propped herself up on one elbow in bed. Daggad, however, was awake and ready. Before the Captain could barge in and notice the long channels chipped out of the wall to either side of the entry, the hulking man from Gannak went out to meet him.
Stark naked.
“Do not wake ’er,” Daggad boomed.
Silence. Perhaps Oniwak was taken aback.
“You slaves behave like rutting animals,” he said at last. “There is no time to waste. I have a message from Odelland. The creature has been seen there by Odel’s emergent.”
Daggad had sent that message himself at the crack of dawn. Imeris could foggily remember him sneaking back to the room with the lantern and enunciating Oniwak’s name in a desperate whisper.
Imeris wondered if Daggad had his hands behind his back, hiding the charcoal smudges on his fingers.
“You go on ahead,” he said. “We can follow after you.”
“Don’t bother! We four can travel to Odelland and back before nightfall. If we find and slay the creature, the better for this one who walks in the grace of Airak and the worse for you! You are both disgraces to the great name of Hunter. I should have your names removed from the monument tree!”
When Daggad came back into the room, Imeris expected to see a smirk on his face. Instead, he seemed lost in doubt, sitting absentmindedly on the bed where she lay. The great sword rested on the sheet alongside her, parallel to her body.
“Your plan worked,” she whispered encouragingly.
“What if they find it?” Daggad stared out the window.
“They will not.”
“But you said the creature might go to Odelland. What if they kill it?”
“Then I will help you to escape from the House of Epatut,” Imeris promised. “Now I think you should put your clothes back on.”
“Am I distractin’ you?” There was the smirk. Imeris sighed.
“As soon as the others have gone, find the smith and redeem the receipt. After you get back you can—” Daggad stuck his tongue out at her, false childishness, and she was struck again by the odd familiarity of the sigil there. “Show me your slave-marking. Hold your tongue out like that.”
She sat up, held his face between her hands and frowned at the interwoven wheel, cocoon, and loom burned into his tongue.
“Theen enuth?” he asked with his tongue between his teeth.
“This is not possible,” Imeris murmured. “My sister Ylly had a silk blanket. A baby blanket. The edge was patterned like that.”
Her stomach swooped. There was only one explanation. The baby blanket so jealously guarded by Ylly and later turned into a dress for her had not been Ylly’s at all.
It was mine.
My blanket.
A silk blanket from the House of Epatut.
She felt like she was falling. There was no up. There was no down. She tried to push Daggad away. He was swinging her around and around; he must be. But she couldn’t make him stop and eventually the spinning room slowed down and stopped.
“She dropped you off the edge of the silk market, eh?” Daggad said sympathetically.
Imeris hunched over the edge of the bed and retched violently.
It was the same spot where Ibbin had evacuated his gut the night before.