IMERIS BLINKED. She looked at his belly, then back at his face.
“What about permission to fornicate?” she asked, touching her mouth, remembering the kiss of slavery and the kiss of freedom he had given her.
“She didn’t give permission for that, either.” Anahah blinked, too, focusing on Imeris once again. “Adepts aren’t allowed to touch one another. That’s true of all Servants of goddesses and gods. It not only keeps them focused, but it keeps them from angling to capture deities’ or Servants’ souls for their unborn children.” He lowered his lashes. “If our power was hereditary, we would be worse than royals. I never set out to entice anyone else to help me break that decree. Yet once I’d tried on the form of a chimera, I realised I could do it alone. Have a child. Love it. Raise it. Protect it, as I’d protected Orin for fifteen years, without a word of thanks. I was wrong, though. I failed to protect the boy hostage, Oul. I’ve made a mistake, but I can’t go back. Fate must take its course.”
Imeris reached towards his stomach, hesitated and caught his eye with her hand hovering over his skin. Only when he gave her a faint nod did she press her palm against the bulge in his abdomen.
Something rolled over underneath, and she drew her hand back, startled.
“It grows faster than a normal child,” Anahah said. “Orin must have found out about it a month before she said anything to me. That’s when the killing of my family and friends began. I heard about Oul from gossipy palace servants, and mourned, yet never suspected. When the goddess confronted me at last, she said she would feed it to the eagles. My child. My daughter.”
“A daughter?” Imeris abruptly saw aspects of Youngest-Father in Anahah. Except that Anahah was not expecting another to watch his child while he retained the freedom to fly. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.” Anahah’s mouth twisted wryly. “I am both mother and father to this child. My daughter is a pulled-apart and reassembled version of me, the fruit of a self-pollinating tree. I fled Orinland to save her. I visited, in secret, the workshop of a clockmaker I’d heard malicious rumours about.”
“In Eshland,” Imeris said, nodding. It was all making sense.
“Yes. At first I thought I’d simply kill Orin and trap her soul forever.” Anahah closed one fist as though he held the goddess’s essence trapped there. “That way she’d be helpless to harm my child. To Floor with the needs of the forest and its people. I didn’t tell the clockmaker what I wanted the soul trap for, though, and when I returned with payment, she revealed that a deity’s soul could not be contained by a trap for very long. She said that Orin, of all deities, would be far too powerful! I realised my only chance would be to take that temporarily trapped spirit to some distant tree-branch, give birth there, open the trap, and ensure that Orin’s soul entered my daughter’s body.”
“The sort of crazed grab for power that the decrees, the Bodyguards, and the Temple spells upon the adepts, are supposed to prevent,” Imeris said with a snort of laughter.
Anahah opened his hand sadly, as though releasing some part of a sweet dream.
“It’s no use,” he said. “I didn’t know that carrying a child would be so draining. In this state, I’ve no chance of getting close to Orin. Even if you Hunters kill the creature before my daughter is born, she’ll never be safe.”
“You could always let her fall,” Imeris said lightly. “There are worse fates than being raised in Understorey. You can fly. We can, too.”
“When I first saw you, I thought you were here on a raid.” His face creased in sympathy. “You don’t have a peaceful life, Imeris. You aren’t safe.”
“Nobody is safe,” she said. “And I will have a peaceful life. When my duty is done. When the sorceress is gone. When Loftfol and I, and Gannak and my fathers, are reconciled.”
Wind fluttered the foliage. In the dappled light, green on green, Anahah looked like a reflection in a pond. Like she could put her hand right through him if she reached for him again.
“You’d better go and tell your friends,” he said, “that Orin’s creature is coming.” Imeris shifted her weight from her knees to the soles of her feet. “And listen, Imeris. I can’t be the bait. I don’t think I can transform anymore without harming the child. You must be the bait. Indeed, you have no choice, because the swords that I made for you from the tusks of the creature, whenever they appear above the barrier, will draw it more powerfully than even I ever could.”
“You did not warn us of that fact before,” Imeris said, frozen in her crouch.
“You were headed below the barrier.”
“We had to come up periodically to keep our auras from fading,” she cried. “We could have been ambushed or killed. What else have you not told us about them?”
Anahah lifted his chin. The shadow of a beard lay along his jaw, and his irises glittered the darker shade of green.
“When you fight the creature,” he said. “When it touches you. Ordinarily, you would have mere moments before transforming. Before becoming part of it. Holding the sword will give you resistance. More time to do what you must do. But beware the sword’s lure as you hold it. Orin’s wildness is in it. You must think only kind thoughts towards your fellow humans when you carry it, or find yourself compelled to slaughter them. What I told you about the sword being unable to harm the creature is true, so you will need to kill it with some other weapon in your other hand.”
Not, Imeris thought angrily, such a great gift after all.
“Are you not of the wild, Anahah?” she asked. “You gave me a sword that cannot harm the creature, but neither can it be turned against you. You always said you would not arm me against you. In case we fought against each other one day.”
Anahah touched his abdomen.
“The eagle that kills the monkey’s child,” he said, “is as of the wild as the eagle nurturing the eaglet in the eyrie.”
That was a thing Youngest-Father could easily have said.
“You have not been as open with me as I imagined,” Imeris said.
“I am open.” His tone entreated. “To you, I am. That’s it. I’ve told you everything.”
“Which animal, then,” Imeris countered, “do I resemble in battle?”
“You fight like Imeris,” he said softly. “I’ve never seen another, animal or human, who adapts as many techniques that should be contradictory into their fighting style as you. That hunter’s trick with the mosquitoes, to locate a hidden sentry by his exhalation, could not be further from the fish-hips reversal made famous by the Fighting Slave of Scenting. You threw a short bolas by a wide, trunk-angled, underarm cast favoured by bee catchers in Irofland, but you switched knife hands like a net wrestler from Nessa.”
Imeris was taken off guard. She responded to the last thing he had said.
“Have you been to Nessa?”
“No.”
“Why will you not go to live in Understorey?”
The intensity of his gaze, the set of his jaw, the curl of his elbow around the child he carried; she half knew his answer before he spoke.
“Because you can’t go there. Loftfol will hunt you forever, the same way that Orin will hunt me forever. Here, though, even if I was unable to transform, you could be a Bodyguard to my child the likes of which Canopy has never seen—”
“No!” Imeris wanted to slap him silly. She could not be a Bodyguard, not to Audblayin, not to Anahah’s child, not to anyone else. She had to find Kirrik. She had to kill Kirrik. If the creature didn’t kill her first. “When Canopy sees me, when it sees these”—she extruded the spines in both forearms—“it sees a slave, Anahah.”
“You will change their minds! It will be as you hoped aloud just now. A great reconciliation, only it will be Canopian instead of Understorian. You will win their hearts and make peace between the two sides of the barrier.” Anahah framed an oval with his hands, inviting her to imagine with him the section of the monument tree where her likeness would rise above the lake. “The victorious Hunter, a flesh-and-blood mortal without the merest magical crutch, who saved the city from the mad goddess’s fury!”
For an instant, she saw it. Her noble profile. The bow in her hands and the outline of spines curving down from her shins. She glimpsed herself as Anahah saw her, and it was wonderful and terrible. Who would not love that person, the person that Anahah saw?
How could she not love Anahah, for seeing it?
No student of Loftfol had been able to see her as more than one thing at a time. She had been either weapon or breeder to them with no possible resolution of the two. Even her mothers and fathers had assumed she would have to make a choice, one path or the other. Mother or fighter. Understorian or Canopian.
Imeris convulsed silently with the realisation that the branch road leading to a future with a flowerfowl farm and few visitors now led, for her, to Anahah and a small green child.
“No,” she said again.
Anahah reached for her face, but Imeris brought her extended spines between them. The instinct shocked her, but she thought that if he touched her, she would agree with whatever he said.
Now that she knew that she loved him, any physical interaction would be overwhelming; it would be painful in its intensity, and she would not allow it.
He took it for rejection. His expression turned crestfallen. What must he be thinking? How did he imagine that she was seeing him? Not a warrior emblazoned on a wooden wall, but something repulsive, weak, stunted, and unnatural? But she could not find the words to tell him that he was a wonder, an extraordinary counterbalance to Orin’s far uglier creations.
“I have to kill the sorceress,” she said. “I should have killed her already.”
“If you had killed her that day, you would be battling me now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Battling her in me, is what I mean,” Anahah answered, his gaze steady, his self-possession recovered, and Imeris stared at him uncomprehendingly for a moment until his earlier words about the mosquitoes, throwing her weighted cords, and switching knife hands came back to haunt her. Those motions, drawn from the Disciplines of Balance, the Knife, and Administering Poison, were not ones she had used in her fight against Orin’s creature.
Anahah had seen her fight the sentry. He had been on Ulellin’s emergent the day that Oldest-Father had died.
What he meant was, if Imeris had succeeded in destroying Nirrin’s body, Kirrik would simply have taken over Anahah’s body, gaining his gift with beasts and birds in place of Nirrin’s gifts.
“What were you doing there?” Imeris cried.
“Hiding from the monster in the foliage, of course. You know I’ve spent most of my time confined to this tree since Orin turned on me. Now you’re acting surprised that the sorceress’s activity, weaving a house out of leaves and snakes, drew my attention?”
“You could have—”
“What? What could I have done? I was below the barrier. I had no power. Not even my claws. I had a rope. I had my hiding place in the leaves. You didn’t find me because I didn’t smell like that sentry smelled or breathe the way he breathed.”
She had no answer for him. Bit her lip. Tried to control the rush of anger.
Abruptly turning her back, she whisked away. Through the windowleaves. Found the hole that led into the Temple.
There, Daggad, Leaper, and Sorros had organised themselves into a production line, hammering the copper into thin sheets, cutting it into lengths, and drawing it through the dies.
Imeris breathed deeply and slowly. She waited until the flare of fury had died.
“We have a problem,” she said.
Leaper looked up. He had mango juice and orange fibres stuck to his face. His hands were ruddy with rust from an iron shield he was using as an anvil. All of his fancy airs had fallen by the wayside. He looked like he’d never left Oldest-Father’s workshop.
“The creature’s coming now,” he guessed cheerily. “The goddess Ulellin is coming as well. The goddess Orin is outside at the head of a horde of angry beasts. Aforis is coming to drag me back to Airakland. The barrier is down, Loftfol is attacking, and—”
“Will you stop?” Imeris folded her arms, scowling. “The first one that you said, and you do not need to sound so excited.”
“’Ow long?” Sorros asked, halting with both hands wrapped around a piece of wire. It protruded from a die hung between two of the overhead vines that formed the funnel.
“We have until sunset, according to Anahah,” Imeris said.
“So we’ve got six hours, maybe less, before the monster sticks its ugly head in here,” Leaper said. He wiped his sticky, mango-spattered forehead with the back of his forearm. “That’s not long enough. We’ll have to abandon this design for the trap and think up some other plan.”
“I wish Oldest-Father were here,” Imeris said, thinking, Oldest-Father would be here, if not for Anahah watching and doing nothing!
Leaper laughed.
“But the old man is here.” He tapped his temple with one rusty finger. Then he pointed it at Imeris. “Look at you. Look at me. We’ve brought him here. His strategies. His ways of thinking. You wouldn’t catch Middle-Father building a trap, not if there were some direct way to wrestle the monster. And Youngest-Father would give it a smug little smile right before flying past its face and away.”
“There is nowhere to fly to.”
“I’m not actually suggesting flight.”
“Maybe wrestling,” Daggad said, one eyebrow raised, fists on hips.
“What do you mean?” Imeris asked.
Daggad shrugged. He gestured around at the setup for wire making.
“Suppose Anahah spoke truth and we cannot finish enough wire ta replace all the vines of the Temple. Maybe we do not need to. One good wire, wrapped many times around the creature’s body to encompass all the different parts of it, might carry the lightnin’ in a satisfactory way.” He glanced at Leaper.
“Sure,” Leaper said. “But who’s going to volunteer to wrestle the monster and tie it into a neat package with a bow on top? Even if the volunteer doesn’t get bitten in half or shredded to pieces, didn’t you say, Daggad, that you started to turn into the thing as soon as you touched it?”
“Should I keep makin’ the wire?” Sorros asked simply as the three others looked helplessly at one another.
“If you would, Sorros, please,” Imeris said. She squared her shoulders. Tossed her head. Middle-Father is my father, too. Why should I not bring him with me to the battle? “I have studied weighted ropes and wire strangulation under Yolmoloy the Scentingim.” Anahah said holding the sword would give me the ability to resist. “I have an idea of how the wire may be secured to the beast’s body.”
But I wish I still had Youngest-Father’s chimera wings.
Just in case.
Anahah.
You were the Bodyguard of Orin. You could have done something.