WIFE-OF-EPATUT’S HOUSE, the extravagant crown of a gobletfruit tree, was crammed full of—Imeris did not know how else to describe them—a great many things.
It was a market with no customers. A village’s worth of goods for just one family. There were rooms full of merchandise, bales of silk, piles of clothing, wooden worm-breeding assemblages, and components of giant weaving apparatus. But there were also things kept that others might have cast away, such as a stack of old, gilt-framed paintings of Ukak, Ulellin, and their prior incarnations, previously in pride of place over the dining table where Audblayin’s portrait now hung. There were stands of hung children’s clothes in a place with no children and preserved dead birds in lifelike positions that had no use besides decoration.
“Greetings, sister,” Imeris murmured to the portrait as she passed.
“This way,” Wife-of-Epatut said skittishly, leading her on through the wide, winding halls. There was so much silk on the walls, and so few windows, that Imeris began to feel as though she’d entered the enormous cocoon of her namesake.
Then they halted in an open doorway. This room, at least, had a skylight of translucent bone.
“My bedchamber,” the older woman said. “You were born here, Imeris.”
Imeris stared at the round, magenta-silk-draped, eucalyptus-smelling room that might have been familiar and beloved. At the knots and splinters in the ceiling that might have witnessed the secret hopes and fears of her childhood.
With her reflexes and quiet understanding of the wild, might she have rebelled against her merchant parents and grown to serve as a soldier of Audblayinland? Or, without enemies and threats to shape her, would she have enjoyed the company of silent silkworms and whispering looms as she hoped one day to enjoy the company of flowerfowl and sacks of feed?
“I thank you,” she said, “and my birth father Epatut for the gift of my life.”
“I kept your cradle,” Wife-of-Epatut said. “In the nursery. I’ll show you.”
The nursery was draped in orange and yellow, a perpetual sunrise. The cradle was fine work, woven of black wattle and set in a rocking frame of sweet-fruit pine. Imeris tried to imagine herself matched to a man like Epatut, absent all the day but useful for his wealth and connections. She looked again at her birth mother, who had been called Igish before marriage, who had tried her best but made an error of judgement when it came to the gods, and seen her whole life shaped by that mistake.
“What does the name Igish mean?” she asked.
“It’s a little bee-eating bird,” Wife-of-Epatut replied. “Rainbow-coloured. You don’t have them … down below?”
“We have dayhunters,” Imeris said grimly, touching the thin, worn furs in the cradle. The animal hides provided by her three fathers were the bedding of royal babes in Canopy. “We have the spotted swarm. We have chimeras.”
Wife-of-Epatut touched the wings folded along Imeris’s back.
“It’s almost as soft as silk,” she said slowly. “I couldn’t have given a skin like this to you. I wouldn’t have known where to find the warrior teachers you needed. Since seeing you in Airakland, Epi is a boy possessed. He never cared about weapons or training before. Now he’s discovered that soldiering skills are passed down through soldiering families, and my husband will never allow him to leave this family and be adopted by soldiers.”
“Do you wish me to stay and train him?” Imeris asked guardedly, ready to refuse.
“I wish you would stay and marry him.”
Imeris shook her head. She lifted her hand from the cradle, thinking again with a pang of Anahah. He had made mistakes too, but he understood her, and she thought she understood him. She had decided that she loved him, yet she did not yearn for him as the songs and sagas said that lovers yearned. Did she really love him? It seemed thrilling enough that she should brush against the secret thought of him, sometimes. If he was nearby, she’d only get angry at him again for letting Oldest-Father die, and besides, she would never see him again.
“I am banished by my sister, Audblayin, back to Understorey,” she said.
Maybe she would see him again, though. Audblayin said Imeris’s home was Understorey and was intent on sealing her away below the barrier, but what if attempts to make peace with Loftfol failed? Marrying Epi, returning to the House of Epatut, would be one way of defying the interfering deity. Marking her tongue with the slave-making token she still carried would be another.
“For what crime?” Wife-of-Epatut wanted to know.
“Every time she opens the barrier for me, Audblayinland is endangered.” And she is angry that I do not behave slavishly towards her. She blames me for not knowing who I am.
“I see.”
“Aside from Daggad and me, there are four Hunters who survived.” Despite how it had gone, Imeris was pleased to think of them returning to their own niches, gathering their gifts. “Oniwak, Eeriez, Owun, and Ibbin. If you wish me to write letters, to ask them to tutor your heir, ask now. I am headed back to Understorey. I will be permitted one final visit to Canopy next moon. If there is anything else you want from me, ask now.”
Wife-of-Epatut smiled.
“Don’t write letters,” she said. “But go back to Understorey knowing I’m proud of you. I’ll go to Atwith knowing I brought something of value into the world. And although I love Epi with all my heart, more than I’ve ever loved anything—aside from you, when I had you, before you fell—he is no warrior. He never will be. Safe journey, Imeris.”
“Thank you, Birth Mother,” Imeris said, briefly bowing her head.
Then her thoughts skittered ahead of her, to Gannak, wondering what secrets of the gods Daggad and Sorros had unlocked.
* * *
HOPING FOR unlocked secrets, Imeris found the forge unlocked, instead.
The air was bitter with the smell of spilled bia. It was the early hours before morning, and slow-roiling mist separated the great trees, hiding all but the brightest lanterns of the village nearby.
Imeris hesitated on the threshold as usual, hating the assault of memories that accompanied her presence in the forge.
“Sorros!” Imeris called, her voice echoing through the gloomy rooms, and heard Daggad’s sleepy chuckle from the toilet chamber. She found him sitting on the hole, drunk and bare-arsed.
“Musta fallen asleep,” he mumbled when she prodded him in the forehead.
“Where is Sorros?”
“In ’is ’ouse. With ’is wife. Could not watch them together. She was mine.”
“What about the writings, Daggad? Has he looked at them? Did you look at them together?”
“Not yet.”
Imeris dragged him off the toilet and back to his blankets before leaving the forge by the front door. She climbed high enough in the jackfruit tree to give her an easy glide to the ulmo where Sorros and Nin lived.
The house where she had visited Nirrin.
Night air whistled over her eyes and ears. She slapped hard against the wrinkled ulmo bark in the dark, efficiently setting her spines, folding her wings, dropping down to the platform outside the smith’s door.
The woman who opened the door was small and stout with a wrinkled neck and silver-blond hair braided in rings around her crown. She rubbed sleep out of her eyes and hid a yawn.
“I do not know you. Do you need moonflower? Wait.” She wrinkled her nose. Imeris knew she smelled of bark, sap, and eucalyptus oil. “How did you get ’ere?”
Imeris had only ever seen Nirrin and Vesev’s mother from a distance before. Now she saw Nirrin’s sky-blue eyes in Nin. Wondered at the deceptive, bland exterior, which hid a history with Daggad that ended in disaster, the loss of her two children, and life with a man who was famous for saying nothing.
“Many things have conspired to bring me here,” Imeris said. “My mother who dropped me. My fathers’ refusal to obey orders. The prejudice of the Loftfol school. The goddess Orin. The king of Airakland. Your husband, Sorros. Your son, Vesev, and your daughter, Nirrin. The sorceress Kirrik.”
“Imerissiremi,” Nin said, standing immediately back from the doorway so that Imeris could enter. Inside, the brightest light was the orange glow from three oil lanterns hung over a tallowwood table. The books and scrolls Daggad had brought were spread out. Sorros’s black-haired head was bent over them. “Will you take ti?”
Imeris shed her wings at the door.
“I can make the ti,” she said. The memory of her visit came back to her startlingly strongly. “I remember where you keep the honey.”
Nin tilted her head inquisitively, but when Imeris didn’t say anything else, she nodded and went to the table. She propped her straight arms against its edge and looked down at the rough notes her husband made with charcoal on pieces of wood.
“I fear,” Nin said, “that what you ask of us will cost a fortune in metal.”
“It is possible, then?” Imeris hesitated at the hanging tapestry which covered the opening to the kitchen. Excitement and hope expanded her chest. Anger as well. Odel had helped her where her own sister had refused. “You can do it? You can make a trap for Kirrik’s soul?”
“Yes,” Sorros said, looking up at her with purpose and determination she’d never seen on his bearded face before.
“I will make ti,” Imeris said again, and found herself seeming to step back in time, confronted with the cluttered but well-organised gourds and herb boxes, and the wooden shutters over the little square windows with their insectivorous-plant-smothered sills, which had so amazed her as a child, when her own family’s cooking area was little more than the open hearth and a series of spits.
She was a head taller now than she had been.
Nirrin’s ghost lingered.
We only have honey on feast days, she had said, and Imeris had quizzed her about feast days, which her fathers had hardly mentioned. Meat and fish were so abundant in the dwelling of the three hunters, she supposed every day was a feast compared to the way things were in Gannak.
Imeris made the tea, trying not to remember the ti-house, Breeze, where Oldest-Father had cooked his last fish.