Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(108)

I’ll find one more goddess, Unar had said. Then I’m done.

She found that child, the child that would be Ilan, goddess of justice, in a prison cell in the queen’s palace in Ilanland. The child’s mother, Ear, despite being heavily pregnant, had been arrested for insulting the royal heir, and had given birth that night in her cell.

I would have protected my baby anyway, goddess or no, Ear said earnestly. I would have bought Odel’s protection if I’d had to lie with the jailer to earn it.

You don’t have to, Unar had said. Aurilon, can’t you—?

I can, Aurilon sighed, and filled Ear’s cupped hands with coins of silver and gold. This is for you. We had it from the Servants of Ilan, when we brought them the body of their drowned goddess. The Servants are no longer starving themselves because they cannot find the one they serve. Call on me in Odel’s Temple if you need more. You are free to go.

Unar rolled up her sleeves and carefully set her spines in the side of the tallowwood tree.

She, too, was finally free to go.

The much-reduced river sang to one side of her, and the autumn wind made the forest moan. Gods died and returned to life, but Unar was seventeen years old, significantly older than the girl child who would be Audblayin. Unar would die before Audblayin was reborn a man. When Unar was born again, unlike Audblayin, she wouldn’t remember anything of her past lives.

With the finding of the last deity, she was set adrift. How strange to feel, while not performing Understorian magic, less solid than the trees that turned the wind. To have felt for so long that she was a tool constructed for a single purpose, only to discover she was as fit for being a Bodyguard as a frog was fit for flying. But there was still the question.

She would have an answer.

The opening she’d made into the brothers’ home was now neatly fitted with a door. It opened when she pushed against it, and she walked down the stairs into light and warmth. The new addition had been modified to accommodate candle niches. A second fireplace had been built in the enlarged storeroom-turned-permanent-bedroom. Unar smiled at the candles. The bear that had died so that its fat could produce that smoky, flickering light; the grasses whose twisted fibres had made the wick and the trees, not pillars of the world as the emergents were, but smaller, unnoticed in the dark, that had provided the wood for fuel for the hunters’ dwelling; those transient things were her kin, unmourned and unremembered, interchangeable as individual breaths.

“You are back,” Hasbabsah said, sounding surprised and pleased, a knitted cap pulled down over her almost-bald head. She looked up from the rope jig with its metal weights, where she and Oos formed uniform lengths that must have pleased even Esse the perfectionist.

“I’m back,” Unar agreed. “How is Sawas settling in?”

Hasbabsah grunted.

“She will take some more time to adjust. You kept your word. You have done what you promised to do in the Garden and more. You do not need to worry about Sawas anymore.”

I have not done what I promised, Unar thought, because the Garden has not kept its promise to me, to raise me into the sun.

But the Garden hadn’t made that promise. Unar didn’t know why she’d promised herself something that could never come true. Nobody else had stood over her, insisting that she take what she deserved; it had been her own inner voice, all along, and she had trusted it. But why not? Who else in the world was trustworthy?

“Where’s Esse?” she asked. “I must make more rooms.”

“He is sleeping,” Oos said. “He has been making more defences around the tree, further down. He said that those men should never have reached as high as they did.”

Unar walked through the brothers’ house. She smiled at faces that smiled at her, but didn’t speak to any of them. Ylly and Issi fought over a floppy black hat that had golden imitation chimera’s eyes sewn onto the sides of it. Sawas sat in Bernreb’s lap, picking bones from her plate of roasted fish.

The brothers’ bedroom was cramped. Unar pushed back the curtain to enter, and tried to straighten once inside, but her head brushed the curve of the spherical ceiling, and the three free-standing bunks in the centre of the room looked like a stack of rough-cut, storm-felled debris. Esse slept on the top, covered in an itchy-looking fur.

Unar sang the godsong to herself as she reshaped the bed into a thing of elegance and added space, waking up the last still-living cells at the timber’s rim. They’d been part of a sweet-fruit pine tree, once. The tallowwood walls of the room were easier to flex and widen. The great tree told her which parts of itself were safe to hollow and which must remain sound, which carried the sap and which carried the incredible burden of the weight of the top of the tree.

Before she had finished, she saw Esse’s grey eyes, open and watching her. He didn’t move a muscle of his long body.

“I’m sorry for disturbing you, Esse,” she said. “But there’s one more favour I need from you. Not monsoon-right, this time, but a right to sleep here, in the new part of this room, for fourteen or fifteen monsoons, or however much time passes before the younger Ylly feels in her bones it’s time to wake me.”

“Is this Canopian double-speak?” Esse asked. “Is it death that you want?”

“Not yet,” Unar answered. “I must deliver the goddess Audblayin to the Garden first. Help me to get up there, please.”