Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(12)

Some of the searchers, Unar realised, would die of old age before the new god or goddess was revealed.

In the meantime, the Servants who remained in the Temple would train the seven new ones to be raised. The new Servants would learn to perform everything from the subtlest hidden magics to the most blatant and most powerful. Many spells would be effective only within the Garden, but Unar yearned for mastery over them. She could already do things her parents could never have imagined.

The Bodyguard came to stand before her, his palm hovering over her heart.

“Your magic is weak,” he pronounced. “You will not serve.”

Unar’s eyes blazed. She bit her lip so hard that she tasted blood. Her magic was weak because of her efforts germinating seeds the previous night. Couldn’t he divine it? Didn’t he sense the sign that the goddess had given her, the first time it occurred to her to seek out the Garden, the seed of power that had sprouted in her chest and the smell of quince and wood fern that had surrounded her? She had to tell him.

She couldn’t tell him. The candidates must respect the silence of grief. The silence was enforced by the magic of the Servants; Unar could feel it. She suspected that even if she opened her mouth to object, the words wouldn’t pass.

“You will serve,” the Bodyguard told Oos.

The glance that Oos gave Unar was frightened, not pleased. Unar didn’t know why. Was Oos frightened of her? Of her anger? Or frightened for her? Frightened of what punishments might be meted out if Unar publicly rebelled?

“You will serve,” the Bodyguard told Aoun.

Unar had time to think about ways in which she might rebel. She might leap off the edge of the platform and die in a broken, bleeding mess on top of the corpse of the goddess. That would show them. What could they do about that?

They might catch her with magic and prevent her from falling. How could they not know her destiny? How could they not sense that she was greater than Oos, greater than Aoun, greater than all of them?

The ones who had been chosen separated themselves from the ones who would go back to the Garden. Oos and Aoun received white robes from the ex-Servants who would shortly pass through the Gate on their way to examine every cradle from beggar’s to queen’s. Unar couldn’t bear to raise her eyes to them. She stared down through the hole at the lifeless shape below.

Audblayin, hear me. She moved her lips without sound, invoking the birth god inaudibly. I’ll prove myself to you, I swear. I’ll show them. I’ll be the one to find you. I have an advantage! I already know you’re reborn a man.

A hand seized hers in a brushing of robes. It was Oos on her way back down the stairs, white-robed in the company of Servants. Her eyes locked with Unar’s, begging for forgiveness, and for patience.

Then she was gone.

Unar’s new conviction wavered as she realised she’d have to face the moat alone. She wondered if she might drown herself and be eaten by fish, polluting the purifying moat with her death. But the returning Gardeners were permitted to wade through the shallow part of the moat, the ford where women seeking enhanced fertility were allowed to cross and enter the Temple, and she couldn’t drown where she was able to stand.

She couldn’t drown. She had to show them. She would teach herself. She was like a seed.

Ambitious. Desperate. Single-minded. Strong.





SIX

UNAR SLEPT early and woke when it was still dark.

Unfamiliar shapes snored in the hammocks to either side of her. Newly admitted Gardeners. Unar hated them. Oos hadn’t snored. The fresh arrivals’ magic hadn’t been wakened yet. She could have put seeds in their nostrils and germinated the shoots into their brains.

Scowling, she climbed out of her hammock and left the loquat grove, only to find the pasty-faced slave woman, Ylly, beating clothes against a rock by the waterfall to clean them. Dirty water fell through empty air down to one of the pools. Tiny, chirping, insectivorous bats flew through the edges of it, snatching mouthfuls of water on the wing.

“I suppose this is the old woman’s work, too?”

Ylly shrank back, folding herself into an uncomfortable bow with her forehead in the moss.

“I’ll accept your punishment, Warmed One,” she said. “If not for me, you would have been chosen to serve today. When I saw you didn’t have enough magic to swim through the moat, I knew the disaster that would fall on you. The young gap-axe trees were knee-high in the morning!”

“Sit up. It wasn’t your fault. It was their fault. They’re stupid. How can stupid select for smart? Can a monkey choose a checkers player?”

Ylly sat back on her heels and risked the suggestion of a smile.

Unar remembered another woman sitting back on her heels in that spot.

Another hesitant smile.

The vizier’s daughter, beautiful and haughty, had clutched a wooden rod in her right hand and the rim of a wide, evil-smelling glass bowl in her left.

She’d also had a black eye that Unar knew was payback from the other Gardeners for some decision the king of Audblayinland had made two generations ago. Having received more than her share of beatings in life, Unar wouldn’t have cared about one black eye on a rich girl; only, she’d expected a vizier’s daughter to run to her superiors at the first sign of trouble, and this one had not. She’d taken the punishment with unusual equanimity.

Inside Oos’s bowl had been half a dozen handfuls of fresh, scarlet poinsettia leaves and something that had once resembled a lopsided, misshapen man’s tunic. The red tunics handed out to the Gardeners were sometimes made of leathery, stitched-together leaves, and sometimes the wispy, white wool inside seedpods. This one was the latter.