Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(16)

Aoun looked incensed.

“Climb over the Gate, like a raiding Understorian? Like a thief seeking tributes? Have you done it before?”

“Maybe.”

“Oh, Unar.” His mouth flattened. “This explains why you weren’t chosen. You haven’t given your heart to this goddess.”

“He will be a god this time,” Unar retorted, stung. “You think you’ll be his Bodyguard, Aoun, but you won’t. That’s not why I wasn’t chosen. It’s because—”

Aoun didn’t argue; he pushed her through the Gate. Without so much as putting a hand to it, his magic giving him the strength of ten ordinary men, he closed it in her face.





EIGHT

THE PATHS of the city followed the flat tops of interwoven branches.

Unar trotted along with her head down, muttering Ylly’s directions under her breath to keep from forgetting them. She wore a green, sewn-leaf jacket over dark red tunic and green trousers that identified her as a Gardener, as she had when she’d trespassed into Understorey, but it would only give her protected status within the boundaries of Audblayinland, her own goddess’s rainforest niche.

The directions took her along the lower roads where stricken, slaves, and out-of-nichers tended to walk. Citizens and internoders urinating and defecating off the edges of the higher paths were a hazard of the lower roads, but the only likely hazard for Unar. Robbers had no incentive to accost the poor, and slaves couldn’t be sold without birth or capture carvings that matched the magically embedded sigils on their tongues.

Lower roads were safer, even at night. Even without the torches set at intervals along the high roads and kept bright by the cold fire of Airak, God of Lightning.

“Cross the border of Audblayinland at the Falling Fig,” Unar repeated again in a whisper. The Falling Fig wasn’t actually falling, but it formed a great crossroads, with the widest spread of any of the great trees. Its root-curtains fell like waterfalls towards Floor in five different, intersecting niches.

There was no rain this time but no moonlight, either. By touch, Unar climbed a ladder woven from lianas, emerging through maidenhair ferns and orchids onto a walkway that led to a small slave’s gate. It was little more than a hole bored through one of the fig’s many trunks, with a small plate over the archway to indicate she was passing into Ehkisland.

She couldn’t read it. Despite Teacher Eann’s good intentions, she’d never learned. But her sense of direction was good, and she’d been into Ehkisland quite recently, albeit by a higher and grander gate. Her awareness of the Garden diminished as she crossed. She startled a crowded stricken family that had built a cooking fire in the shelter of the Gate, not expecting anybody to pass at this hour.

“The snake path, to Odelland?” Unar asked the woman, who stood gawping, holding two birds that she’d charred in their feathers.

The woman told her the way, the same way told by Ylly, and Unar paid her in dried monkey meat she’d been given for her supper.

“Ehkis bless you,” the woman said.

“And you,” Unar said, squirming a little. She should have named Audblayin. Maybe Aoun was right, and she hadn’t given her heart to her master. Then she heard the nyaaa! of a newborn baby and froze where she was on the branch. “You have a little one?”

“He’s my grandson. Born this morning. His mother sleeps.”

Unar stared at the baby’s blotchy, puckered face as it turned towards the fire in what must have been his older sister’s arms. Unar had been an older sister like that. She’d squeezed little Isin so tightly.

“What’s his name? I’m going to Odel’s emergent. I’ll pay tribute for him.”

The girl that held the baby told Unar his name.

“Don’t let him fall,” Unar said.

“I won’t,” the girl said fiercely.

“He might be a god.”

The woman who had given directions squawked a laugh.

“A god? Don’t be putting ideas in her head. Gods don’t walk among the stricken.”

Unar took one last look at the baby. It was too early. She couldn’t search for him yet.

The wind was cold, and the snake path beckoned.





NINE

ODEL’S EMERGENT was a sweet-fruit pine.

It was a softwood, and Unar climbed the spiraling plank stairs that had been hammered easily into the upper trunk of the great tree. The Temple, shaped like a yellow carp standing on its nose, fluked tail to the sky, and eyes the open doors through which the worshippers walked, was abandoned at this hour.

Inside, on a raised platform, the embers of a bonfire died in a bronze dish that floated in a shallow pool. Around it, food tributes had been set carefully, some on priceless platters, others on fresh-picked leaves.

Unar unwrapped her barely touched seed porridge and put it beside the other tributes, bowing her head and uttering the name of the boy she had met along the way. Then she went looking for the chimera skin. Ylly said it was outside The Temple proper, in a tunnel that went through the heart of the tree and emerged at Odel’s Test. Long ago, the wealthy had boasted of their patronage by throwing their children off the balcony there and watching them float in a bubble of Odel’s protection.

The practice was frowned on in Unar’s time, but the tunnel remained nearby. Unar had brought her machete, ropes, and bore-knife, in case branches had broken or passageways had been strangled by vines in the years since Ylly’s visit. She climbed into the undamaged crown of the tree until she had a good view of the Temple surroundings, and sat cross-legged on a branch to look and to think. She was tired, physically and mentally, but the lure of the chimera hadn’t faded.