Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(18)

TEN

ONCE SHE returned to the Garden, Unar burrowed into her hammock.

She fell into a nightmare sleep of broken children being eaten by demons, a tiredness so deep that when morning came, she resisted being awakened. The new Gardeners carried her across the shallow part of the moat to the Temple. Some part of her was aware of entering the great egg’s shade.

She woke in a dim room with Oos’s cool hand on her forehead and the sensation of being fully refreshed.

“It worked,” Oos exclaimed in delight.

“Is this a dream?” Unar asked.

“You’re a fast learner, Oos,” a hooded old woman—Servant Eilif—said with satisfaction, ignoring Unar, before turning to leave the room. It was barely three paces across, with only a bed and a chair to furnish it. Bird droppings littered the sills of the three circular windows, which let in light but had no visible way to close them.

“Where are we?” Unar wanted to know.

“One of the treatment rooms,” Oos said. “Oh, Unar, I wanted to speak to you after the ceremony, but we couldn’t—”

“Treatment? For what? I’m not sick.”

“You were. One who walks in the grace of Audblayin cured you.” By that, of course, Oos meant herself.

“You cured her of tiredness,” said Aoun sombrely. He’d been sitting on the floor, below Unar’s line of sight. When he stood, his dark hair brushed the curving outer wall of the small room.

Unar’s heart fluttered. Aoun had been waiting for her to wake.

“Are you still angry, Unar?” Oos wrung her hands. “Are you so upset by not being selected that you haven’t slept since?”

“How did you do it?” Unar asked. “How did you cure my tiredness?”

“By opening channels in the mind with magic. It’s like opening channels in plants to help them draw water. Watch, I’ll show you—”

“No, you won’t,” Aoun said sternly.

“Will you punish her if she does?” Unar sat up sharply. “Will you throw her off the edge of the Garden like a slave too old to work?”

He hadn’t been waiting out of concern for her, then, but so he could berate her.

“Oos isn’t a slave. Disobedience here is punished by a draining of magic. Any two Servants can perform this upon a third. There’s no need for citizens to fall.”

Neither Oos nor Aoun had reacted with shock to the notion of throwing slaves to their deaths. Of course not.

“You’ve learned many things in just one day,” Unar observed, glaring at them in turn. “Many things that Gardeners aren’t permitted to know. You’ve changed. I don’t know you.”

“You know us,” Oos protested, and Unar pressed her momentary advantage.

“What’s this room for?” She waved her hands around at it. Here I am in the Temple at last, but not the way I wanted.

“The women who pay tribute, who come to have their fertility enhanced. They’re treated in the rooms.”

Worse. I’m in the room for noninitiates.

“Can I see where you sleep?” Unar sat up and swung her feet over the edge of the bed, struck by the fact her feet were clean. She was wearing a clean red robe. Who had changed her? Aoun? A thrill went through her before she realised it had to be Oos. The long sleeves had been taken in to fit Unar’s arms. Only a few quick stitches, but nobody else would have noticed or cared.

“I don’t—” Oos said breathlessly, darting a glance after the departed old woman, at the same time as Aoun rubbed his temple and said with exasperation, “No!”

A fantail flew into the room by the open door and departed by one of the round windows. Able to move freely where Unar was not.

“The women don’t mind the bird droppings?” she asked jealously.

“Birds are beloved of the goddess,” Oos said. She sat on the bed next to Unar and put her hand consolingly in the small of Unar’s back, as if Unar were a decrepit crone in need of support.

Unar knew about the beloved bloody birds. One day separated them, and Oos was already treating Unar like some empty-headed supplicant.

“Oh, great teacher!” Unar said. “Wiser than Eilif already!”

Oos’s chin jerked upwards.

“One who walks in the grace of Audblayin admits one’s nervousness about one’s ability to convey the desires of the goddess—”

“He’s a god, now,” Unar said, and Oos took her hand away as if burned.

“How can you know that?”

Oos and Aoun both stared at her as if she’d added her own shit to the neat piles of bird droppings.

“Trust me,” Unar said stubbornly. “I just know.”





ELEVEN

IN THE afternoon, Oos came out of the Temple to give the new Gardeners a lesson.

Unar would have gone to sleep early, but Aoun came to the loquat grove to tip her out of her hammock and tell her she was needed in the grass plot, that she must undo the blow she’d delivered to Oos’s confidence.

“I’m still recovering,” she answered, made hostile by guilt, sprawled on the ground and gazing up into his carob-brown irises, which gleamed under the pronounced shelf of his brow. Somehow, her hostility lessened. She didn’t want it to.