Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(20)

Unar barely felt the magic that Oos had used. She was still exhausted by her effort on Ylly’s behalf and the slowed recovery caused by Audblayin’s death. Something tiny and bright did seem to unfold in Oos’s breast. Unar couldn’t tell if the smell of sweet rot and crushed jacaranda flower in her nostrils was from the magic or the actual tree, and she certainly couldn’t discern the qualities the seed had gained from either contributor to pollination.

The place inside her where her magic lived was hollow, and it ached.

Instead of dwelling on it, she remembered how her whole body had thrummed, like a hanging bridge in high wind, at the thought that Aoun might have undressed her.

Freedom from lust, she thought. It’s not working for me, but I don’t care. When I have the ear of the god, I’ll put a stop to that tradition. Or at least change it so that those within the Garden can be with one another. There’ll be no split loyalties then.

For Unar might have become newly, uncomfortably aware of Aoun, but worried about her or not, he was incapable of becoming similarly aware of her. Despite all his working parts, magic made him impotent, and although they were both have-nothings, only Unar was a wrongdoer; Aoun would never willingly weaken his bond with the Garden, never break any of its rules.

It’s in me to be law-abiding.

Wait.

He had broken a rule, after all. He’d let Unar out of the Garden. Why make an exception for her? There was no good reason.

Unless.

Abruptly, the emptiness where her magic should have been didn’t hurt quite so much. Suppressing a smile, Unar arranged her face into an expression of interest.

Have patience, Aoun had told her. Watch. Listen.

*

DAYS AND nights passed slowly while Unar waited for her magic to regrow.

Watch. Listen. If you say so, Gatekeeper Aoun.

By trial and error, she discovered a place directly across the moat where she could best position herself, hidden by painfully prickly pomegranate bushes. There, she could listen for snatches of conversation to float out through the windows of the treatment rooms at the side of the Temple and across the fish-filled water.

It wasn’t enough. She couldn’t hear anything worth hearing, couldn’t eavesdrop with magical ears on whispered incantations nor see, with her magical sight, how the patterns were performed.

She had to get closer.

While she waited for a new plan to come to her, she performed her usual duties. Unar weeded, harvested, planted seeds, separated clumps of colourful grasses, slept at midday when she should have been mingling with the other Gardeners at luncheon, and spent the hours after sundown helping Ylly with her ever-increasing workload. There was no Bodyguard to spy on her out the crescent windows anymore.

“You said you were named after your mother, Ylly.”

“Yes.”

“Where is your mother now?” Side by side at the same waterfall that had once made Oos want to pee, they scrubbed metal racks that had been used for roasting afterbirths, considered a prized offering to Audblayin and eaten only by Servants. Unar hoped they tasted terrible. She hoped Aoun had choked on his.

“The princess,” Ylly said, “my former mistress, pushed my mother over the palace wall when her bladder became weak and she began to smell of urine.”

“Did you see her fall?” Unar demanded, outraged, then worried she’d spoken too loudly and woken someone in the nearby grove. She paused, straightening with her fist full of soapleaf, and listened for the warning calls of roosting lorikeets. They could be disturbed by human weight shifting in hammocks, and Unar shooed them out her own hammock-trees for that reason.

Nothing. Her little living alarms stayed silent. Unar bent back over the racks. Ylly shuffled past her, setting the rinsed, dripping racks along the pavilion wall to dry. The water trickling from them watered the moss that grew beneath the wooden foundations.

“No, Warmed One. I was playing with kittens by the kitchen herbery. When I found out what had happened, I was so angry that I threw one of the kittens out of the princess’s window, into the setting sun. The kitten belonged to the princess. She ordered my legs to be broken. I was seven years old.”

Unar stopped scrubbing.

“Ylly. That’s terrible.”

Ylly held the last of the dirty racks before her, her body in the shadow of the pavilion. Unar couldn’t see her face, but her hands were steady. Her voice floated on the wind, disembodied.

“The king was furious that my promise of future beauty had been ruined. He had me taken to Eshland for my bones to be repaired. That’s why you can’t tell. There aren’t even any scars.”

“This king who was father to the princess who owned you. Was he the king of Audblayinland?”

“Of Odelland.” Ylly still didn’t come out from the shadow of the pavilion. Unar bent her head back over her task.

“You must have thanked all the goddesses and gods when you were sold away from that place.”

“I cursed them. I was heavy with the king’s child. They argued about whether to let me live. One of the viziers told them to cut me open and send the child-making parts inside of me as tribute to this Temple.”

Unar felt her gorge rise.

“The law doesn’t permit the torture of slaves!” She got up and slammed the rack under the waterfall to rinse it.

“Kings enforce the laws they choose, in their own niches.”