Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(22)
“I am a seedpod,” she whispered to the wards. “A seedpod borne on the wind.”
The wards allowed her to pass, since she carried the seeds inside of her that all young women carried, and she dropped down on the other side, triumphant. She didn’t need Aoun and his key. With her magic regrown, the Garden knew her. The Garden was part of her.
The Garden is mine.
She’d eaten supper to give her stamina for the journey, but food was not what she had in mind for the tribute that would keep baby Ylly safe. The season had changed. The three-month dry-season winter inexorably followed the short, one-month autumn. Slaves were allowed to lie in with their newborns for a season, but now was the time when Sawas, the baby’s mother, would be required to return to work. Baby Ylly would be learning to move, struggle, escape from the confines of cradles and tree trunk hollows.
The other baby, Imeris, who had fallen in the autumn, the one that Unar had futilely searched for with her goddess-given senses, was all but forgotten by the searchers once keen to claim the reward. Wife-of-Epatut had come to the Temple to seek enhanced fertility and the conception of a new child.
Unar, despite being excluded from the lessons of the Servants, through her friendship with the elder Ylly now had access to slaves’ gossip. It was said that Wife-of-Epatut had dropped her daughter at the silk market. The beewife who had bumped her was imprisoned at the palace of the king of Ehkisland.
Unar sought a different palace tonight. The story of Ylly and the princess of Odelland haunted her. Should such wickedness go unpunished? Perhaps an Understorian could be ignored by the gods and goddesses of Canopy. Perhaps the fate of an enemy’s descendent was not the concern of higher powers. But the elder Ylly was Unar’s friend now.
Ylly was hers to protect, as she would one day protect Audblayin.
To protect or to avenge.
Canopy’s roads were crowded, both high and low. The fruit harvest had peaked and the season of nuts and seeds was waning. Though it was past sunset, slaves and citizens alike carried baskets brimming with macadamias or windgrass grain, green oilseeds and orange oilseeds, some for eating and some for burning, some for leaching of their toxins to make them edible and others for pounding into sealant or adhesive. Several hours passed before Unar reached the crossroads of the Falling Fig, and several more before she’d squeezed through the press of bodies along the snake path and found her way into Odelland.
It wasn’t Odel’s emergent, the sweet-fruit pine, which Unar sought first, this time.
She went to the palace of the king of Odelland, and stared for a long while at the parapets from which Ylly’s mother had been pushed.
The palace, built in a blue quandong tree, swayed in the stiff winds like a giant bird’s nest, polished timber after polished timber placed in a seemingly unstable fashion. Though the breeze bent the boughs that the building rested on, not a plank fell out of place. Hidden dovetails and dowels held snowy sweet-fruit pine branches snugged tight to scarlet bloodwood. The steep roofs of fresh, grey windgrass thatch, highly valued as insect-repellent bedding and for driving the foul flavour from cooked monkey meat, not only trumpeted the king’s wealth but completed the image of Odelland royalty as colourful toucans nesting where fruit would fall on them like rain.
Yet they had killed a woman for the crime of growing old. Perhaps the death god, Atwith, approved of such things, but Unar didn’t, and Atwith was not her god.
Unar sat where the trunk of the adjacent floodgum obscured her from the guards who watched from crooked towers at the corners of the ever-swaying structure. Ostensibly kicking her sandalled feet out in a pose of relaxation, she felt for defects in the path, and in a moment when all human traffic was moving away from her, she swung herself underneath it, hanging like a sloth from ropes of torn floodgum bark.
Hand over hand, wary of the scorpions, biting ants, and tarantulas that called the cracks and bark curls home, Unar made her way to the place where floodgum branch met quandong, directly below the palace.
There, she began to scale the walls in darkness. Nothing could have been easier. The untrimmed ends of the artfully stacked timbers would have given purchase to a child. Soon, she was so high that not even the light from lamp-carrying merchants below could show her the contrast of her fingernails against the fine finish of the multicoloured woods.
Her magic was faded this far from the Garden, but it was still strong enough to inform Unar whether there were any women in the princess’s apartments before she climbed into them. A screen of fragrant smoke filled the window, to keep the insects out, and Unar felt a beetle abandon the back of her jacket in a panic as she passed through the smoke. She had known these west-facing rooms would be the princess’s, but she hadn’t known how a royal daughter would sleep: on a pink, orchid-shaped mattress floating above a lily-pad-shaped platform of pale bone.
How had the royal family traded for such a thing from Odel? Unar hadn’t realised the gentle god owned any powers besides keeping children from falling. Then again, Audblayin could make sky-coral and her Bodyguard float; why not all the goddesses and gods? Unar tried to examine the mattress with her magical senses, but her link to the distant Garden was too strained. She couldn’t see the threads of power holding it in place, nor could she smell anything arcane.
The ostentatiousness of the bed and the sound of Ylly’s voice in her head made Unar want to burn it and its feather-filled pillows. That would make a fine smell, but she’d come for one thing—an object suitable for tribute to Odel, to keep Ylly’s granddaughter safe from falling—and she mustn’t become distracted. She must escape the palace without any alarms having been raised.