Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(23)

Gold combs and charmed anklets covered the dresser with its opal-studded silver mirror, but every item was stamped with the toucan crest of the king of Odelland, and soldiers would be summoned if she offered any such thing at a Temple. The goblets and pitcher on the mantel were the same. Even the iron pokers by the smoke-producing braziers were marked with the symbols.

Her attention was caught by railings that had been plugged into place by the bed and by the armchairs. She threw back the veil surrounding the squat, where the covered hole for piss and shit to fall through had a sort of harness in place, suitable for an old woman whose knees wouldn’t hold her weight while she squatted.

The princess was old. Much older than Ylly’s mother had been at the time of her demise, Unar would wager. It made her blood boil. Without magic, this room would probably smell of urine, too. The beautiful bed no longer seemed a girl’s flight of fancy, but a hag’s need for the bed to rise in order to roll herself out of it.

Unar had wasted too much time. The decrepit princess could retire to her apartment any moment. Unar expanded her tenuous ability as far as she could, her nostrils filling with the smell of sweet-sour quandong fruit, bitter kernel and clean, fresh crushed leaf, in the hope she’d be warned of women approaching.

Instead, something hidden in the floor under a silk carpet tickled her mind.

Unar threw herself to the floor. She peeled back the carpet. A hexagon of bloodwood pulled out of place like a puzzle piece. Inside a small, revealed hollow lay bundles of something black, cool and supple to touch, but difficult to see; as Unar lifted the edge of the cloth, it rippled to brown, taking on the colour of her hand.

Chimera skin. It changed colour, like a chameleon’s, even after the animal’s death. There was something inside. Bits of old bones. She shook them out of the cloth.

Then Unar stuffed the cloth into the front of her jacket, making a false paunch above her belt, before putting the piece of bloodwood back in place and smoothing out the carpet. She leaped for the window, but the smoke solidified, throwing her roughly back.

Stunned, Unar waited for her dizziness to clear. She tried to make sense of the swirl of sound that had thickened around her.

You are a thief, the window had accused her.

It was something similar to the wards around the Garden.

Unar climbed to her feet. She went to the window and laid her fingers tentatively on the sill. The smoke buzzed angrily.

“I’m no thief,” Unar told it softly, trying to link her mind to it the way she linked her mind to the Garden. “The five pieces of cloth I’ve taken are payment for the life of a murdered woman.”

It is too much, the window said. That cloth can buy a thousand slaves.

“But never replace a specific one who has fallen. Slaves aren’t all the same! You could buy a thousand slaves and yet not find another like her. Read my thoughts. See my truth. I’m taking this cloth to protect a great-grandchild that the murdered woman is not alive to protect. I am no thief!”

You are no thief, the smoke conceded, parting.

Unar climbed through the window, triumphant, to begin her descent of the swaying, bird’s nest castle.





THIRTEEN

UNAR YAWNED as Ylly tried to wake her.

“Warmed One,” the older woman said urgently, “they’ve come to question you.”

Unar swayed in her hammock, resenting Ylly’s insistent hands almost as much as she resented the sunlight shafting through the loquat trees onto her upturned face.

“Who? Who has come to question me?”

“Soldiers from Odelland. They’ve been sent to every Temple in Canopy. They say something was stolen from the king that only a Servant of a deity could have stolen. Warmed One, what have you done?”

Unar’s mood changed from sullen to satisfied at once. She sat up in her hammock, gripped the edges of it, and gave a smug little laugh.

“Every Temple in Canopy? That king thinks he’s a cockerel, but he’s a dumpy, featherless duckling, and I’m the one who cooked him.”

Ylly’s eyes went wide and her hands covered her mouth. They were alone. In the Garden, her beloved Garden, with her magic renewed, Unar was capable of plotting the position of every man and woman within the walls. She sensed clusters of men by the Gate, heavy on the soil and the underlying tallowwood. Elsewhere, men and women who had to be Servants massed slightly apart from the younger demographic of the other Gardeners. Unar smelled the vitriol in one of the robes that brushed the earth; that one was Oos. They were attended by almost all of the slaves, who were also mostly young-smelling and trod lightly but held no magic, at the moat’s shallow ford by the Temple doors.

“I went to Odel’s emergent,” Unar said. “I did what you asked.”

Ylly lowered her hands.

“My grandchild is safe?”

Unar took her hands and squeezed them.

“Your grandchild is so safe that the Servants combined couldn’t cast her down if they tried. I paid for her safety with five lengths of chimera skin cloth.”

Unar laughed again, remembering, and let Ylly go.

“How did you take such riches without the king seeing you?”

“I didn’t take the cloth from the king. I took it from the stupid old princess who murdered your mother. Her window still faces the setting sun. You serve the Garden now. I would have it that the Garden serves you.”