Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(26)

“No. We knelt together on the same day, Unar, but we aren’t alike in this. You know I came here to submit to their will. But you must learn greater discipline—”

“We aren’t alike? You showed me the key! That’s not allowed, is it?”

“I swore never to lock the Gate in front of anyone, except in the advent of Audblayin’s reincarnation, my own mortal wounding, or in defence of a Garden under imminent threat.”

“Is the Garden under imminent threat?”

“You’ve breached wards that have been impenetrable for four hundred years, Unar. I can’t imagine a true disciple of the Garden would ever do such a thing.”

She blinked back tears, wounded by his disapproval. Shouldn’t the fact that she had found a way through four-hundred-year-old defences prove to the Servants that she was fit to join them? Shouldn’t Aoun be awed? Full of praise instead of chastisement?

He was as stupid as the others. He could leap off the edge of the Garden for all she cared. Audblayin was reborn a man.

And I’m the only one fit to be his guardian.

“You want to go through?” she said at last. “You guessed that giving me the key would be the only way to convince me to show you. Very well. Your turn to pay attention.”

She could have done it gently. Instead, she lashed out with a whip-crack of power that tightened around his testicles, finding the seeds beneath his clothes, beneath his skin.

He carries new life, she said to the wards, while Aoun’s pupils dilated and his breathing quickened. Do you see them? Do you see that he is only a seed, blowing on the wind?

She gave him a push in the direction of the Gate. Aoun went awkwardly through the wards, bent at the waist, his legs wide apart, and groaned when he found himself on the other side.

Unar let go of him. Her anger died.

“Aoun,” she said, “I’m sorry.”

He tried to come back through at once, made inattentive by pain, and was repelled. Unar studied the structure of the seed at the centre of the lock, and saw instantly how to sow a piece of it inside Aoun, to grow it so that it filled him, so that the Gate would confuse his body with part of itself. She mentally traced the patterns with magic as they occurred to her, knowing from the rich earth smell in her nostrils that life-power was flowing through her and into them, half remembering the flowering that had brought her to the Garden four years ago, half making it her own, hardly noticing that what she did was visible to him, too.

When he came back through, he was still panting, open-mouthed. He stared at her the way he’d stared that morning when Servants and soldiers had been all around them hunting fruitlessly for the thief who served a deity.

“You could destroy everything,” he said. “All of it. You could unmake it. I could almost believe that you are the goddess reborn. Only banishment to Understorey could make you safe.”

“I am a Gardener,” Unar said stiffly. “We knelt together on the same day, Aoun.”

She was frightened into doing something else she hadn’t known she knew how to do, and that was to conceal her strength from him. She felt him probe for the leaves, branches, and glowing stem of it, until he was satisfied that opening the Gate for him had cost her most of her strength.

She wanted to feel his real hands on her, and not just the brush of his magic, but he stayed a respectful step back from her.

“You are a Gardener,” he agreed. “Make sure you don’t fall behind in your work. Your own work, assigned to you. Have an early night. Get some rest.”

For once, she didn’t dare disobey.





FIFTEEN

THE OLD slave woman, whose tasks Ylly had taken on, was called Hasbabsah.

They stood in the kitchen garden, with bean-covered trellises forming a labyrinth around them. The trellises caught every sparkle, every glint of full sun.

“Stand straight,” Unar said. “I can’t see your face.”

“I am standing as straight as I can, Warmed One,” Hasbabsah replied drily. She was puckered and toothless. Her balding head was spotted, and her toenails were like claws. Unar had never seen such an old slave.

She’d never thought to wonder why, before.

“Show me your arms.”

Hasbabsah pushed back the sleeves of her coarse winter robe. At intervals along the blades of her forearms, blunt bone-coloured nubs showed where her warrior’s climbing grafts had been snapped or filed off.

“Why do you attack us?”

“I have served for fifty years, Warmed One.”

“No, I mean why do your people, Understorians like you, attack Canopy?”

“There are bones the size of the great trees in the soil of Floor, Warmed One, if you ever cared to dig to find them. They are the bones of the Old Gods, huge and fierce animals with the intellects of people. Before they were slain by the thirteen gods and goddesses of Canopy, they ruled us, all of us, wisely and well. Humankind was not divided into three. We were one.”

“What a disgusting notion,” Unar said, fascinated and repelled. “Do you seek revenge on our deities?”

“Some of the learned of Understorey believe that if the thirteen are cast down together, between sunrise and sunset of a single day, the Old Gods will rise again.”

Unar laughed.

“That can never happen. The most your attacks have ever achieved is to capture one god, and he was rescued by his Bodyguard. Understorians are too few.”