Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(35)

Aoun let go of her throat. The magical structure that he had grown in her shrivelled instantly and died. Unar wrapped her arms around herself, no longer aroused, incredulous at what he’d done.

“The Garden will spit you out, Aoun!” she screamed. “You have stolen the sovereignty of my body!”

“In the service of the Garden,” he insisted, staring at his palm as though it was someone else’s, sounding as shaken as she was. “It is allowed.”

“Like killing slaves is allowed? You could have been a slave! I was almost a slave! Would you throw me down if I couldn’t work? Is that what you are for?”

There was nothing but the sound of the rain and wind for a long time. Aoun put his right hand through his hair; it settled at last on his left shoulder, trembling. Unar put her back against the Gates, squeezing herself tighter and tighter. Her floating high, the giddy sensations elicited by Edax, had turned to horror and the spectre of death.

“It is the way of the Garden,” Aoun said at last, helplessly. “Old growth is cut away to make room for the new. I must tell Servant Eilif in the morning.”

Unar ran from him. He didn’t follow.

If Hasbabsah was to die in the morning, Unar couldn’t wait that long. Sunrise was mere hours away.

Suddenly, she felt tired. Too tired to do what had to be done. Hasbabsah had been given extra days. It was enough, wasn’t it? The deception was over, now. The inevitable was coming.

Unar imagined the old woman falling and increased her speed.

“Ylly,” she crowed by the door to the wet-weather slave quarters.

It was Hasbabsah who hobbled through the insecticidal smoke that screened the door. Her hair was awry, and her eyes were bloodshot.

“Ylly is sleeping.”

“But not you? Has the Gatekeeper been here?”

“The storm makes my bones ache; that is why I am awake.”

“Wake Ylly. Tell her to gather all her things, and you must gather all yours. We’re leaving the Garden, right now. The Gatekeeper knows we’ve been doing your work.”

Shame heated Unar’s cheeks, but in the darkness of the storm, nobody could see them.

“And how can we leave the Garden, Warmed One? Our tongues are marked.”

“Maybe you can’t cross the wall, tread the walkways, or climb the ladders. Maybe you can’t pass through the Gate. But your marked tongue won’t hold you up when Eilif pushes you off the edge, will it? We’ll go straight down. The wards are weakest that way.”

“You do not know what you are doing, do you?”

“Has Ylly lied to me all this time? Isn’t your life at stake? Hasn’t concealing your infirmity been crucial?”

Hasbabsah sighed, a long sigh. “It has been crucial, Warmed One.”

“Then go, get her. I’ll be back very soon.”

Unar didn’t go to the kitchens to steal. There might have been people there. She raided the trees and bushes she’d tended for the past four years. Bent, oozing sugarcanes made a frame for a nest of watercress, which cradled a late clutch of flowerfowl eggs. Unar stuffed the wrung-necked mother down on top of the eggs, her downy corpse still keeping the eggs warm. Limes the length and shape of fingers came next, with a layer of beans to follow, and a few handfuls of magenta cherries for good measure.

Instead of stealing ropes, Unar let herself down by a single-handed grip beneath the wattle-grove garden to strip bark-ropes from the great tallowwood tree itself. She paused to roll the ropes under a roof of sodden wattle-flowers; the blooms sagged on the ends of their branches like new-hatched yellow chicks with their fluff still stuck to their skin.

She didn’t dare go to her hammock in the monsoon pavilion for her meticulously maintained bore-knife and machete, but took blunter, cruder ones from the tool cache in the prison-tree outside the loquat grove.

“I’m not leaving you,” she whispered to the Garden. “You are mine, and I am yours. We’ll simply be apart for a little while.”

She returned to the slave quarters. Ylly and Hasbabsah stood just outside it, shod and loaded with soggy blankets. They would need them, if they were to survive the monsoon away from the Garden. When distant lightning struck and Unar could finally see them properly, they were blanched with fear.

“The waterfall,” Unar said. “Where we washed the clothes, Ylly.”

They set off for it as quickly and quietly as they could, though Hasbabsah missed her footing on the bridges and had to be carried between them. It reminded Unar of the time Oos and Aoun had taken her between them. Her lips drew back from her teeth; she wouldn’t allow them to punish her this time.

She wouldn’t let herself fall into their hands. Not until Ylly and Hasbabsah were beyond Audblayin’s reach, and perhaps not even then. Unar was too learned, too powerful for them to touch her. If she had to learn from other Bodyguards, spy on different goddesses or gods, so be it. Edax knew her, inside and out, now. He’d help her. And the god Odel had been kind to her.

With the bark-ropes, she secured her own belt to Ylly’s and to Hasbabsah’s, just to be sure she wouldn’t lose them. She left several paces of rope between them, so that they each had room to move.

“Take my hands,” Unar said as they prepared to drop into the pool far below. It wasn’t as deep as the one in Understorey. Unar would have to use her modestly regrown shoot of magic to cushion them from the bottom and perhaps to raise them to the surface again.