Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(4)

So. He might say he wants to submit, but not to the rain goddess. Not yet.

Unar almost tells him about her baby sister, Isin. She almost shows him the indents in her skin from the cot she lay in, tells how it smells of emptiness and death, and how her cold mother thought nothing of making her sleep in it.

After Isin fell.

Instead, she sits down cross-legged beside the boy. Together, surrounded by the sounds of falling water, whining mosquitoes, and musky night-parrots making small branches creak and crack with their weight, they wait for the break of day.





PART I

Dry Season





ONE

MOONLIGHT HAD followed Unar in the hours since she’d slipped out of the Garden, and now, as a shadow on a branch resolved into a rain-silvered silhouette, she realised something else had followed her, too.

Unar wanted to ignore the crouching outline above and to the left of her. Barefoot on her own broad bough in loose leaf-trousers and a red Gardener’s tunic, she was impatient to see if she could reach the thing, several body lengths below, that she’d come for. There, barely discernible in the dark, a cloth-wrapped bundle was stuck in the fork of the next lowest lateral branch, tantalising her, but half-heard myths of the Understorey kept her gaze fixed to the silhouette.

She gripped her bore-knife. It had proven useless in her descent through the mighty forest. This was a gap-axe tree and couldn’t be bored into by any means short of magic. The knife should puncture a lung easily enough, though.

“Who’s there?” she called defiantly.

“You climb well,” a man’s low, amused voice replied. “For a Gardener. But you’re trespassing. You crossed the border many minutes ago.”

“Which border?”

“Both of them.”

Unar had been aware of it even before she reached the crossroads. She’d felt the Garden’s power shrinking as she crossed horizontally from the realm of the birth goddess into the realm of the rain goddess. Then she’d felt queasy in her gut as she’d climbed lower and lower, crossing the vertical border from Canopy into Understorey.

Here, none of the Canopian gods or goddesses held sway. All the magical gifts of Unar’s mistress had faded completely. Only Unar’s physical strength and stamina mattered here.

“You’ve crossed the border, too,” she said. “Who are you?”

The man leaned forward out of the tree’s moonshadow. A lined brow suggested he’d seen at least twice as many as Unar’s sixteen years. Water dripped from his glossy, tousled hair. Raised, charcoal-rubbed scars in the shape of tears streaked down cheeks that in daylight would be dark brown, naming him neither Understorian, nor slave, but a Canopian dedicated to the rain goddess, Ehkis. The tears of her Servants were said to have terrible powers, but below the magically defended border, they could do nothing but mingle harmlessly with the rain.

Unar relaxed her grip on the bore-knife.

“I’m Edax,” he said. “Bodyguard of the Bringer of Rain. Shall I tell you her birth name while she’s sleeping?”

“You’re not her Bodyguard,” Unar said, shocked. “If you were, you’d be with her, watching her.” As if the rain goddess’s Bodyguard, her most trusted, feared, and beloved, would betray childhood secrets from a time before the nature of her soul became apparent.

“She sleeps in the bottom of a lake. Who can harm her there? Meanwhile, I’m cursed with a Bodyguard’s sleeplessness.”

“It’s a gift.”

“You think you want that gift, little adept from the Garden Temple? You think you want to be a Bodyguard to the next incarnation of your goddess, when she is reborn a god? And what if she is a woman, again, and then another woman, and then a woman a third time? Mulch for brains!”

“You’re the mulch for brains if you think you can guess the next gender of the one I serve.”

The goddess that Unar served, Audblayin, the birth goddess, had been a woman for three incarnations. She was old now, so old. Surely she would take a turn at being a man. She must be a man. Then she would need a woman Bodyguard, and Unar would be waiting, ready to take the power that being a Bodyguard would bring.

To never need sleep!

“You have bigger problems than the next incarnation of Audblayin. Staying out after dark, for one thing. Will the Great Gates of the Garden not be closed to you forever, little Gardener?”

Unar raised the rain-speckled bore-knife higher as Edax came closer again. She realised as he moved along the underside of the branch, with a brazenness only a chimera should have owned, that he must be what he claimed to be. With utter certainty, she knew she couldn’t fight him and live.

But he didn’t know everything. The Great Gates were already closed, of course. Unar had climbed them. Edax eased himself down to the final branch between them. The flaps of a sodden, silver-star-embroidered, indigo jacket hung loosely over his black tunic. Also hanging were the paired hems of a calf-length skirt, split up the sides to give him freedom to climb while still appearing formal when he stood on a flat platform. She couldn’t see if he was barefooted like she was or wore boots.

“I came for that,” she said, indicating the bundle below them with her knife tip, not looking away from him.

“And what is that, exactly?” he asked.

“I felt it. When I was higher. I felt new life on the brink of being extinguished. Audblayin shares that power with all of us. So we can tend the Garden.”