Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(41)

“I am Bernreb,” he said, “second son of Moonoom.”

“I am Marram,” the yellow-haired man said, smiling into the silence that followed Bernreb’s pronouncement. “Third son of Moonoom. Over there, gutting the fish for your breakfast, is Esse, first son of Moonoom.”

“I am Hasbabsah of Nessa,” Hasbabsah said.

“I’m Ylly, daughter of Ylly.”

Oos squeezed Unar’s hand so tight that Unar couldn’t feel it anymore and said nothing.

“You don’t look like brothers,” Unar said, avoiding giving her name. “You all look different. How can you all be sons of Moonoom? You look like you all had different fathers.”

Bernreb guffawed.

“Canopy must indeed be a strange and wondrous place. I never heard of three brothers all having the same father.”

“Fathers die so quickly,” Marram said.

“Moonoom was our mother,” Esse muttered, throwing fish guts into the fire.

“Oh.” Unar took a deep breath. She reminded herself that the floor her feet stood on was the very same sapwood that the Garden stood on. This was still her place. The heart that beat within the great tree was her heart. “I am Unar of the Garden. This is Oos.”

“Then we are all well met,” Bernreb said.

“Is there nobody else living here?” Ylly asked.

From some other, unknown place in the home wafted the bawls of a baby crying.

Unar shared a glance with Oos.

“Excuse me,” Bernreb said. “I only just put her down. The sound of our voices must have woken her. We try to keep her in the back where the demons will not hear her crying and come to investigate.” He stood up from the table, passed through one of the embroidered hangings, and returned with a bundle in his bulging, tattooed arms.

Unar stared at the bundle. The blanket-edge bore the family weaves of the House of Epatut. She hadn’t cared about family colours and emblems; hadn’t taken them with mother’s milk, as Oos had.

But she recognised these.

“Now you have seen her,” Bernreb said, “I must clean her. Excuse me.”

Ylly stood up abruptly, went to Bernreb, and lifted the baby’s fat brown body out of the wrappings. This child had been all but newborn when she fell at the end of the last monsoon, and now looked none the worse for it. Her bared bottom had an odorous, muddy smear across the cheeks, but Ylly ignored it.

“She’s from Canopy,” Ylly said, with eyes only for the baby, cooing and swishing until the cries turned to uncertain smiles. Bernreb looked bemused, but he made no move to take the baby back. Perhaps he felt that babies belonged in the arms of women. Or perhaps, since it appeared they would all be living together for five months, he simply saw no sense in stopping Ylly from taking on some of his duties. He couldn’t know how Ylly had longed to hold her true granddaughter, how she’d kept bitterly silent ever since Sawas was sold away.

“Did you steal her?” Oos asked. “Did you steal those blankets?”

“Oos,” Unar said with wonder, extricating her bruised hand, remembering the wrappings full of rotten quandongs and satinashes she’d let fall amidst crushing disappointment. “You know whose baby this is, better than me. She is Imeris, daughter of Epatut. She survived the fall.”

“She survived a fall,” Bernreb agreed heartily. “We had not given her a name.”

“She is Imerissiremi,” Ylly said at once. “Issi for short.”

“Wife-of-Epatut dropped her in the market,” Hasbabsah said. “Not at the Garden. You didn’t find her caught in this tree. How did you find her?”

“I found her ten days ago in the mouth of a chimera that I killed,” Bernreb said, leaning back in his chair and stretching his hands behind his head, cracking his knuckles. “A chimera’s milky saliva nourishes its eggs, passing through the soft shells. Seems good enough for a human babe to survive on at that.” His eyes followed Ylly, who had left the door open carelessly as she carried the child towards the entry room. Unar heard bucket handles swing and the splash of water.

“Is she leaving?” Unar whispered to Esse, who was half bent in the act of placing a roasted fish on a dried leaf-plate in front of her. “Is she mad? Is she leaving with the baby?”

Esse paused to glance down the pitch-black corridor.

“She is washing the baby’s backside,” he said. “We would trust a potplant a hundred times over before we trusted you, Gardener. Eat your fish.”

Unar ate the fish. It tasted like flowerfowl bile mixed with cactus jelly, but she was so hungry she burned her tongue and her fingers in her haste, pausing only to extricate tiny bones from her mouth and line them up on the edge of her plate.

“You did not kill a chimera,” Hasbabsah said, wiping fish grease from her chin with her sleeve.

“Did I not?”

“The chimera is life. Life must come from the ashes of its death, or the curse falls on the family of the one who slays it.” Hasbabsah began to cough so uncontrollably that she couldn’t speak. Unar worried about a fish bone, but Hasbabsah waved Marram back when he stood up and made as if to assist her.

“Life did come from it,” Bernreb said. “The child, from its mouth, as I said. She is lucky, and she is life. We will keep her. We will care for her.”