Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(44)

On her way out of the workshop, Unar brushed past a cold forge which reminded her uncomfortably of her mother, ropes and bundled nets in various stages of repair, animal whiskers waiting to be made into fishing line, and bark to be made into bootlaces. In the hearth room, Hasbabsah closed her eyes tight as she coughed, twisting in seeming delirium beneath a blanket she shouldn’t have needed so close to the roaring fire.

Bernreb was with her. He wiped the sweat from her forehead and the bloody sputum from her lips with a woven cloth.

“What’s the matter with her?” Unar asked.

“I do not know. She bleeds from the tongue. The sickness has spread from there, down into her lungs.”

Unar felt stuck to the floor, glued by guilt at the stupidity of her mistake. She’d thought their escape was in the service of saving Hasbabsah from certain death, only to discover that her people’s cruelty was more cunning than that; in the old and long-encumbered, the mark couldn’t be completely removed, not even by passing beyond the scope of the magic that had placed it there. Ylly had proven recoverable. Hasbabsah was not.

“Oos could have healed her,” she said. “Oos should have healed her. Couldn’t you climb with Hasbabsah, and with Oos—”

“No,” Bernreb interrupted. “We cannot pass through the barrier, and by now, neither can any of you. We must do our best for her here, without the working of gods.”

“Are there no healers? Herb women? Blasphemers of that sort?”

“Not in the monsoon. Nobody travels in the monsoon.”

Unar turned on her heel in frustration. In the fishing room, thin beams of moonlight struck the edge of the river where it flowed over the entrance, making a moonbow overlaid on a soft wall of white. She stopped to gape at it. As she watched, the fleeting moonlight faded, leaving the room cold and dark and wet again.

She filled the toilet bucket with water, then with waste, and finally, wrinkling her nose, she poured it away. She crushed a soapleaf and lathered her hands before rinsing them. Then she cupped the river water directly for drinking.

It tasted a little like tannins, a little like rotted leaves. Not much like rainwater, but at least she hadn’t caught any fish in her hands.

As she was backing away from the water, ready to go back to Esse, something came through the entrance, splitting the water—something that she couldn’t quite see, which she assumed in a panic was a demon. She groped for her knife a second time and loosed a cry of startlement and fear.

“Hush,” said Marram. His voice was higher pitched than Bernreb’s, not as coldly menacing as Esse’s. “What were you doing? I hope I did not walk in through a tossed bucket of solid waste.”

“No,” Unar managed, mortified.

Marram pulled something like a blanket away from his head and the dark bulk resolved into his slender, pale shape. He carried a long, curved stave and a basket on his back. A thick coil of sodden rope hung at the waist of his short wrap. Coarse-woven cloth to provide better grip was laced onto his insteps and the tops of his knees, leaving his shins bare with their spikes hidden in the seams. The rope coil ended in a metal spike with a round eye for attachment, and when Marram turned to drape the blanket from a hook, the glow of luminescent fungi revealed that the stave was an unstrung, powerful-looking longbow of three different laminated woods.

The blanket took on the colour of the fungi-covered wall, and Unar gasped.

“Chimera skin,” she said. She couldn’t help but look into the basket as Marram unstrapped it. “Those aren’t tallowwood leaves.”

“No,” Marram admitted.

“But nobody travels from tree to tree in the monsoon. Hasbabsah said so, and Bernreb, too. Where did these leaves come from? How did you get them, if you stayed only on this tree?”

Marram smiled. “Nobody travels in the monsoon,” he said, “because wet bark means that resin glues for sticky-climbing will not properly attach. Spikes may not penetrate properly through loosened, sodden bark to the safety of the wood. And traditional leather skins for gliding hold too much weight in water. The glide cannot be sustained, and the hapless hunter falls to Floor.”

Unar glanced at the chimera skin again.

“Traditional leather,” she repeated. “Is that why Bernreb hunted a demon for you?”

“It is.”

“So you can glide from tree to tree, even in the rain?”

“I am the first one. The only one. Only I can move through the trees during the monsoon.”

“You,” Unar said, “and your two brothers, you mean.”

“No. Bernreb is too heavy, and Esse is a barkclinger; he does not fancy flight. But I do.”

Hope rose in her chest.

“Then you can go to this barbarian village, Gannak, or whatever you call it. You can find medicines for her. Save her life.”

“You forget,” Marram said, shaking his head, “we are exiles. I would be killed on sight if I showed my face in Gannak.”

“Let me go, then!” Unar grasped his hand. “Teach me to fly!”

“Flying is the easy part. Flying isn’t the difficulty.”

“What is the difficulty, then?”

Marram pulled his fingers out of her grip. He raised his forearm, held it vertical high above the level of her eyes for a moment, and then brought it down sharply against the fishing room wall.