Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(45)

When Unar looked closely, she realised he had extended his spikes and driven them deeply into the wood.

“The difficulty,” he said, “is landing.”





TWENTY-EIGHT

WHEN OOS woke, she emerged into the workroom where Unar was busily stripping fibres from the strap-like leaves.

Oos’s white robe was stained by bark, glue, and fish slime. The beads and ribbons in her hair had congealed with woodchips and pallet-straw into an awful-looking, trussed-up, kicked-beehive shape.

“I’m hungry,” she said to Unar in a small voice.

“Go on, then,” Unar replied, jerking her head towards the hearth room. “They’re in there, the three of them. There’s fruit and fish.”

Since his return with the leaves via the fishing room, Marram had shrugged off his clothes, dried himself, dressed in a clean waist-wrap by the fire, slept for three hours in the bedroom barred to guests, and then risen, refreshed, as if three hours sleep per day were all that he needed. Bernreb had passed Unar once or twice to check on the baby, Issi, only to find Ylly had everything in hand. As for Esse, Unar didn’t think he’d slept at all.

“I don’t want to talk to them. I don’t want to see them. Can’t you…?”

Unar sighed and put the leaf to one side. After six hours or so of stripping, her fingers had blisters aplenty, but there was something soothing in the leaf sap that allowed her to keep working stubbornly through the pain. She needed that knife back. From her sitting position on the wooden floor, she looked up at Oos.

“We wouldn’t be here at all if only you’d helped instead of hindered.”

“How can you say that? You’re the one who dragged us into the river, to death, as far as you knew, but you did it anyway. Besides, how could I turn against the Servants? I am a Servant. I can’t turn against myself.”

Unar didn’t say haughtily that they wouldn’t have died because she had a destiny, even if she was the only one who could see it. Aoun knew. Aoun said that the wards had stood four hundred years, that Unar had the power to destroy everything, that she was practically the goddess reborn.

“You can still think for yourself, can’t you?” Unar tossed her head angrily. “You can decide which traditions are important and which are needlessly cruel. Is Audblayin a god in want of human sacrifices?”

“Of course not—she is the giver of life!”

“Then you failed her when you failed to give life to Hasbabsah. Can’t you hear her, coughing, dying in the other room? You can’t fool me, Oos. We were friends for too long. It’s not those men you’re afraid of, it’s watching an old woman die.”

They glared at each other for a moment. Then Oos brushed past Unar, kicking her pile of fibre in petty vengeance as she went. Unar scraped the pile together again, silently, on her hands and knees, before moving to where she could eavesdrop on the conversation in the hearth room.

“Is it morning?” Oos’s voice sounded timid through the curtain.

“The last dawn that your ex-slave is likely to see,” Esse said. Hasbabsah’s hacking halted the conversation momentarily.

“If I could send a message up to the other Servants,” Oos said into the pause. “Servant Eilif could come down here. She could do something to help.”

“No message,” Bernreb said. “If the Servants knew we were down here, they would poison the river, or dam it, for a chance of getting rid of us. Parasites on their very own tree!”

“Servant Eilif, as you call her, would not venture where her magic could not protect her,” Esse said. “Not for the sake of a slave. Or is it you in need of help? A thousand soldiers could not carry you through the barrier now, even if they left us dangling with our throats cut.”

“There must be a way.” Oos’s voice became so quiet that Unar had to lift a corner of the embroidered hanging. “Hasbabsah came to Canopy from Understorey, once.”

“There is a way—” Marram began to say, kindly, but Esse interrupted.

“If Hasbabsah decides to tell you how she did it,” he said sharply, “I will not stop her. But we three will not tell you. You had better do everything you can think of to help her to get well.”

“Magic is the only thing I can think of!”

Nobody had anything to say to that. There was no magic in Understorey.

Or was there?

Unar sat back down on the floor and took a deep breath. She pinched her left forearm with the fingers of her right hand, feeling the two long bones beneath the skin. She closed her eyes and ground her jaw; teeth were bones, too. Focus on the bones. Bones and magic.

Nothing.

Issi started crying in the former storeroom, now guestroom. Unar heard the shuffling sounds of Ylly dragging herself upright, murmuring platitudes over the cot, lifting Issi into her arms. Then there was the pungent smell of soiled wrappings being changed, just as Bernreb pushed the hanging up onto its hook and passed through the workshop. He nodded briefly to Unar before ducking into the storeroom.

“I will take those,” Unar heard him say.

“Take the baby,” Ylly said. “I’ll wash these now and hang them up right away.”

“The old woman,” Bernreb said. “Her fever has not broken. She takes water, but she will not wake. I do not know what to do.”