Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(48)

Unar and Aoun had given thanks, profusely. They’d gripped one another by the hand as they stepped over the threshold, and Unar had felt that sense of smelling deeper than ordinary smell, the one with which she’d scented the seeds, sweep down into her chest and coil behind her breastbone. She felt reassured of that other sense, the one that ordinary people didn’t have, and remembered that first fierce prickle of providence.

After the announcement had been made that six Gardeners had died of plague, more applicants came to the Gate. Oos had been among them. Rich crown and internoder girls, robed in silk, giggling, painting their lips with pomegranate juice to make them pink and pretty.

Unar ate a pomegranate on the inside of the Gate, spitting the chewed seeds with hardly a care except to avoid getting them on Aoun, who sat beside her, his eyes closed and his oily, spotty face blissful in the sun.

They’re fools, Unar observed. Do they think the Garden needs human flowers?

Were we less foolish, Aoun asked without opening his eyes, when we stood there, not ten days ago?

The Garden needs us, Aoun. The Garden needs this.

She had taken his hand again. The source of power inside of her, between her breasts, had fluttered, and she felt an answering flutter in Aoun, lower down in his belly, and was startled all over again, for she hadn’t been able to feel that, the last time she had held his hand as they passed through the Gate.

And that had been the last time she had deliberately taken his hand. His hammock had been far away from hers in the loquat grove. He rarely spoke to anyone at mealtimes or during lessons, so conscientious was he and so intent on submitting his will to the deity’s.

Oos, who could talk happily about anything and everything, had become Unar’s only real friend.

Until now.

In the home of the three huntsmen in Understorey, Oos’s soft snores joined Ylly’s, and Unar stared at the ceiling as if she might, with enough effort, see through the solid, living tissue of the tree to where Aoun might stand, right now, by the Gate, in the monsoon rain.

Had announcements been made that one Servant and one Gardener had fallen from Audblayin’s emergent? Were the young and curious queuing already at the Gate where Aoun would test them with a handful of dirt?

Unar thought about how much bigger his hands were now and sighed again. She pictured him, naked and brushed with pearl dust, poised to dive into the moat, and shivered with yearning.

He would not desire her. Not for as long as the magic of the Garden held him. But what if he, too, ventured into Understorey? What if Unar led him to the place where Edax had led her? Beneath her blankets, she tucked one hand between her thighs, imagining it was Aoun’s.

She hesitated. It was hopeless even to imagine. He was Gatekeeper, and would not leave the Garden, ever. Not until he died, or was sent, like the prior Gatekeeper, to search out a new incarnation of Audblayin.

But what if he did leave? What if he came into Understorey in search of her?

Unar closed her eyes, the better to imagine Aoun descending on pulleys and ropes to the platform outside the river entrance. He’d wonder who had built it and why it was there. And Unar would sense his nearness. She would appear, wet and gasping, beside him, and he would feel what he’d never felt before, and take her into his arms.

Parting flaps with her fingers beneath the bedclothes, Unar found their inner, silken counterparts already slippery with lust, and felt a brief surge of rage at the Garden, and the Servants who maintained its chastening spells. Was it Servant Eilif who, by casting the magic, had made Unar so disinclined to touch herself or others, ever, that she didn’t even know what these parts of her own body were called? Flaps? The only word for women’s parts she’d ever heard was “hole,” and it was thanks to Edax that she even knew how to find that.

Oh, yes, there it was, secret and tight, unchanged by the stretching that the rain goddess’s Bodyguard had given it. Aoun would find it, one day; he would make it his own place; it was where he belonged, only he didn’t know it; couldn’t know it, until he left the Garden and came to find her.

Unar’s breath caught as Bernreb walked, bold and oblivious, into the room.

His bulk blotted out the light from the tallow candles. Unar squeezed her legs together. Hopefully the biggest of the brothers would be too busy checking on the baby to notice what she was doing.

No such luck. He looked at her and his eyes widened.

“You are Unar, is that right?”

“Yes,” she whispered furiously.

“Do you need a father for your child?”

“No!”

“I am only asking. Just in case. You did not seem particularly interested in the baby. Not like Ylly. But here you are, obviously frustrated—”

“I’m not interested in babies!” Not unless they were reincarnations of gods, anyway. “And I’m not frustrated.”

“As you say.” His impudent smile made Unar want to throw something heavy at him. “Women do not often visit during the monsoon. Esse has moonflower, though, when you need it, to soak up and disguise the scent of your bleed. If you change your mind, you know where I sleep.”

Unar scowled in his direction long after he was gone. Change her mind, indeed. How could she ever be attracted to Bernreb, with his pinkish, fishmeat-coloured skin? You know where I sleep? Pah!

She put her hand under her pillow and tried not to smell her fingers. Moonflower, to soak up and disguise the scent of her bleed. Thanks to the combined controlling nature of her tight-lipped, hateful mother and the unforgiving Servant Eilif, a stupid, bearded brute from Understorey knew more about her bodily functions than she did herself.