Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(59)

Unlike Aoun’s.

That led her to remember Bernreb’s offer with a wince. Since he’d made it, she’d followed Oos’s example and bled for several days; it had been horrible, but it was over now, and she knew what to expect next moon. Her soiled bedclothes, taken by Esse, had obviously been used for demon bait instead of left in the river to leach out the dangerous scent.

Unar looked up and saw the underside of the platform by the side of the river. The rope still dangled down. They were almost back at the hunters’ home. She saw Esse’s upraised forearm, the bone blades gleaming, unblunted by the climb.

Magic must keep them sharp as well as clean.

She tried to extend her magical senses to examine them, but it was not even like trying to reach with her hands tied behind her back. It was as if she had no arms. As if she was born a worm or a snake and had never had them, except in her feeble imaginings.

Unar made a small noise of frustration. Frog must tell her more. No more waiting.

“Do not let go,” Esse said. “We will go through the river together. I will leave the rope tied to the outside, and secure the other end of it to the inside. It will mean extra chores to keep the water from the fishing room floor, but by next moon, the river will be too strong to pass through at all without the aid of a rope.”

Unar didn’t answer him. She could guess who would be doing the extra chores. Then they were in the river again, and her arms around his neck were all that held her to the world. The water washing over her while she clung to a near stranger reminded her of the feeling of Audblayin’s power washing over her the morning she had knelt with Oos and Aoun before the night-yew in the Garden.

There had been six new Gardeners chosen that day. Fledglings, the old Gatekeeper had called them. Not quite Gardeners, but not of the world outside, either.

She, Oos, Aoun, and the three others had worn their crimson ceremonial Gardener’s garb for the first time. Red leaf-shirts and green trousers beneath hooded crimson robes. Their knees crushed the leaf litter, and the branches of the night-yew spread over their heads. The yew’s tiny white flowers were turned to fruit once yearly by the first rays of the first month of the post-monsoonal sun. They had waited for that dawn to transform them too.

Oos had whispered, One who walks in the grace of Audblayin can’t wait for her powers to wake!

I can’t wait to eat the fruit, Aoun had muttered, and his belly had grumbled.

Unar hadn’t said anything. She’d thought her powers were already awake. How else had she passed the tests they had given her? How else had she watched the work of the Gardeners and felt like she could do it faster and better? They had been in the Garden for weeks already.

Then the sun had risen over the great forest. It struck the crown of the night-yew first, some thirty paces over their heads. Minutes later, the first minuscule crimson fruit began to fall. The fruit tasted like turpentine—bitter with only a hint of sweetness, exactly the way that the crushed night-yew needles smelled—but Unar had reluctantly eaten a few more of them, anyway. It was part of the ritual. Or it amused the Servants to poison them.

As the light travelled further down the yew, more and more fruit fell, till it pinged off their heads and shoulders like rain.

Aoun had said abruptly, I don’t feel well.

Then the sun had touched them and something had exploded inside Unar’s middle, like another, smaller sun whose rays illuminated the life around her, so that she could feel it without seeing. Not only filling the confines of her body, as before, but sending strings out to tangle with every plant, every creature, and every beating human heart.

As the sensation had washed over them, Unar found her arms around Aoun’s neck and his arms around hers. They clung to each other, as if to keep from being pulled apart by all the unfurling threads.

Threads had crossed from each of them into the other, too. For the space between breaths, Unar had felt what Aoun was feeling. So it was no surprise to her when he hunched over and vomited into the dirt between his knees.

You ate too many, Unar said, rubbing the space between his trembling shoulder blades. You wanted it too much.

Yet Aoun’s wanting was a drop next to the monsoon of her own desire.





THIRTY-SIX

STILL WET from her passage through the vertical river with Esse, Unar plucked Frog by the collar and dragged her from the hearth room into the dark corridor between the fishing room and the rest of the dwelling.

“Are you my sister?” If she could have used her magic, she would have delved into Frog the way that Oos had delved into the jacaranda seed during her lesson in the Garden. She would have determined at once if Frog was fruit from the same tree as Unar was.

“You are wet,” Frog said, her small fists striking Unar’s chest. “Get off me!”

Unar only leaned harder on her, so she couldn’t wriggle away.

“Are you Isin?”

Silence.

“Answer me!” Unar thought of the story about the man and woman fighting over poisoned mushrooms, Frog’s parents, on the other side of the barrier. In Canopy. “They were my parents that you saw. They were starving.”

Frog’s chin lifted insolently.

“You can imagine them easily, can you not? Imagine this. Imagine them screamin’ at each other to go to Audblayin’s Temple and collect the silver they were owed for their daughter’s service. Imagine the man ravin’ that the Garden was not a place for men, that it was the woman who would hafta go. I lost sight of them when they went. I could not follow. But from that moment, I knew I had a sister in the Garden.”