Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(69)

“You should have pushed ’er out a window,” Frog said.

“Not me. I don’t serve the god of death.” Unar thought of Marram, and the urge to laugh died.

“I tried to kill my foster father,” Frog said, unmoving where she squatted at the edge. “’E was a big man, though. Bigger than Bernreb and with a stomach like a barrowful of melons. ’Is job was to set the bridges. In daylight, ’e set them, when most demons are sleepin’ and it is safe to cross and to trade. But most of the time, ’e just stayed home and drank bia. ’E drank some of the poison I put in ’is bia, but not all of it, and I had been wrong about how much I would need. Then ’e knew I had done it, and I had to run away.”

Unar tried to glance at Frog’s face, but could see only the back of the girl’s head from where she lay. Frog had apparently not been bluffing about using Unar’s power to kill. There was no squeamishness in the child. Nor any sense of loyalty towards the man who presumably had made the choice to take her in of his own free will. Frog, like her big sister, was desperate, ambitious, and single-minded as a seed. Unar could hardly judge her for it.

“If you ever decide to kill me,” she said, “you’ll tell me what I’ve done wrong first, won’t you?”

She was joking, trying to lighten the mood, but Frog’s slight shoulders shrugged.

“If it is my decision, I will. If it is an order from the Master, probably not. The first thing you will learn, if you wanna perfect your magic use, is never to disobey an order.”

Unar didn’t ask again where they were going. She didn’t ask who the Master was, or what sort of orders she might be expected to carry out. To perfect her magic use, she knew she would do almost anything that Frog’s superiors asked of her. Anything but damage the Garden or hurt her friends. There was no sense in freeing Ylly and Hasbabsah only to have them come to harm, and certainly no reason to involve Oos in anything. Oos had Ylly to take care of her now. She didn’t need Unar.

“You’re my sister. I trust you. You came to fetch me for a reason.”

Whatever the reason was, Frog was not forthcoming.

You want my advice, do not love anyone. Or anythin’.

Unar sighed, closed her eyes, and wished she were dry. Her stomach grumbled, but a benefit of having nothing to eat, she supposed, would be not having to dangle her bare arse over the edge of a mushroom and defecate into the dark. Whatever Frog said, Unar shouldn’t have had to put up with the added indignity of blood everywhere, not if she could do something about it. Frog wasn’t old enough yet, but when she found out for herself what a mess menstruation made, she would apologise and beg for Unar’s help.

Just like Aoun would, when he realised she had returned with Audblayin.

Behind her eyelids, Unar imagined the look on his face when she led Audblayin to the Garden Gates. Frog at her side. Aoun four or five years older, like Unar. He would gasp, But nobody has ever found Audblayin so young, before.

Unar would say, There’s never been a Gardener like me, before. Open the Gates.

Aoun would open the Gates. A Servant—not Servant Eilif, most likely she’d be dead of old age—would fall to her knees and wail for Unar to become the god’s Bodyguard at once. They’d take her to the night-yew. They’d perform the ceremony. Aoun would find her, later, alone in the Garden, and beg her to forgive him for pulling away from her kiss. The neutering magic of the Servants had severed him from his true heart, but now he knew that he and Unar were a single spirit with separate flesh. She would do with him what she had done with Edax.

And at last, laughing with the joy of it, Unar would fly.





PART III

Drowning Season





FORTY-TWO

IT WAS near dusk on the fourth day since Marram had fallen.

“Will I make a shelter for us for the night?” Unar asked, hiding a yawn with the back of her hand.

The skin she pressed to her lips was wet and wrinkled. She could barely remember what being dry felt like. Frog had made a tiny fire, two days ago, to cook a roosting fish-owl. Owls were poisonous in large quantities, but birds in Understorey were rare enough that the travellers couldn’t be choosy. Unar had trapped the owl’s feet with a sudden growth spurt in the branch it rested on, trying not to think of Edax, and Frog had wrung its neck, suffering a bite right through the palm of her hand for her troubles.

Unar healed the bite almost at once, but Frog still plucked the feathers with a vengeful sort of violence. The fatty flesh had been rank, and the warmth from the smoky flame negligible.

“No,” Frog said, staring in the direction they had been travelling. “We are close. We should keep goin’. We are almost at the dovecote.”

“The dovecote?”

“It is what we call it. The place where we meet. Where the Master rules.”

“You’re sure you can find it in the dark?”

“Yes. Over there. That way.”

Unar lifted the ear bone and blew. Her body lifted with the freedom of it. She knew the ear bone, at this point, better than she knew her own bones. Every unseen filament. Every concealed coil. There were gaps in and around it that should have been filled with living tissue, and it was these spaces where inaudible sound echoed and magic answered, as though a great being of spirit answered the cry of its naked child.