Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(84)

Frog returned to the room with the leather bag that Unar had last seen hanging from the rafters.

“What of your desire to search for Audblayin?” Sikakis asked.

“Core Kirrik said if I stayed here long enough, it would fade.”

“It will never fade,” Frog scoffed.

“I wanted to search for you, too, when you fell!”

“But you did not. You knew it was hopeless. You were wiser, then, than you are now.” Frog raised her palm and with the forefinger of her opposite hand, impersonated an inchworm. “So dank. So doltish, Unar.” Her fists flashed to her hips and she grimaced. “You want answers, but you do not even know which questions to ask.”





FORTY-EIGHT

HOURS LATER, rain drummed once again on Unar’s head and shoulders.

She shivered. It trickled into the raw wounds where her spines had been implanted, where her own magic still hummed, setting up a resonance that interfered with anything else she might try, which was why she’d been set outside to cool off, as Kirrik called it.

She had expected the magic would render the procedure painless. The boy who had come before her hadn’t screamed.

Unar had screamed, and her screams had been used by Frog to force the snake-jaws deeper into her marrow.

Hasbabsah, no doubt, had received her spines without screaming. Frog, too, and the three brothers Esse, Bernreb, and Marram. Thinking of them firmed her resolve. She’d done what she had to do, to get what she needed. She would undo the terrible consequences at the first opportunity.

I have spines. Next, I need a way through the barrier.

She thought carefully about what Kirrik had said, that the adepts of Audblayin would have no goddess to help them escape back to Canopy. Was the direct application of power by an incarnated god or goddess the only way to open a door in the barrier once a Canopian’s innate magic had faded?

Understorians do not always raid Canopy, Hasbabsah had said. In hungry times, they trade. In prosperous times, they buy back captured slaves.

Kirrik gloated over the fact that the Gardeners couldn’t return because their god was a mewling babe, somewhere, and could not open a door for them. But perhaps other gods could be persuaded. Unar had spoken to the god Odel, held a conversation with him as if he were a mortal man. What about Ehkis? Could Edax carry a message to her? Would the rain goddess help a Gardener to escape a house suspended in the arms of Airakland, to foil an Understorian plot aimed directly at the gods?

Unar rubbed at her forehead as if by rubbing she could untangle her thoughts. The movement of her tendons seemed to set her arm aflame. She couldn’t cradle her arm, for the new spines were extended and razor-sharp. Instead, she howled and stayed as still as possible until the pain ebbed to a deep throbbing.

Frog poked her head out of the dovecote.

“Core Kirrik says to be quiet.”

“Can’t it be healed right away, Frog?”

“It has been.”

“I don’t feel healed.”

“If your bone is healed too quickly and the snake bones are healed too quickly, they will heal separately and fall out. Is that what you want?”

“You don’t know what I want,” Unar snapped. “And I don’t know what you want. I don’t know who you are. You’re probably not even my real sister.”

Frog slammed the door shut.

More hours passed with Unar distracting herself from the pain by remembering the smell of loquats and the taste of pomegranates, the feeling of her bore-knife going into bark and the sound of Oos’s thirteen-pipe flute.

The door opened again, and there was Frog, emerging with a plate of porridge.

“Eat this,” she said. “I am your real sister. I wish that I was not. Do you want to know how I imagined my real sibling?”

“No,” Unar said, but Frog told her anyway.

“I imagined a fighter. A warrior. Perhaps a soldier of the king of Audblayin, yet imprisoned, tortured, for the belief that the barrier is cruel and must be abandoned. Sikakis intuited the truth, even while surrounded by lies. But not you. Eat this.”

Unar glared up at her. “Are you going to stay and watch me?”

“Of course.”

“Of course,” Unar said bitterly. “It’s what you do.” She stared at the porridge, knowing that when she moved her hand to grip the spoon, pain would shoot through her again.

“Do you want me to feed you like a baby?”

“No.” Another scowl. “I want you to tell me how you and Core Kirrik can take my power away from me as if I’m a baby.”

Frog laughed.

“Not how to get through the barrier?”

Unar gritted her teeth as she reached for the spoon. The pain wasn’t as bad as before.

“If I’m so dank and doltish, it can’t hurt to tell me, can it? You can always outwit me, can’t you, my sister?”

“That is right,” Frog said, sitting easily on her haunches. “I can. You wanna know why Core Kirrik is able to use you so easily? I am not surprised you could not work it out. Just as you can only heal someone you love, you can only steal power from someone you hate. You will not get control of your own power from Kirrik until you hate yourself more than she hates you, and that will never be. It was Servants of Audblayin who killed ’er parents.”