Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(9)
“Unar?” Oos ventured.
“Mmm?”
“Did your oaths bind? While you were in Understorey? Could you have broken them?”
“There’s nothing out there that I want to steal,” Unar said scornfully. “And nobody I want to rape. I have no enemies to murder.”
“One who walks in the grace of Audblayin was only asking,” Oos replied, too quickly. “One only wanted to know how it felt. Did it feel like it did before? Before you came to the Garden, I mean. Could you care about things that weren’t birthing or sprouting? Could you think wicked thoughts?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Unar admitted, her eyes closing as she slipped into sleep. “All my thoughts are wicked.”
FOUR
BY MORNING, the Waker of Senses was dead.
The high-pitched harmonising of trumpet fruit roused the Gardeners from their hammocks. Oos emerged gracefully, slipping the red woven shirt she’d adjusted to flatter her form on over soft, knitted, seedpod-down undergarments, but Unar, barely having slept, tipped drunkenly out of hers, only to have the breath punched out of her by the ground.
“What’s that racket?” she croaked, palms pressed to her ears, the direct sunlight blinding. She blinked rapidly up in the direction of what she thought was Oos’s indulgent smile. Oos was taller than she was, curvier, and surrounded by a sweet-smelling cloud, the coconut oil she combed through her tresses. Her long hair leaped straight up like a black flame in the dry season and curled down like wet vines in the monsoon; Unar half suspected her of using magic on it. Thick, black eyebrows framed Oos’s enormous, guileless eyes, a smooth, broad nose, and bee-stung lips the carmine colour of cut tamarillos.
But Oos wasn’t the only one looming over her.
“It’s the transition call,” said a calm male voice from even higher up than Oos’s. “Audblayin has gone into the ether. By sundown, he or she will be born again, though we won’t find him or her for another twelve or thirteen years.”
Aoun. The lanky boy who’d waited with Unar at the Gates. They’d rarely spoken since. Aoun spoke rarely to anyone. There had been the incident with the fish. And the bulrushes. Only crazy people from Ehkisland who lived by the side of lakes could eat fish or the nauseating, glue-paste-tasting roots of bulrushes.
“Why don’t you lecture me for twelve or thirteen years, instead of helping me up off the ground?”
“Aoun doesn’t touch the flesh of mortals,” Oos teased from somewhere behind Unar. “He thinks he’s a god.”
“I don’t think that,” Aoun said. No, Aoun didn’t think he was a deity. Unar had hoped she was, once, and been disappointed to learn she was unusual, yes, but not extraordinary. Which was why she could never tell Oos about her ambition to be the Bodyguard. Oos might look at her in a pitying way, the same way Aoun had looked at her when he found out about her mother wanting to sell her as a slave, and she couldn’t stand being pitied. Better her friends looked at her with admiration when she succeeded.
When Unar and Aoun had pledged their lives to the Garden together, he an orphan and she a short step ahead of the slave block, he’d been shorter than she, his face pimply and his voice reedy. Four years later, he towered head and shoulders above her. His curls, once sun-bleached, stayed black these days, and he spoke as deeply and ponderously as a tree bear.
His hand, where it grasped her forearm, was as big as a tree bear’s, too. He lifted her easily to her feet, where she swayed and made whimpering noises, still covering one ear against the wild music. It was normally so quiet. Singing and the use of instruments in the Garden were forbidden.
“We’ve got to go to the Temple, Unar,” Oos said, giggling, pulling Unar along behind the other Gardeners. “This way.”
“I forget what happens.”
“Isn’t it exciting? I can’t wait to see the inside of the Temple.”
“Wait. Is this the part where we take our clothes off and swim through the fish to get purified?”
The fish incident. Unar tried to contain her shudder. After a teaching exercise where they’d sprouted purplepea saplings from seed under the watchful eye of Servant Eilif, Unar had pulled out her tree and put it on the woodpile as instructed, but both Oos and Aoun had mysteriously vanished with their saplings.
When Unar sneaked after Oos’s light sandal-prints, she caught her friend extracting dye from the flowers to make blue ribbons for braiding through her tall, magnificent hair. Unar left Oos to follow Aoun’s prints and found him using the purplepea leaves to stun fish in one of the smaller pools. His mouth was full of the raw flesh of one he’d stabbed after it floated to the surface. Unar had been repulsed.
Aoun had wordlessly offered one of the gasping, scaly abominations to her. Its horrible mustaches were like slug feelers, and a row of spines stuck up on its back. Unar hit Aoun’s hand away from her so hard that the fish sailed off the edge of the Garden.
Now she would have to get naked in the water with them.
Oos, meanwhile, rapturously shaped the Temple interior in the air with her slim hands, made smooth by wasting her time rubbing rough skin off with sandpaper fig leaves. “My father said the inside of the egg shape is spiralled and segmented like a snail shell. It has marble steps and banisters of purpleheart. He said everything leaving the safety of the staircases, passing into the centre, becomes weightless. Great living artworks of white sky-coral cross the empty spaces, and birds build their nests upside down, but the eggs don’t fall out of them.”