Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(95)

A hand-sized piece of jagged copper pinned Marram’s hand to the floor.

She pulled it out. It was embedded deeply and she needed all of her physical strength. Marram didn’t shout, or maybe he did and she was still deaf, or maybe his words had been stolen.

No. She’s gone. She’s gone, and I do not hate Marram.

“I’ll find something to bind it,” he said. “Something to stop the blood.”

Unar sat alone for a while.

Baby Ylly. Your mother tried to teach me to dive like a duck. And I paid for that lesson in chimera skin.

“Chimera skin,” she murmured to herself.

When Marram returned, she made herself look at him. Really look at him. He’d dressed in odd bits of armour that he’d found inside the dovecote, leaving his shins and forearms bare. His demeanour was confident, but his eyes said he was afraid for his brothers’ lives. They were in danger because they lived in Audblayin’s emergent, but also because they had given shelter to two fallen, gifted women, two escaped slaves, and a little girl running from a demon.

“I know how to get past the lantern,” she said.

The piece of chimera skin that had held the floating fragments of bone was barely big enough to drape the lantern. Marram took a slew of already-deformed weapons from the cloakroom to nudge the colour-shifting cloth into position. When it covered the lantern, only a tiny circle of escaped light remained.

“I’ll go first,” Unar said, brushing past him. Holding up her black skirts, she leaped over the little circle, half expecting to be speared by lightning, but she passed by it unharmed. Marram came a bare step behind her.

“I wish you had thought of that before the bathtub,” he said, grinning.

“What are you doing?” Unar sucked in a sharp breath as Marram grasped the top handle of the lantern through the cloth.

“Bringing it with us.”

“What if it can’t be—” Unar fell silent as Marram proved that the lantern could be moved.

“It could be useful,” Marram said, and his smile turned grim. “If we encounter that charming friend of yours, I will throw it in her face before I let her cut our tallowwood in half with Esse, Bernreb, and Issi inside.”





FIFTY-TWO

NIGHT CAME.

There was no sign of Kirrik or her soldiers. Unar and Marram had gone quickly, but Unar suspected the gap between parties had neither widened nor narrowed. They trod the same path, and Kirrik had half a day’s head start.

Marram set the lantern down behind them and uncovered it so that nobody could creep up on them from behind while they were sleeping.

“I’m not tired,” Unar said, but mostly she was afraid of her dreams. Upon waking, stiff and uncomfortable from being wedged between branches, she felt more tears on her cheeks and the gut-wrenching aftermath of a nightmare whose lingering images she didn’t care to examine.

“We will need to leave the lantern,” Marram said softly in the dawn gloom, and when Unar twisted around to question him, she saw the demon crouched on the other side of the blue-white light.

Only its eyes, huge, round, and glowing yellow like twin suns, remained fixed, Unar’s height above the branch. The rest of the body flickered through umber, emerald, and sooty grey, but the shadow stretched behind and puddled beneath it betrayed its basic form: a four-legged predator with a sleek, muscular, long-tailed body. If it had ears, they were invisible, and its scaly legs were tipped by curved black claws.

The chimera tested the air with a forked tongue.

“I agree,” Unar said, shivering. “Unless you think the demon’s skin will protect it from lightning the same way the dead piece of its hide protected us.”

“I think it would have crossed already, if it could.”

“Yes. I wasn’t thinking. Should we go on?”

“We cannot go back,” Marram pointed out, passing her a curled leaf that carried water. Unar watched the chimera while she drank. Its glowing eyes didn’t move. When she got to her feet, she thought its tail might have twitched, and then she was following Marram down the trunk of the fallen floodgum, hunching her shoulders but not looking back.

In the middle of the day, Marram paused to squint through the forest at something indiscernible to Unar.

“What is it?” she asked. “Is it the chimera? Has it found a way around?” At her feet, a lateral branch of the floodgum vanished into the distance. Marram knelt and touched the bark, as if to detect damage from the passage of boots. “Do you think Kirrik and Sikakis might have gone down the side branch? Is that the way to Ehkis’s emergent?”

“No,” Marram said, straightening. “It is the way to Odel’s emergent. The placement of the branch is convenient. Why were they not tempted?”

“Marram,” Unar said, feeling sick, but unable to keep back from him now what she should have told him straight away. “Kirrik can’t cut down any more emergents. She almost killed me to cut down this one. She used all of my power, do you see? Even if she captures Oos, Oos isn’t as strong as I was. The tallowwood where your brothers live, the tallowwood that holds the Garden, is safe. Kirrik can climb it, or perhaps burn it, but not bring it down.”

“Perhaps burn it,” Marram repeated emphatically.

“She still has Aforis, Servant of Airak,” Unar allowed. “But she was going to get … they were going to get Ehkis first. Ehkis first, and then Audblayin. If you can sneak past them while they’re busy invading the Temple of Ehkis, you’ll have time to warn Esse and Bernreb of the danger. The three of you can make sure Oos isn’t captured.”