Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(96)

He eyed her.

“Me? If I can sneak past them? The three of us? Where are you going? Back to feed the chimera?”

Baby Ylly. Odel’s power protects you for now, but whose power protects Odel?

“I need a way through the barrier, Marram. Your brothers, the ones you need to protect, are down here. Mine are up there.”

Marram made an exasperated sound.

“Whatever it is that lets you pass through the barrier to Canopy, you need to steal from Kirrik,” he guessed. “You are going to wait for me to sneak past and then try to take something valuable from two hundred Understorian warriors, and you have no magic to protect you?”

Unar shook her head slowly. Trying to take the sleeping goddess away from Sikakis would be impossible.

“What I need is in Odelland.”

“And what is that, exactly?”

“Thank you for saving me, Marram,” she said, and wouldn’t say any more.

Sighing, he took the rolled-up chimera skin from behind the strap of his shoulder guard and pressed it into her hands.

“Thank you for saving me, yourself. I hope we will meet again. If you are going to try to climb up through the barrier, at least let me help you with those.”

He pulled out a knife and cut away the front of her skirts at the level of her knees. Her bare feet were blistered from running along the rough bark and there was muck between her toes.

“I’ve never used them,” Unar said, staring at the crease in her shins where her spines were hidden. She hadn’t had time to practice. Now she must climb, or die.

“Pull them in before you lift from the knee,” Marram advised, “or before you lift from the wrist. Have them out before impact.”

“I’ll try.”

They clasped forearms. Marram smiled encouragement at her a final time before turning to continue along the main trunk. Unar knew she shouldn’t stand there watching him. She had little time herself if she was to reach baby Ylly ahead of Kirrik and Sikakis.

It was important, though, that she watch him. She needed to erase the image of him falling and replace it forever with the vision of him lithely leaping along the toppled abode of the lightning god.

When she couldn’t see him anymore, she turned to the lateral branch and began making her way along it. As night began to fall on the second day since leaving the dovecote, her nostrils brought her the smell of sweet-fruit pine.

The branch of Airak’s emergent was wedged tightly against the sweet-fruit pine trunk. Unar could only goggle at it for a moment, wondering how it could possibly be the precise tree that she needed, at a time when she had no magic, no means of growing a pathway.

There must be other sweet-fruit pines in Odelland. This might not be the one.

When she put out her spines and drove them into the sapwood, she realised it wasn’t the one. Odel’s emergent was ancient. This tree was too young and new. Somehow, she could taste its age through the snake’s teeth that jutted out of her forearm.

It didn’t matter. Who was to say Odel was in his Temple, anyway? He hadn’t been, the last time Unar had climbed the steps cut into the spongy, white wood.

Pull them in before you lift from the knee, or before you lift from the wrist.

Pain shot through her bones as she took her full weight on her forearms. It should have frightened her. Nobody had mentioned pain. Maybe the spines were still not properly healed, or maybe they hadn’t been properly set, so that Kirrik could laugh if Unar tried to escape and instead plunged to her death.

Have them out before impact.

When her shin spines were set, the pain eased a little. She willed the spines in her right arm to retract, and they obeyed. She willed them out again. This wasn’t yet instinctive for her. She had to concentrate on each agonisingly sluggish shift in her weight and placement of her next cutting, downward stroke.

She was getting higher. Sunlight reached her. The beam was only a finger’s width, and horizontal with the sinking of the sun, but she stopped to cry some more, with her face turned to the tiny trickle of light.

Licking tears from her lips, her shins and forearms on fire from holding her to the tree, she turned her focus back to the climb. She climbed when she couldn’t see the bark in front of her face anymore. She climbed when night insects landed lightly on her nape to drink her blood.

At last, her head hit something hard and unyielding. It was a thousand times stronger than the princess’s window. It was a thousand times colder than the magical wall around the Garden.

She’d reached the barrier between Canopy and Understorey. There was no sleeping goddess in her arms to bore a way through. There was no artefact and no incantation.

Unar pressed her lips to the sweet-fruit pine and used the barest breath of magic, the feeble speck that had regrown in her over two days of travel, to send the word she spoke into the heart of the tree, the secret word that Frog had ordered Unar to forget lest Kirrik discover she knew its power.

“Tyran,” she whispered.

The cold, hard barrier rippled.





FIFTY-THREE

UNAR HUNG from her spines, in a half daze, waiting.

It seemed like hours before the Bodyguard with the brindle-striped back appeared on the other side of the barrier, gazing with black eyes down at Unar, hands in the claw-tipped gloves.

“I need to speak to Odel,” Unar pleaded. “His life depends on it.”